The heart of the Lakes

The heart of the Lakes

Six months before we were due to return to the Uk from Zimbabwe in 1987, I flew back to do the rounds of the Bishops and try to get a job. My name was on the circulation list put out by the Archbishop’s Appointments Secretary and that in theory put me in touch with every vacancy. In practice, as with my appointment to Hatfield, most posts were filled much more informally.

I went down to Exeter to see Peter Mumford who, as Bishop of Hertford, had been my area Bishop before I left the UK. He gave me lunch at a hotel in the cathedral precincts but told me that Truro were over their quota and were having to lose clergy. But he would contact his friend David Halsey who was Bishop of Carlisle. So a few days later I found myself driving up to the Lake District to Rose Castle. The Bishop greeted me at the door and ushered me in for the compulsory glass of sherry and said he had three groups of parishes and I could choose between them.

I drove around the three of them and settled on Eskdale. Loweswater went to a local who had grown up there and knew most of the people; Skirwith went to someone who had so many problems there he left after six months. All that was left to do was to meet the people, and I couldn’t do that until I had officially returned to the UK. But first on this trip I needed to get to Derby. The Bishop of Derby had offered me a parish on the edge of the dales but a covering letter from the Archdeacon said that he couldn’t recommend it to anyone. But as I had an appointment to see the Bishop I thought I had better go, explain the situation in Cumbria and then I would have something to fall back on if nothing else worked out.

I was ushered into the Bishop’s office in Derby and hastily explained that I would not be taking up the offer of the parish. He then said that he was just about to go to lunch and I was welcome to join him. So we lunched at the Midland Hotel in Derby and shared a good claret, while I explained to him how to charge his wife and children to tax as cleaners, secretaries and gardeners.

In August, we arrived back from Zimbabwe laden down with all the things we had forgotten to put in the cargo, which was coming by sea. So much in fact that we didn’t fit in the hire car to take us to the USPG flats in Bournemouth and Sue and John had to go by train. USPG had offered us three months in the flat but we were keen to move up to Eskdale as soon as possible, but first I had to get through the formal interview and be officially offered the job.

So Sue and I went up to the Lakes and met the wardens and Ian, a sheep farmer who was due to be ordained as an NSM. I should have noticed one of the questions, when Ian said that if I was opposed to fox hunting or nuclear power I should not come. As I am opposed to both I didn’t like to say anything, I was not likely to stand up in the pulpit and denounce them either. But what I should have noticed was the implication that if I didn’t toe their line then I wouldn’t be welcome.

The four parishes that make up the group cover everything from Scafell Pike to the coast and include six churches. Four ancient, one Victorian and one a small meeting room in Ravenglass that we used in the winter when Muncaster church was too cold to use. Irton Church was also too cold to use but the congregation had heaters under the pews so they were all right and it was only the vicar at the altar who had to endure no heating in the depth of a Cumbrian winter.

Irton though had the advantage of Burne Jones Stained glass windows. Its congregation was tiny, often only three, but the parish was actually the most populated of the group. Only at funerals and weddings was it full. Bizarrely their Harvest Supper was always a whist drive arranged by the local whist players who never came to church. A short supper was followed by an evening’s whist. One year I tried to introduce a barn dance to get some of the people together who didn’t come to church but who also didn’t play whist. It worked quite well but the “real” harvest was held a week later with the whist players.

Waberthwaite was a tiny village of just over 100 people, but they produced a congregation of 22 or so at most services. There was a church school there with about 55 pupils, where I was chair of the governors. I went in most weeks for assemblies and took part in many of the activities. The village hall was widely used as well and pantos were put on from time to time that I helped out with.

The parishes are linked by the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway. The vicarage even has its own station – Beckfoot Halt. Beckfoot Farmhouse became the vicarage in Victorian times. The railway was a useful link between the parishes and every year gave us a train to bring visitors up to the vicarage for a coffee evening. One year I arranged for a local sweet shop to give us some nougat so we could call it the Coffeenougatchoochoo and the train arrived complete with headboard. Sadly it was in the middle of the midge season and within minutes the visitors were being bitten to death and many hurried back to the train as soon as possible.

The vicarage was close to Boot. With a field and a river between it and the nearest house. Naturally the Diocese wanted to sell it and move me down to the village of Eskdale Green. Apparently the idyllic setting wasn’t “showing solidarity with the urban poor”. But then neither would living in a purpose built house in its own grounds in any of the villages. My predecessor had signed, as Rector, his agreement to the move the week before he left and that was binding on me. But the Diocese had forgotten the Lake District Special Planning Board. They had control over all building in the National Park. And Patrick Gordon-Duff-Pennington from Muncaster Castle was on the Board. He simply phoned me and asked if I really wanted to move. Naturally I said no. So the Planning Board refused permission to build a new vicarage. So we stayed where we were.

The vicarage was idelly placed for fund raisers. Another of them was an afternoon of cream teas usually on Easter Monday. I would plaster every tree from Hard Knott with posters and the local church ladies would prepare 100 cream teas. Most years would pass without incident but one year one of the visitors came to ask me if I could find someone to open her car door as she had locked the keys in. No problem I thought, after my experiences in Hertfordshire and Zimbabwe. I was an expert. Except that it was a special edition Escort with extra security and that included a shield over the lock which prevented all the usual access. In the end the local garage took an hour and a half and had to virtually dismantle the door to get the car open.

At the other end of the railway was Ravenglass, in the shadow of Muncaster Castle. Patrick and Phyllida who owned the castle were great friends to the churches and very supportive of me. Sue and I were regular visitors to events and often invited to help out as hosts if there was a big party coming in. When we first arrived they used to take guests at the Castle. One of them, a film director from America, complete with Southern Blond in tow was hard work and Patrick asked me to go down to help entertain them. After a short conversation I realised that the film director was actually from Romford in east London and the films he directed were soft porn. His blond companion was one of the “stars” and he was trying to impress her by making out that this was his normal life style in the UK.

Others included the Pennington Society of America all of whom were convinced that they had some sort of proprietorial right to the castle. One year Patrick decided that to get them out of his hair for a day they should come up to Eskdale and I could show them the church and Sue would do some sketching with them in the afternoon. Lunch would be sent up to the vicarage. So a coach arrived bringing fifteen of them and I walked them down to the church. St Catherines is a largely Victorian building and quite small so there is not a lot to see, but it is in a beautiful setting beside the river. As we looked out on the river some of the more adventurous Americans noticed some stepping stones. Could they walk back to the vicarage on the other side of the river? Well yes they could, but the stepping stones weren’t particularly safe and only the most able should attempt it. But one of the more infirm among them insisted that he too would cross. Needless to say he deposited himself in the middle of the river and had to be helped to the bank and then back at the vicarage fitted with my, much smaller, trousers while his were in the drier. The lunch arrived with a box for each of them, but rather than take the first one that came to hand they insisted on examining each box in turn and only then selecting which one they would have.

After lunch we tried to interest them in the views and the flowers in the garden for a sketching afternoon but they were already restless and one of them, behind my back found the phone and asked the castle to send the coach, two hours early.

Also at the castle was Gretchen, who worked as a sort of PA to Patrick but ended up doing all sorts of other jobs too. Her son Joe had been at school with Harry Enfield, and Harry and Paul Whitehouse became regular visitors to the area. They even stayed in the vicarage one year while we were on holiday and wrote some of the Fast Show there.

We invited Harry to take part in the Eskdale Fete. This was Ian’s great annual extravaganza. It took over the Outward Bound School grounds and raised £15000 a year for the churches and local groups. Part of the show was a mountain rescue demonstration. A ‘casualty’ was strapped to a stretcher and lowered down the tower of the centre. Harry was that year’s victim. There was also a Helicopter rescue from the tarn when the helicopter wasn’t in use elsewhere. So one year I was asked to fall out of a boat into the tarn and the helicopter would come and rescue me. Not being able to swim didn’t seem to be a problem; more of a problem was that I wasn’t insured so they couldn’t rescue me. It turned out that all those involved in demonstrations have to part of the team or the insurance doesn’t cover them. In the end it was just as well. The helicopter was called to a real rescue with the ‘casualty’ still on the end of the rope. So they swung over to the bank of the tarn and cut the rope dropping the “casualty” on the bank and then swung across the centre and down the village street at roof height bringing down the soot from all the chimneys.

Gretchen was a practitioner of a therapy known as therapeutic touch which was a sort of massage that didn’t actually touch the body. It was very relaxing, though as usual as soon as it was over I used to jump up and carry on, when I was supposed to have been so relaxed that I wouldn’t be able to move for fifteen minutes. After a couple of years Gretchen decided to move from the castle and set up a healing centre at Knott End. I joined her there as a counsellor, which meant going down once a week for an afternoon to see anyone who needed a listening ear rather than therapy. We also began regular healing services at Muncaster Church where I offered laying on of hands and anointing.

To start with the local doctors were rather suspicious of what we were doing, to the extent that I was phoned by one very irate doctor who accused me of poaching one of her patients. I quietly explained that she was also a parishioner of mine and was suicidal and I had kept her going till she could get an appointment, which seemed to calm the doctor down a bit. A year later the same doctor phoned and asked if I would see another of her patients who needed counselling rather than medicine. Gretchen was seeing the same sort of response and by the time I left, the surgery was working in partnership with the centre.

She also arranged a group for adult survivors of child abuse. This was a mixed group and was led by a specialist, I was just there as an extra voice from time to time (or group facilitator if you want to be official). One of the men, who had been through several children’s homes when younger said firmly that sexual abuse was the norm rather than the exception in all the homes he had been in.

Someone else that I met through Knott End somehow got to know “Miss Whiplash” who became front page news for a time in the late 1980s. To get away from London she went to stay with him in Ravenglass. I needed to see him about some computer problems I was having just at the moment when the tabloid photographers tracked her down. Which is why I was photographed going in to this den of iniquity. At least that’s my story.

One of my clients, I saw over a period of four years. She had gone through a harrowing set of circumstances which I won’t go into and came to me to try and get herself back together. What was interesting was that although we lost touch for a time when I left and she too moved away to find work in Sussex; a couple of days after Sue left in 1997 Chris phoned me out of the blue to say that she had suddenly thought of me and was I OK. She was one of only two people to phone at that time.

On another occasion a reporter asked to sit in on a healing service. I pointed out that our services were quite undramatic – just half a dozen of us praying through a list of the sick and one or two kneeling at the altar for laying on of hands. But she wanted to come anyway, she didn’t believe in this healing business and wanted to see what we got up to. So there we were and when I invited anyone to come forward for healing for themselves or for someone they knew, she came to the altar rail and knelt down. I later discovered that unknown to me one of her hosts in Cumbria had a frozen shoulder. When she got back to her lodgings, before mentioning the service, the writer asked her host how her shoulder was. “It’s freed up now, suddenly at about 7.00pm”, she was told. At the moment a cynical journalist had received laying on of hands that she didn’t believe in for someone who didn’t know she was being prayed for by a priest who didn’t know who he was praying for. Naturally the doctors said it was a coincidence.

I also met some of the refugees from Ellel Grange. This was a Pentecostal “healing” centre down the coast. Their idea was that all sickness is an imposition by the devil and that the answer to everything is exorcism. Even if you turned up with toothache they would surround you with six or seven people praying in tongues and commanding the demon of toothache to leave you alone. Needless to say many of those who went needed counselling after the event and some came to me.

And there were some who were completely deluded. One had a senior position in local government. But he was convinced that then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was stealing his ideas while he was asleep. He would dream of an economic policy (as you do) and the following day Maggie would announce it. She also had spies in his office. He would leave pencil shavings on the papers in his drawer over night and when he got back to work the following day they would be moved.

As usual with my healing ministry some of the people who came for healing didn’t recover. But when they died they did so with dignity and usually with their family surrounding them. One of them was Kath. She was only in her mid forties but had inoperable cancer. And though she came regularly to Knott End for healing and counselling and then we went to her house in Millom, there was never any real chance of recovery. But she remained at home with her husband and two young daughters who openly talked about her coming death and prepared for it. Wilf phoned me on a Saturday night to say that his wife had only a few hours left and would I go down. So I went and said the prayers for the dying at her bedside. Kath had been lapsing in and out of consciousness for most of the day and she seemed almost in a coma. But when I anointed her she opened her eyes and swung her legs from the bed. She managed to walk to each of us, give us a hug and say goodbye. Then she returned to her bed and died an hour or two later.

Wilf decided that he wanted to do something for the church at Muncaster and at the time we were trying to upgrade the power supply and install heating, so I suggested we do a sponsored walk. Around all four of my parishes. That amounted to 42 miles and took us from Waberthwaite on the estuary of the Esk up to Wasdale under the screes; over Great End onto Bowfell and Crinkle Crags; then across Hard Knott Pass to Harter Fell and so back to Waberthwaite.

Jack Gill from Waberthwaite joined me and Wilf for the whole walk and a couple of others did a day each.  We chose the last week in April when I thought the weather should have cleared enough to give us three days to do the walk. We did it in three sections and returned home at night, and followed the parish boundaries as closely as possible rather than established footpaths. Unfortunately the weather instead of clearing closed in. Heavy snow fell on the tops the week before and though I had walked the route and thought I knew all the landmarks, when we arrived off Lingmell under Great End there was no sign of the track and we ended up under a sheer face waist deep in snow. Luckily in that section we had been joined by a member of the mountain rescue team and he had brought his dog with him. They went off in search of the route while we waited in a snowdrift. After about half an hour the dog returned, barked once at us to follow and went off into the mist. We soon found both dog and owner who had indeed found the right path to take us onto the pass between Great End and Scafell Pike. As we reached the pass some tourists came up from Langdale and asked if they were on the right path for Scafell Pike. They were dressed in t-shirts shorts and trainers. We advised them not to attempt it, but to go back down. Needless to say they ignored us and carried on through the mist in an area where even compasses don’t work because of the iron in the rock.

The rest of the walk was uneventful and we raised £2500 for the church and Sellafield came up with the money for the three phase power supply. Finally heating was installed and we could use the church all year round.

A year later and probably in the same week, I hadn’t learnt my lesson about that last week of April and snow on the tops, I took Dave up with a friend from school. We planned to do the double of Scafell Pike and Scafell using Lord’s Rake to get between them. Though there had been some hail the night before, it was frozen and walking was possible. But as we reached the bottom of Lord’s Rake a group of climbers turned up complete with ropes and ice axes. I knew we would be slow going up the Rake as it was hard enough in normal conditions. A sixty degree slope with loose gravel on it. Often it was a case of two steps up and one slide back. I offered to let the climbers go first. In response I was soundly rebuked for taking children out in such conditions without equipment. Both Dave and Tom were experienced walkers and Tom had done some rock climbing so they were hardly novices and there was nothing on the route that really needed anything more than a walking stick. So we set off. Because the hail had iced up overnight it was possible to kick footsteps in it without breaking it up too much. So we made the top quite easily, much to the consternation of the climbers who had been expecting us to land back at their feet. Later in the day after a few climbers had been up it would become treacherous.

In many of my parishes I have found that the most interesting people are those that others find strange. I am obviously attracted to eccentrics. One such was Susan Johnson. Her father was HH Symonds an old style clergyman. From time to time Susan would give me copies of his sermons. She was a great walker and often I would wake to find a note from Susan in the letterbox at 7.00am. She had already walked the seven miles from Ravenglass and was on her way up the fells.

One of her father’s books that she gave me was “Walking in the Lake District”. In it he describes a good day out from Eskdale as being a walk to Steeple; the Langdale Pikes; or Coniston Old Man. I determined that in order to prove the late twentieth century clergy were not as soft as they are sometimes made out to be I would do all three walks.

I cheated right at the start by taking the car up to the bottom of Hard Knott Pass which avoided a three mile walk up the valley floor. Even from there it seems a long walk up to the top of Ore Gap to get across the Bowfell Range. Then around to Stake Pass and Langstrath to Pike of Stickle which I decided was close enough and turned for home. The worst part is the climb back up from Angel tarn to Ore Gap and then the drop down to Eskdale.

The first part of the walk to Steeple is the familiar corpse road across from Eskdale to Wastwater. I had become familiar with that as I had got used to Lakeland walking by working ever widening circles from the vicarage across to Burnmoor Tarn and then firstly across the top of the screes and back to Eskdale Green; then later dropping down to the bottom of the screes and along Wastwater before finding the path back over into Eskdale. But for Steeple there was another pass to complete. After arriving at the top of Black Sail Pass I realised that time had again defeated me. I had Rosehill tickets for the evening. So I slid down Windy Gap and headed for home.

With Coniston Old Man I took no chances. A trial walk one week over Stanley Gill and down to Birk’s Bridge proved that the better route would be via Penny Hill up Birk’s Dyke Nook and down Grassguars to Finkle steps. From there it is a straight route up Walna Scar and then around Dow Crag from where the summit of Old Man becomes visible. I headed back down via Seathwaite Tarn to Birk’s Bridge and over the pass and home. Nine and a half hours to do 18 miles and 5000 feet of climb. Ok I had taken a short cut, H H Symonds went via Hard Knott and Greyfriar and no doubt did it in half the time; but I still felt I had passed the test.

Susan Johnson’s husband had worked for the Inland Revenue which came in useful when the Nat West bank failed to credit a tax rebate cheque we had paid in. The bank needless to say denied all knowledge of ever having seen the cheque. Mr Johnson went to his old office and retrieved the cheque (which in those days were returned with bank statements). It clearly showed that it had been through Nat West Seascale. So we took it down to them and asked where the money had gone. They eventually admitted that it had been paid to Muncaster Parish Council and not Muncaster Parochial Church Council. But it had taken several phone calls, trips to the bank and that trip to London to sort out. So I sent them a bill for £68. And the manager paid, commenting that it was only because I had billed him. If I had simply complained he could do nothing, but because he had a bill he could pay it from petty cash.

One of the vagaries of English law is that you can’t get married where you want to but have to be married in your own parish church. This meant that many of the regular visitors were unable to legally marry in the Lake District churches; instead we ran a thriving trade of blessing civil marriages that had taken place all over the country. Among them was a couple from Oxford who wanted to get married at St Catherines. They were relatives of a film producer Anne who owned one of the isolated farms which had no electricity or water up above St Catherines. Because there was no legal requirement for a particular service I could make it up with the couple themselves and so I began what became a regular part of my ministry in providing tailor made wedding services.

Bill and Liz wanted it to be folk orientated and were dressed accordingly. Bill was from New Zealand and had buried the meat for the celebration in a fire pit before he left for church. We were all invited to the house afterwards. We discovered that they planned a barn dance using tapes on a battery radio cassette but we thought that we could do better than that. So as the bridal party walked up the hillside back to the farm I went home and collected all the instruments we had. In the end Sue played accordion, one of Anne’s daughter played fiddle and Jack Shepherd played clarinet.

St Catherine’s church is alongside the Esk at a point where it is crossed by the old drovers road which goes from Wasdale to Broughton. Close by St Catherines was St Catherines Well. This was supposed to be where a medieval hermit had lived in a hut and had offered prayers for travellers. Some papers in the Rectory indicated that the well had been excavated in the 1930s by Mary Fair but was untouched ever since. Using the photographs from the article I determined to find it. It lay on a plateau above the Esk about half a mile from the church. A few stones had been formed into a crude circle and there were steps going down into it. The area was much overgrown and needed clearing out. But I failed to interest anyone in reclaiming it from the bracken and had to be content with photographing it and leaving in the rectory a few contemporary pictures alongside the 1930s ones.

The Esk was also prone to flooding and as the church was only a few feet above the river it too was at risk. One year I was there as the water rose up the dry stone wall surrounding the churchyard and began to filter through the stones. The Churchwarden was with me and we tried to fill some sand bags and put a board across the door (we had already secured the gateway). But then John Tyson pointed across the board into the church and I realised that the water was simply coming up through the flagstones of the floor and the church would be flooded only. It was then that I realised that these old country churches were built to be flooded and it did little or no lasting damage. They had no foundations and were simply built on the earth.

Waberthwaite had a similar design and was also liable to flooding. It had the added complication of being on the estuary of the Esk. One day I arrived at church to find Greenpeace were there digging soil from the riverbank. They told me it was sufficiently radioactive to be regarded under EU law as low level waste and should be treated as such. The sea brought the radioactivity down from Sellafield and deposited it at high tide in the Ravenglass estuary where a sand bar prevented it being washed out again.

As one of the local clergy I was invited several times to visit Sellafield and shown round the plant. But all questions about safety were dismissed as scare mongering and we were assured each time that the managers knew what they were doing. Each time we knew that in the press the following week would be reports that the company had been fined yet again for breaches of safety and for allowing radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. But as the main employer in the area and a great supporter of local events it was difficult to persuade people that they would be better off without it.

Also up the coast was Marchon chemical works. This produced detergent and was also a great local polluter. Again we had just been on a Chapter visit and were assured that no pollution left the plant when the local press reported that all the cars in the company car park had been stripped of paint after a release of into the atmosphere had turned into sulphuric acid in the rain.

One of my other jobs was to collect water from Blea Tarn which was above the vicarage. This was an ongoing project to test the water for acidity, mainly from the surrounding peat but also from acid rain.

After being involved in clergy training in Zimbabwe the diocese trusted me to help train clergy in the UK so there was a regular stream of ordinands through the parish. Some just came for the day and I would take them around to see the churches, the schools and either the Castle or Woodhall’s Sausages at Waberthwaite. One group from St John’s Durham arrived at the pig farm just as a sow was farrowing. So they watched fascinated as the piglets were born and then Bar Woodhall took them through to show the meat in the mincer filling the sausages. Some of the female students were not impressed and possibly became vegetarian on the spot.

Another student from Denmark stayed for a week and spent most of the time doing the cooking for us including a memorable leek and stilton soup.

The local postmistress, Rosemary, decided to become a reader but she had no transport and the difficulty of getting to Carlisle for the training course would have made it impossible. So I took her through the course and she was duly licensed.

As usual Sue got the local musicians together and formed a band that would play for ceilidhs, string quartets or as a band for shows. A couple of pantomimes were put on at the castle as well as shows for the local schools. Alison went to school in Egremont and her school had a link with a school in Tanzania with a regular student exchange. To help raise the money needed we formed a family group, with one or two others and put on anthologies of poetry and songs. As Nightingales and Noble Sentiments we performed at Knott End Centre, at Wyndham School and also at Rosehill Theatre. Many of the audience were also from the school and had been put off poetry but we managed to persuade them that it didn’t have to be boring.

In the end Sue and Alison went out to Tanzania to help build a clinic and as compensation for missing a trip to Africa I took Dave and John to Switzerland where we managed get stuck in a train in the tunnel up the Jungfrau.

Dave had gone to St Bees School after a few difficult incidents in the village. We discovered that there was a tradition of bullying the clergy children going back at least to the 1950s when Anna Ford had grown up there with her brothers Inigo and Adam. They used to visit with their mother who liked to sit outside the vicarage and told us of their struggles with the local children.

It was made worse by the necessity to spend half an hour on the school bus every morning where the others could get at the vicarage children with no chance of escape. Alison suffered as much as Dave but decided to stick it out at the local secondary school as she had been to five different primary  schools and didn’t want to change secondary’s as well.

Soon after my arrival Ian had told me that there were some outstanding problems that had to be dealt with. One was that the churchyard was running out of space and there was no chance to extend it as the area around the church had been declared a village green; the other was that two couples in the village wanted to get married even though one partner had been divorced and there was at that time pretty much a blanket ban on the remarriage of divorcees; although some clergy were beginning to break the rules.

So I met the couples concerned, one of whom seemed to fit the unofficial criteria for remarriage – remarrying the ‘innocent’ party long after the original marriage had broken down. But the other didn’t. It was clearly an adulterous relationship where a man had left a wife and child behind to come to Cumbria to find work and had no sense of responsibility for his child and no sense of commitment to the new relationship either. Both were from prominent families on the valley. For Ian there was no problem. If other clergy could do it why couldn’t I? The fact that the PCC had policy not to allow it didn’t appear to mean anything either. So I had to go to the PCC ask them to allow the remarriage of divorcees at my discretion and then see the couples and accept one and deny the other. I became the centre of village controversy from which I never recovered and made some powerful enemies.

After I had been working at Knott End for a time, one of the church council turned up at my doorstep insisting I made a statement about what was going on. I pointed out that all I was doing was once a week counselling and the healing services, it hardly interfered with my work for the churches. “And what about you and Gretchen?” There’s nothing to tell, I said. Which I am sure convinced no one. Nothing of course was ‘going on’ but there were those in the valley who were watching me closely and if they couldn’t find anything were quite prepared to make it up.

Shortly after I had arrived I thought I was becoming paranoid. So I asked someone from outside of the parish, but who knew a lot of the people involved, to do a bit of checking up. No, she said after a month or so, you are not paranoid, they are out to get you.

And not just me. After a year or so the headteacher of Eskdale school resigned. To find a bigger school he said. It was only after he had been gone a month or two that he wrote to me giving the real reason. Some of the local parents wouldn’t leave him to get on with teaching. They were always telling him how to do his job. Marking his marking of their children’s work and then handing it back to him.

So when it came to appointing his replacement I knew we had a problem on our hands. It was further complicated by the machinations of the county education officers. The candidate we wanted at the interviews they said they couldn’t support. He had somehow failed their tests of competence as a head. They would only support the other candidate, who was less strong from our point of view. But we had little choice in the face of county opposition. The real reason for their decision became clear when six months later they appointed the “weaker” candidate successfully to a much larger county school; they had wanted to keep him to themselves and not waste his talents on a small village church school.

With the head that they hadn’t wanted the local parents set out from the first to undermine his position. They went into the school to “help with reading and spelling”, but in fact to keep watch. And as he struggled to cope with the pressure, they brought in the county inspectors to place the school under special measures. It was a deliberate attempt to destroy someone’s career. I made some comments at a “confidential” closed governors meeting to consider the situation, and as soon as I got home I was inundated with phone calls and even a visit to pressure me into stopping support for the headteacher.

The real reason for the collapse of standards at the school was the introduction of local management and the imposition of the national curriculum. Both of these prevented small rural schools from having a decent level of staffing. The head had to be a class teacher as well as doing all the paperwork, managing the budget, and coming out of the class to meet with the educational advisors. But of course my comments about that were regarded as unduly political in a rural conservative parish.

At the other church school one of the staff ended up with a breakdown as a result of the stress imposed by the conservative party’s education policies. But rather than look at the real issues the governors there decided that the teacher must be an alcoholic; several parents confirmed smelling alcohol on her breath. Of course the teacher was nothing of the sort, but Maggie Thatcher could do no wrong, and a brilliant teacher was lost to the profession.

I discovered that sorting out the churchyard was not much easier. It was possible to extend the churchyard provided we found an equivalent amount of land to add to the village green. This became possible because the farmer who owned the land around the churchyard was one of the partners of the remarriage I had allowed and so he owed me. But the Open Spaces Society objected and the Charity Commission took five years to get through the paperwork. And the churchyard was filling up. Normally there is no problem about who gets buried, but in small rural churchyards where there are 300 people living in the valley and only ten spaces left in the churchyard there is almost a scramble to grab the spaces. So I refused to allow reservations otherwise we would be turning away those who had died.

But then the emotional blackmail started. One man had died in Kendal, he hadn’t lived in the valley for 36 years but his dying wish was to come back to be buried there. There is no space I said. Would I deny a dying man his last request I was asked. Well he could be cremated and we would accept the ashes I said. No he was set against cremation. And then the phone calls started. It seemed that the whole valley had been contacted to lobby on his behalf. So I was left with no choice but to take the funeral and use up a space that should have gone to a local villager.

And so it went on. The father of a prominent local died in Keswick and he had to go in as well. He had never lived in the valley. We ended up digging up the paths around the churchyard and putting bodies under them.

Finally the paperwork was complete and we were able to enclose the land with a new stone wall – which itself became grade one listed as it was built.

By this time Ian had been ordained as a priest and there were mumblings around the parish that as he was now ordained there was no longer any need for me to be there. As he wanted more responsibility, I tried to get him to take over one of the other parishes as Priest in Charge, but he would accept nothing less than Eskdale. I asked the Diocese to come and discuss it but they simply wanted to support the first sheep farmer to get ordained.

I had taken a month off the year after my father died. Although I had never been that close to him it came as a shock to realise that I never would be. The pressure from the parish didn’t give me much of a chance to work through my feelings and so I had first of all just got in the car and disappeared for a week; and then phoned the bishop to take a month out. I went down to Mary and Martha in Devon and they more or less put me back together, and Sue and I became part of the community there for many years. We volunteered in support of their events and also ran Celtic Spirituality sessions for them with Sue looking after the music and art while I did the poetry and prayer.

They put the Independent in touch with me and I made a half page in the Sunday edition looking at clergy stress. Stress seemed endemic among the Cumbrian clergy. I was asked to speak at one clergy chapter and asked for a straw poll on how many would leave the ministry if they had another house to go to. Over a third said they would. The diocese seemed not to know what was going on. The Archdeacon came to see me and after an hour and a half talking about my healing ministry and the counselling I was doing I thought he was going to ask me to be a part of the new Diocesan Healing Group. But no, instead he asked me to be the church lighting advisor for West Cumbria.

Parish mapping became the buzzword of the age. We were meant to survey the parish, find the needs and how the church could meet them. So we drew up a survey. Questionaires went out to every house in the village. And when they came back they were the usual mix of the possible and the aspirational and the hopelessly optimistic. But included among them were six forms which added anonymous comments in untraceable block capitals about me. About how hopeless I was, how Ian did all the work; how if I felt stressed I should leave and let someone else more capable take over. The trouble was that all these forms had gone to one house where two families lived. To ensure they each had a form someone had helpfully put the names of the occupants at the top. It was the house of Ian the NSM.

One of the more positive comments on the questionnaire was that the church and hall in Eskdale Green needed loos. There had been loos there when it was the village school, but they were long disused. The church wasn’t allowed to bid for lottery funding. So the obvious solution was for the church to hand the hall over to the village as a village hall and then they could apply for the funding. Not so easy. The church was a trust so I wrote to the Charity Commission to ask for advice. They pointed out that actually there were two trusts; the St Begas Church Trust and the Eskdale Lower School Trust. They had been established by the grant of land in the 1890s even though there were no trust deeds and therefore no clear distinction between the church and the hall underneath it. To set up a village hall I would need to formally set up these trusts and establish the Eskdale Village Hall Trust. Then there would have to be a contract between them. And the school trust had to charge market rent to the hall trust in order to maintain its charitable status.

It took several years to set up and I finally managed to sign all the papers before I left. And we had a formal meeting where the rent was duly handed over from the hall trustees to the school trustees (the same people) who dutifully handed it back as a grant for the educational purposes of the hall. I didn’t like to point out that as all the trusts had an income of only a few hundred pounds a year they could all be wound up as soon as they were established.

Then Ian was asked to be on the BBC Sunday programme as the first sheep farmer to be ordained. By coincidence I knew the producer. Linda Mary had been first at university with me and then at Theological College. So on the day before the programme went out live from Ian’s farm I had dinner with her at the local hotel. Interestingly at no point had he mentioned to them that he was only an NSM, or that there was a parish priest in the parish.

Shortly after that there was a mysterious death in California. It appeared that Ian Spiro had killed his wife and children and then shot himself. Conspiracy theories abounded. Ian had been about to publish a book on the Iran-Contra affair. The CIA, Mossad, and several other agencies would have wanted to avoid publication. My problem was that the family had for a time lived in the parish of Irton, had attended St Catherines and their English relatives wanted the funeral in Eskdale. I suggested a funeral at Irton where the churchyard had a lot of space and there was more room to accommodate the likely congregation. But Ian Spiro’s mother in law was a friend of NSM Ian so there was no discussion. With international press interest immediately aroused, I was fielding calls from all over the world asking for access to the funeral and for the contact details of the family. So I quickly decided to involve Eric Robson who lived locally. He agreed to become the spokesman for the family and the church – all press calls would go through him and he would issue whatever statement the family wanted to make. As far as I know this was so successful that the press never found the family.

At the funeral there were 24 reporters, six satellite dishes and many photographers. I agreed with Eric that we should hold a press conference after the service, which had included a rabbi saying Kadish for Ian Spiro. That enabled the family to get away to an unknown destination for the funeral tea. The first question, after burying five members from the same family who had died in controversial circumstances, from the assembled reporters came from the BBC – How do you think that went then?

All I heard from the family, after protecting them for a month from press intrusion into the lives of their family, was that I had arranged a media circus for my own self-aggrandisment.

A year after I left I was phoned by the BBC in Newcastle and asked to take part in a programme about the deaths. They had heard that the funeral was the cause of my leaving Eskdale. I declined and pointed out that by then I had already decided to leave and was simply waiting for Ali to complete her A levels so that we wouldn’t disrupt her education yet again. I went to see the bishop. I said I was looking for a parish that would accept me as a person and value me as a priest. He said I had better look outside the diocese then.

So I went off to London, to No 10 Downing Street, to the Appointments Advisor again and my name went on the list. From that I got a letter from Tony Dumper asking me to look at Sedgley in the West Midlands a traditional parish which was ready to move forward.

When I knew I was leaving I felt able to ask the question that had been nagging me for six years. Which was why the people of Waberthwaite didn’t get on with the people of Eskdale? The other parishes worked well together on shared events or supporting each other’s services. But Waberthwaite at Eskdale, never. So finally after a funeral where I had gone off with the coffin to the crematorium and returned an hour and a half later to find the Waberthwaite congregation still in the pub, I asked the question.

They didn’t tell us the Scots were coming, I was told. In 1136.