by Peter Ryan
Each morning that I remained in camp we sat on the rising ground above the house and waited for our bombers to make their daily raids on Lae and Salamaua. The buildings of Lae itself were hidden by the low hills just behind the town, but the famous ficus-tree stood out clear against the skyline. Salamaua, across the waters of the Huon Gulf, was in full view, though of course much farther away. Often, through the binoculars, we saw fierce fires raging, and pillars of black smoke creeping higher and higher into the sky.
Our planes used to make their runs quite low over the house, and we could count them and see all their markings clearly. It was strange, after they had passed, to see the first puffs of smoke from Lae’s anti-aircraft guns bursting silently round the planes like little balls of cotton wool. Forgetting the slow speed at which sound travels, one wondered at the silence. Then, when the air was full of puff-balls, the first sound of the explosions would thud echoing up the valley.
I found the bombers were great company and encouragement, and used to wish that I had some way of telling their crews that every strike they made was excitedly cheered by a little band of natives and a white man standing on the hills behind their target. ‘Olaman! Make ’im savvy you!’ the police used to cry every time there was a particularly heavy explosion. ‘Hey! Japan ’e sorry too much now!’ the Bawan kanakas would shout as the smoke climbed skyward.
Sometimes the raids were less successful. The American planes had particularly bad luck, and several times all their bombs fell into the sea. Such a detail had small effect on the exuberance of the communiques from General MacArthur’s headquarters, for I checked back on them every time I visited Bob’s. If one believed these announcements, never a bomb was dropped in New Guinea that failed to find its own special little target. A native from a coastal village near Lae told us with a grin that more often than not the raids made from a high altitude were ineffective – except that they saved the Japanese the trouble of fishing, for the explosions stunned or killed thousands of fish, and small boats were always held ready to pick them up when the raid was over.
Any raid, however, was good propaganda material for me. The Japanese were spreading stories among the natives that there was scarcely a white man left in New Guinea. These tales were beginning to filter in to the Wain country, and might easily have been believed – for, after all, there was only one white man they could actually see. The raids, in ever-increasing strength, were a more effective answer to this Japanese propaganda than I could have hoped to provide.
My days at Bawan were a constant round of calls, some social, some business, and some which could not quite be fitted into either category, though one had a shrewd suspicion that business of some sort was at the bottom of them. About ten o’clock the grassy clearing in front of the house would become filled with chattering women from the surrounding villages bearing food. Each woman made a pile of her own food and stood by it while I went down the line asking each one what she wanted. Almost always salt was the answer, and Watute would follow me and deal out an appropriate quantity to each. Sometimes they asked for newspaper, of which I had plenty, or razor-blades, of which there were still a few among the trade stores. All their loincloths were wearing out, so occasionally, for a very large pile of sweet potatoes, I gave a strip of calico. In this way I bought, in addition to sweet potatoes, taro, bananas, and lavish supplies of introduced European vegetables. I was never once short of tomatoes, ordinary potatoes, sweet corn, cabbages, or beans, while several dozen eggs a week was nothing unusual. Every now and then someone would come along with a fowl, for which I gave two or three shillings, or perhaps a couple of razor-blades.
We bought far more food than we really needed, but it helped the people to get some of the trade goods which they had lacked for so long. Besides, I did not want the women to have to carry bundles of food home again. Their visits kept me in touch with the villages, too, and helped me to preserve friendly relations and to hear the local gossip. The police and other native boys were also able to have plenty of food: the more contented and comfortable they were in camp the better, for they had to face such great danger and discomforts on the track.
Buka often went out in the afternoon, with a shotgun Ian had left me, in search of pigeons, which made very fine eating. As we had only a couple of dozen shotgun cartridges, he was rationed to one shot each day, but he often managed to bring back two birds, having walked round for hours until he found two sitting close enough to knock both with one shot. To complete the diet Ian had somehow, somewhere, found a few goats, which gave a pint or two of milk a day. Food therefore presented no problem, so long as one had salt or other trade goods to exchange for it. As I look back on this part of my life in New Guinea, I don’t wonder that the boys at Bob’s jokingly accused me of taking the risk of living in the Wain for my stomach’s sake!
Another market I conducted daily was for brus, the native-grown leaf tobacco that was planted round almost every house. The leaves were picked and hung to dry underneath the house. When partly dried they were attached to a long length of thin vine at intervals of an inch or so. This was wound up tightly, and the whole bundle was bound with other pieces of vine. The result was a tight sausage-shaped bundle of tobacco-leaves, very aromatic, from which one could get really good smoking tobacco. The quality varied from leaf to leaf, and after a while one developed the knack of selecting a good leaf. For more than six months I smoked nothing else but brus in my pipe, and I grew to like it as well as any store tobacco. In a few weeks I had bought over two hundredweight of the stuff, which we hung on the veranda of the house. I intended to take it all back to Bob’s, where the tobacco famine for both whites and natives was acute. This trade pleased the natives very much, for before the war the mission had bought quantities of it. Now the villages were able to dispose of part of the surplus that had accumulated.
Many people came for medical treatment, frequently offering food in payment for quinine or for a dressing on a sore. But we took no payment, for we had enough food, and Ian had left plenty of ordinary drugs and medical supplies. Unfortunately there was no hypodermic, so I could not treat the many cases of framboesia, or yaws. This is one of the commonest and worst diseases in New Guinea, and produces huge revolting ulcers, rather like some syphilitic sores. It clears up almost magically after two or three injections with an arsenical drug, and the hope of getting treatment made people drag themselves to Bawan from places three or four days’ walk away. Mothers who had carried infected children from distant villages would ask hopefully if their piccaninnies could have a ‘shoot’, as they called the injection. When told no, they would turn away sad-eyed and patient. Life was always hard for them, and they met calamities like disease and hunger with a philosophical resignation that civilized races have forgotten.
Jock told me that the pidgin word ‘shoot’, for injection, was once amusingly misinterpreted in peacetime. A group of kanakas were waiting at a hospital to receive treatment for yaws. Lunch-time came and the three white men attending to the patients went to eat. Two of them were old hands, and the third was a young man, a new arrival from Australia. ‘We’ll shoot those boys after lunch,’ one old hand remarked. ‘Yes, might as well finish them all off in one go,’ the other agreed. Neither noticed the look of horror on the younger man’s face, and while they ate heartily he sat there and left his plate untouched. After hearing a couple more casual references to ‘shooting the kanakas’ he pushed his plate away and stamped f
rom the table. ‘You people get hardened to anything up here!’ he stormed. ‘As far as I’m concerned, they may be black but it’s still plain bloody murder to shoot them!’
More ceremonious calls were made by the village officials from all the surrounding communities. It was common for ten or a dozen luluais, tultuls, and doctor-boys to arrive to have a talk and smoke some of my tobacco. They often gave me useful information or passed on village gossip, all of which helped to build up a complete picture of what was happening in the country. Watute used to talk to them for hours in the house-police, and often they would stay overnight with him, helping to eat the enormous pile of food which was always on hand. Watute was a shrewd fellow, and his long service as a detective in the police force had made him something of a psychologist. A tultul who called upon Watute with a secret in his mind usually went away having said more than he intended, and perhaps without realizing how much he had said, so skilful was the questioning.
We gathered that the Japanese, though still inclined to confine their activities to the coast, were now warily extending patrols up the valleys, and all the villages near Lae were now completely under their control. The villages of the Wain and Naba, which had never been visited by the enemy, and had had no contact with them, would almost certainly assist me if there were any trouble.
However, there were villages whose allegiance wavered and which I classed half-way between the ones completely enemy controlled and those which supported me, for some of them had been trading with the enemy as well as visiting me. It was chiefly villages of this sort I had to fear. A native of, say, Wagun village close to Lae, could safely be treated as an enemy. The luluai of one village who came to see me had obviously had dealings with the enemy, and yet I did not wish to antagonize him and prejudice my chance of winning him over to our side. So I was obliged to let him wander about our camp, though I took the risk that tomorrow would find him in Lae telling the Japanese where we were. Circumstances had made shrewd politicians of these natives, for they were caught between two opposing forces and were determined to side with the ultimate winners. They sometimes argued with me that the Japanese were so numerous that they must win. ‘Look,’ they would say, ‘you know for yourself there are now more Japanese in Lae alone than there were white men in the whole of New Guinea before. The Japanese must be stronger.’
I would point to our air raids. ‘If the Japanese are so strong, why don’t they stop those aeroplanes from bombing them?’ I asked. ‘Every day more and more of our planes come over; we are getting stronger and stronger, and will soon finish the Japanese off.’
They would rub their woolly heads and look worried. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ they would say with a shrug, and go off puzzled, trying to decide whether to back the side that had many men or the side that had many aeroplanes – a small-scale edition of the problem that arm-chair strategists were arguing about all over the world.
Some days I would spend walking from village to village, learning all the streams and paths and short cuts, and stopping to talk to the people as they worked in their gardens. By arriving unannounced, and doing away with all the ceremony that usually attends the visit of a patrol officer, I managed to get the people to accept me as someone who really lived among them – not one of themselves, perhaps, but at any rate a sympathetic fellow human, instead of an irritating visitor who made them waste time by lining up to be counted, and who told them that their village was not clean enough. As time passed I felt more and more confident that these people trusted me and would help me if they could.
One morning, as I was handing out the usual remedies for malaria and for constipation, there was a howl from Buka, who was filling my lamp in the storeroom beneath the house. ‘Hey, master, come quick! Some-fella man ’e stealim kerosene!’
I hurried to the store and found him excitedly waving an empty tin in the air.
‘Kerosene ’e go finish! Kerosene ’e go finish!’ he chanted.
I grabbed the tin – our only one. It was empty right enough, but theft was not the reason. The kerosene had all leaked away through a small hole in the bottom. The tin must have got knocked in the carry up from the Markham.
The gloomy prospect of spending every night in darkness set me hard at work to make an emergency lamp, and Watute helped me to rig a strip of cloth for a wick in a shallow tin of dripping. The light it gave was dim and flickering, and the smoke and smell were unpleasant. It was useful for an emergency, and nothing more, but it would have to do until I could get more kerosene from Bob’s.
Darkness came suddenly at six o’clock each night. Almost always there was a violent thunderstorm and heavy rain, then the wind rushed up the valley, shaking the house, blowing down huge trees with rending crashes, and whistling through chinks in the bark walls. I used to sit at the door of the house and watch the brilliant lightning flashing over the stormswept mountainsides and flickering on the roofs of Bawan village, just down the hillside. After half an hour the weather would become calm and the drifting mist would shut the little clearing tightly away from the rest of the world, and I would shiver in the cold. Unless men from the village came up to gossip I would go straight to bed.
A fire seemed the best way of cheering up the dark and silent house, so I sent Watute to Boana Mission to collect three old sheets of roofing-iron we had seen lying about. When he returned, with two Bawan men carrying the iron fastened to a pole, we tried our hands at making a fireplace. A pile of rocks and earth protected the bamboo floor, and we fastened one sheet of iron as a protection for the wall and made a hood over the fireplace with another. A chimney was out of the question, but we cut a slot in the wall behind the fireplace, rather like a letterbox, and lit an experimental fire to see what happened. The draughts went the right way, and most of the smoke went through the slot and out the side of the house. Always afterwards the police lit a fire there just before nightfall, and from a gloomy cavern of darkness the house became a friendly, cheerful dwelling.
So that Buka and Watute could celebrate Christmas suitably, I bought them a pig, which cost £3. Its owner wanted to put it on the fire alive, and apparently regarded me as rather eccentric when I insisted on its throat being cut first. ‘Why bother?’ was his attitude. ‘The fire would pretty soon have killed it, anyhow.’ But he happily counted his sixty shining perforated New Guinea shillings, and strung them on a thong for safe keeping, content with his bargain even if the pig was dispatched in a somewhat messy way.
The two policemen invited friends from the village to eat with them, and they all gorged themselves. The following morning there was still a quarter of the pig left, so they made a basket of bamboo slivers and hung the remnant in the smoke to cure. The ham surprised me by its tender juiciness, though the smell was rather uninviting.
So Christmas passed, and then New Year. There was still no word of Jock. Every day some new speculation filled my mind. Had he perished crossing the mountains? Had the natives on the north side failed to send my message after him? Had the Japanese caught him? Had he been attacked by wild natives? My mind fastened on these questions one by one, and spun round and round upon them till they became obsessions. I used to say angrily to myself, aloud, ‘For God’s sake stop wondering about it! Thinking won’t help him, and it’ll only drive you nuts!’ But, just the same, when the storms came at night I would still find myself wondering whether, at that moment, Jock was exposed somewhere on the ba
re peaks to the cutting rain and freezing wind.
Medical stores were now running out, and I had only a bare personal supply of quinine and sulpha drugs and other vital necessities. I decided to make another quick visit to Bob’s to get more, if they could spare them, and also to send in a report about our activities in the Wain. Buka was left in charge of the camp, with a supply of food and trade goods for Jock in case he returned, and a note saying that I would be back from Bob’s within a week. Watute and I set out for Bob’s, taking our bed-rolls and arms and also the hundredweight or so of brus we had collected to give the boys back at Bob’s a smoke. When we reached Bivoro, Dinkila, the lively young man who had carried my bed to Bob’s on the previous trip, squatted down to talk to us. Life in the village was too quiet, he said discontentedly. The old men kept nagging at you, and work in the gardens was drudgery. Could he join the police force, and have a uniform, and come with us?
‘What did you do in peacetime?’ Watute asked quickly.
Dinkila looked at him. ‘I was a cook-boy in Lae, first of all for some white women and then for Master Jacobsen.’
Watute grinned. ‘There you are, master – he’ll be a good cook if he worked for Master Carl Jacobsen! Master Carl knew all about food. Why don’t you take this man on as a cook?’
I put the idea to Dinkila. The wages were ten shillings a month and all found, and he would have to accompany us wherever we went. If he wanted a change from village life, what about it?
He had set his heart on a uniform, but after a few moments’ consideration he took the job of cook, and from that moment on became the tyrant who ruled the details of my personal life: what I should wear, what I should eat, how my bed should be made, how strong my tea should be. It was no use arguing with Dinkila. What he thought I should have, I got, but he was a devoted servant and worked tirelessly to secure my personal comfort. How often he nursed me through attacks of fever and sickness I have forgotten, but whenever I awoke he seemed to be there with a cool drink, a mug of soup, or a cup of coffee with aspirins and quinine.
