Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  Ned found himself quietly certain that he would stay. They would have to throw him out, now that he thought about it, this was his place, where he belonged.

  “When should I speak to them, sir? I could go back to sea, but I don’t think I want to. I like the place, and the people. I fit in round ‘ere, sir – it ain’t like England.”

  “It could be, Mr Hawkins, will be one day, like the best of England, as England ought to be, not a land of spite and jealousy but a place where men are valued for what they are and what they do, not for who their fathers are and how much land they have stolen over the centuries. The folk here may not have white skins, but they are just as much people as any in England and they have the chance now to make a new country with all of England’s great virtues and none of her many failings.”

  It sounded good to Ned, just impractical.

  “It is a good aim, sir. A pity you can’t improve England, but we can try here. Schools first, I suppose.”

  “Every man to read and write, Hawkins, then books will be open to them and they will have access to all of the world’s knowledge. What they then do with it will be essentially their affair, but we can give them a start, turn their minds to the correct habits, away from bloodshed and towards commerce and industry. Medicine so that they are well enough to study. Schools to give them a start. Roads so that they can trade with each other and the outside world. New food crops so that they can feed themselves without resort to vile practice. These four things will transform this land, sir!”

  ‘Vile practice’ puzzled Ned for a few seconds, there were so many possibilities, but he decided Murray meant cannibalism, which was generally felt to be a bad habit.

  He noted that Murray had nothing to say about religion. Good for him, but it meant he would fail because the churches would bugger him in London and Australia. The religious establishments were ruthless in disposing of their enemies, and it was said that any official who failed to truckle to them was regarded as hostile.

  Still, it was good to hear the words from the man himself, even if they were unlikely of achievement.

  “What of law, sir? Can we have courts and prisons and the noose like England? Will our laws work here? Not that they work too well in England from what I saw, sir. Hungry men with families don’t bother with laws, and the police will turn a blind eye when the kiddies are crying with empty bellies.”

  It had never occurred to Murray that English laws might be flouted with impunity in certain circumstances. He was a barrister by education and the Rule of Law was all in England, or so he had always been taught. He settled to talk, to discover what this young man knew that he did not, for he had never knowingly met a product of the slums before.

  He was horrified.

  “One is inclined to wonder whether the missionaries might not be better employed in England, Mr Hawkins!”

  “Never saw a vicar until I spent a few months as garden boy in Micheldever, sir, and then the local one used to come to tea every fortnight or so. The Salvation Army used to play their trumpets on Friday down in Bevois Valley and they’d always give a ‘ot cup of tea to anyone who turned up in their place, provided you could put up with their ‘appy bullshit, that was. There was a Seaman’s Mission down at the docks where a decky or stoker could get a bed for a few nights in port, cheap and clean - but that was all of it in Southampton for our sort. All of the other churches was collar and tie places, or so they reckoned. I never went near enough to one to see, nor did anybody I knew. They was supposed to come into the Elementary School once a week, but they never did. Don’t know why, I expect there was none of them wanted to get their ‘ands dirty with kids like us.”

  Murray had no comment to make – the Papuan coast seemed less alien than he had always supposed, and that was worrying.

  “Going back to your question, Mr Hawkins – there must be law, but I don’t know that it has to be our law. You must meet young Monckton one day. He is one of the RMs, down coast towards Milne Bay, and he tempers English justice with his common sense. He will not tolerate abuse of the local workers, and maintains a just court, but will deal very firmly indeed with raiders and tribal fighters and blackbirders and rogue traders. Let us be clear, sir – casual, wanton killing must end in Papua, whether it be by kanaka or whiteskin, war party or policeman, but the use of proper force in self-defence out in the bush will never be objectionable to me. We will never achieve civilisation by tying our policeman’s hands, but, equally, we will not attain our aims by butchery – there must be restraint, sir.”

  Sergeant Evans came to mind. Murray would have approved of him, Ned was sure.

  “I think you must be right, sir. I ‘opes you are.”

  They parted within reason pleased with each other, both certainly surprised. Murray made a note in his files; he was always looking for young men who could become RMs as the land under his tenuous control expanded.

  Ned wondered whether he should spread the word that the Rubber Company was on its last legs, decided that if it had been a secret then Murray would not have told him. He went to Urquhart’s office as soon as he returned to Laloki.

  “Thank you, Ned, I had wondered when Fitzgerald did not appear on the last boat. I expect he has gone back to Malaya! Did Murray say anything specific about the plantations?”

  Ned shook his head.

  “Difficult to know what to do, both with the land and our people. Give it a month, I think, in the hope that there will be letters on the next boat. Then if the Company gives no orders I will have to go into Moresby and seek instructions at the Governor’s office. The land will be the problem – unless it is formally sold on it must go back to the clans that traditionally own it, but you can be sure that the missions will try to claim it because it is no longer owned by the local people. They will thieve anything they can get hold of in the name of the Lord. You should look about for a place immediately, Ned. You won’t have any difficulty finding a job, that’s for sure - you are known already, there’s only a hundred of us whiteskins up here, after all, and I can pass the word that I will let you go as soon as you wish.”

  Quiet enquiries, nothing so formal as an application, led to the offer of a permanent job with Burns Philp. Three months as makee-learn on an existing plantation on the coast and then to set up from scratch down the coast in an area where they intended to locate at least four other places, he to run wharf and warehousing as well, to be the depot for the whole area.

  He was told that one of Burns Philp’s senior men down south had been a China hand and had been unable to lose his old way of speech. Maurice seemed to regard it as funny, in its way, but pointed out as well that Murray was against Pidgin so BPs used it as a matter of policy. It was, in fact, much simpler to learn than Police Motu, which was also an invented language though more closely based on the local tongues.

  “Word to the wise, Ned? Wait a bit, don’t resign from the Rubber Company – you’ve got a contract which they are about to break. Murray’s a straight bloke, in his way, and he’ll make them pay off all of their people up here. It’ll probably be worth six months’ money to you.”

  That was a very good argument. It was funny, Ned found, but when he had had no money he’d never cared about it, he would spend everything he picked up without a thought, but now he was getting a few quid together he was much tighter with it. He liked having a few coins to jingle in his pocket, and that was where he wanted them to stay.

  They paid Ned two hundred pounds in the end, after a lot of argument between Australian lawyers on the one side and Murray on the other. The dispute was only ended when Murray pointed out that he was himself a barrister-at-law and happened to be the sole judge in the only court constituted in the Territory. As Lieutenant-Governor, he also made local laws.

  The lawyers retired to Queensland and Ned put his money into his account at BPs before moving down coast to a small plantation near to the copper mine at Loloata, some ten miles south and east of Moresby. It was sufficiently out of town to be almo
st autonomous, close enough to have no RM of its own.

  The manager, Timothy, was an Englishman in his forties, unmarried and with experience in the trade in the West Indies and India itself. He knew copra and was only too pleased to pass his knowledge on, had trained up three other young men for BPs already.

  “Thing is, though, Ned,” Maurice said, “he’s a bit of a funny bugger. Not many people get on with him and the locals don’t like him at all – if we put him further out he’d get chopped for sure. Put up with him for two months, if you can, you’ll pick up enough to get by in that time and we’ll send a Samoan down with you when you start up on your own. That way, he can handle the labour line while you deal with the machinery side in the first year or so.”

  Ned moved in, Raka accompanying him for the first few days. He escorted her back to Laloki at the end of a week, paying her off quite generously, he thought. She was not with child and fifty pounds was more money than a labourer pocketed in two years. She made no complaint, thankful to be back with her own clan in safety – had she stayed at Loloata she would have been gang-raped and murdered by the local clansmen who spoke another language and had no use for aliens of their own colour.

  “They should have warned you, Ned,” Timothy said. “You can’t bring outsiders down here. Some clans will accept ‘em, most won’t, and they don’t believe anybody else is human. From all I’ve heard it’s the same all along the coast. Learn their language and ask them their name for themselves and it always translates the same – ‘We the People’. So anybody who ain’t ‘We’, ain’t ‘People’, either.”

  Ned listened quietly, saddened but not outraged; it wasn’t so much unlike England, after all. The toffee noses there didn’t really believe the ordinary sort were as human as them – Lord Dogsbollocks had blue blood not ordinary red.

  He worked and learned – a little. There really wasn’t a great deal to find out.

  The coconut palms dropped their ripe nuts overnight and some of the labourers collected them each morning, unless a high wind damaged the crop and made some fall unripe, but that was rare enough not to worry about. The nuts were brought back to the drier where they were first husked and then cut in half so that the wet flesh could be scooped out and laid out to dry, either in the sun or, less desirably, in the drier itself. The drier was fuelled mostly by the coconut shells, reducing waste and cost both. The husk was also dried, beaten flat to break up the mass into fibres and then sold as coir. Most doormats in England were made of coir and ships used it as fenders and for some ropes.

  The most skilled task was that of scooping out the flesh in a single piece using a thin bladed knife. The flesh dried into a better quality of copra if it was not too much broken up.

  The bulk of the labourers spent their days cutting grass round the plantation, an unending cycle of monotony, necessary to reduce the vermin population and to give easy access to the trees.

  “Best quality sun-dried sells for twenty per cent more than smoke-dried, Ned, so we do it that way as much as we can. But it means covering it over if it rains and keeping the rats away so we have to have the kanakas working at night as well.”

  Ned, naively, asked whether they were paid extra for night shift.

  Timothy laughed incredulously, explained that they got the sum specified in their contracts, no more, no less, provided they worked every day – time off was unpaid.

  “They get their rations whatever happens. If they’re sick in their huts they still get fed at the laid down rate. A can of fish or bully every day and rice or kau-kau or taro or navy biscuit, depending on the season and what’s growing. Tea with milk and sugar. A stick of tobacco each week. A new laplap each year. Ten pounds a year paid in coin at the end of their time and transport back to their home villages, if they’ll take it – most of them don’t, they want to stay in the big city if they can, although there’s work for one in ten if they’re lucky. A lot sign on for another contract, putting off the day when they’ve got to choose what to do next.”

  A few hands worked in the warehouse, bagging the dried copra and baling the coir and storing and issuing the foodstuffs, and four skilled men worked the stables, looking after the four riding horses and the pair that pulled the cart along the plantation tracks to pick up the harvested nuts. Being a coastal plantation all of their supplies came in over the wharf and the crop was sent to Moresby by island boats run by BPs – mostly forty or fifty ton schooners crewed by Samoans. There was one steamer, a two hundred tonner that handled heavy loads with a powered derrick – all machinery came in on the Victoria.

  Timothy’s main function seemed to be that of bookkeeper, maintaining all of the records of output, hours worked, rations expended and hands sick and writing a running diary for the inspection of the Manager for Plantations based in Moresby. There was no need to keep accounts as such, all of the payments were made out of Moresby and the crop was sold by the Company itself.

  A week and all was clear, a month and it was routine. Six weeks and Ned discovered just why Timothy was little loved by company or villagers.

  “The Father will be visiting tonight, Ned – he comes for a meal and a little relaxation half a dozen times a year. He’s a good bloke, Ned, you’ll like him!”

  Timothy explained that the missions were all Catholic on this side of Moresby, London Missionary Society over on the west and further down coast towards the Islands. The denominations maintained this split by unspoken agreement; it was easier and avoided bloodshed between the various flocks. Down in the Islands competing missionaries had occasionally landed on opposite shores in the past, splitting clans apart and leading to liturgical debate conducted with stone axes. As this had sometimes led to dead missionary it was now avoided.

  Father O’Leary - ‘Mark to whiteskins, me boy’ – bore the normal trademarks of the missionary. His eyes were bloodshot and there was a faint air of spirits about him. The meal was the normal bully beef stew, but, unusually, Timothy had brought in four young village girls to serve at table. Ned was surprised to see them, flat-chested children and clearly ill-at-ease – frightened, in fact. Tea followed and Ned spotted the missionary’s hand disappear underneath the laplap of the littlest girl, no more than seven or eight years old, as she leant forward with his cup. Memories of his little sisters and the worry of protecting them flooded back. He could do something more practical for these youngsters.

  “Excuse me a moment, Timothy.”

  Ned left the table, trotted across to his bungalow, came back wearing his pistol, sat down again. He smiled in the friendliest fashion as he addressed the missionary.

  “I am a police officer, Mark. Touch one of those kids again and I will put two in your chest, resisting arrest, you dirty old bastard! I think Murray would back me, but I don’t really care.” He turned to Timothy, “I reckon the girls ought to go home, mate, don’t you?”

  Timothy stared, appalled, could not understand what was wrong with the man. They were only natives, nobody cared what happened to them, and their parents would get five shillings apiece. He decided Ned meant it, waved the girls out; they ran thankfully.

  “Good night. Remember what I said, Father – I may be back this way on duty and I shan’t forget.”

  “I shan’t either! And if you want to last up here, Mr Policeman, you’ll be sparing with your threats! We do things our way, up here!”

  Ned confronted Timothy in the morning, did his best to push him into a fist fight, but he backed away, evidently unwilling to deal with an offended adult.

  “One last word, Timothy. I had a word with the boss-boy just now. I told him that if you were found dead there would be no policemen to argue with. Was I you, I would not be here tonight!”

  Maurice listened to Ned’s tale and shrugged resignedly.

  “Can’t do a thing about it, Ned. Timothy will be on the next boat out, that’s all. Murray don’t like it, nor do I or anybody else in the firm, but you can’t touch missionaries. Half the Catholics are into little girls and more o
f the LMS go for small boys, and those who don’t all arrange the cover-ups. You try to say a word in public and every bishop of every church in England, Australia and the States will be beating the politicians’ doors down. You’ll be called a traitor if you’re lucky, more likely you’ll just be shot one dark night. We’ll make sure you get sent to a Protestant area, Ned, it’ll be safer for you for the while, until the Catholics cool down.”

  The word reached Murray by the back door and he took Ned’s name off his file of potential RMs – too much trouble. He spoke to the Major and ensured that Ned’s name was on the list of officers to be entrusted with dangerous or sensitive duties. He was clearly a brave and honest man, one who needed an official commendation on his record for his own protection. It was hard to call a man a hero one week and a bloody menace to good order the next.

  The Victoria was laid up at the quayside in Moresby, undergoing some sort of refit. Ned was instantly drafted aboard to assist the engineer, who was drunk and asleep in a corner of the boiler room when Ned boarded her.

  A Samoan boy, a man of thirty or so, was doing the work, as it seemed was normal practice. He was good with his hands but was, in the nature of things, not a trained engineer, and was very glad to stand at Ned’s shoulder for a fortnight, drinking in every word he said.

  “I’ve got a Board of Trade handbook in my toolbox, Athanasius – it don’t cover everything but it explains a lot of the basic stuff about steam engines. I won’t be going back to sea again, and, besides, I’ve pretty much memorised the bloody thing, so you can have it. I’ll bring it down from the Club in the morning.”