Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  We returned to Kansulay to find men with spades willing to donate an hour or two’s labour under their bayanihan system where everyone cheerfully chips in for a common project. There were plenty of volunteers, even a few cheerful ones, until we explained exactly where the spring was. All of a sudden people became unenthusiastic, looked at the ground or remembered other things they ought to have been doing. Tired and bitten, I was swept by a churlish rage. I walked off to the river nearby where I pettishly threw stones at the piglets wallowing in the pools, indulging a savage inner monologue. Typical. You take the initiative, get the Captain’s okay, offer to scratch around for the money and spend hours tramping the jungle to find a bloody spring and you’d think after all that a couple of them might be willing to do an hour’s work on it. I mean, who the hell’s it for, anyway? My drinking water’s fine; it’s not my children dying of dysentery and worms. Right: they want to go on living like that, no problem. They don’t want improvements, all they want is handouts. It’s all the fault of the Americans fostering the aid mentality, that and those sodding charities. No-one can save the goddamned Philippines but the goddamned Filipinos and until they work that out they’re going to have to go on living a hundred and fifty years in the past …

  And so on for quite some time. What was particularly disgraceful about this silent outburst was that it came as if from a reforming zeal I despise and which I dread may be in my genes. It seemed to put me firmly into that class of professional believers in Progress who must often have indulged similar passions of self-righteousness, whether they were Victorian social reformers tackling the rookeries of Tottenham Court Road, missionaries endeavouring to stop penis-eating among the Mbwele or Japanese soldiers trying to get a decent day’s work out of British construction crews on the Burmese railway. Always there is that element of condescension, a disparity between doer and done-to-whether cultural, educational, financial or racial.

  Luckily there is no obligation on anybody to do anything for the right reasons, as the piglets discovered when I stopped throwing stones at them because there were no more left of the right size. In any case I was feeling better. The water expert was approaching.

  ‘You were very wise to go. I think some of the people were ashamed in case you were laughing at them.’

  ‘Laughing at them?’ I say in real surprise.

  ‘That’s what I tell them. “James is very understanding,” I said. “He never laughs at anybody.” They know that but some are ashamed to you.’

  ‘Ashamed.’

  ‘Because of nono.’

  And suddenly everything becomes clearer and it is my turn to feel shame. It was neither indolence nor fecklessness which caused their change of heart, but superstition. The pantheon of demons, spirits and genii in which many of the villagers believe is vast: I do not think I have learned more than a fraction of it, and that fraction is merely a short list of names. Being able to identify spirits by name is but a beginning; what gives such beliefs their cogency and power is the mass of lore behind them, the myths and stories and inexplicable daily happenings which give them life. Each time I hear a new story I realise how ignorant I am of such matters.

  Nono, then, are spirits whose characteristics seem to vary according to the places they inhabit although they may actually be of different varieties. They range from the reasonably neutral to the nasty: those associated with water as in streams, wells and damp places are reckoned the fiercest. This at once explained the men’s reluctance to go to a part of the forest they anyway normally avoided and start attacking the nonos’ residence with spades. That was simply asking for trouble, for displaced ghosts to light upon them. Certain other things began making sense. I had once been looking for wild guavas and chillies somewhat above Lolang Mating’s place and, tired of crashing about, sat down by the stream to watch it for a while with my plastic bag of guavas at my feet. I am very easily entranced by water and must, watching its motion, have become motionless myself. In a short while Lolang Mating appeared wading slowly upstream, her torn dress bunched up in one hand as with the other she made sudden lunges into the water, coming up with small dark crabs she put in a plastic litre pot which had once held motor oil. She was talking out loud to herself, I presumed in the way most people do when engaged in something on their own.

  ‘Damn you!’ she said mildly as she bent down again. Clearly the crab had eluded her, only it hadn’t for when her hand emerged it held a large specimen which she dropped into the pot where it scrabbled hollowly. But then she said ‘Go away!’

  She was not looking at me when she said this; furthermore she had used the plural ‘you’. I had now left it too late to announce my presence. Embarrassed I sat without moving and hoped she hadn’t seen me after all. Nor had she. After a moment she turned round, went back downstream and disappeared behind swags of dense greenery. Well, the old, I thought. Or we solitaries, perhaps; we’re always addressing the people in our heads.

  Weeks later I overheard a companion who was ahead of me jump over a rivulet and pause on the other side to light a cigarette. Before the scrape of match on box he said: ‘Susmaryosep tabi nono.’ Seconds later when I caught up with him I did not ask him what he had meant but remembered the phrase since I had not heard the word ‘nono’ before. ‘Tabi’ meant variously ‘edge’ or ‘to one side’ and hence was used to tell someone to get out of the way. ‘Susmaryosep’ was common enough, mostly as an interjection but usually with a hint of genuine invocation rather than as a mere expression of surprise (typically Filipino, of course, to call on the Holy Family instead of on something coldly cerebral like the Trinity). And now, of course, it made sense. Both he and Lolang Mating had been addressing the genii loci. Suddenly I began hearing everybody do it, which suggested that just as the undersea creatures I don’t recognise can remain invisible, so speech I don’t understand is often inaudible.

  So there it was: Kansulay’s water project seemed temporarily stalled for lack of diggers. At this point it became clear that not everyone was equally worried by the threat of nono and that a certain delicacy obtained in which nobody was mocked for believing. I was anxious lest the believers should feel that a foreigner with his natural immunity to such things would make fun of them and maybe even shame some of them into digging against their better judgement. In the event, however, nobody cried off for the simple reason that those who felt it essential took anti-nono precautions. Among effective charms were copper, salt, ‘metal-shit’ (i.e. swarf from a lathe), a kind of seaweed, incense, holy water and a cross made from a palm leaf. Several men, as they dug, told the nono to leave them alone but obviously felt secure enough with their charms to be amused when someone suggested that nono didn’t understand Tagalog and that it would be better to address them in Latin like a priest. (Nono must have been apprehended and addressed differently before the Spanish came.)

  In the event the test-digging was a great success. Not only did no-one fall ill but the expert said the water was welling up in sufficient quantities to merit building a proper cement ‘spring box’. In short, the project was on. Would he, I asked, if he were in my position – in other words organising the funds – be as certain and as sanguine about it? Oh yes, he assured me. If lower down the pipeline we were to build a large collection tank which could fill up overnight, and if people could be persuaded to turn off the taps when they were not using them, there would be adequate drinking water for Kansulay. This was excellent news and we all returned mud-smeared and cheerful.

  3

  I wade on Tiwarik’s upland through the wild grasses towards the patch of jungle where surely nobody has ever been nor goes today except to chop house-posts or pull firewood from its hostile and thorny fringes: my favourite place on the whole island because the hand of man has so evidently passed it by.

  The type of rain-forest whose high unbroken canopy creates a gloom at ground level is often comparatively free of undergrowth. Not enough sunlight penetrates to encourage the growth of vines and bushes. But this patch of
untouched jungle is not like that, mostly because it forms a cap on the island’s abrupt summit which is exposed to storms and is irregular in its distribution of soil. Sunlight penetrates in shafts from all sides. The tangle of undergrowth is dense, reaching well over my head in places while in others needing only to be waded through but with due regard for hidden trunks rotted into fakes of sponge and mushroom which collapse and throw me into clumps of stingers. With a bolo I hack my way to the top for it is important to have visited every square inch of the island.

  From the summit (whose exact location is not easy to decide: maybe I never did get there) there is no view at all. Splinters of blue light jab inwards from all over but it is impossible to say whether they come from sea or sky. There is a pungent smell of fresh paint from some plant I have cut. As I stand in silence the noises start up again, the crickets and tree-frogs and tukos carry on their interrupted discourse. I wonder which of the massive trunks around me supports the sea-eagles’ eyrie. I am immensely happy in my wild domain; it is like coming home.

  Why? I ask myself as I slash my way out again. Why should it be like coming home? From where did I construct this landscape? Come to that, other than from English literature, where did I acquire any sense of landscape and place? In its near-unanswerableness this question merely throws up four separate memories which come to me as I regain the grassfield and the full glare of the sun.

  The first, chronologically, is of Windlesham House, the private school in Sussex to which I was sent when I was nearly nine. Typically enough this was a substantial country house standing in its own grounds among the South Downs and cut off from the outside world by a long drive ending in a pair of iron gates. Equally typically I felt lost, homesick, bullied. Escape through the gates was impossible yet temporary escape via the farm at the back was not only possible but condoned. We were encouraged to go for long walks among those hills with their chalky scars, horse chestnut and beech woods, hummocks of grass littered with rabbit droppings, windy spaces and far-off glimpses of the sea. But what interested us was the spoor of war. The Army had used the area as a training ground in the Second World War which, when I first went to the school, had been over only four years. Behind them they had left countless unexploded smoke grenades now rusting through to expose a damp pinkish paste inside. We would collect the perforated metal tail fins of these canisters as well as live blank .303 cartridges which could be found all over the place. We would bring them back to the school and, sitting on our beds in the freezing dormitories, lever open with penknife blades the crimped ends, pull out the wads and let the brittle cordite sticks cascade onto the blankets. In the two years I was at the school I collected many ounces of cordite in Stephens’ ink bottles. We would explode the mercury fulminate caps with nails hammered into the base of the cartridges and set fire to cordite trails leading off across the floor among the beds. From the very first, I can say, my landscapes were associated with ordnance.

  The second memory represents war of a different kind, the one with my father. Once again the occasion was a family holiday in the West Country, although it may well have been the same one since holidays tend to elide into undifferentiated scenes of squabbling and bad weather. We were possibly near Okehampton in our sagging grey Wolseley. I remember only the torrential rain, the irritable proximity of a family cooped up in a car with our breath misting the windows and the windscreen wipers’ vain clack and slap. There was that clear sense of four individuals each asking themselves what they thought they were doing here: the dismay of two adults at being parents and that of two offspring at being, by the same token, children, all brewed up in evil weather and grim unspokenness. Finally the rain stopped enough for us to open the windows. Off the road to our right was a long valley whose windings were defined by a newly swollen river.

  ‘Oh look,’ said my father, probably quite privately to my mother. ‘See how the river meanders down the valley.’

  ‘Oh, meanders, does it?’ broke in my hateful eleven-year-old’s voice, heavily sarcastic from the back. ‘How very poetic.’

  My father was nettled, snappish.

  ‘It’s a geological word if you must know,’ he said in a cold and tight voice. ‘It’s a technical word and I used it perfectly accurately. So it pays not to be ignorant if you’re going to be so quick to sneer.’

  He was very angry, perhaps because he had meant it in the poetic sense and suspected I knew. But for ever after – at least for the remainder of his lifetime – I experienced unease about acceptable ways of looking at landscape, refusing perversely tv see anything pretty in Constable-esque pastures or, above all, in sunsets. I associated the whole conventional canon with a kind of grown-ups’ unimaginativeness and even now I find it easy to avoid looking at meadows and sunsets, especially flamboyant tropical sunsets with the furnace colours and peripheral pastel tints. (A good many flowers, too, have abominable colours – all sorts of mauves and pinks – which perhaps look better to creatures seeing them at different wavelengths of light. It is hard to imagine a favourable position on the electromagnetic spectrum from which to view a monkey-puzzle tree.) Popular sights are, of course, matters of fashion, as are the various components of landscape such as clouds and soils which over the centuries go in and out of favour. My father was of his time.

  The third memory comes from much the same year and is of my second boarding school, this time in Kent. It was here at Bickley Hall one June day in 1953 I was to draw Tiwarik in the back of a French exercise book. Once again an English country house, a not very distinguished eighteenth-century hall with one or two fine cedars outside its french windows. The grounds were large, much of the original park having been converted to playing fields, but a good deal of wooded bits remained, especially away from the main house towards the stables. These stables were built in a hollow square around a cobbled yard and entered through a gateway on the side opposite which a pretty wooden turret with a clock and weather-vane glittered on the roof. From this the stables were known collectively as ‘Clock House’. Two sides of coach-houses had been converted into classrooms and the other two into a gym and a chapel. That the chapel had once been a stable was held by the headmaster to have some sentimental significance. Certainly its semi-circular windows had been left in their original shape and the iron tethering rings were still embedded in the walls. The windows had been set with modern stained glass commemorating the headmaster’s name and his Cambridge degree but without, unfortunately, his likeness. Nearer the main house were a fine walled kitchen garden, partially made over into a grass tennis court, and the school shooting range which needed to have a policeman over on a bicycle to look at it since it was laid out across the drive in order to use the back of the kitchen garden wall as the butts.

  What was odd about these grounds was that a screen of trees ran all the way around, on the other side of which lay not the coloured counties but the leafy gentility and Stockbroker Tudor of Bromley, Bickley and Chislehurst. If one lay in the shade in an obligatory grey felt sunhat chewing squeaky grass stalks and talking dirty above the distant sound of cricket one could have been in the deepest of shires. And yet a few yards through that cordon sanitaire of elm thickets, hawthorn and elder the exploring boy came to a rusty iron railing and beyond that to well-mown lawns with circular beds of gladioli, bird tables and creosoted trellises. Since several of the boys at the school actually lived in the houses nearby there was of course no snobbery along gentility–gentry lines. All that happened was that certain expectations of exactly how houses should stand in relation to landscaped parks was set up so that for the rest of one’s life one would instinctively know where to find the stables and the gardeners’ quarters.

  The headmaster, although not of the gentry himself, had about him an entirely natural sense of how life in an eighteenth-century park might go on. He used to stalk pigeons before breakfast with one of the school’s .22 rifles and when I became Captain of Shooting I sometimes joined him with the other. If nowadays it sounds odd that a headmaste
r and a boy wearing pyjamas should have been on the loose with Martini-action rifles shortly after dawn on the fringes of London suburbia I can only say it seemed entirely reasonable then and still does. I remember the headmaster stalking a pigeon and knocking it clean out of a yew while the bullet went screaming off over the roofs of commuterland. ‘What an odd pigeon,’ he said and then, ‘Oh.’ Later I heard him confess uproariously to the senior Latin master that he’d just shot the first cuckoo and ought he to write to The Times?

  Some years afterwards I gathered the lease had run out, the bulldozers had come in and this little island of prime real estate had been obliterated, the rising tide of suburbia rushing forward and closing over it leaving, apparently, mock-Georgian houses with coach lamps on either side of their front doors. The Hall, Clock House, the Pavilion and all are no more. I hope the developers left some of the finer beeches but I don’t suppose they did.

  And the last memory I have of a formative landscape is of that outside Canterbury. Every so often the boys of the King’s School (who were more or less forced to join the CCF) were marched in their borrowed khaki out of the Precincts through the Mint Yard gate and up to the Scotland Hills for training with the Buffs. To explain why at fourteen I was frightened of these outings it is necessary to remember that in the mid-Fifties one’s whole school career was blighted by the thought of National Service. All over the world there were real wars being fought in places where the British still had interests and several boys I knew were killed or badly injured in Malaya or Aden or Kenya, flying Lancaster bombers against the Mau Mau and leading jungle patrols against Communists. It was still only ten or a dozen years after the Second World War and all the Army instructors like the school’s RSM had seen real action and believed their task was to turn boys into men as quickly as possible. Outside the Cathedral Close and the Precinct walls lay a horrid, brutal, khaki world. The Buffs’ barracks lurked on its hill. At night the soldiers used to come down to brawl and drink in town and one boy in my dormitory used to climb out of the house and over the wall to join his National Serviceman cousin in the pub over the road. Often after his return the dormitory reeked of beer and Senior Service smoke and vomit.