by Gavin Young
In the Steamships office Harry admitted that he himself had quite often felt earthquakes. ‘It’s mildly exciting – your heart starts to pound a bit. Once, all the office workers of Rabaul dropped everything, vaulted over their desks like Olympic hurdlers and rushed out into the street. You did, too, didn’t you, Gimana? Even left your shirt behind.’
The other black faces turned, smiling, to Gimana, lightly mocking the only Papuan in the room. Poor Gimana. I hoped he wouldn’t start dreaming of a holocaust, of the population of Rabaul disappearing down a steaming red-hot hole in the earth. I hoped I wouldn’t.
Nine
My notebook reads:
Amusing example of pidgin. On a shop door in Mango Street: Go insite long ia = ‘Entrance’.
Harry the Pole says the mountain dwellers here liked very much to wear tea cosies as hats. Hundreds and thousands of tea cosies are imported; for a time no one could understand why they were ordered. Cases of ping-pong balls are shipped in, too. Harry says that modesty has driven many naked Highlanders to wear ping-pong balls on the ends of their penises – it’s unseemly to leave them completely uncovered, and ping-pong balls are apparently much more comfortable than the traditional nutshell they once jammed on, and more easily replaced.
Harry has a nasty tropical sore on his foot. Sores like this are very common – in this unusual germ-laden atmosphere, he says, a small scratch can turn septic at once. I don’t grasp why the germs are so rampant. Harry’s simple and effective remedy: squeeze the juice of a frangipani leaf on the sore, and lightly bandage it.
I have run into a nice Englishman called Michael Tinne, a copra expert on temporary secondment in charge of Burns Philp’s plantations in PNG: ‘the lone Pom’, he calls himself. From him I borrow a missionary’s book of many years ago called (predictably) Twenty Years Among the Primitive Papuans. In it a Reverend William Bromilow displays his photographs of naked locals, and writes: ‘Up to the time of marriage, the women are undisguisedly unmoral [sic], and afterwards the restraints are doubtfully observed. Among the men no moral code can be said to exist; children are initiated to vice at a terribly early age.’ Should be exciting scope for a missionary there. Another missionary wrote in 1897 that when he first arrived in Rabaul in 1870 he found ‘all were naked, men, women, children’. Now, he said, ‘all are clothed – not a single naked native is visible within the sphere of mission influence’. All dressed up within twenty-seven years.
Talking of clothes: Harry says to me, ‘You’d better get yourself some shorts, Gavin.’
‘Good God, no.’
Harry (astonished): ‘You’re going on wearing longs?’
Me: ‘I certainly am. First, longs are a protection against insects. Second, my knees are too knobbly. And third, I don’t want to look like yet another over-aged hockey player.’ Like some of the yachtsmen in Lae, the Australian men I have seen in shops, in the hotel, all wear natty, tailored shorts, stockings and ‘sensible’ shoes. I add, to mollify him, ‘Of course, it’s all right for a young man. And your niftily tailored shorts are better than the absurd knee-length bell-bottomed things the British wear.’
I might have added that English accents must sound as bizarre to people here as some of the Australian voices in the bar of the Travel Lodge Hotel do to me. I note a few remarks at random: ‘Oi rekin’ the fade’s not bed…. Yis, he sti’ed one yea-a end a hairf in Sidnee…. Yeah, he’s got a mare-ster’s degree…. Excuse oi, can oi use the phane?…. Thenks.’
*
John Taylor of Burns Philp’s shipping department said, ‘We’ve the Burtide, a nearly brand-new little ship, built in Singapore, sailing to Kieta on Bougainville Island tomorrow. Just right for you.’ Perfect. But next day: ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. The captain reports mechanical trouble. She’s giving off black smoke. She’ll be delayed at least three days.’
There was a nasty scene in the Travel Lodge Hotel that night. At dinner, a hideously drunken lout at a table of four Europeans kept bawling at the waiter, ‘Come yer, friend!…. Hey you, you black bastard!’ and similar insults. The Tolai waiter, understandably furious, finally and rightly refused to serve him. Other waiters who did so were similarly taunted and abused by this white monster with a bull neck and huge arms, a scene so noisy and disagreeable that no one in the restaurant could ignore it. Yet no one at the drunk’s table tried to restrain him. Nor, despite the distracted comings and goings of the waiters, was there any sign of the manager who might have been expected to appear. The culprit was a giant of about forty-five and not less than 250 pounds, with yellow hair flopping over a face the colour of magenta with drink and anger. Habitual aggression had moulded his mouth into a bully’s half-pout, half-sneer. The men at his table were frightened of him – that was clear. After the meal I looked for the manager. After all, despite the economic hold Australia has here, PNG is an independent country – a member of the United Nations and all that. In Singapore, or India, or any country I can think of the police would have collared this man double quick, very likely pending deportation.
The young manager told me with a helpless look, ‘I’ve only been here a week.’ He’d heard that complaints had been made in the past about this man to the head of his mission. ‘He works in a Catholic Mission, you know.’
‘A good advertisement for it,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you bar him from your hotel?’
‘Oh, well, Rabaul’s a small place. I make it hard for him, he might make it hard for me.’
‘It looked as if the waiters wanted to go to the police,’ I said.
‘They wanted to,’ he agreed. ‘But I advised them to wait until morning when they’d have cooled down a bit.’
‘Why should they cool down? Doesn’t this affect local attitudes to all of you foreigners?’
‘I’m afraid it does. Because of this sort of thing, there are – well, nationalists – who resent us quite a lot. But, as I say – I’ve only been here a week. And it’s a small place….’
When I told all this to Harry he said, yes, there were expatriates who went about insulting the local people. ‘The people here resent these colonial attitudes, of course. They quietly note who behaves like that, and probably get their own back some time later, somehow.’
I said I hoped they did.
‘Now that you’ve got a little time, you’d better see what a plantation is like,’ Michael Tinne said. He was a large, breezy man, still youngish, despite years of experience of copra plantations in Africa and Central America. Because of the world’s sudden relative lack of interest in copra, the dried pith of the coconut, he was closing some of Burns Philp’s many plantations. For that reason, and because he was British, I had an idea he wouldn’t be too popular in the region. But he didn’t seem to worry. He drove me to the eastern tip of New Britain where a bungalow stood high over St George’s Channel, looking out to sea under the branches of a huge frangipani tree. The blue, lumpy outline of New Ireland lay under cloud on the horizon.
A well-cut lawn plunged to a beach of black sand, and the sound of surf against the headland filtered up to us through a thick fringe of palms. Behind the house the copra forest began, sunless and glum. Ian Smith, the Australian manager, seemed as young as Tinne but he had lived alone on plantations here and there for twenty years; some far more remote than this one, he said. He poured Bloody Marys, and after a bit threw steaks onto a large metal sheet laid across two small piles of bricks. A fire composed entirely of coconut shells gave out an immense heat.
What sort of life was this, year after year on a plantation?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can retire at fifty with a pension. I can save perhaps £10,000 a year out of my salary of £16,000. I’ve bought forty acres outside Melbourne.’ He lived without air conditioning, doors and windows wide open; it was very hot and humid. Just standing still, I felt sweat raining off my face and soaking my shirt. I mopped away at it with the little towel I always carry in my belt in hot climates. Smith was a likeable man, happy in his environment; happy in shorts and
walking barefoot – taking local conditions as they came. Mosquitoes? ‘Don’t worry me,’ he said. Dengue fever? ‘You sweat and shake like hell, you feel all your bones and muscles are on the rack. After that a fearful headache – oh, terrible!’
‘What do you take for it?’
‘There’s no remedy. Just take an aspirin.’
Smith spoke highly of his ‘boys’, the plantation workers. One manager had been stabbed to death in the last ten years, he laughed, ‘but he was sleeping with some boy’s wife – even with lots and lots of boys’ wives. So you see it wasn’t racial.’ He pointed a fork at his head. ‘Once a worker hit me just here with a bush knife. It was heavy and sharp. Thirty stitches in that. But he was an epileptic, so you have to excuse him.’
Smith said the plantation people weren’t vindictive. Still, tormented worms would turn.
‘Like to hear a true story of the old days? Well, at my very first plantation, there was a guy called Henderson – a real tough of the old school of planters. Drank a big bottle of rum a day. He was my first boss, and on almost my first day he paraded a hundred and eighty boys with their bush knives and came along with the record book of their week’s work. To the first one he said, “You’re four bags short of copra. Now, drop that knife.” The guy didn’t move. “Drop it!” Still no movement. He went back to the bungalow for a couple of pick handles, and gave me one of them, saying, “Just back me up. See no bastard comes up on me from behind.” Then he said again to the boy: “Drop that knife.” And yet again no response.’ Smith was handing out steaks. ‘I didn’t believe my eyes – he caught this guy with the knife a huge whack on the wrist with the pick haft – must have broken his wrist, I should think. And at once – wow! – a hundred and eighty men went wild with rage. They snapped branches off trees, snatched up stones, anything, in their fury to get at this hated man. They fell on him from all sides. I was ready to protect his back, but luckily they didn’t come from there, and they weren’t after me. Henderson’s leg was gashed – twenty stitches. And he was hit on the skull by a bush knife. I heard it. It sounded like – well, a metallic resonance, like a knife hitting a stone. I’ll never forget it. Thirty-four stitches he had later. But luckily he didn’t pass out, and when the attackers thought they’d killed their master they ran off.’
‘They must have been used to a lot of bullying from Henderson.’
‘Yes, tough stuff was routine.’
We walked back to the house. Through the open window I could hear the surf and the continuous whistling of birds on the lawn. A large, knobbly crocodile skin covered much of the sitting room floor. He’d made some of the furniture himself, Smith said; it passed the time. He read, too; non-fiction mostly.
‘It’s the local humour I like,’ Smith said. ‘You can control the men through humour. Listen to this. Once I told a habitual sleeper on the job that if I ever caught him sleeping again, I’d pour petrol over him and then throw matches at him. He was scared by that, believing it. Well, we did find him fast asleep one night. So I told some boys to fill a bucket of water and throw it over him. Whoosh!’ – Smith laughed – ‘He woke up soused with liquid in the dark, and all he could see was me striking matches one after the other. Off he went like a madman – sprinting up the hillside through the trees, and away.’
He laughed again. I imagined that terrified, bushy-haired figure, lacerating his body against palm trunks and bushes, striving to escape immolation.
‘Did he ever come back?’ I asked.
‘Of course – and this is where they are so good. Later on, he laughed like hell at the joke I’d played on him, and all the men laughed, too. It was a great joke between us all. That’s nice, isn’t it?’ He paused. ‘But I’ll tell you this. In the old days there were managers who would have put real, flammable petrol in that bucket and really thrown those matches. Oh, yes. Boys were sometimes so badly treated they’d take off into the jungle and reappear half-starved, ragged, in a really bad way weeks later.’
I thought: a human torch wouldn’t have much chance of returning, half-starved or otherwise. Thank God, Smith was a humane man. But what fear there had once been in the tangle of trees behind us; in the relentless ocean of green at which Gimana Kila and I had looked across from our viewpoint over Gazelle peninsula. As distinctly as the columns of trees and the bright birds on the lawn, I could see Henderson with his bottles of rum and his pick handles, and the furious magenta face in my hotel dining room the night before.
*
That night I went with Michael Tinne and John Taylor to the Retired Servicemen’s Club, the regular hangout for expatriates from Down South – in their ‘expat’ accents it became ‘Den Seth’ – i.e. Australia. There I met Captain Stan, master of the local copra carrier. And again, I fell in with the extended, middle-aged hockey team, the burly, sunburnt men in the inevitable tailored shorts and calf-length stockings. Among them you couldn’t have missed Captain Stan. He was, you might say, an anomaly. A short, skinny man of about forty, with lively features, big ears and an easy, lopsided smile, he was decidedly, in sailors’ parlance, half seas over. He staggered with grog. He bobbed and weaved, crowed, hooted with alcohol.
Dashing at us with a wild cry of ‘Ooops!’ he skittishly ran his fingers up Michael Tinne’s billowing shorts, causing Tinne to leap into the air as if a tarantula spider had run up his leg.
‘Yoo-hoo! I’m the Coral Princess,’ chortled Captain Stan. ‘That’s me! Yoo-hoo!’ he yodelled, pirouetting up to the bar.
There was good-natured laughter. No one objected to such high jinks. The captain was obviously a popular member of the community, and a respected one, too.
‘Bloody marvellous sailor, Captain Stan,’ Tinne murmured, straightening his shorts.
‘Totally reliable at sea,’ John Taylor agreed, seriously. ‘Ask anyone.’
‘Y-i-i-i-h-e-e-e!’ the captain yelled gleefully. ‘Yoiks!’ he added, lowering a provocative eyelid at a grinning Tolai barman.
His flirtatious fingers approached once more and Tinne, moving out of range like a veteran matador side-stepping a particularly clumsy bull, said in avuncular tones. ‘Now, now. That’s a good chap.’ After a bit Tinne said to me, ‘He really is a good man. You might be interested in visiting his ship.’ The captain overheard this.
‘Meet you on the wharf, ten o’clock,’ he said with a merry wriggle. ‘Arsk faw the Cor-al Princ-ess,’ he added in a hi-falutin’ English accent. ‘Doncha-know, mah dear.’
*
Next morning I found Captain Stan on the quay. He was no longer pirouetting; evidently he only changed into the Sugar Plum Fairy after dark. It was hardly surprising that he looked as if he’d had a rough night, but he was cheerful, too. He had not forgotten the invitation to visit his ship. ‘Come aboard,’ he said, smiling. Up in his cabin, he strode across and abruptly pulled back the drawn curtains of his bunk, dramatically revealing a small black cat curled up on the pillow by a blond fuzzy head. Cat and head were asleep. Unabashed, Captain Stan seized a handful of the fuzz and shook it, crying, ‘Up!’ and with a small shriek, a muscular young Tolai scrambled out, skipped naked across the floor and vanished into the shower. ‘Next thing, beer,’ said Captain Stan in a matter-of-fact way, as though he had done no more than shoo the cat off the bunk. He handed me a cold can of Foster’s lager from his little refrigerator, while sounds of spraying water issued from the bathroom.
We were joined by two Australians who chatted about the copra situation, the deplorable breakdown of Burtide, and the tragedy of the passenger barge, Sir Garrick, sunk by the recent gale in the Gulf of Papua. She was lost – but how? It was difficult to capsize a barge.
After a while and another round, this time of San Mig beer, Captain Stan shouted in the direction of the shower stall, ‘All right, come out. Are you in there all day?’ Abruptly wrenching back the shower curtains he revealed the Tolai, naked and wet, standing before a mirror clipping his pale yellow fuzz with a small pair of nail scissors.
‘Oh!’
the young man said, eyebrows theatrically raised, but without rancour.
‘Oh, indeed,’ the captain said, with only a touch of the previous night’s skittishness. ‘You can clarify something. Your nice hair. Do you put peroxide on that hair, or is it natural?’
‘All natural,’ the Tolai said indignantly – adding with a careless smile, ‘of course.’ What nincompoops we were, he implied.
‘But some people do put something on it, yes?’ said Captain Stan. ‘Not you, but some people?’
‘Maybe some people.’ Disdainfully intent now on the reflection of his butterscotch-hued muscles in the mirror, he showed an amused unconcern when Captain Stan took his left forearm and raised it. ‘See,’ Stan said to me as if he were lecturing an anatomy class. ‘No one would dye their armpits blond, would they? And it’s blond down there, too. There you are, then. That proves it. No dye.’
The youth was tall, even without his nine-inch yellow busby; his mouth was large with full lips, his well-modelled nose slightly downward-curving. He wore a necklace of shells. Now he walked carefully, almost regally, across the cabin, found his laplap on the bunk, wound it on, and sat quietly as the rest of us talked around him. He was not in the least embarrassed, nor was anyone else. Afer a while, another white man came into the cabin, British this time: a plantation engineer, he said, warmly shaking my hand. He removed an oily singlet and a crumpled pair of underpants from a chair and sat down. ‘You must be from the Duke of York Islands,’ he said in a friendly man-to-man way. No, the Tolai said, he came from a bay west of Gazelle peninsula.
‘Oh, my geography – wrong again,’ the engineer said, and they both laughed. Racial arrogance was not part of the mildly bohemian atmosphere of Stan’s cabin.
