The hero

(I am struggling to process where Bink is and what she is doing.

Sometimes it is easier to tell the story of something you’ve processed already…)

April and May 2009

The other thing chips do when they’re down is show your colours.

One of us emerged way ahead in our battle with Shaun’s employing church, a hero in stature beyond us all.

When WW2 broke out my father was twenty one. I’ve often wondered at such courage, in one who seems to me now so young.

He was a conscientious objector.

He also objected to being put in a safe office job in Blighty after his tribunal. So he – and his clergyman father, deeply ashamed of his son’s unpatriotic stance but nonetheless, and to his great credit, backing him up – fought for a rôle for him on the front line, and he joined the Medical Corps.

When orderlies were ordered to bear arms, my father decided he preferred to face a firing squad on earth, than his Maker in heaven if he betrayed his principles… his life only saved by a countermand from the Geneva Conference the next day.

That was courage? No.

What was courage was that on her deathbed my 99-year-old aunt, his much-loved sister, was still claiming my father brought shame on his family.

Courage is going against the crowd.

We are herd animals. Survival in conformity. The one who changes direction, trampled; out alone, starves. Extremely strong instinct, and good reason for it. (Cf. the Milgram Experiment?)

The younger you are, the bigger the crowd, the more astonishing the courage.

When we said goodbye to Oxford we left Ben behind.

Not quite twenty-one.

He was adding music A level to his portfolio, and staying with his tutor till the exam. So he was still in the city for Shaun’s ex-church’s AGM. He asked me if he should go.

Totally up to you, Ben. If you want to hear how they explain the agreement, the payment, your father’s departure, then do. If it would distress or annoy you, no need whatsoever.

Several people rang, late that night, after the meeting.

Stunned.

That church had an electoral roll of hundreds. The large church was packed.

The speeches well prepared. Very slick. Very neat. No mention of compensation or lawyers or liability. Shaun’s breakdown, merely. End of discussion. Let’s move on.

Business shifts itself.

Just a moment, Ben gets to his feet. I don’t think that’s quite how it was.

And he starts to tell a different story...

Big guns step in and say, thank you Ben, most helpful, let’s move on, shall we.

Not quite yet. Ben isn’t finished.

Three times, quietly but firmly, That’s not my father you’re describing. Not quite how it was. Not quite accurate. Three times, till he is eventually silenced.

His rebel ancestors called it the Speech from the Dock. We English can do rebellion too, and his maternal grandfather clearly passed his courage on.

Completely futile, one admiring witness told me afterwards.

But absolutely magnificent.

The hero of our family, Ben is.

Not sure I’ve ever told him quite how proud of him I am. For ever. And a bit.

Telling him now, innit.

... of mind?

May 2009 [cont…]

So the third and last payment from the church had arrived.

£500 short.

Having lived fourteen years in a vicarage in a parish technically classed as Inner City, we knew every con in the book.

One we had witnessed a number of times went as follows:

Can I have some quids to bury my granny / reach my dying child in Penzance / fill up the car I’ll bring it back tomorrow without fail here look I’ll leave you this nicked and broken phone as proof that I’ll come back / whatever.

I’m sorry: we never, ever give money. We’ll willingly feed you / ring the embassy / help find you a hostel / whatever.

After a tedious amount of this so-tedious negotiation, the request will suddenly shift ground.

Can I use your toilet / take my shoes off in your porch / have a glass of water / whatever.

The point being that no con man worth his salt will ever willingly go away with nothing. It ain’t professional. He has to save face somehow. Even though this means having to ask for something completely pointless.

Thus it was now.

£500? What was the point of withholding £500? The point was to save face.

Wearily, I rang the church office again. Another oversight. You’ve made a slight mistake: £500 short.

Ah, she said. Yes. That’s because you didn’t leave the cottage clean.

Now, we had spent several hundred pounds on a cleaning firm to go over that cottage for two days when we moved out. Not because we had to. Not because it was in the agreement. But because, all said and done, we wanted to leave on an amicable note. We could afford it. Now.

We even had to ask the cleaners to come before we left rather than after, because when we suggested having the place cleaned at our expense afterwards, when it would be completely empty and much easier to clean, we were told we had to be out by that day, the date was specified in the agreement, and even though there were no plans for the cottage for the foreseeable, that included our cleaners.

So we’d watched them work and knew they’d done a thorough job.

Indeed, when the vicar collected the key, he even said, Gosh it’s very clean!

Besides which, keeping any of the money back, for any reason, had very much not been in the agreement, was a breach of contract and was therefore illegal. They might as well have paid us nothing.

I asked the hapless church secretary what exactly hadn’t been clean?

The oven, she said.

The oven. The cleaners had overlooked the inside of the oven.

I rang Mark Jones: £500 to clean an oven.

Are they planning to get a lawyer to clean this oven? our solicitor asked.

Please will you write a letter demanding the payment of the final £500?

You realise, Mark said, it could cost you a lot more than £500 to recover this £500?

And I suddenly realised I didn’t care.

It was nothing to do with money. Just as it wasn’t, for the church. They didn’t need £500. They needed to win. Even if it was only a tiny, pointless, childish little token win, they needed that glass of water as much as the con man at the door.

And it was nothing to do with money for me, either.

It was because, for the last eight weeks since the agreement had been signed, I had slept. Like a baby. Through the night. (Unlike most babies you and I know, but like the proverbial baby anyway.) Till dawn. Not half way through the dark. For the first time in four and a half years.

And now I wasn’t again.

And that was worth a lot more to me than £500.

If it’s not in our account by five o’clock this afternoon, I told the vicar, you’ll be hearing from our solicitor.

It wasn’t.

The next morning I rang him again and told him a letter was on its way.

It will be there in a moment, he said. Now, please leave me alone. Please, don’t ring me again.

(Ah. So now you know what it’s like? To feel hounded and bullied. Not to sleep at night. To lose your peace of mind?

You’ve experience it overnight: we, for nearly five years.)

The best of it all was, few months later I received a bill for £400. 

I, not Shaun. Even though he was the employee and the legal agreement was with him. (Obviously, you can’t bill a man for not cleaning an oven. It’s not a man’s fault if an oven isn’t clean, is it?)

I wanted to frame that invoice. £400 for not cleaning an oven. In the end I did something much better with it.

I lost it.

Instead of my peace of mind.

New life

Mid-February to March 2009

Life really can turn on a sixpence. For good or ill.

More often for ill, alas: a child runs into the road; a horse stumbles jumping a gate. Much more likely than the unexpected promotion; the selling of film-rights or silly advance. And they say a Lottery jackpot seldom brings happiness…

How often, over those weeks, I thought of that tenner I threw away on the Lotto, so low I was... and smiled at my folly.

How God must have laughed the more: I was always minded to give you a windfall... but not with a raffle ticket, you nit-wit! (Does God talk like that? Not to Abram maybe – though he could be a pretty spectacular NW, couldn’t he? – but quite possibly to me.)

It’s not how God does miracles. A brilliant lawyer; a conscientious doctor; a lot of work and dedication. After all, haven’t we seen a miracle this last year, with Bink?

And how dramatically our lives had been turned, in those two evenings we’d spent at the Manor House!

As we thought back to that bizarre Monday night, wondering why the church gave us the money anyway – surely they knew enough, now, to guess Shaun might have a new post – we decided his so endearing anti-bartering, arguing himself out of n figures before I could jump in and stop him, had worked in his favour. A higher amount would have been harder to justify.

And of course Pinky and Perky had spent the intervening week lobbying to vote us out: perhaps not so easy to turn round thirty-five independent-minded professionals.

And they didn’t absolutely know Shaun had a new job. Suppose they voted against… and found themselves stuck with us?

Someone who’d been there told us his argument. “For goodness’ sake, let the Atkinses have it! it’s not a huge amount, is it?" (Not to him, maybe…)

“It’s only money.”

As I thought of Mark’s genius in changing our lives so dramatically (by the way, never tangle with your lawyer: apparently an earlier post accused him of split infinities, so he is now offering different paradises as part of his services); and remembered his words, “You aren’t doing anything wrong”; and was tempted yet again to feel guilty at taking money from a church, I considered what money could do.

It was the kind of church always into swanky building projects: some churches are. That money wouldn’t have educated three dozen children in the developing world.

It would have provided an extra loo in the new church hall.

That, or my parents’ last years with us.

I couldn’t really feel guilty, could I?

We put an offer on the only house we’d looked at, the one I’d found on the internet. It reminded me of my childhood home: I needed no more. And had come down in price by a third, on the market for several years.

We had no idea about mortgages. For all we knew, it was twice what we could afford. Or half.

Then the most enjoyable job of all. I wrote to my parents, inviting them to live with us. I showed it to Shaun and he added a PS: how much pleasure it would give us.

So thoughtful. It hadn’t occurred to me.

My parents have always been careful. Independent. Conscientious. Would mull for months. Perhaps give a tentative answer by Christmas.

The next day, Saturday, a blissful lie-in: no more to strive for. Only our move and new life to look forward to.

Tea and books in bed.

Shortly after nine, the post not long arrived, my parents on the telephone: both of them, different extensions.

“Yes,” they both said. “Please.”

They must have been desperate. For so long…

Rather late in the day, I asked everyone. Are you ok with Granny and Grandfather living with us?

Alex was home for Easter. (Having left Cambridge University for lack of disability support, he’d moved to Bristol and was loving it.)

He had no idea what we’d been through. Accusations, threats, terror, midnight reversal.

“All this?” he said. “And I knew nothing?”

“You said you didn’t want to,” I reminded him. “Worry. If you couldn’t help.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”

We had discussed how long it would take Alex to notice, if he came home and we’d all moved out, left for Bedford, not troubled to tell him.

“A few weeks?” Ben hazarded. “He’d bump into Joanna or Mensun in the street eventually, and ask if they’d seen us anywhere.”

“Why do you ask?” Alex said. “Whether they should move in with us? Why does it need asking?”

“Well… we try to act by consensus, don’t we? Old people can become pretty demanding, to look after. It’s your home.”

(When they were much younger, I’d invited Shaun’s father to live with us, in our London vicarage, when he’d been homeless. Very sadly, two years later we’d had to ask him to leave. Alex, aged five, had climbed into his bed at dawn, and when asked why, said, “I wanted a cuddle, Granddad. Before you’re too drunk in the day.”

So we’d learnt that children’s needs must always be put before parents’.)

Now Alexander applied his flawless Aspergic logic.

“Either they won’t need much. In which case they’ll be no trouble. Or they will, in which case they need us.

“So yes. Either way.

“Obviously.”

...gone. Next door.

Mid-February 2009

Joanna’s philosophy of life was beautifully simple.

Good news: champagne.

Bad news: gin.

This humble ideology had kept us going for three years. You’d think, given our lives at the time, on a lot more spirit than fizz. But there was a further refinement to Joanna’s so straightforward thesis:

If there is the tiniest smidgeon of any doubt whatsoever, it’s probably champagne.

There was not much ambiguity that evening.

A juniper night. Having just lost all that compensation, and the possibility of our own home.

However, perhaps because it was after eight o’clock, we broke with custom and hit Mensun’s rather good library of whiskies instead of Joanna’s usual Blue Bombay.

Seeing as Mensun was out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Shaun consoled me.

“It really doesn’t,” Joanna echoed. “Shaun’s got a job to go to. That’s what matters.”

“We’ve got nowhere to live,” I pointed out.

“We’ll find something,” Shaun said.

“It’s not that we want to lose you,” Joanna said. “We’d love to have you next door for ever. But what you’ve always wanted is to move on. Now you can.”

She was emphatic.

“It’s only money.”

“But it isn’t,” I said. “That’s the whole point. It isn’t only money.

“It’s my parents’ last years with us.”

That money represented something much more important than money. Presumably money often does. A loving, godly couple in their early nineties, who had poured out their whole lives caring for others, and were now increasingly unable to care for themselves.

Money could have spelt the difference between misery and happiness, for the gloaming of their days. The end to their increasingly desperate loneliness. The difference between being unable to leave the house even to shop, my mother now so dependent on my father; nothing and no one to look forward to, except church once a week; the simplest of suppers on their own, which my father could barely cook any more; dwindling into the dark, alone...

Or being surrounded by loving young family, as every old person or couple should be.

That was the difference. It wasn’t money. It was people and love and no less than they so richly deserved.

And it was gone.

Joanna poured me another finger of Talisker.

Mensun got in around ten to find his single malt some way below the Plimsol line.

Nearly eleven.

“Just ringing to say we’re coming home, Ben.” He had stayed in the cottage, Rosie asleep upstairs. “Any news?”

“Nope.”

Strange… But not that strange: they hadn’t bothered to tell us after the meeting, nearly four years earlier, which left us homeless. We had waited hour after hour, then; Shaun finally, most reluctantly, ringing the vicar just after eleven, when I absolutely said he had to, to learn that we had no roof over our heads as of tomorrow.

We got up. Just saying our goodbyes, Ben again. “You left yet?”

“Just about to.”

“Don’t. Stay there.”

We settled back down. Five minutes. Ten.

What was he doing? What fresh disaster had overtaken us?

Following my blog as he is, Ben insisted, over supper last night, that I tell his side of the story accurately.

There he was, minding his own business (and his sleeping sister) in that tiny little cottage… one delightful eccentricity of which was that its front door stood directly on the pavement; and on the inside of the door, invisible to the caller, were several steps up into its cramped hallway. So anyone inside the cottage answering the door was automatically two foot taller than the person on the street.

(Given that we lived with Serena’s Great Dane whose head was already four foot off the floor, this could be quite disconcerting when you rang the doorbell for the first time, and found yourself greeted by massive jaws hallooing you through the large letter box, at the height of your average Tyrannosaurus Rex.)

When the doorbell rang at around eleven o’clock that night, Ben opened it to find the person who’d been bullying us relentlessly for quite a long time now, his head just about reaching Ben’s navel.

“Is your father in?”

“No.”

This was not how the script was supposed to go. We should have been there, doing nothing, hour after hour after anxious hour...

“Your mother?”

“She’s out too. Would you like some tea?” Ben added charmingly. He knew, of old, that Pinky was addicted to tea.

“No!” He collected himself, “thank you. You’d better give them this.”

Given the look on his face, Ben judged that we might not want to bump into him in the street. On a dark and lonely night.

Indeed, we never saw him again.

(Though curiously, because his name has the same initials as our son-in-law’s, I’ve lost count of the times my telephone has nearly dialled him by mistake. Someone in the family recently asked why I didn’t delete him… or substitute the name for something rather more rude. Sentimentality, I suppose. And a proper upbringing.)

Ten days earlier Shaun had come in through that kitchen door, having just been offered the job that spelt our so delirious liberation. An age later that evening Ben come down the same old, worn stone steps between our two gardens, through the friendly night, letting himself in through the same ancient and kindly stable door.

Bearing an A4 manilla aloft.

“Got it,” he said.

“Got what?”

“The agreement.”

“What agreement?”

Ben knew nothing of the call just after eight, asking if Shaun had a job already. Nor of my call to Mark Jones immediately afterwards, confirming what I feared. Nor that we had given up all hope hours ago.

He must have thought we’d been imbibing a lot more than whisky.

“The money. They’ve signed.”

Having been brought up in a vicarage, however, Ben did know, all six foot of him, that if a woman bursts into tears and howls and grabs you round the waist and refuses to let go, you just hold her quietly until she’s finished.

“I think,” Joanna said, “we need to open some champagne.”

... going...

Mid-February 2009, Monday morning

I don’t think I slept much, that Sunday night…

Nine o’clock the next morning, Lawyer Number Two. Not in yet. Ring back mid-morning.

Oh, what?

Mid-morning, at last… I read him the email.

Forget it, he said. As soon as they know Shaun has a job, the deal will be off.

But what about all our trauma? The injuries Shaun has sustained? Everything our children have been through?

The church picked this fight with us: it wasn’t our idea.

(Or rather, Pinky and Perky, representing the church. As I’ve said before, most of the people of God in that place would have been appalled at what was being done to us.) Over and over again, I had begged: could we not be collaborative? They would ruin us, this way. They didn’t need to persuade us to leave. Why not simply help Shaun to a new job, as friends and fellow Christians?

Rather than shoving us to the gangplank and making us turn and fight...

Now that we had spent a considerable amount of time researching and detailing our grievances, we knew they were considerable. And legitimate.

Well yes, the lawyer said. If you really want to put your energy into a court case, for years and years to come. You could do that.

But I would let it go, he said.

(Yeah, well you probably have your own house, already.)

What the church is frightened of, is an Employment Tribunal, he said. And if Shaun now has a job to go to, there’s no case to answer.

If you remember, Lawyer Number Two had personal friends in the church.

“What your husband should do, Mrs Atkins, is get a job and take the money. Both.” I could still hear Mark Jones’s words (Lawyer Number Four) clear as the winter wind blowing across the Fens, as Serena and I had walked through Trinity a few weeks earlier.

Would you prefer, I asked Lawyer Number Two, that we take it to a different lawyer?

His relief was audible.

Mark answered immediately.

He had a few hours, to achieve the impossible. After getting up to speed. The meeting was at eight o’clock that evening.

Would he take it on?

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Wow.

I sent him the email, received the previous night, adding the new condition: that the agreement would only be binding if Shaun had no job to go to. The challenge was to invalidate that proviso, without alerting them as to why.

As you see. Impossible. No way to do this.

Nevertheless, Mark is an absolute, complete, total, amazing, brilliant... every superlative I can think of (though he does split his infinities – probably a lawyer thing, to confuse the opposition) ... life-changing, wonderful genius.

And friend.

And hero.

Taking on a case like that at eleven on a Monday morning.

But even Mark couldn’t achieve the impossible. Presumably.

I felt sick all day.

That afternoon I was appearing on the Titchmarsh Show again. Second time in a week. Shaking far too much to drive. Too late to ask them to send a car.

Shaun drove me. He couldn’t have done what I was doing. And I couldn’t have driven. Teamwork.

All the journey there and all the journey back, on the telephone to Mark. He spent all afternoon on that letter. Most of it in his own, un-invoiced time... I discovered later.

I had to ask him.

I’d never felt so churned in my life. Head in a vice. Stomach going round a washing machine. And then shrinking in the tumble dryer.

Thus I would feel, if I were robbing a bank.

Pounding, non-stop. Tightened in a winch, and then some.

Thus must Bink feel, every moment of her waking life. And perhaps quite a lot when she’s asleep, too.

“Can I ask you a very important question?”

Mark is a highly principled Christian with impeccable integrity. This much was obvious.

(If slightly less integrity in his grammatical infinitives.)

“Is what we’re doing wrong?” I asked him. Were we being greedy? Should we just let it go?

I’ve never heard anyone so definite in his answer.

“Absolutely not.” Mark was very firm and sure. “Their lawyer’s duty was to get the best deal he could for the church. (Not a very good job done, in my view, but that’s not my business.)

“My duty, to get the best for you.

“You are not doing anything wrong.”

We got back in the late afternoon. Still much to do.

That cottage was so small, you could see right through the ground floor just by glancing in from the street.

Some instinct prompted me to send everyone upstairs. Just as well. When the doorbell rang, most insistently, we were able to ignore it. Without diving under the kitchen table.

Mark had drafted the letter, at last.

“Most disappointed at this extra condition being imposed... Last minute changes... Not the agreement... You have not remembered our conversation correctly... not an accurate record of it.”

Copy it out it by hand, by fountain pen, I told Shaun. (I didn’t quite add that he should flick a few schoolboy blotches on it, to make it look spontaneous.)

Email from Pinky just before seven. Have been trying to contact you for three days. Email, telephone, even calling at the cottage in person. Will assume the deal is off.

No time for that now.

Everything in A4 manila. Contract signed – two ways. Mark wanted the money paid one way, but didn’t want that to snag business so had prepared both in case someone baulked.

Here, Ben! Drive into Oxford. This must reach Pinky by eight. That’s when the meeting starts. In the church. If necessary, interrupt them all, to make sure they have it.

It must be in his hands by eight o’clock.

Then I rang an old friend, due at the meeting. Spoke to his wife. He’d had a prior commitment: it had been too short notice. She promised to bicycle to the church there and then, and make sure the documents had arrived.

Bless you!

Phew. All done.

Just after eight. Pinky’s number ringing mine. Over and over again. I can’t ignore people. No idea why. Weakness of mine.

“Hello?”

Straight in. No pleasantries. “Has Shaun got another job?”

When I was about five, I lied to my mother that I’d cleaned my teeth. She knew immediately – my toothbrush was bone dry, and exactly where I’d left it that morning – and I’ve had a bit of a thing about lying, ever since. Can’t really do it.

Don’t believe in it.

“You’ll have to ask him,” I flustered.

All the time we’d lived in that cottage, we’d complained about the terrible mobile reception. You had to go across the road, to talk.

I love the way God uses our complaints, sometimes, to bless us.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello, hello? I can’t hear you. What did you say? Are you still there?”

I hung up. He tried a few more times, but I didn’t bother any more.

I rang Mark, never expecting him still to be in the office. (Or as he would say, to still be.)

He was.

I told him.

I’m sorry, he said. I tried.

(Gosh. A lawyer. And he really seems to care. Or even, seems to really care.)

They knew Shaun had a job to go to.

It was pretty inevitable, all along. There would not be any deal. Once Pinky had realised his mistake.

“Joanna,” I rang next door, to the Manor House. “Can we come over? We need cheering up.”

A very expensive joke

Monday, mid-February 2009

It was before ten o’clock the next morning (after we sent our letter and appendix – refuting all the allegations against Shaun, and countering with several pages of our own – to all the Parochial Parish Council, bishop, vicar, Uncle Tom Cobley and virtually everyone we could think of bar the Daily Mail) when Pinky and Perky, the two cheerleaders, asked if we could meet up.

A bite, by Jove!

What a surprise…

They suggested two o’clock so I said not before three. For absolutely no reason whatsoever. Except, I could.

I then rang Lawyer Number Two. Could he get to Oxford by three, to negotiate please? Long before he said he’d never get there in time I realised that he was the last person we wanted in the room.

He’d never been in such a situation, had no idea how to read it, couldn’t even begin to guess what sort of sum to suggest.

I, however, had often been in such a situation, albeit in a mini-mini-micro kind of way...

Will you do this radio programme for a fiver?

How about twenty-five? And a puncture allowance because I’ll be biking to the studio.

Ten is the most we ever pay. But we’ll send a car for you.

Twenty. And bike mileage.

I really don’t know... I’ll have to refer it up. We never pay that much, usually.

I’ve been a freelance all my working life. I sacked a top agent, when I realised I was negotiating higher fees myself while the office was shut down over Christmas.

(It’s not even the money, per se. It’s the fact that they pay Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand three mill to abuse Andrew Sachs, and then can’t afford to pay the rest of us...)

“Right,” I instructed Shaun. “There may come a point when I have to leave the room. I am absolutely definitely never ever ever signing any confidentiality agreement whatsoever,” (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?) “so there may be details I don’t want to know.

“But as soon as we get onto money,” I said, “keep your mouth shut! I’ve been negotiating fees since ever, ok?”

“Ok,” he said.

Apart from anything, Shaun would give his shirt away if the rest of us let him. He’s given his best coat to a tramp, more than once. (Not the same tramp.) Which, ok, is quite a pleasant characteristic in a clergyman... under usual circs.

“So don’t say a word, when it comes to money. Got that? Oh, and no tea, coffee, any of that palaver. This is business.”

“Right.”

Just before three. Dring.

I showed them into the little sitting-room.

Tiny though the cottage was, it was divided by its staircase, so the sitting-room was one end and kitchen and other gubbins, the other.

We waited.

Shaun must know they were here. Every room was a few seconds’ reach from the doorbell.

And waited.

Good, I thought. Not like Shaun at all. Keeping them waiting...

Rosie hovered in the doorway. Eventually, “Can you tell Daddy they’re here?”

Seventeen minutes past, Shaun showed up.

Right, I said. This clause here. Confidentiality. Rest of the family can’t sign that.

Ok, they said.

Eh? I thought. That was a bit too easy.

And this clause here, about the cottage. Not appropriate for a clergyman.

No, they said.

Coo, I thought.

And we can’t possibly move out next week. How about... (I mused into the middle distance)... 18th April? (We had just, that morning, succeeded in bringing forward Shaun’s new job by a term... to 20th April. We could slum it for a day in between.)

Fair enough, they said.

Blimey.

So it’s just down to the horsetrading, I said.

Indeed, they said. And laughed a little nervously.

Well now, I said, and took a long breath. We’ve been advised that it would be absolutely and completely absurd even to consider anything under n figures, I said.

And waited for the bark of hollow laughter and the suggestion that we get real.

It never came.

I see, said one.

Which end of n figures would that be? said the other.

Holy s***. 

They must be absolutely terrified.

(Our letter and its appendix was quite good, then…?)

It was at this point that I completely lost my nerve. We’d never owned n figures. We’d never even imagined n figures. I didn’t know what n figures looked like. I’d only said that as a joke. Like, you know, when you’re in the bazaar in Istanbul and you say you’ll buy a priceless handmade silk rug for two and six. And then realise you’ve just starved a family of ten for a year.

If I’d spent a few seconds anticipating n figures for real, my answer would have been very different. I didn’t have time to think, I was so shocked.

The lower end, I said. Of course.

Right, they said. And breathed out.

And that would have been that. n figures. Crikey. Beyond our wildest dreams.

Except muggins on the sofa, my husband, saw fit at this moment to shove his oar in.

After all, we’ll need moving costs, he said.

(Eh? Keep quiet, Shaun. We’re done now.)

And rent.

(No we won’t. Only one day’s rent!)

And something to live off...

(You’ll be on a salary, you twerp.)

And... you see, we wouldn’t be able to stay with friends for more than a few weeks...

The figure was rapidly plummeting from n figures to n-1 figures before my eyes. I jumped in quickly, shut him up and closed the deal. The last thirty seconds had just lost us a very great deal of money.

“What on earth were you doing?” I said after we showed them out. “They were just about to give us n figures, till you chipped in. I told you not to say a word when it came to the bartering.”

Bear in mind, reader dear, that my darling husband was still recovering from a very debilitating breakdown.

“Oh, is that what you said? I couldn’t for the life of me remember. Only that it was very important. That’s why I waited so long in the kitchen, hoping you’d come and get me so I could ask you.”

What am I married to?

Why not tell Rose to fetch me? Why not pop your noddle round the door and ask if I could come out for a private word?

Because my darling husband, for all his brilliance, never thinks of the simplest things.

I can’t ring my mother: I don’t know her number. So ring your sister, you muppet, and ask her!

Never thinks of it.

You’re three hours later than you said.

Yes, sorry. Didn’t have my ’phone.

So... why not borrow one? Like the barman’s, for instance?

Oh! (Astonished.) I didn’t think of that.

(Even though I’ve been suggesting it for several decades.)

We laughed for the rest of the afternoon. And again that night. And all the following week.

What a twit! And yet so clever… when it comes to Kierkegaard.

It still makes me laugh, now.

A very, very expensive joke.

Worth every penny.

Still is...

Deadline

Saturday, mid-February 2009

It was about seven thirty the next morning when I remembered.

Mark Jones.

Lawyer Number Four.

(Perhaps I should explain that the church, too, had insisted we consult a lawyer. Even offered to pay. I later thought perhaps this is a legal requirement, if you sack someone? Only thing was, their budget was just enough to pay for the kind of lawyer who would tell us to sign anything, at first skim-reading. Presumably a cheap lawyer can be as dangerous as a cheap personal trainer. Or, worse, hairdresser. You end up in more of a mess than doing it yourself in the bathroom mirror.

Anyway, we had done as instructed. No point paying for all that cleverness if you don’t listen to it, is there?)

Mark’s words had lodged, like tiny shining seeds, glistening in my memory.

Something is missing from this settlement offer. I wouldn’t have drawn it up like this.

“What your husband should do, Mrs Atkins,” I could still hear his clear, courteous words as I walked up The Avenue in Trinity, “is get a job, and take the money. Both.”

“Shaun,” I kicked him awake. “He mustn’t announce it.”

He rolled over in the other direction. Joanna had insisted on quite a lot of champagne...

“Oi. This is important.”

“Nhhnnm.”

“The Head Master. He mustn’t announce your appointment. Not until we’ve taken legal advice.”

“I can’t tell him that!”

“I can. Give me his number.”

It wasn’t quite eight o’clock. The Head was still at home.

“Would you mind,” I asked, “please, not telling anyone about Shaun’s appointment? Yet.”

I explained briefly.

“I don’t mind. But I told the bishop last night.”

“Could you tell him not to, as well?”

“Yes.”

He sounded, if anything, amused.

Of course.

He knew what we’d been through, because I’d nearly pulled out of going to speak at his church six months earlier, when Shaun had a breakdown.

Not a soul. No exceptions whatsoever. Not even Alex, away at university.

Not even my parents.

I hate secrets.

(That Saturday afternoon an old friend, an elderly clergyman, came to pray with us and support us: Shaun with no job to go to, and all. It felt bad, not telling him. Very bad indeed. When we eventually did, over a week later, asking him not to breathe a word to anyone, he instantly announced it to an entire conference of fifty clergy. Must be the long years of confidentiality training in the confessional, I suppose. Leakier than a popped paper bag in the bath.)

Shaun’s response to the settlement offer was due in by tomorrow, Sunday. The four-week deadline. 

We had written the letter and appendix. Refuting everything, accepting nothing.

It now just needed a final paragraph. The merest hint that he might be open to negotiation, perhaps…

I had made it very clear, in person, a number of times, that we could never afford a settlement without Shaun’s having another post to go to. We never could accept one. We needed a roof over our children’s heads.

If anyone had believed me, they would now know he had a job offer.

I also knew they wouldn’t.

Some churches are like that.

I’m a woman.

We had the weekend to read and reread and check.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have Mark Jones’s out-of-hours number. So, Sunday evening, we ran our week’s work past Lawyer Number Two. He couldn’t see any spelling mistakes.

The two cheerleaders would expected a discreet response, just to them. Shaun wouldn’t want the entire church knowing he’d been accused of Gross Misconduct, surely?

I thought it would be fun to deliver, by hand, hard copy to everyone on the church Parochial Church Council, as well as to the bishop. But there were nearly forty of them. An amusing gesture, but it would take us all night.

Email to everyone would have to do.

Shortly before midnight we sat round the table. (All Atkinses except Rose, in bed; and Alex, at university – I’d asked him if he wanted to be kept informed, but he said no: it would worry him.)

Agreeing that we were ready.

We pressed send...

Friendship

Mid-January 2009

[Spot the date, above. So you don’t get as confused as I am, most of the time. With all these spaghetti threads of story waving their drunken Hydra tendrils, constituting my life.

For instance yesterday… spending four and a half hours the moment I came out of a meeting: asking my father’s care provider why she hadn’t told me on Thursday that she couldn’t get care in place for him to come home from hospital, so Shaun and I rushed all the way back from Norfolk to welcome him only to find his room empty; sending texts to all the carers I could think of asking if they were available; finally getting care in place for the weekend… and then discovering the provider had pulled it because she doesn’t like the client making the arrangements; ringing another provider at five o’clock yesterday afternoon asking if they could produce 24-hour-care out of a hat till Monday; ringing the ward half a dozen times to say don’t cancel the ambulance… so my father could come home, where we’ve promised him he can die. Not that I think he will, now he’s home. Not immediately.

Settling him by his fire and Shaun’s pouring him far too strong a whisky and just being glad he’s here. Welcome home, Daddy. Can we resume our Virgil tomorrow? We’re nearly at the end of Ænead IV: please don’t leave us before Dido does.

(And now, of course, determined to sack the care provider since I’m the one that has all this hassle every time… but this will mean sacking all the familiar faces around a dying man.)

Next time you read about bed-blockers, this is what it takes. And about £800 of my father’s money, to free up his hospital bed for the weekend and have him home… Not willing to waste a penny of the NHS, am I, given the nothing there isn’t for Bink?

We resume the story we left off a week ago, after Shaun received his letter of accusation. You remember: he was guilty of Gross Misconduct. Four pages of it.]

So I went upstairs, with my telephone, into that bathroom piled high with cardboard boxes full of books and other possessions as the whole cottage was, and locked the door.

I’ve no idea why. I suppose I didn’t want Shaun to hear me. And worry any more.

You may have read my earlier post, The Sun King, about our dear, wonderful and generous friend Louis. And his gorgeous pad in Scotland which became my home for three lonely and beautiful months, when we had nowhere to live.

Louis and I were at Oxford together. Then we lost touch, and reunited some years later when he came and helped lead the Christian CYFA Venture Holidays Shaun and I used to run together.

The first time he bailed us out – he often has since – was after a house-group he came to in our sitting-room during Shaun’s second curacy. House-groups are smaller groups within a church, which get together in someone’s home for bible study, prayer and being nice to each other. After you’ve poured over a passage of Scripture and asked rather-too-obvious questions, you usually share prayer needs; and earlier that day I’d bonked our car against someone else’s bumper on the school run and was terrified we might be stung for £20 or so. (It was presumably another Christian driver, since our children were at a Christian nursery school… actually thanks to Louis, now I think about it, as he’d told us about it. Sadly, sometimes – not usually, in my experience; but occasionally – Christians care about their cars as much as the next man. Fair enough.)

In those days, living on a curate’s income or more accurately lack of as we were, £20 was enough to reduce me to a helpless sobbing jelly before lunch: as when the washing machine broke down (which it often did as we had a second-hand one and washed several bottom’s worth of nappies every week) and a friend fixed it for us… but the engineer can’t be cancelled now love ’e’s on ’is way so you’ll still have to pay the call-out when he turns up. Waaah-waaah. For several hours.

So please, I said, could we pray that the other driver couldn’t be bothered, as we hadn’t got £20?

Louis had a quiet word with me afterwards, and told me to send him the bill. The worry fell off me like Pilgrim’s burden.

Louis is Ben’s godfather, and adored by all of us. He is a very, very special friend, and the rest of our lot are pretty fed up with Ben, for bagging him at the font.

(I can say all this freely, because the chance of Louis’s reading my blog is nil. I was once reduced to mentioning him in the acknowledgements to one of my novels, in the hope that it would shame him into reading it. It didn’t. Hello, Louis?? Anybody out there? Helloooo?! I’m about to smash your grandfather Louis’s priceless set of Louis XIV crystal champagne glasses! See? Silence.)

So I locked the door, and dialled his number, and got his voicemail as I’d expected to. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, when Louis is presumably a tad distracted, running the London Stock Exchange.

I knew he wouldn’t be there, answering what he calls his cellphone, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I don’t usually leave a message for busy people.

“Hi Louis. We’re in deepest shit. Um. That’s it really.”

I don’t think I even say goodbye, before hanging up.

It was nearly twelve hours before he returned the call. Gone ten thirty. Ready for bed.

At that time you could still have two people on different handsets on the same line, so I listened in upstairs while Shaun spoke to Louis downstairs. Mind you, the cottage was so small I probably could have heard most of the conversation anyway.

The first thing he said, I could have predicted.

“Get a lawyer.”

Obvious. When you live on a clergy stipend, you don’t always think of the obvious.

It was the last thing, however, that was and remains so precious.

He and Shaun had been talking for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and suddenly Louis sounded almost vulnerable. Perhaps I imagined it, but there seemed a tremor of doubt in his voice. Almost as if he were asking us for reassurance.

“We’ll get through this, Shaun. Won’t we?”

We.

Not you. We.

“Yes,” I suppose Shaun said. “We will.”

That is friendship. That’s why Louis is so special.

The letter

Mid January 2009

Did he say, “You’d better read this”?

Or have I imagined that? Was he too stunned even to speak?

He was standing, right there by the side of the kitchen table we’d had specially made for our vicarage in Parson’s Green, near the window of that little cottage which stood right on the pavement, looking out over the street and the C of E primary school Rosie attended. Where she must have been even at that moment.

And as I said before, swaying slightly, as if he’d been sandbagged.

I took it from him. It was four pages long. And it was written on official church writing paper. A proper, formal letter. Signed by several people, I suppose.

What... how... expressions fail me.

Thus must Peter Sutcliffe’s wife have felt, when she heard the charges against him.

I remember reading an account of the Cambridge rapist’s wife or girlfriend or partner, or whatever she was: that she should have realised... that he used to demand sex four times a day and still not be satisfied... why hadn’t she worked it out?

I had been married to Shaun for thirty years – had loved him all that time – and I knew none of this about him.

I’d had no idea.

He was guilty of Gross Misconduct. Over and over again.

I read it again. He’d done all this stuff?

Hadn’t he been the much-loved and respected parson of Parson’s Green? Hadn’t he put a nearly-dead and vicious church on its feet and filled it with life and love and a future?

And again, a third time.

I didn’t even have room for all these jangling thoughts. All the discrepancies between the man I loved and the one in these pages.

At some stage I must have taken a deep breath. Perhaps finished my mug of tea, always near me and topped up for the first two hours after breakfast.

Started again. 

And read it for the fourth time. Properly. Word for word and sentence by sentence. No longer skipping and swirling over the phrases in a whirl of panic, but weighing and assessing all these dreadful claims and accusations.

And the evidence for them.

Bear in mind Shaun only read it once. And he was in the midst of a debilitating breakdown. True, he was talking again now. And applying for jobs, with my help.

But he wasn’t Shaun. He couldn’t think, or evaluate, or do anything demanding. I don’t think he was even reading again. The paper, perhaps. But not proper, theological books.

Nor, it appears, was I. On first reading. Or second or third. In that giddying first fug of horror.

It wasn’t until I read it for the fourth time. And examined what I was reading.

That the mists began to melt.

“Shaun,” I said. “This is bollocks.”

“What?”

“This letter. It’s a load of nonsense.”

“What is?”

“It’s just made up crap.”

“Is it?”

“There’s nothing here. You haven’t done any of this stuff.”

“Haven’t I?”

That’s how convincing it was. Smoke and mirrors.

Fear

January 2009, from my diary

“When I wake in the morning – or rather, just before I wake, in the moment when my consciousness begins to stir – I have a sense of foreboding, every day. A sadness that another day has dawned and yet again, I am not home. Where am I? Somewhere wrong, I know, but I can never quite remember where. The worry squeezes me, like a bully with his hands in a vice either side of my head, pushing in.

“My body is so much heavier than it used to be. I used to wake every day at about seven, shake the sleep off my ears like a dog coming out of water, sit up and relish my mug of tea and the sun on my bed. Now, the sleep drags me back down under, I can’t rouse myself, can’t push it off and open my eyes. My leaden body weighs down on the bed; I can’t lift a limb, an eyelid, my head.

“The entire household waits for me to wake them, take them tea, rouse everyone one by one – sometimes over and over again through the morning and sometimes well into the afternoon. I must get up, must wake up, I must. Pull myself out of this bed.

“Evan Davies is visiting a designer in California. The Bishop of Southwark is doing Thought for the Day. It must be ten to eight.

“If it were the Chief Rabbi speaking, surely I could wake...

“I am pulled back down into the darkness of wherever it is I have come from.

“It is half past eight and the Today Programme sports roundup. I am panting heavily, breathless, as if I have run too far and burnt my lungs. As if I am ill.

“Suddenly and with an abrupt movement I find enough will power to make myself sit up. I push myself onto shaky legs and stumble into the bathroom like an old person, shuffling, bent.

“I am like this every morning now, and have been for four years. Mornings used to be my best time: now they are filled with despair, every day, for the first ten or twenty minutes – or perhaps two hours – till my consciousness mind can take over, shake me out of it and make me face the day.”

I had never been so frightened in my life.

We had been homeless once before, for eight searing months in 2005-6, when Shaun was first employed by the Oxford church and they failed to provide anything after the rental accommodation ran out.

That time, we always knew it would end.

This time, if we lost the roof over our heads...

On the face of it, we just had to sit tight. Shaun was entitled to work. He had offered to return. Repeatedly. He simply had to turn down the offer and keep reiterating this.

You are in an aeroplane which is plummeting towards the ground. You know you have to keep calm, strap on your parachute, jump out, count to twenty, pull the cord. You tell yourself over and over that parachutes work, they are carefully checked, this is what they are for.

There is nothing to be frightened of.

Is there?

Sandbagged

Late Autumn 2008

There was nothing for it but to widen the search.

(That, and look up the Archdeacon of Cambridge to see how near he was to retirement. Not quite sixty-five. Clergy can retire at seventy. That was that, then. Another five years, and I would have detonated in screaming depression, all of us squashed in that lovely but minute little cottage. And Shaun working for an ecclesiastical lunatic asylum. Or not, any more...)

“Here’s one you’ll like,” he showed me. “Looking for a preacher-teacher. Evangelical. Haven’t lost the vicarage: five bedroom Edwardian house. Edge of London.”

We all have our limitations. All of us. In common with the rest of humanity, I can’t do everything. Geographical inflexibility is my annoying little Achilles’ stumbling block. That, and mixed metaphors.

I don’t know why. I suspect Serena may have a similar trait, her deep-roots drinking in places she has loved.

I used to hate family holidays – absolutely loathe them – because I got homesick. Even as a child, I knew this was eccentric. Other children missed their parents. I missed my bedroom, my garden, my spinney deep with cow parsley and its secret hiding places. I couldn’t bear being away from the quarters we lived in, not even our own house, muddled into the school my father was head master of in the middle of Cambridge.

Long-standing readers of this blog may remember the placement Shaun had in that idyllic village in Yorkshire, when we’d been married for about two years. I lasted half a week before dissolving into hysterical sobs and having to return to Cambridge alone, for the rest of the month. He was subsequently offered a job there, which he would have loved...

Funnily enough, I could move to Nepal or Malawi or Kerala easier than to Chesham or Cheadle. It would be so different and exotic, I would dive in and relish the strange colours and smells and curries.

But I had tried suburbia before – Shaun’s first curacy, in Barnet – and couldn’t wait to escape. Persil Country. Shaun happened to let slip that he was the only man in the street who didn’t have his shirts ironed for him...

Which was why a move to Oxford had seemed obvious. That, Cambridge and Parson’s Green: the three places I loved like members of my own family. Now, just Cambridge and Parson’s Green left.

Suburbia, eh?

I smiled bravely, and took the proffered specifications.

Nor have I ever been at home in Evangelicalism, really. I embraced it, when I married Shaun, because I love him. But now that an Evangelical church had treated us the way it had... well, I would have found any other churchmanship easier to enthuse about.

We couldn’t afford for me not to. If he would like it...

Poor Shaun probably spent several days on that blasted job application, before he found me hiding in the cupboard I called my study, in tears.

“Whatever’s the matter?”

It wasn’t the suburbia. It wasn’t even the Evangelicalism. It was the bloody Yamaha.

“The what??”

Page one of the specs. The church’s pride and joy. A spanking new, top-of-the-range, electronic Yamaha keyboard... “to lead the worship”. In place of the organ. Almost as bad as getting rid of the vicarage.

Worse. You can’t even sell an organ for anything.

(Just think: this could have been us. My favourite youtube of all time.)

“You muppet. Why on earth didn’t you say? There’s no point in my applying if you would be so unhappy there.”

Bath. Royal Mile. Never been to Bath in my life but the Royal Mile sounded fun. Georgian terrace vicarage. 

Time was – and not that long ago – when a clergy job application meant being rung up, asked if you were interested and then invited (with your wife) to come and meet a few folk. If you all got on, felt God was in favour (and your wife liked the curtains) that was it.

When Shaun was appointed to his living, it happened like this. I bicycled past the vicarage and fell in love. No but really. Like with a person. The same anatomically improbable gasp of butterflies in the pit of the stomach.

So a retired clergy friend rang someone or other as a result of which Shaun drove to London from our summer holiday to have a chat with the churchwardens. And then returned to the New Forest, where we’d borrowed a cottage, as the new P of P Green.

Believe it or not, in many ways this was a lot better than the current system (vindictive Archdeacons notwithstanding). When the dear old C of E tries to heave itself lumbering into the twentieth century it invariably gets it wrong and is still fifty years behind the rest of us anyway. If it stuck to what it was good at... ah well: too late now. Cat out of the can of worms already.

Shaun and I worked on that Bath application together. For a week. All twenty-six pages of it. I believe he never even got an acknowledgement. Thirty-five other clergy applied. The church almost certainly appointed someone they knew – and had decided on – already. You know: the curate, or someone. Unless the bishop had picked his own poppet and made it look like a democratic decision.

Which means thirty-five other clergy (and their spouses) also wasted a week.

See what I mean?

This process could presumably have gone on for ever.

Except that one morning, I think a Monday, I suppose it must have been early December, Shaun received a letter. He opened it, read it – it was several pages long – and swayed as if he’d been sandbagged.

Discrimination

Late autumn 2008

There was one advantage to Shaun’s being signed off work. For the first time since our move to Oxford at the beginning of 2005, he had time to apply for other jobs.

When we had moved into a six-bedroom Victorian vicarage in Parson’s Green, in the early ’90s, we had offered my parents a home with us. We would have loved it if they’d moved in straight away – my father could have run the church music; my mother taught maths – but only in their 70s, they were still far too independent to give up their own home.

They knew the invitation stood, though, for as long as we could honour it.

By the time we moved to Oxford fifteen years on, the balance was beginning to tip in favour of being near family, rather than where they had lived and worked for half a century, in Cambridge, where my mother still had several dozen private pupils. If the church had bought us a house similar in size to the one we were leaving (as we had initially been given to believe, when Shaun had accepted the post) the arrangement would have been perfect. My brother lives in Oxford, so they would have been near both of us.

Alas, as you will know if you have read this far, the church did not do this. On the contrary, for a while it provided nothing for us at all. So instead of our being able to house my parents, they had to house the few of us who could fit into their three-bedroom house, while the rest scattered elsewhere. (And Serena’s poor Great Dane had to live in the boot of a car...)

When we were eventually housed it was in a cottage so small we could barely breathe. Miles from Oxford.

It was also becoming heartrendingly evident that my parents, now nudging ninety, could no longer care for themselves. Several times, we’d had panic runs over to Cambridge to cook them meals; or rung a friend nearby to rush over and get my mother into hospital. The last time, my only income (my weekly column on the Express) also hung in the balance as well as my mother’s life: I couldn’t attend to all of it.

It was bad enough being torn in several pieces trying to care for our various children... 

Shaun and I even had a conversation about moving onto the sofa in the tiny sitting room so we could give them our bedroom. But we were barely surviving as it was.

Three of our children were at Cambridge University: two had disabilities and needed our support. My parents lived there. It made sense to move to the city we both loved. The other city… now Oxford had become unbearable to us.

Clergy jobs do not lie thick on the ground. A tiny smattering of Cambridge posts had been advertised in the four years since Shaun had been working in Oxford. He had applied for all. Not been short-listed for any.

Slightly surprising, perhaps...

Now a job had come up in a village just outside Cambridge, tailor-made. Every quality they were looking for, he had in bucketloads, and more besides. Even down to the “child of primary school age if possible”, so he could have links with the C of E school. And it still had its original vicarage, so we’d all be able to fit in.

The difficulty, Shaun objected, was that it was completely unpaid. We would have nothing to live on.

“Shaun,” I said, “we’re desperate. We’ve just got to leave. Somehow. Anyhow. We’d have somewhere to live. You can drive a taxi… anything.” I rang a Cambridge tutorial company who said they could use him for fifteen hours a week.

He posted his application on Friday. Just to be sure it arrived in time, I rang the Archdeacon’s office on Monday.

It hadn’t.

“Don’t you remember me?” his PA said. “We were in the same class at school!”

She asked me to resend his form, and I asked her about the job. It transpired that no one else had applied. I wasn’t surprised: completely unpaid. Shaun was many times over-qualified. She thought it just possible that one other person might, unofficially…

Bound to be short-listed, then.

He wasn’t.

This was so bizarre we asked our Bishop to look into it. He wrote to his counterpart in Ely.

A week later he had a letter. The Archdeacon of Cambridge didn’t like me. Me, not Shaun. Take, for example, the way I’d interfered over this job, ringing to see if Shaun’s application had arrived. (Because Shaun was in the middle of an effing breakdown! And his PA and I were at school together…)

For three and a half years, Shaun hadn’t applied for jobs anywhere else. For three and a half years, only Cambridge. For three and a half desperate and inadequately-housed years, we hadn’t had a hope. The Archdeacon had black-balled him every time. And not even had the Christian charity to tell him.

Now, what do you suppose happened at this point?

1. Shaun sued the C of E for millions, for appalling and inappropriate discrimination?

Or 2. Our Bishop said to his counterpart Bishop, “Come on, mate. This is outrageous. Call your Archdeacon to order, before this gets into the Daily Mail! Or indeed the law courts.”

Or 3. Our Bishop said to Shaun, “You’d better forget jobs in Cambridge then, hadn’t you?”

And yet none of this even compared to what was to happen next...