Eric had a lot to do. His three roommates had all left to work in other places, leaving Eric alone in the apartment. The Anglo-Chinese college, which owned the place, gave permission for Eric and Flo to make it their home after they were married. Eric set about transforming the apartment into a suitable home for a married couple. The walls were repainted. New furniture was bought or borrowed, and the kitchen was scrubbed down. Finally, everything was ready, and all Eric could do was wait. Although it had been only eighteen months since he had last seen Flo, it seemed like forever.
Eventually, the day of Flo’s arrival in Taku rolled around. Her father had returned to China a few months earlier, and together he and Eric made the hour-long train trip from Tientsin to Taku. But when they arrived, bad news awaited them. The ship had been delayed by rough weather in the Yellow Sea.
The two men spent the night at a friend’s house in Taku, and the next day, made their way to the dock to meet the ship. Again, they were met by bad news. Gale-force winds were still whipping up the sea, and through the haze of sea spray, Eric could see the Empress of Canada out towards the horizon. The ship was being tossed and turned by mountainous waves that beat against its hull. Although the ship was so close, the harbormaster informed them of the latest delay. The Empress of Canada needed fifteen feet of water clearance to safely enter the harbor and dock. But the tide was on the way out, and with such dangerous winds, the ship dare not try to enter the harbor. Instead, it would wait for the wind to drop or for the next high tide.
Dejected, Eric and Mr. McKenzie made the trek back to their friend’s home. No sooner had they arrived there than news came that the ship was being battered so fiercely by the wind and the waves that the captain had decided to risk docking it during the storm.
By the time they got back to the harbor, the Empress of Canada was pulling parallel to the dock. Tugboats had begun to maneuver the ship closer, when a huge gust of wind caught the ship and spun its stern towards the dock. Onlookers gasped and shut their eyes, waiting for the sound of tearing metal as the dock and the ship collided. Fortunately, that did not happen. The tugs frantically pulled on the stern lines, and slowly the ship straightened. Finally, longshoremen scrambled for the ropes thrown from the Empress of Canada. They placed them over the bollards that lined the edge of the dock, and soon the ship was tied up securely. A gangway was swung into place, and Eric waited anxiously for Flo to walk down it.
Finally, Eric spotted Flo. He grinned broadly and hurried to the end of the gangway to greet her. Once they were together, it was hard to know what to talk about first—Flo’s exams, the voyage from Canada, the trip Flo had made to Scotland several months earlier to visit Eric’s mother, or the colors Eric had chosen for the walls of their new home. All the topics merged, one into another, and the two of them talked until five the next morning, when it was time to catch the train back to Tientsin.
Three weeks later, on March 27, 1934, Florence McKenzie and Eric Liddell were married at Union Church in Tientsin. The popular couple’s wedding drew a huge crowd. Indeed, a report of the ceremony was carried on the front page of newspapers in both Tientsin and Peking. The newlyweds took a brief honeymoon in Peiping, a few miles to the west of Tientsin, before returning to settle in Eric’s apartment.
Flo had a great time arranging everything. She pulled all Eric’s trophies and medals from the boxes he’d stuffed them in years before. She insisted on hanging them on the walls or displaying them on the mantelpiece. At first, Eric found it difficult to get used to seeing all his trophies out where others could see them. He was concerned that people might think he was showing off. But he could see that Flo was proud of them, so he let her have her way.
Inside Eric and Flo’s new home there was lots of laughter and fun. Outside, though, the storm clouds of war were continuing to gather. No one knew just what would happen, but everyone agreed that things could not continue as they had in the past. England’s “golden” days in China were drawing to a close. China wanted to take control of her own destiny. The big question to be answered was, What was her destiny? Would it be a China controlled by a nationalist government or a government controlled by the Communists, who continued to gain power in the countryside? And what about the Japanese? Neither the Communists nor the Nationalists seemed to be able to stop fighting each other long enough to repel the Japanese invaders.
The local government in Tientsin began to prepare for war. It ordered all boys’ schools in the city to conduct military training for their students. Eric was not at all happy about this. It was hard to think of a Christian school teaching boys how to kill and maim others, but the school had no choice but to follow the local government’s orders. Something good came out of it, though. All the training for war made many of the boys at the Anglo-Chinese college think more seriously about their religious beliefs. Soon new Bible study groups were springing up all over campus. Still, it was a sober time that reminded Eric of how life had been at Eltham College back in London as the older boys had prepared to go off and fight in the First World War.
Despite the tension and uncertainty over what lay ahead for China, the first year of marriage passed quickly for Eric and Flo. It also produced a new member of their family, baby Patricia. A year later, Patricia got a sister, Heather. Flo enjoyed telling the story of how Heather came to get her name. Being Scottish, Eric had wanted to name his new daughter Heather, after the purple flowering shrubs that grew on the hillsides of Scotland. Flo wasn’t so enthusiastic; she had another name in mind for the new baby. Eric offered to solve the matter by writing both names on slips of paper and drawing one out of a hat. The two of them agreed to name the baby whichever name was drawn. With great flourish, Eric folded the two slips of paper and put them into a hat. He held the hat up for Flo to select one. When she unfolded the slip of paper it read, “Heather.” Flo stuck to the agreement and announced that the baby would be called Heather. Finally, Eric burst out laughing. He dipped his hand into the hat and pulled out the other piece of paper. It had Heather written on it, too! Flo laughed with him. If Eric wanted that badly to have his second daughter named Heather, he could have his way.
The summer of 1936 should have been happy and carefree for the Liddells, but it turned out to be a time of serious consideration about their future in China. Flo and the girls went off to the beach town of Pei-tia-ho to escape the heat of Tientsin. In August, Eric was to join them for several weeks’ vacation. However, in July, Eric was asked to meet with the board of directors of the District Council of the London Missionary Society, which financially supported him and his new family. At the meeting, the directors told Eric about the very difficult situation they were in. It was a matter of distribution, they said. Too many of their missionaries were in the cities, where life was going on fairly normally, and too few were in the countryside, where there was terrible destruction from the ongoing fighting. The London Missionary Society leaders in England were putting pressure on the local board of directors to take some of the teachers from Tientsin and send them to one of the hardest hit areas, Siao Chang.
Eric nodded silently as he listened to what was being said.
“Of course, your name was one of the first to come up,” said the board chairman. “We know you spent some of your childhood in Siao Chang, and your brother Robert is a doctor in our hospital there. Being an ordained minister, you would be a perfect choice to be village evangelist there.”
“But there is one thing that makes this difficult,” said another board member. “The plains are no place for a wife and small children. The conditions there are terrible. There is fighting everywhere, and no one can keep up with who is winning or whose side anyone is on. It’s a complete mess. The peasants and farmers have given up on the Nationalists and think the Communists might be able to help them more. The warlords are fighting hard to keep their control over the peasants. And while everyone is fighting among themselves, the Japanese are silently and efficiently moving south.”
“Yes, Siao Chang is no place for a woman and small children,” echoed the board chairman.
“Aye. I hear it has become quite desperate in Siao Chang,” agreed Eric. “My brother tells me in his letters some of what is going on. Last week he wrote about the babies who have been brought to the hospital because their mothers have been killed in the fighting. He said the nurses were trying to save the babies’ lives with soybean products, but most of the babies died without their mother’s milk.”
“Then you know what you’ll be up against,” said another board member. “All in all, we think you would be the best person to send there. Unfortunately, as we pointed out, it’s no place for your wife or children. You would have to leave them in Tientsin and come back for regular visits.”
Eric sat quietly. For several weeks there had been talk in the staff room at the Anglo-Chinese college that something like this might happen. Eric had thought they might ask him to go, even though he’d been on staff at the college for ten years now. He never expected, however, that it would mean being separated from his new family. He didn’t know what to say.
As the meeting drew to a close, the board chairman cleared his throat and spoke. “Anyway, it’s not something you have to decide right away. We wouldn’t send you until the end of the next school year. Talk to your wife about it, and we’ll call you in to hear what you have to say in October.”
“Thank you,” replied Eric. “This is not a decision I can make lightly. I’ll pray about it and talk to my wife.”
As the train chugged closer to Pei-tia-ho, Eric was still thinking about the meeting. He wondered how to tell Flo what the District Council had asked him to do. And, more important, he wondered whether it was the right thing for him to do. He was going to have to do a lot of serious thinking and praying during his summer vacation.
Chapter 11
Li Mu Shi
Eric Liddell finally made up his mind. He would go to Siao Chang to work among the peasants and farmers who had been stripped of all hope by the constant fighting going on around them. Many of Eric’s teacher friends at the Anglo-Chinese college thought Eric had been pressured into making the decision by the mission’s board of directors, but Flo knew better. She remembered Eric’s telling her the story of how he had refused to run on Sunday at the Olympic Games. Even though all Scotland had seemed to be against him and his decision not to run, Eric had stuck to his decision. Eric was soft-spoken and still a little shy, but there was no way other people’s opinions could cause him to do something he didn’t think was right or stop him from doing something he felt God had called him to.
In late December 1937, Eric loaded his luggage onto a riverboat. The time for him to leave had come. With a heavy heart, Eric hugged Flo and his two daughters, Patricia and Heather, good-bye and climbed aboard the boat that would take him on the ten-day journey inland to Siao Chang. He stood at the stern of the riverboat and waved until the three people he loved most in the world became a blur at the river’s edge.
The London Missionary Society compound in Siao Chang was much the same as it had been when Eric lived there as small boy with his parents. Eric was five years old when he left, and surprisingly, he remembered much about the place and his life there. When he saw the thick wall that enclosed the compound, he remembered walking around the top of it, looking out at the endless countryside beyond the village. He remembered the house the family had lived in and the field beside it where his parents had allowed the children to keep goats. The sign reading “Chung Wia I Chai” (Chinese and Foreigners, all One Home) still hung over the gates to the compound. It was faded now. It had been hung there thirty-five years before when his parents had first arrived. That had been during the turmoil of the Boxer Rebellion when many Chinese people blamed all their problems on “foreign devils.” The villagers had hung the sign as a way of telling James and Mary Liddell they were welcome in the village. Now, an even greater danger than the Boxer Rebellion was threatening the peace and stability of Siao Chang.
