Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘Well, there’s Matthew, the supervisor – he knows quite a bit. And to get this job, I had to have some training. About district nurse level, I suppose, ha!’

  Could he deliver a baby?

  ‘I delivered Maxie. Round here, of course, there’s two medicines, modern and local. The local midwife uses leaves to boil up for sterilized water, and she bites through the umbilical cord with her teeth.’

  At each side of the tracks, between the trees straight as ‘rides’ in an English wood, I saw again the small heaps of nuts that had seemed, still seemed, like severed heads. Some were in fact cocoa pods (the much shorter cocoa trees were planted between the towering coconuts, making two plantations in one). These were the size of small melons, yellow, orange or green. Tim broke open a pod’s softish outer covering, revealing inside the beans, sticky now with a white mucus-like substance, which would later be dried and become recognizably cocoa.

  On the boundaries, the sullen forest waited – it really looked as if it was waiting to come back. Huge, wild trees stood like green King Kongs, straining, I felt, to regain the domination wrenched from them by saw and panga, and to disrupt for ever the unnatural symmetry of the humans’ plantation.

  *

  Rommel was impervious to threatening atmospheres. A swashbuckling twenty-eight-year-old, he had already served in a mounted unit called Grey’s Scouts which patrolled the borders of what was then Southern Rhodesia and hunted the guerrilla squads belonging to Mugabe, the man who later became Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister. Often the tables were turned and the guerrillas had hunted the Scouts. He had survived several ambushes. He had also been involved somehow, perhaps merely as a spectator, in a shoot-out in a bar in Salisbury in which a man was killed. Rommel drove me about when Tim was busy. He was a pleasant companion. As far as I am concerned, how exactly he came to Bougainville is a mystery to this day.

  Rommel was joined at Haus Wilson by my namesake, the Tolai manager of a plantation two hours up the road, who was a protégé of Tim’s. This Gavin was thick-set, bearded with a blondish fuzz, and heavy-featured; he had the thick nose and lips of New Britain (as opposed to the fine noses and mouths of the Bougainville people), and the chest, shoulders and arms of a boxer. Gavin was down here on a mission. A fellow Tolai, assistant manager at yet another plantation, a big one of 3800 acres, had fooled around, drunk, with someone else’s girl. When his boss, an Australian, had remonstrated and ordered him to step outside, the Tolai pulled out a knife and stabbed him three times. The Australian was said to be in a serious condition in hospital. A local court had fined the Tolai 250 Kina (£200 – quite a lot, I thought). Gavin had come down with a kind of watching brief. Tolais stick together, Wilson told me. They had a sort of Mafia – well, a self-disciplinary freemasonry – which would chastise the erring Tolai in its own way if he had let the side down. But there was more to it than that. The plantation administrators were, I gathered, in a ferment of resentment. The fine was seen as trivial. ‘If a fellow can get away with stabbing his boss, whatever next….’ Tim Wilson himself was disgusted: ‘He could have won or lost that trivial sum in one night’s gambling,’ he said.

  As a mere guest, I said nothing. But the incident struck me as a symptom of underlying unease in this odd and isolated world, where outnumbered whites could only preserve law and order – or even their lives – by force of character and the mystique of their whiteness.

  Tim Wilson, like Asterisk, was a kind man behind a bush-whacking, outback appearance. He would never make a Henderson – it was inconceivable that he would kick or punch a worker. When I asked his opinion of the brutal world of Asterisk, he said, ‘Beating workers isn’t the least bit necessary. Doesn’t work – ha! You have to try to understand them. They’re frightened…. They’re in a strange country.’

  On the other hand, by all accounts the Papuans were no angels. Gavin, the Tolai manager, told me how he had been ambushed by his workers and had had to fight his way clear – I forget the cause of the affair. Papuans quite often got drunk, Gavin said, and then they ran wild – fighting, or even killing drunk. They attacked company stores, assaulted security guards with bush knives, sticks and stones – the guards ran for their lives – looted or destroyed thousands of Kinaworth of goods. Brought to court, their cases, Gavin said contemptuously, were too often dismissed by the magistrate (an Australian usually) for lack of evidence.

  Gavin, I believe, took a tougher line than Tim. As he told it, his advice to managers was uncompromising. ‘You must never – never – make friends with workers’ – he was positive about that. ‘Never admit mistakes. You are never wrong, remember. Never ever let them think they’re on top, running you. It’s the rule of the cuff and the kick.’ To me he said, ‘How else would you get these Highlanders to work? You’ve seen them on the Kazi.’ I saw them again, the crouched, totem-faced men, the cruel hook noses and the deep, sharply watchful eyes. Of course, they were not simply a collection of murderers; they were anxious, bemused, baffled, lost, and quite often, no doubt, happy or at least satisfied. Nevertheless, their faces were like faces seen in a bad dream.

  Gavin said, ‘They brood about things.’

  The Brooding Island: not a bad name for Bougainville.

  *

  Reading in my notebook, I find:

  Scenes from Bougainville life. Merve King, the boss of the quarantine station down the jungle road. A hefty Australian, broad as a barrel: an Old Hand. Keeps white bull terriers and grows hibiscus plants, pale orange, dark red, even blue.

  He says to Tim Wilson: ‘Remember a mad bloke called the Screamin’ Eagle. Skinny, reddish hair?’

  ‘Yes. I used to go rootin’ round Rabaul with ’im.’ (Root, Tim explains, is Aussie for screw.)

  ‘Well, there was a time when these Kanakas wanted to do ’im over. They put a whatsisname – a barricade – across the road and he came screamin’ back in the Land Cruiser and just managed to pull up by this barricade. And the boys came out to do ’im over, y’see?’

  ‘I get the picture,’ Tim says.

  ‘Anyway, the Screamin’ Eagle just took off. Put his foot down and roared into the village and knocked down just about every Kanaka house in the place. Of course, his windscreen was smashed and that – he was chargin’ right through the houses, knockin’ down Kanakas and God knows what. They took down the barricade all right!’

  The word Kanaka, though publicly taboo, surfaces between friends, I notice.

  ‘Then another time, he was screamin’ along and hit this narrow bridge down the road at sixty miles an hour. And there was a jeep on it already, with the Chinese trader in it. Well, the Screamin’ Eagle didn’t bother to stop or slow up – oh, no! He shot past it, full out – and by the grace of God the only damage was to take the door handles off. I tell you, Ah Wong –’

  ‘Thought he was a gone goose – ha?’

  ‘Too right. He was the whitest man on the island that day.’

  A dance party was being held at a distant plantation. All the managers were invited and they drove their black girlfriends up there. Tim’s Lizzie wore a costume with a yellow top and a yellow and orange laplap, beautiful colours against her glossy, night-black skin. Tim should find someone to paint her.

  Up-country we stopped to pick up a planter, Colin, whose house I envied: attap roof, split bamboo floor, woven banana or sago leaf walls, raised on stilts. With nostalgia I thought of Borneo. This was the only plantation house I saw in Bougainville with a lot of books in it, from Gore Vidal to rare books on the birds of Papua. Colin was glad I noticed his books. In a nervous way he mentioned Maugham’s Narrow Corner. I suggested that on the Malay archipelago Conrad was better – Victory, for example. Perhaps Colin, like Heyst in Conrad’s story, had sought out an island in which to escape from the world. He was apologetic.

  ‘You know, I have all these books. I brought them up from Down South. But I have to say, it’s a long time since I read one of them. I used to. Now, there’s no time somehow. I’m busy on the plant
ation, or in the office. In the afternoon I watch video or friends drop in for a beer or two. You get out of reading. No one does any reading here; not that I know of; not really. It’s not only reading, y’see. Take my swimming pool. I hardly ever use it. Just never get round to it.’

  The Brooding Island didn’t only brood. It sucked up the human spirit, too.

  Later, among all the shorts and beefy arms, the beer and tobacco fumes, I saw Colin dancing sedately, with great concentration and alone, a slow-motion performance like a ritual: a high knee action, an extending of the legs and pointing of the toes, and a flowing arm movement – elements of a Bacchante and Isadora Duncan. In such a smoke-filled tumult it was astonishing to see and, because of Colin’s utter absorption, it was somehow moving, too.

  Tim said, ‘Poor Colin, the fire has certainly gone out of him. Even dancing without his tambourine.’

  ‘Tambourine?’

  ‘No one ever saw old Colin high-stepping it without his tambourine!’

  Young white men were scrimmaging competitively round the eager, nubile black girls. At the bar an elderly man called Jock with cauliflower ears dispensed three-finger-deep shots of whisky and Bacardi. Every few minutes a tipsy Chinese fell heavily on the dance floor. Like a good actor, he could do it without hurting himself. Hauled to his feet, he collapsed giggling almost at once into the lap of one or other of the Australian wives, whose smiles became less real each time he did it. Someone said that now his wife had walked out on him he was going to pieces…. Oblivious of the increasing turbulence, a group of men played billiards at one end of the room as though they had the house to themselves.

  The house was near a cliff. Wandering out for air across a patch of grass, I looked down at a bay curving far below it, cupping the dark glitter of the sea; a slip would have meant a sheer and fatal fall. Inland rose the dominating jungle ridges, made menacing by a low ceiling of black storm clouds, and the gloom of them drove me back to the happy uproar of the party where they could be forgotten in the pounding of pop music, the voices, the smoke, the clack of billiard balls, the sound of the Chinaman falling. And the grog – there was no shortage of that while Jock, the old bruiser, ladled it out.

  No one stirred until noon next day. Then, in fragile health, Tim’s little convoy headed back along the dust road to Kirwina. We stopped halfway, by a river pool. We were all suffering. We ate, sparingly, of tinned ham and chocolate cake, and drank, not hairs, but tufts of the dogs that had bitten us during the night, while the girls splashed in the pool and shampooed their fuzzy heads. Dragonflies rested in the sun on hot, smooth stones. ‘Memories are made of this – ha!’ Tim laughed, pouring Coca-Cola into his rum.

  The river bed opened up a vista to the mountain ridge, heavily forested, ever frowning, discouraging visitors. ‘Does anyone ever try climbing that?’ I asked Tim. ‘Any plantations there?’

  He shook his head, following my gaze to the green dragon’s back. ‘A Jap plane or two, maybe. As we say Down South, it’s so thick up in those mountains, a blue dog couldn’t bark in it.’

  Rommel had emptied the remains of a whisky bottle and was decanting a fresh one into his thermos, diluting it with water from the pool.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled to Tim. ‘Do you know why Australians suffer so much from coitus interruptus?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, yeah! Because they can’t wait to tell their mates about it – ha! Let’s go, Rommel.’

  We turned our backs on the mountains and in clouds of dust took the afternoon trail back to Haus Wilson. Rommel drove as if he were still on horseback with Grey’s Scouts, holding the top of the pickup’s steering wheel in one hand like a fistful of reins and pouring whisky and water down his throat from the thermos with the other. Trees leaped by, and each sharp bend seemed almost too sharp. Rommel’s foot kept the accelerator pinned to the floor. I began to come alive. Interesting, I thought, how swiftly perfect fear casts out boozer’s gloom.

  *

  When one of his Australian friends, Scratch by name, asked Tim when he would marry Lizzie (he waited until Lizzie was out of hearing) Tim shuffled his feet and muttered, ‘Oh, well … next year … maybe.’ And everyone present laughed.

  ‘You’ve been saying that year after year,’ Scratch’s European wife said.

  When little Dina, the Bougainville girl who had gone off for the night with curly-headed Bill, returned, she confided bashfully that she loved Bill, that he loved her and that he had said he would marry her.

  ‘Will he, do you think?’ I asked Tim.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘If you want a good time, you too might be tempted to say you wanted to marry the girl – ha! Anyone would.’ It was too bad, he said, but what could one do? It was difficult – a black wife in Australia. And Bougainville girls are very black. On the other hand, a man had to have some fun, and there were no white girls out here. ‘It isn’t the place for ’em, d’you see?’

  I did see, and I felt sorry for the local girls whose dream was to marry these white men they loved and whose babies they sometimes bore.

  ‘It’s very difficult, Gavin,’ Tim said earnestly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  This wasn’t the end of the topic. Before boarding the Capitaine La Pérouse, I had an enlightening conversation in the Kieta Hotel’s bar with a huge, hunched sack of a white man who worked, he said in a harsh though friendly voice, far away in the jungle. His vast shoulders, battered face and big, calloused hands reminded me of Magwitch, the convict who leaps out at Pip in the graveyard in Great Expectations. At his side in the corner, a very black woman with a gap-toothed mouth staggered and giggled merrily; she was obviously enjoying her grog.

  ‘The Missis,’ Magwitch rasped, introducing her with a jerk of his thumb.

  ‘Hello,’ she said with a dainty little belch. A beer or two later he told me he was a bridge builder, up from Queensland. He liked it here. He might be stuck out in the back of beyond, but the wilds suited him, and he had managed to create the domesticated sort of life he needed. He confessed that, in any case, leaving the Missis might not be all that easy.

  What would happen, I asked, if he said one day, ‘Sorry, I’m off home –it’s goodbye.’

  ‘Oo, my Gawd. They’d cut off me head,’ Magwitch said promptly, and he wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Do you have a formal marriage contract?’

  ‘Well, no. But y’see, it’s not quite like that. There’s the jungle telegraph. And if the village people heard – and they would – that I’d planned to do a bunk, or was going with other women, they’d be after me like bloody lightnin’ – with knives.’

  The Missis put her head back and poured half a can of beer straight down her throat as one might pour disinfectant down a sink.

  ‘With knives,’ Magwitch repeated, eyeing her fondly. And with a slight narrowing of the eyelids he added, ‘And the same thing if she goes off with other men. Oh, indeed.’

  Magwitch was living rough, he said, in the south of the island, in a broken-down caravan with no air conditioning and no fans – he didn’t care much about such things. Sometimes the villagers fought lively little wars around him and arrows whizzed about his ears.

  ‘No harm meant to me, of course,’ he added. ‘Six-foot bows. Very accurate. They can shoot a parrot on the wing. I’ve seem ’em.’

  It was pleasant to see these two human beings, one crumbling and off-white, the other a blowsy midnight-black, a sort of black Sarah Gamp, exchanging belches, guffaws and tender glances over beer after beer. Magwitch told me he was very proud that the Missis had learnt English – proper English, not pidgin – from missionaries, and the pride was evident from the tone in which he said it.

  ‘Let me tell you – the other day it was raining, and know what she said? She said, “Rain, rain go away, come again another day.” That’s what she said. Pretty good, eh?’

  Gratified, the Missis cackled happily, baring her infrequent teeth. A blob of froth on her cheek gave her a touching festive air.

  ‘Thre
e more beers,’ I told the barman.

  ‘Good goin’,’ said Magwitch appreciatively.

  *

  That, for me, was the last of Bougainville. Except, I suppose I should add, for a brief look at the World’s Greatest Copper Mine in the hills above Kieta. To many people this hideous scar might be the most exciting thing on the island, but for me mines, however big, have minimal interest. They disfigure a landscape like an abscess on a person’s neck. At this one the biggest earthmovers I had ever seen – seventy tons or more – trundled like robots from Star Wars up and down spiralling tracks of shale that descended, like rifling in a gun barrel, the sides of a crater hundreds of feet deep and as wide as an Olympic stadium. It was at once impressive and unutterably boring. I forgot it as soon as I left.

  Twelve

  The evening was dark and wild when the Capitaine La Pérouse left Kieta harbour. She seemed to sidle out, careful not to disturb the sleeping crocodile. Rather to my surprise, the giant Puk-Puk made no move, so perhaps John the seaman was wrong in thinking the island was an evil spirit. Looking back, I saw high in the sky the loom of the great copper mine, a blurred arc light over a black ridge skimmed by flying rags and tatters of cloud. And then I looked back no more.

  Captain Luc Duflos, the ship’s master, was a young, open-faced man in jeans and sandals. He took me below at once and gave me a stiff whisky, as a good host welcomes a guest – the only one, in this case. He asked me to bear in mind that quite often on the short passage to Honiara he would suddenly disappear up to the bridge, no matter whose watch it might be, and I wasn’t to be put out by what might seem like eccentric behaviour. Our course was littered and bounded by islands, he explained in an easy, attractive manner, and they were by no means always well lit. ‘Bad beaconage, how you say it?’ he said in pleasantly accented English.