Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  There were lots and lots of next times; venues other than Aughton, with all sorts of wonderful things coming to birth. When I was offered the post of Archbishop of York’s chaplain in 1991, it seemed the once-in-a-lifetime dream job, basically playing an aide-de-camp to the Archbishop’s general. His chaplain accompanied him everywhere, making prior arrangements so everything went smoothly, as well as dealing with all the letters, calls and callers that came the way of such a high-profile archbishop. That was only half the job – the other half was being Director of Ordinands, taking people from their first stirrings for ministry right through to their initial post.

  The Diocese of York stretches from the Tees to the Humber, from the A1 to the North Sea, and I knew it well – I had lived in eight different parts of it. I had a little bit of experience under my belt, having worked as a parish priest for ten years, and I was thrilled to say yes to the Archbishop’s offer. Within eight weeks we had moved from Monk Fryston to Brew House Cottage in Bishopthorpe Palace grounds. The cottage was delightful; the former site of the kilns where beer was brewed to slake the thirst of the countless workers who tended the nine acres of palace grounds and farmed the surrounding countryside. All the farmhands had long since gone, with just a couple of gardeners remaining; their sit-on lawnmowers doing the work formerly done by fifty manual labourers. Ruth, Hannah and Clare were thrilled by their new home, and gambolled around the parkland surrounding the Archbishop’s palace, their very own private garden of Eden. The palace itself was just as exciting; a vast hall and chapel built beside the River Ouse in 1215, with equally vast bits added as the years went by, reflecting the varying architectural styles of subsequent centuries. As if there weren’t enough bedrooms already, one archbishop in the nineteenth century had lowered the ceiling of the thirteenth-century chapel and installed bedrooms in the roof-space to accommodate his sixteen children. Those bedrooms now served as spacious studies for the Archbishop and me, with our windows overlooking the busy Ouse; barges and noisy boat trips from York city centre distracting us from our many tasks. The larger boats had guides on board, broadcasting snippets about the palace and its archbishops to entertain their passengers. The snippets weren’t always that accurate, so from time to time the exasperated archbishop would lean out of his high study window and bawl out a corrected version for the benefit of the startled trippers, who no doubt mistook these booming tones from on high for the voice of God. It must have all added to the entertainment.

  The new job was highly demanding. If a problem could have been solved elsewhere, it would have been long before it got to us, so those that crossed our desk were fiendishly complex and often insoluble. Apparently, a previous archbishop had had a drawer marked ‘Too difficult’ where he filed the impossible stuff, and as I settled into the job I could see his point. My learning curve was very steep; I had to quickly bring myself up to speed with the complexities of a problem, make an informed decision and implement it. One new bishop, who for the previous twenty years had been vicar of a large, tough parish in Portsmouth, claimed that he had to solve more problems in his first week as a bishop than in the previous two decades.

  Fortunately, John Habgood, the Archbishop of York, was immeasurably wise, and I could depend on him to guide me. He was a tall, donnish man in his mid-sixties, who had previously served as Bishop of Durham, principal and vice-principal of two theological colleges, and as a parish priest in both South Kensington and Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders. He was the most tender of family men, with a highly talented wife who taught violin and piano, and four children. Both his father and his daughter were doctors and in many ways he approached church problems like a GP, calm and collected, desiring a cure; his nickname was The Saviour because he always kept calm and came up with a solution. Privately, however, he was a very a shy man with little time for small talk, and his great intellect gave him an intimidating air. Trying to make conversation with him at a church bunfight was painful; it was as if he had a machine in his chest which emitted invisible rays which scrambled your mind, paralysing any attempt to put two words together. Because he wasn’t a chatty sort, and liked to think and write while travelling, he had an absolute rule of silence in the car. We covered about 25,000 miles per year driving to various events, which made for an awful lot of silence. I only once broke the rule, when we narrowly avoided a reckless pedestrian just before York’s city walls.

  ‘Well done, Gordon, you handled that very well,’ I said to calm our rattled driver.

  ‘Will you two be quiet? I am trying to work back here!’ a voice boomed from the back.

  On another occasion he broke his own rule. We were driving to a confirmation on a narrow country lane across the North York Moors, with heavy snow showers blowing in horizontally from the North Sea. As we battled against the drifts and neared our destination we saw an old lady hobbling ahead of us, making painfully slow progress with her head bowed against the wind, the snow sticking to her coat and scarf and turning them white.

  ‘Gordon, stop a moment, we must pick her up,’ the Archbishop commanded.

  We stopped and the old lady bundled herself into the back of the car, and we continued our journey, though not going much faster than she had been walking.

  ‘Let me introduce myself,’ John Habgood began. ‘I’m the Archbishop of York and I’m taking a confirmation at Easington.’

  ‘Yes, I know, my grandson’s being done; that’s where I’m going,’ the old lady replied, distinctly unimpressed.

  ‘And this is Gordon, my driver,’ the Archbishop continued.

  ‘Oooo, very nice,’ said the old lady. ‘You’ve done well for yourself; having a chauffeur!’

  The Archbishop looked distinctly miffed. ‘And this is David, my chaplain,’ he wearily concluded. This was a long conversation for him.

  The old lady leant forward and peered at me intently, her eyelashes still covered in snow. ‘Oh, I know him already. I used to sit in for his mum and dad when he was a baby.’ I turned around and smiled as she continued. ‘You won’t remember me, luv, but I lived just up the road from your mum and dad in Lingdale – I’d keep an eye on you while they went to the pictures in Guisborough for the odd night out. You were a beautiful baby, with bright red hair. You slept like a top and never gave me any trouble.’

  We continued the rest of the journey in silence.

  The Archbishop had begun his professional life as a scientist in Cambridge, just after the Second World War; his first published work was entitled The Transmission of Pain in Frogs’ Legs. He was a bit of a Heath Robinson, cobbling together scientific equipment from components he had hunted out in Marshall’s Airfield in Cambridge, which in the late 1940s was a graveyard for redundant Lancasters. Treating it like a scientists’ car boot sale, he had fished out a rusty bomb sight. With the help of the odd valve, he had converted it into a cathode ray oscilloscope sensitive enough to measure electrical current along nerve canals. He held a vivisection licence, and as well as experimenting on the frogs which provided the catchy title to his first tome, he also experimented on stray cats which he and his colleagues had culled during midnight raids in Cambridge’s dark backstreets. I once came across an article by the future archbishop in a learned journal of physiology, exploring the electrical conductivity of the various parts of a cat’s spinal column, which contained the chilling phrase, ‘If one merely cuts off the cat’s head’. When measured by the sensitivities of a later age, such experimentation seems callous and barbaric. Yet as the world reeled from a war which had killed millions, with further millions injured and paralysed and aching for a cure, it is perhaps unsurprising that the suffering of the odd cat or two seemed to pale into insignificance.

  Nevertheless, I side with Aloysha, the hero of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. His brother poses the hypothetical question whether, if he could cure all the ills of the world by making just one child suffer, would that heady end justify the modest means? Aloysha, to his credit, says no: the tears of just one child are too hi
gh a price.

  After a conversion experience in the early 1950s, John Habgood felt the call to ministry, and brought the same clinical precision to faith and theology that he had exercised as a scientist, although thankfully steering clear of vivisection. His talks were masterly, although he often misjudged his audience, conferring a greater intellectual calibre on them than they actually possessed. One visit in particular springs to mind, to a sixth form in Mirfield in West Yorkshire. The Archbishop was supposed to speak to the A Level science stream, but unfortunately the brighter students happened to have been withdrawn to practise for a choral performance later in the day.

  ‘Does anyone here want to read Biology at university?’ he began, in quite an upbeat way. Not a single hand was raised. ‘Let me tell you what I did at university,’ he continued, still upbeat. ‘I read Pharmacology and Physiology; does anyone know what those two subjects involve?’ Even the biology teacher looked nonplussed, let alone the class. ‘Well, pharmacology is the study of how drugs affect the body . . .’ he continued, oblivious to a couple of scruffy students in the back row who started to nudge each other as soon as he mentioned the word drugs. ‘. . . and physiology is the study of how the body works and responds. Do you know, I used to experiment on my own body,’ he confided in them, relaxing as he reminisced about his Cambridge days. ‘I once ate a pound of salt to see what it did to my blood pressure. Another time I ate nothing but porridge for a week, and monitored all my excreta to see what affect it had.’

  They hadn’t been the most engaged group to begin with, but after this revelation they had the glassy-eyed look cultivated by Tube passengers when a busker gets too close. We decided to quit while we were losing, and beat a hasty retreat.

  Despite such occasional missteps, I always felt immensely proud going anywhere with him; privileged to be in the presence of a far greater and holier person than I could ever become. He was the last of the great patricians and being in his company was a real schooling, as if my faith and even my life was taken apart and re-made.

  Chapter Three

  Everyone I saw in my role as Director of Ordinands was disturbed. About 95 per cent were disturbed by God and the other 5 per cent by God knows what; the trick was trying to suss out what God was disturbing them into doing. In the Bible, God disturbs all sorts. He disturbs women into having babies, disturbs shepherd boys into becoming king, and disturbs prophets into taking on the king. He disturbs very few into being priests. These days virtually all disturbance is seen as a call to priesthood, which can’t be right. Often I had to gently direct people to explore other equally crucial roles, like teaching or lion-taming. The role forced me to look into my own heart and try to figure out why I had become a priest.

  I guess a lot of it had to do with inheriting my dad’s mantle. He was born in 1929 in Chesterfield in Derbyshire, weighing in at only 3 lbs, and wasn’t expected to survive. His parish priest was called out to baptize him in hospital and his mum and dad prepared themselves for the worst. But against the odds, he thrived. Sadly, his mum didn’t, but died when he was just three – what started as an ear infection had spread to the brain and killed her. On the day of her funeral, a relative took my dad for a trip to the park, to keep him out of the way. But by the cruellest twist of fate, their walk coincided with the funeral cortege. ‘What pretty flowers!’ my dad piped up when he saw the festooned coffin passing by.

  My father’s father quickly remarried an eighteen-year-old girl ill-prepared for marriage, let alone caring for a grieving little boy. Soon coping with pregnancy as well, she started taking it out on my dad; beating him up, locking him in a dark cupboard. His relatives must have cottoned on to the abuse, because he was taken away for a while to stay at his Auntie Jessie’s farm in Ashover – a happy summer holiday during 1934. But his stepmother decided to have a second go at caring for him, only for the beatings to return, culminating in my dad’s arm being broken. The NSPCC took the case to court, with the wicked stepmother facing a long custodial sentence.

  And then something unexpected happened. At a pre-trial hearing, my dad’s paternal grandmother intervened and made a plea to the judge, which would avoid sending an expectant mother to jail. The deal was that my dad’s father and stepmother would move out of town, and his grandmother would adopt him and bring him up as her own child.

  The judge agreed to the adoption, and my dad’s grandmother proved more than true to her word. She raised him and cherished him, although even their relationship clearly wasn’t all sweetness and light. With several of their own children still around, my great-grandparents simply didn’t have a chair at the kitchen table for my dad, so he had to stand to eat his meals, his mouth barely at table height, his chin resting on the table. He was a slow eater, so was still consuming his meal when everyone else had come and gone, and the family’s fierce tomcat used to sidle up and steal the bacon off his plate.

  Had the mean feline left it there, he might have got away with it. But one Sunday morning my dad returned from church to find his granddad wrestling with a sealed barrel which seemed to have a life of its own. Water was oozing from its steel hoops, the barrel was groaning and grizzling, thumping and shaking so much that his granddad could barely keep hold of it. ‘What are you doing?’ my dad innocently asked.

  ‘I’m trying to drown that bloody cat!’ his granddad replied. ‘It stole the sausages I’d put aside in the larder for my breakfast.’

  Though Dad’s granddad was not religious, his grandmother was, and she regularly took my dad along to the newly built church in the heart of their council estate. The church became a second home to him; it had fired his grandmother’s faith, giving her the nerve to tackle the judge and bring light to a terrible darkness. The church made a fuss of my dad, a blond-haired, blue-eyed cherub, and as time went on he joined the choir and became a server. It was a church with a strong devotion to the Virgin Mary, and in my dad’s mind and life the gentle and kind mother of our Lord proved a wonderful substitute for the mother he had lost.

  Though he left school at fourteen and found work in a factory office, his heart’s desire was to be a priest. Unthinkable, really, for a beaten-up little lad from a council estate. For his National Service he spent two years in the RAF, serving in Northern Ireland. He was shocked by the poverty there – children walking the streets barefoot in all weathers. Then for eleven years he worked for the Church Army, the distinctly unmilitary wing of the Church of England, which trained unordained working-class lads and lasses to minister alongside clergy in parishes, specializing in outreach and work amongst the marginalized.

  After two years’ training, Dad was commissioned as a Church Army Officer and spent a couple of years in Watford before he was posted to Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast. Whilst there he wed my mum, Eileen – they were sweathearts from their schooldays in Chesterfield, and had worked in the same factory – but the parish couldn’t afford to pay and house a married man, so he was moved to Islington, living in a bomb-damaged flat with a leaky roof and filthy bath. My mum couldn’t bear it, so moved back to live with her parents in Chesterfield, where I was born in September 1955. My dad was given the option by his dictatorial boss of having time off for either my birth or my baptism. He chose the latter, so first encountered me at my christening when I was three weeks old.

  By the time I was one, my dad had been posted to the quaintly named parish of Boosbeck, near Whitby. At the other side of the North York Moors from Helmlsey, East Cleveland is rather rough and unglamorous, its landscape ravaged by the mines which were such rich sources of iron ore for the string of steel works which lit up the Tees by night. The mines had long since gone but the spoil heaps remained, casting their dark and threatening shadow over the dank villages. We lived in Lingdale, just up the hill from Boosbeck, and one such spoil heap loomed over the whole village. My dad was paid the princely sum of £5 a fortnight – when the churchwarden remembered – and we were housed in a rat-ridden hovel, with an earth closet at the bottom of the garden as our t
oilet. My earliest childhood memories are of deliberately opting for constipation and worrying my parents no end.

  I also recall a strange incident when I was three. My dad was laid up in bed with the flu, but despite his lack of appetite my mum had cooked him a roast dinner, served on a piping-hot plate which was singeing the sheets. ‘Quick, David, fetch a mat,’ my mum shouted, as she and my dad held the plate in relays, passing it on before it burned their fingers. I thought it was a bit of an odd request, but I ran down into the living room and dragged the large fireside rug up the stairs. ‘David, it’s a table mat we needed!’ my mother laughed. So began a lifetime of not quite getting it right.

  The desire to be a priest was burning within my dad like that hot plate. In 1958 he went to a three-day selection conference in Sheffield with interviews and group exercises designed to test whether people felt truly called to be a priest, flushing out those who had got God wrong. My dad didn’t hold out much hope; he hadn’t even got a degree, let alone been to Oxford or Cambridge like most of the clergy he knew. Tongue-tied, he didn’t have much to say, other than ‘I feel called to be a priest.’ The conference’s chairman realized that beneath his distinctly un-slick performance there was a genuine, heartfelt call. So my dad was recommended, provided he pass four O Levels, which he duly did, studying by correspondence course late into the night and early in the mornings, with me playing with my tiny Matchbox fire engine by his feet. For his English O Level he wrote an essay about his wedding day which must have cheered the examiner no end – a refreshing change from the adolescent, angst-ridden outpourings of his normal clientele.

  He spent two years at Lichfield Theological College, a monastic establishment like most other colleges in the 1960s, unused to having married men in its ranks. There were compulsory daily services early in the morning and late at the night; a regime not far removed from that once practised at Rievaulx Abbey just up the River Rye from Helmsley. Except the medieval monks there didn’t have a warm bed and wife and son waiting for them at home – or at least they didn’t let such things generally be known.