‘I always told you he was a lovely fella,’ Jack said.Īfter Mary’s death, everyone had rallied around Jack. He then refolded it, carefully put it back in its envelope and propped it beside his fabled picture of the ship beached on the mountainside, the most hallowed spot in his home. I handed Jack that letter, and as he read it tears welled up in his eyes and ran down his cheeks. The Cardinal replied by return in a hand-written letter, remembering the good old days and their kindness. Sadly, Mary had died the week before this latest visit, and I had written to Basil Hume – by then Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster – telling him how Jack and Mary mentioned him almost as much as the legendary Hong Kong Typhoon. ‘Never too busy to have a chat, always loved my tales of the Hong Kong Typhoon.’ ‘He was a lovely fella,’ was Jack’s verdict. One priest, Basil Hume, used to come and have a cup of tea with them around the hearth afterwards. They kept the keys, letting in the young priests from nearby Ampleforth Abbey who came to say Mass. He and Mary used to be the honorary caretakers of St Mary’s, the tiny Roman Catholic church adjacent to their little cottage which overlooked the beck as it flowed down from the moors into the northern tip of Helmsley. For a while it seemed he had put the sea behind him, but Val had confided in me that as Jack had grown older, the sailor mannerisms, fuelled by all the tots of rum, had returned and were given an even greater emphasis than when he was actually serving in the Navy. Following the war, Jack had settled down in Helmsley and turned his hand to farming.
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