Page 112 - moondani kyema
P. 112
ndani kyema, My Story - Ray Moore 112
So when we arrived in Rainbow back from our honeymoon we began to set up our
own home and prepare for three or four children to become part of our family.
The Baptist Home Mission loaned us £250 with which to buy furniture, and we were
able to settle quickly in to the Baptist manse at Rainbow. Nine months after our
honeymoon, Michael was born! The family jokingly cast doubt on this, but we will
swear by it! So now I was a father and husband and we were a family.
Bev went into labour on Sunday morning.. These were the days when a husband
was supposed to make himself scarce and not get in the way, so she faced most of
this time in labour alone. Meanwhile I still had my clerical duties to perform. I
preached at the Rainbow church and then had to preach at the Hindmarsh church, a
part of a circuit of three churches which also included Brentwood. The road to
Hindmarsh had been cut due to the overflow of the Hindmarsh lake, so I had to take
a very rough track which started out through some local farms and then became a
sandy track through the edge of the Big Desert.
All was going well until I got bogged in the sand. It took me some time and quite a bit
of sweat to get the car out of there, and I arrived at the Hindmarsh church a good half
an hour late. This ‘church’ was actually a corrugated iron district hall, which was
rarely used for anything else but our church services. There was possibly one farm
house in sight, otherwise it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland. It had
a very old pedal organ from which I extricated a number of dead mice and other
nasties when I first arrived. After patching up the bellows with sheets of vinyl and
glue, it did us well for the next three years.
This church had a very small attendance of about three or four families, and when I
arrived they had been standing around, as farm people do, chatting about the
weather and the crops etc. One of the men had just said in his slow way, “Maybe we
could go in and start the service now”. I took over from there and then rushed back
in to Rainbow without getting bogged this time, to see if I was a Dad yet. But not yet!
The local GP was a slightly eccentric
character who lived with his elderly
mother and used to spend a fair bit of
time on his desert property some
miles away. There he had placed a
20 litre drum on the top of a tall pole
so that his mother would not get lost
when she wandered around the area.
On Monday morning, Bev’s labour
was over and Michael John had
emerged into the light of day. But I
did not know this at the time, because
when the doctor phoned me to give me the good news, I was down at the back fence
using the ‘dunny’ (emptied regularly by the ‘night man’ from the back lane) and when
he got no answer from me, he did not bother phoning back.
None of that mattered when I got to the hospital to find Bev looking beautiful (‘pale
and interesting’ I used to say) and without asking permission I went into the nursery
So when we arrived in Rainbow back from our honeymoon we began to set up our
own home and prepare for three or four children to become part of our family.
The Baptist Home Mission loaned us £250 with which to buy furniture, and we were
able to settle quickly in to the Baptist manse at Rainbow. Nine months after our
honeymoon, Michael was born! The family jokingly cast doubt on this, but we will
swear by it! So now I was a father and husband and we were a family.
Bev went into labour on Sunday morning.. These were the days when a husband
was supposed to make himself scarce and not get in the way, so she faced most of
this time in labour alone. Meanwhile I still had my clerical duties to perform. I
preached at the Rainbow church and then had to preach at the Hindmarsh church, a
part of a circuit of three churches which also included Brentwood. The road to
Hindmarsh had been cut due to the overflow of the Hindmarsh lake, so I had to take
a very rough track which started out through some local farms and then became a
sandy track through the edge of the Big Desert.
All was going well until I got bogged in the sand. It took me some time and quite a bit
of sweat to get the car out of there, and I arrived at the Hindmarsh church a good half
an hour late. This ‘church’ was actually a corrugated iron district hall, which was
rarely used for anything else but our church services. There was possibly one farm
house in sight, otherwise it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland. It had
a very old pedal organ from which I extricated a number of dead mice and other
nasties when I first arrived. After patching up the bellows with sheets of vinyl and
glue, it did us well for the next three years.
This church had a very small attendance of about three or four families, and when I
arrived they had been standing around, as farm people do, chatting about the
weather and the crops etc. One of the men had just said in his slow way, “Maybe we
could go in and start the service now”. I took over from there and then rushed back
in to Rainbow without getting bogged this time, to see if I was a Dad yet. But not yet!
The local GP was a slightly eccentric
character who lived with his elderly
mother and used to spend a fair bit of
time on his desert property some
miles away. There he had placed a
20 litre drum on the top of a tall pole
so that his mother would not get lost
when she wandered around the area.
On Monday morning, Bev’s labour
was over and Michael John had
emerged into the light of day. But I
did not know this at the time, because
when the doctor phoned me to give me the good news, I was down at the back fence
using the ‘dunny’ (emptied regularly by the ‘night man’ from the back lane) and when
he got no answer from me, he did not bother phoning back.
None of that mattered when I got to the hospital to find Bev looking beautiful (‘pale
and interesting’ I used to say) and without asking permission I went into the nursery
