With Such a Mother
Gordon Keith MacKenzie Moyes carries the surnames of all four of his grandparents. He was born in Box Hill on the 17th of November, 1938, but according to him, his life did not really begin until after his alcoholic father died in 1947.
From then on the family’s circumstances underwent some radical changes. Mother took charge and things began to move.
Born in Moonee Ponds, Victoria, two days before the original ANZAC day in 1915, Emma May Gordon was one of the oldest girls in a family of 11 children. As soon as she finished sixth grade she left school and went to work to help support her younger brothers and sisters. She found a job in a cake shop in Burnley on the other side of the city.
It was there that she met and later married Norman John Moyes, an up-and-coming young baker and pastrycook. The couple worked hard and saved diligently and in the late 1930’s they bought their own business; Perry’s old-established bakery at 591 Station Street, Box Hill. Full of optimism they took over the goodwill and the existing staff, and had a new sign painted across the front of the shop:
N. J. MOYES, PASTRYCOOK AND BAKER.
By this time the glowing aura of young love had worn off and May realized the full extent of what she had indulgently dismissed as her young husband’s bad habits. Now it was too late. Sober, Norman was agreeable enough but when he was drunk, which was nearly all the time, he was unmanageable. As years went by May’s life became one long round of misery and abuse.
The couple’s hard work tempered the effects of the Depression. People must eat and the bakery business would have prospered if it had not been for Norman. The money he spent on liquor and tobacco was a constant drain on their slender profits and his gambling losses kept them constantly in debt.
Babies arrived too; first Gordon and three years later Lorna. On Boxing Day 1943 Robert put in his appearance, and 14 months later baby Nola was born only four weeks before her father’s death.
May spent no time in self-pity before shouldering her burden. She began by learning to drive their old Continental La Salle so that she could fetchand carry goods needed for the bakery. Next she moved her family into a house in a better locality. Unbeknown to anyone she had taken out a life insurance policy on her husband and the amount she received after his death paid off some of their most pressing debts and left enough for a deposit on a new brick-veneer, two-bedroom house at 55 Birdwood Street in Box Hill South.
Australia still suffered the effects of World War II and many things were in short supply, particularly building materials. For the whole of Victoria only 3,666 new houses were built in 1946 and how May Moyes happened to get one of them is something of a miracle. The new house was no mansion but at least it was their own. With reluctant help from her offspring, she planted a garden, built a fowl-house, and put in paths. As money allowed the purchase of materials, one of her husband’s friends helped her to build sheds and a garage.
May worked in the bakery six days a week from early morning until 6 o’clock closing time. Staffing was her biggest problem. Apart from the few old faithfuls who had worked for the former owners and now transferred their loyalty to her, there seemed to be constant friction.
It all boiled down to the fact that men disliked working for a woman `boss.’ The Womens’ Liberation movement was far in the future and to show their resentment for petticoat rule the men lied to May, they stole from her, they arrived late for work or drunkenly defied her directives. At best the male workers were unreliable and unco- operative and at worst they cheated her in every possible way.
The head dough-maker is kingpin in a bakery business and when May eventually found a suitable man he lived five miles from the bakery and had no means of transport.
For years young Gordon awoke when the alarm went off at 2 o’clock in the morning and his mother got up and dressed in order to drive five miles out to the dough-maker’s house, bring him in to the bakery to begin his work, and then drive herself home and crawl back into bed.
Probably even harder on her was the book-work connected with the business. With only a primary school education she had to take over the task of paying wages, keeping account books, ordering goods and settling bills. She had to file income tax returns, fill in the countless forms required by government and local council, and battle officialdom on a dozen previously unknown fronts. At night she brought home the days’ takings in a cloth bag and after the younger children were in bed Gordon sat at the kitchen table and helped her to count the money.
Being a child, he made a game of it. He arranged the coins in rows like soldiers drawn up in battle lines. The pennies in two rows of six to equal one shilling, and the ha’pennies in four rows of six. The silver coins he stacked into piles of ten or twenty to a pound. They rarely had any paper money to count, customers proffered coins to purchase meat pies or apple pies at threepence each or a loaf of bread at sevenpence.
After the money was sorted and counted it had to be carefully rolled in small squares of brown paper. This called for particular dexterity and he mastered the art of stacking the coins and wrapping them in cylindrical rolls of one shilling or one pound, ready to be deposited in the bank at 10 o’clock next morning.
It didn’t bother them that they had no safe. May simply packed the small brown rolls back into the cloth bag and shoved it under her bed. She didn’t close her windows or lock the front door and she definitely didn’t keep a watchdog or own a gun.
Although she worked long hours to earn a living May’s children were not neglected. She cooked and sewed for them and even though money had always to be used sparingly she bought records of classical music for the old hand-wound gramophone. Gordon grew up appreciating Beethoven and Tschaikovsky and the tunes he whistled were from the best of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Another major cash outlay went on a twelve volume set, purchased one at a time, of The Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, which she thought would aid her children’s education. Until they progressed beyond the scope of her meagre schooling she helped them with their homework.
When May was at home she was never too busy to help the girls sew doll clothes or show the boys how to build complicated working models with their Meccano set, or devise new routes for the clockwork trains that ran on rails across the kitchen floor.
At the same time as she cooked and cleaned and earned a living for her four children, May cared for her husband’s aged mother—cantankerous, querulous Granny Moyes. For a year or two after her son’s death Granny was able to care for the baby, keep an eye on the younger children and give a little help about the house, but soon her deteriorating memory made that impossible.
By today’s standards Granny should have been in a Home for the Aged. A Scots woman who had married well below her class, the old lady lived in the past, ordering her daughter-in-law around with the same imperious air that she had once reserved for her father’s servants. May Moyes accepted it all silently and if she resented her mother-in-law’s presence she didn’t show it in front of the children.
The only aspect of her children’s life that May left to others was their spiritual welfare. According to the census the Moyes family were Methodists but Norman cared nothing about church and certainly May never bothered. Perhaps religion had played little part in her own upbringing, or perhaps she worked too hard to have time for non-essentials—church attendance coming under that heading. For whatever reason, the Moyes children might never have learned much about God and the Bible if it had not been for Miss Jean Perry.
Jean Perry’s parents owned and operated the bakery before the Moyes bought it and Jean and her sister Maggie stayed on to `show them the ropes.’ It was Jean who had introduced the new owners to local business people. It was Jean who told the Moyes what type of cakes and pies were most popular with customers. It was Jean to whom Norman and May Moyes turned for advice on a multitude of matters.
When she found out that her new employer’s wife was pregnant Jean advised on the choice of a doctor and as years passed took an active interest in each Moyes’ offspring as he or she came along.
Older than the Moyes, Jean Perry was strong-willed and upright, the backbone of the local Church of Christ where she taught Sunday School, played the organ, sang in the choir and was involved in a number of other church-related activities. Gordon was not quite four years old when Jean suggested Sunday School.
“Let me take him along with me, Mrs Moyes. He’s old enough now to attend Sunday school and you’ve got enough to do, what with the new baby and all.”
Norman and May had no religious prejudices and the chance of a few hours peace without a little boy’s incessant chatter was not to be despised. It wouldn’t do their son any harm either. Most of the children in Box Hill attended one Sunday School or another.
May outfitted her son in a diminutive grey suit and white shirt with maroon tie, long socks and shiny black shoes. She made sure that he looked the part and that was as far as her responsibility went. The rest was up to Jean Perry and the Sunday School.
So began Gordon Moyes’ long association with the Churches of Christ. It could just as easily have been Anglican or Presbyterian or Baptist if Miss Perry had belonged to one of them.
Nearly six years later, when the family moved out to Birdwood Street, Sunday School attendance presented a problem. Two miles was too far for the younger children to walk and May had only just learned to drive their car and was not yet confident enough to take passengers. On the Sunday before they moved house she gave Gordon a note to take to his Sunday School teacher. In it May expressed her thanks for the kindness shown to her children and her regret that because of distance they would no longer be able to attend.
That was when the Court Street Sunday School teachers went into a huddle. They already had hundreds of Sunday School children filling every available space in church and hall—even the hall kitchen and the church lobby were pressed into service on occasion—but the loss of one family moving away distressed them.
Eventually a kind-hearted church member who was not even a Sunday School teacher came to the rescue. Jack Ferris, a local orchardist known less for the juicy red apples he grew, as for the unsightly purple birthmark that disfigured one side of his face and made him blind in one eye.
Rascally little boys, with their heartless disregard for other people’s feelings, used to dare one another to creep up to Jack Ferris on his blind side and stare into his deformed eye. The ghastly white eyeball gleaming from between swollen purple eyelids might have inspired many a nightmare if it had not been for the gentle kindness of its possessor.
Sometimes Jack Ferris turned and caught the naughty boys at their game, but he merely smiled and continued to love children—all children. Jack’s family and friends claimed that they never noticed his eye, his loving nature made it invisible.
The Ferris family lived two miles out of town in the opposite direction so it meant a real upheaval in their plans when Jack suggested that he would bring his family in and drop them off early at Sunday School and then drive out to collect the Moyes children.
Some Sunday mornings May, worn out from her long week’s work, failed to have the children ready on time. Jack never complained, instead he ambled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and exchange a few words with Granny.
As the years passed Gordon noticed how much the church depended on this quiet, godly man. Jack Ferris provided cases of luscious apples for church stalls and Sunday School picnics. Jack Ferris’ truck came to the rescue whenever anything had to be moved, whether it was backdrop and scenery for the annual Sunday School concert or gym equipment for the Boys’ Club, or just a load of boisterous teen- agers transported on a church outing.
In the course of time Gordon didn’t think of Jack Ferris as `the one-eyed orchardist’ but as an understanding friend.
