Chapter 7 – The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2015 © 1965 -1970

On June 7, 1965, our son James Ian Berry was born. I will never forget the great feeling of relief and satisfaction when I knew he was a boy. Every man wants a son, and now Jeff had his son and I was so glad. James Ian Berry was a very large baby and he was very red and it had taken only five hours from the first contraction to his birth. Jim was born hungry. It was all he was interested in, and he drank his milk in large gulps, loudly and hungrily. He sounded like a bottle filling up when he drank. His eyes grew wider with each mouthful and noisy swallow.

 

I was so tired in those first few months. Jeff would bring the baby to me at night to feed and I would barely open my eyes as my baby fixed himself upon my breast and drank. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning with Jim still at the breast and one breast would be so empty that it would be like a piece of string and the other would be bursting with milk. When I changed him over to the other breast, within minutes, that breast would be empty just like the other.

Jim’s growth was dramatic. It is normal for a baby to lose some weight immediately after birth, but Jim never lost an ounce – he gained weight rapidly and the nurses at the mothers and baby’s health centre expressed amazement at his rapid growth. Jim always looked at least two years older than he really was, and this made it hard for him. He often heard the words “a big boy like you should know better.”

The months after Jim’s birth passed in a flash and they were spent not only juggling babies but I also began studying for my Adult Matriculation exams. My mother was a wonderful help to me during this period of my life and I was so grateful to her for her help with minding the children to allow me to study and helping with my workload. Having Mum and Dad living “across the paddock” was such a blessing for me. Mum and Dad loved our kids and Mum loved having the interaction with them. With my two brothers living in Sydney and my brother Maynard living over the north of town meant that the only grandchildren Mum and Dad had regular contact with were our children. Deb was five years old at this time, Judy 3 years old and Jimmy was 1 year old.

My Dad loved to laugh, and one day he came to me holding a piece of paper and chuckling to himself. It was an article from the newspaper which he obviously thought was extremely funny.

It was headed “The Plight of the Farmer.”

“It all started back in 1966, when they changed from pounds to dollars-ME OVERDRAFT DOUBLED.
“I was just getting used to this when they brought kilograms instead of pounds and – ME WOOL CLIP DROPPED BY HALF.
“Then they changed rain to millimetres and we haven’t had an inch of rain since. So what do they do? They bring in a thing called celcius and it never gets hotter than 40 degrees in midsummer. NO WONDER ME WHEAT WON’T GROW.
“That wasn’t enough they had to change us over from acres to hectares, and I end up with half the land I had. And so one day I sat down and had a think. I reckon that with daylight saving I was working seven extra hours for nothing. SO I DECIDED TO SELL OUT.
But to cap it all off, I just got the place in the agent’s hands when they changed from miles to kilometres, and now I find I’m too far out of town for anyone to buy the place.”

My brother Charles loved reading and writing things to make people laugh. He used to recite at Prize Giving nights at the Adelaide ecclesia, poems like “Runcorn Ferry,” “Little Albert” and “Albert and the Lion,” and such. One year he wrote a half hour radio program and got the rest of us to help him produce it. It had a “melodrama section,” “classical music” section, “a news” report, and so on. We recorded it, each of us taking a part. Well, to my utter embarrassment, when I went traveling up the east coast with my father on one of our interstate trips, he would trot out this “Radio Program” produced by his kids and he would make every brother and sister whose house we stayed in, suffer through it, and I was so so embarrassed, but there was no stopping Dad, he was so proud of his kids.

It was in 1966 that SA passed the Prohibition of Discrimination Act, the first stage legislation on the grounds of race, colour or country of origin. SA also established the first Australian Aboriginal land rights legislation, the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act.

On Oct 4, 1967, Helen Ruth was born, our third daughter. Once again it was only five hours from the first contraction to her birth and she quickly settled down to breastfeed. The one big difference between Helen and James was that Helen was not a noisy feeder like her brother. She drank daintily and silently and so I could feed her quietly at the back of the room with her face and my breast discreetly covered with a nappy. Oh what a difference that made to me and my socialising! However, Helen was born, I am sure, sucking her thumb and nothing, NOTHING, would prevent her from doing it. There was no way I could get her to use a dummy. I tried every dummy known to man, I am sure, I even purchased a calf’s dummy in case she would suck that, but with no luck at all. Helen sucked her thumb for years after that.

Helen’s thumb sucking gave her a lot of personal grief until she finally gave it up. Helen told me about something that happened when she was three years old which was so traumatic that she never forgot it. On one of our travels over the Nullabor to WA, Jeff and I took Deb, Judy and Jimmy with us by car, but sent Helen on ahead by plane with David Hurn. She could go for free if she sat on his lap. David had severed the top off one of his fingers in an accident and so he was missing a half of one finger. On the trip over to Perth, as Helen was sitting on his lap, he said to her “You’d better not suck your thumb, you know. look what happens if you do,” and he showed her the stump of his finger. Helen was horrified and after that every time she put her finger in her mouth to suck it she would groan, and wonder if she would lose the end of her finger by sucking it. I am sure if David knew how much this would affect Helen he would not have said it to her.

Frank Abel came to Adelaide to stay in 1966-1967 and he was a wonderful inspiration to the Adelaide ecclesias. He attended Woodville ecclesia over the period of his stay and used to come to our place every day for breakfast. My dad and brother had given him work in their factory whilst he was in Adelaide and so he travelled to work with Jeff who was also working there at the time. He finally returned home in August 1967 and we were so sorry to see him go. He and Dorothy took one thing back with them to Canada that was a little unexpected. They found on returning home that they were expecting their first child, a baby conceived in Australia.

In November 1967, the Brinkerhoffs came to Australia and we were soon close friends and for the next three years our families spent much of our time together. For the first months they lived in HPM’s flat at West Beach which was only a hop step and a jump to our place at West Beach. The children’s clothing that Mary Ann brought out from America fascinated me. She had dozens of girl’s outfits made of drip dry material and in an endless array of interesting styles. Such dresses were not available in Australia at that time and I so envied the fact that Mary Ann just had to wash all these “scraps” of cotton and never had to iron them. Similar clothing became available in Australia in later years but not at that time. Mary Ann did not have a wardrobes for her clothes so the children’s clothing was always in a pile on the floor of the lounge room and her girls would just pick out a dress and put it on.

Heidi, Dana, Gail and Sharon went so well with Deb, Jude, and Helen, and well, Jim, he was “just Jim,” and he had to get used to spending his time with a bunch of girls. Mary Ann and I never had to worry about entertaining our kids because the combined imagination of eight bright children, the Brinkerhoff’s and the Berry’s, always found things of interest to do.

I made a back pack that I could carry Helen in when she was a baby so that I could go hiking with the Brinkerhoffs. I went one day with Mary Ann and our children trying to find where I had once gone with Nancy King down to the Sturt River. I knew it I should be able to access the path to the creek from behind the aboriginal girls home that used to be there on Shepherd’s Hill Road, but was unable to find the old pathway down the hill. In the end I realised that the empty hillside above the deep ravine of the Sturt Creek had been divided up into housing blocks and that our way to the Sturt Creek was blocked. I was so sad because I remembered how we had gone swimming in the water holes that were there and there was one place where you could sit under a waterfall and have a shower. I so badly wanted to show Mary Anne the haunts of my childhood, but it was not to be. I thought about that song

It was in 1968 that Morry Stewart came to Adelaide. He was a very charismatic speaker and made quite an impact in Adelaide. His talks were lively and inspiring. He had a few gimmicks that he used. One was that he had a scroll that he had made up which had on it all the quotations in the Bible that spoke about the return of Jesus Chris to the earth. Of course, this made for a very long scroll, and he would throw it down on the floor and it would open up and run down the hall for a very long way. At his major public lecture, a stranger came into the hall and sat down second row from the front, and during the course of the lecture he nodded off to sleep. When Morry came to the part where he threw the scroll down the aisle and let it unroll down the hall, well, it landed right beside our sleeping friend. The friend woke in a fright and jumped up in his seat, and then sat down again and his eyes stayed open wide after that, right to the end of the lecture.

In 1968 Jeff and I received a letter from Ron Abel thanking Jeff for charts he had sent him on Corinthians. He said that he couldn’t believe his eyes when he opened the package and saw the charts. He said they would be an enormous help to him in the work he was doing in Melbourne at the time. Jeff and I also received a letter from Frank and Dorothy Abel who were now back in Canada and their first little girl was around three months old. Frank was enjoying his new teaching position and looking forward to the holidays.

In October 1968 We received another letter from Frank and Dorothy Abel thanking Jeff for the chart he had sent them on Revelation. Frank said that Harry Whitaker’s book was proving a problem in Canada and that many had taken up his view of the book of Revelation. John Martin had been in Canada and had given some talks on James in Toronto which had been very well received. Peter and Lainie Pickering had also been visiting and had been helpful there. Frank was now Sunday School Superintendent and also ran a verse-by-verse class at Grand Valley every Thursday night. Dorothy told us that their little girl Martha was just about to walk and asked how Helen was progressing.

We had correspondence as well with Bart Bartholomew of Vernon British Columbia, thanking Jeff for the charts he sent on the book of Haggai which Bart said had arrived even before he received a letter from us telling him of them being sent. Bart told us how much they had enjoyed the work of John Martin, John Ullman, HPM and Ted Spongberg who have all been traveling in the area. Bart thanked Jeff for all his work on the charts that have been sent to them to use in their public lecture work in Vernon. Bart told us that his daughter Chris had left for the UK for 6 months work there prior to her coming back to Vernon to marry Colin Hollamby, and then return to Australia where they would be living.

In October 1968, Ian Leask from South Africa visited Australia and Jeff and I spent a considerable amount of time in his company and for some time after that we corresponded with him. We were very sad when he finally left to fly home, knowing that we would be unlikely to see him again before the kingdom.

Joan Crocker had moved to Tasmania to live and things had not gone well for her over there. Her marriage had broken up and although the ecclesia was wonderful to her, things were none the less not easy for her. She wanted to stay in Tasmania but her family brought her home.

Throughout 1969 a group of us used to meet in each other’s homes for a bible study around the book Elpis Israel by Dr Thomas. There were usually around six of us who attended, but the numbers varied. They included Phyl Knowles, Marian Roper and Mary Ann Brinkerhoff. We each used to bring a plate of food for lunch, and I always made a salad using the salad slicer that I had purchased at the Bible School. One of the ingredients that I used was the stems of Scotch thistles that used to grow in the paddock at the back of our house. I used to slice this up and mix it with the celery in the salad and it gave a very unique taste to the salad. On one occasion we listened to a tapes that Phyl Knowles had come across on mental health by Dr Murray Banks and we all found it very interesting. There were a lot of books that were appearing in the book shops at the time which soon became known as “self-help” books. I used to read them a lot to try to find out how to modify my behaviour and reactions to the stressors in my life.

The new Hymn book was proving a “problem” amongst the ecclesias at this time, with the suburban ecclesias opposing its introduction and Adelaide encouraging its use. The Adelaide Ecclesia sent out a letter begging the suburban ecclesias to at least discuss the hymn book and not simply refuse to talk about it. The chasm that emerged between Adelaide ecclesia and the Suburbs continued to grow from this time onwards, and the “Hymn book issue” never really was resolved.

One Saturday, I was sitting at the kitchen table marking my Bible when the front door burst open and in walked Barrie and Ronda Stretton. I was so surprised to see them. Ronda and I decided to leave the boys at home and go and see Jan Jolly and Rod Hunter’s marriage which was being held at Cumberland. At the wedding we met Marg and Fran Ryan who were attending the wedding, and so we invited them back to supper after the wedding if the wedding didn’t go too late. However it did go too late so we postponed their visit to a later date, possibly Wednesday.

When I arrived home I found Jeff reading a book Murray Lund had given home called “Three against the Wilderness” by Eric Collier. It is about Eric Collier himself, a young Englishman, his quarter breed Indian wife and small son who set of for a barren land in British Columbia, where he had been given the sole trapping rights for 150,000 acres. This vast area was parched and exhausted by constant fires. His home was seven hours by wagon from the nearest trading post. For neighbours he had only moose bears, timber wolves and coyotes. By back-breaking labour he rebuilt the beaver dams and farmed the wilderness. His small family restored the natural wealth of the area. At first they were so poor that they had to toss a lighted torch into a bear cave to get a winter’s supply of grease. Their whole existence depended on Collier’s skill with a gun. His wife was almost killed by a renegade moose which was shot with only a few feet to spare. It is the story of a fight by an exceptional family against hardships that seem scarcely credible. Jeff and I loved the book and read it together until 1 pm. Parts of it were so moving that Jeff and I both had wet eyes. It left both of us with a yearning to do something worthwhile with our lives, but we knew that we had to conquer the wilderness within before we could conquer the wilderness without.

On Sunday, 10th September 1969, since the house was quite tidy, I thought that we might just be on time for the meeting that day but the day didn’t progress too well from there. Dad came and mowed the lawn and Jeff helped him and did some rotary hoeing as well. Inevitably we were well on the way to being late for the meeting and that made me feel upset because I had especailly wanted to be on time, so that we could sit in the main hall with Ronda and Barrie Stretton. I still had to iron clothes for the children which of course should have been done the day before, and that held me up too. I began to get angry and stressed, and soon was yelling a the kids and at Jeff. In the end, I decided I just wouldn’t go to the meeting at all because we were going to be late. I hoped that would get Jeff moving, but then he decided he would stay home too. I knew Debbie badly wanted to go to the meeting, so finally we got our act together and left for the meeting. There were no parking spaces left and we almost turned around and came home but finally we were settled and Jeff and the children went inside and I stayed outside to put helen to sleep.

When finally I was in the meeting, I found that Graham Wigzell was exhorting on Proverbs 31. I was feeling very miserable and chastened by this time, and felt that Proverbs 31 was just what I needed to lift my spirits, but I found Graham’s method of expression in his exhortation was so very negative that there was little to be gained from it. For example, in verse 11 we are told that the “heart of her husband does safely trust in her.” Instead of emphasising the positive principles of this and exhorting wives to be loving and trustworthy, thinking at all times to do good to her husband and to work diligently and sincerely in the tasks associated with her family’s well being, Graham would take the negative and say wives must not be untrustworthy, must not do husbands evil, must not be slothful, must not neglect family well being. I found it so depressing and all it did was “convince me of my sin,” and I wished he could have had a more positive view of things, so that we women could believe that it is possible to be all those virtuous things.

On 12th November 1969, Jeff and I paid the deposit off on our home and so at last we had a mortgage and could begin to pay that off. On the 22nd November 1969 Jeff’s brother Robbie was married to Terry Akin.

In 1968 I contacted the Academic Board and they agreed that I could sit for Modern History instead of a language for my matriculation. That meant that I could expect to complete my matriculation by 1971 and commence University in 1972, so that was a relief.

The subjects I finally completed for my matriculation were English, Biology, Ancient History and Modern History.

27th February 1969 was pretty much a wasted day. First of all I needed to take the Chris and Vivien Walker to see their new Housing Trust home at Elizabeth. Chris and Vivien had been living for some time with Jeff’s dad at 9 Layton Street Fulham to care for him there after his wife Olive’s death. When I got back I found that Mum had forgotten to take Deb to the Dentist. So far, the day had not gone too well. I sat down and wrote myself a list of jobs to do and decided that if I started right away it was possible that I could do all the tasks I had set myself. Well, it wasn’t possible after all. Wendy Jolly rang me and talked for ages. She wanted to know whether I thought she should go to Israel for a visit. I gave her a pep talk on positive thinking and said that she should spark up and get rid of her negative frame of mind and DO something with her life, and if that involved going to Israel, then GO. Well, I didn’t get my work done, but there is nothing surer than that it will be there for me to do the next day, and the next, and the next. One bit of news for the day, Levi Eschcol died today, so things should get interesting in Israel.

10th April, 1969 – Today after I drove Jeff to work, I called around to see Phyl Knowles. John and Phyl had just returned from a trip to Brisbane and John was pleased with the effort that they had had there. Phyl looked absolutely exhausted and said it had been a nightmare trip both there and back. On the return trip home it had taken them 26 1/2 hours to get from Brisbane to Sydney because the bus kept breaking down. When they arrived in Sydney, they were told there would be no bus until tomorrow. Phyl kicked up a big fuss and ended up getting a free trip ty TAA back to Adelaide. While I was at Phyl’s place, Marg Hill rang up and told Phyl about the Easter week end and how she and Ray thought the weekend was absolutely wonderful and she told Phyl that everyone was still talking about Jeff’s play that he had produced and the general consensus of opinion was that Jeff had excelled himself.

17th March 1969. Today was the sale at the Red Cross. Spare me from sales! Mum came here around eight and helped me get Judy off to School. Debbie stayed home due to a very bad cough. I drove to town and parked at the school of Mechanical Technology, dropped Jeff’s lunch off and then walked to the Red Cross sale. It had commenced when I arrived and now resembled a disturbed ant hill. What a scurrying purposeful multitude of determined women. I tried the $2, $6, and $8 section with my big basket held high over my head. I joined the scrum and a scrum it was. At first I kept sayig, “sorry,” and “beg your pardon,” but soon realised that civilities at a sale are simply so much wasted breath.

I decided to try the suits and dresses section, Here they were letting only a few people through at attime and refusing entry to the “milling multitude,” and I was one of the “milling multitude.” There was a stormy faced woman who came up behind me wearing the determined expression of the seasoned saler. She edged in front of me – I edged in front of her. Finally I slipped past the guard at the door. I found a jumper that looked ok, but they told me they didn’t accept cheques. So with a sigh of relief, having done my duty, I left without a thing. I reported to Jeff, and then went to spend a quite hour in the public library, much more to my taste! I found a section on Psychology that interested me. I read about a woman who had found a way to combine earning with travelling. She put an ad in several women’s magazines saying that she was going overseas and for a fee of $10 she would contract to write semi-personal letters to people telling them her adventures. She had 300 replies and this paid for her trip and most expenses. I should do that!