Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  ‘It’s a funny old house, this,’ he informed me, as if I didn’t know that already. ‘One of the last-vicar-but-one’s daughters got in a huff, found a secret room off one of the chimneys and hid there for three days. Her parents were beside themselves. And then she just appeared, looking a bit sooty, but wouldn’t let on where the room was!’

  Unlike my other visitors, Father Bert was at least good enough to lend me a hand. It transpired he had been a tail-end Charlie during the Second World War, manning the rear gun turret of a Lancaster bomber. He manned the rear of my ladder now, holding it steady with his nicotine-stained fingers, the pipe dangling from his mouth emitting a plume of blue smoke like an ailing Lancaster, whilst I tried to patch up a sagging ceiling. It was all to no avail, as the ceiling came crashing down, enveloping both of us in a cloud of grey dust and revealing the wattle and daub lattice work beneath, which must have been undisturbed since medieval times.

  ‘Ee, that took me back,’ he said. ‘I was always having dust like that fall about me ears, man, when those Messerschmitts used to take a pop at me!’

  He shivered. It was a good ten degrees colder inside Canons Garth than it was outside that day, but it was his memories rather than my cold house that made him shake.

  ‘It was absolutely freezing in those little bubbles,’ he exclaimed. ‘Even colder than this place! I suppose it stopped me dozing off, kept me alert, my eyes peeled for enemy aircraft.’ He wheeled around 180 degrees, scanning my dilapidated ceiling, screwing up his eyes lest a Focke was lurking in my dangling wattle and daub. ‘Heckschwein, that’s what their rear-end gunners were called – tail-end pigs. And, I’m sorry to say this, they were utter pigs; one slip by us and they’d show no mercy, their guns would cut us up like mincemeat.’

  In cramped and freezing conditions, he had risked death and been an agent of death every day. My preparation for priesthood had been working for six years in Barclays Bank in darkest Hull; Bert had spent a similar length of time strapped into a veritable killing machine, a sitting duck for enemy fire. It’s funny how life turns out.

  ‘Let’s go out for a spin while all this dust settles,’ Father Bert suggested. I left Rachel a note on the kitchen table – ‘Sorry about the ceiling – back later’ – and off we went. I wasn’t sure what sort of spin Father Bert had in mind and feared he might have a tame Spitfire parked up on Canons Garth Lane, so I was vastly reassured when he opened the doors of a rather smart red jeep. ‘You need one of these for where I’m taking you,’ he joked, as we roared up the 1:4 incline out of Helmsley. His jeep had all the mod cons, including an altimeter on the dashboard, and the numbers shot up like Wall Street in the throes of a bull market: 70, 80, 90, 100 metres and rising.

  ‘That’s Beckdale House, which Lord Feversham built for himself whilst the school lasses occupied Duncombe Park,’ he explained, pointing to his right as the jeep veered dangerously near the verge. In a blur I saw a rather nicely proportioned mansion perched on the hilltop, south facing, with a highly desirable view over the town and the distant Wolds.

  ‘Why on earth did he leave all that comfort to camp out in an eighteenth-century pile?’ I asked.

  Father Bert grinned. ‘The aristocracy are not like us, bonnie lad. They stockpile millions, but are never happier than when they’re roughing it in a draughty old castle, shuffling around in a pair of worn carpet slippers and stained corduroys, with nothing but a bit of mouldy cheese and stale bread for their lunch. I blame public schools, that’s where the rot sets in. If they’d been educated like me in a Gateshead secondary modern, they’d look for a bit of luxury.’

  The altimeter had risen to 180 metres by now, as the jeep pointed heavenwards. ‘Peer over to your left and you might catch a glimpse of Rievaulx Terraces,’ my clerical guide pointed out. ‘They’re follies originally built by another Lord Feversham with views over the valley, but the family had to sell them off when the earl was killed on the Somme, otherwise the death duties would have crippled them. Seems a bit hard that, dying for your king and country, and then being clobbered by the tax man as well as the Hun.’

  It wasn’t just the old Lord Feversham who had been robbed. Before retirement, Father Bert had been vicar of the moorland parishes to the north of Helmsley. He positively seethed as he told me that the glories of Rievaulx should rightfully have been in his parish and not part of Helmsley. ‘What does the Vicar of Helmsley in his grand town know of rural life?’ he complained, seemingly forgetting that the new vicar of Helmsley was sitting beside him, hanging on for dear life. The altimeter started soaring again, reaching the dizzy height of 300 metres before the jeep screeched to a halt as a roe deer ran across our path. ‘Nearly caught our lunch there, David! Let’s turn off and have a look at the view, and then we’ll double back so you can taste the glories of my former kingdom!’

  The forest clearing was rather aptly called Surprise View. The ground fell sharply away beneath us and revealed a gorgeous, lush green valley flanked by moorland hills, with their tops made bright purple by the heather’s autumn bloom. This formed the largest continuous expanse of heather in the UK, with the UK itself containing 70 per cent of the world’s heather. Bilsdale stretched for twenty miles before our gaze, with just a scattering of stone-built farmhouses clinging to the hillsides. The northern end of the valley was framed by the Cleveland Hills; of equal height to the North York Moors yet more rounded and less rugged, giving them a maternal feel. As we stood in the clearing drinking in the sight, I noticed a pine tree which had been recently felled, the sticky sap still oozing over the trunk. I counted the rings on the trunk; forty-two in total, making the tree exactly my age. Since 1955 it had stood here through every season; from the harshest of winters in 1963 with seven-foot drifts blocking every road, to the scorching summers of the mid-1970s, when my manager at Barclays Bank in Hull bought his staff ice creams every afternoon to cool us down. Every season for forty-two years – lucky old tree!

  Chapter Seven

  Father Bert didn’t want to linger, so we sped off back down the B road and then, after a sharp right, the jeep clung precariously to a ridge before plummeting eighty metres and crossing the River Rye into the village of Hawnby. Actually, it was two villages, due to a falling out in the eighteenth century. John Wesley had preached in the village and over fifty villagers had converted to Methodism. Hawnby’s lord of the manor, the Earl of Mexborough, evicted any tenants who failed to remain loyal to the Church of England, but they managed to club together and buy land on the other side of the Rye to set-up their own farmsteads and build their own chapel. It was a sort of Methodist cooperative, and on a Sunday they’d bawl out Charles Wesley’s hymns from dawn to dusk, twice as loudly whenever the earl was in residence, just to shame him. After all, there is only so much of ‘Love Divine All Loves Excelling’, and all the trilling connected with it, that one can take.

  We climbed out of Hawnby and then turned left, descending another 1:3 hill. There was a warning sign for a ford ahead, but Father Bert sped on. ‘You’ll never have seen a ford like this,’ he warned. Like all fords, the road dipped sharply into a stream, but this one was quite a raging torrent. The water splashed over the jeep as we dived in, but then Father Bert made a sharp left turn, so rather than rising out of the other side, we drove along the river. I felt like a passenger in James Bond’s Lotus Esprit, the submarine car in The Spy Who Loved Me.

  ‘Bert, what on earth are you doing?’ I shouted in panic, as a tidal surge engulfed the windscreen. ‘Get onto the road!’

  ‘This is the road, laddie, we’ve got another couple of hundred yards of this!’

  We bounced along the river bed for the stipulated two hundred yards before making a sharp right turn onto dry land and the tarmac road that continued on the stream’s other side. By night you’d have undoubtedly missed the turn – it was difficult enough to spot it by day with the windscreen wipers hardly able to cope.

  ‘What would have happened if we’d missed it?’ I asked Father Bert as we rose up
the hill, whilst all the water on the hot bonnet turned to steam, plunging us into a veritable fog.

  ‘I suppose we’d have driven down the stream for a couple of miles and ended up in the Rye!’ he nonchalantly replied, shrugging his shoulders, as if driving along river beds formed a normal part of a country parson’s life.

  We reached Old Byland, a village perched on yet another hilltop, and pulled up beside a very smart farmhouse; an eighteenth-century stone-faced building with a stone-tiled roof, a spic and span stack yard and a highly polished Range Rover parked by the side of a barn. Father Bert got out and yelled, ‘Margaret, Margaret!’ After a couple of minutes a lady in her mid-sixties emerged from one of the barns, with bits of straw in her white hair.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Father, stop bellowing, I was just feeding the ’osses. You’ve fair spooked them with all that shouting.’

  The normally loquacious Father Bert was silent, hunching his shoulders like a dog scolded by his mistress. Margaret bustled about in the yard; a rotund country woman, dressed in smart tweeds, with a beaming face and laughter tumbling out of her whole body.

  ‘Now don’t go into a sulk again, Father,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Who’s this you’ve brought with you?’

  ‘I’m David, the new vicar of Helmsley.’ I wasn’t sure what else to say, because I wasn’t sure why we’d stopped by.

  ‘Oh, how lovely.’ Margaret beamed, grasping my hand with both her hands in the warmest of greetings. ‘You’ll stay for a bit of lunch? Father always pops in around this time of day, in fact every day for the last eighteen years, ever since he moved up here. I must be the most frequently visited woman in the diocese!’ She looked at Bert fondly, gently teasing him.

  ‘That would be lovely, but are you sure you’ve got enough?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh yes, don’t you worry about that, I always cook a bit spare and warm it up for me tea. Come on in and sit yourselves around the table and I’ll serve up.’

  We were ushered into a spacious but dark kitchen, with tiny windows set in the thick stone walls looking onto the stack yard and village green. The room was full of delicious aromas. Several pans were boiling on the top of the large Aga, which as well as doing all the cooking gave the room a warm, cosy feel. We sat on Windsor chairs around a large oak table and to start with Margaret served us a thick slab of golden Yorkshire pudding, swimming in a lake of rich, brown gravy. It was the Yorkshire way; fill them up with pudding first to take the edge off their appetite for the more expensive meat served later. I’m a founding member of the Yorkshire Pudding Society, which has only one rule: no member is ever allowed to refuse a Yorkshire pudding. So I dutifully tucked in, not that I needed any encouragement – it was absolutely delicious.

  ‘Are these made with Henrietta’s eggs?’ Father Bert asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Margaret replied, and then added for my benefit, ‘Henrietta’s my best layer, lovely brown eggs, double-yolkers, laid fresh this morning. Will you have a bit more?’ she asked, noting I had wolfed the first slab down. Within seconds another slab, twice as big as the first, appeared on my plate, with another pint of gravy.

  ‘I like to see a man enjoying his food. And you need feeding up, the pair of you are as thin as rakes!’

  I thought that I wouldn’t be staying as thin as a rake for long at this rate, whilst wondering how Father Bert had stayed so slim if this had been his daily fare for eighteen years. As soon as I had finished my second piece of Yorkshire pudding, Margaret put dish after dish of steaming vegetables on the table; peas, carrots, green beans, swede, a huge dish of mashed potato and roast potatoes.

  ‘All grown by my own hand,’ she reassured me. ‘I’ve only just podded the peas. They’re a bit big at this time of year, but they should be as sweet as sweet can be. Father, will you carve?’

  ‘I always do,’ Father Bert replied, as a huge leg of lamb was placed before him. ‘Which one’s this?’

  ‘Oh, it’s Bertha, I thought she was fattening up nicely so I took her down to Thompson’s in Helmsley last week for slaughter, and picked her up yesterday. I’ve frozen the rest of her.’

  ‘Ah, God bless Bertha,’ Father Bert intoned, a somewhat unconventional grace. He carved four huge slices of lamb and put them on my plate, the lush juices running off and diluting the remaining gravy. Before I could help myself to modest amounts, Margaret piled on the vegetables, half a dozen roast potatoes and a mountain of mash.

  ‘Have a bit more Yorkshire pudding to go with it,’ she encouraged, as she perched a third slab on my plate. ‘Father always likes a Yorkshire pudding chaser.’

  It was absolutely gorgeous, but by the time I had finished it I was, to put it delicately, feeling exceedingly replete. ‘Now, you’ll have seconds?’ Margaret asked, although it was more an order than a question.

  ‘It was thoroughly delicious, but I don’t think I could,’ I replied.

  A golden labrador was slumped in her basket by the Aga and hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I’d entered the kitchen, her tail thumping on the basket side every time Father Bert threw her a titbit. Margaret looked at me with the same deep soulful eyes as her dog. ‘Now come on, David, have a bit more, we don’t want it going to waste!’ Clearly saying no wasn’t an option, so once again four huge slices of lamb were piled onto my plate, another half dozen roast potatoes, another mountain of mash, another lake of gravy. Complete with a fourth slab of Yorkshire. This was turning out to be a food marathon.

  Miraculously I got through it all, and even enjoyed it, although I surreptitiously loosened my belt a couple of notches to ease the strain.

  ‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting back to base,’ I exclaimed, suppressing a belch. ‘Margaret, that was scrumptious.’

  ‘But you haven’t had your pudding yet,’ Margaret declared, whipping away the dinner plates and then bringing out a huge dish from the Aga’s oven. It was bread and butter pudding, my favourite, cooked to golden perfection. Surely I would be able to find a little corner for the smallest of pieces? But Margaret wasn’t finished. She placed a quart jug of custard on the table before disappearing into the larder.

  ‘You just wait for her pièce de résistance,’ Father Bert whispered, just as Margaret returned with a cut-glass bowl brimful with trifle.

  ‘Now, David, which are you going to try first?’ she asked. Margaret would not take no for an answer, so bread and butter pudding was followed by trifle.

  ‘Now, how about a bit of ice cream to finish off?’

  Despite the deep soulful eyes, I shook my head, almost incapable of coherent speech. I held up my hand, ‘No, no, I really couldn’t, I’m fine,’ I said, even though I felt far from fine. During pudding I’d surreptitiously slid my belt buckle to the last notch, yet my stomach still felt like a taut drum.

  ‘Well, I’ll put the kettle on and make a cup of tea whilst Father shows you the church and vicarage,’ Margaret decreed.

  Father Bert and I toddled out of the house, the golden labrador trotting beside us. Fortunately, the church was only across the green, so the walk wasn’t too onerous. It was an ancient building, mostly wood, with a Saxon feel to it and a lovely musky aroma.

  ‘It used to be a monastery,’ Father Bert explained. ‘But Rievaulx Abbey is just at the bottom of the cliff, and they got fed up with the monks there ringing their bells at the wrong time. They were two different orders with two different habits, in both senses of the word. They didn’t take kindly to being woken by Rievaulx’s bells when it was their kip time, or being summoned in from the fields only to find vespers wasn’t happening for another hour. So they moved and set up another Byland ten miles away, over towards the Howardian Hills, and we became Old Byland.’

  ‘Might have been cheaper to change the pitch of the bells – make Rievaulx C major and Byland F sharp major.’

  ‘Do you know, I bet they never thought of that,’ Father Bert chuckled. ‘But I think they also got a bit fed up of being perched on this hill, too easy a target for sacking by the
Scots. So they took themselves off to be nice and safe in a hidden valley. Legend has it that during one attack, the Scots tore the habits off their very backs. Those Scots have never been much good at respecting the cloth,’ Father Bert joked.

  Our path meandered through the vicarage garden next door to the church. The ground fell sharply away beneath it, offering breathtaking views towards Rievaulx and the River Rye. We returned to Margaret’s kitchen, where there was a steaming mug of tea in each of our places, along with a thick slice of rich fruit cake and a hunk of Wensleydale cheese.

  ‘I thought you’d need a snack after your little ramble,’ Margaret chuckled.

  After that feast, I felt distinctly sleepy as we shot up and down hills on our drive home, giving Rievaulx a fly-past. I always adored seeing Rievaulx Abbey, with its magnificent and haunting high stone walls, roofless church and monks’ quarters. But today it went by in a blurred haze.

  ‘When did you retire, then?’ I managed to ask Father Bert.

  ‘When I were sixty-nine, in 1991,’ he replied. ‘I’d just had lunch with Margaret, and I went back to my vicarage and looked at the list of visits for the day and said to myself, “I just cannot be bothered.” So I resigned there and then.’

  We were silent for the rest of the journey as I pondered two questions in my somnolent state. Firstly, never mind his reason for retiring, how had Bert ever summoned up the energy to visit a single parishioner after such a daily repast? And secondly, what precisely was going on between him and Margaret?