Plain Jane
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the mid 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
My study bell rang and when I opened it I was struck immediately by the beauty and careful grooming of the fabulous looking woman standing at my door. Her whole appearance made the poverty of our unpainted wooden manse all the more obvious. This woman was trim and terrific, a vivacious person the like of which Ararat had rarely seen. She introduced herself immediately “I’m Elspeth Dunravin. I want to talk to you if I can about my daughter Jane.” She was direct and quite obviously in command of the situation.
I invited her into my rather shabby study where I had one old armchair that had been provided for us by one of the members when we first came to Ararat. All of our belongings had been shipped to America where we were due to start some post graduate study and this short interim ministry in the country required us to beg and borrow all of our furniture and possessions. She looked totally out of place in my rather scruffy study.
Elspeth, however, took no notice of the surroundings and very quickly filled me in about her life and her family. She owned the wonderful “Hillsythe” property down on the Willaura Road. The property was one of the largest in the district. You could always tell the good properties because they had pine trees marching across the paddocks into the distance and it was somewhere over the horizon where the pine trees disappeared into nothingness that the homestead would be. The properties were so large that you did not even see any flocks of sheep near the road. Elspeth owned the “Hillsythe” property and asked me if I would come over and visit their family. She had heard that I had a wonderful way of helping young people and she wondered if I would help her with her daughter Jane.
I must admit that my first thoughts were rather mercenary If Elspeth and her family did not go to church anywhere, although I suspected that they would probably be Presbyterians as were most of the squatters who had settled in Western Victoria, her family would make a wonderful addition to our church. She was the kind of woman who did not come to our church and which we badly needed. She was fit and attractive, probably 45 years of age but certainly looked 25. She was fashionably and expensively dressed. She was a good speaker, articulate and intelligent. I did not know but for a number of years she had been a leading actress with the Ararat Dramatic Society, and she obviously was very successful in running the large property that had once been her father’s.
“I want you to do something for Jane. She is not a normal girl. She weeps a lot, stays in her room, is obviously unhappy and is not interested in sport. All of us are very keen on tennis but she will not even try.” I realised that Jane must be a very difficult child and that Elspeth had done all that she could to help her daughter to no avail. I agreed to come out to the property the next day.
It was a long drive in from the main road and as I drove fairly slowly up the main drive I looked around at the obvious quality of the property and of the great wealth that was in one of the largest sheep stations in Western Victoria.
It was a shock to meet her husband, Dave. The first thing I noticed about his was his beautiful mohair tweed jacket. He was wearing a tweed cap which seemed quite out of place on a great squatting spread like this. Dave was a silent type, shook my hand but did not say a word. Elspeth told me about Dave and told me what he did on her property. Dave worked there. He seemed to have neither opinions nor the ability to speak for himself. After a while he just simply said “I’d better be getting back” and got up and left us. I did not have a clue to what he was getting back.
Elspeth introduced me to both her daughters. “Samantha is a model. She is very much in demand you know. She flies all over Australia on assignments.” Samantha looked very much like her mother. Tall and slender, beautifully groomed and attractively presented. Samantha was the one who drove the Mercedes coupe that was pulled up under the portico.
I must admit that all the time I was taking in the size of the house, its magnificent entry way, the paintings and antiques and these beautifully groomed and presented women who looked more like sisters than mother and daughter.
Frankly I did not even notice the other daughter Jane. But immediately Elspeth started talking about her I began to realize why Jane did not fit. We sat down in the lounge with Samantha and Elspeth sitting on a French antique couch. Jane perched herself rather awkwardly on the end of the piano stool. There was tea and coffee already made in beautiful antique silver teapot and coffee pot on the low lounge room table. There was a wonderful array of refreshments there as if I were some great visiting dignitary. Elspeth poured me a coffee and then started talking about Jane. “I don’t know what to do with her. She won’t eat. She won’t play sport. She is too skinny and she constantly picks her face. It is a real mess. She seems to want to make herself into a mess. You’ve never seen a more true example of Plain Jane than this one. She won’t play sport. I take her out into our tennis court at night and serve to her easy shots but she won’t even try to return service. She does not take any interest in what the rest of the family is doing and won’t even join in our conversations. Her father is just the same. I don’t want her growing up like him. Something has to be done and I can’t seem to find anybody who can talk some sense into her.”
I was watching Jane. She was sitting on the piano stool just picking her nails. Samantha on the other hand, was sitting on the other end of the lounge with her legs perfectly folded and her hands clasped on her lap.
I listened to Elspeth for quite some time as she painted the picture of Jane. In the end I decided that if I was going to do anything to help Jane I would have to take charge. I certainly was not used to doing this and certainly not while I was a guest in somebody else’s beautiful home, but I decided then and there that if Jane was going to be helped it had to be on my terms not Elspeth’s. So I stood up and interrupted her “Well, Elspeth, I want to spend some time talking with Jane and I can either do it in here with Jane by herself or else Jane and I will go out for a walk but I think you have said enough now to set the picture. Would you like to leave and go into your kitchen or go and do something about the house or do you want us to leave?”
Elspeth was taken aback “I I, I, well if you can’t talk to a girl in front of her mother I don’t know what you are going to talk about.”
I replied “Well you will just have to trust me, but I do want to talk to Jane and I want to talk to her privately.” Elspeth immediately got up and beckoned Samantha and the two of them left, rather noisily and ostentatiously closing every door into the lounge before they went.
I had noticed Jane had not been drinking although the other three of us were so I poured her out a cup of tea, not even asking if she wanted one and beckoned to the couch. “Sit down and have a drink with me.” I did not quite know how to begin because this was rather new to me. “Jane, my name is Gordon Moyes and I am new in town. I don’t intend to be in Ararat very long. I don’t know your family at all and I don’t know why your mother asked me to come here. I’ve got no right to interfere in your family life and unless you are willing I don’t want to ask you any questions about yourself. But if you want to, I want you to know that, well, I am available and if you want to talk to someone who will not tell your mother what you have said, then I am here. I assure you that whatever you tell me will be kept in the strictest of confidence and if I can help you in any way I will.”
Jane looked at the floor for a long time. I had learnt that it was best at such moments to keep quiet and allow the other person to talk first. After ages of silence Jane looked at me and said “Oh, it’s all right. Mother has often brought people out here to give me a talking to or to find out what is wrong with me. But they all say the same thing. The fact is, I am just no good. I never was any good. I never will be any good. Mum always said that Samantha got all the brains in the family. And what is more she is attractive too.”
Jane did not have to tell me. I was getting the picture of how difficult it must be for an ordinary person to live in a house so completely dominated by mother and the oldest sister.
I asked Jane about school. And her immediate reply was “Samantha was Dux at Grammar. Everybody expected me to be as good as her. I hated school. I was not good at sport or music although one teacher said I was a reliable monitor but I was too quiet. Since I left school I have done nothing. I just stay here at home and help around the house.”
I mentally checked: that meant for the last six years or so Jane had just worked around the house. I asked her “Have you ever had a boyfriend?” Jane thought for a while and then said “During my last year at school I had to have a boy for the end of term dance. So I asked one of the boys and brought him home to meet Mum but Samantha took him from me and went out with him for a few weeks and then dropped him.”
I then asked her gently “Why do you think your mother is so concerned about you? You seem a rather normal person to me.” Jane looked at me with a flash in her eyes “She wanted me to be another Samantha and I am not.”
The conversation went on for quite some time but it did not take me very long to size up the situation. Jane had an enormous sense of inferiority due to a very dominating mother and a very competitive sister. In that environment and with no help whatever from her father, Jane was not surviving very well.
But it was one thing to come to this conclusion and another thing to suggest ways in which we might be able to help her. I said “Jane, I believe I can help you but it would require you coming into town to see me at once or twice a week and I would like to ask you to help me in some work that I am doing.” She looked at me and replied “There is no problem coming into town. Usually I’ve got no reason, that is why I don’t go out. What is it that you want me to do?”
The fact of the matter was I had not given this a great deal of thought but when she was so willing I realized I had to have an immediate answer for her. With a flash of inspiration I said “I’ve just started a young girls club and I have good leader, but I need a helper someone who is reliable to work alongside of her. She is a good leader but she needs a reliable helper.” I grasped hold of the word that the teacher had used when he had described her as a reliable monitor.
Jane looked at me with a sense of appreciation. It was as if I was asking her to do something that she could do that no one else had ever asked her to do before. It was as if I had confidence in her ability to do something yet by being a helper was not placing too much responsibility onto her shoulders.
Jane became quite excited and started to ask me about what would be involved. I very quickly thought about types of programmes that I considered the girls club ought to have and ways in which I believe the leader would develop the work and how Jane could be a helper. I then said “If you could come in and help, I would like you to come in at least an hour earlier so I could have a time of talking with you before the girls club begins. This would give us a chance to chat on our own.”
Jane agreed to do that. I terminated the interview at that time and then went out to where Elspeth and Samantha were sitting on bar stools at the kitchen drinking some coffee. They had obviously been chewing me over. Neither of them looked very happy. I decided I would just make a plain announcement “I believe I can help Jane. She had agreed to come to see me once a week and I have asked her to help me by assisting a woman leader in our church run a girls club. Jane has agreed to do that and she will come in and see me next Tuesday.”
Elspeth and Samantha nearly fell off their stools. Jane had never done anything like this in her life and the thought of her going off into town by herself was quite revolutionary. Somehow or other I had achieved something with Jane that they had not been able to do previously. They may not have liked me, but they had to admit that something was happening.
So it was that I began a series of discussions with Jane each Tuesday afternoon. She became an excellent helper in the girls club and related with Julie, our leader, very well. Julie was a very warm, ordinary person and Jane took to her like a duck to water.
Over the next weeks I had discussions with her on a number of lines of thought. One was that Jane had to stop comparing herself to her mother and to Samantha and to make comparison with what she used to be. The comparison would be in how she had developed and grown over what she previously was. I asked her to write down the reasons why she felt inferior to her mother and sister and then we discussed them and helped her see that God had made her as an individual and that He had made her as He wanted her to be. She did not have to compete nor try to be anybody else. I encouraged her to lower some of her standards which were near perfection. The reason why she did not try at tennis was because she knew she could not beat either her mother or her sister. If she could not be perfect she would not try. I encouraged her to show an interest in something altogether different. So it was that she began a course at the St Johns Ambulance Brigade in first aid.
I asked her to list ten qualities that she possessed. She instantly replied “I have not got ten.” But I persisted and the list that came back was quite remarkable. She realised that she had capacities and qualities that she had not recognised before. I spoke to her about how God accepts us just as we are, then gives us His Spirit to enable us to become what He wants us to be. She saw the reasonableness of the argument. She had
thought that God expects us to become perfect, then He would accept us. That was the impression that her mother had given her. Her mother would not accept her until she had become perfect to her mother’s standards. I explained that God accepts us just as we and then helps us become what He wants us to be.
The change in Jane over a few weeks was quite remarkable. I then made a dramatic suggestion. “Jane, have you ever thought of getting a flat here in town and shifting into town and getting a job?” She looked at me with the most amazing look of appreciation that I have ever seen in a girl’s face. “That is what I have always wanted. To be on my own and to make my own way, but Mum would kill me if I left home.” I explained to her that if she got a job then her mother would probably appreciate her need to be in town.
When she came to see me the next week she was full of enthusiasm. “Guess what I’ve got a job. The pharmacist who gives us some of our lectures at First Aid is looking for an assistant in the pharmacy and he has told me I can have the job. I am going to look for a flat immediately.”
I went out that week and visited Elspeth. Elspeth was furious that I had suggested that Jane leave home. But I stressed with her how important it was for Jane to have this job and to make her own way in the world.
Well, the story of Plain Jane is a story of God’s grace and goodness. She graduated in First Aid, fell in love with the young pharmacist, Geoff, and eventually married him. She became a member of my church and had a real sense of commitment to Jesus Christ. When I asked her the night of her baptism why she was being baptised she said “Because who I am depends not upon what I do, but upon what Christ has done for me. I want to be baptised as my expression of following Him.”
Just before we left Ararat Elspeth came into town with a lovely gift. She was after all a well bred woman and knew that she should express appreciation. On the doorway she gave me the gift and said “I don’t know how to thank you. There has been an utter miracle worked in Jane’s life. For the first time I am beginning to understand my daughter and I believe she loves me. I don’t know how to thank you for the miracle in Jane’s life. I owe it all to you. Mind you, I had you in the gun for quite a long time. I expected you to help me deal with her. Not to encourage her to leave home. That was the greatest disgrace in my family ever and I have never forgiven you for that. Anyway it has worked out all right.”
I felt like saying “It only worked out because she left home.” But then I guess there was no point arguing with Elspeth as I was leaving. God can work miracles in the lives of people but sometimes we have to get out of the way to allow Him room to work.
I did not realise what I was getting into the first time that I drove out to the beautiful “Hillsythe” property when, after talking with Elspeth and Samantha and Plain Jane, I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES