Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  Following the war, Jack had settled down in Helmsley and turned his hand to farming. For a while it seemed he had put the sea behind him, but Val had confided in me that as Jack had grown older, the sailor mannerisms, fuelled by all the tots of rum, had returned and were given an even greater emphasis than when he was actually serving in the Navy. He and Mary used to be the honorary caretakers of St Mary’s, the tiny Roman Catholic church adjacent to their little cottage which overlooked the beck as it flowed down from the moors into the northern tip of Helmsley. They kept the keys, letting in the young priests from nearby Ampleforth Abbey who came to say Mass. One priest, Basil Hume, used to come and have a cup of tea with them around the hearth afterwards.

  ‘He was a lovely fella,’ was Jack’s verdict. ‘Never too busy to have a chat, always loved my tales of the Hong Kong Typhoon.’

  Sadly, Mary had died the week before this latest visit, and I had written to Basil Hume – by then Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster – telling him how Jack and Mary mentioned him almost as much as the legendary Hong Kong Typhoon. The Cardinal replied by return in a hand-written letter, remembering the good old days and their kindness. I handed Jack that letter, and as he read it tears welled up in his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He then refolded it, carefully put it back in its envelope and propped it beside his fabled picture of the ship beached on the mountainside, the most hallowed spot in his home. ‘I always told you he was a lovely fella,’ Jack said.

  After Mary’s death, everyone had rallied around Jack. He was so very grateful to the girls at the Co-op – Jack had got them sussed to a tee. He had only to appear at the shop door and myriad assistants would run around fetching things off the shelves for him, suggesting a bargain, a tasty titbit. He was their Jack and they loved him.

  He seemed invincible. In 1946, when Jack the war hero was returning home to Helmsley, his car had careered off the road and flipped onto its roof. But Jack walked out unscathed. The man who had survived all the seven seas could throw at him wasn’t to be finished off by a traffic accident. But though he seemed unstoppable, Jack had certainly had his fair share of tragedy. From his ship, the HMS Echo, he saw his brother drowned with nearly 1500 other sailors when the HMS Hood was torpedoed. We talked about that yet again on my visit, with Jack having to dab the tears from his eyes.

  ‘It frightens me, Vicar, all this sabre rattling. We had it with Maggie in the Falklands and the Gulf, and now Blair’s making noises about intervening in the Balkans, of all places. Why don’t they ever learn, war only produces widows and orphans and broken hearts? I don’t want to see a single one of our brave lads die in yet another war.’

  Had Jack been Leader of the Opposition, then all wars would have been off.

  ‘I know you preach forgiveness, but I find it hard to forgive those who got us into that mess,’ he confided in me. ‘Not the German sailors, or soldiers or airmen, they were just obeying orders, like us, defending what they thought was right; their country, their families. Some of them were brutes, but so were some of our lads. But in the main they fought a fair scrap, albeit to the death. It’s the politicians I can’t forgive, signing young men’s lives away, signing innocent children’s lives away. I know Jesus said “Father, forgive them”, but I can’t, I bloody well can’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether he did forgive them, really,’ I admitted. ‘He asked God to forgive them rather than doing the forgiveness himself. Maybe sometimes we’ve simply got to hand over the job of forgiving when it proves too hard for us.’

  ‘Do you know, I’ve never thought of it like that,’ Jack replied, looking pensive. ‘Maybe I’ll just give it a go. But it’s so very hard, even half a century on.’ He went on to confide in me how, when they had saved just three sailors from the 1500, he had hoped against hope that one of them would be his brother. ‘Please, God, let it be Harry,’ he had prayed and prayed, hanging on a 1 in 500 chance. It was beginning to dawn on me why Jack had always refused his Communion; all his prayer was, sadly, to no avail.

  ‘One thousand, four hundred and ninety-seven died then, didn’t they? Such a terrible waste, Jack,’ I sympathized.

  ‘On thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight,’ Jack corrected me. ‘My brother Harold’s fiancée took her own life. She just couldn’t face living without him. It was just so tragic, Vicar.’

  Here he was: a jovial man surrounded by tragedy, losing his brother, and now his beloved Mary. And yet his cheeriness and the twinkle in his eye survived. Some people suffer very little loss, but have a miserable mindset. I recalled how, when I was a boy living in Aughton way back in 1966, my dad had once run the church garden party of which dreams are made. The sun shone, the stalls sold out and nobody fell out over the price of the cream teas. But as my weary but proud dad was clearing away that day, some miserable git came up to him and said, ‘That’s all very well, Vicar, but what would you have done if it had rained?’

  I’d been frustrated myself, during our Monk Fryston days, at one person who was always finding fault with our church. I had joked that at our next garden party we were going to have a most-miserable-person-in-Monk-Fryston competition. True to form, the most-miserable-person-in-Monk-Fryston had then promptly complained about having a most-miserable-person-in-Monk-Fryston competition, which somewhat proved my point. The tragedy was that this person had had very little to be miserable about that I could see, whereas Jack did, and yet there was still a tremendous sense of fun and joy there.

  I’d not heard about Harold’s fiancée’s untimely death until that night – perhaps the memory had been prompted by Jack having lost the love of his life. But immediately after telling me, Jack pressed a twenty-pound note into my hand for the collection, something he had done every single time I had visited his home.

  ‘That’s very generous of you, Jack,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Every little helps, as the old lady said when she weed into the sea!’ A very old joke, which sounded as funny as new when Jack told it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It’s Monday morning. The girls have all left after a flurry of Weetabix, hastily made packed lunches and last-minute packing of their school bags, with a fingertip search of Canons Garth for Ruth’s missing French homework. Rachel’s gone too, a last-minute call to cover for a history teacher who’s gone down with a strange bug – probably a phobia for teaching Year Nine Set Six, the educational equivalent of Alcatraz.

  I am alone, with only the house for company. The ancient beams creak and occasionally crack like gunfire. The radiators knock loudly, struggling to keep this ancient vicarage warm on this chill, windy November morning. Whatever the weather, there is always a ten-degree centigrade temperature gradient between Canons Garth and the outside; I guess that’s true for most homes, except that with ours the temperature rises as you go out. The tiny panes of the leaded windows rattle as a squall blows in from the east, a torrent of dirty water breaks through and gathers in a puddle on the narrow window sill, before running down the wall onto the threadbare carpet. The smell of damp is thick, gets into my clothes, gets into my books. Over the weekend one of the attic bedrooms which we’d decorated and designed as an art room for Hannah turned black with mould overnight. I put on a lint mask and cleaned the lethal stuff off the sloping ceilings and walls before repainting the whole. Sometimes it seems to me that I’ve spent a lifetime dealing with dank vicarages and their fifty shades of fungi.

  I looked at the blank computer screen in front of me. Every Monday morning without fail, for sixteen years in ministry, I have sat down at my desk to write next Sunday’s sermon. To begin with I had written them out longhand, and then progressed to a portable Imperial typewriter, manufactured in my dad’s former parish in Marfleet, Hull, then onto an Amstrad computer screen whose green type burned into your brain. When Ruth was little, she used to sit devotedly beside me at my desk whilst her mum was busy with all the Monday washing; I once left her in my study as I answered a phone call, only to find she
had inserted an unusual if entertaining line in next Sunday’s sermon about her favourite book, Spot the Dog.

  Every new sermon I tried to write took me back to the first time I preached when, at the tender age of just fifteen, I found myself having to deliver the sermon on Advent Sunday.

  There’s a joke about an elderly peer having a nightmare that he was making a speech in the House of Lords, only to wake up and find that he was. I knew how he felt, because speaking in public was a nightmare for me. I used to watch my dad preaching and think, Never ever in my wildest dreams could I do that. And there I was, on 29 November 1970, doing just that.

  I spent hours beforehand learning my sermon off by heart, and I remember it to this day.

  ‘Advent means coming in three ways,’ I boldly began. A couple of teenage girls in the youth club who were more worldly wise than me tittered; fortunately, I was a bit of an innocent and was blissfully unaware of any double entendre. Most church congregations have had some sort of Sixties bypass anyway, avoid kissing and hugging at all times, and demurely sing stuff like ‘Behold the bridegroom cries “I come!”’ and ‘Jesus, put your tongue inside my mouth, I can come no other way’, without realizing the innuendo.

  ‘Number one, Advent means Christ coming at the first Christmas at Bethlehem, when a baby’s cry pierced our dark night, broke history in two, and announced God was in town,’ I blurted out, as if nobody had ever thought of that before. But the congregation nodded encouragingly, as if the Nativity was a complete surprise to them, and they’d been wondering for ages why all the shops in Scarborough were strung with fairy lights and filled with plastic tat at this time of the year.

  ‘Number two, Advent means Christ coming into our lives now, repeatedly calling us, never giving up on us,’ I stammered.

  ‘Alleluia!’ one lad shouted out. He was a Methodist and prone to enthusiasm, and didn’t really fit in. Several members of the congregation glared at him. Apparently, when Methodism came into being in the eighteenth century, one new adherent kept punctuating a staid church service with countless alleluias. ‘Will the person who keeps shouting out “Alleluia!” kindly remember that this is the house of God,’ came the frosty rebuke from the celebrant.

  ‘Finally, Advent means Christ coming at our end, when we will stand alone before him and his dread throne, surprised to find it none other than a mercy seat. Amen,’ I concluded, nearly tumbling down the pulpit steps in relief that I had got through it all.

  As sermons go, it went, and went very quickly. In fact, for some of the more elderly members of the congregation, their bottoms had hardly touched down on the pews before they had to spring up for the next hymn, accompanied by my friend, Simon, on guitar. Phew! I thought. That’s over and done with, I’ll never ever have to do that again.

  Except I found myself doing it, Sunday after Sunday, writing every Monday after Monday for ever and ever, Amen.

  Actually, even though I’d managed to come up with a few ideas this morning, it was a miracle I was able to write any sermon at all. Just before we fell asleep last night, Rachel had told me about a conversation she had had earlier that day with an elderly lady in the church porch, immediately following the main Sunday service. It seemed the old lady didn’t twig that Rachel was my wife.

  ‘I don’t hold with that new vicar having all those girls in the sanctuary,’ she had complained. ‘It should be men and boys only around the altar.’

  ‘How did you respond?’ I asked. The girls concerned were our three daughters, who I’d conscripted to help with all the dance moves and portable-stove-around-the-altar shenanigans. I’d thought they’d looked rather fetching, robed in white albs, moving graciously, always in the right place at the right time, with absolutely none of the self-ostentation which is often the hallmark of people fussing around in the sanctuary. Not to mention the fact that the girls lowered the average age of the ancient choir and other hangers-on around the altar by about five decades.

  Anyway, the girls had come to my rescue, because the rest of the serving team – other than Derek – had buggered off as soon as I was appointed, because they didn’t approve of me approving of women priests. I’d come across this behaviour many times before; people who’d chuck the toys out of their pram unless they got their own way. Serving teams, choirs, flower ladies, bellringers, groups who conveniently forget that they are supposed to be on the Lord’s side and instead pursue power for its own sake. It’s all a bit pathetic, really.

  ‘Oh, I was short and sweet,’ Rachel replied. ‘Or rather, short and tart. I said, “Oo, what a pity, if only I had known I would have only given birth to boys!” Then I flounced off before she could think of a reply. But judging by the way her jaw dropped, I guess she wouldn’t have been able to say anything whatsoever for a few minutes.’

  It took me ages to get off to sleep, and I was still seething as I hammered at the keys writing my sermon. My first meeting with the Church Council was that evening, which is a bit like a team of school governors – there to enable the Head and the school to flourish, as well as being critical friends. Once I’d put my more-angry-than-usual sermon to bed, I read through the minutes of the previous meeting, held during the vacancy. Item three leapt off the page at me, and made me see red ten times more:

  3. That this Council resolves that under no circumstances should children be involved with worship.

  The motion had been carried unanimously. Here we were, living in the oldest, dampest vicarage in captivity, with ceilings falling down about our ears. Our clothes and my books reeked of damp, and were frequently peppered with mould spots. Little Clare was missing her friends at Bishopthorpe and finding it hard to settle into her new school. True enough, Helmsley was an enchanted place, surrounded by gorgeous countryside, but I was beginning to fear this paradise had more than a few gorgons.

  I took myself off for a furious cycle ride up Baxton’s Hill, battling against the wind and the rain to work off my adrenalin. I reminded myself that the church folk here had had a rough time; one vicar dying, the next vicar going off the rails, with all sorts of grief swirling around. Grief often makes people or institutions close down, pull up the drawbridge, keep out all intruders, especially noisy children who’ll disturb your calm.

  I recalled an unhappy period during my first year at Cambridge. My parents had moved from a parish in west Hull because it hadn’t really worked for them. It could be that the countryside around Aughton and Scarborough had actually eaten into their soul as it had into mine, making them unhappy in a city. Or it could be the particular church was in a process of transition. The vicar before my dad had rebuilt it after the previous building had had to be demolished because of subsidence, caused by being too close to the Humber. He had taken on the diocesan authorities, who didn’t want to rebuild, organized all the massive fundraising, and won. Then he left, and my dad came along, and though he inherited a new and shining church building, fit for purpose, the church folk seemed fatigued by all their efforts. Tired people can get a bit cross, and everyone kept falling out with each other, one argument fuelling another. I guess one or two powerful women missed all the thrill of fundraising and weren’t too keen on the spiritual side, which was my dad’s strongest suit. Powerful women trying to bully him triggered memories from his boyhood, which fuelled the fires even more. I tried to help things by serving on the Church Council but I fear I made it worse, in that I inevitably leapt to my dad’s defence when the arguments got personal, and people understandably didn’t like being taken on by this upstart of a Cambridge boy.

  So my parents moved on to calmer climes, and I learnt an important lesson for my future ministry about managing conflict, or not managing it. All that was swirling around as I plotted how to handle my entrenched Church Council. And whenever I felt sorry for myself being hard done-by as a priest, I reminded myself of the story of St Teresa of Avila. On a very long, wet, cold and tiring winter pilgrimage, the final straw was when her horse threw her into the muddiest, smelliest of ditches. As the
visionary Teresa scrambled out, feeling totally wretched, she heard a voice from heaven, ‘Don’t worry Teresa, this is how I treat my friends.’

  ‘Then I’m not at all surprised, Lord, you have so few!’ came her acerbic reply.

  Just before 7.30 p.m., a dozen stalwarts hobbled into our damp dining room, wrapping their thick woollen coats around them to keep out the November chill; coats which must have taken the fashion world by storm way back in the 1930s. We began with a prayer, and then I read them this extract from St Mark’s Gospel, from the Bible that had been presented to me at my ordination as a priest in York Minster in 1982:

  People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.