Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Next the sliced fish are carefully washed to rinse off any blood and pieces of internal organ and put into pans to soak for several hours. If only salt is used as a preservative the solution must be strong enough to prevent the growth of bacteria but not so strong as to render the fish inedible. The correct degree of salinity may be judged when the fish float in the solution rather than lie under it. Personally, I prefer a more elaborate marinade of chopped onions, garlic, crushed peppercorns, soy sauce and tuba vinegar, the salinity brought up to strength. A few chillies add interest. Then the fish are laid out flat in the sun on a tuyuan such as I have been making. When thoroughly dried they can be kept a long time although care needs to be taken in damp weather lest they ‘sweat’: being hygroscopic the salt absorbs water from the atmosphere. Kept dry, the fish are crisp and papery. They rustle when sorted and are delicious fried. It is provident to keep some by one for lean and future days, besides which they are always readily saleable as daing.

  While at work on this drier I have all the while been conscious of occasional explosions somewhere in the background. Every so often a thud shakes the air about Tiwarik and the echo of a dull clap falls to the beach as if, having bounced tiredly off the peak, it lacked the energy to go any further. At the same time I have had a tune running obsessively through my head in the way that happens sometimes when one’s hands are occupied. It is a tune I have not consciously heard in decades, something released from childhood like a trapped pocket of prehistoric air returning to circulation from the heart of a smashed flint. A particularly loud bang from close around the nearest headland has jarred the association loose in my brain. An especial quality in the explosion, something reminiscent about its timbre, enables me to identify the piece of music as part of a Mozart sonata for four hands. And suddenly with a rush an entire memory comes back of Mozart and detonations and bright sunlight. Once again, it seems my present life on this curious island has evoked a private past.

  There was a summer long ago just before I went to Canterbury when my friend Howard and I shared certain interests, two of which were music and explosions. In the long holiday we spent much time at each other’s house where we did more or less exactly the same things. Often we sat at the piano earnestly inventing ever more elaborate descants for well-known hymns or playing Mozart duets. Then a different urge would take us out to the garage to make bombs.

  I still had some of my original cordite collection left, Howard (whose elder brother was a National Serviceman) a lot of empty .303 cartridge cases. We would drill a small hole near the base of these and feed in a length of Jetex fuse which was available in those days for setting off model rocket motors. Then we filled the cartridges with a mixture of sodium chlorate weedkiller and sugar and crimp the open end in a vice. These little bombs made an immense noise, tearing apart into ragged brass petals. Sometimes when set on their bases on a wooden surface they blew out the ignition caps and took off like missiles, leaving a gleaming copper disc embedded in the wood. No boffin at Peenemünde working on his Führer’s programme of rocket-propelled retribution can have experimented more carefully than we did, varying the proportions of mixture and writing it all down in an exercise book. We cross-referenced the different explosives with the way they were packed, too, for we not only used rifle cartridges: we tried lengths of gas-pipe, jam-jars of plaster of Paris, balls of clay, a roll of lavatory paper with both ends bunged and the whole encased in yards of the elasticated webbing Howard’s father treasured for the roof-rack of his Humber Super Snipe.

  That summer rang with tunes and bangs. I can remember adults only peripherally. Howard’s elder sister Judith seems a presence, less because she was a very pretty sixteen-year-old with blonde hair she could practically sit on than because our noises frightened her pony. She didn’t like Mozart and she thought boys with bombs were silly. We didn’t like ponies and it was universally acknowledged that girls constituted a category of silliness such as to re-define the word. Our mines threw up clods of earth at the feet of her horse, sending it cantering with flared nostrils to the protective shade of an elm in the corner of the paddock in whose branches there nestled a ‘blinder’: one of our better devices full of magnesium powder which burst with immense lightning and crack. Shattered twigs and elm foliage rained down behind it as the horse took off once more, eyes rolling, for the far corner of the field where it tore through the hedge and vanished.

  We set bombs off at night to watch the flash; we sent them up on the backs of gliders and kites to see what an explosion in the sky looked like. We even sacrificed Howard’s oldest control-line plane, substituting a bomb in the cockpit for the plastic pilot whose moulded head and shoulders had been glued beneath the canopy. The realism of this explosion exceeded all expectations: it ignited the fuel in the tank and the entire plane blew apart in mid-air while travelling at speed. To children brought up on movies of the recent war it looked entirely authentic: the severed wings fluttering to earth, the E.D. ‘Bee’ engine shooting forward from its mounts and plunging through the greenhouse roof, the trail of smoke across the summer sky.

  And still we were not satisfied. I filched ether from my mother’s bottle of waste anaesthetic, Howard stole petrol from his father’s Atco motor mower. How we never blew ourselves up was a miracle but we never between us lost more than an eyebrow or two. No neighbour complained, no parent intervened. Presumably they were all too busy elsewhere being doctors and lawyers to notice what their sons were up to. ‘That sounds nice,’ said Howard’s father vaguely one evening after we had played some duets. ‘Better than those fireworks you keep letting off. I didn’t know you could buy them in August. Never could when I was a boy.’ My own father, too, was oddly tolerant. The only time he objected was when I embarrassed him. This came about one evening as he, my mother, my sister and I returned home from seeing a film and dining in town. It was late, a dark summer’s night. For some reason I was carrying one of the cartridge bombs in my pocket. While my father was putting the car away and the others were sleepily opening the front door I let it off in the front garden to see how much of a flash it made. The noise was very satisfactory and I went through the hedge into the orchard with a torch to find the torn metal casing which I had heard rattling through the apple branches. Within minutes there were sounds of conversation from the front. I overheard my father saying ‘No, I’m afraid it was my son letting off a firework. I’ll certainly speak to him. I’m sorry you were bothered, officer. Goodnight.’ I made myself scarce for as long as I could without risking being locked out and went in to find my father white with rage not because I had been exploding bombs but because he had had to explain to the local bobby who arrived on his bicycle in a lather of sweat and trembling with dread of being the first on a murder scene. Giving an innocent policeman a nasty turn, making my father apologise on my behalf – far from becoming a family joke such was not a laughing matter. On the other hand I now suspect that my mother, true to her more subversive nature, was secretly amused.

  In the meantime Howard’s and my days were endless, our friendship without bounds. Yet my memory of that summer is not that it was conventionally carefree. Henry Ward Beecher’s observation that despite their intent energy ‘boys have hours of great sinking and sadness’ applied to us well enough but especially to Howard who was older than I in an unchronological sense. Already he had glimpsed the future and one night he was not to be consoled. In the dark of his bedroom he worked himself into a peculiar mood of despairing seriousness which I associated with adulthood and which ended with him in tears. He said that soon we would never see each other again; he was going off to one school, I to another. He said he knew we wouldn’t still be friends in five years’ time. He was ‘frit’ (our slang) about having to do his National Service. Suddenly five years seemed nothing. It was as if men in khaki would be coming round any day now to tear us from our homes and march us away as even now his brother William was exiled and being shot at in Malaya.

  Until then I had not glimpsed this f
uture for myself but Howard’s words now filled me with his contagious panic. I was upset by his upset, frightened by his fright. For a long time we both lay in tears, each staring at his private vista of never-ending uprootings and separations which we knew to be our common lot. The seemingly endless world of childhood was finishing, as it does not when children do precocious things with grown-up earnestness but when tomorrow first begins to weigh upon today. Temporarily adrift somewhere between mourning and panic we indulged ourselves splendidly with a kind of solemn hysteria. What were we really doing? What but making a hostile sea of the future the better to make an eternal island of the present. What but whipping up a storm to earn ourselves the luxury of consolation as young lovers might do while the summer moonlight fell across their bed like a cold scythe.

  The next day we were up early and making bombs with strange intensity. That morning we must have got through pounds of Howard’s mother’s granulated sugar and bags of his father’s weedkiller; when that ran out we moved on to their fertiliser. I remember crouching beside Howard as he tamped a bomb into a hole in the earth. I remember watching not his hands but the edge of his ear with its bright curve of fine hairs, the light down on his forearms, the caramel smell of burnt sugar which hung about his hair, the vulnerable neck in its Aertex collar. In the afternoon we hit belatedly on the idea of underwater explosions, lowering bombs into the water-butt, a vast oak barrel once used for molasses. By tea-time we had devised a way of keeping the fuses dry and had sent up stained gouts of water into the sunlit air, falling as rain across a bed of nasturtiums. We had inadvertently killed a goldfish he had won at a fair and forgotten was in the tub as well as a couple of newts which had also been there. We didn’t discover about the goldfish for a day or two when bacteria brought it to the surface with a bloom of white saprophytes around its gills.

  That night I felt it my turn to work up a storm, but it was not the same. It was too self-conscious, too much an attempt to repeat something which had happened spontaneously, inevitably, in its own time. We went through the motions and again the summer moonlight fell across our bed but this time it suggested instead that we got up and went out into the warm air smelling of night-scented stock to look for Yellow Underwing moths with the ultra-violet lamp from under the stairs.

  We never did see each other again; Howard had been right. We were neither of us the type who keeps in touch with gangs of friends or goes to reunions or Old Boys’ dinners. We might have made a pact but didn’t. Probably each of us was daunted by visions of an awful meeting between two gangling sub-adults making that preening gesture with one hand at the neck as if to check the latest shave and affecting the formal insouciance of our class:

  ‘Christ, it’s Andrews.’

  ‘By God, it’s H-P. Well I’m buggered. What are you doing here? Oh, I’m awfully sorry, this is Felicity.’

  (In fact, though, whenever I had fantasies about seeing old schoolfriends the meetings usually took place abroad as if foreign travel would set the seal on one’s adulthood. I envisaged running into people on the Champs Elysées, in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, on the campus of Berlin University. Or we might find ourselves with our respective girl-friends on the same Rhine steamer or in the same cable car high above Kitzbühl. ‘Good Lord, it’s …’ ‘What on earth …’ ‘Well, let’s all have dinner … Sorry, this is Lisl.’)

  *

  I can still remember the music we played, though. On distant, piano-less Tiwarik it suddenly all comes back, summoned from the attics of memory by explosions. These are soon explained as Arman’s bangka grounds on the shingle. He and Totoy Matias spring out looking pleased with themselves, as well they might since the bilges are full of a slithery mass of silver and pink fish – mainly dalagang bukid, a small herringlike variety of Caesio whose charming local name means ‘country maiden’. A successful morning’s dynamiting has earned them a good lunch. Democratically (for he is the Jhon-Jhon’s owner and skipper) Arman sets about cleaning fish. He has been acting as bomber, Totoy Matias as aimer. The other two crew members who are rather slower out of the boat have had the more strenuous task of swimming down to retrieve the catch. Silo in particular looks done in and even rather cold. Non-smoker Arman tells him he ought to smoke more, since there is a widespread belief that smoking gives a man energy and keeps him warm.

  Since I have firewood and utensils we cook and eat in the shade at the hut. The fish is as good as it only ever is when taken straight from the sea. Not the most instant of quick-freezing processes preserves that unmistakable flavour. It is not a matter of bacteria or decay; it is almost as if the life still present in the fish’s cells at the moment of cooking had a taste of its own, a brisk marine ghost which otherwise fleets away. We also eat kinilaw, marinaded raw fish, which confirms my fanciful thesis for it is even more vibrant with cellular activity. At once I understand primitive ideas of incorporation (anthropophagy, Holy Communion). Maybe I shall now swim better. Soon we drowse over the remnants of an illegally-fished lunch.

  The people of Sabay are practised bomb-makers, as I discover one morning when I paddle over to buy rice and matches and find Arman cooking up what he calls ‘dynamite’ in a large wok over the fire in his kitchen area, surrounded by empty gin bottles, helpful colleagues and children. Strictly speaking the explosive is no longer dynamite but ammoniúm, the cheaper and more legally available ammonium nitrate fertiliser they use for mango trees. It is white and granular, not unlike that powdery snow which falls as tiny balls rather than flakes. To increase its explosive force it is roasted with ordinary kerosene much as rice is fried. The junior pyrotechnician in me is reactivated after lying dormant for decades.

  I tell him about the bombs I used to make when I was thirteen, also using various kinds of fertiliser and weed-killer, but mixing them with sugar rather than frying them in paraffin.

  ‘We used to use sugar too,’ Arman says. ‘Then some fishermen from the Visayas came here and stayed for a week on Tiwarik and told us you could get more power by using kerosene. So now we do it this way. They’re very inventive down there. Most of the bright ideas for fishing seem to come from the Visayas. It was they who taught us we could make our own igniters so we didn’t have to rely on the Army keeping us supplied with blasting caps.’

  I didn’t say so but their igniters were hardly new, having been described in OSS field manuals dating from the Second World War. Arman shows me how they take a torch bulb and rub it against sandpaper until a hole is worn in the glass, enabling the bulb to be filled with powdered match heads before being buried hole-downwards in a gin bottle packed with the still-hot fertiliser.

  There is a story that it was the Army, in the form of a squad of rogue soldiers, which forced Sabay’s villagers into illegal fishing. This account has the air of a half-truth. I have no doubt the incident occurred, as similar incidents have occurred all over the Philippines. But for years before that dynamite fishing had been a way of life at Sabay and had evolved into a sophisticated art. As long as I have been living on Tiwarik I have remained in two distinct minds about it. One of these minds runs thus:

  If I describe myself as a spear-fisherman, hunting for my own food, then I believe in terms of time and energy expended, in terms of sheer physical attrition I earn every ounce of my food. I eat my successes – generally in a matter of minutes – gratefully. My failures account for unrecorded hours which at present amount to my days. To take on wily and evasive sea creatures with an elastic-powered spear is a game loaded heavily against the hunter, whose life is under constant threat from an alien medium as well as from certain of its denizens. Kills which he makes on such unequal terms have often a sublime quality to them. To have out-thought and out-manoeuvred an animal in its own element means for a brief moment having stopped thinking like a middle-class Englishman, a university graduate, a writer, a human being even, and to have partaken actively of that anarchic amoral will which lies beneath all there is and all one pretends to be. The painstaking stalking of a parrotfish, the ke
eping its interest aroused by scooping up handfuls of sand from the bottom and stirring little clouds of silt; the allaying its fears by turning one’s back on it for half a minute and motionlessly lying in the water twenty feet down gripping a knob of coral; intriguing its colleagues and bringing them circling cautiously in at exactly the moment when one must go up for air or die, scattering them with that rise to the surface: that endlessly-repeated cycle is so much an analogue for stalking sexual prey it is impossible not to feel a strange bond with the fish which usually escapes in the end but which very occasionally is caught.

  The complete antithesis of this private combat is the use of explosives. After that underwater gasp followed by a slamming concussion the immediate area is an anonymous battlefield. The seabed is littered with corpses since not all dynamited fish float conveniently to the surface belly up. Some lie on their sides on the bottom presumably because the same shock-wave which ruptures their vascular system also deflates their buoyancy sacs. Whether a fish sinks or floats seems to depend on several things, among them the temperature and salinity of the water and the species of fish. Tulingan, for example, a year-round staple food fish in these parts, is a little member of the tuna family without an air sac which invariably sinks in the deeper waters it frequents and is consequently one of the many species unsuitable for dynamite fishing. Meanwhile at the scene of the explosion there are always some fish cavorting horribly across the scene, their brains broken. To break a fish’s brains by firing a steel rod through them is, to be sure, no better for the fish. All the hunter can say is that the victor of hand-to-hand combat is not left as tainted as he who soars scathelessly overhead and drops his undiscriminating bombs. And when one of the bombers miscalculates and his bomb goes off too soon taking with it an arm, a hand, the head of a companion with screaming shards of gin bottle, the hunter on hearing this tale of tragedy from up the coast piously says how awful it is – as it is. But inwardly he sides with his beloved prey instead of with his own species and cannot suppress a deep and secret thought: ‘Serve them right.’