Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  This Friday was the church’s Gift Day, and it was customary for the vicar to hover all day by the lychgate and receive everyone’s gifts in support of the work of the church. The lychgate proved a handy umbrella or sunshade to offset too much rain or shine, but afforded little protection against the equinoxal gales which whistled down the high street on this particular morning. The custom of having a Gift Day wasn’t unique to Helmsley; the Church of England, through its parish system, is there for everyone 24/7, irrespective of their faith. A Gift Day gives the parishioners a chance to say a little or a big tangible thank-you, and really helps with keeping the church roof on and paying for the colossal heating bills. I had written to over 1500 homes to introduce myself and invite people to bring their gift and have a chat.

  Friday was always market day in Helmsley. Traders had set off by night from far-flung corners of Yorkshire and had parked their vans and trucks by the lychgate, flanking me with a wall of metal. I felt under siege, invisible to the very passers-by I wanted to notice me. So I despatched Alan, my gentle churchwarden who had helped me to set up, to find the offending stallholders and persuade them to move their trucks on. They were not best pleased about this to say the least, and I was treated to some surly looks and choice language as I began my stint. ‘Bloody vicars!’ one said, as he climbed into his cab, only to reverse into the van behind with a sickening crunch. A more fundamentalist cleric might have seen it as divine justice.

  They weren’t all surly. The man who ran the flower and plant stall stayed to chat when he came to move his lorry. His was clearly cold work, as he wore woollen mittens on his fingers, a balaclava on his head and a thick woollen cardigan over another thick woollen cardigan; dress more suitable for the trenches on the Western Front rather than autumnal Helmsley. He worked the longest of days, getting up while it was yet night at 4 a.m. to carefully pack his lorry with the latest blooms from his nursery at Flamborough Head before driving fifty miles over the top of the Yorkshire Wolds. Yet rather than having a weary air, he was immensely cheery. His description of his journey was lyrical; the sun rising behind him over the North Sea, highlighting the contours of the rolling chalk hills with their patchwork quilt of fields and forests. He had passed through village after waking village, the red-bricked houses clustered around their ancient stone church, their fires freshly lit for the day, aromatic wood-smoke spiralling up from each chimney. He left me with a bunch of yellow freesias for my good lady, and £5 towards church funds – my first donation of the day.

  Father Bert rolled up, puffing at his pipe, and stood to attention by my side; a cross between a sentry and Santa’s little helper. He lined people up along the pavement to have their allotted time with me, then gave me a whispered commentary about them after they had departed, which the waiting queue eagerly strained to overhear. Choice comments such as ‘Did he only give you a pound? Mean so-and-so, he owns three farms and has a fleet of Range Rovers!’ and ‘She’d talk the hind legs off a donkey, that one – make sure you’ve got nothing on for the rest of the day when you visit her home!’

  Mind you, they all talked. Life after life was unfolded before me as they handed over their donation. Committed to the lychgate for the day, I was a bit of a captive audience – I could hardly make my excuses and rush off to my next appointment. I have to admit my mind wandered more than once when they were telling me about Auntie Doris’ second cousin’s stepson’s sister. Had it been put to the test, my recall for the numerous genealogies that were unfolded before me that day might not be up to University Challenge standards. Father Bert gave me a useful summary.

  ‘David, everybody in these parts is related to everyone else,’ he said. ‘But just because they’re related doesn’t mean they get on – most of the time they’re at daggers drawn. Until, that is, you insult one of their relations, then they’ll launch themselves at you like a bitch deprived of one of her pups.’

  Minnie in particular stuck in my mind, because of the distinct and rooted life story which she shared with me that day. I saw her coming a long way off; her approach painful, step by step, Zimmer-frame inching before her. When she eventually reached me, she plonked herself down on the stone steps by the gate, clearly here for the duration as she let the tape run, regaling me with details of her school days and adult life. The youngest and brightest of fourteen children, she’d gained a scholarship to Lady Lumley’s Grammar School in Pickering, travelling along the picturesque line that I’d battled with a couple of days before.

  ‘The school train was known as “the monkey train” because of all the tricks we got up to,’ Minnie the Minx informed me, with a glint in her eye. ‘It would be a rare trip when someone’s school cap or boater wasn’t thrown out of t’ window – their dad would have to drive them back on his tractor and tramp the muddy fields to find it. I’d once cooked a gooseberry fool in the home economics lesson and was bringing it home on the train. Because it looked right yucky, another girl threw it out of the window and it shot down the whole length of the moving train, smearing every window. People thought it was sick!’

  There were separate compartments for boys and girls, strictly enforced by the guards, with budding Romeos risking decapitation to lean out of the window and shout sweet nothings at their Juliets in the adjacent carriage.

  ‘Ee, one lad wasn’t backwards about coming forwards when it came to that kind of thing, so me and my three friends stole into his carriage when the train was stopped at Sinning-ton. We held him down, tied him to the luggage rack and then left him there when we got off at Helmsley. The carriage was shunted into the sidings at Ampleforth, and a cleaner found him later that night; Mr Casanova had cooled down somewhat by then!’

  Minnie was so taken with the railway that on leaving school she became a Goods Clerk at Helmsley station, before she was quickly promoted to Goods and Passenger Clerk at nearby Nawton.

  ‘It was only a railway in the back of beyond, but it employed a heck of a lot of people. There were men walking t’ line every day to check for wear and tear, wheel-tappers to check the bogies, signalmen, level-crossing men . . . Then there were goods galore for us girls to weigh and charge before we could release them. The station yard was full of carts, and their massive cart-horses, champing at the bit, waiting to take the stuff to local shops or farms. They were twice as high as me and more – I was absolutely terrified of them.’

  Minnie’s hard work had been intensified by the war. ‘When all the lads at RAF Wombleton had been demobbed at a stroke, me and my friend had to issue them all with the appropriate railway ticket – the total cost was £2000. That was a fantastic sum when not many fares were much over half a crown. By the end of that day we were proper done in, but when we balanced up we were only sixpence out – the brute of a stationmaster still kept us back until we’d found it.’

  Minnie told me how even her back-of-beyond railway had its fair share of tragedy. ‘There was a summer excursion coming back from Scarborough, packed to the rafters, and a stray Messerschmitt strafed it. All the passengers threw themselves onto the carriage floor, and thought they’d been spared. But when they stopped in Helmsley, no guard got out to wave the train on; they found him lying dead in his guard’s van, riddled with bullets, blood everywhere.’

  Minnie had had a near miss herself during the war whilst travelling on the train to York for her day release class. The night before, a German bomb had dropped in between the sleepers on an embankment and blown the earth beneath the line away. So when Minnie’s early-bird train passed over it, the rails snapped and sent it hurtling down the bankside.

  ‘Ee, Vicar, the wagon next to ours was smashed to smithereens, but we crawled out of t’ wreckage and walked the line back to Coxwold, then made our way to York via the East Coast Main Line. Keep calm and carry on was the order of the day!’

  With that she rose painfully to her feet, pressed a ten-pound note into my hand and made a departure as slow and stately as the steam engines whose life she’d ordered.

  Whilst
Minnie had been chattering on, Father Bert had dealt with the ever-lengthening queue of folk; taking their donations and listening sympathetically for a couple of minutes before dismissing them with his, ‘Youse can see our Vicar’s a bit busy now. Youse better get back to the market before the fish stall runs out.’

  Once Minnie had departed, Father Bert filled me in with further details. ‘She’s a grand lass to be sure, coping with all that stuff that the war threw at her. Mind you, she’d been well trained for war by having to deal with the Ampleforth College train.’

  ‘What was that then?’ I asked. I knew that Ampleforth College, a prestigious public school, was just over the hill from Helmlsey, and that it was run by the Benedictine monks at Ampleforth Abbey, but I’d never heard about a train.

  ‘Oh, it was a special from King’s Cross that ran at the beginning and end of term, bringing all the posh pupils from down south and picking up lads from Donnie, Selby and York en route. It never appeared on any timetable, but it took a heck of a lot of organization. It had a goods van at the back packed with the boys’ trunks, which was shunted down a track that led right down into the abbey for the college porters to unload. The line to the abbey wasn’t much more than a tramway, really. When the school needed a second cricket pitch, the monks themselves, helped by a few prefects, re-laid the track, shifting it a couple of hundred yards. It certainly wasn’t safe enough for human traffic, so the boys got off at Gilling and marched up to the school – it was a crocodile to behold, believe you me.’

  There were a lot of images there to take in. The one that gnawed at my mind most was the King’s Cross Express gingerly inching its way around the Second XI cricket field, hoping against hope that the monks had tightened all the bolts and hadn’t been distracted by vespers. ‘So how was Minnie involved – I thought she worked at Nawton station?’ I asked, forcing myself back to some sort of reality.

  ‘I think they commandeered the staff from all the nearby stations, just to control things. God knows how many adolescent boys had been cooped up together for over five hours in cramped carriages, so getting them off the train onto the short platforms and through a small country station was quite a challenge. Several monks travelled on the train and acted as honorary guards to help keep order, but even then you needed nerves of steel to sort it all out. The war was nothing compared to that.’

  Over the summer our daughter Ruth had been reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling, a first-time author, which had been published in June. Ruth’s eyes had been as wide as saucers as she read about the Hogwarts Express, staffed by wizards, leaving Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross. As Father Bert regaled me with tales of the Ampleforth special, I began to wonder if this was where J. K. Rowling had got the idea from. As he was talking, Father Bert frequently checked his watch, as if he were an honorary guard waiting to see off a train.

  ‘If you can cope without me for an hour or so, I’d better be on my way,’ he declared. ‘Margaret will be expecting me for my lunch. If there’s any to spare, I’ll get her to plate something up and bring it back for you.’

  So off he toddled to catch the Helmsley–Old Byland special, complete with a turn-around stop at a dining car par excellence.

  Chapter Sixteen

  No sooner had Father Bert departed than Lord Feversham roared up in his Range Rover, hobbled out and pressed four crisp twenty-pound notes into my hand. He winced as he sat down on the steps ‘My gammy leg’s giving me gyp again!’ Then he assumed the role of showman.

  ‘Roll up, here’s your chance, vicar in the stocks, one day only, throw what you like at him!’ he chuckled. ‘Have you had any difficult customers?’ he asked sotto voce. ‘Anybody you want me to sort out?’ His eyes narrowed, giving him that mean Henry Tudor look that had sent shivers down my spine back in May. I guess he’d be a handy guy to know if I wanted anyone hung, drawn and quartered.

  ‘No, they’ve all been quite sweet,’ I replied. ‘The stall holders from the market weren’t best pleased, having to move the vans they’d parked in front of me, but that’s about all.’

  ‘We didn’t have all that coming and going when I was a lad, it was a very local affair,’ Lord Feversham recalled, peering over towards the market square with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘The Friday market consisted of delicious produce grown in our walled garden or by our tenants in their little cottage gardens, along with a wild venison stall.’ He paused as he smacked his lips. ‘The deer were originally farmed, but the soldiers billeted at Duncombe Park during the war had broken through the deer park fences with their tank manoeuvres – careless buggers – and the roe deer have roamed wild ever since.’

  Lord Feversham told me with relish how the stallholder operated a strict pecking order as to who could buy his venison. Lord Feversham, his household and his estate workers had first pick, then Helmsley’s other inhabitants, then anyone else who’d made the long journey from high over the moors – incomers from Bilsdale or Bransdale or Fadmoor who were rewarded with the gristliest cuts for their trouble. ‘No more than they deserved!’ Lord Feversham chuckled. ‘But I’m glad no one has had a pop at you, Had you been Vicar Gray, mind you, you wouldn’t have had such an easy time!’

  My ears pricked up. Quite a few people I’d encountered in my first weeks had described my indefatigable Victorian predecessor in reverential tones. Back in May, Lord Feversham had mentioned this veritable saint during my interview for the post, describing how he had built churches galore in local hamlets, including East Moors, Carlton, Sproxton, Rievaulx and Pockley. He’d then organized a posse of clergy to take seventeen services each Sunday, with one having to ride up to East Moors on Saturday night. Gray was no respecter of bad weather: one cleric had been nearly sucked into a bog when his horse had sunk up to his girths; another had got lost above Rievaulx in a snow storm and lost two toes to frostbite; a third had had to be rescued from a flooded River Rye at 1.30 a.m.

  He was no respecter of authority either. He’d installed a black marble altar in Helmsley Church in memory of his father, who’d been a fiercely orthodox Bishop of Cape Town. The Archdeacon of Cleveland, who was in charge of church fixtures and fittings, objected to the installation, but drew this curt response from Gray: ‘I spent six yoke of oxen ferrying the stone from Helmsley station. If you wish to remove it, you can provide the oxen.’ The good archdeacon wisely decided to let sleeping dogs, and more importantly sleeping oxen, lie.

  Gray was a social reformer too, railing against the demon drink, founding a temperance society, night classes, a library and a debating society (where women were to remain silent). When we moved into Canons Garth the girls helped me clear towers of dusty magazines from my study. Clare knocked over one tower, taller than her, and as we gathered up the scattered magazines, I came across a few ancient copies of Gray’s parish magazine from the 1870s and 1880s, with some handy if confusing hints for rearing potatoes, poultry and children, including the insistence that ‘tea, beer, whiskey and other stimulants should never be given’. Obviously Helmsley’s chickens were something else until Gray took them in hand! In another magazine, Gray, a celibate bachelor, warned women against the perils of lacing up their corsetry too tightly and offered this touching encouragement for the hard-pressed housewife: ‘No house need to be dirty: soap and hot water with a little hard work can do wonders. A woman is worth nothing if she cannot keep her house clean.’

  He fought for time off for apprentices and better conditions for workhouse children, made his clergy walk the muddy furrows beside ploughboys to give them their confirmation lessons, improved the post office and built an open air swimming pool, ran a soup kitchen when unemployment hit the town hard in 1886, and dispensed an endless supply of beef tea from his vicarage for those laid low with influenza.

  ‘I thought Gray had had forty-three golden years,’ I said to Lord Feversham, feeling exhausted just thinking about all this hyperactivity.

  ‘Far from it. Forty-three years at war, more like. That chap could ha
ve picked a fight in an empty room. The first thing he did when he arrived in 1870 was to ostracize single mothers – something like one in six births was illegitimate in those days. The mother of one of the poor girls threatened to pour a bucket of boiling water over his head if he dared to show his face on market day. As I said, the Friday market is not a patch on what it used to be! Apparently he used to fight local pugilists with one hand tied behind his back; mind you, he’d only take them on when they had drunk their fill and were worse for wear, just to show the benefits that being a teetotaller in tip-top condition brings.’

  Lord Feversham was in his stride now. ‘He took against my great-great-great uncle, the first earl. Always on at him about the state of the town drains, how unhealthy it was to drink from the same beck you did your washing in – as if a bit o’ dirt ever harmed anyone. Accused him of single-handedly causing a typhoid epidemic, killing four people a year, would you believe! The old earl was no stick-in-the-mud. He was ahead of his time, very ecumenical. Gave the monks at Ampleforth land in Helmsley to build their chapel on. Gray was furious, accusing him of selling the Established Church down the river for the sake of a few votes.’

  ‘But surely Gray wasn’t all bad – what about the children’s pageants in the castle he organized in the 1890s, watched by thousands? They had to lay on special trains from York.’ Earlier, Minnie had gone on about those excursions, part of the local railway folklore.

  ‘What, you mean when he got all the local urchins to sing the ‘Magnificat’ in Latin and all that bollocks? Fat lot of good the ‘Magnificat’ in Latin would do you when you ended up black-leading a fireplace, cleansing a cow or felling a tree. Just brainwashing, if you ask me. And Gray could be a brute with children. One little lad failed to doff his cap to him as Gray passed him on horseback – Gray horsewhipped him all the way home, and then insisted his father give him a good beating too. So don’t you ever feel inferior to the likes of Gray. You modern clergy may be a bit wet, but at least you’re kind.’ He raised himself up from the steps and shuffled over to his Range Rover.