The seven children—Amy, Norman, Ernest, Eva, Ethel, Walter, and Alfred—were called daily to family prayers by the sound of a bell. Probably the servants also were required to attend. Amy remembered the sound of her father’s voice reading the Scripture, a “solemn sound, like the rise and fall of the waves on the shore.” Her ear was trained in this way, from those earliest years when a child’s powers of memorization by hearing are nearly miraculous. For the rest of her life the majestic cadences of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible shaped her thinking and every phrase she wrote. A child, even when apparently distracted, learns far more than adults dream he can learn. Amy did not by any means always attend perfectly to the reading. Once she found a mouse drowning in a pail of water just at the moment when the prayer bell rang. She fished it out, hid it in her pinafore, took her place at prayers, and hoped it would not squeak. It did.
Amy, about five, with mother, Eva, Norman, and Ernest.
Whenever there was a meeting at the little whitewashed church in Balleycopeland, the Carmichael family was there. Amy envied the farmers’ children, whose station in life was clearly very different from hers. The farmers’ wives, on their part, may have pitied the mill owner’s children, and sometimes offered them peppermints as they went into church. They v/ere instructed to refuse politely—to smile and say, “Thank you very much, but my mother would rather I didn’t.” It was one thing to go to church with village folk. It was something else to do all the things village folk did. Their children snuggled down during the long service (never less than two hours) and sucked on pink and white lozenges. The smell reached the Carmichael pew—“but such solace was denied us.”
Only psalms were permitted to be sung on Sundays, but hymns might be used in the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. Once when the theme of the prayer meeting was “Our Departure from this World,” Amy amused herself by counting up all the various things hymn writers said you were supposed to do at the precise moment of departure. How a dying person could manage them all she was at a loss to know, but was pleased with the prospect of shouting, “while passing through the air, ‘Farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer!’” What else could it mean but that very prayer meeting?
Amy had an extreme sensitivity to others’ pain. When her mother told her the story of Calvary for the first time, she rushed out into the garden to try to forget “thoughts too dreadful to be borne, for how could anybody hurt another so, specially One who was so good? And there on the lawn stood a boy cousin, and he had fastened a frog to a monkey-puzzle tree. It looked like a crucified thing . . . I was frantic. In a passion of pity I tried to get it off the horrid spikes, but I could not reach up to it. So I tore into the house to call someone, and as I ran, suddenly the thought came, Now all the frogs will go to heaven.’”
A lesson in the mysteries of prayer—a tough one for any adult—came when Amy was three years old. Taught by her mother that God was a hearer and an answerer of prayer, One who could change water into wine, she determined to test His powers. Kneeling by her bed that night she asked for the one thing she most passionately longed for: blue eyes. Surely there would be no difficulty for the Lord in this. The little girl went to bed with perfect confidence. She jumped out of bed at dawn, pushed a chair to the chest of drawers, climbed up and looked in the mirror—into the same brown eyes. She never forgot the bewilderment she felt until, somehow, an explanation was given (did the Lord Himself speak to her, or did someone else?): Isn’t NO an answer? So prayer was not magic. Like her earthly father who loved her, her heavenly Father might also say no.
Given a dollhouse complete with lovely furniture and properly dressed dolls, Amy displeased her old nurse, Bessie, by emptying the house and filling it instead with moss, stones, beetles, and earwigs—things she found far more interesting than the toys nice children were supposed to like.
Their father took them for walks even on Sundays (Sunday walks were frowned on by Presbyterians in those days), through fields of pink clover or blue flax, to the ponds to see swans and, on weekdays, to watch the great black dripping wheel of the scutch mill where the woody fiber was beaten from the flax to make linen.
They had books—all the children’s books that could be had then—and toys, which included a toy telephone soon after the telephone was invented. There were always pets—Daisy, the yellow and white cat, Gildo, the collie, Fanny and Charlie, the ponies. David and Catherine Carmichael loved beauty and tried to surround their children with beautiful things, keeping far from them, when possible, all that was not beautiful. They gave them a microscope and lenses to encourage them to study and observe, taught them capillary action by pointing out how water climbed from grain to grain in a lump of sugar, demonstrated electricity by rubbing a piece of amber on a coat sleeve till tiny scraps of paper flew up to it.
Amy’s grandmother lived in a small house close to Strangford Lough (Gaelic for lake or sea), in a place called Portaferry. The tide there was said to be the second strongest in the world. The children were allowed to go rowing within certain limits. One evening Amy and her brothers passed the limits, were caught in a swift current, and swept toward the bar. “I was steering, my brothers were rowing hard, but they were powerless against the current. ‘Sing!’ they shouted to me, and I sang at the top of my voice the first thing that came into my head:
‘He leadeth me, O blessed thought,
O words with heavenly comfort fraught;
Whate’er I do, where’er I be,
Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.’”
J.H. GILMORE
The children did not attend school in the early years, but were taught by a succession of governesses. One of them, “an unfortunate Englishwoman,” did not stick it out for long, and when she departed they all trooped down to see her off—“We wanted to be sure she went!” Her replacement, Eleanor Milne, was much beloved, like an older sister to the children. She taught them poetry, told them stories of the great martyrs of Scotland and England. The last words of Ridley to Latimer stuck in Amy’s mind: “Be of good cheer, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” When he and Latimer were chained and the fire kindled, Latimer said, “Be of good comfort, brother Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”
As the sternness of an Irish winter, with its gloom and wetness and icy winds, puts apple cheeks on both old and young, so the sternness of Christian discipline put red blood—spiritual health—into the girl who could not have imagined then the bufferings she would be called on to endure. But it was a peaceful childhood nevertheless, its discipline balanced by buttered toast and raspberry jam in front of the nursery fire, the soft soughing of the wind in the chimney as the children listened to stories, the sweet, sweet sound of a mother’s singing, pony rides, tree climbing, swimming in the frigid sea. It was a peaceful home in a peaceful village. Amy’s testimony long afterwards was: “I don’t think there could have been a happier child than I was.”
Chapter 2
The Hope of Holiness
When Amy was twelve she was sent away to Marlborough House, a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Naturally she was homesick. Is there, for anyone who has grown up in a secure and loving home, anything to compare with the first experience of complete separation from that home? It is pure misery from which there seems to be no possibility of escape, for it is the parents themselves who have decided that this is “best.” The child feels that nothing could be worse; yet he trusts his parents. It seems that the “earth is removed and the mountains are carried into the midst of the sea.” Amy’s upbringing forbade her to make much of anything appointed, nevertheless she needed solace of some sort. She found it—in a white lily that stood in a pot in the bow window, in a box of chrysanthemums sent by her mother from the little greenhouse at home, and in a saucer of moss on the dinner table which reminded her of one of her father’s storie
s: Mungo Park, an explorer, was comforted by seeing moss and feeling that the One who made it would care for him.
The taboos and restrictions of Methodism would seem intolerable in the twentieth century, even to the dedicated. To Amy they were perhaps not more stringent than the Presbyterianism she was used to. She did not find schoolwork nearly so pleasant as it had been at home, and only one teacher, the botany master, knew how to make lessons “shine.” Certainly there were no complaint boxes at Marlborough House, nor were students in those days required to evaluate the performance of each of their teachers. Looking back years later, Amy judged that the faults lay mostly with herself—“many things happened which should not have happened, because I had not learned to set to, and work at things which seemed to me dull and not useful. This was a great pity. I have often been very sorry about it.” Unfortunately for us she saw to it that no record of the story was left which she did not believe would edify the children in India, except for a single incident. The wild Irish girl was “quite naughty” that time, but felt that the end surely would justify the means. It was the year of the comet, 1882. Amy went, on behalf of the girls in her dormitory, to request permission of the principal to stay up to see the comet. “Certainly not,” was the verdict.
Missing the celestial show was simply not to be borne, so Amy tied threads to the toes of each of the girls, promising to keep awake and give them a yank as soon as the rest of the house was asleep. At the signal, they all crept to the attic, holding their breath when a step creaked, and found themselves face-to-face with the principal and teachers. “We had time to see it beautifully before anyone had recovered sufficiently from the shock of our arrival to order us back to bed. That was a woeful night for me, I was sure I would be expelled and that would break my parents’ hearts. Happily that did not come to pass. There was a rather solemn hour next morning, for the matter of threads tied round toes showed such purposeful audacity that it could not be passed over. It was taken for granted that I was the ringleader, but in the end I was forgiven.”
It was near the end of her three years at Marlborough House that Amy experienced “the one watered moment in an arid three years.” The Children’s Special Service Mission held meetings in Harrogate at which one Edwin Arrowsmith spoke. She had no recollection of his talk, but remembered singing the lovely children’s hymn by Anna B. Warner, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” In those quiet minutes she understood what she had not understood before—there was something else to be done. All her life she had known of Jesus’ love. Her mother had often told her of it, sung to her about it, and Amy had, as it were, nestled in Jesus’ arms as she had nestled in her mother’s. She realized now, at the age of fifteen or so, that she had not “opened the door” to Him. “In His great mercy the Good Shepherd answered the prayers of my mother and father and many other loving ones, and drew me, even me, into His fold.”
It seems that competition with American flour necessitated a move to Belfast where the Carmichael brothers built a new mill. Amy’s family found a house in College Gardens, and soon afterwards because of financial difficulties she and her brothers were withdrawn from the boarding schools. Amy’s lessons were in subjects deemed suitable for young ladies—music, singing, and painting. She was thoroughly discouraged with the last, in which she had especially wanted to do well. She held up alongside a real sunset an oil sketch of a sunset. “The contrast was so tremendous I resolved to spend no more time on that.” Her father took her to London, where she was filled with wonder at the great sights of the Tower, Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, St. Paul’s, the British and Kensington Museums. They went to hear the famous singers, and one day, seated in the gallery of the House of Commons and peering down through the lattice, they saw the great William Gladstone.
When Amy was nearly eighteen she saw her father talking gravely to her mother by the dining room window. The matter was money, something not discussed in front of the children, so it was not until later that Amy learned the truth. David Carmichael had lent some thousands of pounds to a friend who needed to make a new start in life. When the time came for repayment, the money was not forthcoming. Not long after this blow, Carmichael contracted double pneumonia. He died on April 12, 1885, fifty-four years old. Amy recalled that the last thing she had read to him was from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:
All is best, though oft we doubt
What the unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
If going to boarding school did not seem to Amy a major crisis—lots of girls went to boarding school—surely the death of her father must have. Yet in her story, written for the children, there is only the laconic statement, “on an April Sunday morning while the church bells were ringing, our dear father died,” followed by the lines of poetry which she said had been with her ever since. Not a word about what this sorrow meant to anyone in the family, least of all to herself. Not a hint that she was devastated, nor even tempted for a moment to doubt that all was best. It is, in fact, difficult to find anywhere in the writings of Amy Carmichael anything akin to the poet’s admission, “oft we doubt.” If any doubts rose in her mind—at the moment, perhaps, of watching her father’s coffin lowered into the ground—she would not in any case have put them on paper. Did she speak to her mother of what it had meant to her, or seek reassurance that her mother had no doubts? We are not told. Mrs. Carmichael needed a stronghold. That much we know. It was faith, not doubt, that moved her out of herself, out of self-pity and despair. She found what she needed in the words of Nahum 1:7, “The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.” Years later, Amy discovered in the margin of her mother’s Bible, next to that promise, a tiny notation: “Found true all along the line ever since.” The strength of her example was not lost on Amy.
Being of an acutely sensitive nature, Amy must have felt deeply the loss of her father. The happy, peaceful, predictable routine of her home life was profoundly shaken. If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others. She became like a second mother to her brothers and sisters.
“The time when she impinged on my life was during about five years after our father died,” wrote her sister Ethel. “She lived an amazingly full life in those years, taking classes in painting and other subjects, teaching Eva and me during a period when we were not well enough to go to school, and starting various ‘good works.’ . . . If anybody asked me what were the strongest impressions Amy made on me in her youth, I think I would say—her enthusiasms.”
The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls—their looks, their clothes, their social life—do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.
The decisive moment which determined the direction of her life came on a dull Sunday morning in Belfast as the family was returning from church. They saw what they had never seen before in Presbyterian Belfast—an old woman lugging a heavy bundle. Amy and her brothers turned around, took the bundle, and helped her along by the arms. “This meant facing all the respectable people who were, like ourselves, on their way home. It was a horrid moment. We were only two boys and a girl, and not at all exalted Christians. We hated doing it. Crimson all over (at least we felt crimson, soul and body of us) we plodded on, a wet wind blowing us about, and blowing, too, the rags of that poor old woman, till she seemed like a bundle of feathers and we unhappily mixed up with them.”
There was an ornate Victorian fountain in the street, and just as they passed it, “this mighty phrase was suddenly flashed as it were through the grey driz
zle: ‘Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—every man’s work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it, because it shall be declared by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide—’”1
Amy turned to see who had spoken. There was nothing but the fountain, the muddy street, the people with their politely surprised faces. The children plodded on with the bundle of feathers, but something had happened to the girl which changed forever life’s values. That afternoon she shut herself in her room. It was time to settle some immensely important things, and things of that sort Amy Carmichael settled alone with God.
She began about this time to gather the children of the neighborhood to her home for meetings. Henry Montgomery of the Belfast City Mission used to take her through the city streets on Saturday nights. She saw something of “the other half,” and began teaching a group of boys in a night school, always ending with what she called a “good-night service,” probably her chance to give them something from the Bible, perhaps a gospel song, and prayer. She started a program called the Morning Watch to encourage boys and girls to spend a regular time each day in Bible reading and prayer. She gave them pledge cards, blue with a gilt edge, which they could sign. When they met on Saturday mornings, each would tell what had helped him during the week, or confess failure to get up in time. It can’t have been too dull an hour, because two of her brothers joined. Another member recalled that it was always a happy time and everybody loved Amy.
She initiated a weekly prayer meeting for schoolgirls in their own homes, then moved it to Victoria College when some of the staff and students joined them. She worked at the YWCA, and had a class at Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church for “shawlies,” mill girls who, too poor to buy hats, covered their heads with shawls. This was something of a shocker to the proper church members. Not only were they unaccustomed to the presence of such “common” folk, but the idea of Mrs. Carmichael’s permitting her daughter to venture into the slums to fetch them was deplorable.
A Chance to Die Page 2