The training my husband went through did not include self- preservation. We needed teaching, not just about physical danger but also about more delicate issues. No one ever spoke about what it meant for children to go to a primary school in which they would be the only child in socioeconomic groups A/B/C1/C2. When I asked my 15-year-old what was the best thing about his father not being a vicar any more, he said, “not being the vicar’s kid in school”.The gentlemanly liberalism of the Church of England does not like to talk about class: but it matters Our children were torn apart by divergent standards.

Gradually we acquired basic precautions: a chain on the door, an insistence that the children use it, a burglar alarm, spikes on the garden wall, window grilles; though often it was our insurers’ growing reluctance, rather than our good sense, that dictated these developments. And none of these things would have protected anyone from the panicked ring on the bell at night; from the disconcerting realisation that the person you are giving a cup of tea to is simply insane; from the very angry, or the totally desperate.We would have gone there anyway, I think, even if we had been better prepared. Or the time when it transpired, following a minor burglary, that both the children individually had encountered the thief on the stairs, and said polite hellos to him: they were so used to strangers. (An interesting side-effect of their immersion in the local community was that when the police asked them to describe the intruder they both knew what he was wearing in some detail, but neither had noticed whether he was black or white.)We went on believing in an “open house” policy, but over the years we became more cautious – or less committed; more aware – or less holy.

More frightening was the experience of coming home to find a great deal of blood all over the front door steps, apparently flowing from under the door. It was not, in fact: there had been a knife fight on the doorstep. For the vicar, for the children and for myself.I got shot at once, as a matter of fact, with a .22 rifle, through he window of my study. That was scary, but it was also arbitrary and pointless – the assailant was drug-freaked, and certainly without any personal malice. The baby’s mother told her man to put it away “because the vicar is here”, so he pushed it under the sofa.
We laughed. We went on laughing, in fact, for most of the time we lived there; there is not much else you can do, and anyway I loved it. It is only now, afterwards, living in the country and reading about Christopher Gray and Anthony Couchman, inner-city clergy killed and wounded on the job, that I realise how frightened I ought to have been.

My husband, the vicar, went one day to make a visit related to a baptism and noticed a sawn-off shotgun lying on the table. There was a level of casual violence here that nothing had prepared me for. Around this rather wonderful example of Victorian Gothic fantasy was a wasteland of council housing, a community which was disintegrating: wracked with crime, unemployment, poverty, alienation, and alcohol and drug abuse. We had freehold rights to it, and it did not cost us a penny.

It was an Anglican vicarage located in the poorest ward of the poorest borough in Britain. It had eight bedrooms, huge, high-ceilinged reception rooms, a spiral staircase, stained glass windows, a modern kitchen and a wonderful, enclosed garden with an Albertine rose climbing 30 feet up an old brick wall. Unless you are Carol Sarler, in which case you wouldn’t bother But I guess that is no loss.. For more than 10 years, I lived in a magical house within walking distance of central London. The acting was wonderful, and even if some of the racial implications are lost on a Briton, I am grateful that I had the unaccountable good sense to go and see it This is its last week on the Fringe Go and see it. “Do you speak African?” she counters, and on it goes, the dance of love/hate. There is even an extraordinary nude scene, extraordinary not just because they both have enviable bodies, but because it was the only part of the pay where aggression gave way to a kind of tenderness, as if they had shed their attitudes with their clothes.The whole thing was accompanied by a nearly-on-stage musician, Fred Carl, whose myriad one-man noises were as good as many a complex film score.