Verna’s Diamonds
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.
The first Sunday morning I ever preached in the little wooden church in Finsbury Street, I started a friendship with three of the members that has lasted the lifetimes of those involved.
My introduction came in a most alarming manner. There were only about six members in the church that first morning. I stopped my motor bike outside in the deep gutters of the street and walked in the little entrance way of the Newmarket Church of Christ. There was only a handful of elderly people standing chatting. They were obviously dear and close friends and were the remnant of what was once a large and powerful congregation. All of them had lived all of their lives in the narrow houses that surrounded the church.
The first woman came up to me as I walked in the door. She was short of stature, with curly grey hair and vivacious bright eyes. She was wearing a shoulder fur, was well dressed and obviously quite affluent. “You must be Mr. Moyes our new student minister. My name is Verna Bankstown and I want to welcome you to the church.” She shook my hand with great enthusiasm. She was a bright cheery lady who was the youth leader in the church, a girls club leader and the local Commissioner for the Girl Guides. Her vitality was amazing. Verna was an outdoors woman who loved bush walking and hiking.
She was a jeweller by trade and operated the local jewellery shop. She had an exquisite taste in jewellery, in crystal and china, and her narrow fronted house was full of beautiful treasures.
She possessed fine collections of Royal Doulton and Royal Albert china and Bohemia crystal. She was a great reader and a frequent traveller overseas. She would regularly conduct slide nights showing slides of her trips to various countries, or of hiking in Norway or in Milford Sound. She was an outgoing extrovert who ran the junior Sunday School with delight and precision. On her left hand she had a diamond ring which caught every ray of sunshine coming through the stained glass windows over the front door of the Newmarket church. In her ring those four large diamonds were a symbol of her status and wealth.
I met the rest of the people who were standing in the foyer that day as Verna introduced them, one at a time, to me. The last couple to be introduced were standing at the other end of the foyer. Tom was a tall man and very quiet. I discovered that he was a meat processor in the nearby boiling down works. He had been part of the Newmarket Church of Christ all of his life and was the most reliable and long serving member of the church cricket team. He had been the cricket scorer for more than thirty years. Tom was a fairly slow moving man with a nice smile but not much energy. He was secretary to the Sunday School and quite shy.
His wife Evelyn was very much like him, tall and slim, quiet and reserved, friendly and with Tom was childless. She was the Kindergarten Superintendent. It was then I realised that they all shared the same surname, Bankstown. As I realised they both had the same name, I turned to Verna and said: “Are you related to this Mrs. Bankstown ?” Verna laughed. “Yes, Evelyn is my successor. We both married Tom!”
The shock of that revelation absolutely stunned me. In those days of the 1950’s the thought of any church person being divorced, or even being remarried after divorce, was enough to scare the church mice. That we had this triangle in the membership of this inner suburban church was absolutely unbelievable. I thought Verna was joking, but she was not. It had been a scandal that had shocked the church for years.
The fact was, Verna and Tom were complete opposites, completely incompatible and at Verna’s instigation she had divorced Tom who had apparently taken some time in getting around to asking Evelyn to marry him.
All three of them stayed in the church, one the Junior Sunday School Superintendent, the other, the Sunday School Secretary, and the other the Kindergarten Superintendent. They all attended church services together and went to Sunday School teachers meetings and lived, apparently, with good relationships one with the other in spite of the most unusual matrimonial arrangements. Upon her divorce, Verna bought herself the ring with the four large diamonds as a consolation.
I had never heard anything like it in my life and felt rather stupid having asked such a pointed question. When I asked it so openly in public, poor old Mrs. Harry nearly fainted at the memory of the trauma that it had caused in the church.
Later that day old George Goodman, one of the wisest men I have ever met in my life either before or since, took me to one side and told me the background of the story. He was a World War I veteran and a man who had seen a good deal of life in his time, and he was able to get these issues into the perspective of long life and of knowing human weakness. George explained how they had all accepted the situation and had discussed it together years earlier and how it was the decision of the whole church that they wanted Verna and Tom and Evelyn to live together in the church and to still be the friends of all.
Over the next seven years I was to regularly have lunch with Tom and Evelyn and to be a regular guest in their house. They became good friends and remained so until their deaths.
In the same way Verna Bankstown became a very dear friend to myself and my girlfriend. It was not unexpected, then, that she who was a romantic from the first, saw some extra sparkle after a while in the eyes of Beverley and myself. Yes, it was true, we were planning to get engaged. “Well”, she said, “you must come to my house and pick a diamond ring. I can get you a beautiful diamond ring at the wholesale price. I know you students have not much money, so I will make sure you get it at wholesale price.”
So one night Beverley and I went to Verna’s house where she had brought home from her work a large number of display trays. The black velvet trays sparkled with scores of diamonds. We tried on ring after ring including those far beyond our price range.
With rather limited income we were looking at something fairly small and inexpensive, but Verna gave me good advice. “Your engagement ring will be worn for life. It will be a treasure that you will always have and in years to come it will increase in value immeasurably. I think you should choose a good quality stone, even if it is a small stone, because you will never regret having chosen a quality diamond.”
Under her expert eye we chose a solitaire diamond which was much more expensive than I had planned but because she had arranged to purchase it wholesale it was what we could afford. That choice and her guidance proved to be wonderfully true, and after nearly fifty years that diamond still gives my wife joy.
It was not long after this that Verna decided to shift away from Newmarket and to build a retirement home for herself some distance away by the seashore. We kept in touch with her over the years and usually once a year or so we would call in and visit her. She took tremendous interest in the birth of our first child and then the three sons that followed over the years. Our children, when they were small, loved to visit her.
The years flew by and twenty years passed when Beverley, one night, had a ‘phone call from Verna. She had to come up to town to go to hospital. She was fearful that she had a cancer and she would need to stay, just for the night, after the tests were completed and wondered if there was a place we knew where she could stay.
Beverley immediately insisted that she should stay at our house. The next day Verna arrived looking gaunt and very pale. Her curly grey hair seemed to be rather lifeless. She shifted in and stayed at our house. She was not well enough to go home immediately so she stayed for some time. Beverley regarded it as a privilege to be able to care for her and nurse her.
After surgery Verna decided to sell her house and to come and live in the new retirement village I had just built alongside of us. We helped her shift. Those few next years became the happiest in her life.
Although she now did not have the sparkle in her step and the robustness of health which once she enjoyed, she was there beside us and quickly became a grandmother to our four children. Each night after school they would call in to her home and she would read to them and show them books of countries far away and tell tales of visiting the most remote parts of the world. Our children loved her. She became their chief babysitter, and every night at tea time we had to go over to Verna’s unit to call the children to come to tea. She loved them and they loved her.
But time took its toll upon Verna and gradually she became weaker and then peacefully died. Her funeral was a triumph of a woman who had lived in Christian faith and who had always taken an interest in children, in the Girl Guides, in Sunday School and encouraging little children to grow up in faith and in the love of the Lord.
Old George Goodman came to the funeral service and so did Tom and Evelyn as they paid respects to his first wife and their good friend.
A little while later her solicitor contacted us about her Will. She had left to Beverley some pieces of her crystal and a few choice pieces of her china. Most of the other china she had given away to young girls in the congregation when they became engaged. But there was one other bequest. She left her ring with the four diamonds in it to Beverley to remind us of the friendship we had shared over all of those years and in appreciation for my wife nursing her throughout her illness.
Beverley does not like wearing showy rings and somehow that ring did not belong to us anyway. But it was kept in our family until our children came of age. Then, when my daughter came to be engaged one of the stones became the centrepiece in her engagement ring. Then when my eldest son came to get engaged to his fiancee the second diamond became central in her engagement ring. Then when our second son came to get engaged he was in theological college studying to be a minister and, like his father, was short of money, so the third stone from Verna’s ring came to take the central position in his fiancee’s engagement ring. One stone remained and the youngest son knew that when the time came for him to ask a girl to marry him he would have the stone for her engagement ring.
So dear Verna lives on, in the stones that we purchased in my wife’s engagement ring through her, and in the stones from her ring which now grace the hands of four lovely girls.
I did not know what would be the ending of that first meeting when I met the people of the church at Newmarket and 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 of some of God’s children from the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
