It's all about caring for everyone

“OUR job,” says the new vicar of Royal Wootton Bassett, “is not just to preach and teach, but to live out our faith, which is about caring for all.”

The young Vicki Burrows had no inkling of her eventual role during her childhood in Epsom.

“My grandfather was a jockey and trainer, my father bred racehorses and I grew up riding racehorses. Visiting my grandparents was visiting a racing yard.

“That was my first love as a youngster. I dreamed of being a jockey but over 30 years ago women were not professional flat race jockeys.

“It was an amateur role.”

For Vicki’s father, racehorses were a hobby. He and Vicki’s mother ran a successful West End couture business, specialising in evening and cocktail wear.

Religion didn’t play a big part in Vicki’s childhood or that of her sister.

“My father was Jewish. He married out. He came from a fairly orthodox Jewish family and my mother was nominally Anglican – Church of England.

“I think a decision was taken when we were quite small that we would be baptised into the Christian faith as infants, but religion would really be a taboo subject, because by marrying out of the Jewish faith my father had been cut off by most of his family.

“Initially his mother wouldn’t speak to my mother although in time they became so close.”

Vicki visited her nanny’s church, but her interest in religion didn’t truly surface until later.

She attended an independent girls’ school which she recalls being more interested in making pupils marriageable to rich men than in academic achievement.

“I didn’t enjoy school and I didn’t work hard at school,” she said.

Panicking after the mock O-Levels, though, Vicki did work hard, securing three good A-Levels and a suggestion from her head teacher that she should apply to study at Oxford.

Vicki turned this down, insisting that she would ride racehorses instead.

Her father, meanwhile, wanted her to attend either a Swiss finishing school or a kibbutz.

As a compromise, she trained in shorthand typing and bookkeeping with a view to joining the family business. She joined the firm after working for two years for racehorse trainer Geoff Lewis, who as a jockey had ridden the great horse Mill Reef to victory in the 1971 Derby.

Vicki had long been a committed Christian. She had pondered religion in her teens, but it wasn’t until after her marriage, when she and Billy were living in Norwich, that she found faith.

“I used to commute. Before the lines were electrified it used to take over two hours to get to London, and I read the Bible. I read the Bible and I was converted.

“I was much more familiar with the Hebrew Bible, what you would probably call the Old Testament. In my childhood the only cousins and family I really had were on my father’s side, so Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs and weddings were all Jewish events and I was very familiar with the Jewish faith.

“I read the Bible out of interest to work out for myself if there was a God.

“I was very familiar with the Hebrew Bible stories but it was the stories of Jesus in the New Testament that brought me to faith, the stories that tell me that the God who seems very far off came among us in a human life – so all our longings for a God who is full of love and forgiveness we see in a human being.

“If I want to believe in a God I want to believe in a God of love, mercy, justice and inclusion – all those things that as human beings we long for.

“All of that I see in Jesus and so I dare to say that is what God looks like.

“God is love – undying and unbounded.”

Vicki was confirmed at Norwich Cathedral 28 years ago.

Later, when the couple and their growing family lived in Epsom, Vicki was asked by the vicar of her local church to run a Sunday school.

“I remember telling him that I had no training as a teacher, that I wasn’t very academic, that I wasn’t trained, that I had no experience of even helping in a Sunday School.”

Nevertheless she did run it, and it thrived. As the years passed, people began to tell Vicki she ought to be ordained.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to hear. I said, ‘I’ve got three children, I’ve got four children, I’ve got five children. I’m not academic, I’ve had no training, I don’t have a first degree, I’m not a teacher, I don’t do public speaking, I’m not very erudite, I’m not particularly a good, holy person, I’m flawed – and I still think all those things are true.”

In spite of this Vicki answered what was becoming a calling after hearing a sermon about another flawed character, the disciple Peter, who was told by Jesus: “Feed my lambs.”

Vicki’s training in Salisbury was followed by ordination at Guildford Cathedral, a curacy and then seven years as rector of St Mary’s at Long Ditton, Surrey, where the congregation grew from 60 or 70 to nearly 200.

The move to Royal Wootton Bassett came at the suggestion of June Osborne, Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, who alerted her to the vacancy as she convalesced from a bout of pneumonia.

She is still finding out about her new community, but is sure of one thing: “The church will only grow if you meet people where they are and find out what they need.”