As Long as They’re Clean
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel, my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. During the seven years during the late 1950’s and 1960’s, the people of the inner slum areas were my parish.
In one of the little workman’s cottages just 18 feet wide, consisting of a long passage that went down one side of the house with rooms opening off on the other, there lived a most unusual couple. Nancy and Cyril Saltash were almost a comic couple. They were like Abbott and Lou Costello with Nancy being the rotund, blustery extravert and Cyril being the tall, slim, bashful introvert.
Nancy was huge. The tops of her arms were thicker than the thighs of my legs. No dress could disguise the rolls of fat. She was a merry, jolly person always laughing and full of good fun. Her humour was infectious and with her laughter there was always a very hefty hand that would slap a man on the back, which usually came close to dislocating his shoulder.
There was not much that Nancy could do with herself to make herself prettier than she was so she didn’t bother trying. Makeup and finery of any kind were a waste of time. She pulled her hair to one side with a plastic clip, and pulled on any dress that happened to be near at hand when she got up of a morning. Her dresses were all the same large, shapeless tents sewn up at each side with a hole for the head and the arms. There was nothing much that Nancy could do. Her size was just the dominant feature about her.
Cyril was just the opposite. He would stand behind people and never join in, fingering a pork pie hat he used to wear, looking down at the ground. He hardly ever joined in conversation and when we went out of our way to encourage him into the circle and to make conversation he would look at the ground, move awkwardly from one leg to the other and be extraordinarily bashful. Cyril was much older than Nancy and they met in an unusual fashion.
They were both at the beach one day, although the idea of Nancy in a bathing costume makes the mind boggle. They were both running down a steep embankment to the beach with Nancy ahead and Cyril running behind. There was a point when the rough track passed between two rocks and when Nancy came to the spot she became wedged in between them. Cyril running down behind her had too much momentum to stop and he cannoned straight into her. The force of his sudden arrival upon the jammed Nancy was enough to explode her through the rocks. She went tumbling head over heels down the steep incline onto the sandy beach. Cyril following with arms and legs going in all directions until he landed on top of her.
Such is the stuff of romance! This meeting brought them together, they fell in love and within a short period of time had shifted into one of the houses near my church and produced four healthy young offspring, all boys and all shaped like their father.
When Nancy told me prior to the almost imminent birth of the fourth child that she was expecting a baby, and that it was due any time, and that she hadn’t realized that she was pregnant, I was not in the least bit surprised. However, number four came into the world not long afterwards and joined the other three beanpole brothers.
Nancy was not at all domesticated. The house was an absolute mess. I remember on one occasion walking in the front door which was left open, and tripping over a new vacuum cleaner lying across the floor inside the door in the dark passage way. You must realize that with the passage running the full length of the house, with curtains hanging across it half way down and no windows, the passages were always dark. I picked myself up and looked at this amazing, brand new Electrolux. Nancy came thumping up the passage through the curtains, almost taking them down in her progress, and watched as I untangled my feet from the hose and all the attachments which were scattered over the floor.
I marveled at the fact that she had an Electrolux because the house was poorly furnished with lino covering the floors in every room. There was not a piece of carpet in the entire house and the thought of having a vacuum cleaner without carpets seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms. But no, Nancy explained to me quite logically that the vacuum cleaner was good for picking up the dirt from lino and, apart from that, the Electrolux salesman who called was a very nice man.
I mentally included this along with the list of other useless items that they had in their house.
For example, whenever I needed to do some research on university subjects I would slip around to their house and borrow a volume or two from their new set of “Encyclopedia Britannica”. They were the only people in the entire neighbourhood who possessed a set of encyclopedias. As Cyril was not a bookish type and Nancy certainly wasn’t, and as the children were under six or seven years of age, it seemed quite out of place in their home. But as Nancy explained to me very logically, it was an expense well worthwhile because it prepared the children for later education, it did not cost very much when you were paying it off week by week, and apart from that the “Encyclopedia Britannica” salesman was really quite a nice man.
Cyril had an unusual speech impediment in that he whistled as he spoke. Every “s” in his speech was sounded with a whistle. We would often ask Cyril to say “She sells sea shells on the sea shore”. With his remarkable ability he could whistle on every “s” while others of us would burst into laughter at our feeble efforts. He was a good hearted fellow but a very inadequate person. Tall and slim, he had protruding front teeth and jug ears sticking out like handles on a teapot, with hair that was wiry and refused to be brushed into any order. He was a storeman in a local factory which certainly allowed him plenty of time at home.
However, what his wife was to keeping the house tidy, he was to having the back yard and small garden neat. I doubt if he knew which end of spade to hold, and long grass, mud and the biggest collection of junk filled the yard. At the back of the house was a chook shed and the chooks took over the entire yard as their run and were frequent visitors into the kitchen. Every time it rained, the water from the down pipes which were rusted through would flood all around the back door and the back yard. The children with their bare feet would bring mud throughout the house.
The poor young beanpole children always seemed to have bare feet and running noses. The children never wore socks, even in the middle of winter, but instead just sandals over bare feet when they made their way to school.
Various women in the church used to take Nancy in hand and seek to teach her some domiciliary skills such as cooking, ironing, housework and the like. But all to no avail.
Nancy managed to avoid the effort that was required in doing anything in the house. On one occasion when we spoke to her about the children having no socks to wear on a freezing cold Melbourne winter’s day she replied that that was the way she was brought up and it certainly did her no harm. She added that “the problem with socks is they just add to the washing”.
The washing always seemed to be on the line, which was the standard answer why someone did not have a shirt or a pair of shorts to wear.
The clothes were never ironed because Nancy would say “so long as they’re clean, that’s all that matters”. So the bed sheets were never ironed, the clothing was never ironed, the curtains in the best room when they had been washed were never ironed. “So long as they’re clean, that’s all that matters” was the standard reply for everything.
Cyril did not earn a large wage as a storeman and the family lived in real poverty. Many of the members of the church helped them out with clothing for the children and food for the family.
Nancy’s most wonderful ability was the gift of playing the piano which she had learnt as a child and which she now exercised at church services by playing our little harmonium. Like everything she did she enjoyed playing the church organ and filling the wide organ seat. She would pedal enthusiastically on the harmonium and the more enthusiastic she became about singing a hymn the more the little old harmonium would rock backwards and forwards. How we loved to sing in those days. The crowds became larger almost week by week as new members joined our church, and more volume was required from the organ, and Nancy’s big legs pumped away furiously to give us full volume, with the whole stool full of rolling waves of human flesh.
Behind all of this happy exterior was a very depressed woman who worried over their shortage of money. She was, in fact, a compulsive spender, and the purchase of the vacuum cleaner when they had no carpets to clean and of the Encyclopedia Britannica which none of them had the capacity to read was only symbolic of all the other things in the house that they possessed. Anything that could be purchased anywhere by time payment came into their home.
Their home was full of all the specials that could be bought in stores or by door to door salesmen. There was a full Fowlers Preserving outfit with rows of empty jars that would never have fruit in them. There were stainless steel saucepans in a full range capable of serving cordon bleu meals, all suitable for a gas stove with rounded bottoms when they only had a flat electric hotplate. Every kind of article that could be purchased was theirs and the bills came in resolutely week after week and the debt collector called at their door monthly.
Cyril did not seem to have any capacity to handle the finances and Nancy only had the capacity to spend them. Consequently, they were always short of money. There would be times when the family literally did not have food.
The church family not only provided clothes for the children and food for the family but there were many occasions when some of the older women would get along side Nancy and talk to her about controlling her spending and about her Christian responsibility as a mother to provide good, clean and warm clothing for her little children. In the same way, some of the men used to get alongside Cyril and clean up the backyard, cutting the grass and taking a trailer load of rubbish to the tip. While they had Cyril on his own, stressed with him the need for him to take leadership in the family and to take control of their spending.
But all the words of encouragement and wisdom did little to help. Cyril stood by helplessly and Nancy just went on spending.
On one occasion when I called to see her, she burst into tears when I made enquiries about the arrival of a debt collector and the repossession of some family goods. She said that the debts were so worrying that she felt like throwing herself into the Yarra River from the Princes Bridge.
At eighteen I did not have the wisdom nor the experience to know adequately how to handle this problem. I gave her what encouragement and counsel I could with assurances of support and help.
Three nights later, however, I received a telephone call at the College of the Bible.
It was Cyril. He was beside himself with anxiety. He had come home from work at 4 o’clock as usual and found the youngest child at home by himself. The other three children came home from primary school and Nancy was nowhere to be found. Cyril had waited until 8 o’clock but by now the children were getting hungry and he had no idea where his wife might be. I told Cyril to set about getting the children some meals and I would get on my motor bike and come out and see if I could find Nancy. I immediately rang some of the women in the church and asked them to go round to the home of Nancy and Cyril Saltash with some nourishing food for the children, to bathe the children and get them into bed, while I endeavoured to find Nancy.
She was not the sort of person to go to the picture theatre or any place of personal enjoyment or a hotel or a licensed club. All I had going round and round in my mind was the statement when she said that she was so worried about her finances she felt “like jumping off the Princes Bridge into the Yarra”. All I could think of was this poor distressed and depressed woman throwing herself off the Princes Bridge into the river Yarra. I raced my motorcycle into town and parked it illegally near the side of the Princes Bridge. I hastily ran alongside the bridge looking at the alcoves along the bridge where people would sit and watch the boats pass beneath. She was nowhere on the bridge and there was no evidence that she may have jumped.
I then concluded that she may have booked herself into some cheap accommodation for a while until it was dark and then to throw herself off the bridge. I immediately hailed a taxi and asked a taxi driver where would they take a person who wanted very cheap lodgings in the heart of the city. The taxi driver mentioned three possibilities. I immediately raced my motor bike up to Eastend Lodgings. They had not seen anyone of that description. I then headed the bike down to the Spencer Street Private Hotel and the man behind the seedy reception desk indicated that he had not seen anyone booking in of that description. I then raced the motor bike up to the Salvation Army People’s Palace.
There I struck gold. The man at the desk, a rather disreputable looking fellow who seemed too lethargic to move, chewed the end of a plastic ballpoint pen and gazed into the ceiling: “Nows I come to think of it we did have a big woman like youse describe. She came in here about 4 p.m. and I rented her the room for the night”.
I asked him what room it was and told him it was an emergency. He chewed the end of the pen and looked up into the ceiling and said “I am not allowed to tell you what room she is in. That is her business and no one else’s”. I was faced with an unobliging night manager who seemed too weary and careless to exercise his brains. He had been told his instructions and he would move not a wit from them.
In a most uncharacteristic gesture, my anger overflowed and I reached forward and grabbed the man by the two lapels and yanked him out of his seat. “You tell me which room she is in or I will bash your ears in”. The presence of a young eighteen year old dressed in motor bike leathers must have caused an impression that I was bigger and tougher than what I really was because immediately he protested that he would show me which room she was in.
I followed him up the stairs to the fourth floor. The rooms were all tiny and the doors shut tight. I pounded on the door of number 419 and called out “Nancy! Nancy! Are you in there?”. From inside I heard a groan and nothing more. I called again but there was no answer. I turned on the unfortunate night porter and ordered him to open the doors. But he declared that he did not have a pass key and that there was no way in which the door could be opened. I had seen it done in the movies and without an instant’s thought I ran against the door and hurled my shoulder against the lock. I nearly broke my shoulder.
The door splintered open dragging its catch through the woodwork and there on a bed, looking very sick and almost unconscious, was Nancy. There were several bottles of pills nearby. She had taken an overdose of tablets and had laid down to die.
Seeing her, the night porter sprang into the most action I had seen in him since my arrival and he ran down the stairs and rang for an ambulance.
I waited beside Nancy, stroking her hand and brow which was covered in sweat, reassuring her and affirming her of our faith and love for her.
Nancy recovered. The church paid off some debts and helped the family get set once more.
After seven years I left the area and the family. Only occasionally I had news from them. Then a message arrived. Nancy was dead, causes unknown. Cyril could not manage and left the house and the young children. Nancy’s mother, now a very elderly woman, took to herself the four young boys and brought them up.
Not long ago, in advanced age and worn out by four fairly unruly beanpole teenagers, she died. The boys are now living their own lives, and one of them rings me regularly to remind me of the days when I used to call at their house 25 years ago. Sadly, the boys are continuing in what seems to me to be a cycle of poverty having never gotten out of the poverty into which they were born.
Inadequate people need the church to be supportive of them over many years and to help them to come face to face with their personal problems. And to help them to discover the resources that can be found in faith, so long as they’re willing to accept the discipline of the faith and of the talents and benefits that God gives them.
I did not know that I might be beginning a long relationship with those four boys, their grandmother and their inadequate father, the day I tripped over the new Electrolux in the hallway when I called to visit Nancy, their mother. But they were another family in my parish.
That day I walked out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of the Bible to train as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES