Granny’s Teacup
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. For seven years, during the late 1950’s and the early 1960’s, the people of those inner slum areas were my parish. From the age of 18 through to 25, I lived and worked among some of Melbourne’s worst slums as I attended theological college and university prior to my graduation and ordination.
I had just had my 18th birthday when I started visiting the people of the parish to which I had been appointed, even before I began attending lectures at the Churches of Christ Federal College of The Bible in Glen Iris, Victoria.
I had grown up in the village of Box Hill which was almost at the end of the railway line on the eastern side of Melbourne. There the trees were tall, the paddocks were lush and the cows still grazed around our house. Coming to work in the inner north western suburbs of Ascot Vale, Newmarket, Kensington and North Melbourne, was a cultural shock. I did not realize that people lived as did the people in the narrow slum houses that were soon to be demolished by the Housing Commission.
The houses in the narrow, dirty streets were unbelievably decrepit. Dampness pervaded every one. Because there had been reports for years that demolition would eventually come, no maintenance or upkeep had been completed.
Broken windows were stuffed with old newspapers. Spouting hung down from the iron roofs with water running down the walls every time it rained. All of the houses opened directly onto the footpath so there were no gardens. In the pocket handkerchief backyards there were an outside toilet, a wood shed, a clothes line with a prop, and some plants or a small area of lawn which struggled to survive. The nearby factories belched orange smoke which settled over everything and the smell from the tanneries, the abattoirs, the sale yards and the boiling down works which surrounded my two little churches pervaded everybody’s clothing and hair.
There was one advantage in living in the square between the tannery, the abattoir, the sale yards and the boiling down works: one could always tell which way the wind was blowing!
In the grimy, narrow streets with their even more grimy and narrow lanes behind, lived the people of my parish. The houses facing each street were all the same. The land upon which each house stood was exactly 18 feet wide. There was three feet of sideway down each house and the other wall was right on the boundary. There were no windows in this long blank wall, only on the side that opened into the narrow sideway. Consequently every room in the little wooden houses was dark.
The front door opened onto the street and into a long passage that ran down the entire length of the building. From that passage opened the rooms. The first room or front room was always the good room but rarely did anyone sit there. It was reserved for special occasions, unless it was used as the main bedroom in those families that had a large number of children. Most families did.
Immediately behind the front room was the first bedroom which was occupied as a rule by the parents. The passage opened into a larger room without doors that served as the lounge. Off it was the second and final bedroom. There was a wide passage which ended in the bathroom which consisted of a bath, a chip heater and a stone sink. The bathroom doubled as the laundry when not being used as a bathroom. Tucked into the corner of the house was the kitchen in which everybody ate. These little two-bedroom cottages inevitably housed six or eight persons. I have seen narrow beds in the hallway and in the lounge room to accommodate the family and the parent frequently would have the youngest child in their room. I did not know it then, but in three years time when I would be married, I would take my new bride into one of those cottages which we would share with an elderly lady, my grandmother.
There were many older people living in these houses. The houses were often in bad repair and the people needed support to survive.
On my first day as pastor, before I had even conducted a service of worship, I looked at the rows of houses and determined to visit every single family to let them know I was there in the name of Jesus Christ to serve.
With all the brashness of an eighteen year old starting out on his first week of student ministry I knocked on the first door of Albert Street just off Racecourse Road. The house was occupied by two elderly ladies. I explained to one on the doorstep who I was, and asked if I could come in and talk to them about our church and how we hoped to help them. She told me her name was Mrs. Higgs, although she pronounced it always as Mrs. ‘iggs. She took me into the front room and sat me down. There were lace antimacassars on very old and worn lounge furniture. It was so dark it took some time for my eyes to become accustomed to the light.
She looked thin and weary; I suspected worn out by caring for many children. Her grey straight hair was drawn back into a tight bun. Steel rimmed glasses were on the end of her nose. She wore an apron, as did almost every lady in those days, and tucked into the apron was a tea towel. She told me that she lived in this house with her mother, “Granny”. They were both war widows. Granny was a war widow from World War I and Mrs. ‘iggs was a war widow of World War II. Mrs. ‘iggs spoke constantly of her father who was killed in the Great War and of her husband, Captain ‘iggs. She always referred to him as Captain ‘iggs and as she went on talking about the two soldiers I became rather confused, as the careers of both father and husband seemed to intertwine.
She talked nonstop. Suddenly she realized we had been there for some time. She felt I should come down to meet old Granny. With that she ushered me into the passageway, down through a pair of faded and worn velvet curtains that divided the front room from the rest of the house, took me past the bedroom, through the lounge room, down the passageway, round the bathroom and laundry and into the kitchen at the back. The little kitchen was obviously their living room.
It was crowded with furniture. In the darkness I could make out an old fire stove down one end with a large black kettle steaming away. There was a kitchen sink along one side of the wall, one small window, a solid wooden door and a dresser containing the family china at one end. There were several comfortable chairs covered with washing, and from the ceiling stretching the whole length of the kitchen were several clothes lines filled with articles of ladies clothing and unusual oblong white things like little bags of cotton wool inside sheeting.
There was a terrible smell throughout the kitchen, a smell of stale urine. She introduced me to Granny and in the darkness I peered at one of the chairs and there beneath a pile of rugs and clothes was a tiny, thin lady with a crackling laugh with one tooth in the front of her mouth. She was almost blind, had a piercing laugh or cackle, and interrupted every conversation with irrelevant comments. I sat on the edge of a chair surveying these two ladies. Mrs. ‘iggs kept talking nonstop, while Granny kept laughing and making comments about matters which had nothing to do with what her daughter was saying. I then realized, through intuition more than anything else, that all the oblong things hanging from the line around my head were feminine sanitary napkins that had been washed out and hung out to dry. I had never seen one in my life before and here I was surrounded with a score of them. The presence of the female sanitary pads hanging out to dry and the smell of stale urine suddenly made me realise the old lady was incontinent.
As this brand new student minister was beginning to come to grips with the facts of life Mrs. ‘iggs spoke to me. “Now youse would like to have a nice cuppa, wouldn’t youse?” I nodded. “I haven’t got much milk , do you mind if you have it black?”
I replied that of course I didn’t mind having it black. This was the first lie I had ever told as a student pastor, and on my first day’s visiting, for I’d never had black tea in my life to that moment. She picked a cup out of the sink and as she placed it on the table before me and turned to get the teapot which was stewing on the wood fire stove, I saw that the inside of the chipped cup had rings of what looked like rancid milk. I then realized that Mrs. ‘iggs could not see very well herself. She poured out a cup of black tea for me and toothy Granny chuckled and made comments. Mrs. ‘iggs was not going to have one herself as she’d only had one just before I arrived. I sat there conscious that both of them were watching me as I drank the cup. There was no saucer or spoon so I did not have the solace of sugar to sweeten it. As I picked the cup up to drink I realized that the only clean place from which I could drink was directly in front of the handle. Tilting my hand in an unusual fashion I tilted the cup up and drank in that one clean spot directly over the handle.
Old Granny chuckled and Mrs. ‘iggs peered at me through the darkness of the kitchen. “That’s funny” she said, “youse are the only other person I’ve ever seen drink tea from a cup like that.” I commented “Oh, it’s just a funny habit, but I always drink my tea over the handle of the cup”. I was telling my second lie in the one pastoral visit. Old Granny kept chuckling and Mrs. ‘iggs continued “Yes, the only other person I know who drinks tea like that is old Granny and that is ‘er cup you’re drinking from.”
The tea stopped in my mouth. I had no other option but to swallow it.
This work of being a minister visiting people in their homes was something more than I had bargained for.
Politely declining a second cup of tea I explained to her that I was appointed to the little wooden church around the corner in Finsbury Street and that I would be pleased to come and visit them from time to time and if they had any needs at all to let me know. I invited them to come to church service but realized that probably neither old Granny nor Mrs. ‘iggs really went outside the front door of the little workman’s cottage. I explained to her that I would be visiting all the houses in the street to speak to them about the love of God, to have a prayer with people and to offer the resources of the church to them.
Mrs. ‘iggs interrupted me brusquely. “You are not going to visit ‘er that’s next door, I hope” she said. I replied that I intended to visit all of the houses in the street. She went on, “Not ‘er next door. You keep away from ‘er. She’s a shameful hussy, a shameful hussy, a real shameful hussy is that Maggie Scraggs.”
I wanted to ask why Mrs. Next Door was such a shameful hussy but the way old Granny cackled and kept on talking and the way Mrs. ‘iggs kept shaking her head I knew that it just was not polite for me to even ask about the shameful hussy next door. All the same I determined that I would visit the shameful Maggie Scraggs next door. But that would have to wait until tomorrow.
My visiting had started late that afternoon and the time had somehow or other slipped away while I listened to Granny and Mrs. ‘iggs.
After I had a brief Bible reading, peering through the dimness at the Scriptures, thanking God for acute sight, I had a prayer with these two old war widows and promised to come back to see them again.
Half way up the passage Mrs. ‘iggs stopped me and repeated over and over again how much they enjoyed my visit, “It’s been a long time since a padre has come to see us.” I suddenly realized that the last minister who had visited them had probably been an army chaplain hence the title she had given to me as padre. She repeated again and again how much the visit had meant to them and how she looked forward to me coming back for another cup of tea and a talk with Granny. I was not to know it then, but I was to become very attached to those two and regularly, once a month, I would visit their little cottage and spend some time with them in conversation and a cup of tea, in reading the Scriptures and in prayer.
Just as we got to the door, Mrs. ‘iggs excused herself and went off down through the velvet curtains only to reappear back from her bedroom a few moments later to press into my hands a two shilling piece. “For the offerin’” she said.
I did not know what to do. I did not want to take it because I did not want people to think that I would come visiting them for the sake of receiving the offering. But on the other hand I felt that she was making a gesture of acceptance of me as a parson and of our church, and to refuse her two shilling piece would have created a rejection. I took the florin.
I said goodbye to Mrs. Higgs at the door and thought of the stupidity and the ineptitude of the Housing Commission that had kept sending each of these little houses letters explaining that they would shortly be demolished and that the Housing Commission would build large concrete high rise flats on the site with each tenant having an opportunity of moving into one. But no one had ever visited them. I am sure that the government had no idea that inside the back kitchen, beneath a pile of washing, was a little old lady who needed more than a high rise concrete flat.
As I walked across the footpath I looked to the next house which I would visit the following morning, the house of that hussy “Maggie Scraggs”.
I walked out in the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of The Bible in Glen Iris to start my training as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
