Twelve Miles from Liverpool

By Jean Ford

After unbearable losses, unresolved griefs, mistakes made, and at the lowest point in her life, the author returns home to Widnes and receives an invitation from a baroness to go with her to Armenia and a war. Extraordinary events and encounters, signals and messages, set her on a life-changing path. She experiences flashbacks to World War II, the miracle of Dunkirk, and in Dover, glimpses of the channel ghosts. She tells the story in a clear new voice with a lyrical quality throughout, compelling us to turn every page, making us want to believe again. An epilogue includes the Beatles.

"Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart

and you'll never walk alone." Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein 1945

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889603894

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Twelve Miles from Liverpool

Jean Ford

Copyright © 2024 Jean Ford

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

For personal appearances: [e-mail].

ISBN 979-8-88960-374-0 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88960-405-1 (hc)

ISBN 979-8-88960-389-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

For the Armenians.

To my son, Marc Woodcock.

Chapter 1

Fish and Chips

Chapter 2

The Wonder of Words

Chapter 3

Finding Pastor Ball

Chapter 4

Make It Count

Chapter 5

Landing in the Dark

Chapter 6

A Bishop and a Dove

Chapter 7

The Priest Who Stands in the Wind

Chapter 8

Etchmiadzin

Chapter 9

St. Gregory's and Mount Ararat

Chapter 10

The Baroness Cox

Chapter 11

Christmas

Chapter 12

Bozabalian

Chapter 13

Summer Cows

Chapter 14

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?

Chapter 15

Ferry Cross the Mersey

Chapter 16

Destiny

Chapter 17

The Mantle

Chapter 18

Dover

Chapter 19

Promises to Keep

Chapter 20

Father Haroutiun Dagley

Chapter 21

The Spillover Effect

Epilogue: Close Enough—The Beatles

Close Enough

About the Author

For the Armenians.

To my son, Marc Woodcock.

Chapter 1

Fish and Chips

Eternal Father, strong to save…

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea!

—Navy Hymn, lyrics by William Whiting (1860)

I was lying very still on the sofa in my living room in a house in the suburbs of Chicago. I was wishing to lie so still, so quiet, that I would become invisible and drift away. Perhaps I could die here and no one would know.

It seemed to me that I was at the end of all things. My mother had died in a hospital in America without her sisters from England near her. My young brother, dearly beloved, had died. My dad, dearest friend, had died. They lay in American soil because of me. My husband of twenty years, English like me, was no longer my husband.

I was alone with the pain in my body and mind. I should be at the college overseeing programs, writing curriculum and teaching classes, but I could not move from the pain. I felt sorrow punishing me for the decisions taken and the mistakes made. I did not pray for I was sure no one would hear.

I remembered without trying to remember my visit home a couple of weeks earlier. My husband and I had both worked for the airlines when we came to America, so we had been flying on employee nonrevenue tickets around the world for many years and always, always home to England. I missed my town in England more than he missed his. I came from the north, and I think we are more like that there.

I had jumped on a plane two weeks ago to Manchester and made my way to Widnes, twelve miles from Liverpool. I stayed with my mother's sister, Aunt Ev, during my summer breaks. We had gone together, walking around the old market, when we stopped because a Salvation Army lady in bonnet and uniform held out her can to collect donations for those in need. My aunt Ev did what my mother had always done. She pressed into her purse to find some money as she chatted with the lady. Her mother, my grandmother, had been Captain Alice Whitfield of the Salvation Army, last posted to Widnes. She was known to have made peace with the Catholics and to have stayed up all night helping and praying with their young children when they were sick, and the priests had not come to Charlotte Street. She gave food and clothes to those in need and welcomed them to the altar on Sunday mornings. She had known Eva Booth, the daughter of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He had written in my grandfather's Bible.

Once, when I was little and the war not long over, two young German prisoners of war ventured out of the POW camp nearby. They had been to two churches only to be turned away. We met them at the bus stop, my brother and my mother and I. My mother invited them to follow us to the Salvation Army meeting. That Sunday evening, the two enemy soldiers walked down to the altar with tears in their eyes, and the Salvation Army captains put their arms around them.

On the way back, my mother invited them into our cottage for a cup of tea. They hadn't been in a home in a long time. When my dad came home from work, they were still there. Everything went tense. We were nervous, and my dad was tired. My mam explained the happenings and said their names were Hans and Rudolph. We all took in a breath, then my dad put out his hand to the two enemy German soldiers, and said, The war is over. There has been enough fighting. There is enough hatred in the world. Let us forgive. It's forgiveness we need now.

I was only a child and that is when I thought the Salvation Army and my dad had the same Jesus.

Whenever we saw a Salvation Army uniform, we never turned away. The old hymns would come back, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, The Old Rugged Cross, and we would recall, with emotion, the old days and all we had lost. We would remember the Salvation Army band marching down the drab streets to Onward Christian Soldiers with a big drum keeping time. After the war, the streets of Widnes and Liverpool were a dull grey and layers of dust from the factories and the bombed-out buildings settled everywhere. There was little food and we were cold. Parents would say for a long time, You'd never think we won the war, would you? So when the Salvation Army band would decide to stop at the corner of a street to play something for us all to join in, it was a bit of colour on a grey canvas, and some of us liked it. My dad, who was an Anglican and had been in the Royal Navy during the war, would join in too. He would sing the loudest when they played. Oh hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.

But he didn't, did he? Hear us? Stanley Pumford, my dad's eighteen-year-old brother, never came back from the peril of the sea. The sea had swallowed him up when his ship, The Penelope, was torpedoed by a U-boat on February 18, 1944 in WWII while we were singing in our cold damp churches. Maybe God couldn't hear or maybe He couldn't save the ship or maybe He was too far away or maybe He wasn't there. But still my young self wanted to give God another chance, and I sang my heart out anyway.

So that day, at the market, we were standing with the Salvation Army lady telling her about my grandmother, exchanging memories, when a large man with a shock of white hair was attracted to our conversation. He had fish and chips wrapped in a newspaper in his hands so we knew he was heading home to eat them. He leaned in and said, I overheard your conversation, and it sounds as if you are visiting from America.

Yes I said. Then he told me he was the current pastor of a church I used to go to when I was young. He knew the names of those dear people from long ago. His next sentence surprised me.

You are not that girl who opened the old closed-down church in Golbourne when you were seventeen and left and went to America?

How could I have been that girl? Startled, the memories soft and sweet slipped into my mind. I had gone to the house of the caretaker of the empty boarded-up church and got a key. I had put a note on the door, open. I started preaching there in that lovely old brick building with church-shaped windows and a wooden pulpit. Everything seemed possible then.

I said, Yes, I am that girl from many years ago. How would you know that?

He said, My name is Stuart Windsor. I was just attending an anniversary service in that church, and they recounted the story of this girl from Widnes who had reopened the church as part of their history. They said she had gone to America. Her grandmother had been a captain in the Salvation Army.

My aunt Ev looked a little alarmed at this turn of events. I was not religious anymore. I was an international consultant to governments and colleges and universities. I had pioneered the first accredited degrees in travel and tourism and trade. I was a well-known speaker and expert in the field and had many influential friends.

My aunt Ev and I were easy in each other's company this way, and that is how I wanted it. She was a little ruffled when this man said, Come home with me. I am only a few houses down the road. My aunt Ev rolled her eyes toward the sky so only I could see. Growing up with her and Aunt Rose and my mother, I knew this signal well. The signal was a warning. I did not heed it. I do not know why. I loved and admired my aunt Ev and wanted to please her. It was just that I wanted something to happen.

We went along to his house. I pulled Aunt Ev with me. He put the fish and chips down on the table and we said hello to his wife. While the fish and chips were going cold, he went to the phone and rang someone important. He said he would soon be leaving Widnes to go to work for her in London. After a few words with her, he handed me the phone. This is Baroness Cox from the House of Lords, he said. I think she is looking for someone like you.

I said, Hello. In beautiful distinct words, she asked me about my background in education and teacher training, airline agreements, and curriculum development.

She said, I want to invite you to come with me to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. There is something of a war going on. I think the people need us. I think I can help bring peace. She described that the conditions would be poor; there would be little electricity, little running water, little food, and not much sanitation. She said it would be dangerous. I thought that I would not accept her invitation. By now I had traversed the world many times, first class, in luxury and with many privileges and fascinating people. I had no intention of going with the famous Lady Cox. I did not dare look up to face my aunt Ev. I said into the phone that I would certainly give it some thought and we left.

Aunt Ev knew who Baroness Cox was and that Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher had made her a baroness to sit in the House of Lords where she had been deputy speaker. Aunt Ev did not approve of anything that was not a good bet, and she was looking after me when she said, Least said. Soonest mended.

We went back to Harrisons' Fish and Chip Shop, the best fish and chip shop in Widnes, the one belonging to my aunt Ev and her sons. We had fish and chips cut right there from real potatoes, with mushy peas and malt vinegar. The vinegar wet the newspaper it was wrapped in.

I opened my eyes on the sofa. Why was I recalling all this like a movie going unbidden through my mind? I had to find a doctor. I was in wrenching pain. I couldn't sit upright and waves of nausea engulfed me.

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea. But it was me. I was drowning.

Chapter 2

The Wonder of Words

Have a reverence for words. The wonder of words is a prerequisite for prayer.

—A. Heschel

The next day, a good friend of mine from college, Marvin Segal, carried me to his car in a blanket. Marvin was perhaps twenty-five years older than me, but we had been friends from the beginning, when I was pioneering the first college programs of their kind in the USA and Marvin was teaching law. He had been a young lawyer in Hollywood when he was starting out and knew many of the old film stars. He had worked in New York in the sixties and had met Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish Rabbi and theologian. Heschel had marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King, Jr. on March 21, 1965, from Selma to Montgomery. He had said of the march, Legs are not lips, and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

At Mrs. King's request, Abraham Heschel was the rabbi alongside Christian ministers at Dr. King's funeral, April 1968. Heschel died in 1972. When I met Mrs. King years later at the Hampton Ministers Conference 2002 in a private room, I talked of Heschel, and she talked of promises to keep and messages to deliver. I knelt in front of her and asked her how she had carried on after she had lost her husband.

She said, We lift up our heads, and we go on. She told me to tell the leaders to be less judgmental. She said that preachers should speak of mercy and forgiveness. They should remember how much they have been forgiven and in whose service they are.

One day, she would speak to me of redemptive suffering, and the King Center in Atlanta would allow me to hold in my hands the letter from the Birmingham Jail, secretly messaged from inside that jail by Martin Luther King, before it went under glass at Morehouse College.

When Mrs. King died on January 30, 2006, she came to me in a dream. She was young and radiant. She asked me to lift her up in my arms and carry her. She was so light and lovely. I carried her out onto a great white veranda and walked around with her in my arms. A breeze blew her purple gossamer gowns gently around her ankles.

She said, Don't forget the messages. There is power in the messages. A grand black limousine with driver pulled up. I carried her down the steps. I put her down. She turned and saw my pup. He is thirsty, she said. Give him a drink. I put a cup of cool water down on the floor. He drank and drank. She said, See how thirsty he is. They are all so thirsty. Give them a drink of water. She stood there smiling. Then she moved into the black chariot and pointed ahead with an outstretched hand. In a passionate voice, she commanded the driver, Home! Home! and they were off.

One day, years from now, she