chapter xxxi
a trying task for a woman whose husband was away from home half the time. It was her training on the farm and her knowledge of her father's building methods that enabled her to be a handyman around the house, while she inherited from her mother a selfless care of the family that was automatically extended to all in need. Carol Orr's description may be found in Proverbs, chapter xxxi.
The first family home was in Toronto, then a three-year spell in Chicago, then a series of posts and bases in the Air Force.
When Edwin Orr was shipped to the South-West Pacific, Carol Orr took her little girl and baby boy all the way through submarine-infested seas to Buenos Aires, there to await transshipment to Capetown. It was then that Alan became critically ill and was rushed to hospital, his life despaired of—with his mother distraught, not knowing whether to cable the news of impending death to her husband, about to embark for the theatre of war.
By a strange telepathy (which the Orrs practised or experienced more than once) Edwin Orr became very much concerned about his wife just before the date of sailing on the troopship. He placed a call by intercontinental telephone to Mrs. Carol Orr, in Buenos Aires, not knowing any address, or that she was even there. Within twenty minutes, the New York operator had connected the base near San Francisco with a hospital in Buenos Aires. The relieved young wife was able to explain that the baby boy had passed the crisis and. was on the mend. Some weeks later, she sailed for Capetown and arrived there about the same time that her husband's ship made landfall at Guadalcanal.1®
In 1945 at Christmas time, the separated family was reunited for a couple of months, then parted because of varied means of military transport to be united in Oxford, home for a happy two years.1® In 1949, the Orr family made its permanent home in Southern
California, in the only North American climate which could match that of South Africa or our own Nilgiri Hills for perfection.
Their permanent residence in California was interrupted by lengthy preaching trips abroad, for the whole family moved to Brazil for the year 1952, to South Africa for the year 1953,
a es a
oa. This onatlad diets Pes maintain famil é unbearable situation.
= New Life magazine of Vetboueae published a inline Gndiaht into the peripatetic life of the '""Orrs and Orchids" in 1958. Alan (when fifteen) had been arrested in Yokohama for going ashore without his passport. An interrogation followed :?"
Sergeant: "From where do you come?" j _ Alan: "'From Hong Kong, sir."
Sergeant: "Do you live in Hong Kong?" f _ Alan: "No, I have come from South Africa.'
Sergeant: "Are you a student?"
_ Alan: "'Yes, sir."
Sergeant: "You study in South Africa?'
Alan: "No. I have been studying in Australia."
Sergeant: "You live in Australia?"
| Alan: "'No. I live in California."
; _ Had the sergeant of police asked Alan Orr just where his _ father happened to be, he would have been told "in India'.
_ They held him a while.
_ While the Orrs had the sorrow of losing their brothers and _ sisters on either side of the family, they and their "Orchids" enjoyed uniformly good health. Raising a family gave them jnsight into common humanity, with its joys and cares.