Going to College
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 first started to preach in the little Church of Christ in Newmarket, Victoria, I had just turned 18 years of age. I had not as yet attended the theological college where I was to spend the next three years of my life. The day came, however, when I headed my motor bike towards the College of The Bible in Glen Iris.
The motor bike was my inseparable companion. I had purchased it in a most unusual fashion. Just a few weeks previously I had been pondering what kind of transport I would have for my days as a student when a friend rode his motor bike up a steep road towards where several of us were standing. Suddenly he crashed. His front wheel came adrift from the forks of his motor bike. The motor bike hit the dirt road. He went over the handle bars and crashed onto the grassy bank.
Running down to help him we looked at the bike with its rear wheel still spinning. He got to his feet and kicked the errant wheel, “For five pound I’d sell the thing”.
I said to him, “Chick, do you really mean that? Would you sell it for five pound?” And with one look of disgust at his old bike he replied “Give me five pound and it is yours.”. He took my word that I would repay him the other 4 pound 10 shillings and I parted with my only ten shillings as a deposit on the bike. I now was the proud owner of a large BSA World War 2 vintage dispatch rider’s bike. It had a single cylinder of 500 cc’s with a throaty exhaust that allowed everybody to know I was coming. We stood the huge black monster upright, retrieved the front wheel and bolted it back.
Having not ridden a motor bike in recent years after my disastrous run in with the police when I last rode a motor bike through the pedestrian tunnel at the Box Hill railway station, I sat myself on the broad, well sprung seat of the BSA 500. From that moment on we were going to enter the ministry together.
Eventually decked in a leather jacket, leather gloves, goggles and leather pants, the black motor bike and its rider became a familiar scene around the streets of Newmarket.
After my first few weeks of preaching as a 17, then 18 year old preacher, I headed the bike towards Glen Iris for my first day in theological college. Forty seven men arrived all dressed in suits and everyone of them older than myself. In 1957 I was to be the baby of the college. I was still the youngest in 1958 and in 1959.
Most of the men who came into training for the ministry were mature men with professions and trades behind them. A number of them had advanced university degrees. The two men who slept in rooms beside me had Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education and Master of Engineering degrees, while another new student who joined us a little later in the year had his Master of Arts from Adelaide University and his newly acquired PhD. from the Australian National University. Many of the students had enviable academic records behind them and others had wide experience in ministry. But there was one way in which I, the baby of the college, had it over all the other students I was the only student to already have a church.
Because of my extensive youth activities the church had called me to minister in its midst as a young student before going to college. Therefore with the experience of sermons under my belt, and the early days of a parish ministry already started, I went into the college as the baby in years, yet the one who was already involved in church ministry.
The thirteen men who commenced the first year with me came from a number of States in Australia and one from New Zealand. We had to pay our own way through college, paying board each week for our residence and for our food, and to pay fees for the lecturing and tutorials that we received. A number of us were doing university subjects and we had our university fees on top of that. I was fortunate through my experience to have a university scholarship which enabled me to gain my university studies without paying fees.
The students were required to work in churches each weekend and Monday was a day without lectures but designed to be spent in full time employment. Many with trades and professions worked for that one day as motor mechanics, engineers, pharmacists, teachers, or in accordance with their training and professional skills. I had only come from school and therefore had to undertake whatever jobs were available to pay my weekly fees. For one period of time I worked as a Manchester salesman in a large store. Every year I went back to my family bakery and worked for four days prior to Easter, 24 hours a day with only snatches of sleep, making thousands of hot cross buns. I mowed lawns and packed five pound bags of CSR sugar for a large grocery chain.
Probably the most unusual job came just as I entered college, when as a 17 year old I glued white eyebrows into place, long white beard onto face and chin, and with plenty of padding around my slim figure, donned a Santa Claus costume and for one of the major department stores, became a professional Santa Claus for four weeks. My “Ho, ho, ho’s” convinced all the little children, but upon my knees came scores of mischievous little imps who were determined to pull off the beard or to punch me in the ribs. I learnt the technique of having the children whisper what they would like to get from Santa Claus for Christmas and while bending an ear down to them, kept my eye on their parents. The parents usually gave me a wink or a nod or a shake of the head which led me to indicate to the child that the very thing they desired would be coming to them that Christmas so long as they remained a good boy or girl, or else I was sorry that I could not provide such a toy this year but would think about it in the future.
In college we all had additional jobs. My task as the baby of the college was to peel the potatoes every night for the baked dinner for the 47 men plus the lecturing staff on the next day.
It seemed that everybody despised peeling enough potatoes for 50 or more people, but I came to really love that job and continued doing it over the next three years. Late at night after hours of study, of learning both New Testament and classical Greek and the intricacies of New Testament and Old Testament studies, I would go at the half hour prior to midnight up to the kitchen to commence peeling the potatoes.
The first thing I did was light the huge kitchen stove and put on a pan of fat into which the first few potatoes were sliced and diced as chips and an onion or two to add to the flavour. Then I settled down while my chips and onions cooked to peel the remaining potatoes.
The kitchen chimney interconnected with the chimney of the residence upstairs where our cook lived. The smell of onions and chips frying in a pan would permeate Miss Russell’s room through her chimney. I would then hear a light being switched on. Fortunately a squeaky board on the stairs from her room down to the kitchen would betray her coming. I would instantly turn off the stove, place the pan with its boiling fat and sizzling chips and onions in a bottom cupboard and shut the door and go back innocently to peeling potatoes. Miss Russell would suddenly open the door and step into the kitchen and look straight at the stove. There was nothing to be seen.
I would be just quietly whistling while I peeled the potatoes. “Oh, hullo Miss Russell. It’s you. You gave me quite a start. Can’t get to sleep? Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?” Miss Russell would decline the offer and move round the huge kitchen table where I was peeling potatoes, sniffing and investigating. Occasionally she would draw aside a curtain in front of the pantry and look in but there was nothing to be seen. She would speak to me for a minute or two and then go back up the stairs. As soon as I heard my faithful step creak with her ascending step I would pull out the pan of fat with its now quietly bubbling chips and onions from underneath the pot cupboard and place it back on the stove where it would continue to cook until they were ready. How those midnight feasts of chips and fried onions damaged my lithe, thin figure over those next years.
Other men used their skills in helping the college community on the farm we ran. It seems incredible but only seven miles from the heart of Melbourne there was a registered farm which was part of our College of The Bible property. Here the cows and bulls mated and the calves came each spring. The ducks and fowls produced eggs for the whole community. The vegetable gardens provided fresh vegetables. Some students had experience in these matters and their task was to dig the garden, hoe the vegetables or else, like “Chook” Henderson, look after the ducks and fowls and bring in the eggs.
The worst job, I guess, was milking the cows on the frosty Melbourne winter mornings. I never had to milk the cows because I peeled the potatoes. But one morning after hearing a rumour, I left my bed in the early morning dawn and through the freezing cold frost covered grass made my way down to the cowshed where our good friend from New Zealand, “Kiwi”, used to milk the cows. Kiwi was a huge New Zealander with great big size 14 feet. Even in the coldest morning he would walk across the grass with his bare feet, a bucket of steaming milk in either hand. I wondered how Kiwi could ever keep his feet warm on such a wintry morning. Having heard the rumour I went down into the cow shed and there sitting on a stool, with his head and shoulder into the side of a huge Frisian cow, was Kiwi milking away with the milk spurting in rhythmic spurts into a huge bucket of foaming milk in which he had both feet firmly planted, being warmed by fresh milk.
Looking back on those years in college I can say that I enjoyed every week immensely. The friendships with those men have stood with me down the past thirty years. Some of them became good companions in our athletic training as we pounded the ovals and the streets each night after lectures. Others of them became true mates whose friendship has lasted the years.
They were good days, those college days. But each Friday afternoon I would turn the huge black motor bike with its 500 cc cylinder letting the world know we were coming, towards the people of North Melbourne and into the slums of Newmarket where I would visit the people in their houses. Someone after a while nicknamed me “the flying vicar” and around the streets of Newmarket the flying vicar would ride that noisy motor bike calling at the houses of the people who lived in the little wooden workers cottages which were soon to be demolished in the slum reclamation programme. In their place would be built Housing Commission high rise concrete flats.
I visited each of those houses and at the end of a night’s visitation I would walk out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, start my motor bike, and head towards the College of The Bible to continue my training as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
