Catherine the Great
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
A couple I came to know every early in my ministry were most ill matched in appearance. He was tall, broad shouldered, tough, a blue collared worker of great strength. She was just the opposite, extremely quiet, almost mouse, very short and very slim. I guess he weighed fifty stone and she would have weighed five stone. But Big Jake, as he was known to everybody, and his wife Catherine were a very loving couple. At least that’s the way it seemed. She always hung onto him and looked at him with adoring eyes while he treated her as if she were just an adornment or attachment to follow along wherever he went. They had four kids and lived in a fairly new home just round the corner from the Church on the Cheltenham estate. Big Jake had a loud booming voice and Mr. Stafford, the Choir conductor, had talked him into joining the choir. It was the only function in the community he went to that Catherine did not go with him. She could not sing, could not drive the car, could not do anything around the house of any note. She was just a meek, rather sickly little woman who looked as if everyday she needed a “Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down”.
They were happy enough. In fact when I visited them in their home there was a photograph on the mantlepiece of him a bathing suit with his chest expanded and his arms held up with a rather timid looking Catherine sitting on one of his shoulders in a two piece bathing suit. What staggered me was not that he lifted her up onto his shoulders but that she had enough courage to wear a two piece bathing suit. Somehow or other I never imagined that Catherine would wear a two piece bathing suit.
They came to Church quite regularly and Jake was always featured there with the basses in the choir, with his voice booming out. Their four kids were fairly normal and the eldest son looked as though he was going to be a mirror image of his dad. I would have expected in a normal suburban Church that my friendship would have gone on over the next thirteen years and that apart from normal childhood events nothing much would have happened in their life.
I had been at the Church a couple of months when someone rang me from the factory where Big Jake worked. He worked in Burnley Melbourne in a plating factory. The factory was responsible for straightening out car bumper bars and chroming them. Jake was responsible for all the chroming process which I understand was dangerous and complicated.
The man on the phone introduced himself as Big Jake’s boss. And said “I have just rung Jake’s wife to tell her there has been a dreadful accident and that Jake has been taken to hospital. She just broke into sobs and hardly asked me any questions. I remembered Jake saying he went to your Church and he seemed to have a good affection for you and the Church. I am worried about his wife.
I am wondering if you can get around to see her. The ambulance will take him to the “burns unit” at Preston and Northcote Community Hospital. They have a specialised burns unit there and he is burned very badly.” I thanked him for his information and immediately drove round to Jake’s house. Catherine was sitting in tears just staring at the wall. She did not seem to know what to do. She was totally lost. I suggested that we go straight over to the hospital. It was about an hour and a half drive from where we lived down in the southern suburbs of Melbourne, whereas the Preston and Northcote Community Hospital called PANCH was in the northern suburbs. It would be a long trip. She went to get her cardigan and purse and I realised that she had not thought at all about the kids at school.
Automatically I dialled one of our deaconesses, one of those Godly women who were always ready to visit the families of the sick and needy. Val Goodman was a first class woman, well organised and always ready to help. I knew that she would meet the kids after school and look after them for the evening meal and even if she could not do it herself she would quickly organise some women from the Church to take over the family. One call had all of that settled and by the time Catherine had got her cardigan and purse the children were looked after. Both were being picked up from school and for meals that night.
I sat Catherine in the car and did up the seat belt for her and headed off for the hospital. She did not speak at all, just quietly sobbed. I gently probed asking if she knew the nature of the accident or what had happened but she seem to know even less than I.
As we drove along in silence I felt that small talk was pointless. Jake used to have a joke about his wife which I did not altogether approve. He called her “Catherine the Great”. I think he meant it in a loving sort of way but I think it was obvious to everybody else that it was a bit of a put down to the little lady. There was nothing great about her in any way – in her demeanour, her attitude, her sense of life or her vitality. Jake had all of that. There was nothing apparently left over for her and the title “Catherine the Great” seemed a bit of a mockery.
When eventually we got to the industrial burns section of the Preston and Northcote Community Hospital we hardly recognised Jake. He was covered from head to foot in bandages and gauze. Only his eyes and mouth were visible. His arms and legs were straightened and bandaged and held up by ropes and pullies to the ceiling. Jake could not talk. He was in a drugged state and looked as near to death as I have ever seen anybody. Apparently there had been some kind of dreadful accident with a four hundred and fifty gallon vat of caustic soda. I am not sure of the process of stripping the old chrome off metal bumper bars but somehow or other caustic soda is used at high temperature and either this vat exploded or tipped on him or he fell into it – no one knew but he had burns over a hundred per cent of his body and it was doubtful that he would recover.
I sat with Big Jake and Catherine the Great and prayed and prayed with her for him. She just seemed totally stunned, not able to know where to turn or what to do. I sat with my arm around her shoulders and she snuggled into my chest sobbing. We were not sure whether Jake knew we were there or not. After a few hours in which I was utterly exhausted it was decided that there was no point staying any longer and Catherine should get home to comfort the kids.
It was the worst industrial accident I had ever seen. By some miracle his eyes were unaffected. I understand that the tear system worked so well that the caustic soda did not burn his eyes irreparably.
Jake was in hospital for more than eight months but slowly he recovered. I visited him regularly and prayed with him before and after each bout of plastic surgery. Apparently he was wearing a very light pair of underpants and the only skin on his body which was not badly burned was around his hips where the underpants had given him some protection. Strips of skin from his bottom and inside his thighs were taken to replace the badly burned skin on other parts of his body.
The recovery was very slow. Jake had no life or spirit in him in the hospital. There had been a terrible personality change and he just sat swathed in bandages in a large chair looking out the hospital window while the skin on his body recovered. The change that occurred was in Catherine the Great. She had to take over and run her household. She did not know how to do the banking, pay the bills, drive the car or do anything apart from her normal weekly shopping and the washing and ironing. Suddenly she had to take over the running of the house, care of four children and the visiting of her husband in hospital. We organised a group of women to drive her to the hospital but Catherine insisted she that take driving lessons and several times I saw her very nervously driving her car around the streets under the guidance of a driving instructor. Whenever I visited the hospital I would ring her first and take her with me so that she was not dependent upon another driver. Eventually she got her licence and was able to drive herself.
After eight months Big Jake came home from the hospital. He was nothing but a shuffling shadow of the man he used to be. There was no life or spirit about him and he was totally depressed. Yet when I went to visit him at his home all he could talk about was his work and the need to get back to work. It seemed almost as if he was desperate to get back to work and that nothing would be right until he was back. I had never known a man with such commitment to his work. For eighteen months he was confined to home. Progress was slow and extremely painful but eventually he went back to work for only a few hours at a time at first. But there was almost an instant change of personality. As soon as Big Jake was back to work he rediscovered his noisy exuberant self. In spite of the terrible scars he was extroverted, full of life, loud voice and over the top. He rejoined the choir and although people had difficulty talking to him eyeball to eyeball because of the scarring on his face everyone admired his courage and talked about the miraculous way he had recovered from such a terrible accident.
And then suddenly Jake was at home and in bed once more. He was mumbling, just staring at the ceiling with a vacant look. His whole personality had reduced to that of a shattered shambles of a man. He had lost his memory and was unable to do almost anything. As I visited him at home and sat beside his bed I just wondered how this incredible change had occurred. His doctor, a local area doctor who was a friend of mine stood with me one day on the front drive outside the house saying to me “Gordon, I just can’t understand it. There is nothing that seems to point to the cause of this. There’s no reason why he should suffer such brain damage because of the burns on his body, but it is almost as if he has been poisoned. We are running a most extensive series of tests but I have never seen anything like this in my life before.”
It was a couple of weeks later that he rang me and the conversation was incredible “Did you realise that Big Jake was a drug addict?” I responded that I could not believe he was a drug addict and certainly had never heard anything like it. My doctor friend continued: “I don’t mean a drug addict in the sense that he took heroin like some of those people down St. Kilda town, but apparently at work he had been taking quite large doses of one of the nitrates they use in the industrial process.
It is a well known stimulant and he had been taking up to handfulls of the stuff. That big and noisy personality was really the result of loads of chemical stimulant. I don’t know much about the pharmacology of the whole business yet but apparently he had started taking small doses of this chemical which he used in the chrome plating business and over the years just built up the amounts. Apparently he needed to take more and more of the stuff to give him the drive and zest he had in his life. Since he has been back to work apparently in order to help him over come his depression and flatness caused by the burns and the lack of the drug he has gotten back to taking heavy doses and really this last collapse was because he just took far too much and his body had been literally poisoned. I am afraid Jake has damaged his brain with that chemical to such an extent that he will never recover.”
I was stunned. I had never met a drug addict before and certainly this kind of drug addiction was beyond anything I had even heard about. The effect on Jake was unbelievable. He walked around like a zombie, staring vacantly into space. Gradually he was able to work out how to turn a door handle to open the door and where the toilet was but he seemed not to do much more. He slowly shuffled around the backyard stopping to look at plants or a leaf on a tree or walking into his garage and picking up some of his old tools and turning them slowly over and over in his hand just staring at them. Over the next few weeks Jake recovered some mobility but did not seem to have any mental capacity at all. Catherine however, took on double strength. She nursed and cared for her husband, dressing him and feeding him as if he were a little child. We suddenly began to feel in the awesome, terribleness of this great tragedy an incredible admiration for Catherine the Great.
Month after month went by and he did not improve. One day Catherine rang me. She had grown so confident in her speech that I was amazed to hear her trembling voice, “Come quickly, hurry, Jake is sitting in the car with the motor running and I can’t get in because the garage doors are locked.” I recognised instantly what was happening and said to her “I’m on my way. Ring an ambulance immediately”. By the time she had rung the ambulance, I had driven the few streets from my house round into the Cheltenham estate. I ran straight to the garage. The big wooden lift-up door was locked. The side door was locked. But near the door was a glass louvered window overlooking his work bench. Catherine was in tears, standing beside me. It is funny the silly things you say at a time like that. But I remember distinctly saying “I’ll have to break the glass. Don’t worry I will fix it up later.” The glass was the most irrelevant thing at that time. With my elbow I smashed several panes of Louvre glass and felt around the lock on the inside of the door. The key was still in the lock and I turned it and the door opened. The garage was full of oily fumes. Big Jake was sitting in the car with his head lolled back over the back of the seat and his mouth wide open. He was literally blue. His foot was jammed on the accelerator. I threw up the big wooden door of the garage and dragged Jake out onto the drive. In those days there was no such thing as mouth to mouth resuscitation. But I knew from a Life Saving Course we had done in swimming how to give artificial respiration by laying a person on his stomach and kneeling beside him, pushing into the small of the back. I repeated it many times. Jake was breathing OK but was totally unconscious. The ambulance arrived. Immediately they put him onto oxygen and then onto a stretcher and took him off to hospital. His life was saved.
Big Jake never fully recovered. He was brain damaged before the carbon monoxide poisoning but certainly whatever potential he had, had been killed off by a very sad suicide attempt. Perhaps it would have been better if Catherine had not found him for another hour or so.
Eventually Big Jake came home just a shuffling, shambling shadow of a man. Catherine nursed him at home, dressed him and fed him. It seemed strange to see such a little woman leading him round. He shuffled behind her with one hand just on the inside of her arm. She never walked fast and never pulled away from him. He seemed to be comfortable if she was there. He was always dressed neatly, a big hulking silent man with soft hands who shuffled along. He only spoke one word. His power of speech was gone entirely except for a very faint and high pitched “Hullo”. Whenever people spoke to him he would just simply say “Hullo”. Catherine had the most courageous face of any woman I had ever known. She said to me on one occasion “I’m OK. I can look after him. I married him for better or for worse and just because he is sick there is no reason why I can’t manage. He is the father of our four children and we love him dearly.”
For the rest of the thirteen years I stayed in Cheltenham, nothing ever changed and when I asked about him a few years ago, she was still caring for him.
Whenever I think of Big Jake I can’t help but think of the laughing way he used to introduce his wife in the early days as Catherine the Great. That was exactly what she was. She was great!
That night in my study I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES