Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  The evacuees didn’t stay long after that inauspicious start. Without them the little school was unsustainable and closed in 1944, so Eva moved for her final school year to Lady Feversham’s School in Helmsley. It seems they didn’t know what to do with her – she was brighter than the teachers, let alone the pupils – so she spent that year outside, trimming the huge beech hedge which encircled the school, cementing the deep love of the outdoors which had been fostered at East Moors and which never left her.

  I bade Derek a carefully annunciated farewell and returned home to admire the freshly plastered ceiling. Our youngest daughter, Clare, was missing her friends from Bishopthorpe, so Rachel had cooked her favourite tea – sausage, baked beans and chips – to cheer her up. It cheered me up too, after my twenty or so miles, rising and falling some 3000 feet. The girls chattered on, as was their wont, and I simply listened to them fondly. ‘Poor Dad,’ Hannah piped up, ‘we must be a bit of a shock after all those hours of silence!’

  If only . . .

  Chapter Eleven

  I’d decided to take time out from ancient vicarages and equally ancient churches and visit Ryedale School, the local comprehensive which I’d first encountered en tour with the Archbishop the previous summer. It drew most of its pupils from Helmsley and Kirkbymoorside (another moorside market town seven miles to the east of Helmsley) and had been built in 1952 adjacent to a railway station on the edge of a tiny village, which was a mid-point between the two towns. The cunning plan that most of the children would be able to travel there by rail was thwarted by the closure of the branch line just a year after the school was built.

  I’d booked myself in to take assembly. Our eldest daughter, Ruth, had just started at the school, but was amazingly relaxed about her street-cred being undermined by her dad making a fool of himself before all her new friends. With my legs still aching after the cyclothon the day before, I set off just before Ruth caught the school bus, cycling along the undulating A road that skirted the foot of the moors. The land rose sharply to my left, where combine harvester after combine harvester struggled with an almost vertical ascent up the steep moorside, gathering the golden corn. Ancient school buses inched past me, belching out blue palls of diesel exhaust, and a series of HGVs, hurtling towards Helmsley, rocked my bike as they sped past.

  The heavy traffic made me a bit nervous and caused flashbacks to an incident in 1970, shortly after my father had moved from Aughton to his new post in Scarborough. Running across the road to catch the school bus, I was hit by a motorbike and took two days to come round in Scarborough Hospital. By then it was a Sunday and the Salvation Army were going around the wards loudly playing hymns for the patients – Brassed Off meets Kings College Choir on a bad hair day. Disorientated young me woke up to the discordant strains of ‘How Great Thou Art’. I didn’t feel that great with a fractured skull and broken pelvis. If this is heaven, I thought, count me out.

  Shivering at the memory, I turned right off the trunk road as soon as I could and rode over an old railway crossing, with the gate and signal box still intact, up a steep hill and then through a thick forest, where the sharp smell of pine was so strong that it cleared my lungs and made my eyes smart.

  Suddenly, the forest cleared and beneath me sprawled the school, there in the middle of nowhere. The red-roofed, two-storey building spread out for 200 yards; a sea of glass facing south and catching the sun, set in acres of playing fields. As I cycled up, I realized the view was an education in itself, with the fierce moors sharply rising to the north and the gentler wolds to the south.

  I walked through the main entrance at five to nine as the pupils were streaming into the school hall. At the entrance to the hall a small man with blond hair, blond bushy eyebrows and piercing blue eyes hovered in the alcove, his face taut with tension. ‘Tuck that shirt in, do that tie up,’ he barked. Sleepy-eyed, thickset lads went through the motions, notionally tightening their ties only to loosen them again as soon as they were out of the tense man’s gaze. Something stirred in the back of my mind from our previous visit; the fierce little man was the head teacher.

  ‘Hallo, I’m David,’ I said to the Head, self-consciously checking my own black shirt was tucked in as I did so. ‘Thanks for letting me take assembly. I so enjoyed my visit with the Archbishop last year.’

  ‘Take that earring out!’ he shouted, over my shoulder. The effect was so terrifying that I felt my ear lobes for any offending jewellery. He looked me up and down, as if checking out my uniform. No problems with the tie, since I was sporting a dog collar. ‘We’ll make sure we translate the Latin correctly this time,’ he quipped, before barking at a surly youth for having his shoelaces untied.

  All this fierce discipline made me zone out, and I travelled back in time to my first ever assembly as a visiting curate, barely days after starting in my first post in Middlesbrough. I had moved into a furnished bungalow, owned by a certain Miss Dobson, who – as well as being a leading light in my new church – was the headmistress of a primary school in the roughest part of town. In lieu of rent, she insisted that I lead an assembly. To be honest, I was hoping to leave it a bit before shy old me first ventured into schools, but Miss Dobson was the sort of headmistress who brooked no refusal. So against my better judgement I found myself sitting at the front of the hall, shaking. They all marched in under Miss Dobson’s eagle eye, backs ramrod straight, arms swinging by their sides – and that was just the teachers!

  My assembly was quite simple, as assemblies go. Just a bag of crisps, which I invited some of the 250 children to sample and guess the flavour. Salt and vinegar? No. Cheese and onion? No. Plain? No. They all looked puzzled, because there weren’t really any other flavours around in those benighted days before Gary Lineker had taken the crisp world by storm. ‘The flavour is fish and bread,’ I boldly proclaimed. My infant audience looked even more perplexed. My point, of course, was simple. Jesus had fed an audience twenty times as big as mine with the equivalent of my bag of crisps. To hammer home my point, I taught the children a Victorian hymn, which in my nervousness I crooned (or rather croaked) like Elvis Presley:

  With two little fishes and five loaves of bread,

  five thousand people by Jesus were fed.

  All of this happened because one little lad,

  gladly gave Jesus all that he had.

  All that I have, all that I have, I will give Jesus all

  that I have.

  I then bade them all a hurried farewell and got out while the going was good, speeding away in my Simca 1100; a miracle in itself, since the words ‘speeding’ and ‘Simca 1100’ didn’t usually occur in the same sentence.

  ‘Stop running, Debbie!’ the Head screamed at a late-comer, forcing me to return to the present. A scruffy, bearded man sauntered through the main door, hair ruffled, wearing a baggy woollen jumper and muddy corduroy trousers. ‘Morning, chaps,’ he said, before shuffling down the corridor, walking against the flow of pupils funnelling into the hall.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, thinking it was perhaps the groundsman – someone less likely to be on message with the Head’s high standard of dress code and behaviour.

  ‘Oh, that’s Fraser,’ the Head replied. ‘He’s a geography teacher and Head of Humanities, we’ll catch up with him later.’ The flow of pupils subsided to a trickle and we walked into the hall.

  ‘Please stand!’ the Head boomed. You could hear a pin drop as we marched down the central aisle, the eyes of 350 teenagers staring to the front. As the Head and I mounted the stage, I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach; not the odd flutter, but as if the whole of the Natural History Museum’s Butterfly House had been re-sited in my lower abdomen. I had been doing this sort of thing for fifteen years, but every time, without fail, I found taking an assembly in a secondary school a near-death experience.

  The Head briefly introduced me and then I was on, face-forward, with 700 teenage eyes boring into me.

  ‘Good morning,’ I squawked in a voice an oct
ave above its normal pitch. ‘I know you’ve probably never done this before, but I’ve brought along a banana and I want you to insult it.’

  I took a banana out of my case and held it up high, noticing out of the corner of my eye that the Head was giving me a pitying look. I decided to bring him on board, so got him to hold up the banana whilst I continued. ‘I realize you might be a bit shy, or not able to come up with the right words, so I’ve brought a few suggestions and I want you to shout them out,’ I explained. One by one I fished a series of cards out of my case, on which I’d felt-tipped things like ‘You’re yellow’, ‘You’re spotty’ and ‘You’re bent’. The tightly disciplined pupils took a fair bit of encouragement before they yelled them out, but they got there eventually.

  The original idea for this assembly wasn’t mine – I’d heard second-hand how an elderly woman priest had tried it at a secondary school in a rough part of Middlesbrough. When she’d invited the unruly mob before her to fling insults at the banana she quiveringly held in front of her, oblivious to the phallic symbolism, she’d got considerably more than she bargained for. I’d honed the assembly, warding off the four-letter expletives that had assailed her by inscribing insults on cards beforehand.

  I carefully examined the banana, which the Head was still holding. ‘Well, you’ve hurled all those insults at it, but it doesn’t seem to have affected it much. Mr Jenkinson, would you like to peel it, just to check?’

  By this time Mr Jenkinson was getting jumpy about being my stooge, so decided to take a different tack.

  ‘I think it would be a good idea to be a bit more interactive, so let’s get a volunteer from Year Eleven. Anyone like to help the Vicar?’ he asked, peering at the audience. No one so much as blinked, let alone moved. ‘Tracy,’ the Head called to a blonde-haired girl skulking on the back row, ‘come up here and help the Vicar!’

  A sixteen-year-old girl sauntered down the aisle, her hips swaying. ‘Tuck that blouse in!’ the Head roared as she climbed the steps onto the stage. I felt sorry for the girl, forced to adjust her dress before 349 pairs of staring adolescent eyes. ‘Tracy, peel this banana to check it’s OK,’ the Head commanded, taking over my lines.

  He realized his mistake as soon as he handed over the banana. Tracy, none too pleased at being hauled out of her seat and doubly miffed at having to adjust her blouse, decided to wreak her revenge. Giving a dark smile, and flashing her eyelids demurely, she held the banana firmly in her left hand and with her right hand slowly and tantalizingly drew the skin down, a millimetre at a time. Several Year 11 boys on the back row – and quite a few Year 10, Year 9 and even Year 8 boys – looked highly flushed and stared blankly ahead, or closed their eyes, or suddenly started studying their footwear. Her staged performance somewhat stole my show, because when she finally peeled the thing, half of the audience were oblivious to the big reveal: rather than staying intact, the inside of the banana all fell out onto the floor, in pre-cut slices.

  ‘Did you see that,’ I shouted, all too aware that by this stage half the audience weren’t seeing anything, ‘After all our insults, the banana looked fine on the outside, but inside it was all cut up. Next time you insult someone, remember that. They might look fine outside, but inside they are all cut up.’

  Despite the unexpected turn, my assembly had been short and sweet.

  The Head then waffled on about the results of a rugby match with some neighbouring school, followed by his deputy confusing us all about which bus to catch where in order to get home. We marched out and stood by the hall door. A young woman teacher gave me a broad smile, ‘You’re different, not like all the other clerics we’ve had in, who’ve bored us stiff!’ she said with typical Yorkshire directness, oblivious to the Head’s eyes boring into her. ‘Tell me, how did you do it?’

  I took her aside and whispered my secret to her, ‘I got a needle, pierced the skin at several different points and then moved the needle around to slice through the inside. It’s a bit like keyhole surgery.’

  ‘Brilliant, utterly brilliant,’ she laughed. ‘But thank God you didn’t get Tracy to do the piercing – we’d have had to carry out several lads on a stretcher!’

  Whilst the Head continued his survey of errant ties and shirt tails, I moved over to the reception desk and chatted to the secretary. I’d noticed her before the assembly, and the motherly way she had been dealing with all the children who had wandered over – returning their lost property, lending them a tie because, when rushing to get dressed at some unearthly hour, they had absent-mindedly forgotten to put one on. I recalled the school secretaries from my youth, who would have put the fear of God into God, and simply thanked her for not being like them.

  ‘You’ve obviously got a mother’s touch,’ I said. ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Just one boy,’ she replied, her eyes filling with tears.

  I realized I’d put my foot in it as she told me how her other son had suddenly died just after Christmas – massive heart-failure whilst playing football. We were separated by a glass screen and the whole school was parading just a few feet away from us; not the best conditions for a highly sensitive pastoral encounter. I simply said how very sorry I was for her, let her tell me about her son – an old boy of the school – and his final, fatal day on 28 December. It was a terrible, terrible loss at any time of the year, let alone at Christmas.

  The secretary’s grief reminded me of sharp losses in my own life and ministry. Rachel and I had been married for just over a year when she fell pregnant. We were both so thrilled that we shouted the news from the roof tops, and our family and the whole parish rejoiced with us. Rachel’s father, stepmother and two brothers were coming to stay with us for Christmas, with Miss Dobson, now retired, joining us on Christmas Day to keep us all in order. With Rachel blooming in the first trimester of pregnancy, it was set to be the most joyous of times.

  Then, just before Christmas, twelve weeks in, she had a miscarriage. It happens a lot at that stage, apparently, with one in four pregnancies miscarrying in the first three months. We didn’t know that then, and whenever life turns to death it still hurts, whether it happens to billions or just dozens. Thirty years on, the images are still sharp. Waiting for the ambulance, Rachel so brave, blood everywhere, her school’s deputy head ringing up to ask if she had a lesson plan for the day. Then, before she was rushed into theatre, praying with her the loveliest prayer from the Book of Common Prayer:

  Unto God’s gracious mercy and protection we commit thee. The Lord bless thee, and keep thee.

  The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee.

  The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace, both now and evermore. Amen.

  In any situation, I can never pray that prayer without tears coming into my eyes. Miss Dobson had joined us in the hospital, just to keep us steady, as well as regimenting all the staff, who clearly didn’t meet her highest of standards. Rachel came home the next day. Though I felt utterly useless, I put vases of her favourite freesias in every room.

  It was to prove the strangest Christmas, celebrating the ultimate birth when we no longer had a birth to look forward to. A few people called around; most didn’t. Most of the clergy who called were hopeless; of the ‘better luck next time’ school. My elderly Lay Reader brought a lovely bunch of flowers, but was hardly able to say anything, his eyes full of tears. A very tough lad in the top class at primary school, who invariably talked to me after I’d taken an assembly and who had started coming to church, stood on our doorstep hopping from one leg to the other, with a bunch of carnations in his hand. ‘My mum sent these for your wife, and hopes she soon gets over her troubles,’ he managed to blurt out, before making a hasty retreat. He was called Peter Kermode, but not a single pupil or teacher ever once mocked his surname, because he was such a toughie.

  Sometimes, though, the Lord gives rather than takes away. Our GP in Monk Fryston once tipped me off about an expectant mother who lived near the church,
who was very ill with pneumonia. Because of her pregnancy, he couldn’t prescribe the strong antibiotics necessary, so he had to let the illness take its course, fearing that both mother and child wouldn’t survive the night. I called around just before 11 p.m. The door to the house wasn’t locked, so I walked in, and was accosted by an au pair who had little English. I guess she originated from a Catholic country, because when she saw my dog collar her eyes lit up. ‘You want my mistress? I will take you to her.’

  She led me up the stairs and there, in a large and draughty bedroom, lay her mistress, sweating profusely despite the cold night, writhing in her bed, rambling and delirious. I simply sat by the bedside, held on to her hand whilst she tossed and turned, and prayed for her and her unborn child. Realizing there was little else I could do, I stayed for a few minutes longer and left. I bumped into the GP the next day. ‘The fever broke early this morning, she’ll be fine,’ he told me, smiling from ear to ear.

  I suddenly came to, realizing I had shared too long a silence with the grieving secretary. ‘Did you know your son died on Holy Innocents’ Day?’ I blurted out, as if she was an expert on the intricacies of the Church calendar. I was clutching at straws, desperate to say something, when actually my sympathetic silence had been more appropriate.

  ‘No, I didn’t know that,’ the secretary softly replied. ‘What’s special about the day?’

  ‘It’s when we remember all the innocent children Herod massacred when he tried to do away with Jesus. I always celebrate Communion on that day, so will always remember your son from now on.’

  It was well-meant, but I am aware I always come out with such trivia in the face of utter grief – when you can do nothing to bring back the love of someone’s life. God bless her: she smiled and looked grateful. And I suddenly realized she wasn’t wasting the love she could no longer give her son, or letting it eat her away; she was pouring it out here, soothing kids that missed Mum.