by Judy Nunn
Relieved that he wasn’t offended, Sam allowed her excitement to take over.
‘I know, he said the parallels between the script and the real Mamma Tack were uncanny. And they are, aren’t they? I mean your grandfather died in a battle at sea, and so did Hugh Blackston. But it was pure invention on Nick’s part. Isn’t that incredible?’
‘Not really.’ He respected her passion, but he refused to be carried away by it; film people were so easily over-excited, he’d decided. ‘It was an educated guess,’ he said. ‘My grandmother was a widow and her husband was killed in the war, Nick knew that much. Pretty automatic to assume he died at sea. After all, the New Hebrides didn’t experience conflict on land; theirs was an air and sea battle.’ He shrugged. ‘Common sense.’
Sam refused to give up. Fired by Nick’s enthusiasm, she felt the need to convince Jason Thackeray of the extraordinary coincidences between fact and fiction.
‘But your grandmother knew the plantation owner whose very homestead we’re filming in, Nick told me. Don’t you find that amazing?’
‘Not particularly. The Marat place is the oldest plantation owner’s house on the island, it’s the natural choice for a location. And of course my grandmother came into contact with the most influential people in town, including Marat. Everyone knew everyone in Vila in those days.’ His smile was a fraction patronising, she thought. ‘Let’s face it, they still do. Nick simply wrote what he perceived to be the truth and it was. Nothing strange about that.’
Sam found the electric blue of his eyes, which had impressed her upon their first meeting, cold now. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said, deflated.
Jason was aware that he’d disillusioned her, but he was a practical man. He’d come up with a plausible explanation for every apparent coincidence that had appeared in Nick Parslow’s script, and Nick himself had found the reasoning fascinating. It appeared, however, that Samantha Lindsay was romantically fixated on the idea that the similarities between her fictitious character’s circumstances and those of his grandmother were somehow incredible. Jason refused to fuel any such fanciful notion.
At the end of their discussion that night, Sam was left with the disappointed feeling that Jason Thackeray wasn’t really one of the team at all.
But the following morning, when the cameras rolled, Jason found it difficult to retain his objectivity. He watched as they shot a scene between the Reverend Hugh Blackston and his wife Sarah. Hugh was telling Sarah that he was going to war. They were short of chaplains, he said, and it was his duty to offer his services to the military. Again and again they shot the scene from different angles, and each time they did, Jason felt a faint chill down his spine. Could this be the same script that he’d read? The words and the images were so different off the page. He told himself that it was simply the craft of film-making. The set, the lighting, the costumes, the incredible eye for detail that so authentically recreated the past were affecting him, that was all it was. But it wasn’t, it was far more.
Jason felt that he was living through one of his grandmother’s stories; there had been so many over the years, and this one was the story of Marty. The past unfolded before his eyes, and he could hear her voice as she told him about his grandfather. ‘My Marty,’ he could hear her say; she’d always called him ‘my Marty’. And, as he watched, Hugh and Sarah Blackston became Martin and Jane Thackeray.
At the end of the day’s filming he tried to shake off the feeling that he’d watched history repeating itself, and he congratulated Nick Parslow and Simon Scanlon on their excellent work. But although the cameras had stopped rolling and the lights were turned off and the set was no longer a magic view of the past, there remained one feeling that Jason could not shake off. He could not deny the fact that he had been affected, above all, by Samantha Lindsay’s extraordinary portrayal of the woman who had been of supreme importance to him throughout his life.
‘Would you like to come out to dinner with me?’ he asked. He’d been waiting for her in the foyer of the hotel.
‘Oh.’ She was disconcerted. She’d noticed him watching from the sidelines throughout the day’s shoot, and when she’d left to take off her makeup she’d seen him talking to Nick and Simon. Now, as he’d approached her, she’d expected some comment on her work. She felt the customary stab of actor’s anxiety. Had he hated her performance? He must have. Why wasn’t he saying anything? She looked around the foyer. The gang would be congregating to dine soon; they always ate early when there was a dawn start the following day.
‘Please come. There’s something I want to show you.’
No longer distant, the eagerness in the compelling eyes that she’d found so cold the previous night now intrigued her.
‘Sure, why not?’ How rude that sounded, she thought. ‘Sorry,’ she grinned, ‘I’d be delighted.’
He took her to Vila Chaumieres, a little further down Erakor Lagoon. The restaurant wasn’t visible from the street, and Sam was mystified when they got out of Jason’s hire car and wandered along a tiny path that weaved its way through a miniature forest of tropical ferns and palms. And then suddenly there it was, tucked away behind its lush gardens on the water’s edge, the most romantic restaurant setting she’d ever seen in her life. Candles flickered on tabletops, and in the delicate floodlighting along the banks of the lagoon, trees dipped gracefully towards the lazy ripples of the outgoing tide.
‘This is a movie set,’ Sam said. ‘We should be shooting here.’
The place was deserted; it was an early hour to dine by Port Vila standards. They sat at a table on the small jetty built out over the water, and she was surprised when he told her to throw some pieces of her bread roll over the railings. She obediently did so, and swarms of fish, all shapes and sizes, broke the water’s surface in a feeding frenzy.
‘Hey, did you see that?’ She leapt from her chair to lean over the railing, scrunching up more bread and scattering it wide. The water seethed with action, slim silver fish leaping above the surface like miniature trained dolphins. ‘Hey, Jason, did you see that!’
He put his own bread roll onto her plate and quietly signalled the waiter to bring some more.
When she’d recovered from the excitement of fish-feeding, she sat down, her face glowing, unashamedly childlike. ‘What a magical place. It’s a fairyland,’ she said, looking around, wondering why he’d brought her here; he barely knew her.
‘Good food too.’
‘Is this what you wanted to show me? I love it.’
‘No, it isn’t what I wanted to show you at all. I just thought it was a good idea for you to get away from the resort and try some of Port Vila’s restaurants. We have some very good ones, you know.’
‘So I’ve heard. But when you have a five o’clock start in the morning, it’s tempting to dine in.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he agreed. ‘Shall we order?’
They ordered their meal and as soon as the wine arrived and their glasses were poured, he raised his in a toast.
‘To your performance, Samantha,’ he said.
There was genuine admiration in the way that he said it, and she breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh I’m so glad,’ she said. ‘You did like it then? Did you feel that I …’
But he interrupted. ‘This is what I wanted to show you.’ He rose from his chair, taking another nearby candle and placing it beside the one that sat on their table. Then he took his wallet from his pocket and produced a small black and white photograph, which he placed before her. It was an old photograph, but unfaded, and in it Sam could clearly see the sunlight that bounced off the fair curls of the beautiful young woman who stood smiling, radiant, holding the hand of a small boy, a frail elderly man with a long silver beard standing beside them.
‘Jane Thackeray,’ Sam breathed softly, picking up the photograph as if it were something so delicate it might break.
‘Yes.’ Jason leaned over beside her and looked at the photograph. ‘Mamma Jane, I called her. She was the most amazing perso
n I’ve ever known.’
She glanced up at him, and he was gazing at the photograph with such unabashed love that when his eyes met hers she felt she should look away. That perhaps the practical, somewhat remote man with whom she’d discussed the script the previous night might not wish to be caught out. But she was wrong. Jason had chosen to share the moment with her.
‘Mamma Jane was a true mother to me, she brought me up. My own mother left when I was ten.’ He smiled, then returned his attention to the photograph. ‘This was taken not long after the war. That’s my father, he was about five at the time.’
‘And the old man?’
‘Godfrey Tomlinson. An English trader. He was Mamma Jane’s best friend, and she talked about him a lot. I always felt as if I’d known him.’
‘Have you shown Nick and Simon this photograph?’ Sam couldn’t take her eyes off the young woman, there was such strength in her beauty.
‘No, I haven’t shown anyone else and I don’t intend to.’
She looked at him, surprised.
His reply was once more practical and to the point. ‘Nick and Simon are making their own film about a woman called Sarah Blackston, loosely based upon my grandmother. The script is there, it’s written, they don’t need any added information.’ Jason found it far more difficult to explain why he had shown the photograph to Sam, however, and he knew she was wondering.
‘It was your performance today,’ he said, studying the photograph as he took it from her. ‘I felt I’d stepped into the past. You became her, Sam.’
He looked at her, and his eyes were green now. How extraordinary, she thought. How could someone’s eyes be blue one minute, then green the next? It must have been the reflection from the floodlights on the water.
‘I was seeing Mamma Jane as a young woman,’ he said. ‘And I was seeing her past, so many things that she’d told me.’
‘How come your eyes change colour like that?’
He threw his head back and laughed. Samantha Lindsay was delightful, he decided. She spoke her mind and he liked her for it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally as he sat and leaned back in his chair. ‘It happens a lot. Something to do with a change of mood, I think.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She cursed herself for her stupidly girlish interruption. He was about to return the photograph to his wallet. ‘Please? May I have another look?’
‘Of course.’ He handed it to her.
‘Godfrey looks like George Bernard Shaw,’ she said.
‘Yes, he does a bit.’
His open laughter had encouraged her. She wanted to ask him about Jane Thackeray, and about the boy in the photograph, his father. Her mind was reeling with questions, but she didn’t know where to begin. It was all too personal, she thought, and too soon. She didn’t know him well enough. Godfrey was a safer bet, she decided.
‘Tell me about him,’ she said.
‘It was not long after the war, the time that photograph was taken …’
The waiter arrived with their steaming bowls of French onion soup, and Sam hoped that the moment wasn’t about to be broken, but Jason was very relaxed and seemed quite happy to share the past with her.
‘… It was around then that Godfrey changed my grandmother’s life. Mamma Jane always called him her guardian angel.’
Whilst they ate their soup, Jason talked. And Sam forgot that they were sitting in the pretty surrounds of Vila Chaumieres, she was transported to the Vila of Mamma Tack in 1945.
The Americans departed the islands as swiftly as they had arrived, and they left behind them a postwar state of utter lunacy. But the fault did not lie with the US military. The New Hebrides Condominium government, with all its customary indecision and inadequacy, created its own havoc.
The American government had provided vast quantities of machinery and equipment to the Allied forces throughout the conflict, but at the end of the war, it was feared that the return of such hardware to the US could create economic chaos. It was therefore suggested that the Condominium government might wish to purchase the goods. Plant equipment, bulldozers, modern workshop machinery, cranes, trucks, office equipment and much, much more was offered for only seven cents in the dollar of its real value.
Instead of jumping at the opportunity to acquire unprecedented wealth and opportunities for development, the New Hebrides government procrastinated, and finally replied that, as the Americans were leaving the goods anyway, why should the Condominium pay for them?
Rightfully disgusted by the response, the US military bulldozed every movable object into the ocean.
The knowledge that the wanton destruction of such luxuries had been brought about by their own government angered the New Hebrideans, but the postwar Condominium authorities ignored the growing resentment. In their opinion, they had been left with a legacy of overpaid, over-ambitious natives who needed to be returned as soon as possible to their pre-war conditions. Adding insult to injury, the authorities confiscated, wherever they could, the gifts that had been showered upon the locals, visiting homes and simply taking away the precious treasures of iceboxes, radios, furniture, and even clothing.
It was in this period of unrest and anger that Jane Thackeray proved her true worth to the disillusioned islanders. She was a white person who could be trusted, she healed their children when they were sick, and Mamma Tack’s was their favourite gathering place. A haven where they could talk freely, and eat and drink and listen to the music that played on the radio.
Mamma Tack’s had become a sort of cafe for the locals, serving a dish of the day – bowls of soup or stew – together with endless cups of tea from the urn in the corner, and even soft drinks. Those who had some money in their pockets deposited a few coins in the bowl on the counter towards the upkeep of the place, some arrived with fresh produce as barter, and those who had nothing ate for free. It was run on an honour system and at a loss, but through her work three days a week at the hospital, Jane was able to pay full-time worker’s salaries to both Mary and Sera.
At first, Mary didn’t approve of Sera’s employment. She was plainly jealous. ‘We don’ need help, Missus, we a good team, you and me. And Sera don’ need work, Savi got that job at Burns Philp now.’ But when Jane promised her that she would remain the boss of the clinic, and that Sera would be in charge of the cooking and kitchen, Mary was quickly appeased. Being the boss of the clinic was a far more important position, in her opinion, and the two women ran Mamma Tack’s between them most harmoniously during the days Jane worked at the hospital to make ends meet.
The authorities, although disapproving, turned a blind eye to Mamma Tack’s, but a number of local businessmen, led by Jean-François Marat, called for its closure. Mamma Tack’s encouraged the islanders’ love of the indulgences provided by the Americans, Marat and his cronies maintained.
It was Jean-François Marat’s personal determination to see Jane Thackeray ruined. He had not forgotten his humiliation that day, and he held her directly responsible for the trouble that had ensued with his plantation labourers as a result of Savi’s departure.
When Savi had left, so had many others, following his example and joining the military workforce. Marat had employed a new foreman, a South African who knew how to keep the blacks in place through sheer fear, but there was no sense of loyalty as there had been under Savi’s reign. The men were lazy and pilfering had become rife. Marat’s workforce remained in a state of disarray and, in his view, it was all Jane Thackeray’s fault. She had cost him dearly, and she would pay for it. Without the support of the military, she had nothing, and Marat intended to send her running home to England with her tail between her legs.
But much as Marat pushed for the closure of Mamma Tack’s, and much as the authorities would have liked to oblige, they found their hands tied. They could hardly confiscate the stove and the icebox, the radio and the tea urn and furniture, all of which had been gifts from the Americans, for the gifts had been made to Jane Thackeray. Furthermore, Jane Thackera
y personally owned the boatshed, they told him, it was hers to do with as she wished. And, as there was no profit made from the business – indeed it was impossible to comprehend how she kept the place operating – there was no real justification for its closure. In truth, the authorities realised that they might well have a riot on their hands if they tried.
Marat was thwarted. It appeared that Jane Thackeray was to remain a thorn in his side. But he did not intend to give up. There would come a time, he vowed. One day, there would come a time.
Jane’s ability to survive was simple. She had a silent partner in Mamma Tack’s, a mysterious benefactor about whom the authorities knew nothing. His identity was no mystery to Jane, but the source of his supplies was. Godfrey Tomlinson never ceased to amaze her. Soft drinks, canned goods, tea, rice, cooking utensils and bowls, even fresh linen and blankets for the two-bed treatment area she still ran out the back, everything but the medical materials which the hospital provided her with, was supplied by Godfrey.
He refused any payment. ‘There is no cost involved, my dear,’ he insisted. ‘You must simply accept the fact that you have a benefactor.’ He also refused to divulge the source of his supplies. ‘Ask me no questions,’ he’d say, time and again, tapping his nose and looking very smug.
Godfrey was only too pleased that he could be of some help. She refused the financial assistance he offered, and even insisted upon paying a weekly rental for the share of his house, which he kept to a nominal amount.
Jane knew that she owed her very existence to Godfrey, her ‘guardian angel’, as she referred to him, a term which gave the old man great pleasure, but she worried about him these days. He looked frail, and she knew that he was not well. She tried to persuade him to come to the hospital for a full check-up, but he refused.
‘The fragility of old age, my dear, that’s all, the price one pays for reaching seventy-five. Do stop fussing.’ What was the point of a check-up? he thought. He was dying and he knew it, just a matter of time. Besides, he’d made his own plans, and he didn’t want anyone else interfering, not even Jane.