Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  Shepherd of

  Another Flock

  The charming tale of a new vicar

  in a Yorkshire country town

  David Wilbourne

  SIDGWICK & JACKSON

  To mark the memory of Gordon Powell, my father in law and captain in the Royal Artillery, 1942–1946.

  The most gracious of men.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  List of Illustrations

  Chapter One

  Just after Easter, 1967, a door opened in my childhood and let Helmsley in. I was eleven then, the shy son of the vicar of Aughton, a forgotten corner in the Vale of York. The previous Sunday the ancient harmonium in my father’s even more ancient village church had begun wailing like a dyspeptic cow. The tiny evensong congregation had tried their best to sing ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’, but then gave up the struggle as the organ died. The next evening my dad had scanned the adverts in the York Evening Press and had spotted an organ for sale in Helmlsey. So the following Saturday, Margaret, the organist, her husband, Ian, their two children, Kythe and Ronan, my parents and I crammed into Ian’s Ford Cortina estate car, bound for the North York Moors, over forty miles to the north.

  The first twenty-five miles passed reasonably uneventfully as the estate sped along narrow country lanes, seemingly wending its way around three sides of every field. Kythe, Ronan and I were sitting on cushions in the estate’s boot, chatting happily, I-spying sundry tractors and combine harvesters working the undulating farmland, sticking out our tongues at cars behind us when they got too close for comfort. Then, after an hour, the terrain changed: our car stuttered and coughed as it climbed up Sutton Bank, a 500-foot sheer cliff with rock formations spanning all three Jurassic epochs. As the car reared up the 1:4 hairpin bends, we slid down the bare metal floor, our noses slamming into the rear window. Had we not been terrified that the estate’s tailgate might spring open, launching us on the ultimate dry-ski run (or rather dry-cushion run) down Sutton Bank, we might have enjoyed the panoramic views over the vales of Mowbray and York. On a good day you can see the Pennine hills and the Lake District’s mountains shimmering in the west.

  No one gave much thought to child safety back then. Every day a tired old bus harvested us twenty-eight local kids to take us to the primary school three miles away. It was driven by Les, a curmudgeonly old guy with an oil-stained flat cap permanently cemented on his head. He had been badly injured when a large metal bar had fallen on him in the garage workshop, all but blinding him. In consequence, the biggest boy in the school used to sit next to him, a self-appointed co-driver, grabbing the steering wheel whenever we veered towards a ditch or hedge.

  ‘Give me back that wheel, you little bugger!’ Les would curse, a man of few words, most of them Anglo-Saxon.

  The locals were very good, and obligingly moved their cars off the road at school start and end times. Any other drivers wisely pulled onto the verge as soon our ancient coach chanced upon their horizon.

  Mercifully, there was no Les to hamper our crawl up Sutton Bank. As we reached the top, a dozen gliders hovered above us like eagles circling a prey. We coasted along a high plateau, the North Sea forming a blue horizon thirty miles to the east. After eight miles we sped past an ancient mile post declaring HELMSLEY ONE MILE in gothic lettering, veered to the left and descended sharply. The little town of Helmsley spread out beneath us; numerous red roofs huddled around the Norman church and ruined castle like chicks gathering around their mother hen. We swooped down into the town and through the market square – a spacious piazza flanked on all sides by shops galore, their wares liberally displayed in bright gleaming windows. We glimpsed sides of beef; mouth-watering pork pies the size of saucepans, with jelly oozing out of their crimped golden tops; enormous crusty loaves of bread; row after row of lush-looking cakes with cream cascading down their sides. We drove along narrow, winding cobbled streets whose names curiously all ended in gate; Bondgate, Ryegate, Eastgate and Pottergate all harked back to Viking times. The houses were packed closely together; tiny, terraced cottages built of cream-coloured limestone, two floors squeezed into what would serve as a single-storey bungalow elsewhere, eye-brow windows tucked beneath the eaves.

  We drove up and down all these gates, eventually finding Castlegate, where our organ seller lived. As we squeezed along it, a police panda car – a blue and white Ford Anglia – pulled out ahead of us and we parked in its space. We were on the set of Heartbeat twenty-five years before the Yorkshire TV series took the nation by storm – except this was the real thing.

  After several polite knocks, the door of number twenty-three was opened by a bleary-eyed, thickset man, dark stubble peppering his unshaven chin.

  ‘You’ll have come about t’ organ I s’pose. You’ll ’ave to excuse my appearance, I’ve been up all night wit’ Fire Service.’

  Still standing on the pavement, we peered through the front door straight into his tiny living room. Over the hearth there was a large, red circular bell with Fire embossed on its centre. The rest of the room seemed to be completely filled with a huge pedal organ – its dark pine finish gave the ill-lit room an even more gloomy air.

  ‘You can have a go, if you want,’ he offered. ‘It were me mother’s, she had it given her as a lass when she lived in Canada. Then when she married me dad, she had it shipped o’er here. It was during t’ Great War, and boat what were carrying her was chased by U-boats. But t’ buggers missed – sailors always said t’ organ was a lucky charm!’

  Margaret squeezed into the room and sat at the keyboard, her feet pedalling the bellows. She grinned broadly as she improvised the Navy Hymn – ‘Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm doth bind the restless wave!’ En route we had stopped off at Thirsk for lunch, where she and my mum had popped into a pub for a couple of gin and tonics, so she was in a mischievous mood. ‘It seems to have a lovely tone,’ my dad said, nodding appreciatively, as if he was Sir Adrian Boult relishing the LSO. ‘How much do you want for it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a family heirloom, as well as our lucky charm. I don’t think I can let it go for anything less than four t’ five pounds.’

  ‘Well, let’s say four pounds and ten shillings,’ my dad replied, keen to do the deal.

  ‘Four pounds ten shillings! Four pounds ten shillings! What’s thou talking about? I said forty-five pounds, and I can’t take a penny less. I feel as if I’m giving me ’eri
tage away, even then. It’s an heirloom, nothing less.’

  Faced by 1000 per cent inflation, my dad decided that we all go for a walk around the town to think about the deal.

  ‘Don’t take too long, mind. I’ve had a lot of interest in me heirloom. If someone else should make me an offer, it’ll be first come, first served, and you’ll lose it!’

  A charmless man, hardly a devotee of the Yorkshire saying, ‘If you can’t raise a smile, don’t bother to open t’ shop!’

  We strolled up Castlegate – which was predictably overshadowed by Helmsley’s castle. The moors rose steeply ahead of us, terraced houses, art shops, cafes and bookshops lined the street on our left, and a fast-flowing beck gurgled to our right, its bank festooned with daffodils. We turned left and climbed into the castle grounds, their keep broken in two by Roundhead cannon. As we children scrambled up and down the dry moat, re-enacting the Civil War, our parents earnestly discussed whether they should haggle or accept the surly man’s price.

  Having exhausted the castle, we visited the church. We were always visiting churches; old ones, new ones, light ones, dark ones. As a child I found their colossal dimensions made me skittish, my head spun, the musty smell of old hymn books sickening me further: I was developing a lifetime’s allergy. But the interior of Helmsley Church was different, covered in vividly coloured murals of vines and oaks and crowds of ancient Britons, anachronistically sporting Mexican moustaches and horned helmets, grudgingly having the Gospel preached to them by a baby-faced bishop. I noticed that many of the ancient Britons looked curiously like our thickset organ seller. Above these pictures stretched another of a red-scaled dragon, twenty feet in length, with an anaemic knight on a paler horse beneath him, piercing his side with a lance. ‘They were commissioned by a fiercely Victorian vicar who stayed here over forty years. I believe the artist used local models,’ I heard my dad telling Ian, in hushed tones, ‘It’s all about Christianity versus paganism.’ My vote went with the dragon; I rather took to him, with his pained eyes, fire breathing from his nostrils, blood spurting from the wound in his belly, his squamous red wings poised for flight. If only there were a few more dragons like him in church, people would come flocking back.

  We wandered back down Castlegate and the adults eventually settled on forty-two pounds and ten shillings, with the amount to be paid by cheque.

  ‘I’ll trust you, since you’re a vicar,’ the organ seller said, defrosting a bit. ‘As long as thou take it away now. You’ve got an estate car, we can strap it to roof!’

  Ian looked wide-eyed at the prospect of his – albeit battered – estate car being used for the purpose, but cashing in his heirloom obviously energized our organ seller.

  ‘I’ll dial t’ fire station and get some of the lads round to give us a hand,’ he said almost cheerfully.

  He ran to the red phone box on the corner and almost instantly we could hear the distant fire station’s siren, and the huge bell over the man’s mantelpiece started clanging. ‘It’ll be ringing in t’ other lads’ houses, they’ll soon be here,’ he assured us.

  Within minutes, ten clones of our muscular organ seller appeared, still doing up the buttons on their firemen’s black uniforms. They lifted the organ as if it were a feather, their hobnailed boots sending sparks flying as they shuffled over the stone flags, and plonked it down on the car’s roof rack, which sagged under the strain.

  ‘I’ve got some rope in t’ shed, I’ll let you have it for free,’ the organ seller offered, ‘and we’ll tie it down.’

  We crawled out of Helmsley in first gear, with the organ on top groaning discordantly as the breeze blew through its reeds. Looking out of the rear window, we children could see the organ seller and his firemen cronies standing in the road, waving off his heirloom.

  ‘He made a hard bargain, that man,’ my dad complained. ‘If I never see him again, it’ll be too soon.’

  But I did come across him again. You see, thirty years later I buried him.

  Chapter Two

  I came across the organ again in 1992, when I returned to Aughton, by which time it had had a quarter of a century to settle in its new home. Yet despite nestling in a lofty Norman church rather than a cramped Victorian cottage, and despite now being looked upon by a six-foot-two man rather than a four-foot-eleven boy, it still seemed enormous. Its dark-stained pine bore a fair few scratches, revealing the lighter wood beneath; wounds from its perilous journey from the North York Moors to the Vale of York. The dark stain was also peppered with light dots, like the stars in the night sky; for twenty-five years it had been dive-bombed by Aughton Church’s resident bats, whose acidic droppings had pitted its surface.

  ‘Come, Thou Holy Spirit, Come’, it droned out, joined by a few discordant voices. The music from the wheezy organ was supplemented by the haunting call of Russian geese flying overhead, their wings beating time against the night air. In the merciful silences of the service, I could hear the dark waters lapping against the churchyard’s south wall. There had been heavy rainfall over Helmsley and the North York Moors for the previous few days which had swollen the River Derwent, making it burst its banks and flood the low-lying meadowland in the Vale of York.

  The Derwent’s wending course through Yorkshire made me think of my own circuitous route to this point. We left Aughton in 1970 when my dad was appointed to be parish priest in Scalby, Staintondale and Ravenscar, which covered the dramatic Yorkshire coastline from Scarborough to Robin Hood’s Bay. So at the age of fourteen I was transplanted from sultry countryside to bracing seaside. During the summer holidays here I worked giving change in an amusement arcade on Scarborough’s bustling south bay. After three years we moved again, in the middle of my A Levels, to the lively community of west Hull, with its thriving fish docks and Birds Eye factory. The smell of fish was sometimes so strong that the operating theatre in the local hospital had to be closed, on the simple principle that it was wise to avoid having consultants retch whilst carrying out complex surgical procedures!

  During my first year reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge my parents moved again, when my dad was appointed vicar of Keyingham, set in the glorious countryside between Hull and the North Sea made famous by Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. The area consists of very fecund and very flat reclaimed land, and during the long hot summers of the 1970s sported fields of golden corn as far as the eye could see. There is a string of churches between Hull and Spurn Point, mostly dedicated to St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, all with high towers or spires to enable the ships to navigate along the treacherous Humber. The wide river is immediately south of Keyingham, with a tiny harbour called Stoney Creek; by night you can see the twinkling lights of the ports of Grimsby and Immingham, seemingly just an arm’s reach away. For six years I spent all my university vacations in Keyingham, working as a cashier in Barclays Bank in the centre of Hull before such creatures became all but extinct – our busy branch had a counter serviced by nine cashiers.

  All in all, like the infant Moses, my early life had been a series of rushes. Though I attended seven different schools over my school career, I enjoyed the variety and the chance to start afresh – even to reinvent myself. I was rubbish at games at my secondary school in York, but when I moved to a new school in Scarborough I decided to go for it and be athletic. I was pretty incompetent at physics in York, but in Scarborough I decided to give Einstein a run for his money.

  At Cambridge I gained a degree in Natural Sciences and Theology, and spent a further couple of years training to be a priest and working as a tutor in the New Testament and Ancient Greek. In 1981, I was appointed as an assistant priest in a large parish in the southern suburbs of Middlesbrough, with the rounded Cleveland Hills and the winding road to Helmsley on the southern horizon. In Middlesbrough I met and married Rachel, a history teacher, and in 1985, aged twenty-nine, I became the Rector of Monk Fryston and South Milford. This was a parish on the outskirts of Pontefract, home of the Yorkshire coalfield in its death throes follow
ing the 1984–85 national miners’ strike. Though sited next to a very pungent pig farm, our vicarage was a lovely, new stone-built house, with a coal-fired boiler keeping us and our growing family warm 24/7 – Rachel gave birth to our daughter, Ruth, in 1985, Hannah in 1988 and Clare in 1989. In 1991 the Archbishop of York appointed me as his chaplain, and we moved to live in Bishopthorpe, three miles south of York.

  Back to Aughton in 1992: the water lapping, the birds calling and the wings beating were all redolent of the Spirit of God, which had hovered over the abyss in the opening chapter of Genesis, willing order out of chaos. It formed an appropriate backdrop for tonight’s service, which was a confirmation, with the Archbishop laying his holy hands on the candidates, celebrating God’s Spirit being with them as cherished children of God.

  ‘Candidates’ is a bit of an exaggeration – there were only two to begin with, so hardly an evangelistic success story on the parish’s part. Then one had dropped out, with no explanation, simply not turning up. The service’s start had been delayed whilst we waited, with the vicar to-ing and fro-ing to the porch, willing her to come. ‘She’ll just be putting the children to bed, she’ll be along in a minute.’ And then, ‘Her husband is very anti, she’ll be cajoling him to come with her.’ And finally, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, she’s not coming. We’d better start without her.’ His voice was full of sadness; all the encouragement, all the patient instruction, come to nothing.

  At least there was still one candidate. A little plump girl in her best pink party frock, who dangled her legs self-consciously and stared vacantly at the ancient dog-toothed chancel arch throughout the Archbishop’s erudite sermon. Although the church was sadly devoid of people, for me it was full of the ghosts of people I remembered from my childhood, now no longer with us. The service over, we packed our cases, trudged back over the stony path and left the church behind, its dark limestone silhouetted against the clear starlit sky. The lapping water and beating wings waited for the next time.