My Mother
My mother was born on the eve of Anzac Day in 1915, the day the Australians landed on Gallipoli. She was born at Moonee Ponds, just down the road, I guess, from Dame Edna Everidge. Emma May Gordon came from a large family. They were poor. Her grandfather had been a Scottish shepherd and father worked on the Victorian railway lines. Being one of the older girls in the family she left school after the sixth grade in order to go to work to help support the younger children. There were eleven of them, including a couple who died in infancy.
Working in a cake shop at Burnley, she began a work which she continued for the next forty years of her life.
She married a pastrycook and baker from Burnley and, with him, moved out to Box Hill in the early 1930s. There they purchased a business, kept on the original staff, and worked long hours to secure the business through the Depression years.
As she was born at the start of World War I, I her first born, was born at the start of World War II. They had years of difficulty during the Depression in their attempt to establish their business. Now the war years left them short of staff, short of cash and short of provisions. She worked hard constantly running the cake shop and in the next seven years had four children. Just after the birth of the fourth, Nola, my father suddenly died.
My mother had great difficulties with him. He was a gambler and his gambling threatened their income and existence frequently. He was an alcoholic. His drinking patterns made her life one of abuse and difficulty. He was in debt. That meant his early death would have left her in the most severe circumstances. But unknown to him she had taken a small insurance policy on his life paying, out of her housekeeping, one shilling a week. The capital from that insurance policy helped her pay off some of their debts and gave her at least a fighting chance of keeping the property.
At the same time she had difficulties with her mother-in-law. She was an elderly Scots lady who had married far below her class. She had never lost her imperious ways, but now was completely demented. She should have been in a mental hospital but we stayed in her house and mother looked after her along with the four children and her alcoholic husband.
The house was very small, being only half of a semi-detached cottage. There were two bedrooms, one belonging to my Mum and Dad and the little baby, and one belonging to Nana. The three of us kids slept in a third room which was really an enlarged storeroom off the bathroom.
My sister had just been brought home from hospital when my Dad died. Very quickly Mum realized what she had to do. She was going to bring her children up and run the business as well! This was in the days just at the end of the war when there was night shopping and all day Saturday trading. She could not drive and had to learn to drive our old Continental La Salle. She still had large debts to pay, clothes to make for all of us, and meals for Nana and her four young ones. However, I can always remember her making time at night to make me working models from my Meccano set and setting up my train set. Later on she helped me with my homework until I had surpassed the level to which she had gone herself.
We moved into a new house in those difficult days of the late 1940s taking Nana with us. Together we laid out the gardens and the lawns, built concrete edges and brick retaining walls and with a bit of help, a garage, a chook shed and made the gutters down the unmade streets beside the house. Each morning she would boil up one pot of porridge for the children and one pot of hot mash for the chooks.
Money was always short but we still managed to buy books like “The Oxford Junior Encyclopedia” and records of classical music including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Gilbert and Sullivan.
As long as I can remember she had great difficulty with men who did not like the idea of working for a young widow. One after the other, men lied to her, cheated her, persisted in stealing goods and money from the bakery and arrived at work drunk. They were frequently unstable and unreliable. For many years she used to arrive with the first of the men in the bakehouse and leave with the last of the girls in the shop. She went to work at 3.30 a.m. for years and returned after 6 p.m. closing. For some years our head dough maker, an important man in a bakery had no public transport to get to work at the hour he was due to start, so my mother would get out of bed, drive five miles to his home, drive him to work, then return home to resume her sleep. She handled difficult customers. Many times I saw her calming some drunk who had come into the shop demanding free bread.
Over twenty years she became well known in Box Hill as a respected and successful businesswoman. At home I saw her having difficulties with wages, taxation and accounting records work for which she had never been trained. Late at night when the three younger children would be in bed, she would settle down to count the day’s takings. I used to help her at the kitchen table placing all of the coins in rows. The ha’pennies were placed side by side, six abreast and in rows of four, making one shilling. The pennies I placed in rows, twelve to a row, making a shilling; by ten rows which meant the pennies were in groups of ten shillings. So were the threepences in rows four across and the sixpences two across. The shillings were piled up twenty deep and the two shillings ten deep. We occasionally had a five pound note or a ten pound note but usually, when people bought cakes and pies and loaves of bread it was with small change. Pies were threepence and a loaf of bread was seven pence. The days takings were counted, sorted, rolled in little brown paper spills and taken next morning to the bank. There were no night safes in those days, but we waited until the radio announcer said “It is 10 a.m. and the Commonwealth Bank is now open for business”.
Her life had no romance in spite of the fact that one of my father’s closest friends came and visited her, every Friday night, in order to do what he could to help us children by chopping wood, or doing any of the jobs around the house which needed to be done. She said stoutly “I’ll not think of remarriage until I’ve seen all of you kids grown up and left home.” Ten years later I remember talking with my sisters saying that Joe had been coming around every Friday night for ten years and we ought to do something to push Mum and Joe into marriage. In my late teens I took my mother aside and gave her a good talking to, telling her in our opinion she ought to settle down and get married.
Eventually, she married Joe. Ever since he has been the most faithful and loyal husband a woman could ever find. He was the proprietor of the Criterion Bakery, our main opposition in Box Hill, and the coming together of the two families: he a bachelor and she a widow with four children made a good business relationship.
The problem at this time was my brother Robbie’s illness. Six years earlier he had suffered rheumatic fever and as a result had constantly had severe heart trouble. That was interspersed by occasions of recovery and good health. Then at fourteen, just after winning a school swimming championship, he collapsed. His heart was fatally weakened. Gradually, over the next year he declined in health. We all took turns sitting with him at his bedside every night when he was in fever, placing cold compresses upon his forehead and holding his hand during times of delirium and praying the best we knew how.
There were not many people who came round at that time except Dr. Kemp and Auntie Mabel. Mum never made a fuss of our home life or what she was going through. Robbie died and she laid her son to rest in the same grave as her husband. Robbie’s death effected her deeply. Christmas Day, his birthday, was always a time for tears and a visit to the cemetery.
She had very little social life throughout all of these years. She was not a member of a church or any club or activity. There was one occasion, however, when she brought us all membership tickets in the newly formed Box Hill Football Club in the first year in which it played in the Victorian Football Association. But that year when we followed it, our club went through the entire year without winning one match. We did not buy tickets the next year.
Throughout these years there were two things that stand out in my mind. The first was that we grew up in a family where security was very significant. Not much was ever said about love and I cannot remember ever being cuddled by my mother. But we did feel very secure. We belonged together. The second thing was that she impressed upon us that you must always do your duty. She did her duty by her employees, by the community and by her children. In my childhood the adults were kind, and the children did grow up responsibly.
She built the business and then, eventually married Joe. We had pushed her into marrying him and ever since he has been the most faithful and loyal husband a woman could ever find. We now owned extensive properties with a large payroll of employees.
It was when the business was at its peak that I told my Mum that I felt called into the ministry of Jesus Christ. She had always looked forward to the time when I would take over the business for which she had worked so hard for the past thirty years. There was no future in the business now for the girls, so my Mum sold the business and I went to university. Little did she realise but her own experience transmitted to me would lead me into a career of lecturing in business management, and managing the largest church in the nation, and in my time as minister, successfully raising and spending more than a billion dollars, more than any other minister in the world.
As the years went by she gradually lost her joy in her grandchildren, in her garden and home until she would not leave her house. The doctors did not know why a woman in her mid sixties should be like this. She was so healthy and yet she was getting to be very forgetful.
Gradually, I realized that my mother was suffering from Alzheimers’ Disease. I rang her each week and I visited her, staying over on occasions. Once I stayed with her we had a long talk about her early life. Then looking at me with a puzzled look, she said “You’re a nice man. What is your name? Have you come to fix the television?”. I realized that my Mum had gone and I never took the chance to say “Thanks, Mum. Goodbye.” She then lived in a nursing home until her death.
Even as a child I often thought how good she was, especially late at night after the shop had closed and we walked home, hand in hand, up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No.55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city which was still a village where the adults were kind and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
