Episode 12: The Wrath of God

The Hunt Family

In 2012, I met Gerald Hunt and his wife, Catherine, to talk about Gerald’s recollections of life as a “missionary brat”. Gerald’s memory was sharp and his outlook surprisingly contemporary. A partial transcript follows.

In the last blog post I shared excerpts from the autobiography written by Ethel Thamer, one of the people who appear in my novel, ALL THE DAY ALLOWS, which follows Marjory after the close of the novella you are now reading. One of the historical personages depicted in ALL THE DAY ALLOWS is Dr. Andrew Stirrett, a much-loved SIM missionary. In “real life” as they say, the last missionary baby Dr. Stirrett delivered was Gerald Hunt, the subject of this week’s blog post.

In Ethel Thamer’s autobiography, excerpted in the last blog post, she mentions Gerald’s parents, Aubrey and Enid Hunt, several times. They were all students at Toronto Bible College at the same time, though the Hunts were a little older, and were, at the time, engaged to be married. When Ethel met them again, in Nigeria, the couple were in charge of Egbe Mission Station.

In Little Is Much When God is In It, Ethel writes:

The end of that first semester [at Toronto Bible College] came so quickly and the seniors were ready to receive their diplomas. The ones who had been the leaders in the student body, and thus most in the public eye with their fiancées, were going to Nigeria, West Africa with the Sudan Interior Mission. They were Aubrey Hunt and his girlfriend Enid Newcombe, Cecil Forth and his girlfriend Lilian Hyman, David Rough and his girlfriend Nettle McDonald. These engaged couples had been carefully screened and they would have to be on the field a year and pass language exams, health, and compatibility tests before marriage would be allowed. As I write, only Lilian Hyman Forth and Aubrey Hunt are still alive, but they all gave a lifetime of valuable service to the cause of Christ to bring the light of the Gospel to what was then the very dark continent of Africa. Thus ended my first semester at Toronto Bible College, truly the very happiest days of my life. Little did I know then that there was so much joy and lifelong happiness just around the corner for me.

When Ethel arrived in Nigeria, she was sent to Egbe Mission Station, where she was to study the local language for the few weeks until her wedding to Orville, who stayed at Isanlu, 25 miles away, until after they were married. Aubrey and Enid were in charge at Egbe Mission Station, and the surrounding district. Ethel already knew the Hunts well, since Aubrey had been head of the student body in Ethel’s first year at Toronto Bible College.

The most important time of the month was the weekend that Orville was allowed to visit. He could make it in three hours hard riding on his trusty Raleigh, and would arrive early on a Friday and did not have to leave until Monday. There was so much to say and home mail to share. Sunday services were morning and afternoon. All the missionaries sat on the platform, and usually Aubrey Hunt gave the message—in Yoruba of course. The hymns from the CMS Hymnal were Yoruba words to familiar tunes, so it was easy to sing them. They were as majestic in that language as they are in English.

I have included a sound file, below, of Gerald singing what he could recall of “Jesus Loves Me” in Yoruba.

Here is Gerald Hunt, with occasional help from his wife Catherine.

Gerald:

My father’s name was Aubrey Hunt. And my mother was Enid Newcome, before she was married. Her father was a Baptist pastor in the Maritimes and Toronto. But he was not a missionary.

My mother and father met in Toronto at bible college. Their parents, unknown to them, had rented a cottage on Toronto Island, and they first met there. So, when they met again at college, they said, “Fancy seeing you here!”

Dad’s family were immigrants from Ireland, from Dublin, actually. And they came here around 1910, or 1911, before the war broke out, but not too long before. The young people were too young to get into the war. One of them became a Chaplain, but the others were still going to school or college. Three of them became Anglican and one Episcopal.

Aubrey, Enid and Gerald Hunt

Christine:

So, for Enid and Aubrey to go to bible college was not a stretch, given their backgrounds.

Gerald:

Yes, and they were not deeply steeped in theology. Bible college was mainly practical choice, because it was the quickest way to into Christian ministry—take a bible college course and get on with it. Not nearly so long as getting into a theological college, which would take you three years to get the first degree and three years more in theology, and you feel like you’ll never get there!

Christine:

Did they genuinely hear the call to ministry themselves, or was it just that they were brought up in it and were expected to serve?

Gerald:

There was a great deal of conditioning in the churches at that time to find your ideal of service. If you have a gift or ministry, then you must get some training to use it and then go to certain places. The call is not just to get training but to go off and be of service somewhere.

I remember at Gowans Home, you had all these kids writing letters to their parents, so many miles away, and the mail taking three weeks to get anywhere.

Above: Enid and Aubrey Hunt served at various mission stations in Nigeria in the 1930s. These two photographs from the family album depict the mission compound and mission house at Patigi.

Below: Enid recorded her first impressions of Igbaja:

The compound is situated on a sort of miniature headland, and commands a very fine view of the surrounding country. Until February 1933 this piece of land was shunned by the local inhabitants as being haunted by evil spirits. A wilder, more desolate-looking place could hardly have been imagined, but hard work has made a great difference, and already to some extent the desert is beginning to blossom like the rose.

Christine:

Were you born in Africa?

Gerald:

Yes I was. In Nigeria. We lived there until I was about 10 years old.

Christine:

What are some of your impressions from that time?

Gerald:

Well, I recall how much the people, the Nigerians welcomed Christianity. It gave them hope. You could live a good life, with honest relationships, and you didn’t have to be afraid of—You see, the whole idea of a God who was good—it was a real change for the African people. And it was not just religion the missionaries brought, because it also was accompanied by all kinds of modern equipment, and medical aid, and so on.

Catherine Hunt:

I think in any situation, you separate the social life, cultural life from religious life. It doesn’t matter where you are, who you are. You get that kind of dichotomy, and now, we find it difficult to deal with our kids on Facebook!

Gerald:

Now, for instance, my father was not a dentist. No way. But he was the only person for miles and miles around who would pull aching teeth. He pulled teeth. And there’s a picture of him in the museum at the Faculty of Dentistry, at U of T, pulling teeth.

Christine:

So, when you say it gave them hope—

Gerald:

Christianity replaced all the evil spirits with a single loving god. And tribal customs. Some of them are still practiced. For example, they still have to contend with, if the husband dies, the wife is thrown out on the street with just the clothes on her back. Another one was, if upper teeth of a baby came through first, this was another superstition, they had been bewitched by evil spirits. The believed in evil spirits, so the idea of one God was very liberating.

And then along came the missionaries singing about God and love and so on. And there were bibles. The Bible Society was very busy trying to provide bibles in their own language. They would teach them hymns that, for instance, I learned hymns in the Yoruba language where the music was the same but the words were in Yoruba. Sometimes the music didn’t quite fit, but they tried to get the old gospel hymns into Yoruba.

Christine:

Were there customs and beliefs that were positive?

Catherine Hunt:

Missionaries tried to become part of the people they’re with, and I think, from what I understand, the original missionaries who did go out did try to do that, to keep the culture intact as much as they could. There are stories about Tommie Titcombe, and he was really able to almost became a part of the culture before he tried to teach them Christian principles.

Christine:

Gerald, you were there long enough to get a feel for the music and language and culture. Do you think that changed who you became?

Gerald:

Well, we, of course, picked up the local language, and especially the—well, I won’t say swear words, but I’ll say slang. The sort of thing a couple of workmen would say to one another when they’re up on a roof.

Christine:

So, liberated language.

Gerald:

That’s right. That’s right.

Left: Gerald, stands front and centre. Aubrey Hunt is in the back row, on the right. Gerald Hunt was born in Nigeria, while his parents served with Sudan Interior Mission. Gerald was 10 years old when the family returned to Canada, in 1939. Aubrey Hunt was invalided home due to yellow fever, and the Hunts did not return to Nigeria.

Christine:

Gerald, when you were living at Gowans Home, was there a sense that it was the only place you were really truly yourself?

Gerald:

We actually developed a self while we there, because there was always so much moving around before that. So when I got there, I knew that was going to be home, and these were going to be brothers and sisters for me.

A lot of us have grown much older, and the stories—how do you represent this lifestyle we had? People can’t understand it when you tell them. My parents loved me. I remember hearing—I don’t know if it was from my mom or my dad, but my mother, after she left me at the Gowans home, on the way to Montreal to get the ship to England, she cried on the train all the way from Toronto to Montreal.

Christine:

Was there ever a feeling that you’d been abandoned?

Gerald:

Once in a while. I’m not sure I would say that I cried myself to sleep on some occasions, but I think the sense of abandonment came when we went from one place to another. I would say if I had any ADD in me, it came from the constant moving around.

We lived all over the place, and we spent time at the lake, at the cottage, too. One place we stayed was the Presbyterian Manse in Norval, Ontario when my parents first came home from Africa. The minister there and my father were very close friends. And it’s interesting, because that was the same house that Lucy Maud Montgomery had lived in when she was the minister’s wife there.

Christine:

So, it felt like a nomadic lifestyle. It seems to me it was almost part of missionary life, they had to agree to this rootlessness.

Gerald:

Rootlessness. That’s the word for it, exactly. My grandparents, they were real Canadians, because they knew what it meant to be Canadian. And they lived a very wholesome life.

Christine:

Do you feel Canadian now?

Gerald:

Oh yes, very much. Though I have a wide enough viewpoint that maybe I can see situations differently, or different ways to look at things. I have found that many Canadians have never been outside their own small town, and they live in the same house they were born in, so sometimes I’m not sure if I’m talking Greek to them.

Christine:

And yet, you were born in Africa, and had this completely different window into a broader perspective of how humans live.

Gerald:

Going to Camp Powassan, when I was 14 or 15, that was my first experience of choosing where I would go. My choice.

Well, I got my education at the seminary, which means that I felt called to ministry, following my dad and so. I was a pastor for 31 years, and during a decade when I was a chaplain, in hospitals and various other sorts of places, that were all Christian, but not necessarily a denomination. My father, when he went to bible college, he felt somewhat released from denominations. They were all—his classmates and so on, were bible-based Christians, let’s put it that way, they were conservative Christians, but they were not necessarily Fundamentalists.

As far as the bible, well, I’m a firm believer in evolution, or the big bang or whatever you want to call it, the beginning of creation. I believe the bible was—the stories in Genesis were how they started to tell stories, parables of life, how life started off good, but got complicated by sin.

Christine:

As a minister yourself, what do you think of the way the bible has been interpreted by some religious groups?

Gerald:

Since I was in Grade 4, I went to school with Alan Budger and he and I had big philosophical discussions and theological discussions, and we decided that evolutionary cosmos was the only thing that we could really grasp. I think that the problem with a literal translation of the bible—well, they were trying to break it down into something they can handle. Six days of creation sounds really neat, and then the story of Noah’s ark sounds really neat, but you come back to reality. And there are times when you have to build thousands, even millions of years of evolutionary process into just a few days. But in reality, it doesn’t happen that way, it doesn’t happen by magic. It never did.

I can worship the bible. I can read it with pleasure. I can read it with a sense of being guided. But please don’t ask me to read it as a historical document or a scientific document. Because it’s not meant to be. For instance, the whole thing about a family, the idea of family being a man and a woman and children. Well, don’t go to the bible for that kind of thing, because, David had a bunch of wives and Jacob had wives. Whatever came to mind. When Abigail came into David’s sight, she was a fine woman and a great help to a struggling king…but she was not his wife at that time. And I’m sure, all down through the Old Testament, there is no norm that you can say, “This is normative, normal, for what a family should be.”

Christine:                                        

How much of what you believe today came from the way you were raised at the Gowans Home?

Gerald:

Well, I buy all of that. The idea that Miss Kaercher and Miss Buchanan—these were my parents while I was there. Miss Kaercher was an absolute wonder. I appreciated her so much because she could be very loving, kind, and on the other hand, you know, the strap was de rigeur in those days.

Christine:

Yes. Corporal punishment was the norm. It was certainly accepted.

Gerald:

Yes. But I have a lot of very wonderful memories of living at Gowans Home. Otto Sherrick, he was the caretaker, groundskeeper, or whatever, and he was so good to us. I remember, just on the other side of High Street, we used go out into the field and pick morels. Mushrooms. And then we all trooped, once a year. We all trooped, on foot, on the sidewalk, to Sunset Point, for a picnic.

Christine:

Tell me more about the Baptist church.

Gerald:

Well, the Baptist church went through a real time of division. My father explained it this way. Around 1926, ’27, Baptist churches were being broken like a piece of cake. In between, there were always these crumbs, different sort of pockets of beliefs and so on. And along those crumbs were people who provided missionaries with support, you know, funded missionaries and gave them money. Our family was supported by High Park Baptist Church, which today is part of the other piece of the cake—the Fellowship Baptists. And there’s so little difference between any of those churches today.

You see, originally, Baptists were originally from Europe, and they left to get some sort of religious freedom. Freedom from persecution back in the late 1500s. And then things changed a bit and they had a chance to come across the water and start churches. John Ellis started a church, fresh out of prison, and that was the kick-off.

And then when the English sailors went all over, they took their faith with them. William Carey happened to be Baptist, but it followed in his wake, a whole bunch of missionaries from various denominations. And while Baptists were leaders in that movement, the other churches… for example, the Modern United Church sent a tremendous number of missionaries and resources, all over.

[…segue into other topics]

Gerald:

And when you talk about 1938 and 1939…wondering if they should go at all. No one wants to travel across the ocean in the middle of a war.

Christine:

Were there missionaries who were stranded in Africa during the war?

Gerald:

There were situations that were like being stranded. Especially when there’s submarines. And people ask, “What will happen to us?” And if they ask, it was, “God will look after everyone.”

Well before the war there was the Depression. And my folks noticed that a lot of money, a lot of support, not just to them but supporting other people, grew less and less. It reached down to a trickle, and then they started growing pineapples, and all the different fruits—bananas and oranges and anything else that they could grow. That was wonderful they were able to do that. And it was wonderful that the people from the village, people that come up and give them something, like a chicken. And it was funny, because they might think, is that a chicken or a grasshopper? But anyway, there was that sort of thing going on, and yet they knew they were as safe where they were as anywhere.

Christine:

Did they feel a sense of being pulled towards military service? And especially if they were Canadian, or English would have been first, wouldn’t they have felt some sort of sense of, “I should be in the military?”

Gerald:

Oh. They might have felt a call, but I don’t think they… there was no other kind of pressure on them at all because they were engaged in missionary work, and that was considered important enough at the time. And, of course, in my father’s case, well he had yellow fever, and they came home in 1939, so they were home when Canada joined the war, and he was still recovering.

Christine:

Going back to the Gowans Home, something that did come up, a few people have said they would become attached to their friends at the home, but there was never any warning when their parents were going to come home on furlough, and they’d wake up in the morning and their best friend was gone. Was that common?

Gerald:

Oh yes, yes. Well, in those kind of movements, the important thing was that the missionaries got to where they had to go to do their work, complete their service. And the kids just followed behind, if they were lucky. Either that or they were left behind. So, which would you rather be? [laughs] You had no choice.

Christine:

How do you think that affected your ability to make long term relationships?

Gerald:

Oh, it definitely did. We were ready to find friends where we could, but saying goodbye became kind of, easy. My parents and some other people thought that there might be some kids, somebody else’s kids who could be good companions, good friends. Sometimes that worked miserable. In some cases, they were spoiled kids or in other cases, they were kids who were so well rooted in their own culture, and that sort of thing. And I come along, and I’m like a vagabond, you know. And an only child. Some of the teachers, too, some of them couldn’t stand us, or they couldn’t understand us.

There was one teacher who, in geography or history, he got into African pronunciation and he was fine with something like Timbuktu. But then, he would pronounce Sokoto and other names completely wrong. And, you know, it’s hard to keep quiet, when you actually know what it should be. “If you don’t treat me like an expert on this, I’m going to jump in anyway.” And you say, “It goes this way,” and he used to get furious. That particular teacher didn’t have much of a sense of humour.

The school system was all mixed up at that time. I spent 2 months in kindergarten in Simcoe. I spent 1 day in Grade 1 in Toronto. Then I spent two years in Grade 2 at King George in Collingwood—the whole class did, because they changed to a new curriculum and they figured they had to let other kids catch up somehow. And then, in Grade 7, the teacher said to us in September, “How would you like to skip Grade 7?” We said, “Sure.” And that was because of something going on in Grade 8.

Then in high school, a continuing saga. I went from a three-room school, a continuation school, to a 33- room school in Toronto. It took me about six months to get used to it.