The garage mechanic went on to tell Alan how the next day his tiny son had rallied, positively thriving over the years to become the strapping lad before them now. ‘We often talk about that doctor. With all that was going on that night, we never got his name, but we owe our son’s life to him. And me and my wife’s life, to be honest. I don’t think we’d have pulled through if Bobby had died; our only child,’ he had concluded, fondly ruffling his son’s hair.
I looked down at the sideboard at baby Jesus, another little one whose infant life had been held in the balance. Alan’s poignant tale triggered my own memories, back to the 1960s when my dad had been a priest in east Hull and chaplain to Hull Maternity Hospital; a Humberside version of Call the Midwife. One of his cases became family folklore. Late in November 1963, on a stormy night, dad was called out to baptize a premature baby; a farmer’s daughter from South Holderness. She’d been born on the flagged farmhouse floor beside the wooden kitchen table, before mother and child were rushed to the maternity hospital in Hedon Road. But, two months premature and just two pounds in weight, the little baby was dying and wasn’t expected to last the night, so my dad was summoned. He’d cycled out from our vicarage in the pouring rain to baptize her, lorry after lorry from the docks overtaking him, drenching him with spray. By the time he reached the hospital, he looked like he was the one who’d been baptized.
He’d christened the little girl, using a kidney dish as a font, with the matron and the ward sister looking on. My dad had held the tiny, tiny baby in one hand. ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ And as the water had run down her face, her tiny tongue came out and licked the drops.
‘That child’s not going to die – she’s a survivor,’ Matron had blurted out, taking the baptism liturgy in a somewhat novel direction. ‘Sister, call Mr Stokes out,’ she commanded.
‘But, the consultant will be in bed by now, Matron. I don’t want to disturb him without good reason,’ the sister had stuttered.
‘Call him out!’ Matron had boomed, rising to her full height of four foot eleven inches – a measurement which curiously coincided with her girth. In full flight she would have put the fear of God into God. The consultant was duly awoken, examined the child and decided life was worth a shot. The little one was placed in a shoe box and cocooned in cotton wool, with the hospital janitor – quite the Heath Robinson – clamping a pygmy light bulb to the side of the box to keep her warm. As Alan had said, these were primitive times for premature care.
One year later, late in November 1964, there was a knock on our door. On the doorstep stood a ruddy-faced farmer and his ruddy-faced wife holding their ruddy-faced one-year-old daughter: a beautiful lass brought to life by baptism.
I said a simple prayer for Joan and Alan and their home, then left them to babysit Jesus until tomorrow, the cold night air scouring my face as I cycled back to Canons Garth. It suddenly struck me how this childless couple had never had a baby in the house until tonight, and yet they’d enabled hundreds of babies to flourish, truly their children. Not to mention a succession of sulphurous boxer dogs. It wasn’t just the night air that sent a shiver down my spine, but the thought of Gus left alone with the baby Jesus for twenty-four hours. Would I come back tomorrow and find Christ in pieces?
Chapter Thirty-one
I carried the baby Jesus in my arms to the Quaker Meeting House. As we crossed the busy road by the market place, an angel decked in white clung to my left arm. Potiphar’s servant, with eyelids painted gaudily as ancient Egyptians are wont to do, clung to my right arm. Their breath condensed in front of them like clouds of incense in the crisp night air. Strangely enough, it wasn’t some weird nightmare, but was actually happening. I had picked Jesus up from his previous lodgings, mercifully unscathed by Gus, and he was to spend the next twenty-four hours in the company of Helmsley Primary School. They were staging Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Helmsley Arts Centre, formerly the Quaker Meeting House. Our daughter Hannah was cast as an angel, Clare as Potiphar’s servant.
I deposited Jesus on a table in the foyer of the theatre – the lady taking tickets and selling programmes promised to keep a kindly eye on him. The angel and Potiphar’s servant disappeared backstage and Rachel, Ruth and I took our seats on the front row of the packed auditorium, with Minnie and her Zimmer frame sitting immediately beside us. Despite the frosty December evening, it was incredibly hot and stuffy. The Meeting House was so very small. Judging by Joseph Foorde’s experience in 1744, it was forever excluding people for what they had or hadn’t done, so was unused to large crowds. It was also ablaze with light, which made you feel even hotter – perspiring under the spotlight in front of everyone’s gaze. It was a very public place where it was impossible for a vicar to blend inconspicuously into the background. For her birthday treat in October, Rachel and I had brought Ruth to the Arts Centre to see GoldenEye, which had at last reached Helmsley just two years after its release. I realized that whenever James Bond started getting a bit intimate with his leading lady, every eye in the cinema was on me, gauging my reaction, rather than on the screen. It reminded me of the saintly Pope John XXIII who, in the early 1960s, was at a party in Rome where the young Sophia Loren made a spectacular entrance, wearing a very low-cut dress. Someone asked him what he thought of such lewdness. ‘I feel very sorry for Miss Loren’s new husband,’ he replied with an enigmatic smile. He was pressed to explain himself. ‘Well, with such a stunningly beautiful wife displaying her charms so liberally, when she entered the room all eyes should have been on her. Instead they were all on me!’ As Pierce Brosnan slid the dress off his latest shapely conquest and everyone looked in my direction, I knew how the Pope must have felt.
Fortunately, all eyes were on the stage tonight, with its elaborate Egyptian backdrop featuring painted sphinxes and pyramids and a plethora of Mau – sacred Egyptian cats. ‘Ee, those cats have reminded me of some funny goings-on, Vicar,’ Minnie exclaimed, poking me in the ribs. I turned awkwardly towards her in my cramped seat as she continued, ‘I was doing the ticketing at Ampleforth station during the Second World War with my friend Audrey,’ she said. ‘One day a very large woman alighted from the York train at eight thirty in t’ morning – she’d come to be interviewed for cook’s post at the Abbey. Only problem was, she’d brought all her cats with her – eighteen of them, each in a separate crate. For some reason she hadn’t bought tickets for all these when she’d got on at York – I think there’d been a bombing raid the night before, so things were a bit chaotic. Although how they managed to miss eighteen cats . . .’
Minnie raized her eyebrows, exasperated that York’s station’s staff couldn’t hold a candle to her team out here in the sticks. ‘So we had to calculate all the excess fares, which she paid in halfpennies, threepences and sixpences; all the change she had on her. No one came down from t’ college to meet her, so we had to ring them. Their coal man brought his coal truck and stuck the crates in the back of that, but he was back again with her and the cats for the next train – not surprisingly, she hadn’t got the job!’
Minnie’s reminiscences were brought to a halt as the show began. We had performed the songs at Archbishop Holgate’s grammar school in York ‘way back many centuries ago’ in the late 1960s. But in the 1990s the show had had a massive revival, with Jason Donavan, Phillip Schofield and Donny Osmond playing the lead part, as well as Richard Attenborough starring as Jacob and Joan Collins as the alluring Mrs Potiphar. Sadly, Joan Collins hadn’t been able to make it to Helmsley tonight. Instead, Sharon Dubbins – a precocious girl in Year Five – stood in as Potiphar’s wife, mistress to our Clare, and, so the book of Genesis would have us believe, anyone else who was up for it. Though Helmsley Primary School hadn’t quite come up with the star-studded cast of a world premiere, the kids really entered into the spirit of the show, catching the script’s witty take on the Bible story and timing the wisecracks perfectly. They thoroughly enjoyed impersonating 1950s and 196
0s pop stars, though they were the heart-throbs of their grandmothers’ generation rather than theirs. The boy playing Pharaoh took a well-earned break from his extensive pyramid building programme and asset-stripping of neighbouring Mediterranean states to deliver a truly excellent Elvis, decked in one of the outrageous costumes the mega-star sported prior to his untimely demise, which would have kicked even Pharaoh’s sartorial elegance into touch. He had Elvis to a tee – lips curling, hips gyrating, and a voice which would have made the women in the audience swoon, had they not already been feeling faint because of the intense heat.
He should have stolen the show, but he was upstaged by Laura, one of his female slaves. She was eight, in our Clare’s class, and had Down’s syndrome. Her parents had opted for mainstream education for her, with her inclusion benefitting the school as much as it benefitted her. In short, the little girl seemed unashamed of her own tenderness, and led her contemporaries to be tender too, when eight-year-olds are normally less confident about wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Clare came home from primary school with tales of Laura, almost on a daily basis. Once the head teacher was telling the children off during assembly for the usual things – excessive use of paper towels or sprinting in corridors – but was clearly losing it as his face reddened and his voice rose. Spontaneously, Laura leapt up from where she had been sitting cross-legged with her classmates in the middle of the hall. She ran towards the Head as fast as her little legs would carry her; sundry teachers and teaching assistants tried to block her path, but she dodged them like a rugby winger with a try firmly in her sights. She reached the ranting head and just flung her arms around his legs, wrapping herself around him, giving him the cuddle of his life. For seconds there was a shocked and heavy silence, but then the Head laughed and everyone laughed.
Tonight everyone laughed as Laura really gave her all to a Shawaddywaddy dance, continuing long after the other dancing slaves had exhausted themselves and in fact rising to a crescendo of jiving. Her timing was perfect: she put all she had into the dance, lock, stock and barrel. At first the audience’s laughter was condescending, ‘Oh, isn’t this Down’s syndrome girl a real card!’ But as she continued, their focus shifted. Pharaoh and the rest of the cast became almost invisible as the audience only had eyes for Laura, realizing they were witnessing a unique and marvellous act of which no other child present was remotely capable.
It was a great show. Afterwards, the cast lined up in the foyer to await collection by their parents and receive accolades galore from the departing crowd. Laura was embarrassed, ran off and sought refuge behind the ticket seller’s table. Then she noticed Jesus. ‘A baby, oh a baby,’ she cried, picking him up and cradling him in her arms. Embarrassed no longer, she walked up and down the foyer, rocking the baby Jesus, singing him a lullaby, making up the tune as she went along. ‘Sleep, baby, sleep, little Laura’s here!’ The departing crowd were stunned by her performance for the second time that night. When everyone had eventually departed, I tried to prize Jesus off Laura, who resisted and got into a right strop, becoming near hysterical at the prospect of losing her baby.
The ever-patient and maternal deputy head managed to calm her down, making it clear that Laura would be Jesus’s chief carer from the moment school began the next day. I caught Jesus’s eye as the deputy took him away with her for the night. It had the same miffed look in it that Pharaoh had had an hour before, as both realized that they’d been upstaged big time: tonight the show was definitely Laura’s and not theirs.
Chapter Thirty-two
Cycling through rain is never fun.
Waterproofs help, but your exposed face and hands take the brunt and become soiled with a fine suspension of mud and goodness-knows-what that has lain in wait on the tarmac until passing cars spray it up on you. Mercifully, it wasn’t a long cycle ride this stormy night. I had picked Jesus up in the twilight, in a light drizzle before the rain had set in, and had taken him to evensong to join the faithful stalwarts who would brave a hurricane rather than miss church.
By the time evensong ended the storm was at its worst, rain beating against the stained-glass windows. ‘Ee, Jesus is going to get a typical Yorkshire baptism tonight!’ Alan joked, as we turned off the lights and locked up the dark church.
After cycling a short distance up the high street I perched my bike against a stone wall where the crumbling limestone flaked off onto the wet pavement, glistening under the streetlights. I tapped on the grimy window, the torrential rain pouring on my uncovered head. As I waited on the doorstep, I wrung out the drenched linen cloth in which baby Jesus was wrapped, beads of water running down his porcelain forehead. Eventually the door was opened, just the tiniest crack. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s David, Sister Lillian. I’ve come to bring the baby Jesus to stay.’
Lillian opened the door a few inches wider and I squeezed through for my first visit to Lillian’s home. Despite being crippled by arthritis and finding every step painful, she was a faithful attender at the Wednesday morning Communion service in Helmsley Church. Though very devout, she cut an eccentric, gaunt figure, always decked in the same worn cardigan, blouse and skirt whose colours clashed with each other. I noticed that other members of the congregation gave her a wide berth, apart from Rachel, who enjoyed having a chat with her whilst I cleared away all the Communion vessels after everyone else had scarpered. I had offered to visit her in her home repeatedly, but she had always come up with some excuse. ‘No that’s not convenient, I’m afraid. I’m going to the hairdresser’s.’ I sensed she was fobbing me off, because looking at the state of her bedraggled hair, I doubted she had seen the inside of a hairdresser’s for years.
Last Wednesday I had booked Jesus in for an overnight stay, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. As I entered Sister Lillian’s house, every step took me back half a century. Just a bare lightbulb hanging precariously down from a roughly plastered ceiling, the walls bare plaster with one sizzling electric socket powering an old wireless, a wonky standard lamp and a rusty electric fire, its bars not so much red-hot as cool pink.
The place was freezing. To say the least, Lillian’s room was cluttered. In desperation I put Jesus down on the top of the radio, the only space available, and stuffed the damp linen cloth into my pocket like an embarrassed dad secreting his baby’s saturated nappy. The wireless was permanently tuned to Radio Two, labelled as the Light Programme on the dial from a previous age. Cliff Richard was crooning ‘Bachelor Boy’. Hard-of-hearing Lillian had set the volume so high that the walnut case of the wireless vibrated, jigging the baby Jesus about.
Lillian’s dog, Rusty, which moulted more hair than all the hounds of the parish put together, seemed to jig to the music too, continually orbiting my legs like a sheepdog rounding up his solitary flock, condemning my suit trousers to be trimmed with dog-fur for the rest of the week.
Breathless after admitting me, Sister Lillian had to recover with her ‘beer’; a sip of Dandelion and Burdock which I decanted into a drinking bottle for her. The viscous liquid bubbled over and made my fingers sticky – the aforementioned moist linen cloth came in handy as I used it like a flannel to freshen up my hands.
Lillian wore a worn woollen cardigan. I’m not sure what the original colour had been, but by now it was a sort of dirty beige with interesting psychedelic stains. Wisps of wool were unravelling around the neck, sleeves, pockets and waist. One pocket bulged. From it she extracted an individual apple pie, which she put on the sofa arm.
‘If I lie down, I might squash it,’ she explained. Then from the same pocket she produced some scraps of raw meat, which she pressed into my hands to feed the dog. ‘Is there much sickness in the parish?’ she asked, with genuine concern.
There will be, I thought, if we keep carrying on like this. Not wanting to infuse my multi-purpose linen cloth with salmonella, I stole into the kitchen to wash my hands, only to be appalled by the primitive home comforts I found there, too. There was one cold tap above a chipped Belfast sink and
a battered cabinet or two piled high with chipped, unwashed crockery, food dried on it from goodness knows when. On one plate there was even a discoloured bit of Spam; there was me, thinking Spam had been eradicated in the 1960s, along with smallpox!
I rinsed my hands under the tap and shook them clean rather than dry them on the grubby towel that was draped over a chair. I returned to Lillian, who was suffering from an attack of burping, no doubt caused by the Dandelion and Burdock. Not wanting to embarrass her, I averted my eyes and scanned the room. On one damp wall, festooned with pictures in damaged frames, hung an MBE. ‘Goodness, Lillian, is that yours?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Oh yes, Vicar, King George VI presented it to me, for nothing really. All I’d done was run a Church Army refreshment caravan for the troops in the last war.’
I realized the immensity of all she had done, as she told me how she had taken her caravan all over Britain and Europe, chasing the action. Lillian was there to cheer the troops during Operation Tiger, a practice for D-Day off Slapton Sands on the Devon coast.
‘The local churches were fantastic,’ she enthused. ‘They produced buns galore for the troops, made with fresh eggs, not the miserable dried eggs we townies had to struggle with. Where they got the eggs from, I can’t imagine. I guess they pinched them from local hen houses, and just hoped the farmer would think a fox or weasel had been abroad when he found the hen house bare!’
It all sounded immensely jolly. But then her face darkened and her eyes filled with tears. ‘It all went terribly wrong, Vicar.’ I thought at first a farmer had twigged what was going on, and Lillian must have appeared before the local beak for receiving stolen eggs. But there was a chill in her voice which hinted at a greater tragedy.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 22