Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  I was leaving Samoa, old and new.

  Had I only known the Tolu family for the inside of a week? We said our goodbyes near the Apia market. Tolu’s smile was solemn when he shook hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. Manino, blinking, said, ‘Tofa,’ and Emma, ‘Come next year.’

  Taking her hand, I said, ‘Try to be here then, Emma. Stay in Samoa and teach.’

  To Amosa: ‘Tofa, wood demon.’

  His green-brown slanting eyes smiled. ‘Tofa, Gavin.’

  ‘Come next year,’ Fili said.

  It was difficult to get Isaia to leave the car. He had slept in it every night and now it was his, he thought, as much as mine. I led him out by the hand and brushed his tears away and kissed his forehead.

  ‘Tofa, aitu.’ I tapped his nose to make him smile. Then I ducked into the car and drove off, waving from the window without looking back. The flowers Ruta and Isaia had scattered on the dashboard were beginning to wilt by now, and I let them lie when I left the car at Aggie Grey’s. I noticed something on the back seat. It was Amosa’s bush lime. For a moment or two I sniffed its delicate perfume. Then I slipped it into my pocket as a souvenir.

  Twenty-four

  ‘So travel doesn’t always broaden the mind, eh?’ Captain Tony Carter said. We were standing on the bridge wing of the China Navigation Company’s container ship Pacific Islander, watching the receding shore of Western Samoa.

  ‘In the case of some Samoans, it seems it may destroy it,’ I said. The blue roofs of Vailima were visible on the left slope of Mount Vaea. I felt as if I had left something there I would have to go back for.

  ‘And were those missionaries the first you’d ever met?’

  ‘Almost.’ I said. ‘The first was a young Methodist in a sampan, halfway up the Chindwin River. In Burma. Quite remote. I was travelling illegally to the Chinese–Indian border to write about guerrilla war in the jungle there. No one was sure it existed.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘Oh, it existed all right. But thanks to that missionary I nearly missed it. You see, I was pretending to be a missionary myself – they were the only foreigners allowed up that way.’

  I saw again the overloaded sampan and the great meandering, muddy river, and my chicken coop of a cabin on the hot metal deck. The sampan made slow progress. It went aground on every second sandbank, and we had to wait for the crew to pole us off. I hadn’t actually told anyone I was a missionary, but I suppose the two Bibles I carried rather ostentatiously amounted to a disguise. I expected trouble as soon as I saw the white man in sarong and sandals on the bamboo jetty, waiting to come aboard and share the chicken coop. He had a stack of Bibles tied up with string. There was trouble, too. He took one look at me, my Bibles and my whisky bottle, and said he was going to denounce me to the local police. Interlopers like me should be made to suffer.

  The Burmese police officers squatting outside the coop, tirelessly playing cards and smoking, were on their way to upriver posts; their specific object was to trap unauthorized foreigners like me. One call and I would have faced a Rangoon jail for … well, indefinitely.

  ‘He took a righteous view, did he, this missionary bloke?’ asked Tony Carter.

  ‘Not as it turned out. You see, he’d got an idea I really was a missionary – a Seventh Day Adventist come to poach his Burmese converts. When I told him I was a journalist travelling sub rosa, he became as friendly as anything. Even forgave me my whisky.’

  Carter laughed.

  ‘His name was Edwards, and he came from Reading. I sometimes wonder what became of him.’

  *

  The Pacific Islander had left Apia for Pago-Pago and Papeete on the afternoon of my visit to Mount Vaea. There had been no problems. Tim Bridgeman in Hong Kong had telexed the company’s permission for me to board her, subject to her master’s agreement, and Tony Carter, I soon realized, was another of the China Navigation Company’s friendly officers. There was a bonus, too: Steve Komorowski, the second officer, was an acquaintance from the Hupeh of two years before. I had told him to read Joseph Conrad: their names were similar.

  Then there was Miss Yip, the radio officer.

  Miss Yip Pui Fun was no relation at all to Angel Yip who had helped me to Shanghai. This Miss Yip was small, trim and wore her hair pulled back tautly over her ears – and she was afraid of men. Chris Macdonald, the mate, said with a wicked grin, ‘She has fixed a very strong bolt on her door. She takes it with her from ship to ship. So if you’re thinking….’

  Miss Yip, I thought, was an appropriate person to meet at this stage of the voyage, if she had any puritanical affinity with Somerset Maugham’s Mrs Davidson, the intolerant, hypocritical missionary’s insufferable wife in the short story Rain. Maugham was a shrewd setter of scenes. American Samoa is famous for its rainfall. We were now within a very short distance of the tiny port of Pago-Pago (pronounced Pango-Pango), where Maugham’s character, Sadie Thompson, the hooker from San Francisco, ran into the appalling Mr Davidson.

  Mrs Davidson had ‘served’ in Hawaii, and the Samoan lava-lava scandalized her as ‘a very indecent costume’. How, she demanded in high-pitched tones, could you expect people to be moral when they wore nothing but a strip of red cotton round their loins? ‘In our islands,’ she proclaimed proudly, ‘we practically eradicated the lava-lava. And the inhabitants of these islands will never be thoroughly Christianized till every boy of more than ten years is made to wear a pair of trousers.’

  My first meeting with Miss Yip was not encouraging. To my polite ‘Good evening’ she returned no answer at all.

  *

  In no time we were at the entrance to Pago-Pago – a horseshoe with an extremely narrow southern opening onto a long curve of beach with, behind it, a soaring, spectacular ruff of mountain and forest.

  ‘Tricky entrance,’ I said to Tony Carter.

  ‘If you want to see a really narrow gap in a reef, wait until Papeete.’

  ‘You push the buoys apart there,’ Chris Macdonald added.

  This was nothing like little Apia. Through my binoculars I saw a big modern hotel, bungalows that belonged in Los Angeles, large American limousines, and a lot of baseball caps and jeans. A hefty white rich man’s fishing launch, prickly with antennae, roared out of the harbour as we came up to the wharf, and cable cars moved dizzily between two peaks on either side of the harbour abyss. Evidently, Pago-Pago had changed a lot more since 1920 than Apia or Suva. ‘No town,’ Maugham wrote of it then. ‘Merely a group of official buildings, a store or two….’ Sadie Thompson had called it ‘a poor imitation of a burg’. But the Second World War had come and gone since Maugham, and the harbour had passed through a stage of being a great naval and Marine Corps base. The base had gone too, but Pago-Pago, though materially impoverished by its loss, had never reverted to the damp, sleepy place Maugham saw.

  ‘Samoans here,’ said Captain Carter, ‘refer to “The Mainland”. Guess what that means to them?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘America. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Not easily.’

  Pago-Pago had not forgotten Somerset Maugham. The big modern hotel I had seen was called the Rainmaker, and it had a Sadie Thompson Bar. I wanted to see if it was on the site of Maugham’s hotel, so I took Miss Yip there. I thought she might be lonely in the locked cabin by herself.

  ‘I like to come,’ she said, rather to my surprise.

  ‘Are you worried on the ship with so many men?’ I asked her.

  ‘Filipinos frighten me,’ she said. ‘But this ship is quite okay. Because the crewmen are very old. Only the laundry man is twenty-five; the rest are not below forty.’ The over-forties were past it in her estimation. No wonder she felt safe with me.

  In fact, the Sadie Thompson Bar was the height of propriety. Appropriately, it was full of cheerful American sailors from a visiting warship, as well-behaved as the Broadway chorus of South Pacific. No one sang ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’, but a jukebox jingled. At the bar with a phoney Samoan that
ched roof, Miss Yip accepted a fruit cocktail – passion fruit, mango, milk, soda, grenadine. I kept her company with a mai tai: hefty jolts of three different rums mixed with fruit juice in a glass like a birdbath. Around us sailors called high-spiritedly for more Budweiser. ‘Have a Happy Day’ a bar sign said. Outside the plateglass windows the rain poured down. Old Maugham would have liked that. As for Miss Yip Pui Fun, she looked calmly around her, smiled, and accepted a second fruit cocktail. I liked her. Apart from anything else, she did somehow remind me of Angel Yip. When Pui Fun offered me a sweet I felt as if I had been awarded a good conduct medal.

  *

  Iniquity, according to the Pacific Islander’s good-natured third officer, Graham Harris, was to be found at a dive called the Pago Bar. ‘A cross between the Butterfly Bar in the Bangkok docks and a flophouse in Singapore’s Bugis Street of, well, twenty years ago,’ he promised. ‘Good chance of a punch-up to boot. The Korean trawlermen go there, mostly,’ he said. ‘They spend three months at sea non-stop, then come back here with all that stinking fish. You can imagine what they get up to.’

  ‘But not you, of course,’ Chris Macdonald said sarcastically.

  ‘I’m getting married in six months. You can have those Samoan hags. I’d rather screw a tin of corned beef.’

  ‘I believe you would an’ all.’

  The Korean trawlers lay all around; a fleet of battered rust-buckets, built for nothing but very rough work. Larger, more modern vessels were visible alongside the Star-Kist fish canning factory across the harbour. Several of the trawlers were strung about with lines on which diminutive Oriental underwear hung out like bunting. A Korean in a singlet and shorts was trying to manhandle a squealing pig up the gangway of No. 73 – the Kwang Myong. When darkness fell, the lights of the fish cannery shone across the water sharp and bright. It worked all through the night to keep American Samoa running.

  *

  ‘No beer taken outside’ a sign said when we pushed through the door of the Pago Bar and into the fog of heat and smoke beyond. Koreans were thick on the ground by the time of night Chris, Graham, Steve and I got there, leaving Tony Carter on board singing to himself over a beer. A mirrored globe over a postage-stamp-sized dance floor scattered fragments of light over the tatters of leftover Christmas decorations on the ceiling. In the gloom I saw big male Samoan shapes in dark glasses, bearded and drunk, and women with bottoms like upholstered railway buffers. Most of the Koreans had long hair, and came in two sorts: James Bond’s Oddjobs, with the look of killers who had volunteered for special homicide duty; or jolly Oriental dolls, red-faced with beer and only wanting a good time. Perhaps the Samoan hostesses were too big for some of them – they might have feared being crushed to death – because a few preferred to dance with each other. Soon, unbelievably, the atmosphere thickened even more. Vast dancing Samoan shapes wallowed through it like hippos in a mudhole. Beer came, was drunk, was reordered. I saw Komorowski swaying about with a woman as old as Boadicea’s aunt. ‘Oh, darling, to me be tree-ooo …’ a pretty girl was singing on the tiny dais with a ragged trio of guitarists behind her. In the murk a bottle smashed on the floor and there was a sudden swirl of male figures beyond the bandstand. An elderly American sat down in Komorowski’s place.

  ‘They don’t have to have it so loud,’ he bawled into the gloom. ‘Jee-sus Christ!’ He had a shining bald dome, and W.C. Fields’ nose so pitted by heavy drinking that mice might have nibbled at it. ‘They’ve no savvy. That’s it,’ he declared mournfully. ‘No comprehenso.’ He held up a fist and shook it at me. ‘Don’t say I said it.’ ‘I won’t,’ I promised.

  Komorowski jigged by again, held fast this time in the arms of Whistler’s granny in black face. Even in this dungeon-like obscurity, the sweat gleamed on his brow like quicksilver. On my other side, a long-haired Korean – a jolly type, not a volunteer killer – was trying to entice Graham onto the dance floor: ‘Tak-shee, tak-shee,’ he was imploring – or that’s what it sounded like. Graham looked at me, making signs like a man drowning.

  The Korean muttered again, ‘Tak-shee, tak-shee.’

  I said, ‘Have a little dance with him, Graham.’

  ‘Go on, Graham,’ Chris said, encouragingly.

  ‘I’m getting married in six months, for God’s sake.’ But the Korean was speaking urgently now. ‘Tak-shee, tak-shee – tak-shee!’

  ‘Get a move on, Graham, or he may turn nasty. He’s been at sea three months, remember.’

  ‘Here – put this whisky down for courage.’

  Graham took the drink, but his face still wore an expression of desperation. ‘You’re just a couple of bloody sadists, throwing a young boy like me, that’s about to be married, into the arms –’

  ‘Tak-shee, tak-shee! Bok!’

  ‘Graham!’

  ‘Oh, blimey. All right. The things I do….’

  He and the Korean dived together into the struggling mass, and the music – a Pacific version of ‘Embraceable You’ now – closed over them like animated treacle.

  The old American said, ‘No savvy, as far as the eye can see. Take a drink?’

  I thanked him: ‘A scotch, please.’

  A double came. The American was a drilling expert, he said; he drilled for anything – water, oil, gold – you name it.

  Graham waltzed uneasily by, holding the smiling Korean almost daintily at arm’s length. They might have been dancing ring-a-ring-o’-roses in slow motion.

  The American said, ‘Jee-sus Christ. You don’t have to sleep alone in this place.’ A smiling woman like Babar the Elephant came up to our table. ‘Nice, but no comprehenso,’ the American said, waving her away. ‘No savvy. That’s their trouble. But don’t say I said so.’ He ordered six more beers for the three of us.

  ‘How old am I?’ he demanded when they came.

  ‘Sixty-two,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks very much.’ He was gratified. ‘I’m seventy-five. I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘A large scotch,’ I said.

  Time passed.

  Graham Harris’s sweaty face went by yet again. By now his shirt clung to his back as if he’d been out in a rain storm. The Korean’s left hand sat on his shoulder like a tarantula.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ somebody yelled at him. Perhaps it was Chris – or me. Almost immediately, as if summoned by a war cry, two Koreans were standing in front of me, bowing their heads up and down like birds drinking.

  ‘That’s a kow-tow,’ the American said. ‘They’re kow-towing you. It’s the custom. These guys have plenty of savvy. Better be polite and give ’em a kow-tow back.’

  But the kow-tow didn’t save me. It turned into something between a Highland reel and a galloping version of Auld Lang Syne as the three of us bumped and crashed around the dance floor like dodgem cars at a fairground. I was luckier than Graham. The music soon changed to rock ’n roll. The Samoans went wild, and the Koreans scuttled off the floor like terrified mice at an elephant round-up.

  ‘No punch-ups?’ Tony Carter said next day. ‘That’s odd. I expect you’d have liked a punch-up. You should have been with us New Year’s Eve in Nuku’alofa with the Tongans. We had a good ’un there. The radio officer had to get back to the ship by walking along the top of a reef up to his waist in water!’

  *

  Pago-Pago had a sort of village green now and some attractive colonial-style wooden houses.

  The tiny, dismal hotel in which poor Sadie Thompson had been bullied and then raped by Mr Davidson had actually existed – ‘a frame house of two storeys, with broad verandahs on both floors and a roof of corrugated iron…. On the ground floor, the owner (a half-cast named Horn) had a store where he sold canned goods and cottons.’ I found a ‘Sadie Thompson’s Mart’ in what was said to be the same building. It was a two-storey wooden structure, at any rate. I bought some plum-coloured cotton cloth there, half listening for some echo of Sadie’s famous cry of contempt – ‘You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!’ And I took
a turn down the long sweep of beach where kind Dr Macphail had seen, lying half in the water and half out, a dreadful object, Davidson’s body … ‘the throat cut from ear to ear, and in the right hand still the razor with which the deed was done’.

  There was no one here now. Only the smell of fish from the canning factory, and dark clouds gathering overhead. As I reached the asphalted road to walk back to the ship, it began to rain.

  Twenty-five

  We lay off Tahiti – in sight of what Maugham had called ‘the unimaginable beauty of the island that is named Moorea’. Its mountains floated mistily in a perfect sea. Maugham had not exaggerated.

  The radio was giving out dismal news. I was suddenly made aware again of the Falklands situation. Now what had happened? The Royal Marines had re-taken South Georgia; an Argentine submarine had been attacked by British helicopters and badly damaged. A British naval blockade was in force round the southern extremities of Argentina – precisely where I was headed. This called for some thought. Tony Carter and Chris Macdonald huddled with me over a chart. There was Tahiti, a turquoise spider at the centre of a web of black lines that meant regular sea routes.

  ‘Where do you want to go after Papeete?’ Tony asked. ‘Chile? Are you sure? Nothing regular seems to go there, does it?’ True enough, nothing did.

  ‘There’s a regular line up to Panama, though,’ Chris said encouragingly.

  ‘Or all the way up to San Francisco.’

  I found no encouragement in that. I was determined to see Cape Horn, British blockade or no British blockade. And I had one gleam of potential comfort: there was time for the war to fade away. After Tahiti I still would have half the width of the Pacific Ocean to cross.

  Tony said, ‘Leave it to a very, very shrewd and helpful man in Tahiti. Our agent – Raphael Tixier.’