The Perils of Gas
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.
One of the first things a young student minister learns about the work of the ministry is to visit and care for some of the aged people in his parish.
I never found this a difficulty because I used to ask aged people whom I visited, and with whom I had very little in common, questions about their early life. Inevitably this led to an incredible host of stories, which enabled me to see that the elderly people whom I was visiting were, in fact, the repositories of great stories of days gone by, and were frequently themselves, in earlier life, rebels and revolutionaries, both within the community and within the church.
For example, there were two elderly ladies who lived together in Francis Street, Ascot Vale. They were sisters and to my mind incredibly old. When you are 18 anybody over 80 seems to be incredibly old. Miss Brown was a delicate creature who had lived in the same house for more than 80 years and had attended the church since the Sunday after her birth. She was a faithful, devout woman who solidly supported everything we did and with kindness and encouragement made sure generations of young students were encouraged in their ministry.
In the same house lived her widowed sister, Mrs. J.J. Franklyn. She was a remarkable woman. Both ladies were extremely thin and on a windy day they walked down the hill to the church holding on to each other as if they would blow away. They may have looked fragile but Mrs. Franklyn was as strong a woman as I have ever met. She had strong views about everything, from the activities of Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, to the activities of Australian athletes like Betty Cuthbert and John Landy. Mrs. Franklyn kept up with all the news, and quizzed me closely about my theological education and what I understood about this and that matter. She did not hesitate to tell me where she thought I was not being adventurous enough in my thinking, or where it would be better if I took a more liberal attitude rather than the “stuffy old fashioned orthodoxy that they still insist upon teaching young men”. This was the last thing that you would expect from a frail looking 80 year old lady.
Her husband had been the evangelist J.J. Franklyn, who in the 1920’s was known for his powerful tent ministries both in Australia and in many countries overseas. In latter years he was to be known as a pulpit orator occupying the pulpit of the Swanston Street Church of Christ in the heart of downtown Melbourne. They never had any children, and Mrs. Franklyn used to accompany her husband on his evangelistic preaching tours.
I remember her telling me about a preaching crusade he was conducting in Paris. It was strange to think of an Australian evangelist being successful in many European countries but J.J. Franklyn had a huge marquee in which thousands of people gathered throughout Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and France as he preached the Gospel.
I asked Mrs. Franklyn how she enjoyed the ministry in Paris. She made the point: “Old J.J. never really forgave me for not attending his last night in Paris. It was the biggest night of the entire crusade and the tent was crammed with people who wanted to hear the Gospel. I said to him, ‘J.J. I am not going to the Crusade tonight. I can hear you preach any time. But I am not going to have another night in Paris, and I am not going to leave Paris without at least once going to the Follies Bergere.’”
So this redoubtable wife of the evangelist set off on her own in an era when a woman attending the Follies Bergere by herself would have been looked at askance, and enjoyed her evening immensely.
I wanted to ask her something about the Follies Bergere, but I never got the words out. I guess she saw my 18 year old eyes bulging at the thought of the wife of the prominent evangelist going off to visit the Follies Bergere which was the scandal of Paris at that time.
“They used to say the Follies was an absolute scandal, but I can assure you I was not in the least offended by anything I saw, nor was I surprised. They simply flounced round in feathery underwear trying to look seductive, but to tell you the truth I have seen much more seductive scenes in my life in the dormitory of a girls’ boarding school!”
I decided it was time I opted out of this conversation. If I did not stop at this point Mrs. Franklyn would be telling me what she had seen in the dormitory of the girls’ boarding school. It was already getting too hot for me in the little front room of the wooden house in Francis Street, Ascot Vale.
I kept in touch with Mrs. Franklyn over the next 15 years and visited her regularly after she had entered a nursing home. When visiting her at the Christian Guest Home at Oakleigh on one occasion just before her 100th birthday, she asked me to bring her some up to date books so she could keep up with what was happening in the world of theology. I promised to bring her some from the College and asked her if she joined in any of the other activities of the guests in the Christian retirement home. She replied in an offended tone, “Of course not. You will not find me going down with all those old ladies making plastic coathangers and other useless stuff. I am not really ready to retire yet and I certainly do not want to grow old, which I shall if I keep mixing with all those old people down there.”
The old people “down there” were all people at least 30 years younger than herself. I envisaged that when Mrs. J.J. Franklyn arrived in heaven the Apostle Peter would have taken a deep breath and battened down the hatches.
Of a totally different vein was another minister’s widow in the congregation. Mrs. Mary Patterson, when I was 18, was even older than Mrs. J.J. Franklyn. I guess she was in her early 90’s when I first came to see her. I buried her some years later. Each second Sunday afternoon I would visit her at home because she was now shut in and unable to get out to church. She lived with her daughter who attended church regularly and who made arrangements so that when I arrived we could have a small communion service with her mother. I would prepare three or four small cups of communion wine, some communion bread, and celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in their lounge room, read some Scripture and pray with the two ladies. I would usually take one of our Elders with me. I used to enjoy asking Mrs. Patterson about her early life.
She was born in an area of Victoria called Bet Bet. She and her husband had founded the Dunolly Church of Christ during the gold rush era of the 1880’s. She had been baptised in the Bet Bet Creek as a young girl, and made sure her family, relatives, and neighbours on nearby farms, all came to hear of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. She had had, in her quiet way, a profound effect on a whole range of Pattersons. Among her sons and grandsons there were seven ministers of the Gospel. Other members of her family were very active in local churches.
Such a quiet elderly old lady and yet one who had had such a profound effect for good for the Gospel through the ministry of her husband and herself, her sons and their families and her grandsons. Today the line of ministers still continues and I often marvel at the faithfulness of the witness that began with her baptism on a cold winter’s day in the back paddock where the creek made its way from Bet Bet toward Dunolly. When I buried her, there was a tremendous atmosphere in the church as we truly recognised the words of Christ “Well done, good and faithful servant”.
The final lady I would mention, was again very elderly. Miss Burns had been a hard working woman all of her life. For 60 years she had worked as a washerwoman. As I would sit with her in her little wooden fronted house, in the best room with the best china having a cup of tea, I would hold her hands before I prayed with her and as I held her hands I marvelled at them. A tall, angular, thin woman, her arms and hands were immensely strong. The hands were large and the knuckles bony, and the skin was always red. She had spent her days stoking a large copper in her laundry, and poking down clothes as they boiled in the cauldron with a copper stick. The clothes were then lifted steaming hot into a stone trough of blue water. She believed that “out of the blue came the whitest wash”. The clothes were then rung out by hand, placed in a wooden cane basket and carried out to a clothes line with a centre wooden prop. She took in washing from all the houses nearby and kept herself by this arduous work.
I once visited her old wash house at the back of her house. It had a brick floor, a stone trough along one wall with a cold water tap, and a large brick copper in the corner. The copper had to be fed by hand into the fire box beneath and each morning the ashes taken and spread on the garden. In the small backyard the gardens were built up high on either side of the path that led down to the old outhouse. Above the copper was a single cold water tap. On the other wall was her bath. It was a large old iron bath on four legs, quite deep, the kind of grand old bath in which one could have a genuine soak, and not like some of these itsy bitsy plastic squares they place in the bottom of a shower recess these days. At one end of her bath was her pride and joy. For recently she had had installed in the wash house a gas hot water heater directly over the end of the bath. She had said to me proudly, “All my life I have had to boil the copper with the fire underneath and then ladle buckets of hot water into the bath. Now at least all I have to do is turn on the gas and I can have a good hot bath without any effort.” Miss Burns looked really pleased.
In more recent years she had purchased for herself a two roller mangle which bolted on to the dividing wall in the stone trough and out of the cold rinse water and into the blue water the clothes would travel through the mangle. Even turning the mangle required strength of arm and shoulder. The clothes were then ironed in her kitchen on her kitchen table and the irons that she had used over many years were still there on the black topped wooden fire stove. In more recent years she had used an electric iron, of course, but those flat irons told me of many years of hard labour in the leanto kitchen beside the wash house at the rear of her cottage.
Miss Burns, Myrtle to her friends, was basically a very simple person. Whenever I prepared my sermon I always had her in mind when I asked, “Would Myrtle Burns understand what I am saying?”. If I felt Myrtle could not understand it I would rewrite it more simply.
She often gave me something to laugh about, such as the time when she was absolutely shocked. Standing in G.J. Coles to purchase some Christmas cards, she heard two purchasers complaining that too many of the cards were religious in their content. Miss Burns looked at me, “And do you know what those ladies said? They said ‘Fancy all this religion getting into Christmas. You would think the Churches would at least leave Christmas alone.’” Miss Burns would look at me and roll her eyes to heaven. “Fancy” she said, “not even knowing the true story of Christmas, and they lived in Moonee Ponds!”
I can never think of Miss Burn’s red hands without thinking of the dreadful time I saw her. It was the last time I was to see her.
A neighbour had rung me to say that she had not seen Miss Burns for a couple of days and that her milk was still on the front doorstep. The neighbour did not know who else to ring and as Miss Burns always spoke of me, she decided I should investigate and see if she may be sick in bed.
I quickly rode my BSA 500 motor bike out to Moonee Ponds where Miss Burns lived. I rang the front door bell without success. I then did what I was to do many other times subsequently in ministry, an act for which we were never trained in theological college. I scaled the trellis on her side gate and tried to get into the back door of her house. It was locked, but the narrow window above the back door was open. I forced it wide open, climbed up with one foot on the door handle and squeezed myself through the narrow opening. I dropped down head first onto the floor. I dusted myself off and called out, “Miss Burns? Miss Burns? Myrtle, are you here? It is Gordon Moyes, and I just want to see if you are all right?” I listened and heard running water. I investigated around the kitchen and I could feel the water running through the water pipes which indicated that a tap was running, probably in the toilet or the wash house. Opening the back door from the inside, I walked down to the laundry where the door was locked, but from underneath the door came a stream of water with steam rising off it, running into the gully trap.
I called out again, “Miss Burns, Miss Burns, it’s Gordon Moyes. Are you all right?” I knocked on the door. There was no answer and the door was locked. The window around near the copper was open at the top so I forced the bottom part of the window up and squeezed in head first over the troughs. Half way in the laundry, resting on my stomach on the window ledge I suddenly saw the most horrific sight. Miss Burns was in the bath. She was alive, and had had a stroke while in the bath running some hot water to top up. At the other end of the bath the gas hot water service was still running. It had been running continuously for about two days and the temperature of the water, which totally filled the bath, would have been close to boiling point. Miss Burns had only her hands and head about the water.
I knew I could do very little to help her except turn off the gas and the water, pull out the plug and stroke her head as I told her I would get an ambulance immediately. I raced into a house down the road where I could see the wires coming from the telephone pole to the front door which indicated they had the telephone on. I dialled for the ambulance, her doctor, and the police in that order. Miss Burns had been scalded nearly to death. The doctor and ambulance men tended her and took her away, indicating to me that death was a certainty.
After the police and the doctor had left I went back through her house and locked the door, gathering together a few of her personal effects to see if I could find any written letters or information about what to do in time of her death. I found her important papers neatly placed in the drawer beside her bed. There were quite a number of instructions, and over the next few days I carried them all out. I locked the doors of the house behind me and walked back down into the wash house. In the corner stood the big brick copper with the fire underneath in which her strong red hands had spent a lifetime wringing hot clothes. And on the other side was the bath, the cause of her death.
Of course, in these modern days there are cut outs to the gas and if, for any reason, there is an error the gas will eventually turn off. An electric hot water service would have just emptied the tank, then run cold. But in those days that gas heater which had brought so much delight to Miss Burns was also the cause of her decease.
I walked that day out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of the Bible to train as a young minister, thinking of my meeting with some God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
