Ten Highlights of My Thirties
- Chris Maunder
- Oct 8, 2024
- 56 min read
Updated: Oct 21, 2024
1. 1983: The Year of Coincidences
What are ‘meaningful coincidences’? Sceptics would say that we experience so many interactions in our lives that some of them are bound to appear strongly meaningful by chance and, for that reason, these are the ones that we remember. But sometimes these happenings are just so full of connections that it is difficult to dismiss them so rationally. Well, I don’t at least! In 1983, my adoption of a new faith was attended by a cluster of interesting coincidences. This might be an indication that you are going through a spiritual awakening of some kind, and maybe a signal that you are on the right path.
My thirties began in the same way as much of my teens and twenties was conducted: with a party! But life was changing. My letter to the local Catholic priest towards the end of the previous year had received no response so I phoned. I reckoned that he was testing me to see if my interest was real (or maybe he was just inefficient)! At any rate, on the phone I was invited to go to Mass and then attend the priest’s house for a regular instruction session. If all went well, I would be confirmed in the Summer. I attended my first Mass on the 30th January 1983, at St Mary’s Church in Croydon.
Then, less than a week later, my grandfather Percy Maunder died on the 5th February. He lived to eighty seven, generally with pretty good health until a final bout of pneumonia. As he had been a life-long churchgoer, albeit in a very different church (Congregational), this coincidence of his death with my first Mass caused me to feel as if he had handed me a legacy. I would be his heir now that my own immediate family was totally non-churchgoing.
Soon afterwards, there was another coincidence that touched on my previous passion: astrology. When we gathered at my grandfather’s house to clear it, we searched through for things to keep. I went away with the dog-shaped nutcracker that amused us as children; a silver tea set that commemorated the wedding in 1910 of my Auntie May and Uncle Ernie (Grandad’s sister and brother-in-law, who had had no children); and three books. Two of these were volumes of Greek myths, one of which had been awarded to my grandmother (Nan) as a prize at school. The third book’s title jumped out at me as we looked through the very small book collection left in the house: Moon in Scorpio. It was a novel set in the reign of Charles II, with a few astrological references here and there. It so happens that I was born when the Moon was in Scorpio, and the Sun crosses its position in my chart every Hallowe’en, the date on which my Nan had died and my brother had been born. The book had been acquired from a book club as its November 1953 offering, in my first year of life and during the period when my parents and I lived temporarily at my grandparents’ house. I do not think that either of my grandparents knew about astrology or had discovered that I had been born with the Moon in Scorpio. Therefore, this was a coincidence, I must assume, but quite a striking one.
But it was Catholicism, not astrology, that was in the ascendancy in 1983. My new-found faith must have seemed ironic to Jude, who had unwittingly brought me to consider the Catholic Church when she herself had rejected it. It was even more ironic when, in February 1983, Jude attended her preparation course for going to Nigeria as a volunteer teacher that Spring. Despite being a non-religious agency, the organisers used the Carmelite Priory at Aylesford for the preparation. Her course had no connection with religion, but the setting was most definitely Roman Catholic. By then, I had already discovered Aylesford, one of the foremost English shrines of Mary with a distinctive rosary garden next to the river Medway. My driving job at the time took me all over the London area and into the Kent countryside. If I passed Aylesford, I would stop off and visit, one of the few lorry driver pilgrims of the 1980s! It was very strange visiting Jude there.
In the Summer, Jude’s sister Rachel and I with a large group of friends met at Aylesford to begin a sponsored walk in support of Jude’s school in Nigeria, which needed funds. The route went along the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury, about 32 miles away. The idea was mine, of course; by this time, pilgrimage was beginning to mean a lot to me. The Pope had visited England the previous year, 1982, and there was a plaque in Canterbury Cathedral marking where he had knelt down to pray with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the coming together of two heads of previously antagonistic denominations.
Around the same time, I bumped into a famous person at a petrol station. It wasn’t the Pope, but an actor who would have been familiar to most people at that time: Deryck Guyler, man of many roles, comic and dramatic, best known for his part as the policeman in the Eric Sykes sitcom and also for his portrayal of the grumpy school caretaker in another comedy series, Please Sir. I have no skill at all when it comes to impressions but, at school, I had made people laugh with my own take-off of this caretaker character. And now in front of me was Deryck Guyler, the actor himself, and I have hardly ever met well-known people. He was filling his car at the pump next to me and we exchanged a few words. I remember exclaiming, ‘A famous face!’, but the conversation amounted to little more than that. Nothing special, you may think, no meaningful coincidence there but, a couple of years later, I was attending Mass in Cheltenham with Jude’s and Rachel’s Mum who lived there. We sat down fairly randomly where a space presented itself, but then I noticed that sitting right in front of me was none other than Deryck Guyler with his wife. I felt emboldened to speak to him. He said that he lived in South London, near to where I had first met him, and that he was visiting friends in Cheltenham. He was a Catholic, and so his appearance in my life in 1983 made some sense. But Googling many years later revealed him to have converted to Catholicism at thirty, the same age as I had, and he studied theology at one time, just as I would go on to do. That’s quite a lot of coincidences! As a little extra connection, his birthday was the same as my father’s, albeit thirteen years earlier. (He was also a passionate and prominent wargamer, something I enjoyed in my teens, although in my adulthood boardgaming rather than wargaming has interested me.)
The final 1983 coincidence did not come to light until 1985, when, while studying at Leeds University, I was invited to join an academic group of volunteers that visited the maximum security prison at Wakefield. The very first prisoner that I met there was a man called George who had been in a gang. The case was famous nationally. It had occurred in Croydon, near to where I lived at the time. It concerned the kidnapping of a rich businessman’s wife. The businessman had paid the ransom and the wife was released. However, while the kidnappers had blindfolded the woman while transporting her, they had not stopped her ears. She remembered every turn and stop of the journey, noting sounds such as railways and building sites. She was able to lead the police straight to the house where she had been kept and thus the gang were arrested. This arrest took place on my thirtieth birthday, 9th January 1983. While I had been celebrating only a mile or so away, George, of similar age to me, had lost his freedom. He received a stiff sentence for his involvement in kidnapping. And then we met in Wakefield just over two years later. At Wakefield, I also met Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer who was arrested exactly one month later than George, and who had the same job as I did in the Employment Office (see my blog, 26th May 2021). So 1983 was certainly an interesting year, even if some of the connections were discovered a couple of years later!
2. Up the Great North Road: From London to York
Instruction sessions with the priest of St Mary’s were made amusing by the priest’s large black dog. It couldn’t be left outside the room in which we met, because then it would bark. However, inside, it insisted on dumping a saliva-dripping ball into the centre of my lap and insisting that it was thrown across the room to be retrieved. I did have to suppress giggles from time to time, especially as the dog was quite accurate with the said ball in aiming it straight into your most private area.
In our discussions about my new faith, I was keen to make sure the priest knew that I had misgivings about some of the more reactionary aspects of Catholicism: its rejection of women priests, homosexuality, and contraception, for example. It didn’t seem to faze him. ‘The Holy Spirit will lead you into the truth’, he said. If by that, he meant that I would come to see things from the perspective of the Vatican, then he was very wrong: I feel even more strongly about these issues now than I did then. But it didn’t put him off confirming me on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, a traditional date for this rite, on the 29th June 1983.
‘Which saint’s name will you take?’ he asked as the date approached. I said that I had chosen St John; it is my middle name, and John was the disciple closest to Mary, according to the gospels. ‘Which John, the Evangelist or the Baptist?’ he enquired. ‘The Evangelist,’ I replied. ‘OK, although the Baptist is the more senior,’ he suggested (I still have no idea what the truth of this might be). I stuck to my guns. Years later, the same question would emerge at the College and University where I worked for many years, York St John. The chaplain was commissioned to find out whether the institution was named after the Baptist or the Evangelist, as the management were unsure of the history. He discovered that it was the Evangelist, so I was definitely destined to work there!
After confirmation, I took the opportunity to go on a retreat. Perhaps this was suggested to me, but I don’t remember how the idea came. A retreat is a period of prayer, reflection, and silence, guided by a director. My spiritual home already having become the Carmelite Priory at Aylesford, I booked for a weekend there. The director was a certain Fr Wilfrid. I would meet him several times later; he moved to York himself. The Priory had a library, and it was there that it dawned on me what the future could hold. I was single, my job at the ceramic tile company did not promise much, astrology hadn’t really led to anything substantial, and what’s more, my school career had promised a university degree, but then I had dropped out. Putting all this together, I realised that I needed to study a degree in Theology.
This was given more urgency after an evening at the pub. Jude was in Nigeria, and I spent quite a lot of time in those months with her sister Rachel, who had moved to Croydon, and her friend and fellow nurse Christine, whom she had met in Israel. The two of them were talking about going abroad together. This didn’t happen in actual fact, but it seemed likely at the time and the thought of being left behind again motivated me to do something with my life. I thought it through. Clearly, a degree would mean a frugal lifestyle; I wasn’t rich, and I would have to sell the flat and rent somewhere. London was a no-no in terms of budgeting while being a student. I needed to leave and live somewhere more cheaply.
But where? My thoughts extended to the web of Rheindahlen friends who lived here and there across the country. An obvious candidate destination emerged. In 1977, I had been sent by the civil service on a course to Newcastle, and en route home I visited a school friend called Jane in York. Jane had been a girlfriend of Nigel, my best friend at school, and we all kept in touch. She lived with a couple of friends, Rosie and Pol (Pauline), all three of them Christian evangelicals, and my visit proved enjoyable so I had visited a few more times. Jane married a man from County Durham called Tony in 1981, and they bought a house in a York suburb. She seemed pleased when I suggested that I move to York, although at this stage I thought it might only be temporary while I looked for a place of study.
I went for a walk with my flatmate Caroline in the Kent countryside, and put it to her that she might like to buy the flat. A perfect solution! She agreed, and I saved the estate agents’ fees. We had the place valued, and came up with a price of £21,500. Not bad: the value had more than doubled in five years. I visited York and found a shared flat at a reasonable rent. On the 5th November 1983 I moved; my first social engagement with my new group of friends was a bonfire! The ceramics tile company were very helpful, as they allowed me to borrow a lorry to move my belongings. So I saved on removals as well. Tony was a Catholic, and Jane joined the Church too, so I not only adopted new friends, but also a new parish, English Martyrs in Dalton Terrace, York. Now all I needed to do was to apply for a university place.
My shortlist of universities with a course in Theology & Religious Studies (often shortened to just 'Theology') comprised Canterbury, Hull, Leeds, and Nottingham. The north was more attractive for someone on a low budget. I did receive good news in that North Yorkshire County Council were prepared to fund the second half of the course (I had used up the first half’s grant at Southampton). That seemed fair enough, but I still had to watch the pennies. I went for interviews at Canterbury and Hull, and liked both; therefore, on the basis of staying north, I chose Hull and thought I would probably not even bother to attend interviews at the other two. I waited for the offer from Hull but it didn’t come. So I thought I should probably attend the Leeds interview, which was a couple of months later, and it struck me that Leeds was close enough to York for me to stay where I was and commute. Why relocate again now that I had found new friends? Then, after I had chosen Leeds, I received a letter from Hull, offering me a place and apologising for a breakdown in their application systems which had delayed the offer. That chance event had changed the situation quite dramatically; I stayed with Leeds. It proved to be a good choice.
3. Haunted House: St Mary’s Vicarage
You might be a little irritated to hear that, with so much to look forward to, a new faith and a university degree course on the horizon, that I fell into my third and by far the worst period of anxiety in my young life. I was happy in York for three months and then it hit, suddenly as usual, from February to May 1984 and then again from August to January. I can identify obvious causes of it. Despite the great moves of my childhood, under all the optimism and confidence that I like to portray, I become very unsettled with major change. My Christian and Catholic circle of new friends were very different from the flatmates and astrology group in London. And it did seem impossible to find a temporary job; I applied for several, mostly driving and delivering for which I had plenty of experience, but the employment situation wasn’t great in 1983-1984. So I had to put up with living on the dole for the ten months between arriving in York and starting a degree course. Unemployment is much harder than working people imagine; for instance, weekends lose their attractiveness! It was made more palatable by regular volunteering at the Nottingham centre of the Winged Fellowship Trust. But the anxiety was intense and wouldn’t go away; it is difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t suffer from it, so I won’t try to do that here. What one cannot do while in the state is to ‘be rational’; I was pretty mad with myself for not enjoying life, but that didn’t change anything.
There were two reasons for it eventually coming to an end, apart from the fact that it ran its natural course. The first reason was that my university degree kicked off in September 1984, and I went into it with great relish from day one, keen to make up for the misspent youth at Southampton. Because I commuted from York, I had no need of the settling in period that people require when arriving in a new city; I had already gone through that. The second reason was that, in September, I had moved out of the flat a few hundred yards away across the city walls into St Mary’s Vicarage, on a street called Bishophill Junior near the city centre.
York is full of ghosts. At least, that’s what the tourists are told, and they pay plenty of money to go on the ghost tours. St Mary’s Vicarage is a large, cold nineteenth century building and it is built onto one of the oldest churches in York, St Mary's Bishophill Junior, which has Roman foundations. So St Mary’s Vicarage had its own ghost, of course; apparently, it was a kind Victorian nanny who tucked you up in bed. One of the people who lived there said she had seen her, but I didn’t. Yet never in my life have I felt so safe in a spacious, dark, rambling house, even when totally on my own. So the ghost must have been kind and comforting indeed to give off those good vibes!
I found out about the Vicarage from people at my church. Some Catholics from that parish had set up a community in the house, even though it was owned by the Church of England. The original founders, a married couple, Mike and Fran, wanted to leave because they had started a family and needed their own home. So a gap had opened up and I was just the kind of person that they wanted as a replacement, at thirty about the same age as the rest of the residents: accountant Phil, counsellor Steve, and Fran’s sister, Denny, an artist. I moved in and, not long after, Denny’s brother, Brendan, and Steve’s brother, Richard, both a few years younger than the rest of us, joined too. We had a community and shared meals, with partners and friends staying regularly, so after a lonely ten months with largely absent flatmates, I found something resembling the supportive circle I had enjoyed in London. There was also a little black cat that we raised from a kitten. I particularly liked the approach to gardening, which was to let the garden grow wild and see what came up!
The Church of England helped me enormously with my finances during my student years. The rents in disused vicarages were very low, as the Church preferred them to be occupied and recognised that the residents would have to continue the practice of helping to feed the homeless who called at the door. I lived in two such vicarages during this time of my life, which kept my outgoings low as well as giving me a chance to enjoy the community life. I began to see living in a lay community as something of a vocation, living with and supporting the other members. And, as the weeks went by, this helped me finally to settle in York and find my feet.
At St Mary's, there was something comic in our vicarage being directly joined onto the church building. It was a high Anglican parish, with its smells and bells; hence the sanctuary of the church containing the altar would be regarded as being a particular place of holiness. However, the wall at the back of the sanctuary was shared with one our large downstairs rooms. On this wall on our side, without noticing the irony, someone had placed a big craftwork of a dragon, paper maché or something, I suppose. The room also housed our small-sized snooker table, around which we would gather and share a few beers. The sacred on one side, the profane on the other!
My studies kept me going too; I was absolutely focussed in a manner wholly opposite to my time in Southampton. I read as many books as were suggested and some more. I had an advantage over the younger students in that Greek was compulsory because it is the language in which the New Testament was originally written, and at school I had taken Greek to GCE O level (the predecessor of GCSE). I also took up biblical Hebrew, which was optional. I became very absorbed in the Greek texts that described the women in Jesus’ ministry and were listed as being at his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection; my existing interest in Mary the mother of Jesus (aka the Virgin Mary!) expanded with the insight that other women, such as Mary Magdalene, had a role in early Christianity that went beyond anything that was taught in the churches.
My anxiety came to an abrupt and welcome end near midnight on the 19th January 1985. The community members had decided to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark on video; the film had a good biblical theme, the Ark of the Covenant, albeit given a Hollywood style setting and narrative! Afterwards, I went to my bedroom but still felt that anxiety. I decided to consult the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle that I had been introduced to whilst interested in astrology. Like all oracles, the answer can mean whatever you want it to mean, but I do find the I Ching a comforting and helpful guide to reflecting on life’s challenges. While doing this, I contemplated Mary Magdalene and the resurrection to which she was the first witness. And then, all of a sudden, everything opened up. Where I had been thinking too much about death and imminent disaster, these fears evaporated so that I no longer had anxiety. I can only describe it as the boundaries and restrictions of life being lifted and erased so that one is open to eternity and the freedom that that brings.
When I came to from this ecstatic feeling, I found that my clock, which had recently been given new batteries, had stopped at 11.42 p.m., and so I assume this to have been the time that the experience began. Time literally stood still. And I have marked this moment every year since, which will be forty years at the next instance in 2025. Although I have continued to suffer anxiety from time to time after that date, for various reasons and particularly around the time that Covid started, I have never again suffered from that sense of imminent disaster which has no reason or rationale, not prompted by any obvious concern about anything in the world. For that reason, it is very difficult to combat and I am very thankful that it came to an end on that evening. It was as if, after I returned to churchgoing for the first time since childhood, it took me the whole of 1983 and 1984 to work out internally what that faith commitment meant. I felt overjoyed; that ecstatic mood stayed with me for a few days, but its aftermath lasted a lifetime. I am always glad to see that Raiders of the Lost Ark is on TV, because it reminds me of that evening!
And so the aptly named St Mary’s Vicarage gave me a great gift, and the Victorian nanny did her good work of comfort. The way I see it was that through Mary Magdalene, and aided by Mary the mother of Jesus, I experienced Christ’s resurrection for myself. Death had lost its sting. Eventually, the community broke up with most members leaving roughly at the same time in 1986, and so I moved to Leeds to study the final year of my degree without the need for commuting. But I had found a sense of vocation there in that Vicarage, experienced something of a mystical moment, and perhaps found out what true Christianity might be about.
4. Nieces, Nephews, and Godchildren
In Rheindahlen, I used to wave hello to the dark-haired girl whom I saw riding her bike in Cumberland Drive, where she lived on the same street as some of my friends. Her name was Trish, and my brother Andy was in the same school year. His friendship with her evolved into romance a while after we all came back to Britain, and they married in 1981. My sister Jacqui married Mike in 1983. She had also gone to the same school (in Crowthorne, near Bracknell) as he did, although he was two years older and she didn’t meet him until after he had left. So we could say that they both married childhood sweethearts! Marriage alerts families to the increased possibility that new members may arrive, and so we waited for that day when we would get the telephone call announcing a pregnancy.
According to Trish, who knew by instinct that it had happened, the first of my nieces and nephews, Katie, was conceived in my own bed! Trish and Andy visited St Mary’s Vicarage in June 1985. My bedroom was large and spacious, as were most of the rooms in the house, and contained the furniture that I had brought with me from London. I gave Trish and Andy my bedroom and put a temporary bed down for myself elsewhere in the house. They said that it was like having a roomful of ghosts all sitting on the three piece suite that I had in there, spectating at what they got up to! Once again, the spectral nanny did her thing, and Trish became pregnant. And, as this decade of coincidences demanded, in that same week Grandad Small, our last surviving grandparent, died aged ninety.
Katie was born on the 28th March 1986 in Winchester, which was Good Friday, late in the evening. I travelled down from the north to visit my family every Christmas, Easter and once during the Summer. By this time, my parents had moved out of Bracknell, as my father had retired from the Meteorological Office, and they ran a guest house in west Bournemouth called the Thanet. Conveniently, the birth was due during my Easter visit; I drove down on Good Friday and waited for news. Winchester is within an hour’s drive from Bournemouth.
My parents had gone to bed when we received the call late in the evening. Katie and Trish were in good health in all but one, very crucial respect: Katie had been born without one of her eyes, with just a growth in its place, and with severe problems in the eye that she did have. We visited the hospital the next morning. They operated and did what they could; three months later Katie was given a prosthetic eye. Her one natural eye had minimal sight – she could just about make out vague colours at the age of two – which she lost because of complications in her early childhood. All this happened because of a genetic accident so rare that Katie’s case got written up in a medical journal.
In those first days, it was suggested with gallows humour that at least she would be musical like Stevie Wonder. I’m sure that this is not true of all blind children, but it turned out to be quite correct in Katie’s case. When she was around two or three, Trish told me that Katie could identify by ear which note was being played. Apparently, she had learned this from a TV programme on music for children. I thought that Trish had to be exaggerating; it seemed absurd as Katie was so young. An aeroplane passed overhead as we stood in the garden. I asked Katie what note the sound was making; she replied that it was an E. I went inside and played on the piano; indeed the plane had been emitting an E. I asked Katie to come in to see how far this extended. She could identify all the notes on the piano, from the very lowest to the highest, including sharps and flats, without making a single mistake. I was convinced!
Katie went on to excel in music; as a child, she was able to entertain a hall full of people with the strength of her singing voice. Being quite diminutive, people were amazed at what she could do as she appeared younger than she was. She played saxophone with excellent improvisation and learned the piano. As an adult, she has not continued her playing of the instruments, but she does sing regularly in choirs. Having perfect pitch has its advantages and disadvantages. It helps you sing in tune with 100% accuracy, but it can be painful when others do not share your gift. I sang in the University choir for several years. I thought we sounded good at one concert, but my younger choirmate with perfect pitch standing next to me screwed his nose up. I asked what was wrong. He said that the choir had dropped by a whole semitone as the piece progressed. Only those with that ability could have known this.
I have enjoyed being an uncle to each and every one of my five nieces and nephews born to Andy and Trish (their second daughter Gabby was born in 1991) or Jacqui and Mike (Rich in 1987, Chris in 1993, and Rhiannon in 2000), all now adults, but Katie is the one most like me, unfortunately for her! She shares my lively imagination, writing Harry Potter stories, and she, like me, has a geeky ability to remember dates, even from several years back. She is highly sensitive and suffers from anxiety; thus she will also remember every argument and setback that she has experienced, just as I do. We both have the Moon in Scorpio, which indicates those afflictions.
When Katie was little, I particularly enjoyed recording short stories as she was very receptive to my wacky ideas. Our shared favourite is my invention of ‘the Smiths’ whose family members committed in turn every one of the things that we should avoid: got too hot, got too cold, ate too much, ate too little, and ate the wrong things. The name ‘Smiths’ arose because I turned on the tape recorder before I had chosen a name for the characters, and I couldn’t think of anything else in the two seconds that I had! The story was based on a conversation that I had with Katie when she was about five. Blindness means that a child is more likely to engage in deep conversation, as they cannot run about and be distracted in the same way as sighted children. Katie has taught us all a lot about what blindness means; Trish now publishes academic material on access for the visually impaired, with a particular emphasis on art and museums. Without some effort on the part of staff, visiting galleries and museums will be pretty boring for visually impaired people!
I was asked to be godfather to Katie, and two years later to Richard, my oldest nephew. In my thirties, I became a godfather twice more after this. Jane, my long-time friend in York, gave birth to Christopher. My sister a few years later also had a Christopher; neither Jane nor Jacqui were ever fully clear as to whether their sons had been named after me. They were either embarrassed that they had, or embarrassed that they hadn't! Jane's Chris is as good as a nephew to me. He had a tough start in life; his parents split when he was only two years old. Through his childhood years, he spent part of the week with each, but they both loved him and that's what mattered! I have known him well throughout his life and recently attended his marriage to Emily. My other godchild of this decade was Holly, daughter of my St Mary's housemate Brendan and his wife Jane. As she lives in deepest Sussex, I haven't seen her since her confirmation at age fifteen, but keep in touch via Facebook.
Andy and Trish moved to the U.S.A. in 1994 when their daughters were little. In 2023, Katie married Ryan, a visually impaired man who was her former tutor. She followed her sister Gabby who was married to her female partner in 2019, a wedding each side of Covid! Two weddings outside the norm, with wonderful celebrations that made the transatlantic flights well worthwhile. The Smiths were mentioned at one point during Katie’s wedding, and it was a nice reminder of the special relationship that we have enjoyed. I was delighted to be asked to choose and read a poem, and selected Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.’
I could write a section on each of my nieces, nephews, and godchildren, but Katie’s birth marked the moment when I became an uncle and godfather for the first time. Like grandparents, aunts and uncles have the privilege of enjoying close relationships without that deeply tense connection between child and parent with its weighty responsibilities. You can be the story-teller, play-maker, counsellor, and archivist of family histories without laying down the law and dishing out the hard truths. I’m glad to have finally returned the favour and given my brother and sister and their partners the chance to enjoy that favoured situation with my own daughter. And Jane's Chris - yes, in a happy role reversal, my godson is now Bea's godfather!
5. Madonna of Medjugorje
In my early days as a Mass-goer, I decided to visit Westminster Cathedral in central London, the mother church of English Catholicism. I went on the 2nd March 1983. It so happened that this was the fiftieth anniversary of the final apparition of the Virgin Mary at Banneux in Belgium, and the Cathedral had a little display about it. I devoured the information with eagerness. I didn’t know much about apparitions, although I had vaguely heard of them, and the idea fascinated me given my new interest in Marian devotions, pilgrimage, and shrines. This was the beginning of a long journey of discovery and research.
I learned about the apparitions that the Church had approved in recent centuries, in particular, Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal. But then I found out through the Catholic press that a new apparition was drawing in large crowds. It was happening in a rural parish in communist Yugoslavia. The fact that communism is so inimical to Catholicism gave the case a particular piquancy, and this did cause quite a stir amongst Catholics who thought that the Virgin Mary was out to convert atheists by appearing in a communist state. Yugoslavia was the most open of the communist countries of Eastern Europe, ready to receive tourists from the West in large numbers, and so pilgrimage would not be difficult.
I don’t think that many people in Western Europe appreciated that Yugoslavia was a creation of the peace following the First World War, and that it was a federation made up of quite distinct regions. Not only that, but these regions had a history of intense conflict with each other, and so the union was fragile, to say the least. The Yugoslav strongman leader of many years, Tito, had died in 1980 and the situation therefore became more fraught. This would, of course, lead to an intense civil war in the 1990s. In this environment, the apparitions were first reported by teenage villagers in Medjugorje on the 24th June 1981. Medjugorje is a Croat parish in Bosnia & Hercegovina, made up of several hamlets.
For my degree, I had to undertake a research project, known as a dissertation, of 10,000 words in length. Initially, I didn’t think that apparitions – popular and highly volatile phenomena which would be dismissed as hysteria by many, including some Catholics – could be the subject of academic writing. As communism was of great interest in the 1980s, I suggested to the Theology Department that I looked at the relationship between Church and State in East Germany. This was agreed, but gaining entry to East Germany to undertake research proved to be difficult; after months of applying, the East German authorities came back to say that I was a Roman Catholic applying through Protestant channels, a distinction of which I had been unaware. Therefore, I would have to start all over again, and time was running out. I wanted to travel in the summer vacation of 1986.
In desperation, I went to see the Head of Department, Professor Adrian Hastings. When I arrived in Leeds, there was no head for Theology and Religious Studies as until the Summer of 1984 it had been David Jenkins, who left to become Bishop of Durham (after his consecration in York, the Minster caught fire!). There was an interregnum and we waited eagerly to see who the new head would be. Adrian was a former priest and academic who had married, and he stood in some tension with the Catholic Church of which he claimed still to be a priest, and he was also an historian of some standing. There was no more appropriate person for the subjects in which I had become interested. He asked me whether there was a subject other than East Germany that I could study. I tentatively replied that I was quite interested in the apparitions of Mary, fully expecting to be rebuffed, but he sounded interested and considered it to be a perfectly viable project. After all, millions visited the apparition shrines, and their histories were complex and worthy of analysis. So I chose Medjugorje as my dissertation topic, and set out on the 29th August 1986, exactly four years to the day after I arrived in Jerusalem. I booked a trip of seventeen days in order to give myself plenty of time for research.
After seven days, I thought that the length of time I had chosen was far too long, as I had already explored every nook and cranny of this rural area. I went out with a tour company, and the rest of my group stayed for just seven days, so I had done the rounds with them in that first week. The place was certainly fascinating, and I had been introduced with my group to one of the visionaries, by then about twenty, but I couldn’t see what else I could achieve in the remaining ten days. So I decided to go to the parish church and see if I could volunteer to help with anything. And then things got very interesting.
I was due to leave on the 15th September, a Monday. What I didn’t know until then was that the 14th September was a major feast day in the area, known as the Exaltation of the Cross. Because there was a large cross on the mountain overlooking Medjugorje, great crowds would arrive and climb up to celebrate the feast there. And all this was going to be filmed by the BBC!
Therefore, the parish church had some good ideas as to how I could help out. First of all, they introduced me to an American of about my age and suggested that, as a pair, we could slowly climb the mountain over a couple of days and clean up any litter that we found. After that, the BBC would arrive, and I would be introduced to the filming crew. It was highly likely that some use could be made of me, especially as I was English.
The American was a strange character, of a kind that I would have avoided anywhere other than Medjugorje. He was an ex-serviceman, and very much the macho male. He clearly had psychological problems. Shrines like Medjugorje attracted many troubled people. In talking to him, it emerged that he was a recovering drug addict whose faith was helping him to kick the habit. For this reason, he generally avoided light conversation and preferred to pray the rosary over and over again. On that hot mountain picking up litter left by the thousands of foreign pilgrims, I had to practice great inner restraint as he demanded that we prayed the rosary yet another time, after many rounds.
Then the BBC team arrived, and they were very happy to have me on board as an extra unpaid helper. The top of the mountain was inaccessible by road, and so everything had to be carried up, by human or by mule. They built a wooden tower up there to house the cameras. We had to sleep in it for the night before the feast day to protect them, and the director wanted us to be there as the crowds arrived in the early morning. It is difficult to put into words the experience of hearing the singing pilgrims emerging in the darkness just before dawn, carrying candles. The Croat pilgrims had walked for many miles to reach the shrine.
I talked with the producer as we stayed on the mountain overnight, and he asked me if I would consent to being interviewed in the morning and record my impressions of the place. By now, Medjugorje had got to me. To spend two and a half weeks in such an exotic location, at the heart of which was the Marian devotion now dear to me, turned me from researcher into passionate pilgrim. While I had to keep collecting information for my dissertation, I became more and more immersed in the spirituality of the shrine and its unusual history. And for this to culminate in my first ever television interview for the BBC, not knowing beforehand that they would be there, was quite overwhelming. In the event, the interview was not used for the film, which was titled Madonna of Medjugorje (1987). The director was quite apologetic, writing to me personally about it, and saying that they preferred to include local testimonies, which was fair enough. But a couple of years later, I bought the book on Medjugorge written by the scriptwriter and found my interview quoted in it. I was even listed in the index!
Attending that great feast day on the Sunday was an act of faith in more than one sense. At some point during my visit, the tour company informed me that there had been a mistake in calculating my schedule. The group with whom I was due to return to Split airport were going back on Saturday 13th and there was no transport on the 14th, so I would have to spend the day in Split before catching my plane on the 15th. When I heard about the feast day, I knew I could not stay away from Medjugorje on that last day. So I sought out a taxi driver that we had used who spoke German and asked him if he could pick me up at 4 a.m. on the morning after the feast day and drive me to Split. He said that he would; it would cost me £40 but I had to pay in sterling. I agreed; it was still pretty cheap by British standards for a two and a half hour drive. Thankfully, he arrived in time. As I left, I made the mistake of leaving my remaining Yugoslav currency, about £10 worth of dinars, as a tip for my hosts. This was before hotels were built in Medjugorje and so we stayed with local families.
At Split, it transpired that the airport tax had to be paid in local currency, of which I now had none! I had to beg. I called back down the queue at the check-in as I knew that some of the travellers would be English. A middle-aged woman obliged. The airport tax was only about £2.50 worth of dinars and she was happy to lend me the money on my promise that I would send her the money in sterling when we arrived home, as I had completely run out of cash.
When I arrived home, I called my mother. The first thing she said, before I could describe anything of my journey, was that I had won £50 on the premium bonds. She had bought me a bond when I was a baby and was still the account holder. I have never won anything else on this bond before or since. The £50 was almost exactly the sum I had spent on the taxi and the tip on that last morning. The premium bonds had given it back to me! I also returned the small loan to the woman by a cheque in the post; she lived in Suffolk, I think. She replied to say that she had never heard of Medjugorje and was holidaying on the Croatian coast in Split but, after meeting me, she had become quite interested in the shrine and had acquired some reading material on it.
OK, coincidences can be explained by the likelihood that some remarkable things will happen amongst all those thousands of interactions we experience in our lives. We don’t need to read anything meaningful or religious in them, do we? Or don’t we? Sometimes, the connections are just too mind-boggling. It’s very hard to brush aside the feeling that someone is looking down (if ‘down’ be the right word) and giving you some encouragement. That someone is not going to spare you or anybody else the hardships of life, but they are going to provide some comforting signs that they are there and that the road leads to a good destination. I am not one of the ‘pie in the sky when we die’ brigade; I don’t think that we can shirk the responsibility of trying to make life better for our fellow humans and creatures on the basis that things will be OK in heaven. But I do think that, in the face of all the misery and pain of this world, that ‘hope springs eternal from the human breast’ for a good reason. And it is much more pleasant to believe in meaningful coincidences than to rationalise them away as statistical illusions.
I am not a follower of Medjugorje itself; some of the literature that came out from its devotees during the civil war in the 1990s sickened me because of its lack of concern for the Bosnian Muslims, and worse. The place became a bastion of Croat nationalism during that period. Yet Medjugorje's visionaries referred to Mary as the ‘Queen of Peace’. I am a follower of the Queen of Peace, and my view is that Medjugorje failed her just as much as anywhere else in the world. But I will never forget my two and a half weeks there in 1986, which were magical and powerfully moving. And the dissertation? Yes, I managed to remain objective enough to get a good mark for it!
6. Degree First Class
My name, when the full forename and surname are put together, is quite long at eighteen letters. On lists, it is easy to spot as it usually juts out beyond most other names, When I looked up anxiously at the list of degree results in the Theology & Religious Studies Department in Leeds in June 1987, I saw my name immediately and was ecstatic to find it in the first class category. Because most of our degree was judged on the basis of final exams, you couldn’t be sure how you had done until you saw it in black and white. In these days of computer technology and the importance of privacy, it's funny to think that we found out our degree result by looking at a list pinned up on the wall. And it was displayed a couple of hours later than the scheduled time, too, adding to our anxiety!
I felt fantastic as the class of ’87 all went off to the union bar to celebrate the results. There was a mood of celebration; most people were happy to have completed their degree and only a couple felt disappointed at the grade. In my case, I had worked hard from day one and this included vacations, when I had been single-minded and took on no salaried or voluntary work but kept on studying. And it paid off. It was also very useful to be thirteen years older than the school leavers, and to have had the experience of the Astrological Lodge as well as Greek at GCE O level. I had a head start.
The first class grading was very important to me from a career point of view, as well as simply being a satisfying achievement. As time had gone on, with my extra years I had become something of an amateur teaching assistant for the younger students. The lectures were given without dialogue or discussion, and it wasn’t easy for people to know how much to take down in notes, whereas I developed the skill of writing notes that were concise and preserved the most important information, such as which books to read. So people consulted me to understand the bits that confused them. I liked this situation, and it occurred to me that I could make lecturing a career choice. I already had the astrology teaching experience and felt comfortable when explaining things to adult learners.
We were lucky at that time as the Theology and Religious Studies Department had its own building, Hopewell House, a large three-storied terraced house. There was room for the lecturers to have their own offices and for separate staff and student common rooms. We had a modest but helpful departmental library. There was also a lecture room for manageable numbers and postgraduates had an office and study area. The secretaries were based in the house too which meant that you could take any query straight to them without leaving the building. The provision of a student common room allowed you to make a cuppa and to meet people from all three year groups. It was something of a luxury compared to twenty-first century universities, where space is so much at a premium. This layout made it easy to interact with other students, and to enjoy helping them when they found their studies difficult. Lecturing and tutoring was a logical next step.
And yet the university career advisor to whom I suggested this plan was quite sniffy. He said that it was a most difficult field to enter and persuaded me to make a teacher training application. Yet I was not deterred and teacher training was never more than a fall back option. At the same time, I was left in no doubt that a doctorate would almost certainly be required, and it would be expensive and needed a grant, given that my funds from the sale of the flat were decreasing year on year. To succeed in getting a grant, furthermore, almost certainly required a first class degree. At stake on that results day was something rather more important than bragging rights.
And so I read everything and made notes on everything. I then condensed the notes so that the information would be easier to recall on exam day. Someone managed to persuade me to take a week off during the final Easter vacation and go on a student trip to the Taizé community in France for a prayerful retreat. I’m glad I did. You can get too obsessed with working, and the change of air did me good. Taizé is an ecumenical community founded after the Second World War as a place of prayer and reconciliation between the nations. It developed a particular style of worship, with lots of quiet moments amidst a set of memorable and easy-to-sing chants. We had singing practice, along with work sessions, services, and periods of silence. And we had a lot of fun too. I was in a work group with people from various nations, and felt embarrassed that they spoke English. I apologised that this was necessary because of my poor grasp of other languages, but they reassured me that they needed English to speak to each other and not just to me. I became aware then that English was becoming a pan-European common language. On the whole, the Taizé experience refreshed me and made it easier to get back to study.
In July, we all went to the graduation ceremony to receive our degrees. While my Mum and Dad were pleased with what I had finally achieved at the age of thirty four, and delighted that I had laid the ghost of dropping out at Southampton, they couldn’t be there because it was summer season in the Bournemouth guest house. So it was a bit lonely, but a kind fellow student called Anne invited me to have a meal with her family. And so we all went our separate ways, except that I was destined to stay in the Theology Department at Leeds, along with one or two others going on to postgraduate study.
I applied for a doctorate studying the theme of my dissertation, Marian apparitions, now that we had decided it was a suitable subject for academic research. Adrian Hastings, who was to be my supervisor, suggested that I widen the scope to include other major European apparition cases of the modern period and not just Medjugorje. I think he felt that this would play into his strengths as an historian knowledgeable about various Catholic nations. On my part, I was keen to get him to understand that my doctorate was not just an academic enterprise but also a career move, and so I hoped that he would be able to offer me some part-time teaching work for me to build up some experience, to which he agreed. He was as good as his word.
7. Wilkinson 208
Room 208 in the Wilkinson Building of Leeds University had been the venue for the first lecture of my undergraduate degree in September 1984. It is situated just below the famous clock tower which dominates the university. Lecturer and Baptist minister, Haddon Willmer, a stern but inspiring man, told us about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian who stood up to Hitler and was hanged in a concentration camp. This wasn't ancient and dry, but twentieth-century and highly relevant. On that first day, Haddon helped me to identify a most important question in my chosen degree subject: where is theology in the modern world of politics, conflict, warfare, and brutal oppression?
Fate decreed that, three years later in September 1987, I stood in that same lecture room, Wilkinson 208, to give my first lecture as a part-time tutor and PhD student. My subject matter was not as dynamic as Haddon’s. I had been given the task of teaching a course entitled ‘Studying Religion and Religions’ (because the usual lecturer had moved on or had a sabbatical, I can’t remember which). It was on the theory of religion and the history of religious studies, but it was not a course that I had taken myself, as the syllabus had changed. Therefore, I had spent most of the summer reading the material and preparing for the moment. That first course I taught was tough, as I had sixty first year undergraduates, several of whom were not studying Theology & Religious studies as their main degree subject. The subject matter was somewhat dry. The room, laid out in rows, was not conducive to discussion in groups. Although the mature students were clearly enjoying it, I found it hard to get the younger ones to engage. But it was good to set out on the journey of a new career.
Then, nearer Christmas, came the moment that defined the future. Adrian asked me, out of the blue, whether I would be available to meet some tutors visiting from the College of Ripon & York St John. The college had its degrees validated by the University of Leeds. They needed someone to help deliver a New Testament course. So Jack, the college Head of Theology & Religious Studies, and Keith, the New Testament tutor, met me in a teaching room in the Theology building. I agreed to help them out, of course. I started in January 1988 and taught one day a week, sharing the course with Keith. The Ripon campus was even more luxurious in its space than Leeds. Keith’s office was so large that he was able to lecture to about twenty five students in it. Seven years later, when he retired, it became my office. Now it has disappeared into a block of apartments. The expansive space of the Ripon campus couldn’t be maintained in the economic environment of the 2000s.
Ripon is a market city (it is relatively small, but it has a cathedral) about thirty miles north of Leeds. As I didn’t have a car, this required me to take a bus to Leeds city centre to catch the 7.05 bus to Ripon, which took over an hour and a half to reach its destination, meandering through Harrogate and around villages, picking up schoolchildren. I used to snooze with my face vibrating against the window. The bus was also over-heated, but you needed your coat for walking to and from the stop in the winter cold. So it was about as uncomfortable as a bus journey can get; fortunately, I only had to undertake it once a week. By the time I got another commission to teach in Ripon, my parents had given me their old car.
Ripon & York St John in those days was not rated by the staff at Leeds. Although it offered Leeds degrees, the academics in the university regarded it as second rate, run by ex-schoolteachers rather than scholars. There was hardly anyone with a doctorate in Ripon. The Leeds lecturers saw me as someone sent on a mission to make the place more academic! Yet, for all that, the students got a good deal. It was a friendly department which ran some pretty creative courses that the Leeds people could well have learnt from. Because Ripon & York St John historically was an amalgamation of two Church of England teacher training colleges, many of the students were trainee teachers and appreciated the Ripon style. Rather than the one hour lectures and seminars which characterised Leeds, at Ripon we had several hours to play with, and could incorporate lecture, discussion, seminar, film showings, and student presentations, all as part of a multi-layered approach.
I had to be something of a schizophrenic with two personalities. The Leeds staff distrusted Ripon and vice versa, but I loved both institutions and gained value from both of them. While Leeds taught me the critical reading and research skills that I needed, Ripon showed me that the subject could be taught creatively and with a greater level of student participation. Eventually, the chance developments in my career led me to a permanent career at Ripon & York St John, but I never lost my fondness for my alma mater at Leeds. Nevertheless, I think that Ripon & York St John College, or simply York St John University as it became after the Ripon campus was sold for property development, was most definitely the right place for me. I was destined to return to York, at least for my place of work.
Over the four years of my doctorate, I taught part-time at both Leeds and Ripon. My courses (or modules, as we would later call them) got much better feedback from students than the first one on ‘Studying Religion and Religions’. I had to learn to be more creative and interactive, and soon grasped the lesson, even though sometimes one is forced, because of the subject matter, to do a straight lecture on complex material. After all, I was a lecturer and not an entertainer, and people were studying at degree level! Yet higher education was changing, and the emphasis on student satisfaction surveys meant that younger students in particular were able to demand a degree course that took their learning needs more seriously. Those who could sit through a one or two hour lecture without illustrations were most definitely in the minority.
I wavered in 1990 and considered priesthood for a time, but it became clear that this was not the right path for me. Despite the tricky task of pitching the sessions at the right level, in Theology & Religious Studies lecturing, I had found the career which suited me. It was about time; I gave my first university lecture at the age of thirty five, and became a full-time lecturer from the age of forty. It all started in Wilkinson 208, and it didn’t come to an end until Covid shut us all down in 2020.
8. The House on the Hill: All Hallows’ Vicarage
Just before I began those years of postgraduate study and part-time teaching, Haddon Willmer asked to speak to me. He knew a Church of England vicar who had an empty vicarage in his parish not far from the university. In it he wanted to base an ecumenical community comprised of people from different denominations. Haddon had thought of me, as he knew I had applied for a doctorate and would probably stay in Leeds. I had left St Mary’s Vicarage a year earlier, and found rented accommodation with a friendly young woman called Frances, an unusual owner of property for her age, the daughter of a philosopher and theologian. I was introduced to Frances by her cousin Kate, who was on our Theology course. It was a very suitable place to study my final year. But the idea of community was still attractive, and I jumped at the offer.
We moved into All Hallows' Vicarage at the beginning of the Autumn term of 1987. The community comprised James, a Methodist minister from the Bahamas, also studying for a PhD, Laetitia, a Catholic and third year Theology student, and Ian, a member of the Anglican parish. The vicar’s name rang a bell for anybody who remembered 1960s comedy: Stanley Baxter, the namesake of the Scottish comedian. He lived in St Margaret’s Vicarage with his wife Elizabeth and four children. But, due to a merger, he had inherited All Hallows’ Vicarage. The original All Hallows was a large church on the hill overlooking the Aire valley to the west of Leeds city centre, one of several great Victorian churches in the city. It had burnt down in the 1970s, and so a smaller modern church and vicarage had been built on the site. The original vicarage, also an expansive building, had been given over to a charity and turned into a hostel for the homeless, situated next door to us.
The area was poor and scruffy but the views over the city stunning. Stanley’s idea was that we should be a community living in a deprived area and serving it as well as we could. We would pray regularly together and sign a covenant committing ourselves to this. We had the idea of including in the prayer cycle a regular Friday evening service where others would be invited. This would be modelled on Taizé and its chants, so it turned out to be fortunate that I had just visited that place. In time, the daily prayer did break down, as people had busy lives, but the Friday night service never did. It was the heir to my astrology group: prayer, soup, and then the pub! We made some really good friends through it. The house was also large enough to put up lodgers at the request of the Theology Department.
One of our Friday visitors was an Irish Catholic called Seán Quigley, who had heard that there would be a Taizé service. I’m not sure that our prayer matched the Taizé model any more than the simple use of the chants, but it was enough to bring Seán into our wider community. Eventually, this larger group also signed a covenant, so the community was greater than the four residents. Of all the people involved, Seán was the one who has remained a good friend to this day. He was on a spiritual journey of his own: in the 2000s, he became a Buddhist in the Triratna tradition and took the name Ratnadeva. His analysis of the common ground between Buddhism and Druidry, yielding a Buddhism that relates to the Celtic cultures, made him an interesting speaker at York St John University. He is also a chess player, and we have had very many games over the years, about two thirds of which have gone in his favour, I am sorry to say! And then, in 2015, he kindly agreed to be my best man. Ratnadeva, now in his sixties, is considering returning to the Ireland that he left in 1988. It has been a long trajectory from Catholic, originally quite a conservative one, to a teacher in Buddhist centres, and his future mission will be to promote knowledge of Buddhism and mindfulness in his home country which is a lot less Catholic than it was in 1988.
In 1989, Laetitia left us and we replaced her with Sally, who was studying at postgraduate level to be a dietician. After a few months, my relationship with Sally became a romantic one, a development which we had to declare to the others. Fortunately, it wasn't against the rules! Sally’s time in the community led her to change her direction from dietetics to one of Anglican ministry. Many of us were active in the movement for the ordination for women, which was successful in the Church of England, but not, unhappily, in the Roman Catholic Church. Several members of the wider All Hallows’ Community were likewise aiming for ministry, and this led me to consider whether my own theological studies were leading me to a priestly ministry rather than an academic one. It had always been a faith journey as well as an intellectual pursuit. The problem was that Roman Catholic priesthood required celibacy whereas Anglican ministry did not. This led to some anguish as I grappled with this new sense of vocation which collided with my relationship with Sally.
1989 was another year of coincidences. Sally brought with her a lovely old Morris Minor with wooden trim. This proved to be a mistake, as All Hallows was in an area rife with petty crime. The Morris Minor went missing one evening, and we reported the theft to the police. The next day, I took my Citroen out (safely in the garage as I was the only car owner when we moved in) and gave two friends, Rachel and Neil, a lift to a church where Rachel, a Methodist, was preaching. As we drove down a road the best part of a mile from the vicarage, I saw an old Morris Minor parked by the road. It was similar to Sally’s but was it the same one? We drove back to the house and asked her for the registration number. No, it was not. On the way home, as we passed this car again, another Morris Minor pulled out slowly from a driveway and passed parallel to the parked one. I looked at the registration plate. Yes, that one was Sally’s! In my excitement, I drove the Citroen across the front of the moving Morris Minor to block its path, a manoeuvre reminiscent of American cop shows. It didn’t dawn on me that Sally and I could have ended up with two crashed cars! Fortunately, the Morris Minor stopped and two teenage boys got out and ran away. Sally removed the recovered car back to her family home in Herefordshire to keep it safe. But had it not been for the parked car at that very place, we would not have asked for the registration number, and I would not have had the conviction to intercept the stolen car. And the timing too: mind blowing!
In September 1989, my research for the PhD took me to Ireland to look at apparition shrines. There had been a spate of apparitions and moving statues there from 1985, and some of the visions were current. On the plane from Leeds to Dublin, I found a Medjugorje medal under my seat. It turned out to be a very relevant symbol for the state of Marian apparitions in Ireland. I managed to interview two Irish visionaries; they had both been to Medjugorje and found it inspiring. The 1985 cases in Ireland owed a lot to the Medjugorje series of apparitions, which had begun four years earlier in 1981.
Then, later in the Autumn, just as the Iron Curtain was about to collapse, I had a call from a woman who had been a fellow mature student on the Theology degree course. While studying, she met a young male student from another department and this union led to her giving birth to a little boy. In 1989, she was pregnant a second time, but her partner had ended the relationship and denied paternity. She thought he had gone back to Lancashire. Consequently, could I take her to the hospital when she was due and stay with her during the birth? I said yes. The contractions began on November 3rd, and I was present as she gave birth to Rosie that evening. When mother and baby were taken off to recover alone, I went – my head spinning with the excitement of observing a live birth for the first time – to a pub near All Hallows where I knew my friends would be gathering, as it was a Friday night. As I entered the bar, it was clear that the putative father was not in Lancashire at all, but right there in Leeds. He asked me if I had seen the woman in question, and I replied, gasping, ‘She’s just given birth to your daughter!’ He rushed off to the hospital, which was unfortunate, as he was drunk and they would not admit him to the ward. But I can’t imagine that someone who believed himself not to be the father would have set off so urgently to the hospital!
Around the same time as all these strange happenings, in September of that year another baby was being born in Manchester. I didn’t keep in touch with Rosie and her mother, but this second baby named Natalie I would get to know pretty well. She grew up to become my wife and the mother of my daughter Beatrice, who was the second baby whose birth I have attended!
I lived in All Hallows' Vicarage for the four years of my PhD study. Like St Mary’s Vicarage a few years earlier, it played an important role in my life development. These two communities helped me to know myself better as I related to others, and to understand more clearly what my faith was about. They were both communities of what might be called liberal, or perhaps radical, Christians. At All Hallows, we believed that a Church without a passion for social justice and a commitment to the vulnerable members of society was a dead one. I, along with some others, became a member of Church Action on Poverty. We marched against Conservative government policies like the Poll Tax. But, like all positive intentions, whether we contributed more than faintly to the cause of positive social change is a good question.
9. A Healing at Lourdes
‘Kill her, 18!’ declared the teacher in the last year of my primary school one day. That seemed perfectly reasonable in the 1960s, when there were several films and TV programmes featuring secret agents with numbers. That’s what I heard but what he actually said was ‘Quelle heure est-il?’ as he introduced French for the first time. This first encounter with French just about sums up my linguistic ability; I wasn’t born with that gift. I am better at reading other languages than speaking them (which isn’t saying much!). And studying Marian apparitions at PhD level meant that reading French was indispensable as, while these phenomena occur in all countries with Catholic populations, France is the most prominent in the modern period (over the last two hundred years or so).
I knew that I needed and wanted to travel to carry out my research. Around Easter 1988, I travelled to Paris by ferry and train, visiting the Catholic library there as well as the convent in the Rue du Bac, where a nun reported visions in 1830. I then went on by rail to Belgium. There I stayed in the shrines at Bearaing and Banneux, the latter being the site that had first triggered my interest in apparitions when I saw that display in Westminster Cathedral. The hotel in Banneux was run by a middle aged lady whose mother I saw briefly in the background. I saw an opportunity for some fact finding. ‘Would your mother have known the visionary?’ I asked in my poor French, being aware that the visionary, whose experiences occurred when she was eleven, would now be in her sixties. ‘C’est ma mère!’ she answered. Her mother was the visionary. She then looked horrified at her indiscretion and swore me to silence as her mother did not like to be known to the public. Given the thousands of people that visited the shrine, I am not surprised. Later, I confirmed with the parish priest that the visionary did indeed own that hotel. So I was staying with the visionary of Banneux but unable to interview her.
Later in my PhD period, I travelled to Ireland and Italy. But the funding only allowed for one trip abroad that I didn’t have to pay for myself. So, to take advantage of that, I organised a great tour across France, Spain, and Portugal in September and October 1988 that would take me away for a full month. I had been without a car for a year or so, but fortunately my parents let me have their old Citroen, which seemed to be the right make of car for the journey.
The trip did not start well. The ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg got into some very heavy weather. I am OK as a sea traveller, but when it gets really rough I need to stay on deck. So I got soaked and had to change my clothes in a field in Normandy. Then, at a relatively early point in the drive across France, the car started pinking. There was clearly something wrong with the fuel system. Be careful what you pray for! Worried about the ability of the old car to make it to Portugal, I prayed, ‘At least let me get to Lourdes!’, as I knew that Lourdes would be the highlight of my tour, the great healing shrine which attracted millions and deriving from apparitions of Mary in 1858.
For some distance, the car pinked from time to time but wasn’t too bad; it continued to take me where I wanted to go, including the shrines at Le Puy, the dramatic and scenic town built on volcanic rock, and La Salette, where a grand hotel in the Alps only cost about £10 a night for full board because it was funded by a charity that wanted to promote the Catholic faith. I was delighted. Although it wasn’t my money, I still had to watch out for overspending the grant budget. At La Salette, about 6,000 feet above sea level, you could go walking along the peaks with stunning views. But on the way from there towards south west France, the car got worse and started to stutter. Eventually, I stopped at a garage and asked them to repair it. There was a lot of fluster but, when I left, the car was as bad as ever. At least now Lourdes was not far away.
On entering the town, I looked for a hotel and was about to drive past the shrine entrance. At this point, the car ground to a halt and would not start again. Prayer answered: I had got to Lourdes, the shrine entrance itself, but no further! I had to push the car into a parking space to get it out of the traffic. A lady from a gift shop came and helped me. She then recommended a local garage and phoned them for me. They were not expensive, and the towing was paid for by breakdown cover. Within a couple of days, the car had been ‘healed’ at Lourdes and was able to continue smoothly for the rest of the trip. Despite the over-pricing of artefacts in the gift shops, by way of thanks I bought a small statue of Our Lady of Lourdes from the helpful lady and still have it now.
As at Medjugorje, I enjoyed the benefit of unplanned good timing on this trip. I got to Lourdes just as a national festival was taking place, which involved the costumes of all the regions of France, a fantastic spectacle. It caused the accommodation to fill up ahead of my arrival, but I found a small, cramped room in one hotel who were so apologetic that they offered it at a low price. I stayed for seven days and got on extremely well with the staff, causing them some amusement when telling the cleaner through a closed door that I didn’t want the room cleaned just at that moment as I was ‘washing my horses’ (‘chevaux’ rather than ‘cheveux’). There certainly wasn’t any room for horses in there!
In Spain and Portugal, things worked out very well, as I coincided with a group from England led by a Spaniard from London with whom I had previously made contact. I was with them in Garabandal, Spain, and Fatima, Portugal, and the group leader acted as an interpreter, including an interview with one of the Garabandal visionaries’ mother. In Portugal, I found that a couple of months trying to learn Portuguese in a Leeds University language lab floundered on the impossibility of understanding the border guard who was trying to tell me something as I crossed from Spain. On the way back, I visited Zaragoza, with its ancient statue of the Virgin Mary on a pillar (thus Spanish women can be called 'Pilar' after it). There I tracked down a priest called Father Luna who had written about visions in Spain and was able to speak French. It is easier to dialogue in French with non-French people, as the vocabulary and use of idiom is much more limited! Then I revisited Lourdes for a night on my way back. This time, the staff were delighted to offer me a much bigger room, Lourdes having emptied, but it cost my budget a good deal more than the previous nights!
From Normandy to the Atlantic coast in Portugal, I was drenched in Marian statues and shrines, and the happier for it. As I approached Calais on the way home, I thought I had finally left the statues of Mary behind, but no: a Madonna and Child greet you on the main road as you enter the port. At Dover, the customs official was keen to find out why I had been away for a month. My explanation didn’t seem to satisfy him, so I showed him a boot full of books on Mary in French, leaflets from shrines, and Marian artefacts. He went off into an office to consult a colleague. Through the open door, I saw some frowning and some shrugging, then he conceded defeat and sent me on my way. And so it ended, but that research trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And I had certainly fallen in love with France!
10. Doctor Maunder
I am writing this section of the blog on the thirty third anniversary of my PhD examination, which took place on the 26th September 1991. In the medieval period, doctorates were examined by a presentation open to public scrutiny, but by 1991 it was cosier, with a small group comprising your supervisor, an internal examiner from your own university, an external examiner i.e. a subject expert from elsewhere, and a secretary to take notes. But it was still supposed to be something of a trial, defending your ideas doggedly in front of a highly critical learned committee. Mine wasn’t. For some reason, the internal examiner, who was Haddon, announced that the examiners were satisfied with the thesis at the very beginning of the meeting. This confused me, as I wasn’t sure if anything I said from that point on could alter their decision. But it didn’t, I’m glad to say. I was questioned on several points but without any harm done, and then we all retired to the university library for a glass of sherry. I walked into Hopewell House on that morning as a ‘mister’ and left it as a ‘doctor’. On this occasion, my parents were able to attend the graduation ceremony as they had retired from running the guest house in 1988.
In my opinion, the external examiner, Eamon Duffy from Cambridge University (an Irish historian and specialist in Catholic history) was generous, for which I will always be grateful. I had been told horror stories of very picky external examiners who demanded the rewriting of the whole thesis on the basis of some perceived weakness, and worse. Eamon didn’t ask me to rewrite anything, despite his admission that one chapter, in his view, was ‘half baked’. He also recommended the publication of the PhD to Oxford University Press, but the two reviews they obtained from other academics showed me how far the thesis could be picked apart if somebody really wanted to! Consequently, there were too many changes to tackle for publication in a busy life, and I didn’t publish a whole book on the topic of Marian apparitions until 2016.
My PhD capped a very memorable and successful seven years as a student in the Theology & Religious Studies Department at Leeds. The PhD had not been as plain sailing as the first degree. I was told that a PhD was like ‘two elephants mating’, which illustrated the fact that an awful lot had to be undertaken before you achieved anything. And it was like that! In the first two years, I didn’t feel as if I had made much headway. I hit a low point when handing in a draft chapter to Adrian who, with his customary bluntness, told me that it was not worthy of a second year undergraduate. Oh dear, I thought, as he was entrusting undergraduates of all three years to my teaching. I must have looked crestfallen, as he declared, cheerily, ‘Onwards and upwards!’ as I left the room. He could be a difficult man to relate to, an old school academic who said exactly what he thought and didn’t take prisoners. And yet he was indispensable for my future university career, encouraging me in my research, encouraging Ripon & York St John to take me on, and later giving me my first chance at editing an academic book. So I do regard him as something of an academic father figure. And he was right – that chapter was pretty poor. Not long after that meeting, I turned a corner and the last two years were much smoother. I can date the turning point to September 1989, the month in which I travelled to Ireland, another country which stole my heart while I undertook research field trips.
The examination was held in Leeds, of course, but I had to travel up from London as I was a month into my mad year of seminary training to become a priest. Not ‘mister’ or ‘doctor’ but ‘father’! I was never sure about the decision, and I had communicated this to the Catholic Diocese of Leeds, who urged me to spend just one year in the seminary to see how it went. They would not regret the expense on their part should I then withdraw; it was a normal process of discernment, apparently. So I went off in September 1991 to Allen Hall, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, having gone through the upsetting process of leaving Sally behind but with both of us wondering whether there might be unfinished business.
The seminary was middle-of-the-road, not particularly conservative, and it was tolerant on the surface but only up to a point. I came into contact with the boundary when I told some fellow students at dinner that I believed in intercommunion, that is, sharing the communion of Jesus’ bread and wine, which is part of the Mass in Catholicism, with other churches. This was part and parcel of our life at the ecumenical community of All Hallows in Leeds. But at Allen Hall, things were different. A tutor overheard me. I was asked to discuss it with the tutor of doctrine and, while polite, he was not there to give any credence to my view, as it was not the teaching of the Church. Around this time, it became known that the Vatican had decided to require all new priests to sign an agreement to maintain obedience to the authority of the Church. Without this, you wouldn’t be ordained. The seminary with its staff and students was a far cry from the kinds of company that I kept in All Hallows, where we discussed everything and imagined everything.
The seminary was in a posh part of London, so that poor students like me had to stay in and stick with the in-house menu. I polished my snooker skills because of the many quiet evenings! I did feel that we ate too much in a world full of hunger; you could have eaten meat three times a day if you wanted it. If I had stayed there, I would have put on a lot of weight. Maybe food was seen as a substitute for sexual relationships! A small group of us tried to raise the question but without much success. There were also a lot of rather camp students, gay men in a Church that suppressed any physical expression of this. One evening, the rector told us that the Westminster diocese had uncovered a group of gay priests who were prepared to practice their sexuality in defiance of the Church and who were trying to recruit new members from the seminaries. We were to be on the lookout for this and report it if we were approached. No one had approached me! I was either too unattractive or it was just plain obvious that I wasn’t gay, I’m not sure which.
It was a struggle to imagine myself as a priest in the Church that I was now encountering. It would have been very difficult to be a radical priest. And all the cases of abuse had yet to be uncovered, so I’m glad to have avoided being a priest through all that. I decided to leave at the end of the year and said goodbye in July 1992, having confirmed that, while priestly ministry might be something I could and would like to do, I couldn’t do it in the Catholic Church of that time. Yet it was not a wasted year, as I studied for a Postgraduate Diploma in Pastoral Theology, the theology of practical ministry, at Heythrop College, then a Catholic college in the University of London. This proved very useful later when Ripon & York St John College teamed up with an ordination training course, and from that union emerged a job for me which became a career.
There were many reasons for leaving the seminary, but my strong doubts about the value of enforced celibacy provided the most obvious one. When I left the seminary, I asked Sally to marry me, and accepted that I would be a priest’s husband rather than a priest. That seemed to be a good compromise, and the Church of England would be a friendlier home for a progressive liberal like me. I managed to get more part-time work from Leeds, Ripon & York St John, and also the Catholic college near Leeds, Trinity & All Saints. I moved into the flat where Sally lived, a run down council home that had been given to the Church of England to house some refugees from Sri Lanka who had now left. Sally applied for ordination training at Queen’s, Birmingham, and was due to start in September 1993. I would accompany her there, although it wasn’t at all clear that any lecturing work would be available for me, as I asked at Birmingham University and didn’t get much encouragement. Even a doctorate didn’t guarantee anything; people often gained their experience with part-time work in places where they were already known, as I had in Yorkshire. But, never mind, Sally’s ministry after her course would be based in the Ripon Diocese and we would return home.
At my PhD examination in 1991, I seemingly had two options: ordination in the Roman Catholic Church or marriage to Sally, and I couldn’t do both. A year later, approaching forty, I had ruled out one. But, as it turned out, I would choose neither.
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