A Most Peculiar Man
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 and for seven years during the 1950’s and 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
During this period of time many of the little narrow fronted wooden cottages, which really were the heartland of Melbourne’s northern area slums, were demolished by the Housing Commission in a great post‑war reclamation scheme. The old wooden buildings were pushed over by bulldozers and high rise concrete flats housing up to 2,000 people in each block, up to 24 storeys high were built on Debney’s paddock which was now renamed as Debney’s Meadow.
Many of the uprooted people were shifted into the first blocks of flats and there was terrible agony as the people came into a new style of living.
Many of the people found it very difficult after living all their lives in their own little property with the broken windows and leaking guttering, to translate onto the 17th floor with perhaps eight families all living around a narrow corridor. What with people upstairs and downstairs and beside them and behind them, every family could conceivably have twelve other families separated only by a very narrow concrete wall, ceiling or floor.
Community living had its difficulties. The young man with his drums or trumpet next door annoyed a lot of neighbours all at the one time.
For some incomprehensible bureaucratic reason all the external lighting outside units used to be automatically turned off at 10 p.m. because someone did not believe that people living in high rise would come home later than that hour. Elderly ladies were fearful of the lifts, fearful of falling down a lift well and fearful of getting stuck in a lift.
Drunken men coming home at night would urinate in the lift creating dreadful odours for all who would follow them. Young people who wanted to ride their bicycles around the streets had to bring them up to the 20th floor to keep them in security which meant that bringing bikes into lifts created havoc with ladies who had their shopping jeeps damaged and nylon stockings snagged.
Tensions among the residents were rising.
I visited each of the units one by one, offering the help of the church. In one whole block of high rise buildings the Australian Navy had provided provisions for Navy wives. There were several hundred wives plus hundreds of children in the one building and virtually not a man in sight that was married to any of the Navy wives. That did not mean to say there were no men visitors. Many of the girls, married to a husband away at sea for long periods at a time, entertained other men at home and this caused a great deal of friction within the family and within their immediate neighbours. The amount of social work to be done in this community was unbelievable for an eighteen year old student minister, struggling to cope with the calling to be the church in the new community.
The last thing that we expected to happen as the big blocks of flats opened, however, was that we would have so many people who would live in a block of flats completely isolated from every other person and absolutely alone.
Loneliness was the major social disease.
I visited flat after flat and found people only too eager to have me in for a cup of tea and a talk, because they had no other person with whom they spoke. I would point out how close all their neighbours were, only to find that only very rarely did they ever speak to “her what’s next door” or “him over the passage”. The closer people were brought together the more they remained aloof from each other.
I think of two in particular. There was Mrs. Heal who had been a widow for many years. Mrs. Amanda Heal had lived in the area all of her life and had been a widow for about 30 years. She lived in a flat with not even a budgerigar to keep her company. The Council regulations had declared that no animals were to be taken into the building and there was great trauma with many families, as dogs and cats were sent off to the lost dogs home to be destroyed because the families could no longer keep them.
Mrs. Heal lived by herself and her window on the world was a twelve inch black and white television set. She had had that same television set for seven years and had been paying a television hire company $7.00 a week for it. She faithfully kept up all of the payments. It would have been useless to point out to her that her rentals had purchased that television set over and over again.
One day a lady reported that there was mail sticking out of her letter box uncollected for some time. “Somebody ought to do something”, she said.
In our community at that time we just did not have a “somebody to do something”. The church seemed to be the only caring agency that really looked after these people who had no one else to care for them.
What happens next is lost in my memory, the exact sequence being somewhat blurred. But I know the cause of the problem.
Mrs. Heal had paid her $7.00 per week to the local office of the hire firm. Whenever she did her Thursday shopping she paid her $7.00 and had collected over the years a big file of receipts, each proclaiming $7.00 faithfully paid.
One day through the mail came a demand from the company for $7.00 which she did not owe. She ignored this request for the additional $7.00. She believed the company had made an error and that probably the next week they would catch up on it. They did not catch up on it and although she continued to pay her $7.00 she continued to receive form letters indicating that she was required to pay $7.00 for a week she did not pay. Then she started receiving computer print out letters indicating that she was $7.00 behind in her payments and that she should keep up to date with her payments.
She protested against this somewhat irritably but believed that the company would rectify their records. However, the computer sent her more demands for payment, each one becoming more threatening. Finally a letter came indicating that unless the $7.00 was paid the matter would be put into the hands of a solicitor. It all became too much for her. “I cannot stand any more of those TV people worrying me”, she told her neighbour. It was then realized that Mrs. Heal had not been seen around for a couple of days. The alert neighbour, noticing some letters in her letter box uncollected, called the police who broke in the door to the flat where they found the 86 year old lady had taken an overdose of pills ‑ a whole bottle ‑ and was in a coma.
Fortunately Mrs. Heal did not die but was revived in hospital.
Unfortunately she was never again well enough to go back to her unit and was cared for later in a large government institution.
The point that has always stuck in my mind is that the television company admitted their computer error. A spokesman for the company said, “This is a terribly distressing business. The old lady was one week in credit all of the time. We are anxious to make amends. Mrs. Heal will immediately be given two months free rental.”
I could hardly believe my ears. After seven years of payments on a black and white television ‑ a generous company gave two months free rental!
Mrs. Heal was never to enjoy it and never returned to her flat again.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this I became conscious that there were many such lonely people living in the flats.
Whenever people suicided by jumping from the roof of the block of flats onto the concrete below, in the flat would be found a note that said, “It is no use living any more. I am alone. No one ever knocks at my door. My phone never rings. I cannot face this loneliness any more.”
Whenever that situation happened other people used to stand round in little circles and say to each other, “If only I had known she was lonely, my wife and I could have called on her and made friends with her.”
Someone else standing watching the ambulance go away would say, “No one ever calls on me, but it does not worry me. Why should it worry her?” Another person would say, “I get lonely myself at times and I would have been pleased if she had come downstairs and visited me.”
I began to realize that there were large numbers who would never go out of their way to make friends with other people, even though they were desperate for friendship themselves.
Before I really had developed a strategy of trying to cope with those people “the old violin man” had died.
It was his death that really brought that loneliness home to me.
I had never spoken to him but had seen him round the streets. He shuffled along wearing a long gabardine overcoat with long rather dirty grey hair over the collar and a violin case under his arm. No one knew where he went to or where he came from. He just walked around the streets on occasions and people would refer to him as the “old violin man”. People knew him but then again people did not.
I was asked to take his funeral. He had died apparently of natural causes. When I was asked by the Public Trustee to conduct his funeral I asked if I could see through his flat to see if I could find any photographs of a family or any personal records that might indicate something about his background so that I could speak meaningfully about him at the funeral service.
The caretaker was given instructions to let me in and came with me into the flat. It was exactly the way he had left it. One dirty, overstuffed armchair with a tin tray on crossed legs in front of it where he would have his evening meal watching television. The sink was full of dirty dishes with cups of half drunk tea, with rancid milk stains ringing them. There was a packet of cheese, open and hard, now going mouldy on the table, some bread and butter and some very basic foodstuffs. There was nothing much at all. I realized that underneath that gabardine overcoat must have been a very thin body of a man. The paucity of the flat came home to me. A few books, no photographs, one small black and white television set, no record, no radio, no record player, just a television set and a few books and his old violin. I opened the violin case and plucked the strings. They were all very loose. The horsehair of the bow had parted in the middle. It was obvious that the violin had not been played for years. Why he carried it around I did not know.
It was a single bedroom flat and I went into the bedroom and small bathroom and received a dreadful shock. His bedroom was littered all over the floor, several inches deep, with the worst hard core pornographic magazines I had ever seen in my life. They were all homosexual pornography and of a type that I had never even imagined existed. He had used his violin case to carry them home. There were pictures of nude men in all kinds of amorous and erotic poses. And in the bathroom a large mirror which had once adorned the front of a wardrobe, was hung up from the ceiling so he could lay in the bath and see himself in the mirror. The bathroom consisted of many bottles of baby oil and of other kinds of fragrant oils which I presumed he used to rub over his body. The scene nearly made me physically ill. I walked out of that flat absolutely stunned. The caretaker made some comment about, “I do not know who is expected to clean up all this filth, but it will not be me.”
I buried the man the next day. But that night back in my room at the College of The Bible I had the radio on and heard the well known folk group of the time, Simon and Garfunkel, singing a song which stood out in stark reality. It could have been written about the old violin man.
“He was a most peculiar man
That’s what Mrs. Reardon said
And she should know,
She lived upstairs from him.
She said he was a most peculiar man
He was a most peculiar man.
He lived all alone within a house,
Within a room, within himself.
A most peculiar man.He had no friends, he seldom spoke,
And no one in turn ever spoke to him,
‘Cos he wasn’t friendly and he didn’t care,
And he wasn’t like them,
Oh no, he was a most peculiar man.
He died last Saturday.
He turned on the gas and he went sleep
With the windows closed
So that he would never wake up
To a silent world and his tiny room.
And Mrs. Reardon said,
‘He has a brother somewhere
Who should be notified soon.’
And all the people said,
‘What a shame that he is dead,
But wasn’t he a most peculiar man!’”
I often wondered about those lonely people in the high rises when I first worked as a student minister in the inner slums and I finished an afternoon’s visiting, and walked out into the heavy air with the blowing from 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 the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
