Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Eleven

  My thoughts found an unexpected voice. John was standing by my bag, holding out his hand. He was saying, ‘Kieta not good. Better watch out. Better not stay long time. Too much fighting.’ He drew, in mime, a knife across his throat.

  ‘Who, John?’

  ‘Bad people work in timber yard down the road from Kieta Hotel. Too much beer. Fight.’

  ‘I’ll remember that. Goodbye, John.’

  The agent’s man drove me to the Kieta Hotel through the sticky heat. It was a three-storeyed, undistinguished building. It had a bungalow attachment with a receptionist’s room, a television room, a low-ceilinged bar and then a simple dining room. On the reception office door a sign said, ‘Sorry, no gat work.’ I signed the register. Black, middle-aged ladies ironed shirts on the landings. A Tolai showed me to a room, and I stood under the shower for ten minutes sluicing away the sweat and grime of the Kazi. The small red fleabites were fading.

  I telephoned an Australian plantation manager whose name Michael Tinne had given me – Tim Wilson; ‘Tiny’ Tim, Ian Smith had said. At the end of the telephone a voice said, ‘Yis. Come up and stay if you like. I’ll try and find a bloke to pick you up.’ I thanked him.

  I had a few hours. Best to make sure of the first possible onward passage. I only had to walk across the road to Burns Philp. Everything seemed to be across the road: the bank, the store, the post office. A large, fair, bespectacled man at the desk said, ‘I’m John Fieldhouse,’ and shook hands. ‘Now let’s see what we have…. The Capitaine La Pérouse, Sofrana Line, French…. Yes, in a week. Captain Luc is a young chap, very accommodating. I expect he’ll take you to Honiara. If not … there’s the Papuan Chief. Umm. They don’t take passengers. Very strict about it. Anyway, you’ve got a few days here.’

  I returned to the Kieta Hotel, comforted. At noon I ordered a beer from the very black barman in the little bar. A notice on the door said, ‘Minimum Dress – clean shirt, shorts with long socks and shoes…. Or: tailored laplap and sandals. T-shirt and Thongs not permitted.’ Thongs are rubber flipflops, comfortable for slopping about in.

  An off-white New Zealander with olive-tinged half-moons under his eyes said, ‘Kieta’s no good,’ echoing John, the seaman. Papuan labourers at the timber yard beat people up ‘really badly’, whites particularly. ‘It’s the grog,’ he said. I must avoid the timber yard, I thought.

  Tim Wilson’s driver, a silent Bougainvillean, arrived in a rattling pickup. I heaved my metal suitcase into the back and we drove over tarmac for some time heading inland. Then we turned off onto a rutted dust road, bouncing about for some miles in relatively open bush. After that armies of trees swooped in and enveloped us like the dark soul of the island. It was a revelation. I knew a plantation was a sprawling, man-made, relatively disciplined forest. But this was different. The extent of the plantation – or perhaps it was two together – seemed infinite. A pall of gloom descended over the track, the pickup, the silent driver and me. The effect, mile after mile, was not only dark but unexpectedly chilling. There might have been an eclipse of the sun. The ragged heads of coconut trees blotted out the sky, imposing a sinister twilight. Rank after rank they hedged us in, uncountable, unmoving, silent regiments – no, divisions – so meticulously planted that from a right-angle or diagonal view of them hardly a single tree was out of line. As time and these trees went by, the impression grew that I had strayed into a fairy story by Grimm, that I was reviewing a ghastly parade in which all the soldiers were dead, the resurrected heroes of a long and disastrous war, an impression deepened by the husked coconut shells that lay singly or in small heaps here and there, under the trees or on the roadside, like severed heads.

  ‘Haus Wilson’ at Kirwina – Tim’s home – was a long, well-built bungalow with a wide lawn, once the outpost’s airstrip before a reasonable road came, Tim said, stretching two or three thousand yards to the sea.

  There was a bay and there were reefs close by, and the wreck of a tiny coaster leaned its broken ribs on one of them, like a hopeless drunk. There were spreading frangipani trees on the lawn near the house, and the sides and back of it were tightly enclosed by the dense ranks of the coconut palms.

  ‘Tiny’ Tim was extra tall; he was also thin, a shaggy-looking thirty-something-year-old with short, unkempt, darkish hair. He had a long, bony face, a long, none-too-well-shaved jaw and the weathered look of a rancher in a film about the Australian outback, one who worked hard and liked his liquor. It was a good-natured face, and I found that he was indeed good-natured; and self-contained and self-confident without being in the least arrogant. How could he not be self-confident, marooned out here in this coconut forest with a ragtag army of imported labour from the half-discovered valleys of New Guinea. He wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt; his long, strong, skinny legs disappeared into army-style boots which looked terribly heavy and cumbersome, but which I suppose were ideal in the mud and tree stumps of the plantation.

  When we went in through the flyproof screen door from the verandah, the first thing I saw in the living room of Haus Wilson – the ‘Haus’ was a relic of the pre-1918 days when the plantations of Bougainville belonged to the Germans – was a prominent rectangular bar near the door. It dominated and welcomed. You had to step round it to enter the room, a considerable wooden-floored space well lit by numerous large windows. There was also a round dining table and an exotic bronze fan (‘Won that in a tequila-drinking competition, ha!’). The room had no air conditioning, but it did have seven or eight armchairs and sofas, bookcases, a video and a hi-fi. It was a comfortable place.

  On the walls hung mementoes and clues to an exiled, adventurous life. A rusty Japanese bayonet; photographs of birds and pin-ups; a polished brass shell case or two; empty Drambuie bottles; an ancient anchor and an even rustier axe; a punchbag; oddest of all, a convict’s ball and chain. On the bar were a good few bottles, but Tim seemed to think I might find their number inadequate. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’ve got some more piss coming – or should I say grog?’

  Hard rock, I swiftly discovered, was a relentless, omnipresent feature of plantation life. The mind-hammering bang-bang, thud-thud of it followed one around, as irritating as earache. I longed to switch it off. I would have preferred the silence of the thousands of trees, however much unease that might at times have produced. Not that silence was the alternative to pop music at Haus Wilson – the bungalow was usually full of some sort of sound. Various people lived in or near it. For a start there was Tim’s Bougainvillean ‘wife’, a smiling young black woman called Lizzie, and her small child, Maxie, as black as his mother – the plump apple of Tim’s eye. Lizzie’s face was pretty and strong, with big, glossy, responsive eyes that laughed much of the time.

  ‘Uh, the – uh – relationships around this place are – uh – complex – ha!’ Tim said in his self-deprecating, James Stewart way. He tacked the ‘ha!’ on to the end of almost every sentence he uttered – a strange verbal tic. ‘You see, Maxie is Lizzie’s son by the welder….’

  ‘The welder?’

  ‘Yis. See? That’s the welder, out there. Welding the safety struts on the swimming pool chute.’ I saw a young blue-black man by the small, prefabricated-style pool on the lawn. ‘Now the welder – ha! – is married to Lizzie’s sister, and she is having a baby by him, so what the bloody relationships will be all round here, God knows – ha! I mean when the kids grow up and go to the same school. Lizzie’s and her sister’s, all with the same father – ha!’ He paused and added in a different, quieter tone of voice, ‘Lizzie’s pretty marvellous. I suppose Lizzie is a kind of saint – you know.’ Suddenly embarrassed, he covered his mouth with a large hand, letting out a final ‘ha!’ before turning away.

  Female laughter came from all parts of the house – sounds of struggles and then the giggling of girls seeped through its wooden walls, for Tim seemed to have at least three Bougainville girls around the place apart from the favourite for the last six years, Lizzie, the black beauty.


  When a close friend of Tim’s nicknamed ‘Rommel’ (though he looked nothing like him, being much younger, with a fair moustache to boot) came to join us in the house, he told me the story of a visit by Tim’s mother to Haus Wilson.

  ‘She was very upright. Forbidding. People stood up to talk to her.’ He laughed. ‘God knows what she thought of old Tim’s friends who came round. I do know everyone called her Mrs Wilson from beginning to end. Actually, I asked her – I said, “What would you like us to call you? Mrs Wilson, or, you know, your own name?”’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t quite answer that. Gazing round at Tim’s kaffir girls, she said, “Well, I see there are four Mrs Wilsons here already.”’

  There was no doubt of Tim’s love for Lizzie – and for Maxie. The living room of Haus Wilson had a sort of play area in which toys and cushions, coloured balls, koala bears and a teddy, a trumpet and a model bulldozer lay in confusion. Tim showed me a book of children’s songs in pidgin. One song was called ‘Wanpela Puk-puk wak-about isi’, a title which I took to refer to a happy crocodile living free. Another was a sad little ditty about a calf born without a tail. ‘Mi laikim tel,’ the calf cried, pathetically – ‘I want a tail’ … but, alas, the poor beast ended in the stewpot instead – ‘Kaf i mas go long sospan?’ ‘Em. Yumi kaikai sori.’ (‘Must the calf go into the pot?’ ‘Yes. You and I are going to eat him. Sorry about that.’)

  I soon got used to the way Tim’s voice, too, seemed to echo from every room in turn. Perhaps it was something to do with acoustics. Anyway, he was seldom still, always clumping here and there in his heavy ammunition boots: into his office, to the telephone, to his bedroom, into the garden to see how the welder was getting on, back through the living room, out towards the back of the house for a word with Luke, the driver who had brought me from Kieta and who was also the accountant. Restlessness agitated Tim Wilson like a fever.

  He read a little, though he preferred to watch a video film serial like James Michener’s Centennial. He was a lover of Rolf Bolderwood’s Robbery Under Arms, the novel of outlaws in the outback of nineteenth-century Australia. He was hooked, he said, on the manner of Captain Starlight’s betrayal by the white bull that tags along with the herd of steers he has just hijacked.

  ‘The real Captain Starlight,’ he told me, ‘was called Harry Redmond. I’ve seen his memorial at Corella Creek on Brunett Downs in the Northern Territories of Australia.’ The life of the other best-known renegade, Ned Kelly, fascinated him. Tim’s father owned huge tracts of north-western Australia, and he loved it there. He showed me photographs of his father’s ranch, and of himself as clerk of the course at some Australian race meeting, his lean face mostly hidden in a wideawake hat that turned him into a real bush-whacker, every inch. Why did he leave? ‘To be my own master.’ He had had to learn this job in six months and how to speak pidgin as well. Indeed, he rattled off pidgin so fluently (interspersed with ‘bastard’, ‘bloody’, and ‘ha!’ and a good deal of chortling) that I could very seldom catch more than one word in ten or twelve; sometimes none at all. From 5.30 a.m., when the hammering of a gong sounded reveille for the workers in their barrack-like huts in the trees behind Haus Wilson – it was still dark at that hour – Tim was in sole command of a huge, remote and valuable estate; he was as responsible for every thing and human being on it as a liner’s captain is responsible for the vessel, its passengers and crew. He was his own master all right.

  I stayed a week there. When Tim was busy, I read more of Isles of Illusion – after all, I was actually on a plantation as remote in its way as anything in the New Hebrides. Asterisk told horrific stories of the old days.

  Once there had been a deputation of white missionaries from Malakula to Vila, the capital of New Hebrides. ‘They had a shocking story to tell and were so frightened that they had left their wives and children behind in the danger…. It appears that the natives had been getting truculent for some time. Last Sunday they made a descent upon a quite inoffensive English planter‘– I looked up at Tim Wilson who at that moment was mending one of Maxie’s toys – ‘killed him, ate him, and then retired to the bush with six of his labourers, and ate them alive there.’

  It was heartening to know that there are no cannibals on Bougainville Island. The Bougainville people are a quiet lot, Tim had said. Reading on, I found Asterisk’s accounts of white savagery – like this one, for example, concerning ‘recruiting’ of island labour:

  A trick played by a French captain. He arrived at an island where the natives are good strong men, but absolutely refused to go away and work. The captain told the chief he did not want recruits, but only thirty strong men to help him shift a large tank in his hold. The job would take about an hour and he would give them 2 shillings each for it. Thirty of the best braves in the village came and toiled away trying to shift the tank. Their efforts were not very successful owing to the fact that the tank had been carefully bolted to the ship’s keel, and when, weary of the work, they came on deck, they found the anchor up and the ship well out at sea. The captain grogged them all, and as they could do nothing else they all signed on for three years. Their troubles didn’t end there.

  The niggers are supposed to be paid 10 shillings a month, but at the end of their three years they find that all their pay had been swallowed up in gaudy calico and tobacco, or else it had been stopped for refractory conduct. The poor nigger is so disgusted at having to go back to his home empty-handed, which would cause him to lose caste for meanness, that he signs on for another three years, and so on ad infinitum.

  It was only in certain islands that the natives were prepared to go elsewhere to work (‘Same here,’ said Tim when I asked him. ‘No native of Rabaul or of Bougainville works on a plantation.’) In the old days, every planter kept a schooner and sailed round the most God-forsaken islands trying to get men to work for him. If they agreed they were signed on – they put a thumb mark on some scrap of paper – for a three-year stint in a plantation they had never seen, in a place they had never heard of. There were very strict laws and regulations governing the manner of recruiting. ‘Needless to say,’ Asterisk wrote home, ‘these laws are set at defiance, openly by the French, secretly by the Britons.’ At an hotel known as the ‘Blood House’ in Vila, Asterisk found a group of recruiters playing poker and drinking champagne (‘Cliquot-demi-sec’). The stakes were

  merely the recruited niggers who are ranged solemnly round the wall of the room and who change hands many times a night. All this in spite of the Anglo-French Convention of October 20th, 1906…. Fancy the excitement of a jackpot with four stalwart male niggers and two female (total value £92) in the pool. ‘Years of labour’ is a unit of currency here. For example, when I bought and resold my property there was a 7-ton cutter which I withheld and subsequently sold for twenty ‘years of labour’, i.e. five boys engaged for three years and five for one year or any other equivalent combination. In the open market a male Kanaka indentured for three years fetches £17. If you are a Frenchman it is cheap; because you keep him for nine or ten years, and then send him home without paying him. If you are an Englishman you are naturally more superficially honest. At the end of each three years you supply him with a new wife (generally your own cast-off), and then, when he insists upon going home, being tired of wives, you pay him in ‘trade’ at 10 times its cost price and throw in a Bible as a make-weight.

  ‘“Pay your worker before his sweat dries up,” says the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon Him)’: I have seen that injunction in a Muslim newspaper in Pakistan. Apparently, it wouldn’t have attracted much heed among the profiteering Christians of the South Seas. At Tim’s, in 1982, the workers stumbled out into the plantation at first light, ate their kaikai (food – a bowl of rice) at noon, then worked from one to four o’clock. ‘We pay them 28 Kina every two weeks,’ Tim said in answer to my question: £46 a month. ‘The government-approved wage.’

  He took me to the coconut drying sheds behind the house
, where the fires themselves were heated by coconut shells; the iron-roofed sheds stood on a driveway of shell chippings. Once dried, the half-shells were pushed down a chute to another room which echoed with the sound of hundreds of castanet players gone mad, as the workers banged them on the ground so that the loosened copra fell out like the lining of a helmet. In these sheds, the copra was bagged for shipment.

  I stumbled with Tim over the dark uneven earth between the flawless avenues of coconut trees; gloomy avenues to which daylight never seemed quite to penetrate. Now and again we met a tractor pulling a wagon loaded with copra on which dwarfish workers crouched like black, brooding gargoyles. Most were bearded and dressed in nothing but ragged denim shorts, and their bush knives added menace to their ugliness. Yet some had jammed scarlet hibiscus flowers into their woolly locks and these, combined with their beaklike noses and wide, sensually lipped mouths, gave them a curiously ancient, pagan look. Among the trees, other sad self-exiles from the hidden, mist-filled valleys of Papua husked coconuts, bashing the fibrous outer skins two-handed against the pointed ends of bayonet-sharp metal shafts they had rammed straight up in the soft, damp earth; a dangerous business that could cost you a hand or at least a hideous wound as bad as a spear thrust through your palm. I asked Tim if he had a doctor on the estate.