Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  We were housed at number 66, Greencroft, a newly built but very damp council flat in the city. We were lucky – cruel colleges elsewhere wouldn’t allow an ordinand’s wife and family to live within a fifty-mile radius to enforce celibacy during term time. Money was very tight indeed, with just a local authority grant of £100 a year to cover everything. Meals were frugal and breakfast was regularly missed, and whilst five-year-old me didn’t go to school exactly ragged, I was definitely scruffy. The elastic had long since given up the ghost on my underpants, which peeped out from the hemline of my black cotton shorts – a kind dinner lady regularly took pity on me and pulled my pants up for me. My dad supplemented the grant by delivering mail, even on Christmas Day, hopping on and off the running boards of the Royal Mail van. My mum got a temporary job, demonstrating the wonders of instant soup to sceptical shoppers in a local store. We and another college family used to pop in every lunchtime and my mum would call out to my dad as if she had never met him in her life, ‘Excuse me, sir, would you like to try this soup? And would your little boy like to try some?’

  Thirty years later, when I was serving as Archbishop of York’s chaplain, I came across my father’s file and noticed that there had been discussion about awarding him an additional£100 per annum during his training, effectively doubling his income. An archdeacon had declined the award, scrawling, ‘No, a little holy poverty will do them good.’ It’s difficult to put into words my feelings as I read that throwaway line. I certainly felt very angry: angry at the sheer stupidity of that tight-fisted man, angry at an institution which should bring light but failed to show any compassion whatsoever. But my over-riding emotion was that I felt immensely sorry for my younger self and my parents, blighted by an unnecessary struggle.

  At his ordination in York Minster in 1963, the church in the council estate in Chesterfield which had fired my dad’s faith as a little boy presented him with an expensive red silk stole. Fifty years on from his ordination, though it looks a bit threadbare, I wear it with pride. It keeps me ever mindful that even a beaten-up little boy in a forgotten council estate is not beyond the reach of God.

  But though my dad’s vocation fired mine, at some stage you have to fashion faith and vocation to make them your own. In 1966 an event shook not just me but the whole world, and set me on my own path through my faith to vocation. It had been raining for most of the second half of October, causing a coal spoil tip above the South Wales village of Aberfan to collapse. It sped down the mountain, a veritable avalanche, and slammed into the village, engulfing farms and terraced houses and suffocating their inhabitants. Pantglas Junior School took a direct hit, with the classrooms immediately buried under ten metres of slurry. The casualty numbers were appaling; 116 children and twenty-eight adults died. Minutes before the spoil tip collapsed they had been in the assembly hall at the other side of the school, which avoided the worst of the carnage. They were singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Had the already lengthy hymn had a few more verses, they might have been spared.

  There are two images from the disaster which have always stayed with me. The first is of a policeman with a taut face, barely able to control his emotions, carrying the crumpled body of a little girl he had rescued from the debris, who had miraculously survived. The second is of the mass funerals; row upon row of little white coffins lined up in their hillside grave. I was off school with a cold and watched that funeral on our black and white TV. Though eleven-year-old boys never ever cry, tears ran down my cheeks as I peered at those grainy images. And then those poor bereaved parents sang their hearts out. I had never come across the hymn before, but it seemed so beautiful, so poignant. I hummed the tune to my dad, and he found it in his hymn book, and I played and played and played it on my recorder, ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’, to the Welsh tune ‘Aberystwyth’. It was the tune which caught me, not the words – after all, they had sung the hymn in Welsh, not a language in which many in Yorkshire are fluent. But the tune somehow spoke to me of God weeping with those sorry parents on that South Wales hillside, aching in agony with them.

  An exploited valley in an exploited land had suddenly been robbed of its children. The children were my age, I had lived in a village over which a slag heap loomed, so it made the horrible tragedy even more personal. I guess a vocation to priesthood started swirling around that day; the idea that I wanted to spend a life convincing people who were hurting and felt abandoned, even abandoned by God, that God had not actually forgotten them but was so very close to them. God so loved the world that he impaled himself on it, although it took me twenty-five years of further study and reflection to come up with that line.

  As a teenager in west Hull I’d enjoyed putting a bit of life and drama into readings from the Bible at the quite formal school assemblies and less formal church services, although I was still very shy and would usually spend an entire afternoon rehearsing a reading. One night our family was watching a rather fanciful ITV series about the Brontës. There was a vivid scene where Charlotte Brontë was kneeling at the altar rail in her father’s church in Haworth, receiving Communion from the curate. Charlotte only had eyes for the impoverished curate, the curate only had eyes for her cleavage, with the backstory that they were falling in love. But it wasn’t their doomed romance which caught my breath. For a fleeting moment time stood still and our dingy west Hull living room seemed bathed in light, charged with God’s grandeur. The conviction suddenly hit me in the eyes that this is what I wanted to be, a priest simply feeding his people.

  That conviction stayed with me through the long process of selection, culminating in an interview with the Bishop of Hull in April 1977 which did not go at all well. I was halfway through my degree at Cambridge at the time, and American Evangelist Billy Graham had just led a university mission which had painted a very black picture of humanity and a very scary view of the crucifixion, where God punished Jesus for humanity’s sin. I felt in my heart it was a phoney picture, a spurious fall and an equally spurious redemption. I tended to take a kinder view of humankind, often nobly struggling with all sorts of stuff. And, post-Aberfan, I saw God more as the victim of suffering rather than the author of it, allying himself with all his aching children. I pointed all this out to the Bishop, who had just been moved to Hull from the stunning north Devon coast and was probably feeling a bit miffed as a result. Rather than agreeing with what I thought was a pretty obvious take, he actually subscribed to the view that I had labelled as phoney and sent me away with a flea in my ear. I was not to come back until I had converted all my friends at Barclays Bank, as well as persuading the manager to abolish Barclaycards, which the good Bishop saw as the greatest threat to humanity since the Black Death.

  That’s it then, I thought, almost relieved – I could get on with being a scientist and get a life. But the Bishop of Hull’s boss, the Archbishop of York, overruled him and sent me to a selection conference. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  I often thought back to that interview over my years as Director of Ordinands, when I picked up one or two tricks to check out whether people had a genuine calling or whether I needed to protect the Church and society from their delusion. Once I was interviewing a guy who was full of himself, informing me of the busiest of days where he led countless people to the Lord, spent hours praying, spent hours helping the needy. As he was spouting on, my secretary walked in with a tray of coffee and tripped, and the boiling coffee landed in my lap, scalding me. While I writhed in agony she tried to dab my lap with a paper handkerchief, but quickly thought better of it. All this time my interviewee was waffling on about all his good works, without noticing the crisis going on under his very nose. At the very least priests should be attentive and good listeners, so I decided he was out.

  Another time I had a vicar waxing lyrical about a candidate about whom I had reservations. I asked the vicar to imagine himself very ill in a hospital bed, with his candidate visiting him as his parish priest. How did he feel? There was a long pause, ‘I could only
cope with him if I was well,’ he admitted.

  Chapter Four

  In 1995, John Habgood retired and was succeeded by David Hope, who had previously served as bishop of both London and Wakefield. The son of a Wakefield builder, he was very friendly and grounded – at ease in Yorkshire. He never stood on ceremony. Essentially, he was a parish priest among parish priests; realizing the high price that priests paid as they walked with those in deep darkness and sorrow, trying to be Christ to the world and see Christ in the world. He would ring up, simply for a friendly chat, ‘Hallo, it’s David here, how are you doing?’ He would listen and give advice, and even get angry and come out with a few choice Yorkshire phrases when he felt one of his priests was battling against intolerable situations or people. The story goes that when David Hope was a vicar in London and lustily singing a hymn during a Eucharist, a frosty server came up to him and said, ‘Our tradition is that the priest doesn’t sing during a service, Father.’

  ‘I’m the vicar, it’s my bloody church, and if I want to sing I’ll sing, so there,’ David Hope responded; argument over. He was just great. During his first two years I arranged a sort of royal tour of the Diocese of York for him. During the tour we visited the North Sea gas terminal at Spurn Point; the narrow spit that unfurls itself across the northern mouth of the Humber like a lizard’s tongue.

  ‘Ooooh, that’s a big flame, you could light a few cigs with that,’ the Archbishop quipped.

  We visited the Portaloo factory in York and spent an amazing length of time there, not just admiring their loos, but also the plushest designer changing rooms and showers. We went to Aughton and peered through the windows of the little Norman church. We walked along the road to the church which had been built with the proceeds of a garden party my dad had organized in 1966. Unfortunately, the event had coincided with that World Cup final, but was nevertheless a fantastic success: business was brisk, and the stalls had all sold out by 3 p.m., when everyone inevitably scarpered. We visited a chicken farm near the A1, where the Archbishop retched when we stumbled into a shed containing 17,000 chickens, all high on ammonia. Distinctly green at the gills, we sailed up a very choppy Tees Estuary with the Tees Pilot, admiring the odd blast furnace still in operation beside the river before spending the rest of the day touring the high-spots of Middlesbrough, where my ministry had begun.

  We descended down the Potash Mine at Boulby, with shafts and tunnels which go deep under the North Sea. It was a show-mine, and I had forgotten to tell the Archbishop that they routinely staged a mock disaster at the deepest point. There was a terrific bang as we were cast into darkness, complete with some mock dust filling the air. ‘Bloody hell,’ exclaimed the Archbishop. Later in the day we stopped at a church cafe on the front at Whitby, where we bought a cup of tea and an iced bun. The assistant was going to pick up the Archbishop’s bun from the shelf with a pair of tongs.

  ‘Don’t bother with all that, just use your fingers, luv,’ he said, reassuringly. ‘They’ll be fine.’

  The happiest day was in Helmsley, with a tour of the surrounding moors. At the little village of Hawnby we parked on a steep hill, and I had to stand guard outside the red phone box whilst the Archbishop had a few stern words with the Bishop of Manchester. Later that day we toured the local comprehensive school, and sat at the back of class as the nervous history teacher gave a lesson on the Bayeux Tapestry. He got the Latin translation slightly wrong, and I gently corrected him.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ David Hope joked to the headteacher, ‘he’s a right clever clogs!’

  It was such a friendly school, set in the midst of the countryside with a team of teachers who were obviously contented in their skin, and pupils who were contented too. It reminded me of my happy schools in Aughton and Scarborough.

  We finished off the day with an evening meeting in Helmsley Town Hall, open to anyone. David Hope gave a little talk and then took questions. We regularly did sessions like this, and I was always a little nervous, because any subject whatsoever could come up. We had made one visit to a Sixth Form in Stokesley where a girl had taken the Archbishop to task for not ordaining women, and he had got really rattled. I had tried to soothe him, even though the voice in my head was shouting, ‘Go for it, girl!’ Tonight the questions were edgy, making me suspect there were definite tensions within Helmsley Church itself. Part of the edginess could be explained by a new, flamboyant vicar trying to move an innately conservative place on, but there seemed to be more serious undercurrents. The new vicar himself was present at the meeting, and seemed just a tad too anxious to please. He showed great affection for a lady whom David Hope took to be his wife, but actually wasn’t. It ended an otherwise wonderful day on a sour note, and as we drove home, stopping for fish and chips en route, we tried to find an explanation as to why both of us were disquieted, but couldn’t.

  ‘I’ve no doubt there’s somert going on, but God knows what it is,’ was the Archbishop’s typically blunt conclusion.

  The storm broke on Easter Day, 1997, when the News of the World featured photos of the vicar of Helmsley in bed with his mistress, and he promptly resigned. After taking the Easter Day morning services at York Minster, the Archbishop had gone away for a few days’ well-earned holiday, so I rang his deputy, the Bishop of Whitby, to ask if I could help in any way with the situation.

  ‘Yes you can. You can go there as vicar and sort them out!’ the Bishop replied.

  The prospect attracted me, not least because of my deep love for the countryside, which had been hardwired into my psyche during happy boyhood years in rural Aughton. Notwithstanding our infamous organ hunt in 1967, Helmsley had loomed at other times in my life, including one strange incident when I was six and both of my futures simultaneously came together. Early on Boxing Day, 1962, my parents dragged me out of bed and we caught the first train of the day from Hull to York. We were just about the only passengers – in those days everything used to shut down on the days after Christmas; there were no frantic queues for Boxing Day sales because none of the shops were open. We arrived in a deserted York, and killed time on a bright and frosty morning by walking on the ancient city walls for a while, taking in the fantastic views of the Minster as well as slightly hazy views of the North York Moors thirty miles away. With a bit of imagination, you could just about make out the chalk White Horse which Victorian school children had carved into the hillside at Kilburn. Fortunately, Terry’s Restaurant, an offshoot from the famous chocolate factory, was one of the few places open, and we had a bite of lunch followed by a short bus journey to Bishopthorpe on the southern outskirts of the city. En route we went past the Terry’s factory itself, and even though it too was shut down post-Christmas, we inhaled the strong aroma of its delicious chocolate in every breath. The factory, built out of red brick in 1926, was designed to look like a Georgian stately home festooned with myriad windows, each pane covered in brown chocolate dust.

  ‘The local vicar keeps bees,’ my dad informed us. ‘He says they produce the only honey in the world which is chocolate-flavoured!’

  The visit to Bishopthorpe was the real reason for our early morning start. Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of York, was hosting a Christmas party for clergy children. It was like a royal summons – not something you could say no to – so every clergy child from the four corners of the sprawling Diocese of York descended on Bishopthorpe that day. They were all accompanied by their very worried parents, anxious lest their offspring let some expletive slip in Bishopthorpe’s hallowed confines: a mere ‘blast’ was enough to get you defrocked in those days.

  The Archbishop himself met us at the door and gave me a tiny piece of paper with the word ‘David’ written on it.

  ‘You are David,’ he informed me, in his clipped tones.

  ‘That’s right, I am,’ I replied, really impressed that he should know my name.

  ‘No, I don’t think you understand,’ he replied. ‘This is our first game of the afternoon. I am giving all the children a name fro
m the Bible as they arrive, and then they have to find their Biblical partner, like Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah.’ His speech was laboured, as if he suspected I was a bit backward.

  ‘But I am called David,’ I protested, once again not quite getting it right. Donald Coggan gave me a funny look and moved on to greet the next child in the queue. My parents twigged, and explained the game to me, and eventually I found Goliath, lurking beneath a portrait of Archbishop Michael Ramsey. At the age of six I was blissfully unaware that David, my biblical namesake, was quite a lad and that there were a fair few ladies and not a few gentlemen who could have qualified for the post of his partner: Michal, Abigail, Bathsheba, Abishag, Jonathan . . . But the Beatles and Lady Chatterley had yet to broaden Bishopthorpe’s rather puritanical horizon, so Goliath was the only partner on offer.

  I actually got on very well with Goliath, which is more than I can say for one well-dressed girl there who seemed to be sneering at me. Even though my parents had dressed me in my smartest clothes for the day, I think I realized I was still a bit ragged. Thinking she was mocking my humble east Hull origins, I told her to get lost. Unsurprisingly, she took exception to this and fetched her big brother. He punched me and I punched him back, all beneath the portrait of a beaming Archbishop William Temple. They weren’t real punches, only taps, and my new friend Goliath pulled me away before things escalated.

  ‘Keep clear,’ he advised, ‘there are three of them and they’re a cut above the rest of us. They’re the Vicar of Helmsley’s children.’

  The party ended without further incident. As our bus once again passed Terry’s, my parents started chuckling about something the Archbishop had got up to the day before. Having completed his round of Christmas Day services in York Minster, he had dragged his chauffeur and chaplain off to visit every lighthouse keeper along the Yorkshire coast. They’d spent two chilly hours driving to the first, at Spurn Point. The North Sea had broken through and flooded the final approach to the lighthouse, but, undeterred, the indefatigable Archbishop had found a convenient rowing boat and got his chaplain to row across. They then drove to Withernsea, where the lighthouse was safely on dry land, in the middle of the town. From there they drove to Flamborough Head, north of Bridlington, scrambling down the icy cliffs to the lighthouse, before travelling on to the lighthouses in the harbours at Scarborough and Whitby and finally heading home.