The card Rachel had received from Pessy that morning hadn’t just prompted memories of chocolate cake recipes, but also contained an intriguing postscript to her Exodus story, a flashback clearly prompted by our own, albeit more modest, exodus from Bishopthorpe to Helmsley. Pessy had written paragraph upon paragraph in her tiny, spidery handwriting, absent-mindedly peppered with the odd Hebrew letter. Still savouring Pessy’s chocolate cake, I read how, in the early 1970s, she and her family had holidayed in the Scottish Highlands, where they caught a tiny ferry across to Iona. The particular smell of the diesel fuel triggered sharp memories from Pessy’s childhood, and she asked the fresh-faced young captain if the boat had ever been further afield than the waters around Mull.
‘Aye, but only once, long before my time. In 1940 it crisscrossed the English Channel to bring our lads back from Dunkirk,’ he answered.
He showed Pessy a plaque beneath the mast, simply stating that the boat had seen valiant service at Dunkirk and, along with a flotilla of boats of all shapes and sizes, had plucked the British Expeditionary Force from certain death.
‘Any of that original crew still around?’ Pessy asked.
‘Just Paddy in the engine room,’ the captain replied. Pessy ventured down below and recognized a shortish man, whose skin was deeply tanned, his eyes bright blue, his hair no longer blond but white. She spontaneously threw her arms around him, profusely thanking the man who’d saved her and her family and numerous others. Not surprisingly, given all the people they’d rescued, he only had a vague memory of Pessy.
‘I spent most of the time down below, nursing the engine,’ he’d explained. ‘I just went up on deck once at Dunkirk, our very last trip. The German army were closing in and all hell was let loose. I peered through a pair of binoculars at the Nazis on the shore. I cannae forget the look of utter black fury on their faces because we were thwarting them. Just as well that I hadn’t seen that look before we embarked, or I’d have never set sail.’
I put down the letter in awe. ‘And if he’d never set sail, you’d never have got the recipe for that wonderful chocolate cake! Do you think I could have another piece?’ I asked, cheekily holding out my plate for more.
Rachel ruffled my hair, ‘Trust you to reduce the epic of a lifetime to a piece of chocolate cake,’ she laughed.
Chapter Fourteen
The sun was low in the sky as I walked down Castlegate, the beck which bisects Helmsley bubbling by my side. It was a beautiful autumn evening, the air very crisp, and the town seemed very still now that the numerous day-trippers had deserted her. I stopped by a terraced stone-built house, whose front door opened straight onto the pavement, and I was suddenly transported back thirty years to my first visit to Helmsley when we came organ-hunting. This house was a few doors down from our organ seller’s, but the line of cottages, originally built by Lord Feversham in the nineteenth century to house his estate workers, all had a very similar look to them. In fact, if it wasn’t for the different coloured front doors, I thought, they’d be indistinguishable.
That took me back to my Middlesbrough days, when my boss was making an urgent call by night to minister to a dying man who lived on an estate of very similar-looking bungalows. My boss, bearing a passing resemblance to Darth Vader in his black cassock and cloak, perfunctorily knocked on the back door. He then breezed straight in, as was his habit, only to surprise a young woman in a revealing negligee who had popped into her kitchen for a glass of water and got more than she bargained for. She screamed loudly. ‘Sorry, luv, wrong house,’ my boss shouted, as he made a hasty retreat.
You live and learn. As a parish priest I tried to visit at least twenty homes a week, but I always knocked on the door and waited respectfully on the step. Over time, as you hop up and down before front door after front door with neighbours’ curtains twitching, you develop an intuition for whether someone is at home or not; telltale signs, stealthy footsteps and creaks often reveal that someone is in but avoiding you. There’s a French proverb, ‘God called but you were out!’, which I often reflect on when people play evasion games. In Middlesbrough there was a woman I used to visit regularly, who was in the final stages of MS. There was a sign beneath her doorbell that read PLEASE RING AND BE PATIENT. She was a lovely soul who was at ease with herself, despite her failing body; definitely worth waiting for.
No need for patience on Castlegate. As soon as I knocked on the door, there was a loud barking, sounds of a scuffle and shouts of ‘Down, Gus!’ The door was opened by Joan, a smartly dressed lady in her seventies, sporting a crisply pleated skirt and a high-necked, starched cream blouse, with perfectly coiffured white hair. I only had a glimpse of her before she lurched to the right and disappeared inside the house.
I followed her in and realized she was trying to restrain a boisterous boxer dog, who singularly refused to be controlled as it dragged her around the room. ‘Heel, Gus, heel,’ Joan shrieked, tugging at his lead to no avail, as the dog pulled her through into the kitchen, leaving a sulphurous odour in his wake. Stooping to avoid banging my head on the low beams, I followed Joan, who was trying to tie the dog to a thick stainless steel rail which bordered the hob of a shiny red Aga. After several failed attempts, she finally found a slip knot which did the trick.
‘Alan’s just in the garden, I’ll go and fetch him,’ Joan said, leaving me at Gus’s mercy. Fortunately, the leather lead was thick and strong and the Aga firmly fixed, so I was safe. Even so, there was a look in Gus’s eye and I made a mental note that if I was ever walking down Castlegate and saw a huge boxer bounding towards me, with an Aga bouncing behind him, then I should run for my life.
For the rest of my visit Gus tugged violently at the leash and panted more and more because of the unbearable heat of the oven, despite noisily lapping up the multiple bowls of water that Joan supplied him with. Alan came in from the garden and washed the earth off his hands in the kitchen sink, with Joan bustling around him. He was the churchwarden who had visited us on our first day, eventually leaving us with one of his prize cauliflowers as a welcome, if rather strange, house-warming present. A retired GP, as churchwarden he fulfilled an ancient office which made sure the church building and its life, worship and ministry were ordered decently. Churchwardens are canny folk, and as well as keeping the vicar up to speed with all the local gossip, they try to save the parish from the vicar’s good and not-so-good intentions.
‘Just wait a minute, Alan, let me move the bowl of washing-up out of the way, we don’t want soil getting into the pots.’
‘Stop fussing, woman,’ Alan snapped. Though wearing his gardening clothes – an old shirt and a pair of worn corduroy trousers – Alan was as smart as his wife. His bearing was erect, his full head of grey curly hair immaculately groomed, his eyes steel blue, with his rimless spectacles perched on the end of his nose giving him a studious look.
There was a pot of beef shin bubbling on the hob. The smell was absolutely delicious, and between bowls of water Gus perched his front paws on the rail and tried to reach the pot. He shot back and howled as the red-hot hob scorched his nose, reverting to pulling at his lead once more. ‘Ee, you’re a comical dog, Gus,’ Alan laughed.
The kitchen, like the front room I had briefly passed through, was cluttered with Mouseman furniture; English oak crafted with medieval tools in Mousey Thompson’s workshops at nearby Kilburn, a trademark tiny mouse carved on every piece. Despite being contemporary in one sense, in that it had all been made in Joan and Alan’s lifetime, every piece of furniture looked as if it had been carved in Tudor times. Alan pulled out one of the stout chairs arrayed around the equally stout table and invited me to sit down. Alan and Joan sat on two arm chairs on either side of the Aga, with Joan gazing at me intently throughout, fluttering her eyelids demurely. I looked down, shy as ever, ostensibly examining the table top. Actually it was quite interesting, not flat at all, but undulating, with ridges and furrows of oak. Mousey Thompson never used a plane but an adze, a medieval chisel, which gave any to
p this effect.
I had called around to get to know them a bit better, and didn’t have to do much prompting before their story poured out; Alan did the talking and hardly paused to take a breath. In his time he had clearly been the GP of which dreams are made, running his surgery from their home in the centre of Leicester along with Joan, who was a practice sister and midwife, and furnishing it with the same Mousey Thompson oak, transported by open truck in all weathers from Kilburn. He had trained at Leeds University and the General Infirmary, a student doctor in the casualty department, yet the rush and tumble of the longest hours and the hardest work never blunted his compassion. Though he seemed somewhat reticent about sharing his experiences (that is to say he paused in his monologue for about two seconds) he recalled a mining accident, all-too common in the 1940s. The injured miner’s colleagues, faces and hands jet-black with coal, carefully carried in their twisted brother, handling him with more tenderness than any nurse or orderly.
‘I can still hear their quiet whispered voices; voices of direction and of reassurance for their wounded friend,’ he said.
Alan told me his habit as a GP had been to do home visits at 7 a.m. before his surgery – ‘If they needed me, they welcomed me, whatever the time.’ He was clearly shocked that sometimes people cared less than he expected them to.
‘Do you know,’ Alan recalled, ‘one Christmas Day I had had a busy morning doing house calls, and had just returned home and was making a start on our Christmas dinner when the phone rang. It was a patient from another practice, but they didn’t want to disturb their own doctor, who was a grumpy old so-and-so. They didn’t seem to worry about disturbing me! But they were concerned about their baby, and wanted me to call around straight away. I rushed over, only to find them tucking into their Christmas dinner, with not a poorly baby to be seen. “Our Lee’s in his cot in the bedroom at the top of the landing,” the father informed me, nodding in the direction of the stairs. “He’s snuffling a fair bit.” Then he went back to cutting himself a thick slice of turkey breast and putting it on his already piled-up plate.’
Alan shook his head as he told me how neither the man nor his wife went up with him to the little lad’s room: ‘I found Lee lying on his back in his cot. He was snuffling, but he soon stopped when I picked him up. I took his temperature and did all the other checks, but it was just a cold. His nappy hadn’t been changed for hours, so, holding him at arm’s length, I carried him downstairs and plonked him in his father’s lap. The father looked none too pleased – by then he was savouring a huge portion of Christmas pud. “This is very serious indeed,” I said, putting on my sternest face. “It’s not a doctor this child needs, he needs you two to get off your backsides and take turns to cuddle him. If you leave him in his cot, the cold will go to his lungs and we’ll be looking at a case of double pneumonia before we know it. And for goodness’ sake, change his nappy, and make sure it’s changed at least every two hours. I’ll give your own doctor a ring and ask him to call around tomorrow to check you’ve been doing what I told you.”
‘Then Lee’s mother chimed in, looking terrified. “Oh, there’s no need to trouble him,” she says, “if it’s just a cold.”
‘I looked her in the eye. “No, I’m duty-bound to pass on the details of my visit, and the remedy I’ve prescribed. Make sure you do it, otherwise you’ll have hell to pay on Boxing Day!” That fixed them!’
I told Alan how I’d been similarly called out one Sunday lunch by a baby’s mother, who insisted that her child needed baptizing without delay: ‘I thought the little one was at the point of death, so I cycled around straight away. The chubby baby was in its play pen, bouncing around, clearly in the rudest of health. “Why the rush?” I asked.
‘“Oh, she’s putting on weight ever so fast,” the mother explains. “Another week and she won’t be able to fit into her christening gown. It’s a family heirloom, and I won’t have her baptised in anything else.”’
Alan chuckled, ‘Ee, what people interrupt us for!’
We talked some more about local events and the news, particularly about Princess Diana’s recent funeral. I mentioned, when I managed to get a word in edgeways, that I admired the Queen for remaining composed throughout, despite the intense complexities. But Alan chuckled, and recalled the Queen’s visit to Selby Abbey to distribute the Royal Maundy in 1969 – the Abbey’s ninth centenary. Alan had been brought up in the area, and Her Majesty had arrived the evening before on the Royal Train, which had holed up for the night in the sidings at Barlow – Alan’s home village in the distinctly unglamorous region between Selby and Goole. When the Queen drew back the curtains of her royal carriage the next morning, she had been faced by scores of loyal villagers lining the tracks, who had twigged that the Royal Personage was in their midst and were eager for a glimpse of Her Majesty in her night attire. ‘Three cheers for Her Majesty,’ they had cried. Apparently Queen Elizabeth had given them the iciest of stares as she had wrapped her dressing gown around her, looking as if she would have preferred a more gentle and private awakening.
We laughed about Yorkshire folks’ very quaint and queer ways. ‘I would have thought you’d have been glad to escape to Leicestershire – they’re relatively normal there. What made you return?’ I asked.
‘Leicester was OK,’ Alan replied, ‘but away from Yorkshire I felt as if my very soul was slowly drying out. It’s like anaemic patients needing a top up of iron now and again; I needed a top up of Yorkshire. So whenever we could, we came for a few days’ break at the Black Swan. Helmsley is Yorkshire at its best; the hills, the straight-talking folk, the shops – they weren’t that fancy when we started coming here, but the stuff they sold was real.’
He recalled how in the 1950s their slumbers in their five-star hotel room had been disturbed by the milk churns being delivered at 4 a.m. by horse and cart. Alan clearly loved his food – simple Yorkshire cooking, with treacle sponge his favourite pudding: ‘None of that French muck these posh hotels insist on serving up these days.’
‘Mind you, we made an exception for Ted Dzierzek’s smoked garlic sausage,’ Joan interrupted. ‘It was absolutely scrummy. Have you met Ted?’ I admitted I had, and told them a bit of my encounter with him earlier that day.
Though Joan hardly took her eyes off me, Alan hardly took his eyes off her, and he clearly cherished his wife. They’d met when he was a trainee doctor and she a trainee midwife, and they had both been doused when a pregnant woman’s waters broke as they inspected her ‘down below’. After that joint baptism they’d formed a team for life, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. And in a GP’s life there’d been a heck of a lot of sickness, and a heck of a lot of health.
I realized they had had no children, which seemed more than a bit cruel, given how many babies they had brought into the world. I guess their patients served as their children, not to mention a succession of boxers, of which Gus was the latest lively incarnation. And though there was enough doctoring to fill a life, and compensate for their lack of children, there was clearly much, much more to Alan. Since retirement his medical skills had been transferred to nurturing the church as well as nurturing the soil. His allotment was of legendary quality. I had noticed this small strip of land squeezed between the castle and the church whenever we had visited Helmsley on our days off from Bishopthorpe. Usually there was a small crowd of tourists, who had ignored the castle and stopped to pay homage to Alan’s garden instead; the lines of onions and cabbages and cauliflowers, regimented in rows like perfect soldiers standing to attention. Alan told me how he often feigned deafness when he was working on it, otherwise he would have spent all his time being complimented and questioned about his produce.
During a brief interlude when Alan nipped to the loo, Joan told me how – on top of all her other duties – she had cared for Alan’s mother, who had suffered a severe stroke which had left her body badly twisted. Each and every night in their flat above the surgery she had tenderly wa
shed and dressed her. Then, until sleep overtook her, she had read to her from St Luke’s Gospel – her all-time favourite book. One Thursday in May 1973, as the old lady lay dying, a GP from another practice had visited and asked her if she knew the day of the week, just to check how compos mentis she was. ‘Why, it’s Ascension Day!’ the old lady chirped, putting the GP to shame, who had somehow overlooked the festival which is the crescendo of Luke’s Gospel. The legend is that Luke was a doctor before he took to Gospel-writing, although doctoring clearly never left him – Luke’s Jesus is like a tender, merciful GP; at it 24/7, always desiring his patient’s healing.
It was well after 9 p.m. by the time I left Alan and Joan’s and stepped out into the dark autumn night, having listened to their tales non-stop for over two hours. As I plodded my weary way home, I had the strangest feeling that St Luke was still alive and well, living in Castlegate smack in the middle of my new parish, having picked up the odd cauliflower and sulphurous, hyperactive boxer along the way.
Chapter Fifteen
On the last Friday in September I sat on the damp pavement opposite Claridge’s, begging, for eight long hours! I ought to explain it was Claridge’s of Helmsley that I had pitched outside; more modest than its counterpart in Mayfair, it’s just a rather lovely book and gift shop. Whenever you wandered in to find a gift for a birthday or anniversary, Ken Claridge, the owner, would hover over your shoulder, asking who you were buying for, what you had in mind, what your budget was, and then suggest a rare book or gift which you would never have dreamt of without his help; your own personal shopper. Over the years I was able to go in and ask, ‘What card did I buy my wife for her birthday last year?’ and he would remember and make sure I didn’t buy the same one again.
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