The Manses
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 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
After I had been a student minister in the Newmarket and Ascot Vale for three years, the church invited me to stay on as a young married man. I was married in the Christmas vacation and after returning from a rather unusual honeymoon which we shall mention at a later date, we settled in to the first of six houses which, over the next thirty years, would be our homes.
Our first house was at 15 Vine Street, Moonee Ponds, just down the road from the famous Dame Edna Everidge. It was grandmother’s home and she had lived there all of her life. Like the houses of Newmarket nearby, it was a workman’s cottage built in the very poor days at the turn of the century. The house was eighteen feet wide and ran the width of the block except for a narrow sideway two feet six wide down on one side which then was joined by the wall of the next house. It was a weatherboard house with a corrugated iron roof and one long passage running the entire length of the house opening from the front door right on the street down to the end. Opening immediately inside the front door was the front room which was always reserved for best and immediately behind it the main bedroom out of which my grandmother shifted for my new bride and I to have as our own. The middle room of the house was the lounge room and off it a very small single bedroom into which Grandma shifted. The passage then opened into a bathroom/laundry with a big brick surrounded copper in the corner, two stone wash troughs and a bath with a wooden chip heater. It served its dual capacity as bath and laundry, and then the kitchen rectangle in which people ate and dominated at the far end by a large wooden stove, a sideboard for crockery and an ice chest. The ice man came every two days. The only other building on the property was an outdoor toilet down the end of the narrow block of land with its back to the alley. Up this lane for several generations the night cart had come. This toilet had fond memories. One day when I was two years of age my Nana was minding me for the day, and while she was in that toilet, I slid across a door bolt which locked her in. All morning and afternoon she was locked in as my small fingers could not loosen the bolt. Neither could her shouting until my mother returned. At least she had a place to sit! But in Moonee Ponds in our day we had sewerage connected and a cast iron water closet sat at the top of the toilet with a chain dangling within reach. There was a small vegetable garden and a woodshed attached to the back fence. I was reminded that in this tiny little cottage my grandmother and grandfather had brought up nine children.
Nanna had lived alone for a number of years and it was a concern of my mother and my aunt that she was becoming very forgetful and it would be good if the young married couple could move in with her. I was still a student at university and the low cost accommodation was a great boon to us, particularly as both the church and the university were not far away. We lived there for the next two and a half years with the lounge in the centre doubling as our common room, my study and our family room together. Very soon I had some bookcases moved in, a desk, typewriter and it was here that I used to counsel many of the young boys that I had in our Youth Club and the first of the boys that came on probation.
My grandmother felt she owned the piece of street immediately outside her front fence and as our house was adjacent to the Moonee Valley Racecourse there were always race goers parking their cars outside. On every race day she would stand outside the front gate with her arms folded across a very ample chest, glaring at any car who dared to park in front of her house. She would place empty wooden boxes on the road with pieces of timber across them so that no race goer could park there. The fact that she did not have a car, and we did not need it for parking was quite irrelevant. That was her piece of road. She paid rates on it, and if the Council allowed people to park their cars in front of her house on her road, then they would soon hear about it!
Living with my Nanna was very difficult for my young bride. Unfortunately Nanna’s memory was failing, and although her daughters had not seen it and I was too young and inexperienced to realize it, she was well advanced in a stage of dementia suffering from Alzheimers Disease. Very soon we began to notice a lot more symptoms than the loss of memory. She would occasionally bring home from the greengrocer’s large boxes of berries and a huge bag of sugar and start mixing pounds of jam on her stove, or bottling dozens of bottles of preserved apricots. Whenever I would ask her why she needed so many she would always reply, “If you have a large family you must do the bottling! It is jam time now, and I’ve got to get the preserves in.” She had so much happiness making jams and preserving fruit even though she no longer had children round about to eat them, that I took to a rather tricky subterfuge to help her. As soon as her preserving cupboard became full, and she started to complain she had nowhere else to put the bottles of preserves, I would sneak out bottles of preserves and jams and give them to deserving people in the community whenever I visited, or else to some of the ladies from the church who would run a street stall. Nanna was never the wiser about where they went but noticing the cupboards were down by a few bottles would make comments about how she would soon need to get some more sugar in because “those kids have nearly finished all of the jam”. When the time came to leave, she suffered a stroke and we rushed her to hospital and after a short time she passed away.
The second house we lived in was really the first manse we ever occupied. The little church at Newmarket and Ascot Vale had not had a house for a minister since the early 1930’s and had relied upon student ministers to supply ministry over all the years. After three years of student ministry and now another two and half years of part time student ministry, the churches were showing signs of vitality and great growth. The Sunday School was booming, boys and girls clubs were at good strength, we had a teeming teenage group and church attendances had reached the highest they had been for forty years. It was obvious that we needed to move into full time ministry and that would require the purchase of a manse. To those poor people living in the inner areas of Melbourne, the purchase of a manse was a huge undertaking.
But I broke down the cost into units and encouraged people to buy one unit representing part of the total cost of the property. We encouraged other people to give some interest free loans, and very shortly we had sufficient money to purchase our first manse at 85 Athol Street. It was a moment of enormous pride in the life of the church. They had achieved what people had talked about for forty years. It was a lovely house, one
of the best in the street. Unlike almost every other house it was solid brick and painted white. It had a little patch of lawn in the front, but like all the other houses still had only a very narrow frontage although this time we had gone from 18 feet to 25 feet in width. It also had a door opening at the front leading into a passage that ran the length of the house with one front bedroom, then a lounge room, then a kitchen and dining area and finally a second bedroom and, opposite, a laundry. This time we had a toilet attached to the house even though we had to go outside the house to enter the toilet.
On one side of the house we shared the common wall with the family next door, an Italian family who covered their backyard with trellis growing grapes and who squashed the grapes for wine in the family bath.
On the other side we had a narrow sideway and our one lounge room window opened directly opposite the lounge room window of the house next door. They had a large family and the mother and father were always shouting at each other and engaging in physical fights. In our young married life we would often be astounded to hear the shouts, the swearing and the physical assaults that were taking place. There were times when we would just sit on our single lounge chair looking out the window at life size shouting and fighting and carrying on next door. We referred to it as our “life size television”. It was really quite a soap opera. On one occasion Mr. Lake fled out the front door of the house, closely followed by Mrs. Lake who was brandishing a broom taking swipes at him. He managed to get out the front gate and started running down the street with Mrs. Lake in hot pursuit. As they reached the front of our place she caught him on the back of the head with the end of her broom and he fell to the ground like a stunned mullet, completely unconscious. Mrs. Lake looked at him lying there, rolled him over with her foot and taking her broom under her arm, calmly walked back inside knowing that he would one day recover and come home for his meal.
Our first baby was born there and that house became tremendously important at the start of our family life. We did a lot of work in establishing gardens front and rear and in building a carport at the back, a brick barbecue, and a tool shed. We had not been there long, however, before many of the community’s derelicts came to know our address, and our house was the most popular one in the street for people who came for meals and handouts from the young wife who would meet them at the door.
The third manse in which we lived was in the country town of Ararat, Victoria. 90 High Street, Ararat, was right opposite the busy Ararat railway station. Here during harvest time all night the trains would be shunting the huge open carriages of wheat backwards and front and rear talking to each other with systems of whistles’ signals. Beside us was a plumber who manufactured large round rainwater tanks, and the hammering of the tanks night and day made sure there was always plenty for us to hear. We had not been called to this church and they were not expecting a minister. It was a church that had been riven by strife and factions. A series of young ministers had left broken hearted. While preparing to go overseas for some graduate study the Conference of Churches of Christ of Victoria and Tasmania asked me to go up to this little country church, to sort out the differences and settle it down so that a minister might be sent and have a fair chance of having a happy ministry.
All of our furniture and belongings had been sold or else sent to America in preparation for our arrival. We had nothing at all except what we stood up in when we arrived at the door of the church manse. The church people knew we were coming and knew that we had no furniture of our own but they had guaranteed that they would furnish it. The house itself was an absolute disgrace. The iron roof was totally rusted, having not seen a coat of paint since the First World War. The timber walls were all cracked, and the paint had long since disappeared leaving the boards exposed to the weather. There was a rusty iron fence outside and an unmade dirt track up the side of the house.
The church had promised to furnish it but we were surprised with what greeted us. There was a nondescript old wooden bed in the front room with a wire that sagged almost to the floor. A kapok mattress full of lumps …..... on this weighed down the wire. It was more comfortable to put the old kapok mattress on the floor than on the wire. The rest of the house had an odd assortment of mismatched chairs and tables, and an old lounge suite that had been in somebody’s garage. We had been furnished with people’s second-hand furniture that was not good enough to give to St. Vincent de Paul.
The toilet, as with country toilets, was outside and down the back. There was a slow combustion stove which was slow and without any fire wall which meant that the oven was completely useless. The hot water service was supposed to run off the stove and so it had to burn night and day, but as the tank was out in the open and not insulated we had luke warm water even at the best of times. The old wooden house had huge rooms with high ceilings. In the heat of the summer the house was an oven by day and in the cold of the evenings, freezing by night. There were no carpets, but odd pieces of condolium were tacked to the floor. It was an absolute hovel. But here we turned some back sheds into some fowl houses and started keeping some chooks, brought home sleepers from along the railway sidings and split them in the backyard to keep the slow combustion fire burning, laid out gardens in the front and along the side and at the rear, and made for the first time a level lawn. It was here that our second child was born in the local country hospital. We ended up staying two years because the church experienced the nearest I have ever seen to a revival, large number of new members joined it. The church property itself was demolished in part and new buildings were erected and the whole life of the church became vital and expanded. By the time a new minister was called and willing to come, arrangements were made to purchase a new manse.
Our fourth manse was 101 Chesterville Road, Cheltenham. We had struck another winner. It also was an old wooden house, but better painted with asbestos sheet walls. The church had once possessed a very nice manse for its minister but had sold it in order to buy the block of land next door to the church upon which this old house had stood. They explained to me when I came that they were thinking of building a new manse. We stayed in that manse for the next ten years and it was always the same. Every time the wind blew the carpets would all rise up. The lounge room carpet would rise nearly three feet in the centre on a windy day. The lathe and plaster walls and ceilings were in very bad shape because of movement in the foundations from the rumbling traffic that screeched to a halt at the major intersection right outside our door. There were 36 traffic lights outside our front door on a major 13 lane highway, and the rolling of the heavy trucks and sudden breaking at a red traffic light always caused the house to vibrate. The stumps had gone and the walls were sagging and as the walls moved huge cracks appeared across every wall. Lumps of plaster would regularly fall off the ceiling roof. But this house had an inside toilet and here two of our children were born in the next ten years. It was here Beverley’s mother came to live in a tiny room at the back of the house during her last illness as we nursed her towards her death.
Once more we built gardens, both flower and vegetable gardens, and a chook shed for ducks and chooks, and in the large backyard a sheep, a tortoise, a dog, a cat, 56 white mice, a gander, several drakes, a flock of ducks, a rooster or two, some hens and, at various times, other additional members of the family.
The problems of the dropping floor, the sagging walls and the pieces of ceiling which kept falling in the various rooms of the house, was overcome by the Officers after a great deal of operation. The time for building of a new manse was not now, but as it was impossible to live with the plaster falling down about our ears, a practical solution was reached. A false ceiling was put in throughout the rooms and sheets of masonite were nailed up over all the walls to stop the plaster from falling.
After ten years that church had grown to be a very large church with huge properties with the first of three retirement villages being built and by now a large staff. When I had come I was the only person on the payroll but now we employed an office secretary, a minister of education, a minister of visitation, a minister of evangelism, a minister of administration, a social worker, a part time nurse, a retirement centre receptionist and so on. The time had come to replace the old manse. The church quickly gathered the money to build the new house. Plans were drawn up and the old house was demolished while we lived a little distance away. I took our children to see the last day in the life of the house as a bulldozer pushed it all into a heap and set fire to it. Our children were absolutely devastated. I did not realize the traumatic effect because for four of them it was the only house they knew as home.
Six months later we moved into the new manse, large, light, airy, beautifully presented. It was the first time we had ever had such comfort and convenience in our life and just after we were shifted into it the call came to leave to come to Sydney.
And so we came to 16 Corona Avenue, our fifth manse. A grand old home which had been the home of Superintendents since 1930, with large rooms and high ceilings. But after the new modern house it felt dark and depressing. The laundry was outside the house up behind the garage and had no hot water connected to it. The hot water had to be carried from the kitchen in buckets. The carpet was original 1930 and had holes in many places and had split at the joins. The Officers were apologetic and immediately set about building a new laundry and enlarging the kitchen and installing hot water to the laundry. As for the carpets I looked inside hall cupboards and sure enough found that the carpet layers had even carpeted inside the cupboards in those extravagant days of the 1930’s. So those pieces were cut out, the holes were patched and the split seams were re sewn and they have lasted us another ten years to this day until now they are to be replaced.
The unusual thing in all of this is that from the early days of our marriage my wife and I struggled to get enough money to put a deposit upon a house of our own. Eventually we bought our own house and it has followed us wherever we have been, but we have been unable to live in our own house because the church where we served insisted that it was proper that we should live in the church residence. So our own house has been for us a refuge, one day a fortnight when we would mow the lawns, do the painting, clean out the gutters, do the gardens and pay the rates like any other couple.
Our experiences of church manses, in spite of the fact that we have ministered in two of the largest and most significant churches in the nation, has been as I have described. And yet we hear people say, “But aren’t you lucky, having the church provide a house for you.”. They never realize that ministers rent their manses from the churches and the rent is taken out of the salary before it is even paid to them.
But over all the years we have never complained, and we have never asked the church to do anything about our manse, believing that it is the church’s responsibility to provide a convenient and comfortable residence at the level of its own concern for its minister. God has blessed us with great happiness in the houses in which we lived.
But I must admit that where we were going to live never consciously figured in our minds whenever we heard a call to minister anywhere and never once have we actually visited a manse prior to accepting a call. And I certainly never thought about where we would live in those days of long ago when I would walk out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, start my motor bike and head towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister, thinking about my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
