Chapter 10 – The Blacksmith’s Daughter – Vol 2 – 1971

Chapter 10 – The Blacksmith’s Daughter – Vol 2 – 1971

1971 was a very auspicious year in my “life’s calendar,” because it was the year that my future dear friends, Kate Daniels and Meg Clothier were born! I am 32 years older than Kate and Meg, and yet they are such good friends

now, in 2017. It just proves to me that friendship is timeless and age is not a deterrent to a good friendship.

 

 

 

There were a number of ecclesial problems that emerged around 1971 and these were dealt with ecclesially with varying degrees of “success.” The atonement was under discussion, and also the nature of Christ, and whether man was mortal before the fall or not. There was also a morality issue among the young people in the northern suburbs of Adelaide that caused a great deal of concern and heartache at the time. In NSW, there was the “Ted Spongberg and John Dawson,” issues and In Qld, the activities of Bro Herbie Twine were being questioned, and Petrie Tce was withdrawn from by many ecclesias as a result. Bro Herbie Twine used to travel around visiting brothers and sisters in isolation and baptizing people, apparently without requiring they change too many of their beliefs to fit in with the BASF. In hindsight, my personal belief is that if each ecclesia had been allowed to deal with and solve its own problems, it would have been better for all concerned, but then hindsight has 180 degree vision, but present vision does not. Christadelphia has never been very good at solving ecclesial problems, I am afraid. Without the Holy Spirit to guide us in this generation, it is my humble opinion that we are wise to let the wheat and the tares grow together until Christ’s return

At Xmas time 1970-71 Jeff and I travelled by car to the Bible School at Rathmines. The speakers at the school were HP Mansfield, Jeff Berry, John Ullmann, Paul Cresswell, and Eric Mansfield Jnr. I was glad to leave Adelaide and go to the Bible School because it was the first school where I didn’t have a baby in nappies. Helen was “adopted” by a couple of “grandparents” at the school and they looked after her for me for a lot of the time and it was a wonderful break for me.

After the school, Boolooroo put on a special lecture at Adamstown and Jeff was the speaker. The next few days were spent with Fran and Marg Ryan at their home at Warners Bay and we had such a great time there. Fran and Marg were such fun. We had managed to persuade Fran and Marg and Don and Una Strempel to accompany us to Queensland to support Jeff at the special efforts that he was putting on up there. The efforts were to be held at Ballina, Brisbane and Redcliffe. Don and Una and Jeff and I towed trailers to sleep in, and Fran and Marg took their caravan.

We went to Ballina first, and a brother kindly gave us the use of his house while we were there. It was right next to a tidal river which had a deep channel with a flat sandy beach on each side. Here the children could play in the sand when the tide was out and paddle in the water when the tide was in. The tide was always in first thing in the morning and the water was only about 2 ft deep among the mangroves. Every morning Helen and Jamin Ryan used to get into their bathers and take their buckets and spades and go to the flats to play in the water. Each day on the sandy flats, in the late afternoon, we saw an amazing sight. There were millions of soldier crabs that used to appear. They would march along the sand in their battalions, making the flats look like a carpet of shining black metal, but as we walked towards them, they would dive into the sand and disappear before our eyes. It was the most unbelievable spectacle.

The house was only a small cottage, so Don and Una slept in their trailer and Fran and Marg in their caravan and Jeff and I had the house for ourselves with the children. During the day we often visited various farms around the area where we could purchase very cheaply a whole range of tropical fruits. It was a tropical paradise to us, and the whole time we were there we would keep a big hand of bananas hanging from the clothes line and we would just pluck off a banana to eat whenever we felt hungry. Needless to say, we didn’t need to spend much on food while we were at Ballina, because we lived on the beautiful tropical fruit. Jeff’s studies were well received and we made lots of good friends amongst the brethren and sisters at Ballina. I already knew Bro Colin Herman because Dad and I had stayed with his family on our way up to Townsville in 1961. On this particular trip, I really became attached to his daughter,Jenny and her boyfriend Mal Shaw and I would love to have spent more time with them.

We went to a meeting at one of the ecclesias up that way, I am not certain which one it was, but I had an interesting experience there. It was after the memorial meeting when an old brother approached me and introduced himself. He was short and wiry and had very sinewy arms. He shook my hand with great enthusiasm, and I felt a tingling going right up my arm. It was as though I had received a mild electric shock. After a few pleasantries, I asked him what he did for a living and was quite surprised when he told me he was the local “water diviner.” I must have looked at him with a measure of disbelief and so he said, “You don’t believe in water divining do you?” I confessed that I did not. He said, “Would you like to have a demonstration?” I said “Yes.” He took me outside the hall to a tree that was growing on the verge. He snapped off a thin branch and began peeling the outer bark from the branch exposing the white inside wood. I followed him back inside the hall and the then held the white part of the thin branch between the first three fingers of his hand. The branch began to bend downwards, and it looked as though it would snap off in his fingers. He told me that there was a stream under the hall and the branch was bending in the direction the stream was flowing. He then took an old watch on a chain out of his pocket and hung it downwards towards the floor. The watch began to swing round and round beneath his arm and he told me that this indicated how great was the volume of the water in the stream below. Well, I still looked disbelieving, so he said, “You try it,” and he handed me the chain of the watch and I held it as he had done – Nothing! Then he put his hand lightly over mine and suddenly the watch began to swing in a wide circle. I was amazed.

Well, from that moment I was hooked, and so for the rest of my travels in Queensland I could be found breaking off thin branches from the trees I passed and removing the outer bark from one end and holding the branch and “divining” for water. I found a weight which I hung on a chain and I used this to “find the volume” of the water below. Well there was so much water in Qld at the time due to heavy rains, that water wasn’t hard to find. I continued my water divining when I got back home to dry old Adelaide, much to the amusement of such as Don McColl, who told me water divining, or “dowsing” as it is called was a scientific impossibility. Well, it was fun anyway. I went to the Barr Smith Library in Adelaide, and found a number of books in the “restricted” area on “dowsing” and as I read them, I noted that they started off all “scientifically” and then moved off into the “never never” of superstition, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there and so I gave water divining, “dowsing,” away.

The ecclesias we went to in Brisbane were Redcliffe, Coorparoo and Wilston and we found that the brothers and sisters there had done little to prepare for Jeff’s visit; not much advertising and not much money spent, consequently the response was pretty poor. Nonetheless Jeff’s lectures and studies went well and Jeff was pretty pleased overall. The ecclesias were having a number of marriage and divorce problems at the time and there was a general atmosphere of depression in the ecclesias. For the effort at Redcliffe, we stayed with brother and sister Townsend in their home and parked our trailer in their backyard. The lawn that we parked on was Kikuyu, a very strong and hardy lawn, and easily contained the weight of our trailer, but by the time we left Redcliffe it had been raining so heavily that our trailer sank down to the axles into the soggy lawn.

Apart from Jeff’s talks at night, there was a personal problem that Jeff found he needed to deal with. Brother Townsend’s first wife had died some years earlier, and he had married a second time to a much younger sister who had a couple of daughters. Brother Townsend had a farm that he had been trying to sell, and he had got himself into rather a muddle by signing contracts to sell his land to two different parties at the same time and so he was being sued for “specific performance” of the second contract.

Bro Townsend’s wife was very worried about it and so Jeff got to work to see what he could do to help. After the evening meetings he would sit with Bro Townsend and try to find out exactly what had happened but extracting all the details of what had happened proved very difficult to do, because Bro Townsend would fall asleep mid-discussion. Jeff contacted the solicitors for the complainant and negotiated with them on Bro Townsend’s behalf. Whatever he did was successful, and in the end the second contract lapsed and the parties to the second contract dropped their charges and Bro Townsend was able to go ahead with the first contract without hindrance and the caveats were removed from the land and all was well. Jeff was very popular with Sister Townsend after that because it had been such a worry to her.

But what I remember of Bro Townsend was something else again. I remember that he was a terrible, terrible driver and should not have been trusted with a driving license, let alone a car. The roads in Qld were full of pot holes at the time and that was bad enough, but when Bro Townsend was at the wheel of his car and I was a helpless passenger, sitting beside him, I would sit there, terrified, with my feet up on the dashboard as some sort of insulation against an almost certain crash. When a car came towards him from the other direction, he would grab the wheel grimly between his hands and move it from side to side until the car had passed. Each time I was sure we were going to crash but luckily, there were not too many cars on the country road at the time.

Jeff and Don and Fran put on a lecture at Evans Head and Fran was the speaker. Evans Head was full of tourists who mostly seemed to be of the drifting “hippie” kind. What an experience we had there. I will NEVER forget our time at Evans Head! The lecture was held in the Town Hall on the Main Street. There was a foyer and then an entrance into the hall behind. I sat down on the side of the room near the front and put a blanket down on the floor for the children to sit on. Part way through the meeting a crowd of young people came into the hall, making a lot of noise and bent on disrupting Frans lecture. Jeff decided to try to get them outside and keep them occupied there so they would not interfere with Fran’s lecture. I waited rather anxiously for him to return, but when, after a time Jeff didn’t come back, I decided to go and look for him and see he was safe. I took Helen with me but left the older kids on the blanket in the hall. I was worried about what was happening with Jeff because the young folk had looked such a rag tag lot. I put Helen in the car and then stood beside it looking down the street to see if I could see Jeff. I could see him in the middle of a growing crowd of people who had gathered around him and he was giving them a mini-lecture. When the crowd all began to yell “crucify him, crucify him,” it was too much for me and I left the car and began to run up the street. I threw my my hat onto a chair in the foyer of the hall before running further down the street, and towards the milling crowd that surrounded Jeff. I hovered anxiously for a moment or two at the edge of the crowd but soon saw that all was okay, and in fact, Jeff seemed to be enjoying himself, so I left him and ran back to the car.

When I got to the car, I found to my horror that it was empty. Helen was gone! I ran up the street calling out “Have you seen a little girl, have you seen a little girl, I can’t find my daughter.” I tried not to panic but was pretty unsuccessful at that. When I didn’t find her further up the street, I ran back to the front of the hall and looked once more in the car, hoping she may have come back. She was not there! By this time my heart was beating very fast indeed, and I was really distressed. I ran into the hall to get help, but inside the hall, there, to my utter relief, sat Helen with the other children happily playing with her doll. How relieved I was. It took me ten minutes before my heart beat slowed and I felt better. When I went to pick up my hat from the foyer, I found that it was gone. I found it later pulled to pieces and in a rubbish bin. Later, to my pleasure, the sisters at the ecclesia all combined together and bought me a new hat!

Jeff had been working in his Job on the design and space allocations for a number of open space schools, so while we had been in Qld, Jeff had been going around the various colleges taking photos of the open space designs of their schools and colleges. On the day we were to leave Redcliffe Jeff discovered that the camera he had been taking photos with, a camera that Fran Ryan had loaned him, had no film in it, and he had been taking photos with NO film in the camera! He was furious (yet I told him that any “idiot” would know to check that the camera had film in it). He rang Fran, who by that time had gone home, and berated him because there was no film in the camera. Fran’s response was predictable, he just rolled around on the floor laughing his head off, much, much to Jeff’s displeasure.

Well, what this meant was that we had to stay in Qld longer than anticipated so that Jeff could go around the schools again and re-take the photos. The consequence of this was rather disastrous, because it began to rain and what a rain! I mean it really rained. There had not been a rain like it for 85 years they told us later. In the Townsend’s backyard, the said Kikuyu grass became sodden, and our trailer sank down to the axles in it. We had to put a tree branch in front of the trailer to get the trailer out and to give the tyres something to grip on as we towed it out of the backyard. Of course, we literally destroyed the Townsend’s lawn in the process. When we left Redcliffe we had the muddiest trailer in existence, but the rain soon washed it off. We had to drive down the inland road because the coast road was flooded.

We got as far as Tamworth and came over a bridge and hit a washout and our back tyre was wiped out. Tamworth was cut off by the floods so we had to spend the night there. We were billeted in a private home because all the hotels were booked out. The next day we drove down the main street and all the shop doorways were sandbagged, then over the bridge, inch by inch, and then on our way again. We had to cross lots of rushing torrents that simply tore up the roads. Once we came to a road that was there one minute and not the next and we had to detour around that. There were a lot of people drowned all around the neighbouring areas but we managed to get through as far as Singleton. Here we were brought to a “glottal” stop when we found we were cut off in front and behind by a new huge flood wave that had cut off Tamworth. We spent the afternoon and night there along with another 500 vehicles all trapped between the two floods; cars, semi-trailers and trucks, only one shop long since sold out of good, no toilets and no bushes either, but there were tons of Mosquitos!! We were so grateful to Marg Ryan for loaning us two big mosquito nets that we were able to put right over the car and the trailer. The kids slept in the car and Jeff and I could only lie on top of the trailer because it was impossible to open up the trailer and set it up in all the rain.

What a picnic! People searched for firewood and when they couldn’t find any, they pulled up fences and used the wood to build bonfires and sat around the fires and talked and sang and generally made it a holiday affair. There was no food to be had and so next morning, just before the flood had diminished, a helicopter flew over and dropped packages of food and medicine to the trapped people below. The supplies were then distributed by the Salvation Army and so Jeff and I and the kids had some lovely sandwiches to eat. Jimmy insisted on swimming in the flood waters by the side of the road, and his underpants came out a lovely shade of grey! When at last the floods had passed on and we could drive again we were so relieved. However, we had a smash in the car on the way to Brisbane because of the brakes having got wet in the flood.

We came back to Adelaide in the second week of February, and received a number of letters from people we had met along the way. John and Carol Barton wrote asking Jeff for charts and to tell us that they were expecting another infant. Aleck Crawford wrote asking Jeff for slides and a letter came from Mary Ann Brinkerhoff telling us that they had just had an earthquake in Los Angeles which was so severe that many people had died of heart attacks as a result of their terror at the quake. She said that she longed for her front door to open and for Helen and I to come in, or failing that she wanted so much to come back to Australia.

It was around this time that Paul Cresswell came to Adelaide and did a series of lectures in Adelaide. I wrote a letter to Dev Ramchuran about my interest in the Cherubim, the army of the saints, as it comes through the East Gate into the Temple at the beginning of the millenium, and that I did not believe that the altar would be in the centre of the Temple complex but near the porch, and that I wanted to know whether he thought that the prince was Jesus Christ or a mortal man.

I wrote to Mary Ann about a book I had read that had so much impressed me. It was a book called “Malabar farm” by Louis Bromfield which was a diary of his establishment of a farm in the Ohio Valley and his unique method of farming. This book had sparked an interest in Jeff and me for growing organic food and we now had a huge watermelon in the backyard which had grown in our compost heap. Jim was at school full-time and Helen was out of nappies. Yippee!! The children were all well, and even Debbie hadn’t missed much school lately. Jeff has headaches, tiredness and frustration and irritability – Everything! And I had been working in the mornings, sleeping 2 hours in the afternoon and working then till midnight.

I told Mary Ann that Debbie had a weep last night because she missed the Brinkerhoff children so much. I also wrote to her about an offer I had received from Phillip Russell that I could talk to her for half an hour at night because Phillip worked with the telephone exchange. His job was to test phone lines apparently and he would get bored doing his job. He said that if I was prepared to talk to him for half an hour some nights, then I could make a call to Mary Ann or Joan Hodge and speak to them for half an hour.

Another letter from Mary Ann asked me to borrow a cassette recorder so that I can listen to the tape she would be sending me. She said that she loved my last letter because I sounded “like the old Fay.” She said that “Gramps has given up on the vegetable garden because the smog is so bad it kills everything in Los Angeles and she wondered if the Herbie Twine affair had been sorted. She said she prayed that we could spend the coming years together raising our kids.

Around this time, Jim and Marg Cowie left Adeladie to go to live up in Queensland. This made Jeff and I feel very sad, because Jim and Margaret were such good friends. In March, they wrote to us that they had arrived in Sydney and were now staying at Ted  Spongberg’s place and that they had now left Sydney but had not traveled far. They had seen so many beautiful places on the way out of Sydney including some lovely rain forests. In April we received a letter from Dwayne and Deanna Tunnell who were in Fiji for 6 months on mission work. They said they had visitors from Australia, Bruce and Kerry Hosking, Margaret Littler, Kevin Dennes (Kevin is in America right now and Morry Stewart has really enjoyed seeing them again), Bro & Sis Leslie Hodges from Invercargill NZ  and Brian and Wendy Saunders from Canada. Aleck and Chris Crawford left last Thursday for Canada and we had a baptism of Sorojini Gounder the sister who stayed with Jim Mercer in Adelaide for a year. They asked if we would be going to Easter Camp this year as they understood that John Martin would not be doing it and wondered if Jeff might. They asked if work is going on at the new school, and whether construction had started yet. Bob Witton was in Fiji with them and was such a help in the work there.

At Easter time, Perce Mansfield asked Jeff to go to Perth to do the effort there because he was unable to do it. This meant that I had to go to Easter Camp and take the kids by myself this year. Just before I went to the camp I received a letter from Mary Ann saying that she was very unhappy in LA and that she felt she had come full circle because Forrest had had to take a corporate job again and he was away a lot and life had just gone back to what she hated. We received a letter from Don and Una asking us to come to Perth at the end of the year and do an effort at Stirling and offering to pay our petrol if we would come. We received a letter from Val and Gil Swan telling us about a young people’s camp they were hosting at Stanwell Tops, NSW.

In May we received a letter from Jim and Marg Cowie. Marg said she was sitting on a park bench in the botanical gardens near a small lake with a fountain, having just been offered a job in the Qld Institute of Technology because of her experience in immunology. She said she and Jim had had a pleasant trip up to Qld and enjoyed themselves most in Ballina where they were staying with Bro and Sis Evans. She said that Jim had been working very hard and had become quite run down and Margaret hardly ever seemed to get to see him and was feeling lonely and home sick. They had gone house-hunting but houses are old and needing a lot of work but they had found one that was a reasonable price and in good condition. How I missed them. I hate it when old friends leave.I received a letter from Lydia Mednyanski from London where she and Joe were visiting. We had another letter from Dwayne and Deanna Tunnell telling us that they had met the Murray Lunn’s as they came off the ship, the same ship, that Dwayne and Deanna were to travel on, on their way back home after 6 months in Fiji. They said they had had Phil and Kaye Russell and Gordon and Eunice Russel visiting them in Fiji for a few days.

Ron Abel had left to go back home and we had gone to the airport to see him off and that felt like an “end of an era” too. How he will be missed. We wrote to him telling him how much we had appreciated his ministrations while he had been in Australia. We received a letter from Margaret Littler telling us that Ted Spongberg was going to the spring school in NZ and wanted some slides if Jeff had any suitable. When I think of the work Jeff did making charts and slides for all sorts of people it is really quite amazing. I sent some cash to Rhonda Stretton in Sydney for some of the clothes and all the wonderful “dress up” petticoats she had sent us for the kids. She wanted to know if we were coming back to Sydney at Xmas time and I told her “No” because we were heading in the other direction to Perth and the Strempel’s at Xmas.
19710819 I wrote a letter to Jeff, telling him that Yagoona, Bossley Park, Pennant Hills and Campside had dis-fellowshipped Shaftsbury Road ecclesia! So sad. 19710827 was our holiday at Port Broughton that I have written about in Chapter 9 The Blacksmith’s daughter, Vol 2.

I wrote to Jim and Marg Cowie telling them that Klaus Papowski had called around to see us and played us a tape from them saying that everything had worked out for them and that they have a house now. I told Jim and Marg that Klaus was finding things rather tough and lonely here in Adelaide without them and I said that it might be a good idea to keep him up with them in Qld when he went to visit them at Xmas.

19710922 – I wrote a letter to Joan and Ted Hodge thanking them for their card and telling them that I miss them so much since they have returned home. I told them that I drive past where they lived while they were here in Adelaide and find it to sad that they are not there now. I told them how much our kids miss their kids as well. I said that we had seen Ron Abel off on Monday afternoon and that it was such a sad and miserable bunch of people who saw him off. How much they will all miss him. I told them that Brighton put on a big send off for Ron at the Unley Town Hall and there were a large crowd of people there from all the ecclesias. Ron had just come back from Brisbane and said that Donny McIntosh was missing you badly. I said that Jeff had been taken off of teaching and is now doing space allocations and floor layouts for a 5-school complex at Gilles Plains.

.We received a tape from Mary Anne and Forrest and I wrote a letter to them in reply saying that we had just returned from a holiday at Pt Broughton which was reminiscent of Mary Ann and my holiday at Willunga and what a good time we had had there. I reminded Mary Ann about the dairy at Willunga and the milk man providing us with beautiful fresh milk and thick cream every day. I spoke about how Debbie loved that milk so much that she would eat it even though she was allergic to it and would within half an hour be vomiting it up, yet she still came back for more each day. I told her how Peter Scott was so miserable when Ron left Adelaide. He said “first Mary Ann and Forrest and now Ron, why does everyone LEAVE!” And by the way, we have a pet lamb now called “Ali Ba Ba.” Why? Well the kids wanted a pet to replace the Brinkerhoffs!! The kids play a game with Ali Ba Ba-they stand in a row on the back lawn and try to stop Ali Ba Ba as he charges through. He knows it is a game because he likes to play it endlessly.

When Mary Ann and Forrest were still with us, they wanted their children to learn German, so I was the transport, because I had the car, and so our children as well as Mary Ann and Forest’s went to German School at Rose Park. Well, Sharon and Helen used to sit at the back of the class playing with their barbie dolls under the desk the whole time and learned NO German, Judith’s report at the end of the year read “Judith has NO interest in the German language.” The only ones who learned any German were Deb and Jim. In later years Jim andJesia contued their German studies into High School and beyond. Also at this time I was working for Woodham Biggs selling residential housing. And that was 1971!