Visitors to the Manse
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.
It was not long after we had shifted in to our very first manse that we realized that ministers had certain regular visitors. Of course there were the derelicts, the homeless people, those who wanted food, money and a hand out, and other people who wanted counselling or guidance in all sorts of personal and domestic issues. But there were other people who came to the manse, some of them regulars.
These were the members of the church who felt that for some reason or other they had a special invitation to use the manse as a second home where they might find friendship and help according to their particular need.
Sometimes these regular visitors were real delights that brought a great deal of encouragement and help to our life. On other occasions they were just nuisances.
One man who was far from a nuisance was Roy King. We had not long been married when we first came to know him really well. He had been a member of the Ascot Vale and Newmarket Churches for 50 years although he now lived in another area on the other side of Melbourne. But he regularly came back to church anniversaries and special functions ,and provided financial support and encouragement to his old home church. Roy King was one of the most exceptional men I have ever met. His wife had recently died when we first came to know him and we invited him back to our home for a meal. Although there was 50 years of age difference between us we immediately struck up a friendship with him. He made it a habit to call our to church while I was preaching and we made it a habit to invite him home for a meal. He was a bank manager and for many years held a number of significant positions in large banks around Melbourne. Now he was retired and, being on a good salary, could afford to use his money to help others as his own personal needs were very limited and as he lived a very disciplined and careful life.
Frequently he would notice that we were overworked and stressed and he would turn up at our home on a Monday morning knowing which day I would be free from university lectures and my young wife would be able to go out with us and he would drive us both to a little country restaurant where we would have Devonshire tea together and then drive us back home with that few hours break doing us the world of good. I found it very hard to get the story of his early life but many of the older people had told me of his courage and prowess both on the sporting field and during World War I. Gradually the story came out.
Roy King was an outstanding Australian Rules footballer. He played for a number of teams before eventually winning his way into the Firsts of the Essendon Football Club. He soon was vice captain of the team and an outstanding example to other players as he played in the league. In 1915, however, the call to arms was being heard across the land and Roy answered the call.
As a committed Christian he explained to the recruiting sergeant, “I cannot go and shoot others. I cannot fight as a Christian, but I want to go and I will be a stretcher bearer.” Enlisted, he moved immediately into the most bloody scenes of the war. At Gallipoli he worked alongside Simpson and his donkey. The casualties were enormous and stretcher bearers were some of the first to be shot. But unarmed, he moved among the sick and dying outside of the trenches bringing bodies back for burial or for medical attention.
Miraculously Roy King was not hit throughout the whole campaign although Turkish bullets killed his ass upon which he carried wounded soldiers, killed several other stretcher bearers who were working with him, passed through his hat, punctured his water can and even knocked an enamel mug out of his hand.
The Gallipoli campaign ended, Roy King went to the European theatre of the war and for the next three years served as a stretcher bearer in the worst situation of the trenches of Flanders, Belgium and France. He was awarded a number of distinguished medals for bravery. At war’s end he came home and never again spoke about the war. He was reticent to mention anything at all save that as a Christian he could not condone fighting, but because there was a war on as a Christian he felt he must serve in the most compassionate and loving way possible.
After the war he again played for the Essendon football team and then spent many years as a coach and trainer of younger players. He was an absolutely gracious and generous gentleman and our regular morning teas were quite a delight.
On the other hand Sunday roast dinners at our house likewise came for him to be a great joy as he developed a friendship with our first child, our daughter Jenny.
It was three years after we left that first church that we again met with him in our next ministry which took us to the area where he lived. He was always present in the church services, Sunday morning and evening, and at mid week meetings and anything special that we were organising. He was one of the earliest to pledge his finances whenever we had a building campaign or a regular stewardship drive. Our Sunday lunches continued and in due course two and three sons were added to our little family. Always he rejoiced with us with our growing children.
Then one day after lunch he came back to us deeply troubled. He had been searching for some time and could not find where he had parked the car. Suspecting his car had been stolen, I rushed outside and round to the church car park at the back where he used to park and there it was. Roy followed me and when he saw the car parked there he could not believe that he had not seen it, but the problem was he had just forgotten where the car park was. I then noticed that several times he made appointments to meet with us to go for a morning tea but he would not turn up. When asked about it he was most apologetic but he had simply forgotten it. We then noticed a very rapid deterioration in his memory. I called into his home one day to see him ironing his shirt and wondering why the creases would not come out. He had forgotten to switch the iron on. I began to realize that this acute loss of memory which was rapidly deteriorating was not a temporary thing but a very serious problem. Eventually it became so bad that I arranged for him to enter one of our church nursing homes where, full of health, with excellent physical vigour he spent the rest of his days. I regularly called to visit him, but he could not remember who I was. Roy King was a champion in every way and it was sad to see him age without memory. When death came and I buried him I could not help but feel what a great relief it was that God should take him. Yet throughout all of our years of friendship together we never once regretted him coming to our home.
In our second church in the country town of Ararat we had a different kind of regular visitor. The disgraceful wooden house in which we lived was just opposite the railway yards. All through the first summer the trains, shunting their huge carriages of wheat, used to keep us awake at night. Then in the early morning hours we would always have a regular visitor.
One of our first mornings in the manse was shattered at 6 a.m. with the arrival through the back door of a man who shouted as he walked up the front passage. It was Ron the chook man who used to bring his day old chickens into the railway station at 5.30 a.m. to catch the goods train to Melbourne. After loading them on the goods train he would come over to the manse, walk in the back door, and shouting walk up the passage until he came into our kitchen or knocked on our bedroom door saying, “Come on. Where are you? Rise and shine. The sun is up. I have been working for the last hour. What do you mean spending half of God’s good daylight in bed?” He would then ask my wife as she struggled to pull her dressing gown around her, having been up most of the night with our new baby, if she would make him a cup of tea. As soon as he got the tea he would then ask if he could have a slice or two of toast, and as soon as he got the toast, would ask if she would mind cooking a couple of soft poached eggs for his toast.
We put up with this intrusion of an early morning for several weeks. Ron the chook man thought he was funny but we certainly did not. It was then I realized something: I used to run his teenage children after Boys’ Club on a Tuesday night and Youth Club on a Friday night. I always had to let the kids off quietly lest they wake Dad up because he had to go to bed so early owing to the fact that he had to get up in order to take the day old chickens in for the train. I waited until one particularly late night, and I made sure Ron the chook man’s kids were the last to be driven home. On this night I drove my car up close to his front bedroom window, tooted the horn several times, called out the kids some instructions about next week and then walked round the back of his house banging the doors as I walked through his kitchen and lounge room, calling in a loud voice “Ron. Where are you? What are you doing in bed at this time of the day? Many of us are still working. What are you lounging in bed for?” Ron came out of the bedroom with his eyes blinking, grasping at the draw cord in his pyjamas. I sat down in the kitchen and put my feet up. “I am hungry. I just feel like some supper. How about a cup of coffee, Ron?” Ron mumbled as he went towards the kettle. While he was filling it I said, “Oh and, by the way, what about a couple of slices of toast, and can you cook us up a couple of sausages? I am starving working at this hour of the night.”
Ron learnt his lesson. Never again did he barge into our house before six in the morning wanting breakfast.
While we were living in that same manse at Ararat we had another regular visitor, Roy Farmer. Roy was a delightful elderly retired dairy farmer and he came to our home almost every day at morning tea time. He would never come empty handed but would bring a small pot of jam or marmalade that his wife had recently bottled, a couple of oranges that he had picked from his tree or a couple of lemons or a few beans from his vegetable garden or whatever. It seemed like he wanted to come round and have a talk whenever I was at home which was quite rare at that hour of the morning, but he enjoyed talking with my wife as she nursed our first son, recently brought home from hospital.
He would always arrive at morning tea time and enter the back door hanging his hat on a nail behind the door, and sitting down at the kitchen table and chatted to my wife. He had had eight children of his own and he and his wife, Nellie, knew what it would be like for a young girl, far from all of her family and friends being on her own in a country town. So he took it upon himself to call in for half an hour just for a friendly chat, to offer any guidance that might be required, to pass on any information that might be helpful and to do any odd jobs that needed to be done. The presents of the small pot of jam or marmalade or the few beans or the couple of lemons was just an excuse for calling in. Beverley would make him a cup of tea and he would sit down until it was drunk chatting with her about the family and always in the most positive way giving her great encouragement in the part she was playing in this new rural ministry. Faithfully he drank his cup of tea but it was only after a whole year that we discovered that he did not like tea but was too shy ever to what to tell us that we were serving him something he did not usually have. So he drank it in silence just to make us feel comfortable.
There was another lady at the time in the town who also used to call in regularly but her motive was much more plain. She would knock on the back door and call out “Yoo hoo. Is anybody home? Do you mind if I use your toilet?” And she would trot off into our toilet. Our house was exactly half way between her home and the shops and it was a convenient port of call both going to shopping and coming home from it.
There were some other visitors to our manse when we lived at Cheltenham who were even less welcome.
Over a period of weeks there had been a spate of robberies in the big hotel around the corner from us. Their bottle shop had been raided in the middle of the night by someone who apparently had a key to a master padlock. Large quantities of liquor had been stolen.
One night, hearing a noise at the rear of our manse, I quietly sneaked up the side of the property and around the far back where it joined close to a Sunday School hall. In the darkness I could hear two men. One was under the hall and the other by our backyard passing to him piles of bottles and boxes. In the darkness I could not see what they were doing but I could hear their whispered instructions to each other.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I realized that they had the proceeds of another large robbery of whisky, spirits and cartons of beer from the hotel and they were moving them and stacking them under our property. They had taken a couple of boards off the side of the house and had pile them away at the back. When they were all stacked in they backed out from underneath the building, carefully replaced the boards on some nails which they had, on some earlier occasion, hammered in at strategic points and stood up ready to leave. They were dressed in black clothing.
Springing upon them I called out in my loudest voice, “Stay where you are! Don’t you dare make a move. I have you covered. Turn round and face the wall.” To my absolute surprise both men did as I commanded. Walking up behind one of them I grabbed his arm and pushed it up his back in a half Nelson and grabbing the other man’s arm, twisted it hard, also round his back and then started to march them off to our back door.
To my absolute surprise I had both men fast and they made no attempt to break away from my grip. They were in fact older than I and much stronger in build but I had them in a solid grip with their arms half way up their back and they were leaning over as I marched them along, speaking in a deep gruff voice.
It was one thing to catch two robbers. It is another thing to know what to do with them when you have caught them. I marched them to our laundry and called for my wife. I asked her to open the laundry and I took both men in while I asked her to ring the police. I kicked the door shut behind me and forced both men to lean over the stone trough with their heads down into the empty trough, with the arms still pushed up behind their backs.
I then pondered my fate. Here was I with two strong robbers locked in a laundry. I had told Beverley to lock the door and to take the key with her. Not only were they locked in but so was I. I kept their heads forced down into the sink with their arms up their backs and hoped against all hope that the police would come quickly.
My wife must have described the situation very vividly to the police sergeant because within minutes I heard the wailing siren of the approaching police car as it drove over our front lawn and up beside the house with lights blazing. The door was unlocked, the police entered and grasping the two offenders handcuffed them and bundled them into the back of the police van.
My arms were aching from the constant tension of keeping their arms in the half Nelson position up their backs.
As I was rubbing my arms the police searched with their torches under the property and saw stacked there thousands of dollars worth of spirits and cartons of beer.
“There should be a good reward in all of this, because we have been after these two fellows for quite some time. They have both got long records you know, and both of them have spent a fair amount of time inside. One fellow in particular is a nasty bit of business. He is an extremely violent man taken to bashing other prisoners and anybody with whom he disagrees. How on earth you ever managed to keep them both quiet I will never know.”
There was quite some excitement for a little while when it was discovered that I had apprehended the two unwelcome visitors. I never did get a reward except the men from the hotel who removed all the stolen liquor back to the bottle shop gave me a couple of bottles of scotch whisky in appreciation. As I have always been a teetotaler and never wanting to pass on alcohol to anybody else which may be the cause of their downfall,
I did what many people would think would be crying shame, I unscrewed the top of the Black Label Johnny Walker and poured both bottles down the sink.
Over the years thousands of visitors came in and out of our manses but those were the two most unlikely visitors we ever had.
Over the last thirty years we have had thousands of visitors to our various manses. The four visitors books are crammed with names of people and each one is a memory, many of them absolutely delightful like that of Roy King and Roy Farmer who would share with us morning tea, and Muriel the half way toilet lady who seemed to think the church had built our house there as her convenience, and the two hotel robbers who were captured by bluff more than anything else.
I never thought that we would have such experiences when I was a young man at my first student church and 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 minster thinking about my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
