Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  ‘There’s only one doctrine, as far as I’m concerned,’ I’d replied. Despite Barbara’s sharp intake of breath, I’d continued, ‘God is love. Everything else either follows from that, or it’s not worth bothering with.’

  I guess she was a sort of serial monogamist, with boyfriend after boyfriend failing to return from their latest bombing mission. On her mantelpiece was a charred ripcord, clearly a highly treasured possession. One boyfriend had managed to bail out of his shot-up Lancaster, only for his parachute to catch fire, causing him to plummet to the ground like a stone, dead on impact.

  Despite her disability, Barbara was a skilled and practised needlewoman, turning her gnarled hand to anything from knitting to tapestry. She was fond of all sorts of music; classical, folk and pop. Often her CD player got jammed, and I had to sort it out before ending our Communion with ‘I’ll Walk with God’ from The Student Prince, or even a bit of Elvis if I put the wrong disk in.

  Considering she took no exercise whatsoever, she had a healthy appetite and really enjoyed her food. Her favourites coincided with mine, and we often compared the products of Helmsley’s numerous pie shops. Her all-time favourite meal was battered scampi from her home town of Whitby, which she savoured annually when the local ambulance service took severely handicapped people on a seaside visit. Every time I popped into a supermarket I tried to find some battered scampi for her, but to no avail; she turned her nose up at the breadcrumbed variety.

  She had a Christmas hamper bursting with goodies for me and my family, awaiting my Boxing Day visit. All a bit ironic, considering Boxing Day was her birthday, yet here she was giving me a gift. She told me how she had also given a Christmas hamper to her neighbour, Ken, who was a deaf mute. ‘Ee, he were right chuffed with it, Vicar.’ Throughout my visit, Father Bert sat on a chair in the corner, staring at a huge picture which dominated the wall opposite him. It featured a Lancaster bomber, flying west over the Wash, a trail of black smoke billowing out of one of its starboard engines: Barbara’s boys finally coming home. In the picture’s top right-hand corner, the rear gunner was in sharp focus, scanning the skies.

  ‘You like my picture then, Father?’ Barbara asked Bert as our service concluded.

  ‘I do, luv, I do. You see I was a tail-end Charlie.’

  At that, the heavily disabled Barbara sprang from her chair with a sort of superhuman strength. Father Bert stood up and caught her, as Barbara simultaneously flung her arms around him. ‘God bless you, Father, God bless you for risking your life, protecting our boys and us!’ she cried, as Father Bert blushed a deep red. The war may have finished over fifty years earlier, but once the Forces’ Sweetheart, always the Forces’ Sweetheart.

  ‘Best not tell Margaret about that little episode,’ Father Bert said, as he drove me carefully back home. ‘I don’t want her getting jealous!’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘A cold coming they had of it’, the chilly start to Bishop Lancel of Andrewes’ Christmas Sermon 1622, the inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s famous poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’; the ultimate lament for hard journeys, harder arrivals and even harder returns. A cold coming I had of it too on 28 December, Holy Innocents’ Day. The weather forecast had been dire: sub-zero temperatures, heavy snowfall and winds gusting in from the Arctic all conspiring against my Christmastide service at my tiny church at East Moors, five miles up the bleak North York Moors.

  Canons Garth was chilly enough; when I drew the curtains at 7 a.m. there was frost on the inside of the ancient leaded windows. It reminded me of my boyhood in freezing vicarages. The only way to keep warm was to don three or four woollen sweaters – every so often a trunk arrived from the Poor Clergy Relief Fund and my dad and I fought over the gaudily coloured spoils. We weren’t bothered about the sweaters’ colour or whether they were in fashion; it was the thickness that won the day.

  Before setting off, I had managed a game of table tennis with each of the girls (I’d beaten a fiercely competitive Clare, 21–18, eventually defeated Hannah 37–35 after deuce upon deuce, and lost to Ruth 19–21), which had warmed me up no end. I then made the lonely journey by bicycle along deserted lanes, with a chalice and paten, wine and bread and all other necessary ingredients for a Communion packed into my rucksack.

  Usually cycling up 1:3 hills dispels the cold, but not today; the chill bitterness of the journey was unrelenting. The streams which normally tumbled down the hillsides had become ice and had crept across the road like mini-glaciers. In the middle of the lane lay a rabbit, stiff as a board. Her body was perfect – she hadn’t been hit by traffic or attacked by a bird of prey, so I guess the cold had simply got to her and her arteries had frozen solid. I stopped and moved her body to the verge, kicking the cold soil from a rock-like molehill to cover her with earth: it seemed a more tender funeral than being mashed by the wheels of a passing car.

  Not that there were any passing cars. I dropped down Cow House Bank, rear and front brakes full on, putting my legs down throughout the descent so I had four points of contact with the slippery road: two feet and two wheels. The road was lined to left and right with pine trees, needles brittle with frost. My arboreal guard of honour gave a false sense of security, because immediately behind the trees on the right-hand side of the road was a thirty-foot sheer drop. As I grimly held on for dear life, I fleetingly wondered how long it would take to find me if I slid off the road and catapulted down the cliff. Would my no-show eventually spring the congregation into action? Would they gamely start a fingertip search of the chilly hillside, communicating with each other with whistles or a medley of Christmas carols, before finding their errant priest just before nightfall, snoozing in the bracken, showing the early stages of hypothermia?

  Eva had told me of how, during the war, a pilot had bailed out of his ailing Spitfire and come safely to rest just by the ford beneath East Moors Church. He had crawled up to the red public telephone box and managed to reverse the charges to RAF Linton-on-Ouse, near York, to inform them of the sad loss of their Spitfire, but that he had had a safe landing and was ready to be picked up.

  ‘Where are you?’ the duty sergeant had asked.

  ‘I’m next to a church which says “St Mary Magdalene, East Moors” on its notice board.’

  ‘Where the hell’s that?’ the sergeant snapped.

  Eventually they had established that it was a remote spot in the North York Moors, but it was a whole ten days before the RAF had any transport free to make the long journey to come and collect him. Eva’s family had taken pity on him and let him kip on their sofa. He returned their kindness by lending a hand around the farm, relishing both the country fare and country air.

  I relished the country air too, thick with the sharp scent of pine. By this time, I had reached the bottom of the hill, mercifully unscathed, so was able to stand down my imaginary search party. I skated over the ford – now rock-solid ice – and arrived at the little church so celebrated by John Betjeman’s famous poem; still hiding in a thicket of rhododendron bushes, but covered in white frost rather than pink flowers. I set up for the service, wondering if anyone else was going to come.

  The first person to arrive, at 9.55, was Yvonne, the woman who had kept me company with Lina at Sproxton Church way back in September. She explained that she had parked in the car park at the top of Cow House Bank and watched me descend. Since I survived the slippery slope, she had decided it was safe for her to follow in her four-by-four. ‘I calculated your speed at twenty-one miles per hour,’ she informed me, ever the mathematician. ‘That’s far too fast in conditions like this, especially when you repeatedly refuse to wear a cycle helmet,’ she further informed me, ever the headmistress.

  At 9.56 Father Bert shuffled in, accompanied by a spritely Margaret. ‘We called round at Canons Garth to give you a lift, but you’d already set off. You must be mad cycling in weather like this,’ he chided. ‘The girls tried to get me to play a game of table tennis, but I told them Mass always comes first. Mind you, it was a close-
run thing – I think Margaret rather fancied a quick rally!’

  At 9.59 Lord and Lady Feversham walked in, hand in hand, with Eva following them half a pace behind like a lady-in-waiting. ‘Thank you so much, my Lord, for coming to my rescue and giving me a lift in t’ Land Rover. I was planning to follow t’ old water race because Cow House Bank was proving a tad slippy. Then you showed up, like my knight in shining armour.’

  ‘It was absolutely no trouble, Eva,’ a rosy Lady Polly responded, squeezing her hand. ‘It’s always good to have another gal on board to even out the odds in Peter’s male preserve!’

  At 10 a.m. precisely, the old guy who I had encountered back in September clattered in, together with his long-suffering daughter and the same four springer spaniels straining at the leash, setting off the hounds in the nearby school house. ‘Is that the new vicar? When’s the service going to start?’ he whined.

  ‘I am the new vicar and the service starts right now,’ I snapped. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’

  The congregation mumbled along with me, the spaniels whimpered, the hounds bayed. The Prayer Book I was using was a century old, with its set prayers including ‘We beseech Thee to specially save and defend Victoria our Queen, that under her we may be godly and quietly governed.’ In 1901, Vicar Gray had put a line through ‘Victoria our Queen’ and written ‘Edward our King’ in his meticulous copperplate down the narrow margin, and altered ‘her’ to ‘him’. In 1910, Vicar Gray had put another line through ‘Edward’ in the now cramped margin and written ‘George’ above it. In 1936, Gray’s successor had put a line through George and written ‘stet’ (Latin for ‘let it stand’) above the crossed-out Edward. Almost before the ink had dried, he had angrily crossed out ‘stet’ above the disgraced abdicator Edward, re-inserting it above George. Then in 1952, Canon Senior’s predecessor had undertaken a major revision, squeezing ‘Elizabeth our Queen’ into the tightest of spaces, as well as putting a line through ‘his’ and letting the hyperactive ‘stet’ finally come to rest above the previously crossed-out ‘her’. All in all, a very busy page.

  We sang a hymn, unaccompanied, ‘Unto Us a Boy is Born’, including a terse verse which matched the day’s chill:

  Herod then with fear was filled:

  ‘A prince,’ he said. ‘In Jewry!’

  All the little boys he killed

  At Bethl’em in his fury.

  As we sang, our breath condensed before us, compensating for the lack of incense. When it came to sharing bread and wine with everyone, I lifted the tiny chalice to my mouth, causing me to flinch as the silver gave my lips a freezer burn. Even though I had filled the chalice almost to the brim during our improvized carol, no wine came out. In these polar temperatures, even the alcohol had turned to gel, so I cupped my hand around the frozen grail to thaw out the blood of Christ.

  Given the freezing conditions, why didn’t I cancel the service? One reason was that ever since that survivor from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition had addressed our primary school, I had never been fazed by even the fiercest cold; in fact, I found it positively bracing. But the main reason for continuing was that on my first visit to Ryedale School I had promised a mother whose teenage son had tragically died on that day two years earlier that I would pray for him on his death-day. I could hardly let Marjorie down with a cheery report-back, ‘So sorry, it was a bit icy, so we called it off.’ So as we sang about all the babies massacred by a paranoid Herod, we also remembered all children taken before their time, including Mike.

  On the cycle ride home I huffed and puffed up Cow House Bank. A deer scrambled down the hill and crossed the road in front of me, followed closely by her fawn. It seemed almost as if they nodded to me before they disappeared once again into the dark forest, making it a morning for lost children and found children.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Though the Arctic conditions continued, there was a long journey the next day which I could not put off. So, midmorning, I gingerly drove up the steep and icy hill out of Helmsley towards Sproxton. Having safely made the ascent, I coasted past the church that a former Lord Feversham, in rare harmony with Victorian Vicar Gray, had moved from one hilltop to the next. Lina, the octogenarian I had met on my day of prayer, was out in the churchyard on her knees even in this sharp frost, dressed in just a skirt, blouse, a green and red Christmas cardigan and headscarf, hacking at the frozen soil with her trowel, planting bulbs in good time for spring. She was one of life’s indestructibles. I smiled as I gave a wide berth to the church gates, and thought of her taking on the tank commander who had dislodged the stone ball; even a Sherman would be no match for Lina.

  As my car skated down the steep hill into Ampleforth, I was certain that just touching the brake pedal would send me into a dangerous skid, so instead I tried to slow the car down by crunching into second gear, the engine whining fiercely in protest. After what seemed like 165 million years of having my heart in my mouth, at last I reached the safety of the flat, wide valley bottom. I circled the famous Roman Catholic abbey and school; the sprawling buildings and the trees which surrounded them covered in hoar frost, which glistened and twinkled in the weak December sunlight. There was a ghostly feel to the place, with Benedictine monks in black habits walking here and there in the spacious grounds, their hoods pulled up to keep their heads warm, their closely cropped hair affording them little protection. I laughed to myself as I remembered Minnie’s tales of Ampleforth’s version of the Hogwarts Express and the cook with eighteen cats of excess luggage.

  The icy road wound around three sides of every frosty field, my car skidding on every bend. After what seemed an age, I made it to York. For about the last ten miles York’s Minster had been enticing me. I had spotted it first as I drove through the quaint hill-top village of Brandsby, straining my eyes to focus on a tiny black rock shyly peeping on the horizon. But as York drew near, the Minster’s three towers, magnificent nave and transepts came into sharp focus, their limestone gleaming in the midday sun.

  Circling the Minster, I drove clockwise around York’s ring road in the shadow of the ancient city wall, and headed down Bishopthorpe Road, driving past Terry’s chocolate factory. Breathing in chocolate with every breath took me back thirty-five years to my first visit to Bishopthorpe, and my spat with the Vicar of Helmsley’s son at the Archbishop’s Boxing Day party for clergy children. But thirty-five years on, those parties were mercifully no more. This Christmastide I wasn’t quite bound for the Archbishop’s palace, but the crematorium next door, squatting precariously on the banks of the swollen River Ouse. In the early 1960s the Archbishop had proposed to sell off part of Bishopthorpe Palace’s extensive grounds. York Council came up with a bid to build a crematorium and memorial gardens, which the Archbishop accepted, doubtless on the principle that the dead and bereaved would prove quieter neighbours than the noisy inhabitants of a Barrett housing estate.

  Despite my precarious journey, I’d arrived half an hour early, so I wrapped my cloak around me, sat on a bench in the memorial gardens and munched the turkey sandwiches which Rachel had kindly packed up for me. As I overlooked Bishopthorpe Palace, whose ancient limestone and red brick goes back eight centuries, I pondered over past archbishops. Though there had been ninety-five in all, and all but one now dead, a handful had become familiar friends during my time there. There was Lancelot Blackburn, who prior to becoming archbishop in the eighteenth century had been chaplain to a pirate ship. I was never quite sure what the role entailed – ‘Stop the raping and pillaging, lads, it’s time for evensong!’ His portrait in the chapel made him look like a real rake, more pirate than bishop.

  As I savoured my turkey, I also recalled Richard Scrope, who backed the wrong horse – or rather the wrong king – in the Wars of the Roses, and found himself leading a protest against Henry IV for neglecting his subjects in the North East. Henry promised to accede to Scrope’s demands provided he and his men lay down their arms, but then once they were disarmed promptly changed his
mind and arrested them all for treason. Scrope was tried in the dining room of his own palace, condemned to death and was beheaded on York’s Knavesmire. In these more enlightened times, archbishops are no longer beheaded on the Knavesmire, freeing it up to serve as York’s racecourse.

  Biting into an apple made me think of Adam being tempted by Eve, which in turn made me think of Edwin Sandys – Archbishop of York in Elizabeth I’s reign – who was stitched up a treat. He had a long-running dispute with a guy called Stapleton over ownership of land near Doncaster. In those days Doncaster wasn’t the urban sprawl and industrial wasteland it is today, and lands around it were prized possessions. Stapleton invited Sandys to stay at his mansion to discuss the matter. But, no doubt taking his cue from the story of Potiphar’s wife in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Stapleton induced his own wife to visit the Archbishop in his bedchamber whilst their guest was sleeping. Stapleton then ‘discovered’ them both, and threatened to publish the scandal unless the Archbishop gave up his claim to the disputed land. But the po-faced Sandys refused to give in to blackmail, protested his innocence and was finally exonerated by Royal Council.

  Rachel had packed a miniature bottle of red wine for me, to ward off the day’s chill. As I sipped it, I thought of William Fitzherbert, who’d been archbishop twice in the thirteenth century. In those tumultuous times he had been appointed once, then deposed by his enemies, then reinstated by the Pope. He was clearly a popular fellow, because on his return hundreds of clergy turned out from the diocese and formed a guard of honour along the bridge that crossed the River Ouse to welcome him home. Their considerable weight caused the wooden bridge to collapse, and they were hurled into the Ouse’s icy waters. The fact that not a single cleric drowned or caught pneumonia was hailed as evidence of Fitzherbert’s saintliness. Unfortunately, the archbishop’s proven ability to ward off death did not apply to his own person, in that shortly after his return he was killed in York Minster by his archdeacon, who added poison to the Communion wine when he was serving his lord and master at Mass. I know over the centuries church disputes have got pretty heated, often murderously so, but dispatching an archbishop by slipping a slug of deadly poison into the chalice strikes me as the meanest of crimes.