Val, the secretary, then read the minutes from the previous meeting. ‘Any matters arising?’ I asked.
‘I have,’ one curmudgeonly bloke growled. ‘You’ve spelt my name with a ph again, and I’ve told you time after time it’s spelt with a v. Will you never learn?’
‘I’m so sorry, Steven,’ Val apologized. ‘I’ll make sure we spell it correctly in the future.’
‘That’s what you said last time, and the time before that, it’s not good enough.’
Val looked very tearful, and my heart went out to her. ‘Erm, where is Steven’s name mentioned?’ I asked, emphasising the ven.
‘Oh, he proposed item three,’ Val gently replied.
‘Remind us what it says,’ I asked.
‘“That this Council resolves that under no circumstances should children be involved with worship”,’ Val read, her eyes downcast.
‘Well, never mind the peculiar spelling of Steven’s name, it seems to me that we need to look at the whole of that item again, because it directly contradicts Jesus in the reading we’ve just heard. We’re a Church Council, and being faithful to Jesus is non-negotiable, otherwise we’re a contradiction in terms. Since we’re changing a ph to a v, I also propose that we omit the words under no circumstances should and add the word always after children.’
It took them a few moments to get their heads around that. Steven was the first to object: ‘Hang on a minute, children should be taken out of worship to stop them disturbing us. They can do crayoning and stuff in the Church Room.’
The Church Room was even damper than Canons Garth, which was quite an achievement.
‘If we’re going down the “taking out” road, there are a lot of other factions I would like to take out before I’d get to children,’ I responded, slightly tongue in cheek. ‘During the first hymn those miserable so-and-sos who will only worship in Tudor English can take themselves off to the draughty shed in the graveyard, do some crayoning-in and then come back during the last hymn and tell us what they’ve been up to.’
‘I never thought I’d hear a vicar speak like that about faithful traditionalists,’ Steven fumed. ‘That’s absolutely disgusting.’
‘No more disgusting than talking about children like that. After all Jesus never said “Let the traditionalists come to me.” But whatever, once you go down the separation route, excluding groups who disturb your calm, spoil your nice little set, then my experience is that you find Jesus himself waving at you from the very midst of the group you’ve shut out.’
‘I’m not putting up with any more of this utter claptrap. I’m off,’ Steven spluttered, banging our dining-room door as he made a noisy exit. Flakes of white paint fluttered down from our fragile ceiling, settling on our heads and giving us all a frosty look. Yet despite that the temperature of the room seemed to rise a few degrees and make for a warmer atmosphere – there was almost an audible sigh of relief as everyone took a breath and relaxed.
‘He pushed all of us into supporting that motion,’ Enid, my churchwarden explained. ‘If we didn’t back him he said he’d leave and take all his cronies with him. Good riddance, I say.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Mary objected. ‘I’m not at all happy at having girls in the sanctuary.’ She was a lovely soul, deeply prayerful and caring. Her husband, a retired vicar, had died just before we moved in. In his time, he had been quite a fierce traditionalist, and like all good clergy wives, she remained loyal to her husband however strange his views. I’ve always told Rachel that when I die she should forget everything I ever said and just get a life.
‘I understand, Mary,’ I replied, determined to take the softly, softly approach. After all, a PM doesn’t want too many members of his cabinet storming out. ‘It’s just that my hero, James Herriot, used to take his children on his rounds with him when they were little. I suppose the altar is my working environment, and I just like having my children with me. It can get a bit lonely up there sometimes!’
Mary gave me a silent smile. ‘So, all those in favour of my revised motion, “This Church Council resolves that children should always be involved with worship.”’ Eleven hands went up, so that was that. ‘But we’re not really here to talk about what we’re against, against children in worship, against girls in the sanctuary. We’re really here to talk about what we are for,’ I said, pressing home my advantage. ‘I thought I’d give you five things to think about, they’re what I feel any church worth its salt should be for.’ I then rattled off my five points:
1. We should be producing excellent, moving, converting worship, match-fit for 1997 rather than 1897, which will make anybody dropping in feel it’s really good to be here.
2. We should be sensitive to our community’s hurting points and stand alongside people who are going through their personal Good Friday.
3. We should be aiming to transform and heal those hurting points, moving people on from Good Friday to Easter Day.
4. We should be making disciples, encouraging people to fish for Christ.
5. As a church we should have a care for each other, and make sure we are a forgiving, loving and accepting community, so that when people say, ‘See how these Christians love one another’, they really mean it and aren’t being ironic.
I let the words sink in for a moment, and found that everybody was nodding their heads in agreement; after all, I was only stating the obvious. ‘Look, I’ll get Val to print off copies of all these points, but I wonder if we can divide into small groups, with each group looking at one point and come up with suggestions how we can run with it?’
They readily agreed, and broke into their groups for the remainder of the meeting, huddling in various corners of Canons Garth. And whatever my family felt about living in Canons Garth, one advantage was that there were an awful lot of corners. They reconvened just before 9 p.m. to report back, with all of them concluding that they’d like more time and wanted to come back with major ideas at our next meeting. Which seemed fine. We concluded business by saying the Lord’s Prayer, and then I sent them to prepare for government.
‘How did it go?’ Rachel asked me as they all departed, pouring me a pint of Guinness, my favourite tipple.
‘It went just fine. We got rid of the out-of-work U-boat commander looking for a war, and after that it was peace in our time. It was really just a case of “love me, love my kids”,’ I joked, raising my glass to toast my lovely little family.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Just three weeks after Ian Carmichael’s visit, an official-looking letter landed on my doormat. Against all expectations, permission to move the Dragoons’ standard to a more prominent position at the east end of Helmsley Church was granted, with a full week to spare before Remembrance Sunday. God bless Archbishop David Hope, who’d obviously pulled a few strings as well as pulling all the stops out – he’d truly lived up to his surname. I think we should only appoint people archbishops if they have a catchy surname. As a boy I was always fascinated by Makarios, the very militant Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Cyprus. Makarios is Greek for ‘happy’. Imagine Archbishop Hope meeting Archbishop Happy. But what would happen if they encountered the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, Cardinal Sin?
Ian Carmichael was so thrilled when I rang and told him the good news, that the very next day he drove over and helped me and the ever trusty Derek install the standard in its new position, holding the stepladders as I screwed the mount into the wall. Our labours coincided with a coach trip from Liverpool, who were seeking shelter in the church on this rainy November day. Eventually one elderly liver bird, ignoring the vicar on the top of the ladder, asked the man below, ‘Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind uz askin’, but are you Ian Carmichael, luv?’
‘I am indeed,’ Ian replied, Lord Peter Wimsey to a tee.
‘I’m proud to meet you; you’ve given uz such pleasure,’ said the lady, shaking him warmly by the hand. Our DIY then had to be abandoned as a queue of Boxing Day sale proportions developed down the ch
urch, all eager to shake the hand of the man himself.
Ian gallantly brushed the drops of rain off the shoulders of one admirer. ‘We don’t want you catching your death,’ he said. She coloured up; he had not just made her day, but her life.
‘What yur doing here then? I didn’t know you worked for the church,’ she asked.
‘I’m just helping my good friend the Vicar hang the standard of the regiment I served in in the war, the twenty-second Dragoons,’ Ian explained. ‘We were amongst the first to land on the beaches at Normandy.’
‘Oo, you brave things. Did you get injured?’ the woman asked, chattering on as if the actor were a long-lost friend.
‘Afraid I lost the tip of this finger, when we had to close the hatch of my tank in a bit of a hurry. Those bloody Nazis were throwing everything they’d got at us,’ he replied.
‘Oh, you poor, poor luv,’ the woman oozed, caressing his hand with her hand, as if the star of her dreams’ missing finger-tip could be restored by sheer willpower.
‘Goodness me, it was nothing compared to what my dear comrades took. They whipped me back to Blighty and did the neatest job, stitching my finger up.’ Ian drew closer to the woman, treating her as his confidante, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper. ‘Do you know, the Mess Sergeant visited me in hospital. “I’ll be a bit slow at pulling a trigger with only part of a finger,” I joked. “Guess it will be mean I won’t be rejoining the lads!”
‘“No, sir,” he replied. “We’ve taken so many losses you’ll have to rejoin them. But if you have trouble firing the trigger, I guess it will mean that you won’t ever be coming back home!” Very droll, these Mess Sergeants! But I did rejoin the lads, and I did get back home, so there we are.’
The woman laughed raucously. ‘Thank God you did, sir. My sister bought me the box set of your Lord Peter Wimsey videos last Christmas, and we’ve been watchin’ and re-watchin’ them ever since. A real treat – I can’t imagine anybody pullin’ off the role like you do!’
‘Oh, I say, how tremendously kind of you,’ Ian replied, giving her a beaming smile. ‘Well, better return to my duties and help the Vicar. But it’s been a pleasure meeting you, don’t you know. Thank you so much for dropping in!’
I sensed it wasn’t so much Ian Carmichael who played Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey, but rather Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey who played Ian Carmichael. The very best of men.
On Remembrance Sunday, the very best of men and women lined the High Street, their freshly polished medals catching the morning sunlight. The two minutes’ silence focused on the war memorial in the churchyard, some four feet above the street below, meaning everyone in the street had their eyes raised heavenwards whilst I read the list of the fallen. The list was too long, far too long: the heart of this community had been torn out, twice, within three decades. It is amazing, absolutely bloody amazing, that this community, that any community, survived. I thought of villages in medieval times that had been wiped out by the Black Death or the Great Plague, of the monasteries and their communities wiped out by Tudor caprice. Two world wars should have finished us, yet here we were, in the words of that great father of the Church, Elton John, still standing after all this time. And not just standing, but standing proud.
During the long silence I looked around, looking at the scouts and guides and cubs and brownies, standing to attention, shivering, their uniforms too thin for this cold November day. Each face white as a sheet, eyes staring vacantly ahead, wondering what on earth all this was about. Behind the youngsters, the older folk lined up, the crowd three or four deep. As I looked at them I thought of the stories that had been shared with me over the past few weeks. I looked at Lees, who had served with Monty in the North Africa campaign which turned the course of the war. He had been captured and recaptured after making not one but two escapes as a POW in Italy. The Nazis sentenced this troublesome prisoner to hard labour deep in a coal mine in Poland, and then forced him on the Long March as they fled the invading Russians. He and many others marched ten miles a day for two months, surviving typhoid, the poorest rations and night temperatures of minus thirty degrees Celsius. I’d have spent the rest of my life recovering from all that. He didn’t. He taught: a head at primary and secondary level; a chair of Governors until he was 75; coached the handicapped to play football; taught in the Sunday School. Wow! Before the war both his young wife and unborn child had died when an old appendix scar burst during labour, yet there was not an ounce of bitterness about him. One dusk I had bumped in to him breezing through the churchyard, returning from his daily ten-mile walk. A few youths were larking about outside the church, low-level stuff, the odd can of lager, the odd hand-rolled cigarette, the odd catcall.
‘These young people, how do we get them from outside the church to inside the church?’ Lees asked me, his eighty-five-year-old-eyes bright and alert.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘To be honest, I’m more interested in getting those inside to come outside and join in the fun!’
Lees had laughed.
I looked at Rosie, a spritely eighty-three-year-old grandmother. The eldest of a large family, she’d skived off school to care for her siblings. She’d married in 1936, given birth to a daughter, and then her husband had been whisked off to serve in the Far East. He had been captured, beaten, starved, and then with other POWs had been packed like sardines into a prison ship in the Java Sea, where he died when it was torpedoed by the Americans. The Japanese had scattered these prison ships amongst their fleet, either as decoys or hoping the enemy wouldn’t fire on their own. Early in the 1950s, Rosie had got married again, but to a violent, angry man, who brought home a taste of war every day.
I looked at Rob, who as a boy had gone on the ill-fated rail excursion to Scarborough which had been strafed by a Messerschimdt as it steamed into Helmsley. Some Canadian soldiers on the train had thrown him to the floor, protecting his body from stray bullets by flinging themselves down on top of him. He’d had a strange life, working at Lord Feversham’s sawmill and drinking heavily. But then he’d become addicted to the moors rather than alcohol, forever wandering over them with a succession of faithful terriers. He lived just across the road from us, simply, in the tiny terraced house his parents had owned; one cold tap, no television, no oven, no inside loo. It was adjacent to the Feversham Arms, and the plush hotel had its sights on his little house, though some improvement was certainly needed.
I looked at Frances, whose brother had flown Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Their parents had been farmers in Bilsdale, and she’d grown up with a life-long interest in botany, shooting rare flowers with her SLR camera and posting off films daily to be developed by return. She’d ended up as head of a local primary school, treating naughty boys as fiercely as her brother had treated Messerschmitts; just one look from her and the biggest bully turned into a quivering wreck. Apparently, her former pupils often wrote her letters of appreciation, expressing how her firm but fair discipline had set them up for adult life. The letters were returned, any lapses of spelling or grammar corrected with red ink; very occasionally a well-written letter escaped her censure, and the writer was rewarded with a box of chocolates.
I looked at Len, who lived in one of the tiny ex-estate workers’ bungalows near Eva, with a bizarre electronic croaking frog serving as his doorbell. Like Lees, he had fought at El Alamein. He too was captured, and became a POW in Italy and Germany in 1942, enduring forced labour on the railways. As the war drew to its close, he was liberated after his POW camp was bombed by the Americans, and he made his way to the Allied lines, dodging the SS thugs still at large. After the war he’d worked at nearby Flamingo Land, caring for the animals he had seen roaming free during his time in North Africa. Then he’d had a brief time in Liverpool, dealing with benefit fraudsters who’d accused him of acting like the Gestapo, before returning to Helmsley to do this and that. Beside him today stood his wife; restless, eyes vacant, wasting away with Alzheimer’s.
&nb
sp; I looked at Harry, ancient of days, in a wheelchair and cosseted in a thick, warm rug. He was an old soldier, but his heart’s desire was for peace. He was only nine when his dad had died in the trenches, fighting alongside the ill-fated Lord Feversham. He was fiercely loyal to the Duncombe family, and had worked on the estate as Lord Feversham’s horseman, organizing the local hunt and lending a hand with forestry. During the Second World War he had signed up with Lord Feversham’s Yorkshire Hussars and had been shipped off to South Africa and the Holy Land. After the war he had stayed on as the scattered Jewish people returned to their homeland, and had tried to keep the peace in those fraught, troubled times in Jerusalem. Now he spent most of his days sitting in his doorway in Bondgate, hailing passers-by and greeting me as I cycled to and fro, his equally ancient wife fussing around him, making sure his rug was tucked in.
I looked at George, behind Harry, holding his wheelchair. Like Harry, he’d served in the Yorkshire Hussars, and they were comrades in arms. In peacetime he had worked at Ampleforth Abbey as a coalman – stoking the boilers and the little tank engine which shunted the boys’ luggage. A widower, he lived in another one of the tiny ex-estate worker bungalows, next door to Len. His garden overlooked Helmsley Primary School playing field, and he idled away his daylight hours chatting over the fence to the children, regaling them with tales of his time as a Desert Rat.
I looked at Neville, like me a Hull boy, who in his youth had thought nothing of cycling the sixty miles to Helmsley and back. Formerly a manager at Yorkshire Penny Bank, he looked a bit like Captain Mainwaring of Dad’s Army fame, and acted like him – barking orders at his sweet wife as if she were that ‘stupid boy’, Pike. During the war he served in the Far East as captain of a crack corps of Gurkhas: he made it sound like It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. After the war Captain Neville returned to Hull, where he was forced to serve as a mere junior in the bank before working his way up to be manager.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 20