Robbie
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 1950’s and 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
One morning as I was listening to a lecturer in the College of The Bible and feeling very tired from sitting up nearly all night, a knock came to the lecture room door and the lecturer paused while a lady from the office came in and asked if she could speak to me. She walked across the classroom and said, “I have a message just telephoned for you. You are to go home immediately. It is your brother.”
I knew instinctively what she meant. I asked the lecturer to be excused, went out of the class, donned my leather jacket, gloves and goggles and started the big, black BSA 500 motor bike to head back for home.
My brother, Robert, was born on Christmas Day 1944. Just younger than me, he became in our early days of childhood my inseparable companion.
We looked quite different from each other, for Robbie had the most curly hair you have ever seen, and as was the fashion with little boys in those days of the 1940’s, little boys with curls had mothers who inevitably disliked cutting their hair. His deep brown eyes and long sausage curls caught the attention of mothers everywhere who would always stop in the street and want to pat his curls. I have a family portrait taken of my widowed mother, dressed in her best black dress and fur coat with her four children standing around her, and poor Robbie was there with his curls.
He was lean and wiry, a fast runner and very soon discovered that he was a good swimmer.
Life was full of fun and he was constantly laughing. School was a breeze and after school play was designed for fun.
During his fourth grade at primary school he caught a cold, developed a sore throat, developed chills and obviously became very sick. Dr. Kemp visited him day after day looking very worried at the rapid spread of the illness. It was a streptococcus infection, “but what I am worried about, is that it looks like it might be rheumatic fever”. In those days rheumatic fever was one of those dread diseases that children occasionally caught for which there seemed to be no cure.
He was six months with the rheumatic fever. It developed with dreadful pains in all of his joints and the enlargement of the heart with acute pains constantly across the chest.
There was no doubt about the seriousness of the illness and he spent several weeks in hospital.
Dr. Kemp visited him constantly throughout the period of his illness both at home and in hospital. He came frequently in the middle of the night to administer some pain relief. But as usual we never received a bill through this period of illness. It was only after the treatment was declared successful that a bill would come.
Robbie recovered but Dr. Kemp warned us of recurrence.
Fortunately there was no sign of recurrence. Robbie grew strong and went back to school and all of his activities still full of fun and deeply involved in sport, especially swimming.
It was a matter of great pride when he first came to Box Hill High School to have his elder brother there in the school ahead of him. He learnt French while I was learning Latin. He developed good artistic skill and became interested in a hobby of calligraphy, writing magnificent manuscript print in mediaeval English italic style. He entered a competition in calligraphy and to the surprise of all, although one of the youngest to enter, won first prize, a book on calligraphy. That book and its inscribed frontispiece became his pride and joy, even more significant than several of the swimming races that he had won.
I remember one Friday in summer. He was in the second form at high school. It was the time of the school swimming championships. He swam in several competitions during the day and won the Under 14 Years Freestyle. That night at home he was absolutely exhausted.
The next day, Saturday morning, it was our job to mow the lawns and trim the edges. I pushed the hand mower around all of our lawns and it was Robbie’s responsibility to push the edger along the concrete strip. After every one or two pushes of the edger he sat down on the grass. I called out to him several times to get on with it or else I would be finished before he was. He just looked at me with a face that was blank and eyes that were wide. He sank down with his back to our front brick fence. I realized something was dreadfully wrong and ran to get my Mother.
In Epworth Hospital it was confirmed that he was suffering severely from a strained heart condition. The heart was pounding at an abnormal rate and was placing a great deal of strain upon his body.
In the hospital they treated him well and brought the condition under some control.
Living in the College of The Bible, the Epworth Hospital was on my way out to Ascot Vale and Newmarket churches. I used to drive the black BSA 500 motor bike to Epworth Hospital whether I was coming or going from any function in the church or youth club activity. I climbed the back stairs of the hospital and let myself in through the fire escape which I had discovered. I would sit beside him for long visits during the night.
The Night Sister of the ward discovered me one night and after I told her that I was unable to visit during the daytime because of my College lectures agreed that I should come in any night that I wanted. Robbie and I talked a lot during those night hours. Sitting there with nothing much to do he taught me how to write in italic script. My attempts were clumsy compared with his. After some period of time it was obvious that Robbie was not recovering.
He was wasting away. His joints became swollen. His legs and arms became thin like match sticks. His face became thin and his dark eyes seemed to retreat inside. His curly hair seemed to be limp always with perspiration. I started praying with him just before I left each night. It seemed strange to pray with your younger brother. Faith was not something that our family shared. We had no background of church commitment.
The weeks turned into months. Robbie gradually wasted away. His chest seemed to be all bony and his ribs could be plainly seen and in the top of his rib cage, a pulsing, throbbing enlarged heart which could be seen so easily from even the other side of the room.
He now just lay there in bed, exhausted constantly, unable even to weave the cane baskets that the occupational therapists had helped him make.
The hospital then spoke to my Mother quite frankly on the advice of the specialists. There was no hope for Robbie’s recovery. They suggested that it might be better if she took him home to die.
My Mother wanted to nurse him at home but it was very demanding work. He was constantly sweating, alternating with chills. She hired a day nurse to come in to bathe and change the bed and sit with him and to administer what drugs he needed. But Mum had to go out to work. She still had to keep her family and run the business. There was no way that she could stay at home and care for her youngest son.
To help with the baby sitting I developed the habit of coming home from College at night time after I had finished my work, to sit with him during the night hours. Not every night. But most nights I was able to sit in a chair beside his bed mopping his brow and giving him constant sips of water. Sometimes we talked. Mostly he just lay there breathing deeply and painfully. I would sit throughout the night in the chair alternately dozing, doing some assignments or writing some essays, wiping perspiration or giving sips of water. His thin legs and arms with their swollen joints were so painful to move. His bony chest kept heaving for breath with the enlarged heart pounding away at an abnormal rate.
One night he was obviously weaker than usual and during the night he kept looking at me. My eyes were full of tears. I tried to encourage him with words of comfort, “God cares for you, Robbie. God will always be with you.”
He was too weak to discuss or to have much to say. He looked at me with his deep brown eyes and wet curly hair. He asked one question, “Why am I dying?”
I just burst into tears. I laid my head on his heaving chest and sobbed. I had no answer as to “Why?” But I did have an answer as to who was with us in our suffering and who loved us and strengthened us.
I prayed with him after a while as I had done before in hospital.
He looked at me again, “Can you find my pen prize?” I looked at the row of books on our bookshelf for his calligraphy book. I pulled it out and showed it to him. He said, “You keep it, always.” He shut his eyes before I could answer.
Next morning my mother came out and woke me up. I was still in the chair beside the bed and the pen book was in my hands. There was no time for a shower or for breakfast that morning. Just time for a cold wash, a quick bite to eat and then onto the motor bike, off to College before I missed my first lecture.
It was during the lectures that morning that the girl from the office came in with the telephone message.
As soon as she told me that I needed to go home immediately and that it was something about my brother I knew Robbie was dead.
The funeral was a family affair. We held it in our house with the small coffin in the lounge. The minister and the two doctors who had treated him over four years took part in the service. The house was crowded with relatives and friends. On the lawn outside stood all of my fellow students from the College of The Bible. Dr. Kemp spoke of how medical science was so limited when it came to effective treatment of rheumatic fever. He spoke of his limitations, and the limitations of medical science, and of his faith in life beyond death. He declared that he had treated the disease with the latest of drugs including the new cortisone, and by prayer.
We commended the spirit of Robbie to God, then followed the little coffin outside of the house, and up the front path lined with all of the students from the College of The Bible. We travelled to the Box Hill cemetery and laid him to rest in the same grave as our Father.
The day after the funeral my Mother rang Dr. Kemp and insisted that he now send us a bill. He had visited the house on hundreds of occasions as well as the hospital, both night and day. Dr. Kemp agreed. A few days later the bill arrived. It read simply “To providing care for Robbie Moyes, say 20 pounds”.
Every Christmas Day, Robbie’s birthday, for the next twenty years my Mother went to Box Hill cemetery and placed flowers on the grave of her curly headed boy. She grieved constantly throughout that period. The headstone says simply “In memory of Norman John Moyes and his son Norman John Robert Moyes” and the dates of their deaths.
We cleaned up his belongings. A fourteen year old boy in those days did not accumulate very much. Apart from his clothes and the furniture which we shared in our room together, there was only a cricket bat and ball and a couple of wickets, a swimming medal, a Hornby train, some wicker work baskets that he had made in hospital before he lost his strength, some school books, a few other books given to him as presents over the years, his stamp collection, and his pen book. Very little else remained.
When I went back to my room at the College of The Bible I placed on my bookshelves a book that has travelled with me ever since, the only tangible evidence that Robbie ever lived, a book on calligraphy.
I determined that I would take up what he had taught me on those nights we sat together in Epworth Hospital. I took the book and taught myself italic writing and developed a mediaeval script. In the past 30 years, over 2,000 wedding certificates and baptismal certificates have been inscribed with names of people in the much admired italic hand that my younger brother Robbie had taught me.
Thirty years have gone and the pen book has travelled with me wherever I have been. Only that and memories survive.
There are people that come into your life for a short time, influence you for good, and then move on. Such was my brother Robbie.
Even now when I see a young, thin teenager with curly hair and dark brown eyes I think of that long departed brother.
I did not realize it then, but his death was also part of my training in order that I might better help others who were grieving. I did not realize that we were learning to be ministers even in our own homes in those days when I would walk out into the heavy air blowing from the abattoirs and start my motor bike to head back to the College of The Bible to continue to train for the ministry thinking about my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
