The new baby arrived nineteen days early on 10 January, a normal birth this time, another little girl whom we named Hannah. She was a very placid baby, and indeed became quite a wondrous child. Once I lost my cool at tea time, when food was flying all over the place. Hannah, still less than two, looked into my eyes and simply said, ‘Be happy, Daddy.’ The first night we moved her out of her cot and let her sleep in a normal bed, I was awoken by a loud but muffled wailing. I traced the sound to Hannah’s bedroom, and it was coming from a lump at the bottom of her bed. ‘Help, I’m a bit stuck,’ the lump wailed. In her sleep she must have burrowed down the bedclothes, only to awaken trapped in her dark cocoon. Hannah joined about a dozen church babies and for years I didn’t need to write more than the first line of my sermon, because I could guarantee the rest of it would be cried out. So I made the first line a very good one.
Our own set of babies was completed with Clare Iona in November 1989, a child who chuckled almost from her very birth; always seeking fun, a great joker, never happier than when she was given games for her birthday or Christmas which would draw all the family in. The countryside around Monk Fryston was a bit flat and boring, so for my days off we used to drive into the hills, walking above Helmlsey or in Swaledale or Wensleydale. We often called in at Harrogate en route, so the children could browse the toys in the Early Learning Centre and we could buy a treat from Betty’s iconic bakers. Two weeks after Clare was born we took her to Swaledale, walking on a deserted road high above the Swale at Muker, a favourite spot. The north wind was like ice and cut through layers of clothing and flesh to the bone. Poor Clare howled and howled and would not be quietened. With hindsight it seems cruel exposing a newborn baby to the wildest Yorkshire weather. Except Clare grew up to adore exploring the moors and hills in even the fiercest conditions, almost as if we inoculated her at just two weeks old against the worst the elements could throw at you. Just like mending things was like coming home for me, moving to Helmsley was a coming home for Clare.
Chapter Twenty
At 3 p.m. precisely I climbed into the passenger seat of Lord Feversham’s Defender, grateful for a sit down following my Helmsley cricket debut. We climbed up the B road, a stream of motorbikes overtaking us on their way home to Middlesbrough, having had their fill of Helmsley. Father Bert was installed on the bench seat at the very back, scanning the road behind with eagle eyes and acting as Lord Feversham’s rearview mirror.
‘Six motorbikes approaching at ten o’clock, my Lord, estimated speed eighty-four mph, followed by a Harley Davidson with a girl pillion, estimated speed seventy-two mph. By the way, you’re pothering blue smoke.’
‘Don’t worry, Bert, all Defenders do that. Their differential always whines, so you can hear ’em coming, and they always burn a hell of a lot of oil, so you can smell ’em when they’ve been. Like most of my tenants, they whine on approach then leave a stench behind!’ Lord Feversham chuckled at his own joke as we reached Surprise View then dropped down into Bilsdale, the road falling away so steeply that you simply couldn’t see it over the Defender’s bonnet. Father Bert went pale.
‘I never like nose-dives – too many of my friends never came out of them,’ he said, his face so, so sad it wrenched my stomach.
So many parishioners talked to me about the war. I realized that Helmsley had a high concentration of over-seventies, for whom war had loomed. The aftermath of the First World War would have dominated their childhood; absent fathers and uncles lost in the trenches, wounded veterans, blinded by mustard gas or with lost limbs, an all too visible reminder of the conflict. Then came their own service in the Second World War, taking on a ruthless killing machine. I guess it wasn’t just Pessy’s Paddy who was terrified of the utter black fury on the faces of the enemy. I listened respectfully to all their many tales, realizing the time for telling them was rapidly running out. It was my privilege to listen beside them for what remained of their day.
The beauty of Bilsdale’s green fields, bounded by dry-stone walls criss-crossing the valley with a handful of farmsteads perched on the sheer hillside, restored my cheer. In the middle of nowhere we drove past the Sun Inn, with a sandwich board announcing QUIZ NIGHT EVERY WEDNESDAY 7 P.M. MADGE’S HOMEMADE PIES SERVED FROM 8 P.M. FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED! Clearly Wednesday night was party night.
‘But where the heck do they get any customers from?’ I asked, looking at the swathes of green for miles around, inhabited only by sheep.
‘Oh, they walk down from their farms in Bilsdale, Bransdale, Beckdale, East Moors or wherever,’ Father Bert explained. ‘Madge has a powerful outside light which attracts moths and farmers from miles around!’ He chuckled to himself as he continued, ‘It’s finding their way home after closing time which is the problem – they tend to lose their bearings when they’ve had a skinful. It was better in the old days when they rode over on their farm horses. Then when they staggered out of the pub they could just slump into the saddle and the horse would know its way home.’
‘Yes, I rue the day we saw the last of our farm horses,’ Lord Feversham interrupted. ‘They were truly hefted to the hills; however many new-fangled gadgets, no tractor can match them.’
‘Many a night I was called out when I was vicar to find the lost shepherd,’ Father Bert continued, with a wistful look in his eye. ‘Locating them wasn’t very difficult – they were singing so loudly I could hear them even over the revs of my jeep. I used to bundle them in and drive them home into the tender arms of their good lady wife, who gave them a reet earbashing for troubling the vicar.’
Lord Feversham suddenly pulled off the road and we bounced along a rough track; one of the many green lanes with a surface of closely cropped grass. ‘We’re too early in the day to be chasing Madge’s lost shepherds, Bert. I thought I’d show David the source of the Carlton Water Race.’ He spoke in hallowed tones, as if we were Livingstone and Stanley, tracing the source of the Nile.
We trundled up a hill for about a mile, heading towards the Bilsdale TV mast. ‘It’s over a thousand feet high, you know,’ Father Bert informed us. ‘And that’s on top of a moor twelve hundred feet high. I used to gaze at it when I drove down the A1 from County Durham. I never dreamt that I’d end up as vicar of it!’
Lord Feversham pulled up sharply, ‘There she blows,’ he shouted, hobbling over to a spring gushing gallons upon gallons of crystal clear water. He cupped his hands and slurped noisily, ‘Absolutely beautiful, not a hint of chemicals,’ he said, beaming.
My eye was caught by a darting movement to the side of his feet, as a yellow adder with characteristic black zigzags slithered away, deciding it was no match for Lord Feversham when it came to a drinking competition. Riding on the adder’s back was a miniature version of itself; I blinked a couple of times, wondering if being bounced around in the Land Rover had given me double vision.
Father Bert allayed my fears. ‘You were lucky that adder didn’t nip you, my Lord. They get very protective when they’re carrying their autumn babies,’ he wryly commented.
‘Pah, no snake is going to take me on,’ Lord Feversham laughed. ‘My leg is so full of antibiotics that I would poison it rather than it me!’ He looked reflective for a moment. ‘Mind you, thinking about adders slithering all over the moors, I wonder if that’s where Joseph Foord got his idea from?’
During yesterday’s visit to Duncombe Park, Lord Feversham had waxed lyrical about this guy, who had served as land agent to his ancestor Thomas Duncombe in the eighteenth century. He was a local boy made good, who knew the area like the back of his hand. The problem was that whilst there was a plentiful supply of springs in the valleys, any water on the uplands quickly drained away through the pervious limestone.
‘Things came to a head in the long hot summer of 1762,’ Lord Feversham informed Father Bert and me. ‘Every single cow grazing at Old Byland died in the drought. The knock-on effect was that our tenant farmers had no income to pay their Michaelmas rents, so the whole economy of our estate was grinding to a h
alt.’
‘Ee, just imagine, no roast beef on Margaret’s table. I don’t know how I would have survived, man,’ Father Bert joked.
‘Well, there would be hell of a lot of scrawny beef to consume to start with,’ Lord Feversham pointed out. ‘But then nothing but famine for months afterwards. Clearly something had to be done.’
They had tried to sink wells, but digging through the limestone to a sufficient depth below the water table was impossibly hard manual labour. Bringing water from the valleys by ox cart, though a slightly easier option, was slow and cumbersome. Joseph Foord had come up with the ingenious solution which I had ably demonstrated to the girls over lunch, until my scale mash-model of the North York Moors had dissolved in a mush.
‘He must have been quite something striding the hills with his telescope, spirit level and surveying poles,’ Lord Feversham pondered. ‘It was all very minimalist, creating his own relief maps, employing just a handful of men to dig shallow water channels which snaked over the hills, using hollowed-out tree trunks as makeshift aqueducts, taking advantage of the west–east decline.’
‘How did they seal the water in?’ I asked.
‘That’s the beauty of it, they didn’t. Using puddling clay or cement or whatever would have taken ages and cost the earth. All they did was line the channels with gravel and sand, and let the rushing water and gravity do the rest. They leaked something terrible, but there was so much water gushing from the springs it didn’t matter. And it was uphill-downhill sort of stuff.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Jump in the Land Rover and I’ll show you.’
We bumped back down the track and drove back up Helmsley Bank, our engine roaring on the steep incline. Just at the base of Surprise View we turned left onto a forest track, lined with a thick carpet of pine needles which nicely cushioned our boneshaker of a journey. Father Bert had retaken his seat as tail-end Charlie. ‘Barn owl at ten o’clock, David,’ he informed me. The owl, with its characteristic white face and light beige wings, glided behind us, tempted by the fading autumn light, its head slowly scanning the undergrowth. ‘He’s a canny lad, following us. He’s hunting any mice or voles disturbed by his Lordship’s chariot! They’re nature’s ultimate killing machines, you know.’
It took me back to when I was a teenager in west Hull, and we had a barn owl who regularly perched in a recess in the chimney stack in our Edwardian vicarage, scanning our lawns and the adjacent park for its supper. My parents had bought my brother a border terrier puppy, and one twilight I was exercising the almost full-grown dog in our garden when I realized the owl was swooping down on it for a kill, mistaking its light-brown colouring for a rabbit’s. The dog turned, snarled and gave one sharp bark. The owl suddenly realized its mistake, that this was a rabbit with a definite attitude, not to be messed with. It aborted its mission in the nick of time, scraping the lawn with its talons as it desperately flapped its wings to achieve the lift it needed.
My mind jerked back to the present as Lord Feversham suddenly turned off the ignition and made the engine stall. It was uncanny: climbing up the track, surely we needed a lift like that owl’s to stop us grinding to a halt. But instead we actually picked up speed.
‘It’s what I said, uphill–downhill. We’re quite close to the route of Foord’s Carlton Water Race here,’ he said. ‘You think you’re climbing, but that’s an optical illusion, because the hills are actually falling towards the North Sea.’
We coasted up and down for a couple of miles before reaching Cow House Bank, the steep hill between Carlton and East Moors which I had cycled up and down when I’d toured all the churches earlier in the month. Lord Feversham pulled up and scanned the hillside. ‘We cleared away the bracken a couple of years back and uncovered the race, which was still trickling with water despite it not being used for forty years. Let’s have a rummage and see if we can find it.’
Lord Feversham, Father Bert and I scoured the hillside like detectives doing a fingertip search, until Father Bert suddenly dropped down two feet.
‘I think I’ve found it, my Lord,’ he shouted. ‘Give me a hand, David, and pull me out!’ He laughed as I nearly toppled in with him. ‘That’s reminded me of a funeral I took in Cold Kirkby. We got to the grave, but one of the sides had fallen in overnight, so the undertaker leapt in with his shovel and cleared the bottom, sending a shower of soil over me and the chief mourners.’ Father Bert covered his head with his hands, acting out the charade. ‘When he’d finished I leant over and took hold of his hand to pull him out, but the gravesides were so slippery, I fell down on top of him. Ee, it was an absolute shambles trying to scramble out!’
Father Bert explained that the old lady they happened to be burying had become more than a bit cantankerous in her declining years, so her relatives and friends weren’t too upset at losing her. ‘But they all wept at that graveside, tears running down their cheeks with helpless laughter, flowing like one of Foord’s water races! I could hardly keep a straight face as I intoned, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, because I was absolutely covered with earth, ashes, dust and God knows what else. Margaret was by my side, tittering throughout. She wasn’t tittering when she had to wash my white surplice not once but five times to get all the mud out, though.’
The three of us scrambled up and down the hillside, kicking the bracken out the way for about ten feet to reveal the watercourse, a trickle surreally running uphill.
‘See what I mean, uphill-downhill,’ Lord Feversham lectured, pointing out the obvious. ‘By the laws of gravity the water should be going down, but instead it’s going up!’
Our water-race seminar was suddenly interrupted. ‘What the ’eck are you three getting up to?’ a grey-haired and somewhat bedraggled woman shouted across to us as she emerged from the bracken at the other side of the road, carrying two bulging carrier bags.
‘We were just showing David the water race, Eva,’ Father Bert replied, quickly climbing out of the stream, where a moment before he had been merrily splashing, as thrilled as a toddler in a paddling pool. ‘What are you up to, then?’
‘I’ve been gathering blackberries – they’re never lusher than by the old water races. I wanted to catch them before the Devil pissed on them!’ she informed us.
‘Don’t worry, David,’ Father Bert responded, noticing my frown. ‘It’s just a country expression, isn’t it, Eva?’
‘Oh yes,’ she explained. ‘There’s one day in October when t’ blackberries turn. The day before they will have been plump and sweet, but then overnight they wither and taste as sour as vinegar. We call it the Devil pissing on them!’
‘My Lord, can I ask a favour?’ she continued. ‘I’ve walked out ’ere from Helmsley and I’m fair jiggered. Any chance of a lift back?’
‘Of course, Eva, be my guest,’ the genial Lord Feversham replied. We all climbed into the Land Rover – Eva, Lord Feversham and I huddled together on the front bench seat, Father Bert once again at the back. I realized this was the same Eva who had held court in Carlton Church for my so-called hour of silence. It was her smile that jogged my memory; she smiled broadly at the prospect of a ride home, the same smile that had lit up her heavily lined face in Carlton Church. She was lean, like many who had worked hard on the land for a lifetime; a wiry frame, muscles taut with energy. She was sitting very close to me and I could feel her warmth positively radiating through her thick clothes and stout coat.
‘Tell us what you know about the water race then, Eva,’ his Lordship asked as we roared up the bank and headed home.
‘They were still using it when we moved into Carlton as newlyweds in the 1950s,’ Eva began, moving animatedly as she spoke (movement compounded by the bouncing Land Rover). She hardly took a breath before continuing, ‘We had an outside tap, so I was spared the trek to t’ pump. The pump was at a trough, which was topped up by t’ reservoir, which itself was fed by the race. My, it were a bit complicated. But the reservoir was ten-foot deep and eight-foot wide
so there were always enough water for whole village. It were a foul colour, though, with little creatures swimming in it. The ’ealth officer condemned it time and time again as unfit for human consumption, even though we always boiled it.’ As she recalled the taste of the polluted water, Eva pulled a sucking-on-a-lemon face. ‘I wasn’t surprised it was so filthy. As kids we used to walk along the race as a short-cut to school, splish-splashing in our muddy wellies, and there’d be bird muck and sheep muck and leaves and God knows what else on them. Over t’ years people were fined for softening their sheep skins in the race, or steeping thatch or watering their horses. It should have been called a sewer race rather than a water race!’
‘So how did they keep it flowing?’ Lord Feversham asked, crashing into second gear as we pulled into Carlton.
‘If you rummage through your records at Duncombe Park you’ll find the estate employed a waterman, my Lord. If we had any trouble, we used to send him a postcard and he’d eventually come out and unblock it or fix any leaks with puddling clay. And boy, did we have trouble!’ Eva paused for dramatic effect before reeling off a list. ‘Moles and rats would burrow into the race and suddenly find they had an ocean flushing through their tunnels, children would be little beggars and kick t’ sides of the race in just for fun, carts and cattle crushed the race sides in when they tried to cross it, not to mention snow and leaves and dead sheep bunging it up. There were one farmer who kept diverting it to irrigate his land. He may have irrigated his land, but it didn’t half irritate us.’ Eva broke off, chuckling at her clever play on words. ‘We never had it blocked by a dead shepherd though, although it’s a wonder, considering the state some of ’em used to come wandering home in after an evening at Madge’s Sun Inn. You deserve a medal, Father Bert, for saving them from a watery grave.’
Father Bert beamed serenely, puffing at his pipe.
‘The whole race was always leaking,’ Eva went on. ‘There were one stretch where we were threatened wit’ strap as kids if we even ventured anywhere near it. Ground was so sodden beneath it, it were an absolute quagmire which would have sucked you down, never to be seen again. Mind you, the leaky races came to our rescue when we had those terrible moorland fires in t’summer of 1960. By then we’d been put on to mains water, but t’ local firemen opened up the races again and let them douse t’smouldering hillsides. If it wasn’t for those races, everything would have been ash!’
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 14