WHITE ROBED ANGEL - NORMA GOODWIN REDMONDS BRAY - BY RONNIE BRAY

Today, 19th November, 2013, would have been Norma's 80th birthday. She is sadly missed by her family and her friends.

 WHITE ROBED ANGEL

The patients knew she was an angel – that white robed figure who slowly and silently moved through the dim night hours in Ward Eight of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. Some people do not believe in angels, and I understand why they do not. But I do! 

Angels come in all shapes and sizes. Their existence does not depend on whether people do or do not believe in them. Most think of angels as diaphanous spirits floating down from heaven to minister to people in times of need, before returning to ethereal realms. This angel was not visiting from heaven. She was an earthling, who did not know it, but was on her way to paradise.

The angel’s name was Norma. We had been married for almost thirteen years when she became ill. Initially it seemed nothing more serious than a sore throat. She took a turn for the worse, becoming hoarse, tired, and weak. I drove her to the hospital, insisting that a doctor examine her. The doctor ordered tests and x-rays. 

The test results and x-rays came back. The young physician was taciturn, avoiding my gaze. “I think we’ll keep her in,” he said. “We need to do further tests.” I wheeled her into the reception ward, hugged her long and hard, and left for home to get the things she needed for a stay in hospital. When I returned with her necessities, she was in bed in Ward 8.

She was gratified that something was being done and after some rest, she was more like the happy, laughing woman everyone knew. I spent each day with her and she had many visitors. Friends and neighbours flocked to see her, bringing her flowers, fruit, chocolates, and the mandatory energy drinks.

Her happiest day was the Sunday that three of her four surviving children visited. They spent the day talking, remembering, and laughing. She loved to laugh, but her greatest attribute was her impulse to loving service. Although now enfeebled by disease, she obeyed the divine impulse to serve others, shuffling painfully through the ward, seeing to the needs of others.

A young girl, struggling to come to terms with life, lay listless and morbid. Tattooed, pierced, her arms bearing the scars of frequent self-mutilation, ostracised by her fellow-patients, brooding, and depressed. Norma encouraged her to think positively about herself and the possibilities of her life.

In the bed across from Norma was an old lady. Everything she ate came back. Norma soothed and comforted, encouraging her to take a little nourishment to get strong enough to fight the illness that was sapping her vitality.

One elderly Indian woman spoke little English. She had many visitors at one particular time of each day, but for long periods after that, she was alone and unable to join in conversations. Norma, who spoke no Urdu or Gujerati, sat on her bed and painstakingly made contact. She understood how important it was for people to have human company if they were going to feel good about themselves.

Many others, scattered throughout the large ward, were grateful recipients of Norma’s ministration. She was often up in the night, comforting those who were feeling lost, or lonely, or who were anxious, or unable to sleep. It was not easy for her to move around, because her illness sapped her strength, and made walking difficult. However, it did not stop her from visiting and helping. The nurses and doctors praised her enterprise, appreciating the value of spiritual support in healing.

In the next bed to Norma's was a woman in her thirties. It was she, more than any other, that attracted Norma’s most profound compassion. She was a tender little thing who apologised every time she opened her mouth. She was so anxiety laden that it was painful to hear her. If she dropped a crumb onto the bed covers, she apologised profusely, and looked as though she feared an ogre was going to punish her. She repeatedly complained that she was being a nuisance, and that she caused trouble for the staff.

One night, she called for a commode. After using it, she began to cry that she was sorry, that she was sure she had made a mess. Would they forgive her? Norma assured her that everything was all right. She spoke softly and encouragingly. The woman came and sat on the edge of Norma’s bed. Norma took her hands in her own, looked her in the eye and spoke softly but directly. “You have a Father in Heaven who loves you.” These were the last words she heard. She smiled, the only time Norma had seen her smile, then died on Norma's bed. How fitting it was that the last words she heard in mortality were words of love, assurance, and hope. 

The White Robed Angel had performed her ministry. Three weeks later, she was herself called home to her reward where she continues to minister to and teach fragile souls that have not yet learned that in spite of all the disappointments and anxieties of life, they have a Father in Heaven, and that He loves them beyond all comparison.

Copyright © 2013- Ronnie Bray - privileged to have been her husband for 13 years and for eternity

RETOLD YORKSHIRE TALES & ASSOCIATED' YARB GROUP' WEBSITES

The Wafter - an autobiographical experience

Ronnie Bray recalls the day he was asked to use a wafter. 

In a perverse sort of way, it was my own fault for being too trusting. When Matthew and I lived at 39 Lower Reins, Honley, a few miles out of Huddersfield, I felt to get employment nearer home instead of making the daily epic journey to the village of Dobcross, on the border of the White and Red Rose Counties, so when I was made aware of an opening for a rag puller two miles towards New Mill, I went to see the elder Robinson of James Robinson Limited.

What had once been a dye house in the heyday of the textile boom following the Industrial Revolution, had bowed before the weight of overseas competition and devolved into a place where textile fibres were recovered and reconstituted from discarded garments.

Mr Robinson Senior, who was past retiring age, was almost taciturn, somewhat gruff, and had the air of a man used to telling people off. He showed me the rag pulling shed where two machines stood, one each side of the shed, connected to giant tubes through which the separated fibre of the pulled rags were drawn by vacuum into baling hoppers. The shed floor was home to mountains of old rags, coats, cardigans, sweaters, scarves, and every other kind of garment with which humankind is wont to adorn their frames, either for decoration or to keep warm in chill winter days. 

These were the rags waiting to be pulled. The first task of a rag puller is to remove all buttons and zips, so that the pulling machine is not fouled by them. The rags had previously been sorted by colour to produce the right colour of fibre mix when pulled. I did not see any reason why I could not be a satisfactory rag puller and neither did Mr Robinson, who offered satisfactory wages, and I mentally saw myself with an extra hour in bed of a morning. After I had obtained from him an assurance of the plenitude of work, “Twelve months already in hand, and plenty of overtime,” I struck his palm with mine and set off to Shaw’s (Pallets) Ltd., to hand in my notice.
My first few days as a rag puller went well with no untoward incident, apart from the definite feeling that I was eating and breathing acrylic fibres, which suspicion turned out to be true. That was remedied by my ascending to the office, housed in a separate building near the works entrance, and persuading the office manager that my health and temper would benefit from using a surgical mask, predating Michael Jackson and other eccentrics by the better part of thirty years. A box of masks was reluctantly handed over. 

The reluctance was redolent of the same attitude experienced by the nice lady secretary when I required the office staff of Lisle and Munday’s paint Works in Southampton to hand over what she said was the MD’s ‘last’ toilet roll! 

The machinery hummed, as the rags I placed in the rear feed box were taken to the top of the machine by a linked feed belt before they were dropped onto another metal track that fed the rags toward the real working part, the ‘swift,’ a rapidly revolving drum into which were driven steel pins with flattened ends, ground occasionally to keep them flat ended and sharp. 

When the cloth came into contact with this rapidly revolving four feet diameter drum, the fibres were ripped from them like wisps of candy floss, then sucked into the baling hopper, cunningly lined with a huge plastic bag, so that when the bag was full, the top was folded over, and a vacuum tube stuck into the contents and the air drawn out, making a bale of some 300 to 400 pounds in weight, that was strung around tightly to prevent expansion and then taken to the warehouse, following which the whole process begun afresh with a new liner. The more bales wheeled into the warehouse, the happier and richer Mr Robinson was. 

Two weeks later, Mr Robinson marched into the pulling shed and announced that we were going on short time. That got my dander up and I reminded him forthrightly that he had promised me that there was a year’s work on the books and plenty of overtime, and that I had left a perfectly good job on his say-so, and that I was furious. He relented and said I could work forty hours a week. However, his eye was now firmly fixed upon me! 

The machine I worked was relatively new. It had been made by a company of textile engineers in Heckmondwike. Its weakness was in the metal plate belt that received rags from the upper hopper and fed them forward into the swift. Sometimes, one side got ahead of the other and then the linked plates separated. Setting it right was a comparatively easy job, requiring only that the track be partially disassembled, straightened, and the tensioning bolts replaced and correctly adjusted. 

I had performed this function several times since beginning work there, but when I was seen doing it by the Curmudgeonly boss, he exploded in anger, warning me never to touch it again. The machine, he explained from somewhere inside a cloud of acrid blue smoke, was under warranty and all he had to do was to telephone the manufacturer in Heckmondwike and they would send out a fitter who would set it right under warranty.
I exploded back that it took anything from one to four hours for the fitters to arrive, but that I could have the machine running as good as new in less than twenty minutes. 

My words fell on closed ears. I was placed under an interdict not to touch the machine again with anything but a shoving stick under pain of excommunication! My last effort to render him conscious of my skills as a fitter was to inform him that as a mechanic I had kept the British Army going in the Middle East. I was grateful that he did not ask me where I had kept it going to, but he was immovable. 

He strutted like a man who knew he was right, and, technically, he was. So, the next time the belt plates came apart, I reported to the office that the Heckmondwike fitters were needed in the rag pulling shed and left the machine alone. I took my rest in the strange silence of that usually noisy place, and was discovered at ease by my taskmaster. 

“What are you doing,” he asked as if he had found a poacher with one of his prize salmon. 

“Waiting for the fitter,” was my laconic reply. 

“Don’t just sit there doing nothing,” he said, spitting pins and feathers at me. 

“What would you like me to do?” I asked, nonchalantly and with an air of uninjured innocence. 

“Clean off the beams,” he said, in as near a Stentorian tone as he could muster, indicating with a wide arc of his hand, the massive beams supporting the quarry tiled roof of the shed. 

I looked at the beams. They were at least fifteen feet from the ground, and their upper surfaces were covered with an inch or more of variegated acrylic and wool dust. I re-assessed my height and reach. At a miserly 5’7” in two pairs of thick army socks and perhaps another couple of feet of arm extension I could make it about halfway to the sturdy beams that had been felled and adzed when Napoleon was creating havoc in Europe. 

“With what shall I clean them?” I said, beginning to sound like an old song. 

“With a wafter,” he responded, unconscious of how appropriately he had done so, as in the old song. I tried not to display my amusement. 

“With a wafter?” I inquired. 

“A wafter!” he returned with emphasis. I tried very hard not to look like Harry Belafonte and softly asked the question. 

“What’s a wafter?” as I bit the inside of my lip hard to keep me from smiling out loud. 

“A wafter? You don’t know what a wafter is?” 

“No. Sorry.” I apologised for my ignorance. After all, I had not worked in textiles for some years and when I had the subject of wafters had not arisen so I was without illumination on the subject. However, thanks to Mr Robinson Senior I was destined not to remain curtained in ignorance one moment longer. 

“You get a bit of cloth,” he countered, with just the hint of exasperation creeping into his voice, “and you waft the dust off with it!” He made a ‘wafting’ motion with his arm as he spoke. He was picture perfect. The standard textile training process known as ‘Standing by Nellie’ still worked! 

All was clear. It was blindingly simple. Anything used to cause a draft, or waft, or air, could properly be nominated as a wafter. 

Thus informed, my sense of the ridiculous refused to remain totally submerged, but a lot was riding on it doing so, and to that end I redoubled my efforts not to display one tittle of mirth by biting the inside of my lip ever so hard.
Had I been an eccentric millionaire working just to pass away my idle hours in pleasant pastimes, I might have bent double before him and rolled on the floor in a fit of hysterical laughter at his grave explanation of so simple a thing. Sanity held the day for me and I remained in his employ. 

Having completed my education, the gentleman departed leaving me to fashion a wafter from a suitable rag and get wafting. 

Thus were my idle hours transformed into light duties dedicated to wafting dust from one place only to see it settle in another. And then, when that place was duly wafted, the dust obligingly left that place also to settle on another, until the fitters from Heckmondwike mercifully materialised and did what I could have done some hours earlier, and the voice of machinery was heard once more in the land. 

I took time to consult with the fitter about the method I had used to fix the machine. “That was the right way,” he said. In fact, he confided, “There’s nothing to it. A monkey could do it.” I offered him a banana, which he refused and went whistling on his way back to Heckmondwike, while I ate the banana and mused on the possibility of hiring a couple of monkeys to do my work so that I could sit in the dust proof shed and watch them through the Perspex window. 

That was not the end of Mr Robinson ‘keeping his eye’ on me, but it is the only one worth repeating. I started ‘keeping my eye’ on Mr Robinson, and let him know that he was being watched. 

In a reasonably short time I decided that I had collected all the buttons and beads I needed and that my fortune lay elsewhere and secured employment as a welfare operative for Fairclough Builders (Leeds) Ltd, at Shadwell on the outskirts of Leeds, where my boundless talents thrust me to the forefront of ‘useful’ people trusted by the site’s General manager, Richard Clough. 

Using my initiative, the same one I had used to mend the conveyer at Robinson’s, I organised the stores, brought the mediaeval toilets up to perfection and kept them there, gave a new lease of life to the mess hut by killing the ptomaine and generalised bacteria that engulfed it, worked in the office as the time clerk preparing the hours of each employee ready for the wages department, advised Richard on Union procedures and current Labour Laws, saved the company thousands of pounds by repairing scratches to new doors using felt tipped pens, and undertook to clean completed homes to ‘walk in’ readiness. 

For all these services I was richly rewarded by Fairclough Builders with generous hours of overtime pay, and treated like a king. During my employment at Shadwell I occasionally considered what a difference there was to be found among employers whose roots were in different ages. 

There I contrasted Victorian Ager Robinson and New Ager Clough. Each had much to recommend them in their own ways and industries. But I have never forgotten how my life was profoundly enriched by old Mr Robinson and his wafters. 

(C) 2013 Ronnie Bray

Wanted – Lodgings For Unemployed Single Man -- By Ronnie Bray

Landlords coming across the want ad, ‘Wanted – Lodgings for Unemployed Single Man’ might be forgiven if they don’t excitedly get in touch with the advertiser to offer their accommodation.  It is reasonable for those renting rooms to be sure that their prospective tenants have the means of paying their rent. 

If the homeless had described himself as a ‘gentleman with private means’ it would give encouragement to landlords, especially those that have had their share of rent-skipping fly-by-nights, because most landlords don’t let their accommodation spaces for love.  They are in the lodging business to make income. 

If the lodging seeker had been more forthcoming about his life-style and intentions for the future, someone with a room to let might have been prepared to take a risk on him.

It has been said that an optimist is someone looking for a room that takes his saxophone and piano accordion along on the hunt.  How much in need of a tenant does a landlord have to be to open his doors and arms wide to someone that carries with him the means of annoying his other tenants? 

Let’s play fly-on-the-wall to find out how this particular unemployed single man spends his time.  Why shouldn’t we?  Landlords are only human and the old adage ‘Once bitten twice shy’ is at the front of every landlord’s mind.  If it isn’t, then he is either new to the business, or else he has been lucky. 

There are always certain risks when you open your home to strangers.  It makes sense to learn as much as possible about a potential client and the more you know about him the better you are to make a sound decision about whether or not to take him in.  However, all that is known is that he is unmarried, out of work, and needs a place to stay.

We have a room to rent, times are hard, but we must be careful, we feel justified in being cautious and so we followed him discreetly to acquaint ourselves with his character.

A few days and we had our summary.  It was not encouraging.  It noted that he keeps company with dubious characters, drinks with working men but never buys a round, and he is known to take meals with contemptible people.  He seems comfortable when he is with outcasts that some believe are the dregs of society, the lumpenproletariat. 

He talks a lot, is generally soft spoken, and, strange to say, most people enjoy listening to him.  He dresses like an out-of-towner, talks with a northern accent, and wants the polished speech of genteel urbanites.  

More disturbing is the observation that he has attracted the attention of the police, who, it is said, are watching him closely.  He has a small gang of permanent followers that are as impoverished as he is, so we presume that they too live on the generosity of strangers. 

A red flag was raised by the particularly harsh way he spoke to a group of evangelists.  It looked as if they were trying to make him into saying something they could use against him, but he was too smart for them and called their bluff.  Loudly he denounced them as heretics - and worse.  The result was that they were quite humiliated and shuffled off muttering excitedly that they would make him pay for what they took to be his sarcasm.  Whatever they thought, it was clear that he felt justified in exposing their hypocritical cant and superficial religiosity. 

When speaking to others he was so gentle that he put them at ease.  Most people liked him and moved in closer to him as if they were old and comfortable friends.  This made us think he might have a split personality, such as a Mr Nice Guy and a Mr Nasty.  We were not the only ones that thought that.  Some even thought he was mad, or drunk, or in the grip of a malevolent humour, and said so.  Others nodded in agreement. 

The summary concluded that he was either a wonderful or a dangerous man, depending on which group your ear got caught in, and which you believed.  It was not helpful to us because it didn’t tell us whether would he murder us in our beds, pay his rent, bring outcasts home to disturb our peace, set fire to the house, or run off with our daughter?  We were just as indecisive as we were before.  He didn’t seem like a lot of trouble, but would he have our rent money? 

Then the matter was taken right out of our hands because he was arrested.  It looked as if his goose was well and truly cooked because some powerful people brought accusations against him.  We knew he was different, but the complaints showed a side of him that knocked us right off our buffets. 

He was accused of anarchy, plotting to overthrow government, and of making himself more important than local and national authorities.  It was told he had run amok in a market, assaulted people, and had upset their stalls.  Some said he was mentally ill, paranoid, a megalomaniac, and a danger to life and limb.  We had had a close shave!  It was even charged that he intended to destroy a national monument and then build a better one by his alleged magic power. 

Others said he was a political activist, a revolutionary leading an army of terrorist insurgents that would attack the city at night, overthrow the administration, and set up his junta.  His wandering habits and his parleying with all and sundry was really a secret campaign to recruit fellow radicals to his cause. 

They dragged him quickly to trial.  His trial was unusual because witnesses flatly contradicted each other.  Some opined that witnesses had been paid to lie and there would have been laughter in court as one witness after another contradicted each other, except the court dealt harshly with any that didn’t take its proceedings with absolute gravity. 

He was pronounced guilty of everything they charged him with.  It was obviously a pre-determined verdict.  However, what was even more unusual was the chief justice’s announcement that he was sending the case to the Supreme Court for sentencing. 

Some demurred at verdict, but did so quietly, on grounds that no defence was mounted.  The homeless man was not represented, and didn’t open his mouth in his defence.  By any legal standards, it was clearly a mistrial, but it was evident that the court officials were not willing to risk losing control of the situation and relinquish the opportunity to have the ultimate punishment of death imposed. 

When he was set before the senior judiciary the prosecution was reluctant to define the charge for which it sought the death sentence.  The transcript of this part of the trial reads:

Chief Justice:        What is the charge against the accused?

Prosecutor: Don’t you worry about the charge.  He is clearly guilty.  If he were not guilty, we would not have brought him here!  Just sentence him to death.

Chief Justice:        No charge, no trial!  If that’s how you feel, then take him back to your court and deal with his offence.

Prosecutor: We cannot do that because we are not authorised to pass a sentence of death.

After that things went badly for our almost lodger.  The high court avoided its duty to uphold the law by giving in to popular clamour that ensured he was put to death.  It was as just as a lynching in the lawless Wild West.

It was all over in a very short time.  He was sentenced to die, taken, and then executed.  No appeal, no plea for clemency, nothing offered in mitigation, no sense that justice had been served.  For most of the citizens it was just another hard day in their hard lives. 

Nevertheless, the executed man was not forgotten.  He was talked about all over town.  We learned much more about him than we had found out for ourselves.  Some of the accounts seemed far fetched, but those telling the stories were honest folks with nothing to gain by lying.  Some had seen him heal sick people of ills such as lameness, paralysis, and blindness.  Others said he had fed big crowds of people with a few scraps of food. 

One said he turned ordinary well water into delicious wine.  Another that he had changed the weather, and more than one said they had seen him raise the dead.  It was hard to know what to believe. 

We solved our lodger situation by renting the room to a weaver.  There was nothing unusual or outlandish about him.  He paid his rent, made his cloth, and sold it in the market place.  He was easy to feed, very quiet, the children liked him, and apart from his snoring we hardly knew we had him. 

Late at night, my wife and I talked about the homeless man and what it might have been like if he had come to live with us.  I was unsettled because there were too many unanswered questions.  However, my wife, simple soul that she is, said she liked him because he had a kind face and smiling eyes.  She said she thought he would have been a good lodger. 

And then, and I know it’s a funny thing, but I was in the city centre a few weeks later when one of his people was talking about him to a crowd, and he talked about him as though he was still alive – and still looking for lodgings! 

It is amazing how some people manage to look serious when saying daft things.  This fellow was saying that the homeless guy still needed a lodging.  That’s when I lost interest and skirted the crowd to make my way home.  The world is mad enough without making more madness.  I could still hear him going on about the dead man until I was almost home. 

When I got back home I told my wife what I had heard, and she quizzed me as if I was the one on trial.  I had no choice but to tell what I had heard, expecting her to laugh.  But she was not amused.  She looked at me in that way she has when she wants me to listen carefully 

“Is that exactly what you heard him asked?” she asked.  I had to admit that it was not exactly word for word.

“Then what was it?  What did he say?  Exactly!” she returned.

“Let me see,” I needed time to think. 

“Ah, yes,” I said when I had collected my thoughts.  “He said, ‘This man you delivered to be killed has been raised from the dead by the power of God and is alive today.’  He also said that the man’s name was Joshua, and that God has made him both King and Messiah.’”

“Messiah?  King?  And then what?” asked my bold - getting bolder - wife.

“Well, that’s when I started to leave.  I had heard enough to know it wasn’t something I wanted to get mixed up in.”

“What did the others do?” 

“They seemed thunderstruck.  Their mouths gaped open.  Some began to cry and pull out their hair, and they all wanted to know what they ought to do.”

“And then?”

“Then this big fellow told them to change their ways and be baptised in the name of homeless Joshua and that if they did God would wash off their sins and then they would be given a special Spirit.  When I heard that it seemed so reasonable that I almost wanted to go back and join them.

“What else?” demanded the curious one.

“He said that this applied to people in all parts of the world, and told them to save themselves by finding safety in Joshua.”

“I must go to them,” said she.  “I must become one of them.” 

“Hold on!” I said, seeking to prevent her making a fool of herself and me.  But she was determined and went out through the door to make her way downtown.  I couldn’t let her go alone so I went with her.  Anyway, I still had a couple of questions that needed answers, although, being the sensible one, I had my doubts that it was anything worth our while. 

I thought the whole thing absurd, but I detected a funny feeling in the air, much like the atmosphere when a big thunderstorm is coming, and I knew my lady had felt it.  And then there was this peculiar urge growing inside me and before I knew it, we were in the crowd hearing about Joshua. 

The longer I listened the more it made sense to me.  I mean about the lodger thing.  It transpired that the homeless man, Joshua, had told a man that asked to join his band he was welcome to join him but that if he did he would be homeless, because although foxes have dens, and birds have nests, the Son of man, that’s what this Joshua he called himself, didn’t have a place to lay his head at night. 

Hearing this I felt ashamed that I had ever hesitated to take him under our roof.  But what could I do about that now?  My wife and I talked with his chief follower and found that though he is no longer homeless, it was not him that needed lodging in the first place, but us that needed him as our lodger.  They told us he had gone into heaven to his Father and his God, but has promised to live with us as our Comforter. 

We went home with the funniest feeling I have ever experienced.  It was as if my heart was bursting with joy.  Well, we were both exhilarated by what we had learned and come to believe. 

We talked and talked for hours through the night about the homeless man, warming ever more to him as we did.  As we were talking excitedly at what the day had uncovered to us, we were silenced by a knocking on our door. 

We looked at each other in the feint glimmer of the oil lamp.  The question "who is it?" hung on our lips unasked.  I looked through the window to see the Homeless One. 

“It’s him, wife!”  I shouted.  “It is the Homeless One!”

“Well then, open the door!” husband she shouted, standing and taking off her apron. 

Hurriedly I unlatched the door and invited him into our home, and into our hearts.  Before he crossed our threshold, he said,

“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” 

He came into our home with his aura of light.  But not only light, but joy.  And not only joy, but hope, and not only light, joy, and hope, but peace, a perfect peace so profound that we while cannot understand it we are nevertheless transformed by it. 

Our Lodger now has a permanent home with us.  Moreover, he has promised us a permanent home with him. 

© 2010 – Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Fishing With Sam

Fishing with Sam
 
I have only fished once since I was a pole net fisherman in the duck pond of Greenhead Park in distant days when I was a boy and the prize was minnows an inch or two long, that we called sticklebacks because of the sharp spikes along their backs, and that was a day’s fishing with little Sam in the stream by the bridge in the field next to the Old Mill House where he lived with his baby brother, and his parents, my good friends Keith and Caroline Vugler, for whom I occasionally babysat.

I liked spending time with the Vuglers. Keith and I became friends when we went to the School of Nursing at Saint Audrey’s Hospital in Woodbridge, Suffolk in 1970. Keith was a musician who had been in the pop music industry and had performed in many places round the world. Equally at home on the double bass as on the piano, his wit and easy humour made him an excellent companion. It was, he said, his compulsion to give something back to the world that had given him so much that led him to become a psychiatric nurse. Caroline was a beautiful young woman from Saffron Waldon. She was kind, talented and the kind of mother every child ought to have. Their children called them Keith and Caroline, and that did not seem out of place in their relaxed and bright
household.

Their home was an old flourmill that sat beside a now sluggish weed-stilled stream that had once propelled the decaying undershot wheel and ground wheat into flour. The mechanism occupied the back part of the composite of industrial and domestic premises that oozed old world charm with its low head-bumping oak beams, duck or grouse doorways, sloping broadboard upper floors, and a fundamental cottagy charm that swept visitors backwards at lightning speed a couple or more centuries into a pastoral idyll that probably never was, but seemed to have been in the sun soaked days of a blueskied summer in Suffolk.

The odd fusion of present charm and the evocation of the Arcadian manners of past generations of millers enchants those whose poetic souls are unrestricted by the demands of reality to see what exhausting drudgery milling really was, and how its impinged on each of the miller’s household, from youngest to eldest, to keep the mill stones turning, maintaining high standards and hitting deadlines for demanding customers, and always so much to do in the hustle and bustle that characterised the lives of agrarian workers in those harsh times and from whose obligations the mill and its operators were neither immune nor excused. Mills, like most worthwhile crafts and enterprises, required continual close attention from skilled eyes and hands, and conferred no repose until the creaking wooden mechanism was put to rest for the night. Only then, when the persistent rumblings slowed to a halt and there was no more need to shout to be heard, did quiet come to that place.

One day, the mill, having been brought to a standstill the previous night, slept on undisturbed, its giant undershot wheel letting the rushing water break against it, but the drive was locked and the great axle beam did not turn that day or ever again, nor the grinding stones roll one over the other crushing the hard won kernels into flour for bread and pastries, for the mill was put from use by the march of progress, and the fruits of the field taken to more modern, less wasteful factories run by sleepless steam engines and ground with greater precision into finer, more useful and better quality flour, and a way of life silently passed into antiquity. Flour dust settled for the last time on the Old Mill, the miller and his family either retired or went to work for someone else, the cornfat rats sought a reliable supply of provender, and eventually the farmer who owned the mill and the land on which it rested let it as a residence.

Now, it was the home of the Vuglers, but not as happy as it had been, for Keith and Caroline were amicably talking of divorce. It was at this time that I went to visit them in a summertime warm day and found the family in the throes of being split, their futures uncertain, and their lives standing as still as the dead mill as they thought what the future might hold.

It seemed like a good idea for Sam and I to go fishing. He had a boy’s fishing rod with a float, hook, and reel, and we took some doorstep-sized wads of bread from the bread tin in the whitewalled kitchen, and set off out of the mill house, across the brown field path to where a small brook was straddled by an unpretentious brick-arch bridge without parapets. Before the water coursed under the bridge, it widened into a little pond about ten feet across and three clear feet deep to its sandy bottom.

The fish were visible to Sam and I as we sat on the grassy bank to lure the prizes onto our hook. Sam was maybe five or six, bright-eyed, inquisitive, and intelligent with all the typical politeness of English children. We spoke of fish and of this and that, but nothing that broached the sombre world of my diminutive friend. Sam knew little about fish, and I knew less than he did. We knew that they should find the bait irresistible, get the hook caught in their lips, and then be hauled wriggling ashore and then … well, we didn’t know quite what came after that what with neither of us ever having caught one, but we figured that we would cross that bridge when we came to it.

The fishes came; good sized ones of five and six inches long, flashing silver in the sunlit stream. These were experienced fish who came and sniffed at the pellets of bread that we had made by soaking bread in water then squeezing the water, and most of the life, out of the paste into round balls that we impaled on the hook before lowering it gently into the water. The fish were not, it transpired, bread eaters, except when shards of our pellets dissolved from the hook and fell free to the bottom, then the fish ate heartily, but we were not deterred. We switched to Plan B, but when we had dug up a couple of reluctant earthworms and threaded them onto the hook, the fish also turned up their noses at meat on the hook.

Nevertheless, Sam and I enjoyed our time together. Sometimes, families breaking up have pressing concerns and often little time for their children and then it is easy to be with such children, and Sam was one and we talked of fish and other burdens that squeeze a young boy’s world at times, but he spoke nothing of his parents, and neither did I.

He had the confident warmth of unselfish children that makes them candid, honest, and congenial. Such souls are exquisite butterflies that summon our life’s summers even as the calendar proclaims a different season, and such a soul was Sam.

We spent the hot afternoon shielding our eyes from the sun, watching fishes sport with us and our inducements, and talking extravagantly as if we were the only ones alive in that green world of the high summertime glow in a deserted meadowfield in the heart of holy Suffolk, when earth, sky, God, man, and boy met in a lustrous celebration of life and its blessings attended by a peace that no spell can bind or break, and that is forever locked within the secret chambers of my heart, and, I hope, still has meaning for a man who once was a beautiful dark-haired boy who on that hallowed day turned the key in the lock that loosens the door to admit life where there is deadness, and makes room for joy by sweeping aside the pain of heartbreak, even if only for a few joyfilled hours.

I hope too that Sam remembers our non-fish fishing day – remembers it, and is still glad.

Copyright (C) Ronnie Bray - 2013