Despite his bluff exterior, he had a soft heart. The Hull connections made me warm to him, so I’d visited him often in my early months in Helmsley. He showed the greatest sympathy for our girls trying to settle into their new schools, and always sent me back home with gifts of sweets. He was just as concerned about Rachel setting up home in an impossible vicarage. When I had no one else I could really talk to, I trusted him, and poured out my hopes and fears for ministry in Helmsley. He always listened attentively, asked the right questions, gave sage advice. I suspect he saw my congregation as a band of unruly Gurkhas with me as their hapless captain.
Seeing Hull-boy Neville standing there in the silence made my own memories of Hull come flooding back. I recalled my old school, Flinton Grove Primary, perched above the black murky waters of the Hull Drain – a glamorous spot. Hull, and most of the South Riding towards the North Sea, is reclaimed land at or below sea level. The land is kept dry by a system of water channels and floodgates, which are closed when the tide comes in and opened when the tide goes out. The Drain next to the school was strictly out of bounds. Even so, every so often a trawlerman’s child with sea-lust in their genes would climb over the railings, wander too close and fall in. The ever-vigilant school caretaker would pull them out with a hook on a long pole, which he normally used for opening the high windows in the school canteen. He would then drag the child, spluttering black water, to the headmistress’s study, where the severest caning would ensure that he was completely resuscitated.
On my first day at the school all the kids had ganged up around me, chanting, ‘Your dad’s a vicar, na, na, na, na, na!’ I was quite a serious child and I replied, ‘He’s not a vicar, he’s just been ordained a deacon and he’s the Assistant Curate of Marfleet.’ This grasp of complicated ecclesiastical titles completely flummoxed them, and I didn’t have any trouble with them whatsoever after that – ‘Don’t mess with him, he’ll start quoting complex ecclesiology at you!’
In the early 1960s the labour-intensive docks were booming, and brought full employment to east Hull. My memory might be faulty, but every day in assembly we sang the same hymn:
When lamps are lighted in the town,
The boats sail out to sea;
The fishers watch when night comes down,
They work for you and me.
The boats come in at early dawn
When children wake in bed;
Upon the beach the boats are drawn,
And all the nets are spread.
It was all a rather twee view of an industry which involved massive trawlers spending weeks far away, fishing in the icy waters around Iceland, and then returning to land their catch in the Hessle Road markets, giving Hull its distinct aroma. But fish was plentiful and very cheap; you could buy a whole halibut for ten shillings, around five or six pounds today. This was just as well, because my dad was only paid £33 per month, in arrears, once again depending on whether the churchwarden remembered to drop by with the cheque. We had a lot of callers to the vicarage, usually dockers’ wives or sailors, often late into the night, asking for a tide-me-over loan of ten bob or even a pound, which they would bring back the next day. My dad always helped out but they never returned the cash, and so it was us who went hungry.
It’s funny the memories that surface on Remembrance Sunday. As the two minutes’ silence drew to a close, I forced myself to leave my Hull childhood behind and concentrate on the present. I looked at Ted Dzierzek, who just prior to 11 a.m. had waved his walking stick angrily at a car which had tried to drive through the crowd. I looked at Minnie. I looked at Father Bert standing beside me, his head frequently turning, his eyes darting, looking for enemy craft stealing on him from behind.
‘At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them,’ I said slowly and loudly, drawing the churchyard Act of Remembrance to a close.
The bugler played The Last Post and we moved into church. Three elderly Dragoons staggered in, eyes moist, bearing their battle standard, carrying it to its new, proud place by the altar as we sang: ‘Eternal Father strong to save, whose arm doth bind the restless wave . . . O hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea.’ Lady Polly read exquisitely well: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see righteousness prevail, for they shall be satisfied.’ And so say all of us.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The remaining weeks in November gave me the only shot to plan for the year ahead, before December and the frantic countdown to Christmas overtook me. Just like a maths teacher’s year is bound by exciting things like quadratic equations and trigonometry and calculus lurking on the horizon, each year a priest has to incorporate a statutory range of Bible readings within his Sunday services. The gory and sexually explicit bits of the Old Testament are mostly censored, which strikes me as a great shame. A bit of sex and violence would help spice up a dull Sunday service, and leaving them out can skew the Bible, making it seem puritanical and lifeless, when actually it is a bodice-ripping yarn.
I realize church is family entertainment, before the 9 p.m. watershed stuff, but even so, children have their own way of hearing things, with some amusing results. As a boy I had read the books of I and II Samuel, which describe the story of my namesake David, the shepherd boy who became king. At the time it seemed swashbuckling stuff, with David defeating Goliaths at every turn. But I realize now that David was a bit of a James Bond, with girls galore (as well as the odd boy) seduced along the way. There is one episode where David’s adult son Absalom stages a coup, and drives his elderly father out of Jerusalem. Just to show he’s in charge, he lines up all his father’s many concubines on the palace roof, and has sex with them all, in full view of the admiring crowds in the city below. The thing is, when I read the story as a boy, I thought concubine was a sort of porcupine, and imagined that the palace roof, rather than being a flat roof-top garden, would be steeply pitched, like all the roofs I had ever known. My King James Version didn’t mention sex, but euphemistically described Absalom as ‘going into his father’s concubines’. I was baffled by most of the Bible in those days, so assumed into was just another word for after. In the midst of the coup, David’s porcupines had escaped and shinned up the roof, and Absalom had gamely chased after them, clinging on to the slippery tiles for dear life. I thought long and hard about how he would actually have got hold of the prickly porcupines. Peering for ages at the strangely garbed picture of a well-endowed Absalom in my illustrated Bible, I deduced that he had a pair of very large and thick oven gloves dangling from the centre of his belt, which would have helped no end with porcupine recovery. Be it porcupines or concubines, the outcome is the same. Absalom is so exhausted by his extramural activities, that David stages a comeback and fiercely routs his son.
Sadly, this episode wasn’t included in the set Bible readings for the year ahead. I breezed through the possible readings, selecting story in preference to theory, poetry in preference to prose, short in preference to long, powerful point in preference to muddle. I then tried to allocate the readings to appropriate people, thespians for dramtic accounts, GPs for healing miracles etc. My best ever match-up was when a church cleaner had once read the opening chapter of Genesis and startled the congregation by reading ‘God hoovered over the abyss’ rather than ‘God hovered over the abyss’. It all sounded rather exciting, imagining God like a stressed 1950s housewife, forever cleaning up.
At the end of the day, or rather the end of a lot of days, all I had to show was one side of A4 paper matching fifty-two readers with fifty-two readings on fifty-two Sundays. I don’t like sitting at a desk for very long. Even darkening and damp November days beckoned, and I frequently stole out for a quick cycle up Beckdale or Baxton’s Hill or through Duncombe Park, its tank roads carpeted with golden leaves. These were all familiar places to me now, and the strenuous climbs followed by a hurtling descent concentrated my mind, enabling me to return fresh and ready for
another couple of hours’ administration until I felt the call of the wild once more.
Visiting was a good distraction too, although from my first days in ministry in Middlesbrough, my Vicar had made it clear that visiting folk was the whole point of ministry, with everything else a distraction. Clearly he was a latter-day Vicar Gray, who used to kick his team of assistant curates out of the vicarage after lunch and not let them back in again until 10 p.m., with strict orders to get out and mingle with their flock. Fortunately, I enjoyed the mingling. I enjoy hearing people’s stories, and many times their hard-won faith and the way they put it into practice shames mine.
As November moved rapidly towards December, one episode gave me pause for much pondering. It was a routine baptism visit in The Limes estate, the allegedly dodgy end of Helmsley. The baby was asleep upstairs in its cot and the baby’s dad, as so often happens when the vicar calls, was out, so I sat in the kitchen and chatted to the baby’s mum, a bright and breezy young woman, busy with her many tasks. As she dried up the dishes from their evening meal, I took down a few details to record in Helmsley Church’s ancient baptism register. Standard stuff – the date of birth, the names to be given to the child, its surname and address, Mum and Dad’s Christian names, the names of the godparents. ‘I work under my maiden name, so you might as well put that in for the record,’ the child’s mum added. ‘It’s Stillborn.’
‘Fine,’ I replied. Stillborn sounded a bit like Wilbourne, so its deadly connections didn’t really dawn on me. Until I asked the next question. ‘We might as well put your profession down as well. What is it?’
‘Oh, I’m a midwife,’ she nonchalantly replied.
Usually I’m good at conversation, but I dried up, as all sorts of questions ran through my mind. What impact would it have on mothers in labour when they were told that Midwife Stillborn was going to take them through the stages? Why hadn’t she used her married name, since it would have been far less distressing to have been faced by Midwife Davies? How was anyone ever given the surname Stillborn to start with? I knew that surnames arose in ancient times to describe someone’s profession or personal characteristics, but titles like Barren or Eunuch or Stillborn tend, by definition, to be epithets which last just one generation.
‘I use it deliberately, Vicar,’ the baby’s mum explained, reading my mind. ‘I’ve just been through a birth, and all sorts of worries are swirling around about whether your child will survive, whether it will be OK, whether you’ll survive. Some worries are rational, some irrational, but whatever, worries cause stress and raise the blood pressure, just at a time when you want to keep the blood pressure down. They all look a bit shocked when they hear my surname for the first time, but actually we’ve named the demon – it’s out in the open and we talk about it. We talk about how only one in every two hundred births end in still-birth, which reassures them big-time, especially when I wire up the heart monitor and they can see from the screen that their baby is very much alive. “I may be called Stillborn,” I tell them, “but I am for life not death. I’m staying with you throughout, and by the end we’ll have a live, healthy baby.”’
‘Looking at what harms you to heal you,’ I replied, moved by her sensitive rationale. I recalled another strange incident in the Scriptures which I’d puzzled over as a boy. When the Israelite slaves had escaped from Egypt and were making the long journey to the Promised Land, their camp was attacked by hundreds of snakes, and many Israelites were bitten and died. Moses’ solution was to make a bronze snake and impale it on a stick. Whenever anyone was bitten, looking at the bronze effigy somehow enabled them to miraculously recover.
Apparently, quite a lot of deaths from snakebites are caused by panic and the accompanying adrenalin surge rather than by poison. I guess seeing the snake impaled calmed people, making them realise that the snakes were mortal and fallible rather than deadly and terrifying. Just as well that Moses had completed a Psychology and Chemistry degree at the University of Alexandria before the Exodus, and that the Israelites had included a portable smelting works in their baggage prior to their rush across the Red Sea, otherwise they might never have made it. But whatever, as I cycled home I realized that, had I stayed in tackling my rotas, I’d have missed my latter-day Moses, lurking in The Limes.
Chapter Thirty
‘Lo, he comes with clouds descending,’ trilled the evensong congregation. It sent a shiver down my spine, actually singing the famous Advent hymn, which was set to the tune ‘Helmsley’, in Helmsley Parish Church. There were a dozen or so in the congregation on this last day of November; mostly clergy widows or retired clergy in the twilight of life. They sat as far away from each other as they could possibly get, scattered throughout the chilly church, their breath condensing in billows of white steam as their shrill Yorkshire voices struggled to span the tune’s three octaves. ‘Thou shalt reign and thou alone,’ ended the hymn, on a variety of discordant notes. I blessed the congregation from the ornate high altar, and then sped to the back of the church to wish them goodnight as they rushed back to their warm homes and hearths to defrost.
‘See you in five minutes,’ silver-haired Joan said, as she bustled away.
I took off my black woollen cassock, white linen surplice, black and white silk Cambridge degree hood and black silk scarf – robes obviously dating back to an age before colour was invented, I thought, as I put on my more cheery yellow cagoule and cycle clips. Rooting about in the tall wardrobe in the vestry, I then unearthed the baby Jesus amongst the other Christmas crib figures. The whole set of half-sized nativity figures including; Mary, Joseph, sundry angels, shepherds and wise men, daubed in the gaudiest of paints, must have been bought from the bargain basement of an ecclesiastical boutique way back in the 1960s. Baby Jesus, with a somewhat chipped golden halo around his head, stared at me with stark, dark pin-point pupils set in a pink and distinctly un-Semitic face, clearly none too pleased to be disturbed four weeks before his actual birth. Reverently, I wrapped him in a linen cloth, put him in the front basket of my bicycle, and pedalled off. My cycle lamp, precariously perched above Jesus’s head, cut a bright line of white light through the chill mist swirling up from the River Rye.
I hadn’t gone mad. My plan was to take Jesus to stay in a different house every night during December in a sort of Advent Calendar roadshow in the countdown to Christmas. I was acting out a physical reminder that Christ is invisibly present in every home and every life, sharing every joy and every sorrow.
I soon reached Joan and Alan’s home in Castlegate; the terraced stone-built house I had visited in my early days in Helmsley. As always on this street of near-identical houses, I wondered briefly if I’d got the right door, because I didn’t really want to drop off Jesus any old where. Although, thinking about it, leaving him on random doorsteps like an abandoned baby of yesteryear and seeing what happened did have its attractions. I supposed I could write a book of my adventures called The Importance of Being Jesus and give Lady Feversham a star line: ‘A bicycle basket! You left Jesus in a bicycle basket?!’
Gus’s incessant barking and crashing around behind the front door snapped me back to the present, confirming I had definitely got the right house. I gingerly carried in baby Jesus, stooping to avoid banging my head on the low beams as Joan desperately tried to hold the baying boxer back. Once again the most obnoxious sulphurous fumes engulfed us, forcing Joan to apologize as well as making it quite clear that it was Gus who was the culprit.
‘Alan, you’ve been feeding this dog far too much raw steak again!’
Twice Gus leapt up at me, and the second time actually knocked Jesus out of my hands. Jesus somersaulted across the room like a rugby ball destined for a conversion. Fortunately, quick-witted Alan resurrected his skills as a winger, which had lain dormant for forty years, and caught Jesus in the nick of time. Otherwise the Lord of heaven and earth would have been smashed to smithereens on their stone fireplace, ending my parish-wide tour before it had even begun.
Joan had cle
ared the top of the bulky Mouseman sideboard and laid a starched white handkerchief in the middle, with a candle burning at each end. I placed baby Jesus in the centre and we stood in silence.
Joan stood in a sort of rapture, every ounce of her being radiating her thrill in hosting the baby Jesus for twenty-four hours. Alan was standing by her side, stooping slightly rather than his usual habit of standing to attention, tonight a quieter presence than his wife. Having a baby in their midst – albeit a pot one – stirred memories. After a few minutes of silence, Alan softly told me how, as a newly qualified GP working in Leeds, he had once visited a newborn baby; a miner’s son.
‘They were so very poor, Vicar,’ Alan said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘They had to resort to using a dirty coal sack to wrap up the little mite, with the family’s tin bath doubling up as a cot.’
Having got into his stride with baby stories, he recalled his early days as a GP in Leicester, when he helped out with shifts at the local maternity hospital. There’d been a premature baby with the palest skin and the brightest red hair, whose life had hung in the balance at a time when premature care was so primitive. Alan fought through the night to try and save that baby’s life, and then in the morning handed him over to the consultant. Alan’s heavy caseload meant he didn’t have any time to return to the hospital to check how things had gone. But seven years later, he had gone to a local garage to get his car serviced, and had noticed there a seven-year-old, with bright red hair and pale skin, helping in the garage workshop.
‘Who does that lad belong to?’ Alan had asked the red-haired mechanic.
‘Oh, he’s my son – Bobby,’ the mechanic proudly explained. ‘He was a prem baby, born two months before his time, and we thought we’d lost him. But this absolutely wonderful doctor stayed up through the entire night, willing him to survive.’
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 21