Derek was there too, firing up a sort of portable stove called a censer – basically two metal hemispheres dangling from a chain. The lower hemisphere contains self-igniting charcoal tablets which Derek had lit and were now fizzing nicely; dull red if not quite red-hot yet. The upper hemisphere acts as a perforated lid and when you swing the whole thing on its chain, the incoming air acts as a bellows, making the charcoal tablets white hot. If you put three or four grains of incense on the charcoal then clouds of incense emerge – acrid smoke to some, a fragrant offering to others. To get the thing going nicely, Derek swung the censer through a few complete revolutions, narrowly missing Father Bert and me in the process but unfortunately clonking it against a cupboard, which sent a shower of sparks onto the carpet. Father Bert and I gamely stamped out the embers before they melted too much of the soft furnishings, and then we were ready to start the service. The general public haven’t got a clue that preparing for worship is so complicated.
And that’s only for starters. Using incense involves a series of dance steps which would bring the most experienced competitor in Strictly Come Dancing out in a cold sweat. Whilst swinging the censer, bow twice, take four steps sideways, three steps backwards, four steps sideways, bow twice again, take four steps sideways, three steps backwards, then finally four steps sideways. Remember that you’re doing this with a white-hot portable oven emitting clouds of noxious vapour while negotiating a series of stone stairs. Then later in the service, repeat the action, but swing the censer over the bread and wine, completing two circles anti-clockwise and one circle clockwise followed by three signs of the cross.
The wine is contained in a chalice, a silver bowl set on the thinnest of stems standing on a starched white cloth. Call me over-cautious, but swinging a portable white-hot stove not once but six times over a top-heavy, unstable vessel brimful with red wine perched on a bleached-white altar cloth strikes me as a rail crash waiting to happen. Back when I trained for the priesthood in Cambridge, we were told that if you ever spilt consecrated wine on an altar cloth, sanctuary carpet or stone, you could summon a team of nuns who would devotedly wash the cloth, lick the stones clean or even consume the carpet. Apparently this top-secret order continuously travelled up and down the A1 in a Mini, and could be contacted on a radio whose exclusive frequency would be revealed to you at your ordination. I think our tutor was having us on.
Roman Catholic churches wisely avoid this pantomime and just have a fixed censer, either set on the floor or suspended from a beam. Legend has it that in the seventeenth century the scientist Galileo watched such a giant censer swinging from a beam in Pisa Cathedral and calculated the earth’s gravitational constant. That constant equals the length of the chain divided by the square of the time it took the censer to complete a full swing, with the whole lot then multiplied by 4π2. Apparently, he estimated the length of the chain and timed the swing with his pulse, since watches had yet to be invented. Assuming that he didn’t hit on the correct form for the equation first time around, it must have been a very long and exceedingly boring service. I’ve tried it myself in very boring services with dangling lights swinging in a draught and it does work – if you measure the length in metres and time in seconds, the answer should be around 10.
Dance moves notwithstanding, the service went fine, with Father Bert following me around throughout like a faithful sheepdog – or perhaps my rear-end gunner. We were through within the hour, which is always my aim, keeping things nice and tight on the ‘if you don’t strike oil in ten minutes, stop boring!’ principle. You pack a lot of things into that hour; singing, reading, preaching, praying, sharing bread and wine. The service in church is a springboard for service in the community. At least in theory.
‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’ I asked one old dear, shaking her hand as she was leaving.
‘Ee, luv,’ she replied, ‘I’m going home to recover. All that singing, smoke and stuff has fair taken it out of me. I’ll make meself a cup of coffee, cut a slice of sponge cake and have a nice lie down on my settee!’
Out of a congregation of about forty, Lord Feversham had been the last to receive the bread and wine, moving stiffly as he knelt at the ancient altar rail, the latest in a line of Fevershams who had knelt there over the centuries. ‘Are you free this afternoon?’ he asked as he was leaving. ‘I thought I could take you for a spin in the Land Rover and show you those water races I was going on about yesterday. You can come too, Bert, if you want.’
‘I wouldn’t be free until about three, my Lord. I have a luncheon engagement,’ Father Bert explained.
‘Well, let’s make it three then, if that’s all right with you, David,’ Lord Feversham replied, with a definite glint in his eye and a dark smile which revealed he knew all about Father Bert’s luncheon engagements. I left the two of them, put my robes in my rucksack and pedalled up the hill to catch my final service of the morning at Rievaulx. As I laboured up the steep slope, motorbikes galore soared past in the opposite direction. Helmsley market place is a Mecca for motorcyclists on a Sunday. They race from Middlesbrough; roaring over the Cleveland Hills then through Bilsdale, rising again over the moors before dropping down the final strait to congregate in Helmsley. Apparently it’s akin to the Isle of Man TT races, with thirteen minutes for the twenty miles from Stokesley to Helmsley the record to beat. Never mind Stokesley, it takes me twenty minutes to reach Rievaulx just one mile into the hills, but then again, I only have two legpower compared to their hundreds of horsepower.
A nice chap who is restoring the old mill turned up and played his cornet to keep our hymns reasonably in tune. He tended to run out of puff by the second verse, however, so then our singing had to keep him in tune. Frank the shepherd, who had kept me company on the day of prayer, arrived in the same shabby gabardine with a piece of twine for a belt and took the collection; not too onerous a task given that there were barely half a dozen other worshippers. As he did so he sang what could politely be termed a howling descant to the hymn, nicely blending with the off-key notes of the struggling cornet player. I was barely able to keep laughter at bay. When I’d trained for the ministry, my tutor had advised me that when I felt a fit of giggles coming on during a church service, I should think of the saddest thing that had ever happened to me. Similarly, when you feel on the brink of tears, think of the funniest thing. It just about works, although contorting your face with conflicting emotions makes for a painful time.
There was a distinguished-looking guy there who lived in a cottage opposite the church. I later learned he was a renowned musicologist; he had lectured at Oxford and had regularly written the blurb on the cover of classical CDs. He had the bewildered look that Persephone must have sported when she was wrenched from the Elysian Fields and found herself wintering in Hades. I knew how he felt.
Chapter Nineteen
I had to lean over the handle-bars pedalling up the heavily wooded Rievaulx Bank, otherwise I would have fallen off the bicycle backwards. Once again, on the basis that maths kicks all other pains into touch, I derived the formula for quadratic equations from first principles in my head. In an instant I found myself magically transported to the top of the bank, the pain in my thigh muscles banished by algebra. And it was a magical sight; the Rievaulx Temples rising to my right arching protectively over the Abbey, and to my left the purple-topped moors, climbing to their peak at Surprise View. The descent into Helmsley was a sharp one, topping 40 mph on my cycle’s speedometer. I overtook a Reliant Robin trundling down the hill at a steady twenty-five, the driver and his good lady with mouths agape at being passed by a vicar on a bike. I pulled in sharpish, narrowly avoiding a little red jeep speeding up the hill, Father Bert at the wheel, licking his lips at the feast which awaited him in Old Byland.
The road takes a tight right before entering Helmsley. I had to brake hard to avoid landing in the beck and catapulting into the prettiest cottage garden, the flowerbeds a firework display of autumn colours. I’d landed in a fair few gardens
when I’d first learnt to cycle as a curate in Middlesbrough – a novel if painful method of evangelism. Somehow, presenting yourself as the immaculately dressed expert puts folk off. Hobbling up to their back door with grazed hands and muddy knees, apologizing because your bike has cut a swathe through their carnations, alters the dynamic and enables real if colourful conversation.
To revive me after a long morning of cycling and Communions, a sort of churchy version of an Iron Man triathalon, Rachel had served up a delicious chicken roast with all the trimmings.
‘Will you play cricket with us this afternoon, Dad?’ Ruth asked, as I slumped down on a kitchen chair. At the tender age of eleven she was one of the meanest bowlers I had ever encountered, and never missed an opportunity to drag me out onto wherever we improvised a pitch.
‘We’ll be all right until three-ish,’ I replied, helping myself to a mountain of mashed potato to fortify myself for the innings ahead. ‘But after that, Lord Feversham is showing me and Father Bert his water races.’
‘Is it like a duck race?’ Hannah asked, intrigued. Just before we left Bishopthorpe, her school had organized one on the River Ouse, which proved thrilling primarily because it hadn’t quite gone according to plan. The Ouse was in flood at the time, and all the plastic ducks had swum downstream at break-beak pace, defied the deputy head’s brave attempts to net them at the finishing line, and instead made a bid for freedom as they hurtled towards the Humber and the North Sea. No doubt some beachcomber in Denmark was at that moment scratching his head as to why 202 identical yellow ducks had been washed up on his shore.
‘No, it’s not quite as exciting as that,’ I replied. ‘The water races are channels that bring water from the north side of the moors to the south side.’
Hannah’s eyes glazed over. It isn’t easy to compete with the mass migration of 202 plastic ducks, but I persevered. After all, as a vicar I was an expert at injecting excitement even into the dullest stuff.
‘Imagine this is the north side of the moors and this the south,’ I said, moulding my mashed potato into two parallel mountain ranges with a valley in between, as you do. ‘The main gradients follow a north–south line, but there is also a very gentle slope west–east towards the North Sea.’ With my knife I managed to give my twin mountain range a tilt towards the oven. ‘Now, imagine there’s a spring on the north side. If you cut a channel westwards down the north–south slope, and then bring it back eastwards along the gentle west–east slope, you should get water to the southern peaks.’ I carefully cut a channel with my knife and poured a trickle of gravy onto the north side of my mashed potato mountains. For a moment my gravy race worked, before the whole lot dissolved into a soggy brown mass.
‘Just eat your lunch before it goes cold,’ Rachel sighed. Kitchen-science isn’t really her thing.
But it is my thing. Deeply sad though I was to leave Aughton in 1970, one compensation was that my new school in Scarborough instilled in me a fascination for maths and physics which has lasted a lifetime. I suddenly started mucking about with machinery, trying to repair broken lawnmowers and washing machines, occasionally with some success. Inspired by the experiments we did in the chemistry and physics labs at school, I repeated simple experiments in our home. For instance, I used the transformer from my old railway set, set up a cathode and anode by wiring it to a couple of graphite leads from my propelling pencil, and by the principle of electrolysis, turned a jug of saltwater into a jug of Domestos. The kitchen smelt very strongly of chlorine for a few days – more Western Front than Scarborough – and though I didn’t exactly turn water into wine, I found the spirit of experiment and discovery very thrilling. I used bits and bobs from around the home and in the back of drawers to calculate immense invisible entities, like the speed of light and force of gravity.
Years later, when I was selecting and training people for ordination, one of my killer questions was, ‘What in your heart of hearts do you feel you were born to do? What activity makes you think, “I was made for this?”’ Quite a lot told me that they had been born to conduct evensong, an answer which always made me rather sad – far too narrow and churchy when there was a whole world out there to enjoy. A dental technician told me that he had been born to make people smile, which seemed a priestly vocation if ever there was one. But not a single ordinand ever told me they had been born to mend things, an activity which for me was like coming home.
‘Dad, stop daydreaming and eat up your lunch,’ my daughter Ruth commanded. ‘We’ll never get this cricket match started at this rate!’
I duly obeyed and, following a hurried treacle sponge washed down with a scalding cup of tea, I was bowled out no less than twenty-four times, caught eleven times, and scored a measly thirty-seven runs for all my efforts, with two balls lost for all eternity in the graveyard thicket.
Talking of eternity, as so often happened when I played with the girls, I replayed in my mind their birth and early life. One Sunday in the middle of October 1985, in my first year as Vicar of Monk Fryston and South Milford, I had rushed around taking five services, and on top of that we had all the churchwardens to lunch and the church treasurer to supper. We retired just before midnight.
‘We’ll have to get some sleep before our baby is born,’ I said to Rachel, who was by then eight months pregnant, before turning off the light. Just one hour later I was turning it on again because clearly the new baby was on its way. I drove Rachel to the famous St James’s Hospital in Leeds at breakneck pace, but for the next twelve hours not much happened, until the midwife decided the baby was highly distressed and Rachel was rushed off to theatre for an emergency caesarean. For an hour I wandered around the hospital, feeling totally lost, realizing that life hung in the balance. I came back to the maternity ward and someone came out of theatre and dumped a set of notes on the nurses’ station, which I read upside down. ‘Live baby, mother in recovery.’ Within minutes the live baby was brought to me; a tiny little girl with wisps of blonde hair and eyes tightly shut. Then Rachel was wheeled in and held her in her arms, with her smile positively radiant and beatific. Time stood still.
After a few minutes I realized I had better call Rachel’s dad, and found a nearby payphone. ‘Rachel’s had a baby girl and they’re both fine,’ I began. ‘We’re going to call her Ruth, after Rachel’s mum.’
That was it, just eighteen words, my heart was too full with joy to say anything else; Rachel’s dad’s heart too full to reply.
I brought Rachel and Ruth home a week later. Freesias, Rachel’s favourite flowers, were in every room once again, along with mountains of baby clothes and toys and cards – gifts from family and friends and a host of parishioners. Given the trauma she had been through, Ruth didn’t sleep that well for the first three months, and I used to take my turn in the night, soothing her cries with John Betjeman’s poetry, which I was keen on at the time. Before Christmas we had a carol service in Monk Fryston Church, accompanied by the slowest brass band in creation. Rachel brought baby Ruth along, and we suddenly noticed that whenever the brass band played, Ruth stopped crying. So that Christmas Rachel’s brothers and I kept doing trombone impersonations, no doubt aided by eating copious amounts of brussel sprouts, to placate Ruth’s cries. There’s always a trick to calm every child.
We felt very fortunate, realizing that prem babies don’t always make it. A couple of years later one of the many parish mums gave birth at twenty-five weeks to a baby boy, who died in her arms as her husband looked helplessly on, just minutes before medical help arrived. I had come across the couple before – I’d baptized their first child, they were very pleasant, very civil, but I didn’t feel I’d made much connection with them.
But even so, when I heard about their loss I felt compelled to go and see them, simply because I was so utterly sorry for them. The searing grief of bereavement is compounded by people giving you a wide berth because they don’t know what to say, especially when you lose a child.
I didn’t know what to say either, but I kn
ew I had to be there. So after evensong one September Sunday night I detoured via their home, sat with them, listened to them, held them in their grief.
In due course we had the little boy’s funeral. I dug the grave myself to keep the costs at zero. The father carried his son into church in a little white coffin which he placed on the altar, his wife and their two-year-old daughter by his side. And that was the congregation. It proved too much for the hardened undertaker, who had to leave us to our own devices. I can’t believe it now, but we had a hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. God knows how we sang it. Ray, the boy’s father, had played rugby for Castleford so was used to bellowing out rugby songs. Like Eric Morecombe he could manage the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
Yet we managed the hymn, we managed the sorriest of funerals, and we shook hands at the church gates and they walked away. Or rather, they didn’t. I saw a lot of them in the next few weeks, as I was always popping in. And as weeks turned to months, Ray and his wife, Sue, got confirmed. Six months later Ray became my churchwarden, and this hard-talking Yorkshire businessman woke up our sleepy parish and proved my right-hand man.
By Christmas 1987, Rachel was once again great with child, as the Authorized Version of the Bible so quaintly puts it. By then Ruth was two, and on 6 January – the Feast of the Epiphany celebrating the Magi bringing their gifts to the infant Christ – Ruth brought her yellow blanket to her mum, saying, ‘This is to keep the new baby warm.’ That blanket was her favourite possession, in fact we had to resort to subterfuge to clean the thing, waiting until she had fallen asleep before we sneaked it away, quickly washing it, tumble drying it, and returning it to her bed before she awoke. Yet at Epiphany she gladly offered it for the new baby.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 13