Dear Stalkers…

When we arrived back in the Uk from Zimbabwe we had a car full of luggage and a few scattered belongings with friends and relatives around the country. After six years in the Lakes it took two removal vans to shift our furniture down to the Midlands.

And we arrived to find that the only power in the house was a jerry-rigged light in the kitchen. As usual the Diocese had done an incoming survey on the house but had deliberately failed to spot that it needed rewiring. The churchwardens weren’t so gullible and they got the MEB to check it out as well. They refused to supply electricity to the house unless it was rewired. So for a time there was stalemate. And then just before we were due to move down, the diocese accepted a quote from a local one-man band electrician, Jim, who reckoned he could rewire the whole house by himself. And he started just three days before we moved.

So Sue, Ali, Dave and John got back in the car and went on to Sue’s parents in Worcester. And I set about learning how to rewire a house. The house itself was a disaster area. When the old vicarage (based on a medieval cruck-framed house) had been pulled down in the seventies, the Diocese had given the land to a developer on the basis that he could build and sell houses on most of it if he also built the vicarage. So it was built out of the left over materials from the main development in the spare time of the builders. They had skimped and saved at every turn. Including the wiring. It was in metal conduit beneath the plaster. The conduit nailed in place, often through the wiring; which is why it wouldn’t pull through. Everything had to be chased out and new conduit put in place and then plastered up. The cables to the office extension were laid on top of the walls, partly under the joists holding the flat roof in place.

In all it took six weeks to do and was only finished because by then Jim and I were doing the same tricks as the original builders.

On my appointment the local bishop had resigned and the Lichfield Diocese decided to move the whole deanery to the Worcester Diocese. No one wanted to spend money on the vicarage. So for three weeks I was in the Lichfield Diocese and then became part of Worcester.

A week before my induction there was a PCC meeting to welcome me into the parish at which I mentioned Tony Dumper’s comment that the parish were ready to move forward and asked in what ways they saw that happening. “We had to put that in to get a candidate”, they said. They had no intention of changing anything. Far from it, many of the PCC were refugees from a nearby parish that had gone “happy clappy” and some had even moved house. Having just moved myself and spent four weeks rewiring I could hardly pull out. But I did point out that I was far from “happy clappy” and we would not be singing choruses any time soon.

I spent a few evenings calling on the PCC members to try to find out what they hoped for and arrived at one door to be greeted on the doorstep with, “what do you want?” “Well I’m trying to introduce myself to the PCC members.” “Well I know who you are.” I never made it inside. The PCC had remained much the same for many years. The churchwardens John and Alan had also been there a long time. The treasurer was another fixture. By the time I left he had been treasurer for 20 years; and there had never been a proper audit. He simply got a mate to come round and go through the books over a bottle of whisky and that was that. I tried to get the PCC to instigate proper financial controls but they wouldn’t hear of it. As far as I know he is the treasurer still.

There was also the writer of an anonymous letter, or one of the authors – more of that later, who wrote that people were concerned that my shoes were not as clean as they could be and that my fingernails appeared unkempt; also he felt he needed to point out that it had been noticed that my family didn’t sit in the vicarage pew and that they didn’t kneel for confession. This was a bad example to others. I pointed out in a sermon that if the writer was kneeling at the time with his eyes closed how did he know what my family were doing. I had a pretty good idea who the writer was as someone had made similar comments to me face to face. A couple of years later he was one of my best allies and would slip me a bundle of notes to pay for things the PCC wouldn’t finance.

So change would be painful and slow. As usual there were problems to solve. There was a second church in the parish, St Andrews the Straits. Down the hill towards Gornal, it was on a large estate, partly private, partly council. A regular congregation were looked after by a resident priest who tried to run it as a high church centre. He left for Rome shortly before I arrived but Rome was sensible enough not to have him and the last I heard he was selling insurance. I went there to services taken by another local high church priest and noticed that though he went through the motions at the front the congregation were largely ignoring the ritual antics.

So when I set about looking for a replacement I tried to find someone who would be fairly open in his approach to churchmanship and move the church to the central catholic position that I think the people wanted. I found Antony Lane and invited him to come to join me. There was just one more problem to solve. Edwin, his predecessor, had left the church house without telling anyone that the immersion heater was leaking. The Diocese had failed to inspect the house as he left and waited until Antony was appointed; only to discover that the joists under the airing cupboard had rotted and the house needed major repairs. As it was anyway below current standards it was decided to buy a new house. The one next to the church was offered to the diocese, which would be ideal, but it too needed refurbishment. And so, like me, Antony had to wait for months for the housing situation to be sorted out.

Sedgley is the white highlands between Dudley and Wolverhampton. Multi-culturalism hadn’t touched it. Like most of my parishes it was a conservative stronghold despite a large working class population. Many of the people had been there for generations. Though the old industries had gone – chain making, bicycles, nail makers – the people had stayed put. One of my first funerals was of a woman of 94 who had married the boy next door, moved in with him and his parents, taking over the house when they died. She had no children and had never been further than Sedgley Bull Ring 400 yards away.

The centres of local life were the Conservative Club and the British Legion. Each year the Legion paraded through the town into church and we had to time it so that we would arrive and have time for a hymn and a prayer to lead into the two minute silence. I became a regular visitor to the Legion club and they eventually made me the Chaplain to the branch. There were as ever many wonderful characters there. And they gave me an insight into the real thoughts of old soldiers about the increasing celebration of the military that seemed to be taking place. One man never came on the parades and never wore his medals. Those who put themselves at the front of the parades, he said, were never in the front line as he had been. Most of all he would like to forget, not remember, but that wasn’t an option after all he had seen.

Then there was Alex, one of the last of the “few”. A Battle of Britain pilot. He too would rarely put himself forward. Eventually he collapsed one night at the Conservative Club and was taken to hospital after suffering a stroke. I went to see him and said some prayers as he wasn’t expected to last the day. The following day he was sitting up in bed and said he knew I had been. He had felt himself being called back. For another few months at least.

At one Remembrance service Sue played the Flowers of the Forest while Hayley sang. There was not a dry eye among the Legion but the congregation asked why we had to have “pop music” in church. Similarly when Sue organised a youth band, I was asked why we “had to have that row in church”.

The other club was an old pensioners club. This was run by three women who had not spoken to each other for several years. That they were the chair, secretary and treasurer; and that three signatures were needed on every cheque; meant that there had been little activity at the club for a few years and the building was becoming derelict. Age Concern were willing to take it on and manage the centre, but it was down to me to negotiate with the reluctant committee of the old club who had to sign their consent. It was of course impossible to get the three together so I had to be a go-between and take papers from one to another, learning in which order I could get signatures as one wouldn’t sign anything the others had signed.

After a year or so of negotiations we signed the lease and a year or so later even got hold of the money from the old account. And so a new day centre could open and a new room be available for events. A manager came in who was frighteningly ambitious. She thought we could do trips out and even holidays. The first trip was a Christmas lunch at a country pub. Which would have been great except that the largest lady insisted on sitting at the back of the coach. Coach seats are like a lobster pot – easy to get passed to get to the back, but then they trap you there. It took 45 minutes to get her off the coach while the rest of us drank endless glasses of sherry waiting for lunch to start.

For the first time in my ministry there was a curate in place when I arrived, but he too announced his move after I had been in post three months. He had seen the parish through the interregnum and was ready for his own parish. So shortly after my first Christmas we all went down to St Austell to Fr Philip’s induction. During his time in Sedgley he had been the subject of anonymous letters, which perversely accused him of both being gay and of having an affair with one of the female parishioners. He was not the only one targeted. Letters were sent to a variety of people about another member of the congregation.  It was widely known who was sending them. I left it to Philip to take what action he chose and he, I think, got a solicitor to send her a letter warning of the consequences if further letters were sent. She of course denied sending anything.

Without a curate for at least a year, and with no one at the Straits, I set about finding help. As I had gone to Africa with USPG and was now within reach of the College of the Ascension where we had spent three months in 1982, I went back to the college to see what they could offer. They were at that time mainly a centre for training clergy from overseas and I offered to take African clergy on placement. Which meant that for a couple of weekends a month they would come to the parish take services and learn something of the English way of church life.

And so it was that Sedgley found itself with black clergy for the first time. As expected there were rumblings in the congregation. They claimed they couldn’t understand them, which was a bit rich from people who from time to time would lapse into Black Country dialect that no one outside a very small area could decipher. And there were those who made a point of crossing the aisle so that they would receive communion from white hands. But largely the congregation were welcoming.

One spin off came from an Archdeacon from Zambia who I introduced to the Mother’s Union. They were a group of pensioners who met on a Tuesday afternoon for tea and a talk. So they looked forward to hearing about life in Africa. The Archdeacon had other ideas. He told them that in Africa the Mother’s Union are the centre of the church. They see the babies into the world and they lay out the dead, they clean the church and advise the young women about the duties of marriage and how to keep their husbands.

A bit of a contrast from the cosy tea party that the Sedgley MU had become. But they took up the challenge. They started tea and coffee after church (despite churchwarden Alan saying “over my dead body” which I explained could lead to health and safety issues). They began to provide refreshments at the mother and toddler group so that the leaders could concentrate on the children; and some, even more adventurous, went to help provide refreshments to visitors at a local young offenders institution. As a result more people wanted to join and an evening group was started for those unable to make the afternoons.

The MU also had a service once a month on a Monday morning. Usually only six or eight of them would make it and it was a straightforward communion. But then the AIDS crisis struck and they suddenly got jittery about the common chalice. Some began to retain the wafer and dip it into the wine. I pointed out that AIDS was unlikely to be transmitted through the chalice and anyway which of the other MU members did they think had it. Or did they think I had it, in which case they needn’t worry as I was probably the only one who had been tested and so I knew I hadn’t.

But slowly the church had started to change.

When the diocese decided I could have a new curate, Queen’s College suggested Eric Petrie. He was a 40 year old biker with a wife and young daughter; hair in a ponytail, his, not the daughters, and a habit of turning up to everything in shorts. Not what the church at Sedgley were expecting; but just what they needed. So Eric came and learnt the ropes from Antony and me. He began to have great ideas for youth services and got involved in the local school. Their miscreant pupils would be told they could either be suspended or have a few sessions with Eric. Naturally they chose Eric.

At youth services he began to wonder why only church family children were coming – the ones out of the choir who had been indoctrinated to like Victorian hymns and evensong. Then he discovered that the churchwardens were standing guard outside seeing off any young people they didn’t recognise. They also had a habit on Sunday mornings of standing at the door advising any families with young children that they would be better off going to the URCs down the road.

Some teenagers that I had got to know came to evensong one night and got the giggles as soon as I started to sing the responses. A perfectly understandable reaction not just to the absurdity of Anglican Chant but also to my singing. But they were duly asked to leave and would presumably never go to church ever again.

They were friends of Kelly. I had found the fourteen-year-old Kelly asleep on the back pew as I went in to lock up one night. She had left home (again) and had nowhere else to go. She had tried social services but was unhappy in the children’s homes and preferred to sleep rough. I took her across to the vicarage and Sue made her tea while I phoned the NSPCC to see if I could take her to them. Remarkably they told me I had to phone social services or I would be accused of kidnapping. They wouldn’t take her without her father’s consent. I only found out later that I should have phoned the Children’s Society. Social Services took her off to a children’s home for a couple of nights and then returned her to her father.

Which might have been the end of the story if Kelly’s mother hadn’t then got cancer and Kelly came to see me about the funeral. Her mother’s favourite song was Cliff Richard’s Saviour’s Day and the family wanted that played at the funeral. Normally I had no qualms about playing CDs in church without asking but Chris Eaton (who wrote Saviours Day) was the son of a member of the church choir. Chris was living in Nashville but had a house at Enville and I knew from his father that he was there at the time. So I phoned Chris to ask if he thought Cliff would mind the song being played. Chris asked when the funeral was and then said he would come and play it live if we wanted him to. So Cliff’s songwriter came and played at the funeral of an unassuming woman off a council estate.

After introducing black clergy and making a start at getting young people into church the last remaining taboo was women priests. It was around the time of the vote which saw the first women ordained. But of course the conservative nature of the parish meant that no women had ever taken part in services and women were discouraged from entering the sanctuary even to clean. But knowing Eric and my theology no one was willing to openly come out in opposition. So when women were finally ordained priest and the parish had to decide if it would pass resolutions A, B or C which would prevent their ministry in the parish they were reluctant to do so. Instead they passed a resolution of their very own that they were not opposed to women’s ordination but would only accept them in exceptional circumstances.

So I quickly found a set of exceptional circumstances. I had to wait until Eric was away and Antony busy at the Straits. Then I suddenly told the churchwardens that I had to go away for a weekend and the only person I could find to take the service was Heather, the new curate from Coseley. I’m not sure I convinced everyone but the result was the same. After I got back from my “family emergency” most people came up and said they didn’t know what all the fuss was about. After I left and Eric had run the interregnum for a bit and the new Rector was appointed, Eric went off to a parish of his own and the new Rector, with the full support of the PCC appointed a woman as curate.

I introduced healing services once a month and met up with the usual suspicion that they were witchcraft. But a small group of regulars came and we prayed for the sick and for each other. Some received the laying on of hands and some were healed as a result.

I also began to get requests for exorcisms. Usually around Halloween when the teenagers had been playing on the Ouija boards and scared themselves rigid. But one or two cases were more interesting. As only licensed exorcists are allowed to do the full thing I was restricted to just blessing the houses and the people in them, which was usually enough to calm things down. In one house, not only were things flying around but the wife’s mother, recently deceased, kept appearing at the top of the stairs. It turned out that she had been living with them, much resented by the husband as she had controlled the household. After her death the wife was naturally feeling the loss while her husband was elated to be free of her. The conflict of emotions seemed to have taken on a physical form. After a few counselling sessions for the couple and a blessing of the house everything was sorted out. And I was glad I had ignored the rumours that the estate had been built on the site of a wood which was a favourite place for people to hang themselves.

The church had a massive churchyard with about 5000 burials. It had been started in the 1840s and most of it was overgrown. There were constant complaints about the state of it and normally it would have been closed long before and handed over to the local authority. But it had been left to get in such a state that the council refused to take it on unless it was put into a manageable condition which would have cost £35000. So it stayed the way it was. The local wildlife people came and did a survey and found there were rare plants and butterflies there that were found nowhere else in the West Midlands. They too would have taken it over but they didn’t have the funding for management either.

So we struggled on with some help from offenders on community service who rebuilt part of the retaining wall and did some basic clearing; and we tried to keep open access to the graves that were still being visited. But the complaints persisted. One of them came from someone who only ever came once a year to visit a grave in the middle of the wilderness. He eventually called in the local TV to show what a disgrace it was. I went with them to give an interview. The producer asked him to show how difficult it was to get to the grave and he went straight there, albeit through a bramble patch, but without the need for the secateurs that I had taken with me. I then pointed out that all we could do was maintain the paths and we relied on people maintaining the graves of their relatives by regular visits. So the interview went out as a look at the problems churches face looking after churchyards in the face of complaining locals. Which was probably not what the man intended.

The churchwardens decide to emphasise the responsibility of the bereaved by putting up a sign.

Would visiting relatives

please remove their dead

flowers and wreaths and

keep the churchyard tidy.

I pointed out the sign was likely to lose its last two lines and it was never put up.

Another source of local controversy was the organ. This was an uninspiring Victorian fixture, which had long passed its sell by date. It kept breaking down or blowing a fuse in the middle of services and the organist wanted to replace it. He was a drinking partner of one of the directors of Makin organs who produce digital models which use samples of great organs of the world to put together an instrument suitable for small churches. There was of course a major conflict in the church as to whether we should replace a pipe organ with a digital one. As Worcester had just spent over £1 million on a partial refurbishment of their pipe organ the PCC eventually realised that a pipe organ replacement was out of their reach and even a strip down and rebuild would cost more than the Makin one. So it was agreed to give away the old organ to an enthusiast who would do the dismantling for free.

And not a moment too soon. As he started to take the organ down it became apparent why it was constantly tripping out. The wiring was from the 1930s and was very old paper insulated cable, which over the years had burnt off until only bare wires remained. It could have all gone up in smoke at any time and the church with it. This gave me the reply I needed to a poem to Birmingham’s poetry magazine Raw Edge from a teenager called Dante complaining that he wouldn’t have proper organ music when he married his “Beatrice”. So I wrote a suitable reply using the metre of Dante’s poems and pointing out the dangers of an “Inferno”.

After we had installed the new organ we got a bill from the architect. For his 15% of the total cost of the project, including the price of the new organ. The project cost apart from that was fairly minimal, just making good the back walls and floor and recarpeting and redecoration. But we resented paying 15% to the architect for getting an electric organ off the back of the van and plugging it in. The dispute dragged on for years until we had to pay £1000 just to get the architect to stop chasing us.

As well as three or four funerals a week and four weddings every Saturday from Easter to October, I ended up on 24 committees and so was working for 84 hours most weeks. Naturally with a large church with lots of groups there were also a lot of committees. But as well as all the local ones I was also on Diocesan Synod and a couple of their working parties; and the Bishop asked me to be part of both the major incident group and the crisis support group of the West Midlands. These required me to train in Post Traumatic Stress Debriefing. Part of that was watching the police videos of major incidents like the Kegworth plane crash and the 100 car pile up on the M42 and then role-playing the counsellors called in to help the victims.

I also decided to top up my training as a counsellor and I joined the Clinical Theology Association tutors group. They in turn asked me to take a workshop on PTSD at their annual conference and it was for that that I wrote the epilogue “My name is Peter” which started the set of meditations that became Cooped up Angels.

I was never called out as part of the Crisis Support Team and there were no major incidents either. But the training did come in useful on a couple of occasions. One of the pupils at the local secondary school died on the football field one Sunday afternoon. I was called in to talk to his year group and offer what support I could to his friends. And I was called out one evening when one of the brownies was hit by a van as she crossed the road to the church hall. Inevitably I forgot to take my fluorescent “Clergy” tabard and so was greeted with some scepticism by the paramedic. But I stayed with Katie’s mum until the ambulance arrived and then followed them in to Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Katie made a full recovery and later joined my confirmation class.

I went in to the school for assemblies and occasional lessons. After Eric arrived he took on the assemblies but I was still asked to talk to particular classes. This was often a battle of wills as I had to keep my mind on the subject while the fifth form girls in the front row, with short skirts and no knickers, tried to distract me.

At the other extreme I was asked to lead a service as the close of a tent mission. I had met the local Assemblies of God minister and he wanted a communion and it was decided that if I led it, it might be more acceptable to the congregations from the more traditional churches. So I was in front of a band in a large tent with about sixty in the congregation and extemporised as best I could. Suddenly I realised that there was no wine. I had assumed the Assemblies would have brought some, they thought I would. The only person spare at that moment was the Methodist minister and so I sent him off on a Sunday afternoon to buy wine from the local Safeways.

Ten years after leaving Africa I decided it was time to go back. I was eligible for a sabbatical every ten years and that meant I could get financial support from the diocese. I won a bursary from the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company as well and contacted USPG for practical support. Through Victor de Waal I was put in touch with the Britain Zimbabwe Society and compiled a long list of contacts.

At the end of the sabbatical I returned to the UK and two weeks later Sue and the family returned from their stay with Sue’s sister. Sue had only come back to say that she had decided to move out. After 25 years of putting up with me and with the variety of demands that the parishes had made on her she understandably wanted a life of her own. John went with her to Worcester; Dave went off to Uni at Bristol and Ali stayed on with me for a year or so. She had graduated from Leeds but had yet to work out what to do.

Life on my own proved no easier than life as a family. The parish assumed that Sue had left because I was having an affair. About six months after Sue left one of the mother and toddler leaders tried to drop in a newsletter to the vicarage only to be told by one of the leaders of the parish that she shouldn’t be seen going up to the door of a man like me. She naturally phoned me to tell the story and we arranged to meet for a drink and began a long friendship.

Then the anonymous letters started again. This time I was the target. The writer had picked up the fact that I was seeing someone. She started with the assumption that that was why Sue left, and listed enough details for us to know we were being stalked. To start with I didn’t do anything. I thought that the woman concerned was harmless enough and we would just have to put up with it. But then she dropped a more aggressive note through the door of the person she thought I was seeing, but got the wrong door. The couple there knew me and recognised who the letter was about, but instead of bringing it to me they went straight to the police. This conveniently took it out of my hands. I supplied the police with the other letters I had collected over the years together with a couple of cards the woman had sent me so that forensics could positively identify the writer who was then arrested and formally cautioned.

After the sabbatical I enrolled at Selly Oak to do a PhD based on my researches. That meant travelling up to Birmingham twice a week. I also became secretary of the Britain Zimbabwe Society which took me down to London or Oxford every other month. The parish were a bit annoyed that I was no longer giving them my undivided attention. But I was no longer sure that I wanted to be a parish priest and wanted to explore other options. Radio 4 picked up that Sue had left and asked me to do an interview for the Sunday programme in which I pointed out the impossibility of sustaining clergy family life under the various pressures and with little or no support from the diocese. On the contrary the diocese just loaded down another set of pressures on the already embattled clergy and then offered counselling to those who failed to manage the unreasonable demands.

As a result the Bishop of Dudley asked me to see him and began to offer what I thought was the possibility of doing my research full time in Birmingham for a year. I jumped at the chance and he said that the diocese would draw up the paperwork. After a few weeks I was called to the Bishop of Worcester’s house and presented with a legal document that talked about “severance pay”. “Does that mean that at the end of the year I can’t come back,” I asked. That was the plan – I had rocked the boat a little too much and was being offered £20000 to leave the church.

And having gone that far I was unlikely to be offered another job any time soon. So I had to fend for myself. As usual that meant looking to friends for help. John Austin was another of Robert Runcie’s protégés; he was by now Bishop of Aston and lived just down the road from Selly Oak. So I called to see him to see what was happening in the Birmingham Diocese. There were one or two possibles, in particular a challenge at Small Heath, but they all looked a bit demanding and what I wanted was a rest, somewhere I could take a back seat for a bit and have to fight too many battles.

Then I remembered Jim Quinn. He was also part of the CTA tutors group and had talked about retiring from Aldersley. This was part of the Tettenhall team and was a team vicar’s job. A small church on a post war estate with a small but regular congregation. I contacted Jim and he introduced me to James Makepeace who was Team Rector. He like me was one of the churches mavericks and not too bothered about protocol but pointed out I still had to go through a patronage board which was half diocese and half parish. As I was still persona non grata in the C of E I wasn’t supposed to be moving any time soon, so I knew the diocesan bit of the board would be packed against me. In the end there was no problem as one of the diocesan reps sided with my appointment. The Bishop was hardly likely to refuse to license me and I could announce my departure form Sedgley and arrival in Aldersley.