Just an Ordinary Bloke
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of the 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.
In the early months of 1966 I got round to looking at the families who attended our Sunday School. Often in those days parents sent kids but never attended Church themselves. Part of my role as minister would be to visit the parents of our Sunday School scholars, present them with the claims of Jesus Christ upon their lives and seek to bring the parents within the fellowship of the Church.
That’s how I came to meet the Draper family. I had started to work my way alphabetically through the parents of more than four hundred children in the Sunday School. Very soon I came upon the Draper family. There were five young children in the Sunday School. I called upon Lorraine and Lindsay the parents who lived up in Olympic Avenue. Olympic Avenue was a new development made I guess sometime around 1956 when the Olympics came to Melbourne. All over Melbourne in that year new housing developments were named Olympic Way, Olympic Drive, Olympic Avenue and this one in Cheltenham would have been most typical of all of them. It was a gum tree lined street with houses mainly built of fibro/cement or timber designed for young couples with a limited budget and providing plenty of opportunity for growing families. Olympic Avenue had now been occupied for about ten years when I arrived and families like the Drapers were down the line with the numbers of children they had planned to have.
Lorraine was pleasant and pregnant. I forget whether this was number five or number six. It was quite natural that she should be pregnant. She was one of those warm hearted, jolly women who really loved children.
Lindsay was a quiet man, with friendly smile and decent ways about him. He drove a panel van with an electricians sign upon the side. He did a lot of household electrical works on the new houses and the addition of power points to those that had been built with far too few. I always remember pulling up just after his panel van pulled into the drive of their house and he got out in his overalls. I walked over to him, extending my hand and introducing myself. He said to me as he gave me his name, “Well don’t expect anything special of us. I’m just an ordinary bloke with an ordinary family.”
I never forgot Lindsay’s line about just being `an ordinary bloke’ because in all of the ways that society usually judges people Lindsay was `an ordinary bloke’. He was a tradesman and proud of it, he worked long hours and was honest in the work that he did. He didn’t seem to have many gifts or abilities and certainly it is hard to imagine him ever being mentioned in any way in a community as an outstanding citizen. But reflecting on the twenty years I was involved with them, Lorraine and Lindsay were far more than just an ordinary family. They were so typical of the ordinary blokes and families that were part of the life of Cheltenham Church of Christ.
I had been visiting them a few times when they indicated their desire to accept Christ as Saviour, be baptised and come within the membership of the Church. From that time on they were regular and loyal in everything we did. This ordinary family, however, were quite extra-ordinary in what they contributed to the life of the Church. It was while visiting them in their home on one occasion that I made the remark, pointing to the piano against the lounge room wall, “Which one of you plays?” I expected the answer to be Lorraine but to my surprise Lindsay owned up that he was the one in the family who played. I hadn’t pictured Lindsay as a pianist. Very slowly I prised from him the fact that not only was he a pianist but he was a pianist with some real abilities. I encouraged him to play something for me and looked round for some music but there was no music present. “Oh I can play alright, but I can’t read music. I just taught myself on the farm where I grew up and then started playing with dance bands in at the country dances of a Saturday night. I guess I played for fifteen years or more. I can play any tune so long as I have heard it but I can’t read music.” With that he sat down and started to play.
Lindsay’s manner of playing had to be heard to be believed. Whilst it was true he was self taught it was also true he had a most incredible talent. Sing any tune and he would immediately pick the correct key and start playing. He could follow you through on any tune as if he had known it and even if he had never heard the tune before would always manage to improvise neautifully. Except for one thing, he had great difficulty with tempos except those that were played by a normal dance band. Give him a song which had the timing of the Pride of Erin or of a circular waltz, fast fox trot and away he would go but give him a well known song with a regular beat like God Save the Queen and he would start off alright but before very long could start to swing it and before you knew where you were that regular beat had turned into a waltz.
I tried him a couple of times on the piano at the Church hoping that we might develop him as the Church pianist, but every hymn that was ever written somehow managed to end up like “When you are in love it’s the loveliest night of the year.”
However, we did find a place where Lindsay could use his talents. As his daughters were growing up they started to attend our girls gymnasium where a hundred and eighty girls in three different age groups each Monday night donned the shortest skirts and with clubs, bar bells, hoops and sticks with ribbons attached went through a whole series of marches, movements and exercises. All of this was done to rhythm and the rhythms were all of those that Lindsay could play. So it was that he became each Monday night the pianist for each of the three groups within the girls club. His daughters became enthusiastic, were regular attenders, developed some great skills in their callisthenics ability and it’s not surprising that each year when the names of gold medal winners were read out, his daughters were among those that came forward to collect. Lorraine at home just made the uniforms, washed and ironed them and made sure her daughters were there on time. It was the same when the girls began to grow older and joined our church netball teams. By that time we must have had about fifteen netball teams playing girls netball each week. I can remember a photograph in the Sun News Pictorial featuring the three daughters each of whom was Captain of the team in their respective age group and each of them representing the State of Victoria in their age group. Mum was behind them with every support making the uniforms and washing them and making sure the girls were at practice looking spick and span.
Lindsay was also a dad close to his sons. We had three boys clubs called “Boys Explorers” and Lindsay always drove his boys up for Tuesday night Boys Group and was a regular attender at our Lads and Dads camp. On these occasions lads and their dads went out bush camping for a weekend living in tents and cooking food over open fires in the midst of some rain drenched forest. It was never easy for us to get a fire going in wet weather somewhere up in the middle of the Victorian Alps. But Lindsay could always be counted upon to have packed a box of matches in some weather proof packet inside a tin which he had wrapped in plastic. Lindsay could be relied upon to have been the only person to have somehow or other kept some newspaper dry and some kindling on hand. Lindsay was the one who could always produce the scout knife at the precise moment when we needed to cut some rope in order to keep the tents up at night. He was just one of those practical men who was always there and always willing to help and who never said much about it.
At working bees, Lorraine was always found cleaning up things in the Church kitchen and Lindsay was out helping in the Church gardens. They were among the first to arrive and the last to leave. Their own home was never pretentious but the gardens were always neat. If any widow in the Church had a problem with her electrics, a simple call to Lindsay and his panel van would be around regardless of the day or the hour and the job would be fixed promptly and usually without charge. They were never wealthy but they always gave of their dollars willingly in the work of the church, the Red Cross, World Vision or in any other appeal that we ran for the needy in this country or overseas. For twenty years Lindsay also had another passion. He served our local Bushfire Brigade as a volunteer fire fighter. Over the twenty years he rose through the ranks until he became Captain of our local Bushfire Brigade. Each of his sons in turn joined the Brigade and served in a voluntary capacity. Eventually Lindsay was the Captain of the Cheltenham Bushfire Brigade and the driver of the tanker that was the pride of the Brigade. In mid February 1983 dreadful fires burned throughout southern Australia and in Victoria a total of 71 people were burnt to death and hundreds of properties were destroyed. Lindsay and his team fought valiantly day after day against the fires.
Then fighting up a particularly vulnerable gully a fire ball exploded suddenly right over where their tanker and team were working. Two of the team were burnt to death. Lindsay’s youngest son Larry, then sixteen, rolled under the tanker and turned a valve on dowsing himself with a continuous stream of water which saved his life. Lindsay had called them in, back to the tanker and was seeking to start the tanker to drive them to safety as the fire ball engulfed them. The engine, deprived of oxygen, would not start. Lindsay caught in the open cabin of the truck was horribly burned. Somehow his son later grabbed the bodies of his two dead mates and hoisted them onto the cabin with that of his father and drove the tanker out to safety. The rescuers could hardly believe their eyes at the cargo of burned flesh. Larry through tears tried to explain what had happened. It was then that someone heard Lindsay moan. He was still alive although burned beyond recognition.
I saw a photograph taken a few days later of him in hospital, swathed from head to foot with bandages. I could not believe the size of his head. It had swollen larger than a basketball. Every part of his skin was black and those hands and fingers which had vamped out many a waltz tune was so thick and stiff it was doubtful they would ever play again.
As I tell you this story I am looking at a photograph taken four months later and Lindsay was still sitting in a hospital bed with a hugely swollen head and black skin peeling from every part of his features. It was impossible to recognise him.
Yet by the grace of God and the wonders of modern skin grafting one year later to the day Lindsay walked out of hospital, his same cheery self, with a bright smile and a wave to the people who stood round the entrance way to the hospital and applauded as the last of the victims of the Ash Wednesday Bushfires slowly walked out of hospital and back to his home. We never thought we would ever hear him play the piano again but in a letter just months after his return home Lorraine told us that Lindsay had only that week got back to the piano and there once more started to stretch his cracked and damaged fingers to get them back into the old routine. Lindsay was a true bush hero who wanted no compensation other than the privilege of serving his fellow men. As he said, he was “just an ordinary bloke with an ordinary family” yet as members of my Church at Cheltenham they were people who loved God and their country, who enjoyed sport and music, who worked hard and paid taxes, who provided voluntary support at the school, the church and to the community and who in everything he did expressed his love of God and his care for his fellow men.
Where do you find people like Lindsay and Lorraine Draper, truly an ordinary family yet the very salt of the earth?
That night in my study I spent some time 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