Easter in the vicarage: stressful, unpredictable and funny

In the Seventies, you often saw a poster in people’s front windows at this time of year. It was a very simple poster with a stark image of the crucified Christ and the words: “This is Holy Week”. On Easter Day, a flap at the bottom would be unfolded to reveal: “Today he is risen!”

I had forgotten about this poster until I saw one recently in a neighbour’s window, yet in the north-east mining town where I grew up, it was quite a common sight.

I lived in Ashington between the ages of eight and 15, with my parents, two sisters and brother. My father, Alder Gofton, was a vicar, with a flock of 21,000, and Easter was his busiest time of year.

We children all loved Easter. We knew it was the most important festival in the Christian year. But we also liked the fact that it was a day on which to enjoy luxuries we had forgone during Lent, as well as being a pretty time of year as the natural world came to life again.

But to my father it meant exhaustion after the endless services of the previous six weeks and the intensity of Holy Week. My mother’s diary from Easter Sunday 1970 reads: “Churchwardens and friends for coffee after church as usual. Alder doing Sick Communions all morning. Twelve for dinner. Children started their Easter Eggs, not having had any sweets during Lent. Alder had 13 babies to baptise. By evening he was so tired he was in a bad mood so I went to bed.”

Easter Monday is no less manic: “More Sick Communions. Two men came to fix curtain rail then stayed for coffee with the gravedigger. I pruned the roses then lots of unexpected visitors [list of names of great aunts and uncles plus a family of four] who all stayed for tea.”

Clearly it wasn’t just Dad who needed a holiday – Mum did too, and a holiday for us meant going away for a few days, not relaxing at home or day trips. As we got older, my sister and I pleaded to be allowed to stay behind rather than go away yet again.

“Do we have to go to Soand-So’s [add name of one of several of my parents’ friends who had a dilapidated cottage with no running water in a Northumberland field]? Can’t we just stay at home?”

But in the Seventies, being a vicar was different from now. There was no parish office – except perhaps our kitchen; no secretary – except my mother, who was on excellent terms with the undertaker and the churchwardens; no office hours – the vicarage was the place to go, day or night, in an emergency.

For the first few years after our arrival, most of our parishioners had no phone, so came to the door when they needed to make an appointment to see my father, be it for a baptism or a marriage, to discuss church flowers, to find a gravestone or to complain about the person who sang too loudly in church. (I called the book I wrote about those years, Is the Vicar in, Pet?)

It was only by going away that Dad could be guaranteed peace from the parish, and with no mobile phones, he really could switch off.

The busiest week of the year began on Palm Sunday. It was high Anglican church, with a penchant for incense and processions. I loved the hymns we sang. The rest of Holy Week felt more sombre – at least until the year Dad’s trendy young curate arrived.

Stephen Brown gathered together a troupe of young people from the two churches in the parish to re-enact The Passion in church every evening. As I had a crush on one boy in the group, I was particularly devout that year.

My school took Easter seriously, too. We all learnt There is a Green Hill Far Away with its unbearably sad tune. I wasn’t sure what the significance was of the hill having no city wall, but it clearly made it extra-sad.

We might have protested about going to church on other days, but Easter Sunday was different. The church was full, and there were flowers everywhere. There was more incense and another procession. And everyone was given a small chocolate egg on the way out.

If Easter might not have been quite up there with Christmas for us children, we awarded it an honourable second place. Small gifts were exchanged – for some

The Gofton family at home in the Seventies

reason my mother has always given underwear at Easter – and, of course, Easter eggs. Mum rationed them, but if she had kept all the eggs we were given, she would have been rationing them until the next year.

People were extremely generous to us vicarage children, and one year we had 64 eggs between us. Mum spent the next month giving them away. Every caller to the house was likely to leave with one, and the home for delinquent boys was a grateful recipient.

Easter Sunday dinner was usually a repeat of Christmas dinner. We had the same guests as at Christmas, too – grandparents, a great aunt, and anyone else who had nowhere to go. We were used to new faces at the dining table at all times of the year. My mother says that her cry of, “Set the table, please!” would be followed by: “How many for?”

Frequent among these visitors were the Franciscan friars from nearby Alnmouth. It might surprise some to know that they were among the most down-to-earth and humorous of our guests, their dour brown habits giving them a severe appearance that was entirely undeserved.

The rope girdles around their waists had three knots to remind them of their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Or, as Brother John put it, “Got no money, got no wife, do as I’m told.” (He did tell my mother he would like to marry her if he got the opportunity, but I think we all realised that was unlikely to happen.)

Brother Kevin was the first friar my parents became friendly with when they invited him to speak to the ladies’ club at their previous church. When one of the audience asked him what happened to the friars when they grew old and infirm, Kevin had answered with a straight face that at the age of 70, they were put in a wheelchair, wheeled to the bottom of the friary garden and pushed over the cliff. There had been a deathly hush before the laughter.

Today, almost 20 years after their retirement, my parents will be spending the day at the home of one of my sisters. There will be a large gathering there, too, with a mixture of family, friends and a local priest and his house guest. It seems that even when you leave the vicarage, you take some of the customs with you.

Is the Vicar in, Pet? by Barbara Fox is published by Little, Brown Editorial Comment: Libby Lane: