‘I’ve got a painting exactly like da Vinci’s Last Supper,’ another old dear piped up, ‘only it’s with ballet dancers!’
My gathering tonight in Helmsley danced around one subject after another, distraction after distraction. I had been chairing meetings like this for nearly twenty years, and I always felt like a collie trying to round up a flock of spooked sheep, who persistently scatter themselves to the four corners of a very large moor. My flock tonight suddenly became maudlin and reminisced about the old vicar’s final Christmas in Helmsley. He was bed-bound with only days to live, but had written a heartfelt message to be read out by his churchwarden at all the Christmas services. It began, ‘My friends, after thirty-seven years as your vicar, this is my last Christmas with you.’ The churchwarden had kept breaking down as he read, hardly able to contain his grief. The regular members of the small congregation, devoted to their vicar, were similarly afflicted. But I guess most of those gathered were either locals who only tended to go to church at Christmas or visitors staying in the town’s numerous hotels. Eager for a burst of carol singing and general bonhomie, they probably wondered what the heck was going on.
‘It was the most miserable carol service I ever went to,’ Father Bert concluded. ‘More like a death-knell rather than ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’. Bong . . . Bong . . .’ he slowly intoned.
‘Well, let’s make sure we put on a joyful show this Christmas,’ I said, attempting to get a grip of proceedings.
‘Church shouldn’t be about joy or putting on a show,’ an elderly spinster contradicted me. ‘It should be about convicting people of their sins, especially when they don’t come for the rest of the year.’
Gus growled, bared his teeth, and strained at his leash in the woman’s direction. Her distinctly dour take made me think of a story about an archbishop of York in Victorian times. Around Christmas he liked to sneak out of Bishopthorpe Palace incognito, drive his carriage out into the country and blend inconspicuously into a village church congregation to join in with their carol service. Apparently on one such occasion he was standing at the back, belting out carol after carol, when a local stalwart standing next to him sharply elbowed him in the ribs, ‘Will you shur up, mister, you’re spoiling t’ show!’
‘Well, people do come at Christmas,’ I retaliated. ‘So let’s make sure what we put on makes them want to stay rather than puts them off. I’m afraid I just don’t do misery, so that’s the end of it.’
Father Bert winked conspiratorially at me, as if to say, ‘Go for it, bonnie lad.’ Though my distinctly unbiddable flock kept mumbling and muttering, I finally got them to agree on my modest programme of additional Christmas services. These included a carol service for Ryedale School, which I’d already booked anyway, to be led by their outstanding brass band. Then I’d proposed a simple service for children on Christmas Eve around the crib, followed by a carol service for the town. I didn’t have the nerve to be as adventurous as my former head teacher, but I thought we could maybe introduce a tableau or two during the familiar Christmas lessons, with a young couple with a newborn baby quietly walking down the aisle during one carol, shepherds and kings walking in during other carols, and Lord Feversham playing his customary, chilling role by reading Herod’s lines.
‘Why can’t we just have a Mass or two like we did when the old vicar was here?’ my splenetic spinster complained. ‘He said a lovely Mass, did Father Senior. He wouldn’t have held with all this entertainment and brass bands cluttering up the aisles.’
‘We’ll have all the traditional stuff as well,’ I reassured her. ‘I just want to put on one or two other things that will make people feel drawn in rather than cast out.’
There were a few more grumbles and mumbles, as well as one or two brave souls who came on side – I wasn’t entirely sure whether this was because Gus was growling fiercely at them, or whether they were naturally sympathetic. Whatever, the meeting eventually came to an end. I shooed my cardiganed committee members out of the door having spent too long in the chilly porch, reuniting several shapeless woollen coats with their shapeless owners.
I snuggled down with Rachel in front of the TV, my eyelids heavy. Crimewatch was just coming to a close, as Nick Ross ended with his catchphrase, ‘Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well!’ I duly drifted off and dreamed of naughty shepherds dragging lassoed brass eagles, and flaming angels, slithering on asparagus and howling with pain, piercing their bare feet on shards of broken glass. An elderly spinster tried to shoo the angels away, shrieking, ‘We don’t want any of your joy here’, until my old friend the dragon sprung from his wall and vaporized her with darts of fire. Dream on!
Chapter Thirty-seven
The night before the meeting, I’d taken the baby Jesus to stay in Duncombe Park, cycling up to the dark house in a fierce snow storm. I knocked on the small door by the side of the steps. The woman-what-does eventually let me in, and deposited me and Jesus in a chilly ante-room. ‘I’ll see if his Lordship is free,’ she said, as she limped down the dark passageway.
Don’t worry, I thought, I’m only bringing Jesus to stay. Eventually his Lordship slowly descended. Whether it was the chronic pain in his leg or something else which was troubling him, he didn’t seem at all chuffed to receive his Lord. And I wasn’t that keen to leave Jesus there either, because by this time I’d become quite attached to him!
‘So what do you think you’re going to achieve, foisting this voodoo doll on everyone?’ was Lord Feversham’s abrupt introduction. He was clearly in one of his argumentative moods.
‘Well,’ I stammered, as he gave me the mean-eyed look that Henry VIII must have given to Anne Boleyn and her babe, contemplating whether the Lord High Executioner had a vacant slot next Tuesday teatime. ‘I’ve no particular agenda. I just want people to host him and run with their imaginations, exploring the difference Christ’s physical presence would make to their lives.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think people have the foggiest idea what a heck of difference he’d really make,’ Lord Feversham grumbled. ‘Just think of all those weirdos he hung around with, David – terrorists and quislings, tarts and perverts with every sort of filthy disease imaginable. Helmsley’s house prices would plummet if that lot set up shop here. And think of all those miracles; enough bread to feed five thousand, 180 gallons of vintage wine at that wedding that ran dry at Cana, nets bursting they were so full of fish. Thomas the baker, the fish stall on the Friday market and all our hotels and pubs would go out of business at a stroke. It would be sheer anarchy if you really let Christ loose. As your patron, let me give you a piece of fatherly advice: far better to keep Christ confined to church and inoculate your congregation with a weekly dose of Christianity rather than let him ravage their lives!’ he laughed.
I laughed too. It must be lonely being a lord, and I realized that from time to time he liked a sparring partner and the cut and thrust of debate; he liked someone to take him on rather than bleat ‘Yes, my Lord, no, my Lord’. He was surrounded by enough sycophants.
‘I’m not here to inoculate people against Christ, I’m here to encourage them to see Him as their constant friend, carrying them through their ups and downs,’ I responded. My legs were starting to feel a bit wobbly. It could have been the effect of the uphill bike ride, or, more likely, that I was feeling a little bit like my boyhood hero, Robert Aske. The prospect of hanging in chains for ten days on York’s Micklegate Bar would make anyone’s legs turn to jelly.
‘With them through life’s ups and downs?!’ Lord Feversham exploded. ‘With them through life’s ups and downs! Come off it, David. As I boy I was fascinated to read about the Mesozoic era, when the dinosaurs ravaged the earth for one hundred and sixty-five million years – absolute killing machines stalking the world. Where was your Christ, who “carries everyone through their ups and downs”, then? What the heck was your God of love doing for one hundred and sixty-five million years of carnage?’
‘Waiting, I guess,’ I r
eplied, with little more than a whisper. ‘Waiting for love’s moment.’
‘Waiting one hundred and sixty-five million years? Even the NHS wouldn’t buy that, and they’re the experts when it comes to waiting times! If I sat on a platform waiting one hundred and sixty-five days, let alone one hundred and sixty-five million years, I think I’d come to the conclusion that trains don’t run on that line any more!’ He chuckled at the brilliance of his own analogy. He was clearly enjoying this.
‘I suppose love takes its time,’ I replied, chuckling with him. ‘But it will win, one day it will win. That’s what I believe and if I didn’t I wouldn’t be doing this job. The era of the dinosaurs was a one hundred and sixty-five million-year Good Friday. A crucifixion that lasted one hundred and sixty-five million years. Horrendous. But all crucifixion is horrendous; if you’re the one being crucified, the excruciating pain probably feels like it lasts one hundred and sixty-five million years. But that’s not the end. Easter Day is the end – or rather the beginning.’
‘So where was Easter Day for those poor souls in the death camps? Where was Easter Day for my great-great uncle, blown to smithereens on the Western Front like a million others?’
‘I don’t know, I just don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Any crucifixion is horrible, total pain, total darkness. I just believe light will come. Or rather that we’re the light – we bring the light to a particular darkness.’
‘You put up a good argument, David, I’ll grant you that. It takes me back to my days as a barrister, all the thrill of the case for the prosecution versus the case for the defence.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been a barrister,’ I said, realizing his former career explained a lot about his dogged nature and love of argument. Thinking about it, nearly all of our encounters had had a courtroom feel about them. After all, our very first meeting in the Purey Cust Hospital had culminated in the judge pronouncing sentence: ‘Thou shalt be taken down and go unto Helmsley!’
‘Well, that’s a very long time ago,’ he explained. ‘I trained as a barrister after leaving Eton, but I only practised for a short while before publishing beckoned,’ he chuckled, with a glint in his eye. Though his novel was out of print by then, I had heard on the grapevine that it was really rather racy with some steamy scenes shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. ‘Anyway, be that as it may. It’s a long time since a vicar stood up to me and gave as good as he got. But I still can’t see the point of taking this voodoo doll on tour. The place for Christ is in church, not being hawked around here and there on a push bike!’
‘Oh Peter, do stop teasing,’ Lady Polly chided, making her usual graceful entry. ‘You know you just can’t lock Jesus up, any more than they could nail him to a cross or seal him in a tomb. He’s always going to break out and run amok in the world. That’s part of the fun.’ Lady Polly was a very faithful Roman Catholic, but with a sharp take on her faith which gave any parish priest a run for his money. ‘I’ve dug out Patrick’s christening robe and I thought we could put the Christchild in that. We don’t want the Lord of Lords to go down with a chill in these draughty haunts!’ she said as she turned to me, her eyes twinkling merrily.
Peter looked pensively at the christening robe as memories of Patrick’s birth stirred. The episode had clearly been immensely healing following the tragic death of his first wife – just one of a series of immensely healing episodes brought about by Lady Polly.
‘You’re right, Polly, a birth changes things. Patrick’s birth was wondrous; you were wondrous. It must have been nearly midnight by the time I got back to Helmsley. I drove up to Duncombe Park and I just stood outside, staring at the night sky – so clear, so beautiful. It’s just all so wondrous, I thought.’
I left Lord Feversham cooing over the Christchild, realizing, if I hadn’t realized it before, that a baby is the ace of trumps and wins all arguments.
After the meeting with the sub-committee, I cycled back to the big house at dusk, snow falling snow on snow, and knocked on the back door once again. The woman-what-does answered more quickly than the night before and handed me the baby Jesus, roughly stripping him of Patrick’s christening robe as she did so.
‘There you are. We’ve done our bit with the voodoo doll, you can take him away now.’ And with that the door was shut, as if I was a tradesman being dismissed.
I put Jesus into my bicycle basket and cycled down from the high moor at breakneck pace, the snowflakes swarming like dark moths around my cycle lamp. The uneven joins and the massive potholes in the Park’s concrete roads once again made it a boneshaker of a ride. Despite the billowing snow, I took off my cagoule and wrapped it around Jesus; I didn’t want his fine porcelain getting any more chipped as he jarred against my wire basket.
I sped through the wrought-iron gates out of the park and was straight into the town, instantly passing from one world to another. I leant my bike against the crumbling stone wall of a tiny terraced house and knocked gently on the place’s only door; had I knocked any harder I’m sure my fist would have burst through the plywood panel. Such a thin door, such thin windows, such thin walls; it had all the hallmarks of an estate worker’s cottage, offering scant protection against the worst of weathers.
The door was opened by John, a tall and ascetic man, who greeted me with a shy smile.
‘My goodness, I thought it was the abominable snowman! Come on in, David. Sit around the fire and we’ll see if we can defrost you.’
I was duly ushered into their small, cluttered living room, and a steaming mug of tea was pressed into my hand by Erica, John’s wife – the black-haired and ivory-skinned young woman whom I’d first encountered at the church lychgate on Gift Day, with her ever-chuckling toddler; she of the blue eyes and blonde ringlets.
Isobel, the toddler, was still up, and immediately took baby Jesus off me, unpeeling him from my cagoule.
‘Careful, Issy, don’t drop him,’ Erica warned.
Issy’s three black-haired brothers fussed around her, like a wicket keeper and first and second slip ready for a catch. I’d brought along the little crib Ryedale school had made, which we put on the hearth before settling Jesus down for the night. Issy disappeared upstairs and returned with her comfort blanket, which she wrapped around the babe.
‘That’s a first,’ John said. ‘She fights tooth and nail if ever her brothers tease her and try to take that off her.’
The three boys clearly adored their younger sister; playing with her, teasing her, she teasing them and wrapping them around her little finger. John and Erica cleared away the remnants of their tea on the table – homemade blackberry crumble, homemade shepherds pie – while frequently glancing at each other with fond smiles. When you encounter such a happy family as this, they make your day, ministering to you rather than you to them. As Erica had told me on Gift Day, John was a former monk. But even if she’d not tipped me off, I could have guessed that, just from the way he moved: graceful, never intrusive. The contents of their bookshelves also gave away his monastic past, in that they were packed with the office books used by monks and nuns when they join together in worship seven times a day, mostly singing the Psalms. I picked out one at random, which was well-thumbed and dust free; either Erica was an avid cleaner, or this was a book still in use.
Having found the love of his life, John had moved on from being a lab technician, and worked around and about; mending fences, repairing dry-stone walls, felling trees. In his spare time he was a voluntary fireman, like the bloke we had bought the organ from way back in 1967. Surly organ sellers notwithstanding, Helmsley’s voluntary firecrew were an amazing bunch. When the siren sounded and their personal bleepers went off, they had four minutes to get to the station. These men and women, rushing from all quarters of Helmsley, donning their firefighter’s trousers as they run towards the station, were utter lifesavers who spared little thought for their own safety as they cut motorists out of crushed cars or braved falling timbers to clear a house gutted by fire. More often than not, John�
�s bleeper went off during our Sunday worship, with him invariably missing a big chunk of the service. I didn’t mind in the least, because John was actually just where the church should be – at the heart of rescue.
Like Ian Carmichael before him, John and his buddies spent a significant amount of time trying to put out moorland fires. On one occasion the firecrew had been called out to the depth of the moors, seemingly on a false alarm, because there wasn’t a glowing ember to be seen. Just in case, they decided to hang around for a while. It being a hot day, the firecrew had started snoozing in their stuffy cab, only to wake and find themselves surrounded by a circle of flame. On another occasion they had been called out to a moorland fire, but by the time they arrived only the embers remained. They kicked these around a bit to fan the flames and give them something to put out, only to find the fire really took hold, and they had to urgently call out engines from nearby stations to quell the inferno.
Tonight the only fire was in the hearth, blazing beside Jesus, snuggled down in Issy’s comfort blanket. We gathered around and I said a little prayer for this lovely family. When I’d finished the eldest boy said to me, ‘God kisses you with prayer, you know.’ Now where had he got that from? I looked across at John and the penny dropped.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 25