Page 278 - Three Score Years & Ten
P. 278
“THREE SCORE YEARS AND TEN” MISSIONARY WORK IN CHINA
Amy Moore
afford even the one servant, so very reluctantly we let him go. Now we really did have to ‘do our own
thing’.
One of us got the kitchen fire going each morning to heat water for washing and for breakfast, while
the other got the children up and dressed. Our fires were charcoal ones and it was a messy job
getting them started. Bread had to be baked almost daily with so many people eating at our table and,
as our oven was only a kerosine tin with a lid at one end, I could not do great quantities at once.
Percy learned to use a carrying pole to carry water for the day from the well down in the Church
garden. That was an art in itself, and then he had to learn just how to give the bucket the right twist as
he lowered it into the well so that it would go under and fill with water. He became quite an expert and
our water butts were filled to the full every morning.
I learned just how many minutes I could afford to go on kneading bread dough after the air alarm
sounded before I must cover it in a warm place and make a dive for the dugout where everybody else
had already gathered. The guests who were with us for any length of time were roped in to make their
own beds, tidy their own rooms and help with the general housework. So we managed but the time
we could spend in visitation and other Church work became sadly curtailed. We longed for the day
when we could have servants again and hand over to them these mundane jobs so that we could
spend more time in doing the work we had come to China for, the preaching of the Gospel. People all
round us were suffering because of the air raids and we longed to be free to reach out more to the
needy in our streets.
David Bentley-Taylor’s impressions of life in Hanzhong at that time are worth recording. We had lived
in South Shaanxi for so long that we had lost the freshness of first impressions, but to him it was all
new. He spoke of Hanzhong and the Hanzhong Plain as being so different from the ‘barren mountains
of Gansu’. He called it
“a smiling part of Shaanxi, semi tropical, the glorious Hanzhong Plain, 100 miles long
and mostly 20 miles wide, surrounded by mountain ranges and covered with towns,
villages and prosperous farmlands watered by the great Han River on its long journey
to join the Chang Jiang at Hankow (Wuhan), meaning ‘mouth of the Han’
The walled city of Hanzhong seemed like Old China after the bustling metropolis of
Lanzhou. Its twisty narrow streets were packed with simple country people. There
were plenty of stationers’ shops, shoe shops, chemists, photographers everywhere,
tea shops at road junctions and banks with their sentry and gun. Dark and steamy
food shops alternated with tailors’ shops filled with sewing machines, grocers’ shops
and bamboo shops where all manner of articles were made. Every evening
prodigious hordes of crows flew in with great determination from the surrounding hills
to spend the night in trees all over the city.
Outside the walls among the rice fields, activity was equally feverish. At one and the
same time one might see field after field filled with ripened grain, others in process of
being reaped, others where the grain was being beaten out into large bins, leaving the
rice straw to be tied into bundles.
In the villages on the age old roads, already by-passed by broader highways for motor
traffic were a multitude of temples. Many of them were used for barracks in war time.
Common sights were hump backed stone bridges, massive archways, stone wells
with idol shrines beside them and trees to shade the rural streets. All round one could
hear the click of weavers’ looms and see women endlessly spinning, while men
278
Amy Moore
afford even the one servant, so very reluctantly we let him go. Now we really did have to ‘do our own
thing’.
One of us got the kitchen fire going each morning to heat water for washing and for breakfast, while
the other got the children up and dressed. Our fires were charcoal ones and it was a messy job
getting them started. Bread had to be baked almost daily with so many people eating at our table and,
as our oven was only a kerosine tin with a lid at one end, I could not do great quantities at once.
Percy learned to use a carrying pole to carry water for the day from the well down in the Church
garden. That was an art in itself, and then he had to learn just how to give the bucket the right twist as
he lowered it into the well so that it would go under and fill with water. He became quite an expert and
our water butts were filled to the full every morning.
I learned just how many minutes I could afford to go on kneading bread dough after the air alarm
sounded before I must cover it in a warm place and make a dive for the dugout where everybody else
had already gathered. The guests who were with us for any length of time were roped in to make their
own beds, tidy their own rooms and help with the general housework. So we managed but the time
we could spend in visitation and other Church work became sadly curtailed. We longed for the day
when we could have servants again and hand over to them these mundane jobs so that we could
spend more time in doing the work we had come to China for, the preaching of the Gospel. People all
round us were suffering because of the air raids and we longed to be free to reach out more to the
needy in our streets.
David Bentley-Taylor’s impressions of life in Hanzhong at that time are worth recording. We had lived
in South Shaanxi for so long that we had lost the freshness of first impressions, but to him it was all
new. He spoke of Hanzhong and the Hanzhong Plain as being so different from the ‘barren mountains
of Gansu’. He called it
“a smiling part of Shaanxi, semi tropical, the glorious Hanzhong Plain, 100 miles long
and mostly 20 miles wide, surrounded by mountain ranges and covered with towns,
villages and prosperous farmlands watered by the great Han River on its long journey
to join the Chang Jiang at Hankow (Wuhan), meaning ‘mouth of the Han’
The walled city of Hanzhong seemed like Old China after the bustling metropolis of
Lanzhou. Its twisty narrow streets were packed with simple country people. There
were plenty of stationers’ shops, shoe shops, chemists, photographers everywhere,
tea shops at road junctions and banks with their sentry and gun. Dark and steamy
food shops alternated with tailors’ shops filled with sewing machines, grocers’ shops
and bamboo shops where all manner of articles were made. Every evening
prodigious hordes of crows flew in with great determination from the surrounding hills
to spend the night in trees all over the city.
Outside the walls among the rice fields, activity was equally feverish. At one and the
same time one might see field after field filled with ripened grain, others in process of
being reaped, others where the grain was being beaten out into large bins, leaving the
rice straw to be tied into bundles.
In the villages on the age old roads, already by-passed by broader highways for motor
traffic were a multitude of temples. Many of them were used for barracks in war time.
Common sights were hump backed stone bridges, massive archways, stone wells
with idol shrines beside them and trees to shade the rural streets. All round one could
hear the click of weavers’ looms and see women endlessly spinning, while men
278
