Big Bertha Skidmore
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel my student churches were two small adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of North Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
When I came out to conduct services or to visit members I would drive my big black BSA 500 motor cycle from the College of The Bible, Glen Iris, out to Newmarket, and often would have meals with various families in the church.
This always accomplished two objectives: on one hand it provided me with a good opportunity to get to know some of the more settled people in the church and to join in their family life as they also lived and worked in the slums; and on the other hand it provided a free meal for an otherwise impoverished student.
The best meals we ever obtained were at the home of “Skids”. Skids could cook more nourishing meals than any, and the generous helpings would fill a thin student for a day or more.
Big Bertha Skidmore was an unusual person to find in the heart of the slums. She was essentially a country woman, country born, country bred. All of her life she had lived in the country and she had brought with her into the city all the best of country ways including the concept that meals had to be big and nourishing.
Skids, as she used to encourage everybody to call her, was a widow and childless. In fact she had no one in the world apart from the church members. They were her family. She was a great heart, with a merry laugh and a never ending supply of reminiscences about country life.
She was a superb cook and took charge automatically of every catering event in the life of the church. Her second home was the kitchen and the church kitchen was very much her private domain. Before and after services she was always found in the kitchen washing up some cups that someone had left dirty on the sink, putting things away in their proper places or just polishing the stainless steel sink
The only thing that limited Skids was the fact that she could not lift. She would hit her lower abdomen with a big slap and say, as she asked someone to lift a pot of tea up on to the bench, or a box of vegetables from the floor, “You know, I’m all gone in here” and with a slap she would indicate where she was all gone, and continued “All gone! All gone you know.”
Well I for one did not know, and I did not want to learn.
But that did not stop Skids from telling you all about her abdominal problems. Even on fairly hot days she would wear a fox fur when she came to church of a Sunday morning. The fur around her shoulders had a poor fox’s head on one end and a bushy tail on the other. Its two feet were joined by a gold clasp across the front of her very ample bosom.
Pastoral visits or a meal visit to the home of Big Bertha Skidmore was very much like substitute house calls from a doctor.
I would knock on the side door of Skid’s comfortable house and she would call “Come on in, the door’s open”. The doors were always open in those days at every house. People walked in and out of the narrow houses with complete abandon. There was a rough sort of honesty in the slums. No one would steal from anybody local even though they would steal from employers, from businesses and from the shops down the street. But what was in each other’s house was taboo and people respected that. Skids lived in one of the few brick houses in the middle of the rows of narrow, wooden, single width workmen’s cottages.
“Come on in, the door’s open.” She would always be in the kitchen preparing an apple pie, or peeling vegetables. As I would stand in the kitchen and talk with her, perhaps drying up a few dishes that were draining on the sink, she would almost automatically bring the conversation around to the fact that “Well I can’t do what I used to do. The troubles are inside. I’m all gone in here. All gone you know.”
Even at lunch time which would have ample slices of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes, peas, carrots, pumpkin, and cauliflower, with gravy over everything, followed by her absolutely delicious apple pies and cream for dessert, the conversation would always get round to her health.
What lunches they were. Living on her own, not having a single family member, she would say to me, and to my girlfriend Beverley who may have been visiting with me “I love to cook. The trouble is I’ve got no one to cook for these days. I love helping you students when you come to my home for hospitality.” While she was talking she would try to add another couple of baked potatoes that she had left over or another slice of roast beef. When we left to go back to the college to take up another week of study there would often be, wrapped up in grease proof paper in a brown paper bag, an extra piece of plum pudding and a cupful of custard.
When you are living in a university college there were barren times as far as good meals were concerned. Good plain food, plenty of bread and large plates of porridge in Melbourne’s winter mornings were the order of the day. Skids’ hot roast meals were always welcome and third helpings were not unusual.
One day while I was visiting Big Bertha Skidmore, she became more reminiscent than usual and started telling me the story of her life. Once started Skids was impossible to stop. She would go on telling the story. It was impossible to interrupt or even to ask questions. She had her story to tell, she knew it in detail and she was going to finish it come hell or high water. Any other plans I might have had for visiting that day had to be laid to one side.
She and her husband had been on the farm up in Warracknabeal. It was a wheat farm, hot and dusty in summer with cold winter nights. They had fought drought and bush fires in turn. Times had been tough during the Depression years. She had to make do day after day with an endless variety of rabbit meals. The wheat crops were poor, the prices were low, the rains did not come, but the rabbits multiplied. Every day her husband would bring in a half dozen pair of rabbits which he skinned. In those days before adequate refrigeration fresh meat had to be cooked immediately. It lasted only for a short period of time. Skids became expert in cooking rabbit. They had rabbit stew, baked rabbit, fried rabbit, broiled rabbit, steamed rabbit, curried rabbit, and every other variety that she could imagine. Then of course there was pickled rabbit, salted rabbit, and cold rabbit.
Her husband was a very quiet, moody man who took the worries of the farm very much to himself. The failure of the wheat crop left them in a parlous financial situation. They had little furniture, no car, their two house cows had to be milked by hand, the chickens and ducks fed each morning, a few pieces of primitive harvesting equipment, and four draught horses which provided all of the energy and productivity of the farm. Those horses were their livelihood.
From the broad acres of the flat wheatlands of Warracknabeal, the four draught horses were the powerhouse of the farm. They hauled the ploughs, the harrows, the seed drill, the harvesting combine and the tray trucks for the bales of hay made after the harvest.
Green feed was difficult to come by and the horses used to live on chaff and oats.
One day the horses got out and took off down the country lane to a nearby paddock in which there was a patch of lush lucerne watered from a bore. The horses gorged themselves on the lucerne and it was many hours before they were discovered and brought back home. That night the horses swelled up in terrible agony and pain with the lucerne gases. During the night two of the draught horses died.
Skids’ husband was beside himself with grief. Those horses were the main means of his income. Through some poor fencing on the property two of his best horses were now dead.
The man was not able to control his sense of self blame.
That night Skids’ husband did not come up to the farmhouse and Skids went out to find him. She thought he might be in the chaff shed working, or in the stables keeping an eye on the other two draught horses, or perhaps in the milking shed. She found him in the barn. He was hanging from a noose tied to a rafter. Unable to cope, depressed and physically exhausted, he had taken his own life.
As she sat at the tea table telling the story, her eyes were full of tears. She gazed straight ahead as if she was unaware that I was also at the table.
She told me how she did not panic or run but quietly held his hand and realized it was so limp that there was no life left in the body which slowly turned upon the rope. She walked over to a nearby tool shed to find a sharp butcher’s knife. She came back and, standing up on a milking stool, cut the rope. Her husband’s body dropped to the ground. Big Bertha picked up his thin lifeless body and carried him in her arms up to the farmhouse. She laid him on her bed. She then sat up all night in the front room in front of the fire, throwing on another log every now and then as she watched until the dawn came up on their farm. She thought what she would do and worked out her future.
The next day she put on her best hat and gloves and walked into town. She called in at the doctor’s and told him that during the night her husband had passed away. The doctor drove her back to the farm and examined the body. He noted the rope marks around his neck and asked Bertha what had happened. Bertha explained the death of the two horses and of the tight financial position they were in and of the fact that her husband thought that they would lose the farm. The doctor closely examined the burn marks around the dead man’s neck again and said “It looks like it was pretty hot out there yesterday because his handkerchief has been rubbing his neck with the sweat. There is no doubt about it, I’ll write on the death certificate that he just died of natural causes. Probably his heart gave out on him.”
The community were very sorry that Skids’ husband had died of a heart attack. It was such a shame that she did not have any sons to take over the farm.
A clearing auction was held and everything was sold. Bertha took the proceeds and moved away from the community down to the city where she bought herself a house and for the next thirty years was a respectable woman in the life of the community and of the church at Newmarket.
After Bertha had told me that story that day I looked at her with a new kind of sympathy and love.
I was to have hospitality at her place scores of times but there was never a moment like that moment when she entrusted me with the story of her husband’s death. I believe I was the only other person in the world to have known.
Three years later in my final year at College I received a call in the middle of the night from the student whose bedroom was near the student telephone. The call came from a neighbour who had heard Bertha banging on the wall of her bedroom. The neighbour had been unable to get into the house but she thought something was wrong with Bertha and that as I was the only one that Bertha ever spoke about I should come immediately.
I quickly pulled on a shirt and trousers and a jumper over the top of my pyjamas and ran up and kick started the BSA 500 motor bike and headed for Newmarket. By the time I had reached there the neighbour had also rung the local doctor who had come around the corner immediately and let himself in through the side door which was always unlocked. Bertha was dying and he ordered an ambulance to take her to hospital.
When I turned into Finsbury Street there were a group of neighbours standing outside the house dressed in dressing gowns talking about Skids. They told me that she had been taken to the hospital and that she had lost a lot of blood. The doctor had gone off but he had told one of the neighbours that he held grave fears for her. I started the motor bike and headed for the Royal Melbourne Hospital. By the time I had arrived at the casualty ward, a sister on the night staff came to tell me that Big Bertha Skidmore had died. She had bled to death. The sister could not tell me anything definite, but it was her opinion that Skids had a very serious abdominal condition which must have remained untreated for years, and that she had suffered an acute haemorrhage and literally bled to death.
The next day I wandered fairly aimlessly through Skids’ house, opening a drawer here and a box there looking for some indication of a Will. I called in a couple of the older ladies of the church who washed her clothes and packed them to be taken up to the opportunity shop. I found her Will and in it she had named the secretary of the church as the executor of her estate with all of her possessions to go to charity.
As I left the house for the last time I stopped in front of the big old dresser in which she had her crockery and standing up against the back of the dresser was a large oval meat dish. On that meat dish there had been many a fine roast. Whenever I think of Skids I think of her dressed for Sundays with the fox fur around her shoulders, or else in her kitchen with a full apron with a carving knife and fork in her hands and that meat dish containing the most beautiful roasts you could ever see.
Those were my thoughts as I came out of her house for the last time into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES