Chapter Thirty-eight
At 1.10 a.m., after celebrating the Midnight Mass, I made my way home through Helmsley’s churchyard and simply paused – the first chance I’d had to stop for quite a few weeks. There was a force-ten gale blowing and the clouds in the night sky were scudding by, affording me just occasional glimpses of the moon and stars, but enough to make me wonder. Thus far my first Christmas at Helmsley had been fine. Ryedale School had packed the church to bursting for its carol service, with the haunting sound of the brass band giving a welcome element of pathos to the jauntiest carol. My splenetic spinster had moaned about the pools of spit left on the stone floor by the tuba and trombone players, but they didn’t bother me. Rather they spoke to me of flesh and blood giving their all, exerting themselves to the limit.
My splenetic spinster didn’t like my carol service either, because I got Julia – the Irish girl I had met in the caravan – to reprise the role she’d had as a girl in County Cork. Accompanied by her man, she had carried the Christchild into church as the choir struck up ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. ‘How dare you bring in someone who’s not one of us?’ the spinster complained. I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was referring to Christ or Julia.
Sister Lillian had read, ‘Because there was no room for him in the inn’. She had struggled to come to the carol service; inch by painful inch along the pavement and up the church path, inch by painful inch from her pew to the front, inch by painful inch climbing the wobbling steps to the brass eagle lectern. ‘No room’ seemed rather apt for her – her life spent giving room to those who had no room, ending up with not much of a room herself.
Other lines seemed strangely apt for their readers too. ‘She gave birth to a son, her first-born,’ Joan the midwife read, who had saved the day with countless births but sadly had no first-born of her own. ‘Now in the same district, there were shepherds out in the fields, keeping watch through the night over the flock,’ read Frank, who had spent many a night wandering the North York Moors looking for lost sheep. Sailor Jack, a man who had travelled from east to west, surviving Hong Kong typhoons and losing brothers en route, tottered up to the lectern and read, ‘Wise men from the east travelled to Jerusalem, asking where is the child . . .’ Lord Feversham narrowed his eyes and in his most sinister Richard III voice read, ‘When you have found him, report back to me, so that I may go myself and pay him [dramatic pause before injecting a sense of dark irony into his tone] homage.’
A couple of hours before the town carol service we’d had the children’s crib service, which I had introduced despite much opposition along the lines of ‘What are you wasting your time doing that for? No one will come.’ In fact, everyone came – the turn-out was brilliant, as parents and children from Helmsley and beyond had heard about the service and just wanted to spend forty-five minutes reminding themselves of the heart of Christmas. We had gathered around the crib for a few carols and prayers. Then, with the help of Ruth’s Sooty puppet, I read them a very simple child’s version of the Christmas story that I used to read to the girls when they were little. We had a treasure hunt – running around the church looking for baby Jesus, who was hiding behind the altar. The little girl who found him was presented with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange by a very naughty Sooty, who pulled her pigtails and made her giggle uncontrollably. It was all terribly chaotic, hyped-up children out of control and running all over the show, high-pitched squeals frequently interrupting me, but at the same time I had the sense it was all just wonderful. Still I shuddered to think what my dyed-in-the-wool critics would make of it all. I returned to Canons Garth for a brief respite, feeling utterly drained, having played the buffoon for three-quarters of an hour. But my brief interlude at Canons Garth was interrupted by an earnest knocking on the front door. On the doorstep stood a young mother with a tiny baby in her arms, along with a huge box of chocolates.
‘I just had to bring you these, Vicar, I was so grateful for that crib service,’ she said, breathlessly.
‘Goodness, but I was utterly rubbish,’ I admitted.
‘Well, you see, ever since Katie here was born, I felt my life was utterly rubbish – one chaos after another. When I came to church tonight, I felt at the end of my tether. Katie had been crying all day. I’d changed nappy after nappy, and still she stank. She wouldn’t feed, even though I was literally aching to feed her. Then I saw you, trying to keep order, trying to keep things together, but losing it time and time again. And I suddenly thought: It’s not just me, chaos is OK. I can’t say how grateful I am.’
Her little speech concluded, she thrust the box of chocolates into my hand and disappeared into the night with her crying babe. It’s a funny old world; had our crib service been more formal, she’d have felt totally out of it.
The Midnight Mass had been as magical as ever, with those staying in the Black Swan and Feversham Arms hotels for the Helmsley Christmas Experience filling the church. I could tell that they weren’t from these parts because they laughed loudly at the jokes in my sermon, whereas the locals were more restrained. There were some Americans there who not only laughed but positively guffawed, which cheered me immensely. We started with the church in darkness and gradually undimmed the lights as the service progressed. Only there was a storm raging outside and the night sky had been lit up with the occasional flash of lightning, followed by loud crashes of thunder which caused the lights to dim when they shouldn’t have. Not exactly the son et lumière I had planned. I thought of Sally’s sad funeral; the last time a storm had hijacked our worship.
After Mass had ended, I crept back into Canons Garth. Rachel was still up, putting the finishing touches to the girls’ Christmas stockings. For Christmas we’d bought them a full-size table-tennis table, which we had secretly installed in one of the empty bedrooms. When I was busy in church, Rachel had sneaked along the landing with four table-tennis bats wrapped in red and green Christmas ribbons, but had bumped into a sleepy Clare, tottering to the loo. Fortunately, she hadn’t twigged what was going on and had assumed her mother routinely waved bats around in the middle of the night, marshalling the odd stray jumbo jet, or even the odder stray Santa, for a touchdown on our landing.
Father Bert had not been present at the Midnight Mass. ‘These days I go to bed religiously at ten p.m., no exception to the rule, even for the birth of my Lord and Saviour,’ he had starkly informed me following the carol service. To his credit he was there for the early service on Christmas Day morning at 8 a.m., keeping bleary-eyed me on track. The girls had got up at 6 a.m., and we had heralded the day with a knockout table-tennis competition, which, true to form, had knocked me out.
Father Bert was also present for the all-singing and all-dancing – well, at least all-singing along with the censer dance – 9.30 a.m. service. In a sort of Christmas morning stupor, I had got a bit over-enthusiastic with all the wafting of the incense during the offertory hymn, and – unbeknown to me – one of the tablets of red-hot charcoal in the portable stove had flown out and landed in the very full collection plate perched on the altar. As the service proceeded, I noticed flames billowing as the charcoal ignited five-pound notes, ten-pound notes, and even threatened to incinerate the customary fifty-pound note donated by his Lordship. Fortunately, Derek, my right-hand man, noticed too, and lifted the flaming collection plate with his bare hands before swiftly retreating to the church kitchen. Seconds later, my hallowed words over the bread and wine were accompanied by the sound of a tap running, together with much sizzling and loud laughter. The rest of the unusually large congregation, who normally and very wisely gave this sort of thing a wide berth, no doubt thought it was all part of the ceremony. ‘Silent night, silent night. All is calm, all his bright,’ they sang. Well actually, not that calm, although with a flaming collection plate exceedingly bright.
Whilst I battled through the gales on my bicycle, rising out of Helmsley towards Rievaulx, Father Bert stayed behind to clear up. Rachel told me later that he’d then pottered round to Canons G
arth. She’d made him a cup of coffee and, while she got on with preparing lunch, he simply sat in our living room, watching, with the greatest glee, our girls opening their presents. I envied him that – never once in thirteen years since our Ruth had been born had I been there for them on Christmas morning. But then again, when I recalled they were always with me whereas Father Bert had no one, I didn’t feel so envious after all, and didn’t begrudge him his moment of fatherhood. Of course, it wasn’t strictly true that Father Bert had no one, because he had Margaret. And once he had finished his coffee and the girls had opened their last present, he made his excuses and drove off to Old Byland. Given the feast Margaret served on a normal day, I couldn’t imagine the banquet she’d serve on Christmas Day, perhaps it was of the swan stuffed with goose stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with pheasant stuffed with quail variety no doubt served during the medieval glory days of Helmsley Castle. ‘Stuffed’ would truly be the operative word.
The gale was really blowing hard on the top of the moors, with gusts of 60 mph causing me and my bike to swerve from one side of the road to the other. I was grateful when I turned and sharply descended down Rievaulx Bank, because its high wooded sides shielded me against the worst of the wind. I parked my bike and walked into the little church, my ears ever alert for the sound of falling roof-tiles. Considering the miniscule village population, the church was really full, but those gathered had the air of a slightly sleazy Edwardian house party at which I was definitely not welcome. When I walked through the church door, I was sure I heard the sound of several bottles clinking as they were hurriedly hidden away; my congregation more like teenagers secreting illicit alcohol. The cornet player had brought along a few of his friends from the Bilsdale Silver Band, and were knocking out Christmas numbers like ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Lonely this Christmas’. They looked quite miffed when they had to change their repertoire to more conventional Christmas carols. The two Rievaulx nuns were there in their grey habits, but like me they looked out of place – Maria von Trapps thrust onto the set of Dirty Dancing. I eventually got the congregation to knuckle down to a staid service of Holy Communion, but their responses were muted, and I felt they couldn’t wait for me to finish so they could return to their alternative carousing. Such a shame when Jesus muscles in and spoils the Christmas show.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Good King Wenceslas looked out,
On the feast of Stephen.
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even.
It was 9 a.m. on Boxing Day. Father Bert was serenading me on my doorstep in his Geordie tenor voice. ‘I’ll be just fine, Father, it’s only a heavy frost,’ I reassured him. ‘I’ve only got a couple of home visits anyway; I did the rest on Christmas Eve morning.’
‘You are not going out on your bike in this, and that’s final,’ he argued. ‘I’m going to drive you around in my jeep. It’s difficult enough to keep that on the road with all the patches of black ice lurking; I shudder to think what it’s like on two wheels.’
Realizing that resistance was futile, I rushed upstairs and disturbed Rachel’s well-deserved Boxing Day slumbers as I kissed her goodbye, before shouting goodbye to my preoccupied daughters. ‘Eighteen–nineteen!’ they shouted back, already on their umpteenth table tennis game of the morning.
I climbed into the passenger seat of Father Bert’s little red jeep, my robes case on my knee, and we slowly moved off, slipping and sliding on the ice. ‘You see what I mean, David,’ Father Bert pointed out. ‘Absolutely treacherous!’
The conditions were indeed bad, but instead of focusing on the road ahead, Father Bert was, as ever, continually looking in his rear-view mirror. ‘What on earth are you looking for, Father?’ I said exasperatedly. ‘We’re probably the only ones out and about for a fifty-mile radius. All the other sensible souls are still tucked up in bed.’
‘Ah, but you never know, David. Just when you think all is quiet, then they come!’
It was only 400 yards to our first stop, a bungalow belonging to an old guy called Norman who had ulcerated legs so couldn’t get out and about. Formerly, he had been the manager of a railway hotel in Leicester, and his father had been a fireman on a steam engine, which explains why his home was festooned with pictures and models galore of steam engines. His bookshelves were packed with virtually every issue of Bradshaw’s published since Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and Assistant to Railway Travelling topped the charts way back in 1839. In theory, I was bringing Norman his Christmas Holy Communion, yet in practice it was actually me who was visiting a shrine and drinking deeply. I said the hallowed words of the service on automatic pilot, spending my time just looking from picture to picture and model to model, and adoring it all. I caught Father Bert out of the corner of my eye, snuggled down in an ex-GWR First Class armchair, looking as if he was in a little boy’s heaven.
It was on Boxing Day in 1963 when, as a boy of eight, I played with my first railway set. My parents had bought it second-hand from a parishioner in east Hull, and had spruced it up a bit by buying a couple of Pullman carriages. It was an old-fashioned Hornby engine, which picked up the current from a live but temperamental third rail powered by a transformer the size and weight of a brick. The transformer was to come in handy in my teenage years, when I performed the miracle of changing salt water into Domestos.
I didn’t get a chance to play with my new toy on Christmas Day because my dad and his fellow priest hogged it the whole afternoon, the pair of them arching over it throughout, resentful when dinner interrupted their Fat Controller fantasy. On Boxing Day, I sneaked beneath their scrum and changed the points, causing the whole train to derail. ‘What do you think you are doing, interfering?’ my dad shouted, and then he and his fellow priest smiled as it finally dawned on them who the railway set was really meant for.
My and Bert’s next port of call was another little bungalow about half a mile away. A slow coming we had of it, with the jeep never exceeding 10 mph. ‘How did lunch go yesterday, Father?’ I asked, trying to distract him from excessive rearview mirror gazing.
‘Oh, Margaret had to scale things down, because she’d also invited her new vicar and his wife and they’re vegetarians. She only cooked a turkey, a side of beef and a gammon joint. She usually boils up a bit of pheasant and grouse casserole, which nicely sets off the roast meat, but she decided to leave that out yesterday, in deference to her other guests. I was very disappointed.’
‘What did she give the vegetarians, then?’ I asked.
‘She’d bought them a nut roast from Morrisons. I sampled a bit when she was serving things up, and I’ve never come across anything so tasteless in all my life. Yuk!’
‘How did you get on with the new vicar and his good lady?’
‘Well, they’re all right, as vegetarians go. He’s quite an academic, like you, but without your common touch.’ I guessed that was some sort of compliment. ‘He told me he was going to run a Lent course in the parish on Hinduism. I have to admit I’d never thought of doing that. Just what our local moorland stalwarts need, a bit of Hinduism!’ he said, turning towards me with a wry smile.
We eventually arrived at Barbara’s little bungalow. I had visited her every fortnight since our arrival in Helmsley. Twenty years earlier, rheumatoid arthritis had hit her hard. Her husband had walked out on her with the parting words, ‘I can’t abide living with a cripple.’ When I first visited her, I’d been delayed on my rounds and she was quite cross.
‘I can’t be doing with Communion now, it’s nearly dinner time,’ she’d snapped.
Apparently her condition made her irascible and she fell out with numerous home-helps. But I decided to be gracious, came back later in the day and made sure I was always on time on subsequent visits. That’s the thing about visiting the housebound; you think they have all the time in the world for you, but often they have only the narrowest of timeslots, with me being fitted in around the hairdresser, home-he
lp, nurse, doctor, Rington’s Teamen and sundry other callers. And the other thing about the housebound is that though they never get out, all the local news comes to them – they sift through all the gossip from this home-help or that nurse, and become a reliable source for every minute detail. From her still centre, Barbara had brought me up to speed with quite a few local issues which I had missed despite my gadding about here, there and everywhere.
By the time I came onto the scene in 1997, she spent virtually all her days and nights confined to a special electronic chair, which massaged her muscles as well as launching her into her Zimmer frame for occasional trips to the loo or kitchen. During one of my visits the chair malfunctioned and catapulted her across the room, like the ejector seat in James Bond’s Aston Martin. Fortunately, she missed me and landed on, or rather in, her settee – breach presentation. It took me ten minutes to extract her and settle her considerable weight back into her special, if temperamental, chair.
Beneath Barbara’s brittle exterior there was a golden person, whose story had been gradually disclosed to me over my regular visits. She’d begun life at Whitby, one of three sisters whose father was at sea in every sense of the phrase. The three girls were brought up single-handedly on a pittance by their hard-pressed mother. They’d moved to York during the Second World War, fearful that the Germans might repeat the naval bombardment that had hit Whitby so hard in 1914. By then a teenager, Barbara had worked in the little Thornton’s Chocolate Cabin in York’s market place, managing the meagre wartime stock. Quite a few airmen from the local air force bases used to patronize the shop as well as patronizing Barbara, who became a northern Forces’ Sweetheart.
‘They were such lovely lads, Vicar, and I wanted to make sure they felt thoroughly loved before they went off to their possible deaths,’ Barbara had informed me on my third visit, fixing me with a steely gaze which made it clear she had no time for the pickier aspects of the Church’s doctrine on sexual ethics.
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 26