Memoirs of travelling On God’s Train

Francis said: “My friends and parishioners have been telling me for years that I should write about my life. When I had my 80th birthday last year, I decided it was time to get on with it! Parish priests end up in all sorts of situations – and meet all sorts of people – so over the course of my ministry, I’ve ended up with a lot of stories to tell. The hardest thing was deciding which to include. I was also a chaplain in the emergency services and in Crawley town centre for over 25 years, as well as chaplain to three mayors of Crawley.

“But even before I became a priest, my life was perhaps a little unusual. My parents were refugees from Austria, who had converted from Judaism to Christianity a few years earlier and who sent my two sisters and myself to Catholic boarding schools from a very young age so that we would not grow up with German accents. There was a resident ghost at my prep school in Cambridgeshire that my fellow pupils and I saw when we were in bed one night. After leaving school I worked on the railways – including a spell in the infamous Dr Beeching’s office – before being called to the priesthood. I attended a Catholic seminary and was a priest in London and Sevenoaks for five years before, disillusioned with the Catholic Church, I became a probation officer and then an Anglican priest. I spent four years working and living in The Hague (by then I was married and had two sons) before spending almost 20 years as a parish priest in Norbury. I moved to Crawley in 2000 to be team vicar of the Town Centre parish. Back then the parish included five churches, one of which was St Michael & All Angels, Lowfield Heath, on the edge of Gatwick Airport. When planes took off to the east I had to stop preaching because of the noise! Later, at St Elizabeth’s Church in Northgate (like St Michael’s, also now decommissioned), I met my second wife, Nicky and became stepfather to her two daughters.

“I wrote (the book) with a company called Story Terrace that paired me up with a local writer, Barbara Fox, who wrote the book with me after several interview sessions. Barbara has also written or ghost-written several other memoirs so I knew I was in good hands. We had a laugh as we did it and consumed lots of coffee and homemade cookies! She and I have become good friends. While the book was initially published to share only with family and close friends, people who have read it have told me it has a broader appeal, which is why I then published it with Amazon.

“It adopts a chronological approach, so begins with my parents’ backgrounds and my early years in Kent, before I set off for boarding school from King’s Cross Station, just like Harry Potter, aged six. As a priest (though officially retired from full-time ministry, I still take services regularly) I am used to writing sermons! I wrote a handbook for police chaplains in 1998 and a paper on the Amish people of Pennsylvania – a great fascination of mine – during a sabbatical in 2006, but this is the first book of general interest I have written. We wrote the book last year, over a period of a few months.”