Today I’m going home but by another way. It’s not the route I took to get here. I’ve been a sort of pilgrim in Canterbury for the last few days with my gentle exploring of the city and visits to the Cathedral. I’ve tried several places to eat, walk, write and pray. Now it’s time to go back, as term begins again in a few days.
On the way I will go via some London suburbs which 30 years ago I knew better. In those days I was an evangelist for speech therapy and my pilgrim places were child development centres in the south east. Trains were my usual form of transport as I criss crossed from one to another. It was a job I loved and when I first went to Oxford for ministry training, I missed the whole of it enormously. It was speech therapy that had informed and fed my theology and call at that time.
I have many good friends to remember in those days. One such is Brian Neville, who died in December, and for whom we gather in thanksgiving today at Petts Wood Methodist Church, on my way home, so to speak.
I first met Brian Neville in a lift in Guys hospital in 1983. He said l understand you’re interested in language and the brain. If I was astonished that he’d heard if me, very much a junior speech therapist, my reply tried not to show it. Oh I’m interested in much more than that, I said. And I was and still am. But that first subject, language and the brain, launched several years of clinical and research work with children who had acquired aphasias , and their families, some of whom I continue to keep in touch with.
That range of enquiry survived my time in Oxford, where in addition to my ministry training, I wrote two speech therapy books, to resurface again at the Institute for Child Health, where Brian was working with a team doing clinical and research work with children who had epilepsy and their families. I joined in again. Although I later went to Sheffield as a minister, and there did my PhD in of course speech therapy, Brian and I stayed in touch.
However, at the time if his death I’d not seen him for a couple of years. But his approach to detailed enquiry of anything at all continued to inform mine. I’d learnt to look deep and wide at any subject, to frame questions, to examine evidence. I still do all of these things.
We shared a love of organ music. He was a very good organist and I was a rather feeble one. But playing the organ is a kind of church based fun that few adults bother to enjoy for themselves. I was introduced to it during my childhood by Ruth, the organist at the church where I grew up. It was awesome. At Mansfield College, one of The Good Bits, and I need to remember those, was that Carolyn Brock, the college organist, taught me properly for a few years, and I played weekly, and probably weakly, for Matins on Thursday mornings. The instrument was a small chamber organ which has recently been moved elsewhere for restoration. Sometimes I’d play the big one. It was a great way to de-stress. Later my own daughter took up the organ and so that form of church based fun has been passed on to another generation.
All this then is about going home by a long and complex route.

Arriving early at Petts Wood I began with fish and chips. Meals were always a hearty part of working with Brian. Meeting over lunch and talking about current research anywhere in the world was always a good aid to digestion.
The local cafe soon became a meeting point for those going to the service and many hugs and kisses were exchanged often with folks not seen for several years.
Petts Wood Methodist Church is not large and we were soon filling it up. Edward, the steward, kindly took my overnight bag but of course I was by no means the furthest travelled. Richard had come from Edinburgh, Rob from Vermont, and Charles from Nairobi to name a few. The service was all we could have hoped for and a super tribute to one much loved. Memories of family and friends mingled together into a seamless celebration.
Music was a significant part of Brian’s life and faith. The hymns, many of which feature amongst my favourites, we’re good to sing together.
Now thank we all our God
Awake awake to love and work
To be a pilgrim 
Be though my vision 

Andrew also played the ‘cello to help us all to reflect. There were words but there was much more. Psalm 139 might now be viewed as the paediatric neurologist’s psalm. Here’s a remembered version with commentary :

I have know you all your life, since you were formed in your mother’s womb
This is more than the cradle to grave service of the NHS many of us work/ed in, but what we later become  begins here

I know your sitting down and your standing up.
This reminded me of the clinical encounters we shared where sitting, standing and much more would observed as functional skills. The patella hammer would be deployed. That bit often made me laugh.

Where can I go to get away from you. Not to the east, or the north, west or south. Wherever I am you are there.
So not just a local service either. Truly universal in extent, equal in accessibility, just, merciful and humble.

The darkness and the light are both the same to you
This is the amazing high point in this psalm for me: whether good news or bad God would keep the vigil with us until we rose again. Before each encounter I would pray. I still do.

The service ended with the voluntary Brian played at my wedding to Bob 25 years ago.
And so to greetings and eating, stories shared and more hugs. More than 30 years since we first met but it has passed all too quickly. It was good to catch up with others and discover where they were still travelling to.
Some of us then travelled on together for a while, talking and thinking. I parted from the final colleague, Maria, at Charing Cross. Here I am travelling home by another way, that went by Petts Wood Methodist Church. It is the feast of the Epiphany and a notice outside the church is old fashioned in its language. I’ll refashion it for 2017: wise ones looked for Jesus, wiser ones still do.
Brian was such a one, wise indeed.

So Bethlehem was full. Didn’t I just know it. Every last lousy room full of travellers from heaven knows where, and me on my fleabitten back in several of them. There were endless pots to wash and food and drink to serve, not all of it that wholesome. Here at The Key of David they’d got hold of an old ewe from a rustler and were trying to pass it off as lamb. Well I know how that felt.
I hadn’t had much time to consider what was euphemistically called strange goings on. I had enough trouble of my own, trying to keep wandering hands at bay, avoiding the master’s eye and the back of the mistresses hand. More folks kept arriving and every last space was filled. I heard they’d put a young pregnant lass in part of the stable. Well in some ways there was less vermin there than inside the house.
I spent several mornings heaving up in the gutter outside. What I’d thought was a bad brew of ale was looking increasingly less gastric and more drastic. I didn’t really have time to think or listen to vague stories from drunk locals about angels and peace on earth. There was always more work to do and no one else to do it.
Things began to thin out a bit once people started to get registered. Once done they left for their own homes again. The master agreed the young mother (she had given birth out there after all) could move into one if the inside rooms and I was kept busy enough running food and water and whatnot up and down the stairs. She was quiet most of the time, thoughful maybe, tired of course and trying to get the hang of managing an infant.
One day an odd bunch of foreigners turned up, a sort of camel train. Said they were looking for one born a king.’ Look all you want’ the master laughed at them. ‘Only baby here was born in a stable and is now upstairs’. They went to look anyway, and decided to stay over. That pleased the master most because it meant more money. I cleaned out some rooms as best I could and found something for them to eat. They were serious reserved gents but they told an odd story of ancient wisdom, stars and a long journey with many twists and turns. They’d even been to Herod’s court which made most of us shudder. But they were polite and didn’t take advantage, even though the mistress kept hinting at how there were extras available if they were interested.
They weren’t but went to bed early. Next day we were all woken by noise and chaos. News had it troops had been sighted. The little family and the camel riders all wanted to move on suddenly. Something about bad dreams; well I know how that felt. I’d not been sleeping for quite a few nights now wondering what to do about my own situation. I was bright enough to know that my news would not go down well in this household.
‘We have to go at once’ they all seemed to speak at once but in different ways. The camels were loaded up and a couple of donkeys too. Seemed the family and the foreigners had decided to travel together. It wasn’t the right way back for any of them but it was a way out for now.
Turned out it was also a way out for me. The mother could not travel alone with all those men. Who would help her with the baby? I would. I rolled my few possessions into a bundle, and seizing the bridle of the pack donkey I set off without looking back.
We were on odd bunch, the little family, the three gents and me, now an ex-barmaid but something bound us together.
As we left chaos erupted in Bethlehem. Troops went from house to house searching violently, killing male infants and even toddlers, maiming family members who got in the way. Mothers wailed: there was a crescendo of pain that could be heard beyond the walls as we set our sights on Egypt. Somehow in the confusion we made it, though those were anxious days.
We left the family on the border and we turned to cross the desert again. What, you are surprised I stayed with the three gents and not the family of three? Well it was a difficult decision but I’d learnt a lot on that journey. To go to a new place and start again, a new life with a new story and identity; that attracted me. From barmaid to scholar might have sounded unplanned, unlikely and not without hidden dangers but I’d come to enjoy their company, their storytelling and wisdom and amongst them I’d found myself valued. My own voice had begun to emerge as my belly grew with the child I carried. No one can say what the future holds but I began to understand what stories I would tell and get a glimpse of the wisdom I would grow from this.

Janet Lees/ 01.01.2017