God was Impatient

In March 1955, I packed all my worldly possessions into my Hillman Minx, said goodbye to Johannesburg and drove the 1000 odd miles to Cape Town. Finding a place to live and setting up an office for Graham Miller & Company did not take too long, but getting instructions from the local insurers was a very slow business at first.

I was therefore, very pleased that on Monday January 23, 1956 - the hottest day of the summer incidentally - the Alliance asked me to deal with a fire claim at a Mission Church in Basutoland (now of course, Lesotho). The address of the church was "near to Lebihan Falls", and several telephone calls established the fact that there was a tiny airstrip at the Falls. I caught the Skymaster plane from Cape Town to Bloenfontein on January 25, some eighty miles from the capital of Basutoland, Maseru. To the Maseru airstrip before dawn next morning, to find Dicky Southworth warming up his tripacer (Dicky was a legendary bush pilot, who later had the misfortune to impale one of his eyes with a fish hook during a fishing trip to Basutoland. Despite the almost unimaginable pain and impairment of his vision, he nevertheless managed to get back to his plane and fly himself to Maseru for treatment). After take-off he flew East off into the dawn, climbing and climbing up the face of the green, bare mountains which ring Basutoland, then swooping down in to the Mahalangana valley, and then apparently flying straight for a vertical cliff face. At the last moment Dicky lifted the nose of the aircraft and we screeched to a halt on an absurdly short, dusty airstrip. "Very bad downdrafts here" said Dicky, "chap last week got caught in one as he was coming in to land - you probably saw the bits of his plane at the bottom of the cliff".

The church I had come to see, St Leonards Mission Church, was half an hours walk from the airstrip, across rolling grass land, with the ring of mountains all around, dark in the early morning light. Knowing that the Father who ran the Mission had been killed by the lightning which started the fire in the church I was worried that the nuns at the Mission might be in a state of shock. However this worry proved to be quite groundless. They were in fact radiant, and over a large and delicious breakfast explained to me that God had been impatient - "he had been so anxious to have our Father with him that, seeing him praying at the altar, He sent down a bolt of lightning and snatched him up!".

All the while I was taking my measurements and making notes, walking back to the airstrip, and flying to Kimberley and on to Cape Town I was filled with the wonder of having witnessed the manifestation of such an unquestioning belief in the existence and omnipotence of the Almighty.