Faith on the Move
BBC Radio 4
We first met Sierra Leone-born Dylis George as she conducted Saturday night bible study with her 12-year-old daughter. There was brief mention of her Sunday job as pastor of her local church in Deptford, before a train rattled us through the Kentish countryside to Hastings station. Here, on platform two, Dylis resumed her main role as chaplain to the UK’s Southeastern railway company. Stressing the deeply communal air that hung over their calling (“If you cut me in half I would bleed railway”), staff members warmly approved her presence. “Not your average stereotypical chaplain,” someone remarked. “One of the family.”
Before long Dylis was off again on a journey to nearby Gillingham – for some reason this took all of three hours - where a suicide had thrown the station into turmoil. The staff spoke of the abuse they received from customers and growing difficulties with the mentally ill. In the old days there might be a fatality a year. Now, as the team leader put it, “there’s always something going on”. Dylis, who confessed that she had gone into railway chaplaincy with “no expectations”, sounded as if she agreed. “You see a lot of things,” she quietly noted.