‘Ah, I see you’re admiring our furniture. My man made those with bits of oak he scrounged when he used to work in the sawmill!’
She chatted on, sharing the memories of a happy childhood in Ireland, then falling in love with her man, their adventures on the road, various troubles they’d experienced with the locals; wherever they parked up people always ‘persuaded’ them to move on. As she chatted, her baby daughter mewled quietly in her bulky cot. ‘Where are you taking him, then?’ she finally asked, nodding her head in the direction of my cycle basket.
‘Actually, we’ve got a spare day,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing until tomorrow morning when we’re having a visit to Mr Hacket and Mr Angel, the local dentists.
‘Go on, you’re having me on,’ she laughed. ‘Mr Hacket, the dentist, of all things!’
‘No really, I’m not,’ I said, laughing with her. I’d spent so much of my life bracing myself in dentist’s chairs that hitherto I’d never given much thought to their names. Thinking about the letters after their respective names, I realized Mr Hacket’s qualifications majored in restoring teeth, Mr Angel’s in anaesthetics.
‘Well, fancy leaving our Lord at the dentists’, poor little mite!’ she continued. ‘But I suppose, though, wherever there is pain, there is Christ.’ I did a double take, because she’d just put into seven simple words the heart of my Gospel. The professors of Theology from my Cambridge days would have spent hours rabbiting on without ever coming up with anything near as good as that.
‘Can I ask you a favour, Father?’ she pleaded. ‘If he’s nowhere else to go today, can we keep him here? I promise you we’ll look after him.’
It seemed like madness, leaving the most indispensible part of our Christmas crib with a here-today-gone-tomorrow traveller, but something about the encounter triggered memories from my boyhood in east Hull thirty-five years before. In September 1962, our Sunday tea had been interrupted by a loud knock on the front door. I followed my dad to the door and there on the step stood a tall gypsy, shabbily clothed, his face care-worn and peppered with black stubble. ‘Please, sir,’ he began. I vividly remember my dad going rigid, bracing himself for the usual request for money. But no such request was made. ‘Please, sir, we’d like you to baptize our babies.’ The gypsy pointed to the gate, where there was a crowd of similarly unkempt men and women, as well as an awful lot of children and crying babies: his tribe.
Although my dad was keen, since he was new to the job and a mere assistant, he had to ring up his boss for permission. The Vicar hummed and harred, since normally seven days’ notice was required for any baptism. It was a strange rule; I’m not sure where it came from. ‘Jesus presented himself at the River Jordan to be baptized by John,’ the Gospel began. ‘“Lord of heaven and earth or no Lord of heaven and earth, you have to come back in a week’s time,” John the Baptist barked, “Seven days’ notice is required!”’
My dad might have been new to the job, but he wasn’t new to faith. ‘We can’t apply seven days’ notice to them,’ he objected. ‘They’ll probably have been moved on elsewhere by next week, and I’m not going to turn them away. Everybody else rejects them, looks down on them. I’m not having the church turn them away as well. I’m just not having it.’
Faced by the most rebellious of assistants, my dad’s boss backed down and gave him permission to have his tea interrupted. ‘Just make sure that they’re gone by evensong, though,’ he insisted.
My dad conscripted me to go along to church to help him. The gypsies’ horseshoe-shaped caravans were parked up in a circle around the churchyard; tethered to them were thin horses and dogs, their ribcages visible. All the gypsies packed into church. I remember their faces; old before their time, yellow in the lamplight, their babies swaddled tightly in yards and yards of yellow cloth, with only their little red faces peeping out. I remember the stench of unwashed bodies. I also remember the reverent hush – you really could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
My dad explained the baptism service as he went along; simple stuff, like we need water for life, we need God for life. He took his time, baptizing nine babies in all, letting me pour the water from a large jug into the ancient, lead-lined stone font. We’d pre-warmed the water at home, so as I stood on my tiptoes and poured it into the font, clouds of steam billowed out.
When all was done, he gave his surprise congregation a tour of the church. They all paused beneath the stained-glass window at the east end. It was a nativity scene, depicting a young girl, her face yellow in the lamplight, holding her baby swaddled tightly in yard upon yard of yellow cloth, only his tiny face showing, its hue a similar red to the gypsy babies’ faces. The tribe leader stared in silence at the scene, and then turned to my dad and said words I will remember until my dying day, ‘We believe in Him, sir, we believe in Him.’
My dad turned to the gypsy and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘He believes in you, sir, He believes in you.’ After a long, poignant silence, they departed, harnessed their horses, climbed into their caravans and clattered down the lane. We cleared up the church so that it was spick and span for the Vicar’s precious evensong, returned home and finished our tea.
Back on the Yorkshire roadside, I climbed down the caravan’s steps and retrieved the baby Jesus, complete with crib and straw, from my cycle basket and took him inside to hand over to Julia. ‘I can’t think of anywhere better for him to stay for the next twenty-four hours,’ I said, and meant every word.
Julia took him, holding him reverently, and placed him beside her baby’s spacious cot. ‘Thank you, Father, that means so much to me, so very much. Don’t you worry, we’ll take care of him.’ I arranged to return early the next morning, and pedalled off home, with an empty basket but a full heart.
Chapter Thirty-five
For reasons which will become all too clear, I’d decided it was politic to leave my bike at home and to walk to an outlying farm, about a mile up in the moors. By the time I set out I could barely see the road in front of me. There were dark silhouettes all around, and high hedges and trees which loomed over me, creating a very spooky feel. Every minute or so a pheasant would make its shrill call, piercing the countryside quiet and making me jump out of my skin.
I was visiting a farmer who had tried to overtake a bike in his Land Rover when the cyclist had wobbled, fallen under his wheels and sadly died. It was not the farmer’s fault, but Enid, my churchwarden, had told me he was deeply sorry and deeply despondent, and urged me to go and see him. Despite the lateness of the hour, I decided I could put my visit off no longer. I had no magic wand to make things better, I just wanted to be with them.
As I knocked on the farmhouse door, I felt the peeling paint flake off beneath my knuckles. In these situations you never quite know what to expect. His wife let me in, her manner quite cheery, considering. ‘Oh, it’s you, Vicar, come on in, it’s so good of you to call. Josh’s so down, so very down. We’re cutting up a pig to take his mind off it!’
I walked into the kitchen and there was Josh, the farmer, a large meat cleaver in his hand smashing it down and crunching bone and flesh, blood splattering everywhere.
‘Ee, I’m right down, Vicar,’ he said, as he laid into the pig’s hind quarters. Apparently the pig had been killed further up the moor, and now they were sorting out the various joints and cuts of meat.
As he cut the thing up, his wife mopped up the blood with a tea-towel, which she then used to dry the blood-speckled cups on the draining board. ‘You’ll have a cuppa, Vicar?’
‘OK then.’ The kettle was already sizzling on the top of the coal-fired Yorkshire Range, oven and hob all contained in one polished, black-leadened mass of solid cast iron. I hadn’t come across such ranges since my boyhood. My experience of them was that they only had two settings; out or nuclear. Ours had had the luxury of the thermometer dial on the black oven door. Something must have gone wrong with it because the needle used to spin around like the altimeter of an aircraft plummeting to the ground. I guess the actual te
mperature must have been close to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit; the roast beef was done to a turn in less than half an hour, the Yorkshire puddings rose instantly like skyscrapers and scraped the oven’s ceiling. I have never eaten anything quite so delicious since.
Fortunately, the tea was a strong brew, and I turned a blind eye and a blind tongue to the little globules of pig’s blood floating on the top. I listened and talked with them for a couple of hours, conversation accompanied by the rhythmic sound of the chopping, which was strangely soothing.
‘Ee, I’m right down, Vicar,’ Josh kept saying, his face strangely speckled with polka dots of pig’s blood. ‘You won’t ’ave met Robbie yet, will you? He’s the one who massacred t’ pig for us.’
I confirmed that indeed I had yet to encounter this porcine butcher.
‘He lives right up Bransdale, no electric, not much really. Just a few cows, a few sheep. T’ barns are still lit by oil light. His farm ’ouse is bloody draughty, only heated by wood stoves which belch thick blue smoke up into t’ rafters.’
Josh’s Yorkshire range suddenly belched out a puff of blue smoke, as if in solidarity.
‘I was up there one winter’s night, it were that bad winter in 1982 and we were having to dig Robbie’s sheep out of deep snow drifts – blizzards cut through you like steel knives, and no sooner had you dug t’ sheep out of a gully than the wind blew more snow in and filled it again. Eventually, wit’ ’elp of some brilliant dogs, we got all t’ sheep into t’ barn, along with ’alf a dozen ’eifers who were already in t’ stalls there. “Come and have a bev with me to warm you sen up,” Robbie said. “We’re not far off midnight, so when we’ve had a drink or two we’ll come back and I’ll show you something.”’
Warmed by a couple or six hot toddies prepared by Robbie’s wife, the two men had returned to the barn. They had stood outside in the billowing snow, peeping through a crack in the door. Inside, bathed in yellow oil light, the sheep and cattle stood in their stalls, munching hungrily at generous amounts of hay stacked up in the mangers. ‘So Robbie whispers, “It’s nearly midnight” checking his pocket watch. “You just wait.”’ There was a moment’s pause before Josh continued. ‘I couldn’t believe it, Vicar, at the midnight hour, one by one every sheep and cow went down on their knees, every single one.’
‘So was it Christmas Eve, then?’ I asked, mindful of some ancient folklore that stalled animals knelt at midnight every Christmas Eve, mirroring the action of the animals in the original stable who had knelt as Christ was born and laid in their manger. Thomas Hardy had written a famous poem about that particular folklore called ‘The Oxen’.
‘No, it wasn’t, it were sixth January,’ Josh replied, as if his point was obvious. Then seeing he wasn’t carrying me with him, he explained further: ‘Robbie’s family ’ave lived up in Bransdale for generation after generation, and wouldn’t ’ave anything to do with that new-fangled calendar that came in two hundred years or so since. So they reckon that t’ real Christmas is ten days after time that rest of t’ world keeps Christmas. And he proved it by showing me t’ animals kneeling.’
Stirring at the back of my mind were my boyhood history lessons, with ten days being added to the date in September 1752 to bring us back into line with the seasons, as Britain adjusted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Clearly this innovation had yet to reach some of the more remote parts of my moorland parish.
I came back from my visit with a massive joint of pork – certainly fresh. Rachel cooked it for our tea the next day: its gorgeous aroma filled Canons Garth and it proved absolutely delicious. If only we still had had the Yorkshire range of my boyhood, it would have been doubly so.
Chapter Thirty-six
Way back in 1966, Mr Nixon, head teacher of my primary school in Bubwith, had decided to stage a nativity play in church. Nothing unusual in that, except, using his considerable imagination, he trawled through the Scriptures to find parts for all ninety-six children on the school’s roll. For instance, the prophet Isaiah, Mrs Isaiah, and their three children – Emmanuel, Shearjashub and Mahershalalhashbaz (catchy names) – all had a speaking part: ‘Ee, come on, Mahershalalhashbaz, eat up your Passover lamb, it’s good for you!’ Eric Whitehead was cast as Isaiah and Judith Southgate as Mrs Isaiah, and for most of November and December these two children filled angst-ridden hours trying to get their tongues around the names of their offspring, let alone deliver the rest of their lines.
And those lines were considerable: Mr Nixon had written the play himself and it was the length of a Shakespearean epic, with copies for all produced by his Banda duplicator. Bandas, with their ghostly purple ink and sweet aroma – a cocktail of alcohol and wax – have long since been superseded by more sophisticated printing processes. But in 1960s Bubwith, they were nothing less than a revolution. Previously, any writing intended for general circulation around the village had been chiselled on the church wall or a gravestone. One such inscription on Aughton’s squat church tower had always intrigued me: CHRISTOPHER ASKE, SON OF ROBERT, PRAY REMEMBER 1536. It seems that during the ill-fated Pilgrimage of Grace, the aforementioned Christopher had struck some deal with Henry VIII and sold out on his brother (another Robert, who bore the same Christian name as their father). Below the inscription was a crude carving of a newt – newts were known locally as askes. Below that was an even cruder carving, declaring a local lad’s undying love for an extremely well-endowed local lass, circa 1928. I guess 1928 was the year rather than her chest measurement, although from the drawing’s proportions it was a close-run thing.
I was cast as Joseph because I was tall. I was also a tonguetied child who, like Jonathan Ross and Roy Jenkins, found it difficult to roll his rs. Mr Nixon clearly thought that throwing me in the deep end would bring me out of my shell. He couldn’t decide on Mary, so we had two pretty dark-haired girls; one for one night’s production, one for the next. Secretly I adored both, so Christmas came early for me that year.
Mr Nixon’s mistake was to cast the naughtiest boy in the school as a shepherd. There he was, watching his flocks by night, high on the Banda fluid he had inhaled whilst doing a final frantic check of his lines. He was wearing his dad’s oversized dressing gown, with an M&S tea towel on his head – sartorial elegance sported by all Palestinian shepherds. He quickly became very bored with watching his cardboard cutout sheep, even though Mr Nixon had festooned them with wisps of wool to give them an authentic feel. So he whiled away his time by making his over-long dressing gown cord into a lasso, trying to flip it over the head of the brass eagle on the lectern opposite him, which he no doubt imagined to be a bucking stallion.
At the third attempt he succeeded, effectively roping off the stage. This drove the angels, whose visit our very bored shepherd had long anticipated, to bypass him altogether and divert via the Christmas candle stand. One angel caught her cotton wool wings on a candle, and suddenly there really did appear a flaming angel before us all. The churchwarden, a quick-thinking farmer, suddenly found himself with a walk-on part, or rather a rush-on part, as the ninety-seventh cast member, bravely leaping up and putting out the angel with his bare, calloused hands and saving her life.
All this high – if unexpected – drama happened during the carol ‘Away in a Manger’. Normally it has three verses, which I, with my low boredom threshold, find tedious enough. However, Margaret, the organist, who was to play such a major part in my first jaunt to Helmsley the following Easter, had just been to see the film A Night to Remember at the Odeon in York. She was very taken with the orchestra, who, spurred on by the Titanic’s second officer (played by the actor Kenneth More), bravely continued serenading the passengers as the Titanic sinks. So Margaret, having fortified herself with a couple of gins prior to the production, merrily played not three but twelve verses of ‘Away in a Manger’ whilst the flames were doused and order was returned.
My dad processed with great dignity in his robes from his stall towards the flaming angel, bowing to the altar as he went. By the time
he got there the fire was definitely out. There’s always the danger that fussy church protocol can make you miss an angel’s flames . . .
‘Do you remember that Christmas we had the great storm?’ Enid asked the motley company. I stopped musing about my boyhood and focused on the present. Along with me, Father Bert, Alan and the inevitable malodorous Gus, about a dozen heavily cardiganed souls had assembled in our chilly living room at Canons Garth, and we were supposed to be finalizing plans for Christmas services. They were a sub-committee, commissioned by the Church Council to address the first of my action points, that worship should be joyful, moving, inclusive and converting, fit for purpose for 1997 rather than 1897. But they kept straying from the subject in hand.
‘Yes, that was the very same year we had the terrible break-in in the vestry on Christmas Eve. The thieves forced through the skylight and attempted to jemmy open the safe,’ Anne, the plumber’s wife added breathlessly, as if she were relaying the plot of The Italian Job. ‘It had to be closed off for two weeks because they’d scattered glass and asparagus all over the place.’
‘Glass and asparagus?’ I asked, intrigued. I wondered if she was confusing things with a recent spate of vandalism at Helmsley’s Walled Garden.
‘Oh yes, the thieves tried to prise open the safe door and had scattered asparagus all over the place. Terribly bad for your lungs, asparagus is,’ Anne informed me.
The penny dropped. ‘Ah, asbestos,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s what I said, asparagus!’ she reiterated, giving me a fierce look. Father Bert chuckled.
It was ever thus. In Christmas 1974, just before the Midnight Mass, a few parishioners from the rougher side of our west Hull parish dropped in; rather sad and lonely people who had no one else to spend Christmas Eve with. My mum proved a bit of a Mrs Malaprop, proudly telling everyone that I was going to Jesus to be an exhibitionist – I had just gained an Exhibition (a sort of scholarship) to read Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. After briefly consoling with my mother over the impending if surprising death of her son, the conversation then turned to religious art, which I guess seemed an appropriate topic for a vicarage on the eve of Jesus’s birth. However, their limited knowledge of the subject became all too obvious as the conversation ground to a halt with some awkward silences. Then someone mentioned Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which nicely got things going again, as various west Hull stalwarts were hailed as the spitting image of one disciple or other. ‘They’re all fishermen, after all,’ some old dear concluded, with no qualms whatsoever about shifting the action two millennia, from the dazzling shores of Galilee to the muddy banks of the Humber.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 24