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.

Breakdown

September 2008

I had long marvelled at Shaun’s fortitude and stoicism. 

I had stopped going to his employing church three years earlier, as soon as I’d finished what I considered my duty.

In early 2005 I’d been asked to take over the music for the 11 o’clock service for three months, for the Director of Music’s sabbatical. Each week (unpaid, of course) I gave the church fifteen hours or so of my life: setting up a chamber group; pulling a choir together; organising rotas; finding an organist for each service. We had rehearsals at our rented accommodation: if we’d had our own home I would have wined and dined the musicians too.

(People commented kindly on the transformation. Because it was the more conventional service, preferred by older members of the congregation, it had been known as the “graveyard slot”. I considered it the civilised spot.)

I was gritting my teeth, until the last Sunday of those three months. The last Sunday I ever set foot in the place. (Apart from the one-off visit I mentioned a few days ago, enabled by Paul McKenna’s empowering techniques for overcoming trauma.)

From then on, I stayed away.

My absence was misunderstood. The number of well-meaning exhortations I received, telling me to “forgive” (from members of the church that had failed to house us; caused us to be split up for nearly a year; then accommodated us in a cottage less than half the size we needed; and from whom we had never yet received an apology, let alone any hint of reparation) could have powered a most exquisite psychological torture chamber.

Eventually I emailed one of them back, curious. “Why do you think I haven’t?” She had invited me to attend the church fête. I had thanked her, but explained I couldn’t face it. “The fact that I can’t do something, doesn’t mean I don’t forgive.”

Oh, she said. I see.

Shaun didn’t have the same freedom.

Day after day, week after week, month in and year out, he continued with his characteristic calm, dedication and professionalism. At a job he was finding insupportable.

I could never do that, I thought. (But of course I could. If I had to. We all do, don’t we? If you have no choice, you do what you can’t do.)

You don’t join the clergy for money. Nor indeed for promotion or status. You have a calling to serve. The reward is the work itself. The job satisfaction is all. There is nothing else.

(That, and just enough to live on if you have a stipend, which many clergy don’t. And a roof over your head, and your children’s. In theory.)

Shaun has always given his all. Never held back any part of himself, or indeed of his home or his family. He did it because he believed in it, with all his heart and soul. When he was the parson of Parson’s Green, he loved his flock as his own family. We all did.

So imagine, when he came home from work and his only words were: “I need a drink.” 

The feeble vine bends and bows, giving way at the earliest pressure.

The mighty oak stands firm in the storms and the hurricane; the rain soaking its unseen roots and loosening them; the cruel winter winds battering its proud, tired head. Until the day comes when, exhausted and hollow as it is, one squall rips it up and tears it from the soil.

One Sunday afternoon that September, the great oak broke and fell.

Like a car driven and driven with no oil, suddenly unable to do another mile. Another inch. 

He just stopped.

For weeks afterwards he sat in the midst of his normally noisy family, completely alone. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, saying nothing; registering no one. For months, grey and unrecognisable, unequal to even the simplest tasks.

His mind bears the trauma still, his once flawless and astonishing memory now commonplace.

For six months even Bink’s health took second place. I have little idea of what she did or how she filled her time or survived during that next half year.

On the Monday morning, the day after he cracked and crashed, I took him to our GP; the best we’ve ever had. The number of times I’ve seen Shaun in tears I could count on one hand: in that surgery was one of them.

She listened a lot and talked a little and gave him a questionnaire to answer, to measure his level of depression. I looked over his shoulder as he did so. For most of the questions, I scored higher in my head than he did on paper.

As she was signing him off work, I said, “We need to come back, for me. I need to fill that in too.”

I had hoped Shaun would accompany me, as I had him. “I’m so sorry,” he shook his head sadly. “I don’t think I can. Do you mind?”

Not me, too.

“I just can’t face it.”

Quitting...

January 2008

It was shortly after the start of the Lent Term of Bink’s second year at Cambridge, January 2008.

We were in bed, asleep, in the sweet and tiny cottage Shaun’s employing church had bought for us, which we all squeezed uncomfortably into, tucked in among dozens and dozens of piled-high boxes which I knew we’d never be able to unpack until we moved out again.

Shaun and I slept with our heads under the low Western window in our dear little higgledy-piggledy beamed bedroom, which was a thoroughfare to Serena’s room and Bink’s, which (I’d forgotten this, but there weren’t any others) she must have shared with Rose. There were windows behind and before, church bells through the one and birdsong through both, and an early woodpecker which used to rat-tat-tat-tat at dawn, delight us and drive our neighbours nuts.

It was long before dawn, though, when the telephone rang. Between about one and two, from memory.

I’ve taken so many distraught telephone calls from Bink over the years that I’m probably amalgamating other memories as much as distinguishing this particular one. Sobbing, beside herself, out of control with grief and distress. Help me. Come and get me. I can’t keep going any longer.

One sentence, however, I recall very clearly. Over and over again.

“Don’t make me stay. Please, please, don’t make me stay.” Begging, desperate, entreating.

I was surprised, thinking it never would have occurred to us to persuade her to stay in such wretchedness. But I wonder now, remembering her anguished words as I still do so clearly over a decade later, imploring us not to divert her course: why was she so insistent...?

We calmed her as best we could, and assured her we would be there as soon as it was day.

Shaun went over to Cambridge to pick her up, and was with her for three days. I’ve no idea where he stayed but that’s how long it took for her to be able to leave.

At some stage he accompanied her to her tutor’s study, signing her off to degrade from Cambridge, which in theory means you can resume your place again, when – if – your health improves enough. The tutor, Shaun told me, was deeply shocked at Bink’s appearance. There was no question as to whether she was ill enough to warrant leave of absence.

What we didn’t know at the time (nor the tutor either, I presume) was that the CPS had deemed there was sufficient evidence against the friend she’d reported as assaulting her, so the court case was now pending…

Thus Bink left her course at Cambridge, half-done, half-way through, and came back home to the little cottage.

And for years afterwards bemoaned her departure. What a waste of so many years of her life! Why didn’t she stay on? Surely she would have felt better again soon…

I am reminded, in some ways, of a choice Alex made some years later. I knew immediately that it was a bad one – it was obvious, glaring, idiotic – and he and I were an hour on the telephone, talking of its ramifications.

At one point he implored me, as if longing, “Just tell me I’m not allowed to go.”

“Alex, I can’t do that,” I said. “You’re an adult. I know you’re making a mistake. I can advise you as strongly as I can. But I can’t tell you you’re not allowed to.”

So he went, and learnt for himself.

For a long time afterwards I wondered whether he really had been asking me to prevent him. When I relayed the conversation to him a year or two later, when he’d had to reverse his decision, having lost a year of the career he could have embarked on and the deposit for a house he could have had, I asked whether I should have put my foot down and told him he couldn’t do it? Was that what he was asking me to do?

“Surely not,” he said, not even remembering his request. “I wouldn’t have wanted that.”

Really?

Perhaps Bink, too, was begging us to make her keep going?