AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
99
bottom marked D. This neighbour suddenly left England for a post in South Africa. I negotiated with his landlord,
bought the piece of land marked D with my last ha'penny, and moved my £200 worth of material on to my own
land, and commenced building in January 1921.
This range of greenhouses consisted of three houses built side by side, 150 ft. long and 12 ft. 6 ins. wide. I laid
every brick, glazed every sash, cut every joint, painted the whole roof, and then with the assistance of a boy got the
ground ready for planting, and sent a crop of tomatoes to London that weighed four and a half tons! In all this
arduous labour my dear wife, quite unaccustomed to country life, as I was myself, saw to goats for milking, chickens
for eggs, and went inside the greenhouses and watered the plants with a hose six mornings a week while I worked a
rotary pump by hand and used up my breakfast outside. One good thing resulted. We lived hard, but open air and
hard labour, provoked a more healthy appetite, so that a strip had to be let in to the back of my waistcoat!
All this time it must be remembered that I was busy writing the articles for The Berean Expositor and wrote and
produced, with the kind assistance of Mr. F.P. Brininger, the volume entitled The Apostle of the Reconciliation.
Soon it became evident that I must do something to increase production, so among other Herculean tasks I sunk
a well, built a chimney, and installed a tubular boiler and four inch pipes the whole length of the three houses.
Later, with the assistance of a loan freely lent by Leonard Pinkney, I extended these houses another fifty feet each.
But, although my produce received sometimes a trifle more than the top price advertised in the Trade Journal, I
could not make a living. First, because I was continually absent for the purpose of taking meetings in London, the
Provinces and in Scotland, and second, because I was not distributing my costs by not employing labour. This led
once more to a halt. I sat down with my wife in consultation and prayer:
`Either I must extend, and devote my whole time to Tomatoes or I must shut down and devote my whole time to
the Ministry'.
My dear wife, in face of possible and continual lack of means said: `there is no doubt what your real work is'. That
settled the matter, the greenhouses were shut down, the property put up for sale and prayer ascended for guidance as
to the next step. For a year, I worked for a Christian builder on odd building operations, starting at 6.0 a.m., often
correcting proofs in the dinner hour on a rough building site, and then, on reaching home, changing clothes and
travelling to London and elsewhere to continue the ministry of the Word.