Maggie Scraggs
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 early 1960’s, the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
In that week before I even started preaching and conducting services, I determined to visit the people in the streets surrounding the first of the churches.
The people lived in narrow little wooden houses, terribly derelict and badly maintained. For years, even before the war, they had known that these houses were to be demolished so no maintenance had been undertaken over the years. Windows were cracked and holes were stuffed with tattered newspapers. The front fences were askew or broken. Paint was peeling from everything. The narrow sideway between each house was just wide enough to admit a man with a pushbike or wheelbarrow and was enclosed by a wooden lattice gate which, in most cases, hung badly from the hinges. There were dogs all about the streets. The air was heavy with the fumes from the tannery or from the abattoirs or the sale yards or the boiling down works that surrounded this area of Newmarket.
Mrs. ‘iggs had advised me not to go next door to visit that “terrible hussy Maggie Scraggs” but I had determined to visit every house in Albert Street just off Racecourse Road. I knocked at the door. This was to be my second pastoral visit in my life. I stood there, 18 years of age, holding a Bible and the pair of leather gloves I wore as I rode my motor bike.
I heard Maggie Scraggs long before the front door opened. Her heavy footfalls echoed up the passage as she came to answer the door. The door was flung wide open. Before me stood a woman in her late forties, of immense stature, with plastic rollers in her hair, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and a loose housecoat on which showed underneath a huge bra stretched to capacity. She was bare footed and bare legged. I stood there not knowing what to say except I was trying to introduce myself as the student minister of the little wooden church down at Finsbury Street. Maggie Scraggs was talking at the same time, asking me who I was. All I could think, as I looked at her standing on the stone step above me, were the words of scripture “My cup runneth over”.
Her voice was booming. She had a wide smile, “Come in – the door is open – a young one – I like young ones – would you like a beer? I’ve got a cold one in the ice chest – got any fags? I’ve just finished this one and I’m all out of them!”
All the time Maggie was talking she was walking ahead of me down the passageway. I entered the front door as if drawn by suction. I shut the door after me and followed at some distance down the long passage to the kitchen where she got a cold beer out of the ice chest.
I stopped her before she had opened it explaining that I did not drink beer. I thanked her for her kindness and said that I did not need a drink just then. Holding the bottle she said “Well, you don’t mind if I have one then do you?” With a deft movement of a bottle opener, she took off the bottle top and poured out a hotel schooner full of beer for herself.
She sat down on a big chair and again asked me if I had a smoke. She was big and smelly.
I told her of the church and that I was the new minister. I explained I was planning to visit the people in the area to let them know that I had come to minister there and if I could be of help to her I was always available.
Quick as a flash she replied: “I suppose Mrs. Busybody next door sent you? That woman ought to mind her own business. She couldn’t keep a man if she ever had one.” I found it hard to follow the conversation but I could see that there was no love lost between the two neighbours.
I told Maggie Scraggs that I was, in fact, visiting every house in the area, that the church cared for people and that I wanted to visit her to let her know that we were in the community to help her.
She looked me up and down a number of times and then started to talk. She talked and talked of her early life, of failures and disappointments, and before I realized it tears were flowing down her cheeks. She kept looking for a cigarette in empty boxes. I desperately wished that I did smoke in order to give her a cigarette because she obviously needed one.
She told me of the work that she had been doing just a few years earlier. “I worked up on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. I worked as a waitress for a while but with all them men up there and no women, it wasn’t long before I was earning far more money after work than I ever did with the waitressing so I gave it up. Three bloody years I worked for those men but it got me enough money to buy this place.”
Slowly the coin began to drop as to why Mrs. ‘iggs told me I should not visit Maggie Scraggs. Maggie had been earning her living as a prostitute up in the Snowy and for all that I knew might still do so. It was then I remembered her words at the door: “A young one eh, I like young ones.”
Just to be sure, I reiterated my calling as a Minister of the Gospel and explained to her that we cared for everybody and that included her. I told her of the fact that Jesus loves people as they are regardless of what they have done. She listened. It was my turn to talk. Then she talked. In the end I asked her if I might pray with her. I read the passage from John 4 about Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman who had had many husbands and was living with a man who was not then her husband. Maggie understood all of that.
I prayed with her and held her hands.
After the prayer she was silent for a long time, wiping her eyes, sniffing and listening. She pulled her housecoat closer around her and did up the belt. She asked me if I would come again.
I invited her to come to church and indicated that I would come again and see her.
We walked up the passage and as she opened the front door and stopped I told her that if ever she wanted to contact me she could always reach me by telephone at the ministry training college in Glen Iris. I gave her one of my newly printed cards which proclaimed that I was the minister of the Newmarket Church of Christ and a student of the Federal College of The Bible. She looked at the number and walked into the front room. There was double bed in the front room, a dressing table with a mirror and all round the edges of the mirror were business cards. She tucked my card in the edge of the mirror where she could find it if she needed it. We said goodbye. I started to get onto my motor bike to move a little further up the street. It was then I realized what all the other business cards around the mirror meant. They were the cards of the men who used to come and visit her while she worked for them in that front bedroom. Now there was my card sitting among the commercial travellers and insurance men and truck drivers who called to see Maggie.
I called to see Maggie on other occasions. Over the next few years I really felt that she looked forward to my visits. She often cried when I prayed with her. I spoke about God’s forgiveness and love.
One Sunday night three years later she suddenly appeared in the doorway of the church at an evening service. She walked down the aisle wearing hat and gloves totally out of place with all the other people in the congregation. It must have been hard for her to come in. Many of the people knew her and the crowds of young people certainly did not wear hat and gloves. That night I called people to repentance and to commit their life to Christ. She came to the front during the singing of the hymn “Just as I am” and knelt in quiet repentance.
She was still there after everybody else had gone, except for a few who were locking up the church property. I knelt beside her at the communion rail and prayed with her. She sobbed and sobbed and repeated the story of her life over and over again, asking for God’s forgiveness.
That prayer of repentance and request for forgiveness was heard by God. He forgave her and her whole life changed. Never again did Maggie Scraggs entertain men in her house. She became a regular attender and communicant member of our church. She even got to speak to Mrs. ‘iggs next door. Maggie Scraggs was struggling hard to be a Christian lady, one of the first conversions in my young ministry.
One Sunday night at church I introduced her to a tall, young taxi driver. He had been single, although at one time he had lived with a woman for a number of years. He was very shy, reserved, unable to speak easily with others. I introduced her to Mike the taxi driver and before long they were engaged. I married them and they started a new life together. Before long they had two children, and had moved to a new housing area. Maggie and Mike still live together with children and now grandchildren about them. Maggie discovered her incredible talent as a cook. She became grandmother to the young children in the entire area. She is looked upon as a genial, happy, loving grandmother to everyone in the community. No one knows her history.
I have never forgotten Maggie Scraggs, and she has never forgotten me. She still rings me from Melbourne and asks if I will pray for her on the telephone over some problem with which she is wrestling. It is usually that she is trying to lose weight and she is despairing. Or she asks for me to pray because yet again she has given up smoking. I pray with her across the miles and she returns to take up life more valiantly than before.
I get a great joy when Maggie rings me or when we receive a Christmas card. My mind goes back over those 30 years to 1957 and to my second visit as a student pastor and of my first meeting with Maggie Scraggs.
But they weren’t the thoughts I had on that first day when 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 one of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
