Life observed

If a third reflective piece on the life and death of my parents seems self indulgent, please be patient with me.

I had always intended a trilogy; of death, grief and ultimately life.

My parents’ lives could be divided into three phases, each spanning about 30 years, give or take.

The First Thirty Years

Six years ago my son edited and typed up his grandfather’s personal memoirs, written longhand in the previous decade of his life. Strangely, and yet not so strangely, his memoirs concentrated almost exclusively on these first thirty years. As a POW on the Burma Railway, his life seemed to be defined so powerfully by this short period.

Dad really lived the drama and trauma of several lifetimes during his first thirty years. He lost his mother at the age of four. He lived with uncles and aunties and at an Anglican orphanage at Ashfield for the next five years. He returned home when his father remarried but his relationship with his stepmother was strained.

Dad tells of an occasion when he was six:

In early December of 1926 I came down with double pneumonia and was rushed to Camperdown Children’s Hospital. My life was hanging by a thread. I had a rubber tube inserted through my right side into the walls of my lungs. It was used on a daily basis to siphon the fluid from my lungs. The end of the tube was prevented from moving into the body by means of a large safety pin. After the operation I was given up for dead, as my heart stopped beating for some forty seconds. During recovery I was given blood transfusions by direct means from Dad. He lay beside me and blood was passed from him into me through a vein in my right arm.

Dad proposed to Mum before he set sail for war. He saw two weeks of action when Singapore fell.

An uncanny silence fell over the area. It seemed such a tragic silence, making it difficult to grasp what had happened, but the fact was plain enough. Singapore had surrendered unconditionally. Even though we were surprised and flabbergasted, there was no gesture that could adequately mark this moment in history. Some just swore, some threw their rifles down while some just stood like statues in the empty streets.

He and his fellow prisoners stood on the parade ground outside Changi prison for three days. They were then transported, like cattle, in railway trucks up to the Thai/Burma railway camps.

In nearly four years of incarceration Mum received two pieces of correspondence confirming that Dad was alive. The first was an official telegram from the Japanese War Office informing his family that, “Alf Mansfield is healthy and happy.” The second was just one of many letters that made it through to his beloved Betty.

Dad writes about a trek to a new campsite:

Many men were falling out along the way, so we took turns to help them shuffle forward, by having a man on each side of the sick one and he with his arms around the shoulders of the two supporting men. One could have enjoyed the march in other circumstances for the woods were alive with beautiful butterflies.

And the loss of one of many of his band of brothers:

Then we lost our dear friend Tom Carter. He died of the wretched cholera. It was a very fast and quick death. He returned from work one night and by midday the next day he was gone. We carried his body on a bamboo stretcher to a funeral pyre also made of bamboo. Jack Clarke, the acting padre, read the funeral service. Kerosene was then splashed over his body and burnt. Later the ashes were gathered in a bottle and buried in a marked grave.

The Second Thirty Years

Dad returned from the war looking like a tissue-thin, skin-covered skeleton. He was determined to show his gratitude to God for preserving his life by raising a god-fearing family. He was confirmed at St Andrew’s Cathedral, married Mum at St Columb’s West Ryde and built a home, brick by brick, with the help of his father on a soldier settlement bush block in West Killara.

I came along three years after my sister. Many happy years were spent on that dusty unsealed road high on a ridge above the Lane Cove River. We caught tadpoles and killed snakes. We built fires on overhanging rock ledges above the river and boiled the billy down on the banks of the river.

A move to Wollongong saw me trade the bush for the beach - and a much less innocent life as a young teenager! I didn’t see much of Dad during these years. He was consumed by work, I by mischief. It was an all too common combination for trouble.

Dad’s work colleagues, above him and below him on the chain gang, waxed eloquently throughout my life and to this day about what a hard working, gentle and fair man he was. They loved him, and I loved that they loved him for I loved him too.

I just wished, and I know he wished for he told me much later, that he hadn’t been so busy. I wanted him to come and watch me play park footy more often and to come with me to watch more big matches at the SCG. We were like strangers during my turbulent teenage years.

The Third Thirty Years

Mum and Dad were to live a third of their life in retirement. When our children were young they were generous with their time. Dad taught our son to fish while I was preoccupied with other watery interests. The fishing gene skipped a generation.

Mum taught the girls to shop. I joked at Mum’s funeral that preachers want to die in the pulpit, farmers with their boots on and horsemen in the saddle. But Mum wanted to die in a dress shop.

From the day I came to Christ and began to share the gospel with Mum and Dad they struggled with the scandal of God’s grace. It had to involve merit and not just mercy. What about good people? And people who have suffered serving and defending their country?

A great group of retired men at St Michael’s Wollongong took Dad into their golfing fraternity. They and their wives took Mum and Dad into their mixed Bible Study group. They soaked up the faithful teaching of God’s word at church and slowly, surely, the light of the gospel of grace switched on in their lives.

On a mission to Bega on the South Coast of NSW I heard my otherwise shy father share his story of grace for the first of several times:

For most of my life I believed in God and prayed to God, especially in times of crisis, like during the war. But although I believed in God I always felt that I was a stranger to God and I could never figure out where Jesus fitted in. But in the last few years I have come to understand that Jesus is God’s Son who died on the cross for my sin and the really important thing is to trust in Him.

Life observed; of life that hangs by a thread, life of beauty and brokenness, and life rescued by the beauty of grace and the brokenness of Jesus’ life for His people’s sin.

So that in life, in death, and in grief, there is eternal life for those who trust the crucified and risen King who declared: