Mysteries of the missing limbs, deadly asparagus and U-boat commanders

In 1997, David Wilbourne had just been appointed vicar of Helmsley and that autumn his diaries reveal the unexpected surprise he and his family got when they moved into their new lodgings in the historic Canons Garth.

September 26

Canons Garth originated as a 12th-century medieval hall to house monks embarking on a spree of local church-building. It contains some curious ecclesiastical items. In the hall hangs a crucifix with a wooden figure of Jesus riddled with woodworm, making him look like the local rifle range had been using him for target practice.

In the chapel (a handy thing to have in your home when you only have five other centres of worship in the parish!) there is a another crucifix, where Jesus’s arms are broken at his shoulders. Upstairs in one of the four attics we discovered a brass bedstead bearing no less than six mattresses, on top of which nestled a Madonna and child – the infant Jesus’s foot was missing. Back in the chapel is another Madonna and child, this time Jesus is missing his hands, gazed at by the statue of a monk without a nose.

All these missing limbs in the this strangest of houses puzzled me somewhat, until I chanced on a story about Saint Hugh of Lincoln, who roamed around in the same century as our new home was built. When visiting Fécamp Abbey, his devotion to relics moved him to chew on Mary Magdalene’s arm bone and in spite of protests bit off one of the saint’s fingers first with his front teeth and finally with his molars.

Clearly on one of his pilgrimages he must have ended up in Helmsley and sated his appetite with Jesus’s hands and feet, washed down with a monastic nose. Eight hundred years on, Canons Garth seems a very tired building indeed, and I spend our first month there never more than a few feet away from my tool box. I want to be out and about as a parish priest, but instead find myself stuck indoors being the curator/caretaker of the tattiest ancient monument.

Another thing that disturbs me, is that I have always set great store on honesty, but suddenly find myself the recipient of two lots of stolen goods: a fireplace in my study which was looted from the local castle in Victorian times and tiling in the chapel which was nicked from nearby Rievaulx Abbey following its dissolution by Henry VIII in the 1530s.

While my family and I are watching a TV programme about the first atom bomb, a ceiling in the corridor collapses in sympathy, sending up a veritable mushroom cloud of wattle and daub last deployed in the Dark Ages; the mushroom cloud of dust blocking the struggling electric light means the Dark Ages have returned.

Hasty repairs are completed followed by Helmsley’s decorator, who has a striking doppelgänger in that he is the spitting image of Lord Feversham, the local peer who appointed me to this pile. Lord Feversham is a practical sort, and like all true nobility dresses down, where the decorator dresses up and is quite a philosopher. In the understandable muddle, I fear I have instructed my Lord to apply a second coat to the newly repaired ceiling while bemusing the decorator with a lengthy treatise on the intricacies of the Church of England’s Pastoral Measure.

October 5, 1997

Oldest congregation in captivity they might be (the combined age of the two churchwardens is over 150) but they couldn’t have given us a more wonderful and friendly welcome, not least performing the Herculean tasks to clean up Canons Garth. Yet all that being said, my first Sunday after being officially put in was more than a bit depressing.

The cathedral-like parish church has the highest tradition, bells and smells and bowing and genuflections punctuate every paragraph. They had a little gong in the sanctuary, which the server, the kindest and gentlest of men, took great pains to bong when I said our Lord’s words over the bread and wine. But the server didn’t seem to notice there was hardly anyone there in the congregation to appreciate his painstaking efforts. And if he did notice, it didn’t seem to worry him, almost as if people were irrelevant as long as the job was done (which he was doing with great panache) and the high church fineries we observed. My great friend, Canon John Young, had once quipped that the Church of England could be the first organisation in history to die because of an obsession with good taste.

October 12

I was determined to inject some life into my new church, so for my second Sunday I conscripted my three daughters as servers. I appointed Clare, almost eight, to carry the boat shaped incense container, for use at various points of the service when you wanted to asphyxiate the congregation. Her sister, Hannah, two years her senior, was to carry the altar book and Ruth, our eldest, held the cross and all the robed flunkies followed behind.

The three girls took to their roles like ducks to water, and it was good to have their slightly mischievous company in the sanctuary. Before my time, the sanctuary at Helmsley was a fiercely guarded male preserve, so it was no surprise that after the service someone took Rachel, my wife, aside and complained that the new servers should be boys and not girls.

“I’m so sorry,” my wife replied, with a mischievous glint in her eye. “If only I’d known I would have given birth to sons and not daughters.”

December 8

Christmas preparations are in full swing, including a discussion at December’s Church Council, which has shades of the vicar of Dibley about it. Inevitably the discussion turned to Christmases past, including one year when thieves broke into the church vestry on Christmas Eve and tried to jemmy open the safe containing the silver plate and chalice.

“The vestry had to be closed until the new year,” one stalwart informed us. “It was in a terrible mess, but the police wanted everything left as it was until the forensic team had taken fingerprints. And then the place had to be sealed because they discovered asparagus all over the show.”

“Asparagus?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah, it all spilled out of the safe door when they tried to jemmy it open,” the stalwart assured me. “Asparagus everywhere.”

“No, it wasn’t asparagus, it was asbestos, you silly clot,” someone corrected her.

“‘Now,” I pronounced, taking my opportunity to bring the meeting back on task, “I thought we’d do three new things for Christmas this year. First, let’s have Ryedale School in for their carol concert. Secondly, let’s have a midnight mass. Finally let’s have a crib service on Christmas Eve afternoon.” The Church Council couldn’t have looked more shocked if I’d liberally scattered asparagus or even asbestos all over the place. But to their credit they gave me nothing but encouragement. It was those on the edge of church life, a small minority of people I termed “out of work U-boat commanders looking for a war”, who could be relied upon to give me flak.

“But the school will make a mess... what do you want a crib service for, nobody will come?...What do you want a Midnight Mass for/ People are too old in Helmsley to stay up until that hour.”

December 25

Fortunately, my crib service featuring the world premiere of Thomas the Tank Engine comes to Bethlehem brought the house down. Lord Feversham was the star of the show for the traditional bit, reading the story of the coming of the Wise Men and proving the meanest Herod I have ever heard. My mistake was to get the youngsters in to impersonate a flock of sheep. One toddler’s baas were incessant and his twin, who wasn’t caught by the sheep bug at all gave him increasingly disdainful looks. Our Christmas morning communions were also pure magic, with a little boy demonstrating his super-charged car up and down the aisle during my sermon. The out-of-work U-boat commander were shocked, but let’s just say the rest of the congregation was delighted.

A vicar’s chronicles

David Wilbourne spent 12 years as vicar of the North Yorkshire market town before being appointed Assistant Bishop of Llandaff in Wales.

He will be back in Yorkshire next month, signing copies of The Helmsley Chronicles at Claridges Bookshop in Helmsley, from 2pm on Saturday, June 2. For further details call 01439 770401 or online at www.claridgesofhelmsley.co.uk

The Helmsley Chronicles by David Wilbourne is published by Darton Longman Todd priced £10.99. To order through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing costs £2.95.