This Part-Time Job Is One Worth Crying About

If I had even a half-timbred voice, I’d be working in York today.

I’d be wandering the old cobbled streets and listening to the York Minister bells.

I’d be doffing my hat to children and posing for tourists’ photos. Mostly I’d be shouting out tidings in a tone that would shake the Roman foundations of that ancient English city.

York was in the market for a town crier when I was there in May. Of course, I was interested.

I noted that the job would pay $1,000 a year, or maybe that was a season. The new crier will be provided with a tailor-made costume (a design competition is under way). Appropriate shoes are included.

And the workday is five hours long.

Actually, the position has been vacant since 1872, when the last crier died at age 80. At that time no one seemed eager to carry on.

Now, with summer visitors booming into the medieval town, a serious search is under way. Advertisements were posted prominently. They hope to choose a crier by July.

“It’s not limited to Yorkshire residents or even to British subjects,” Paul Wells of the York Visitor Bureau assured me. “Everyone is eligible--Yanks, Canadians, women. Would you like to audition?”

Feeling a little hoarse and a lot shy, I followed him through narrow lanes and a tilted street called The Shambles. When we came to the center of St. Sampson’s Square, he backed away and said:

“Now call out, ‘Hear Ye. Hear Ye.’ ”

I looked at the crowd and I choked. Nothing came out but a whisper. The old bugaboo stage fright had struck again. I fled from the sun to the shadows.

“So I’m not the right person,” I said. “Tell me exactly what the town crier will do.”

“The crier will start here at noon each day and deliver 10 minutes of news,” Wells said. “Not made-up stories, either, but the daily headlines. Then he, or she, will walk to the other squares in old York and repeat the news.”

The rounds will be made again at 3 p.m. In addition, the crier is expected to greet visitors and generally spread cheer.

“We need a great communicator with a 1,000-watt voice and personality,” he said, looking at me doubtfully.

It was not so much the free costume and shoes that I found appealing, but the excuse to linger in York, an endearing and compact museum-of-a-city in northern England where walking is the only way to go.

On my first morning I climbed the stone stairs above Bootham Bar, an imposing city gate. I ambled along the tops of crenelated 13th-Centuy walls--some with Roman bases--and stared into private gardens and the odd back-yard chicken roost.

Huge horse chestnut trees shaded the walls, and above the branches rose the stone finials of the Cathedral of St. Peter, affectionately known as York Minister.

The minister is 534 feet long and 249 feet across, the largest Gothic church in England.

The vast damage to the west front and ceiling from a lightning fire in 1984 has been meticulously repaired and restored. The only hint is the incredible lightness of the vaulted ceiling, which carries no smudge of the ages.

When I walked into this mighty space, I was dazzled by the stained glass, by the heaven-bound columns and by the enormous choir screen with its royal lineup of every king from William the Conqueror to Henry VI.

The organ was still reverberating from evensong. The sanctuary held the sweet smell of candle wax.

Above all were the bells, 12 of them, which hang high in the west front towers. They rang the changing scales for an hour that night to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Europe in World War II.

The grandest of those bells is Great Peter--the fourth-largest bell in England, according to a bell-ringer named Clive. Clive did not know where the other three were, except that London’s Big Ben was among them.

“Great Peter is 300 years old,” Clive said proudly. “No reason she shouldn’t last another 300 years.”

Clive claimed that, when the wind is right, you can hear Great Peter toll four miles away.

Maybe, if the wind had been right, my voice would have carried across St. Sampson’s Square.