A Wild Lassie

“Like as a father pitieth his children, So Jehovah pitieth them that fear him.”

— Psalm 103:13, ASV

Aberdeen, 1848

Mary Mitchell Slessor was born on 2 December 1848 in Gilcomston, a district on the edge of Aberdeen. Her birth was entered in the register of the parish of Old Machar. She was named after her mother.

Her father, Robert Slessor, had been baptised in Aberdeen in 1815. Livingstone says he “belonged to Buchan,” the farming country to the north, and perhaps his family did, but the parish register records his baptism in the city. He is usually remembered as a shoemaker, and the records confirm it, but they also show a man who moved from trade to trade. In 1841 he was a handloom linen weaver. At Mary’s birth he was a shoemaker. A few years later he appears as a fireman, a stoker of furnaces. Later still he was a labourer. It is the record of a working man in a hard time, when the old hand trades were dying and the new factories wanted cheap labour, not skill.

Her mother, also Mary, had been born in 1821 at Old Meldrum, a small town in the Aberdeenshire countryside, the only child of William Mitchell and Ann Wilson. She married Robert Slessor in 1840. Those who remembered her described her as sweet-faced, patient, gentle, and retiring, with a deep and quiet faith. She was a member of Belmont Street United Presbyterian Church in Aberdeen, and she followed with intense interest the mission that her Church had begun on the far side of the world, at a place called Calabar.

That mission was only two years old when Mary was born. It had been founded in 1846, and its reports appeared every month in the Church’s Missionary Record. In the Slessor house they were read aloud and talked over. “I had my missionary enthusiasm for Calabar in particular from her,” Mary said long afterwards of her mother. “She knew from its inception all that was to be known of its history.”

Eleven Children

Livingstone says that Mary was the second of seven children. The registers tell a sadder story. Her mother bore eleven children, and at least four of them died as infants, too young even to be baptised. The eldest, Robert, born in 1844, was dead by the time of the 1851 census. After Mary came William in 1850, a second Robert about 1852, Susan in 1855, John in 1857, and Janie, the youngest, in 1862.

Family memory preserved a story about Robert, the elder brother. He announced that he would be a missionary when he grew up. A girl could not hope for such a career, but he consoled Mary by promising to take her into the pulpit with him. Livingstone also tells us that when Mary played at keeping school, the imaginary pupils she scolded and taught were always Africans. These are the kind of details a family cherishes after a life has turned out as hers did, and we cannot know how much later memory has shaped them. The elder Robert died before Mary was three. If the pulpit story is her own memory, it may belong to the second Robert, who bore the same name and who died in December 1860.

Drink

“Dark days came,” Livingstone writes. Robert Slessor drank. He lost his work, and in 1859, hoping that her husband might make a fresh start where nobody knew him, his wife agreed to move the family south to Dundee. The furniture was sold to pay for the move, and the money soon ran out. By the census of 1861 the family was living in Dura Street, in the east of the city, near the textile mills.

The move did not cure him. Livingstone’s account of these years is restrained, but it is enough. Every penny Robert Slessor could lay his hands on went on drink. His wife, who was not strong, went out to work in a factory. Mary, still a child, was sent with parcels to the pawnbroker. She ran by the quietest back streets so that her friends from church would not see her. Then she came home with enough money for the week, and her mother kissed her and sent her out to pay the most pressing bills.

There was one night of terror in every week. On Saturdays, after the younger children were in bed, mother and daughter sat sewing or knitting in silence, waiting for the sound of uncertain footsteps on the stair. Now and then they prayed to quiet their hearts. When he came, he would sometimes throw into the fire the supper they had gone without in order to provide for him. Sometimes Mary was put out into the street, and she wandered alone in the dark, crying.

Mother and daughter tried to hide the family’s shame. The younger children, Livingstone says, knew nothing of the Saturday vigils, and the neighbours and church friends were kept from the secret. The family was never publicly disgraced, and they believed that was an answer to prayer. Few families, Livingstone adds, looked brighter or more hopeful in church on Sunday. That was their faith, and it was also their pride.

Mary Slessor rarely spoke of her father. Livingstone tells us that she once wrote and published, under her own name, a story that her friends knew to be an account of these years, but he chose not to reproduce it. He says the memory was the only one that could “send a shaft of bitterness across the sweetness of her nature.” It made her shy, and it made her dread speaking in public. It also, he suggests, made her the fierce defender of children and of the weak, and prepared her for a lifelong fight against the trade in cheap spirits on the West African coast. Whatever else the book of Proverbs meant by it, the Slessor children learned for themselves that “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler” (Proverbs 20:1, ASV).

Robert Slessor died in Dundee on 16 September 1870. It was Mary, aged twenty-one, who went to register the death. By then he was working as a shoemaker again.

A Prayer That Was Not Answered

Much later, writing to a friend about prayer, Mary Slessor said something she seldom said about her own life. She was trying to explain that God does not always answer prayer in the way we expect. “I know what it is to pray long years and never get the answer,” she wrote. “I had to pray for my father. But I know my heavenly Father so well that I can leave it with Him for the lower fatherhood.”

That sentence carries the weight of a childhood. She had prayed for her father for years, and he had not changed. She did not pretend otherwise. But she had found another Father, one who did not fail, and she had learned to trust him with the question she could not answer. The psalm at the head of this chapter says, “Like as a father pitieth his children, So Jehovah pitieth them that fear him.” The next verse gives the reason: “For he knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14, ASV). Mary Slessor knew what a weak and failing father looked like. She came to know a Father who understood weakness because he had made us, and who pitied it instead of despising it. It may be that some of the tenderness she later showed to drunken chiefs and frightened slaves was learned in Dura Street.

A Wild Lassie

In spite of it all, she was not a gloomy child. She remembered herself as “a wild lassie,” and in later life she would describe her childhood escapades with a mixture of amusement and shame. Her mother took the children to Wishart Church, a plain building above a row of shops in the Cowgate, near the old Port Gate, from whose walls the Reformer George Wishart had preached during the plague of 1544. The children went to church with a drop of perfume on their handkerchiefs and a peppermint in their pockets for the sermon.

Her conversion came through an old widow who lived in a room in the back lands of the tenements. The old woman used to watch the children playing in the street, and worried about their souls. One winter afternoon she gathered some of the girls in from the cold and dark to sit by her fire, and talked to them about the danger of neglecting salvation. Then she pointed to the fire. If they put their hands into it, she said, it would burn them. But if they did not repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, their souls would burn forever in a fire far worse.

The words went, Livingstone says, like arrows to Mary’s heart. She could not get the picture out of her mind, and it kept her awake at night. She decided that she had better make her peace with God, and in the words that she herself used, she “repented and believed.” Years later she would sometimes say that it was hell-fire that drove her into the Kingdom.

That is not the kind of conversion story Christians usually like to tell today, and she did not recommend it either. But it is honest, and it is worth noticing what she did with it. The old widow was saying what the apostles said to the jailer at Philippi: “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31, ASV). Fear brought Mary to the door. But once inside, she found, as Livingstone puts it, that it was a Kingdom of love and tenderness and mercy. In all her later work she never tried to frighten anyone into it. Livingstone says that she never sought to bring anyone into the Kingdom, as she had come, “by the process of shock and fear.” The girl who had been frightened into faith grew into a woman who drew others by kindness.

So the story of Mary Slessor begins not with courage but with fear, and not with a strong father but with a broken one. It begins in a poor and anxious home, where a mother prayed through Saturday nights and a daughter ran to the pawnbroker by back streets. God had not given her an easy start. He had given her a mother who loved Calabar, a heavenly Father who could be trusted when her earthly father could not, and a hard school in which to learn endurance. The next lesson would be the loom.