At the end of that first term, I switched to joint-honours in History and Theology. At the end of the year I dropped the History. I called Sarah in Oxford and visited her a couple of times in her beautiful college and then in a town house she shared, with not too many stairs. It was easier for me to visit her, but she was improving and came to Birmingham once, where she seemed an anomaly, just not part of my life there.
I also called WorldMission on the number Noel had given me and spoke to a nice woman called Sally.
“You’re a Christian organisation, aren’t you?” I said, not disguising the accusation in my tone.
“Yes, we are,” said Sally. “Our mission is based on the principles of Christian faith. But our volunteers are forbidden from evangelising in the field, unless someone asks. And they do ask.”
“I’ll only come if I can bring my friend,” I said. “She walks with crutches and isn’t a Christian.”
I got the forms to fill out and that’s how Sarah and I started, with an internship of about thirty of us that long first summer holiday, doing mainly backline logistics stuff in Ethiopia. I think they took Sarah because she’d already developed a bit of a reputation with the UN network through the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford. Anyway, she spoke to Sally herself and her forms looked bloody good.
We were always pros from the start, Sarah and me. No bleeding hearts. No charity. No celebrities. Those were the rules. It was a good bunch, that first gig. I remember on the way back coming across a load of Live Aid trucks up to their axles in sand, remnants of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, which seemed a very long way away to the north and west. Wrong supplies, wrong place. A load of us started rocking with our muslin scarves held high between our hands, in a pastiche not just of the song but of the whole rock-festival philanthropy sketch.
“Feed our eee-gos,” we sang happily. “Let them know we’re rich and famous . . .”
The drivers smiled behind their aviator shades. The anthem had been everywhere, but not in the desert.
I think Sarah and I knew that we became aidies because we had to. There was no choice. We used to tell people we did it for a laugh and watch their faces freeze. And when we cried, we cried together, but never emotionally, more as catharsis. I certainly started to feel that I was at home out there and that it was Britain that felt foreign when I got back.
When I came back that first time, I gave talks to the church and argued some more with Father Trevor about why Samaritans were thought to be bad and who exactly our wealth enriched. I fell in with a campaign for women’s ordination. I was aware that I was being gently held up by the congregation. No, offered up.
So it was natural to do a post-grad course to be a deacon. I liked that there had never been such a word in Greek as “deaconess” in the early Church. Just deacons. Men and women. And when women were ordained priests in the Church of England, I was sent to a ghastly selection conference for that too.
First, there were a load of interviews with the Diocesan Director of Ordinands. He was a thin man with a ponytail who asked me why I thought I wanted to be ordained into the priesthood of the Church of England. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to be, but I thought I was called to be. That seemed to be the right answer.
I was never very sure what a vocation felt like. It was a kind of giving in to drift. Perhaps the truth was that I’d never felt a sense of calling, though of course I didn’t give that impression at my examination in Ely, the three days when I had to jump through the spiritual hoops that were held obligingly in front of me by earnest but actually quite uninterested church people, whose job it was to recommend ordinands for priestly training.
There had been underfed men and over-fat women who had spoken of their moments of epiphany in college chapels or on Derbyshire ridges, or of an incessant celestial nagging that had told them that this single-storey motel in East Anglia that smelt of stale pastry was “where God wants me to be”.
I knew none of that. All I knew was that I’d spent more time in famine zones than most people of my age. Sarah and I had been to east Africa four times by then, Sudan as well as Ethiopia, and had graduated from being backline flunkies to distribution and medical support at the sharp end, leaving WorldMission behind us as Sarah became more involved with UNHCR – the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The politics that caused the suffering we witnessed out there made us both mad. A faith in something bigger helped me with that, but Sarah didn’t need it. I may not have bothered to identify it much at the time – too busy, I suppose – but I needed the one simple voice that spoke of a hope of freedom and the ludicrous notion that
