I knew nothing of Mrs Davies until a few weeks ago, when I came across her name while doing family research.
Had this interfering old cow (bless her bloomers) not stuck her nose into my parents’ ambitions, I may have been born in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai.
Instead, your columnist was hatched in Whangarei, where the odds on infant survival were somewhat better.
To most of us, our parents are puzzles. Part of our own family’s legend was that before we children arrived, our parents were set to depart for China as missionaries — but were thwarted by the outbreak of World War 2.
Our father was a young pharmacist who decided he’d rather dispense prayers than drugs. He trained as a Presbyterian minister at Knox College, and while Hebrew and Ancient Greek had Dad scratching his head, he eventually got his papers. (He also left a 1936 student diary, with his thoughts on King Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate to marry a dodgy American.
"The King is a rotter and a cad!’’ fumed Dad. I don’t think he’d have gone for Meghan Markle).
But I digress. Knox College, I discovered, has a Presbyterian archives section, which indeed held records on the Rev W. Robin Lapsley. I made an appointment, expecting to find a skinny envelope containing a few forms — but was greeted by a researcher, with a pile of excellently assembled folders that covered 50 years.
Deep in the pile I struck gold — my father’s 1937 application to become a missionary in Canton. He’d filled in a lengthy interview form, carefully assembled by the devout.
"Do you believe your paramount duty would be to lead souls to Christ?’’ — "Yes.’’
(Big tick for Dad, I presume.)
"Would you give up personal habits that might grieve fellow missionaries or the heathen?’’
"Yes.’’
"Are you sufficiently free of pride of race to be kept from despising other races?’’
"Yes.’’
And "Yes,’’ he told them, his fiance (my mother) was all aboard for the big adventure. The pair were called in for medicals, and soon after, told they’d got the job.
The Church of the 1930s was still one of the grand callings, and for two 26-year-olds, this appointment must have been huge. But the logistics were slow. Nineteen thirty-eight passed, then in 1939, with the Lapsleys raring to go, a fly alighted in the ointment.
It came in the form of a letter penned by our Mrs Herbert Davies. From Evans St, she wrote to the head of the Presbyterian Missions: Mr Davies asked me to write a note to you re Mrs Robin Lapsley. If there is a question of their being appointed to China I think it is very important that there be a rigid inquiry into her health. I believe she was passed by a doctor in the north as fit, but if so the doctor didn’t know of her susceptibility to bad attacks of headaches and nerves.
The letter described a fragile, nervous woman, who was difficult to please, and would be a burden in China. Mrs Davies suggested there be another medical.
"So often things that are not definitely asked about one are withheld from a doctor so that his diagnosis may not be correct.’’
The Mission wrote fulsome thanks to Mrs Davies, telling her she may have "saved the Church from a very serious error’’. Soon after a doctor filed a new report detailing a fistful of reasons why my mother was unsuitable. (My mother was gregarious — the complete opposite of nervy — but she did die young, aged 48.)
So who was this Mrs Herbert Davies? Well, it turns out the Davieses were China missionaries home in Dunedin on furlough, and their son had applied for the same job as my father. Rightly or wrongly (the former, I suspect), my parents’ appointment was cancelled. Three years later, when the Japanese invaded China, the Davieses and other brave NZ missionaries (who would certainly have included my parents) were rounded up and interned in camps in Shanghai — and that’s where, but for fate, I’d probably have been born. With the Japanese defeated, my father reapplied, suggesting his pharmacist’s knowledge would be helpful in the mission’s hospital. He was rejected. What the Chinese really needed, he was told, was a chap with top-notch Greek and Hebrew. (As the saying goes, God works in mysterious ways.)
Dad grew old in New Zealand, and never got close to China. But thank you, Mrs Davies. You altered my life.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
