To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  A waitress with an introspective Girl with a Fan face brought Root Cola and a saucer of crudités among which a small starfish concealed itself with a discreet movement. Cats striped like tigers lay in wait near by ready to pounce on any land crabs that moved too far from one of their innumerable holes. The doctor explained the mystery of his name—which, in view of his unmistakably Polynesian appearance, had seemed puzzling at first. It was one of a dozen or so, he said, handed out by the missionaries at the beginning of the last century at the time of the island’s incorporation into the kingdom of the London Missionary Society. ‘I use the original name on what I call tribal occasions,’ he said. ‘In our language it means shark. It was a shark, as you know, that led our seafaring ancestors to Raiatea. Many of us have a totemic relationship with this fish. I am supposed to have inherited the power to summon one up from the depths—a feat which I once performed in public, although it was generally regarded as a coincidence.’

  There was no argument, the doctor said, about his ability to tame sharks, which, if approached in the right way, were the friendliest and most co-operative of fish. He suggested that I might like to meet one, which followed him about like a dog and allowed its fins to be tweaked, and I readily agreed to subject myself to this experience. The shark, he said, frequented an area in the lagoon in which fishing had been debarred by an ancient taboo, and where many singular fish had taken refuge. The chieftains of old had placed taboos on certain rivers and lagoons at spawning times, and for one reason or another this taboo had never been lifted. He instanced the case of the stream on the neighbouring island of Huahine, full of monstrous, sluggish eels that survived only by the charity of the local villagers. Rare flowers were also under a taboo, and I remembered the newspaper story of a development company that had brought a prime coastal site, only to learn that its use was restricted to the grazing of pigs.

  Behind its front of run-down normality, everything about Raiatea was extraordinary, including the specialised canoe in which our trip to the off-limits area was to be made. This craft, an outrigger of the local kind, was notable for its possession of mana, a kind of spiritual radiation infused by the insertion into its hull of a sliver of timber from a war-canoe excavated from one of the ancient sites. It was the common property of several families, and much in demand for Sunday outings, due to the belief that the mana flowed into the bodies of those whose rumps came into contact with the seats and so set them up for the week. It had been out for most of the morning, and as soon as it came back to the jetty, the doctor grabbed me up, we made a rush for it, and jumped in. It now turned out that in addition to the area of the lagoon where an absolute taboo on fishing was in force, there was at least one zone where a kind of semi-taboo persisted. Puttering towards the distant reef we passed a number of women, bedecked as usual with flowers and in dresses hitched up to the knees, who were fishing in the shallows. A few minuscule fish dangled from their waists. Women—seen as inefficient anglers—were permitted here, the doctor explained, but men were not.

  Seagulls hung like white ideograms in the purplish haze over our target area. Dr Collins put down the anchor, fixed his mask in position, and lowered himself into the waves. I followed him, finding myself in 20 feet of water over a bed of shimmering coral sand, in which had been placed, as if with premeditation, a single enormous rock honeycombed with caves. From this base, the fish drifted to form slow interlacing processions and stunning weaves of colour. Individually they were magnificent, often strange, sometimes startling. What instantly caught the eye was abstract decoration; an Arabic scrawl, a mathematical sign, an inky blot. Transparent fish with a barely visible outline showed little more than eyes and a digestive tract. Enormous sea horses went bobbing by, pipefish unrolled from crevices, and lion-fish scowled through their poisoned plumes. There were fish that switched colour to match the garish sea anemones against which they nestled; fish like Disneyland parodies of fish; fish that spun or tumbled about us like demented birds. Occasionally one turned aside in passing to search my face with flat, dejected eyes, but on the whole they showed indifference to our presence. Big stingrays shuffled uneasily under their coverlet of sand as we dived to swim close to them. A single small shark took shape in the milky distance, but as soon as it spotted us it dodged out of view behind the rock.

  The doctor broke surface and pulled back his mask to comment on the shark’s strange behaviour. He was worried by the absence of the confiding ten-footer we had come to see. A rumour had reached him of the presence on the reef of a party of spear fishermen from the Club Méditerranée on nearby Bora Bora. Sharks were highly strung, instinctive, exceptionally nervous creatures, he said, and if the report were true he had no doubt that fear had spread its contagion among them.

  Half an hour later we were back in the port café. The outcry of Pacific starlings flocking in the trees broke for a moment into the chorus of ‘Soldiers of Christ Arise’. ‘Bligh of the Bounty’s gone into that one,’ the doctor said. ‘He’s been turned into an honorary ancestor since they showed the film.’

  The singing stopped, the church door burst open and the worshippers poured out, all the men in their stiff Sunday suits with sprigs of frangipani behind the ears; some of the women wearing leafy crowns. They made for the line-up of veteran taxis, crowding as many as nine people into one for the ritual Sunday ride of a couple of hundred yards before the midday meal. A dishevelled, time-whitened old man, the last to leave the church, limped into sight. ‘That’s our tatuna. Witch doctors I believe you call them,’ the doctor said.

  ‘What’s a witch doctor doing in a church?’

  ‘They’re all staunch church-goers. They’re very devout. We have four varieties in all. This man’s a healer. He casts out devils.’

  It seemed impossible in this calm sunlit place, within easy range of so many mild satisfactions, that devils could exist.

  ‘Anybody can go crazy,’ the doctor said. ‘At least we know how to handle it here. All they do is take the man into hospital, get rid of any doctor on duty—which could be me—and smuggle our friend in. They hold the man down and force his mouth open. The old fellow cuts a big lemon in half, puts on a terrible face, then rushes into the ward and rams the half lemon into the patient’s mouth. After that he can go. He’s cured. The tatuna has as much mana as that canoe. When you shake hands with him you see visions. His second speciality is finding things people manage to lose.’

  ‘How does he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll give you my personal experience. I was sitting with him roughly where we are now. I’d been out fishing and I gave him a couple of snappers. “What’s on your mind?” he said. He could see something was worrying me. “Someone took my car keys while I was out in the boat,” I told him. “Shut your eyes,” he said. He put the tip of his finger between them at the bottom of my forehead, and it felt like ice. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was emptying my brain. After a minute he said, “Can you think of anything now?” and I told him I couldn’t. “Get up then,” he said, “and go for a walk.”

  ‘I got up, laughing, crossed over the street to the Chinese supermarket and then back again into Arthur Chung’s café on the other side of the road. Two boys were sitting there. I didn’t speak to them, but I could feel that they were from Papeete. I held out my hand, and one of the boys dropped my car keys into it. The old man was waiting by the car when I got back. He asked me if I could think now. I told him, “More or less,” and he said, “Well, in that case, let’s go.”’

  Something was puzzling the doctor. ‘How can it be that a man with so much power can go hungry?’ he wondered.

  ‘Isn’t he paid anything for his services?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s not the way we do things here. You give for the pleasure of giving. Only shopkeepers ask you for money.’ He shook his head. ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘If I’d thought we were going to run into him I would at least have caught him a fish.’

  LOKE’S MERC

  BACK IN
ITALY IN 1937 someone sold me an Alfa Romeo car, a recent winner of the 24 hours Le Mans race. Having collected it off the train in London I set off somewhat cautiously to find a suitable road to try out its paces. This turned out to be the A120 going northwards through Epping Forest and virtually empty. The car accelerated easily up a slight gradient to about 110 mph, with power clearly in hand, which seemed good enough at the time. The test at an end, I pulled in at the Wake’s Arms at Loughton, and almost immediately another car drew up at my side. This was an astonishing Mercedes of a kind I had never seen before. Out of it stepped a smiling and immaculate young Chinese who introduced himself as Loke Wan Tho. Loke wanted a close look at the battle-worn Alfa. Encircling it, excitement leaked from him like an electric current. ‘Oh, absolutely!’ he said. ‘How absolutely!’ It was a form of commendation lifted from P. G. Wodehouse, then reaching the end of a long vogue. For fifteen years young men of the upper classes, foreigners in this country in particular, tried to talk like Bertie Wooster.

  I invited him to try the Alfa; he was breathless with gratitude (jolly sporting of you) and returned entranced by its bleak functionalism, its lack of concession to driving comfort and the sheer noise generated by the combination of the regulation track silencer, supercharger and straight-cut gears. In the meanwhile I had floated up and down the road at the wheel of the Mercedes in a silence and smoothness so unnatural as to foster a moment of illusion in which the landscape appeared to slide away while the car stood still. Loke asked me if I liked the Mercedes, and when I told him that I did he suggested an exchange, there and then and without further ado.

  It was a proposition that astounded me. This lustrous and extraordinary machine with its voluptuous display of exhaust-pipes and its leopard-skin upholstery would have been worth, as I saw it, two or three times as much as the battered Alfa which had never recovered, and probably never would, from 2,000 miles covered at an average of 87 mph. I had never met a Chinese before, and for a moment I suspected a conventional oriental courtesy by which admiration was expressed, but which was not to be taken seriously. I had no way of knowing that this was a very rich man indeed, prepared at this moment to indulge what to him was no more than a trivial whim. Loke took my hesitation to mean that he had not offered enough, and hastened to add a cash inducement. I explained that it was not a matter of relative values but the fact that I was half committed to a project to be undertaken in partnership with a friend. This was to convert the Alfa for racing on Brooklands. The explanation satisfied him and he gave me an address in Cambridge in case I changed my mind.

  I was now presented to his companion, Miss Dovey, a neat and sparkling English girl, who had stood aside while these transactions were in progress. Miss Dovey thought we should have a drink. We went into the Wake’s Arms where we sipped orange juice and nibbled sociably at potato crisps, which Loke, trying them for the first time, responded to with what struck me as no more than simulated pleasure. I picked up a few scraps of information. Loke was at Cambridge, reading English. Of Miss Dovey I learned little except that she collected shoes and had a hundred or so pairs. She made mention of Loke’s interest in rubber plantations in Malaysia, and that he kept an apartment in a Park Lane hotel for his use when in London. This, she added, with a touch of proprietorial satisfaction, she had helped him refurbish according to his taste.

  In the course of a further half-hour’s amiable exchange of ideas Loke said that they were both interested in birdwatching and the visit to Epping Forest was to facilitate their study of the wren (Troglodytus troglodytus troglodytus), found in its woodlands and glades in exceptional concentration. He opened up the boot of the Mercedes to display a collapsible hide imported from Switzerland into which, when the occasion presented itself, he and Miss Dovey would creep to take photographs and record the bird’s song. This, he agreed, most laymen would regard as an uninspiring twitter. It was none the less of great scientific interest since the troglodytus was believed to possess extraordinary ability to vary it according to the environment.

  We parted company. The Mercedes stole away down the road, turned off into a track and embedded itself in a likely thicket. I made for Weybridge where an expert on the staff of the firm undertaking conversions of the kind I had in mind, took one look at the Alfa and shook his head. It would be cheaper to buy a car designed for track use than to convert one that was not. They had an ERA, and a Maserati in reasonable shape in their used stock, but both were far and away outside my price.

  Faced with this verdict I decided to go ahead with Loke’s proposed exchange if by this time he had not changed his mind, and thereafter sell the Mercedes to raise the cash required. I wrote to him but there was some delay before the reply came. He had been away touring in Germany and a photograph enclosed with the letter showed the wreck of his car. It had been hit by a train at an unguarded railway level-crossing and, while neither he nor Miss Dovey had been hurt, the impact had sliced away the Mercedes’ rear wheels. It would have to be rebuilt, he wrote and this would take some months. It was clear that the matter of the exchange was not ruled out. Mentioning that a complete repaint would be required, he added, ‘What colour do you prefer?’

  Almost with that, it seemed, the Munich crisis was upon us, changing not only our plans but those of the world. Loke, obliged to drop everything, was called back to Singapore. Escaping subsequently from the Japanese invasion, he was on the Nova Moller, sunk in an air attack, and rescued from the water with severe burns and temporary loss of sight. In the meanwhile, I was in North Africa and Italy, and it was 1947 before we met again.

  I was in Pembrokeshire, where I spent that summer rock-climbing, when a letter from Loke, forwarded from London, announced that he was back. When he heard where I was he wanted to come down. The cliffs of Pembrokeshire—although I had no idea that this was the case—were a famous venue for birdwatchers. He arrived overbrimming with enthusiasm and, apart from an area of pink new skin surrounding the eyes, little changed in appearance. The conditions in which I was living must have been among the most primitive in Europe; certainly far beyond anything Loke had ever experienced. The three-room cottage I had rented in a fishing village possessed no running water, no sanitary arrangements of any description, and no electric light. It was a scene into which he plunged with relish, although unable to believe his eyes at his first view of one of the mild and contemplative rats that were a feature of the place ascending the step-ladder that gave access to the bedrooms. The villagers seemed not to notice their presence and Loke, always on the lookout for virtue lurking beneath everyday attitudes, saw this as evidence of a latent, intrinsic Buddhism in the Welsh character. The truth was that due to a superstitious local aversion to cats, rats were tolerated in their place for the efficiency with which they cleared up the mess left on the quayside after the fishermen had boxed up their catch.

  Loke was in his element. Littlehaven was brilliant with life, with seals in every cove, the morning fox on the beach in search of anything left over by the cats, a stream with an otter at the back of the hill and a bluster of wax-white gulls always in the sky. Ensconced in brambles and bracken Loke trained his 20-inch telephoto on a 1½-inch bird. Despite all the ravens and peregrines around him he was back to his first love, the common wren hunting its microscopic prey just out of reach of the spume. He informed me that three island sub-species of troglodytus were to be found on St Kilda, the Hebrides and the Shetlands, and his hope was to identify a fourth variation, based on the large and deserted island of Skomer, a few miles away. This, despite many days of field-work, he never did. When I made some mention of the Mercedes, he seemed momentarily puzzled. Then he remembered. ‘I had to leave it behind,’ he said. ‘I expect my people will have dealt with it.’

  He was now in control of his family empire, of its cinemas, rubber, tin and real estate, and had become one of the rich men of the world, yet he admitted that when the time came for his return to Singapore he would do so with reluctance. It evidenced a personal schism never to be repai
red. He was committed by custom to a pursuit of wealth for which he had little true inclination, and removed from the convention of his background, his tastes were frugal, even austere. In the introduction to his book, A Company of Birds, published when he was seen as the best bird-photographer in Asia, he lays blame on destiny: ‘I was destined to be a businessman.’ Of his ornithology, he adds an explanation, ‘Every man needs some invisible means of support.’ How sad that the empty ritual of a man of affairs should have usurped so much of his life.

  A year or two later he invited me to join him in an expedition to northern India, the proviso being that I must first learn to skin birds, but this it proved impossible to do in the time. We met again in 1954 in Singapore when I stopped off there to snatch a night’s sleep on my way to North Vietnam. I phoned Loke from the hotel and shortly afterwards an extraordinary cortège of cars drew up outside. It was impossible not to be reminded of a top mobster’s funeral, minus the flowers. Loke had clearly arrived, but I found it hard to associate him with this arrogant display. The explanation was simple, and his smile apologetic. ‘We’re going to my sister’s birthday party, dear boy,’ he said. ‘Black tie—white Cadillac. Hop in.’