by Gavin Young
‘With the exception of India,’ I put in. In the Andamans, in the Bay of Bengal, I had walked through forests so selectively trimmed that it was hard to tell where the missing trees had been. The Indian Government deserves the ecological equivalent of the Nobel Prize for that.
*
I went to Auki the next morning. In my notebook I read:
Auki, Malaita. What Jack London in his book, The Cruise of the Snark, called ‘the savage coast of Malaita’ is invisible. It’s still dark at 0500 when I step off the little motor vessel from Honiara. A single street of stores, little more than painted sheds, slopes gently up from the jetty. I had been advised to stay at the Auki Lodge. Two friendly policemen on the wharf direct me ‘up the street’ and one of them walks with me, flashing his torch over the frequent puddles and along a wet, grassy lane as far as a bungalow with a lit verandah. A large toad crouches on a step pretending to be a stone. No other sign of life. The front door is closed. I find a chair and wait on the verandah, watching the first slow rays of dawn begin to touch the cassia trees on the lawn, slowly tinting their dew-drenched blossoms with gold and the delicately splayed leaves of the flame trees with a fringe of silver. The silent birth of a new island day; with sun-up, a white-necked kingfisher swoops past me to perch in the trees, uttering a harsh, monotonous squeak like someone rhythmically squeezing a teddy bear. The silence is broken. I hear human beings stirring within the bungalow; soon the door opens.
The Auki Lodge is small and cosy and owned by two well-to-do Baptist Malaitans, David and Ethel, both of them built like middle-aged sumo wrestlers. I have it from Gerry that David is the grandson of a chief and an elder of the South Seas Evangelical Church, and, bulky, almost stately, he looks it. ‘You should see the Langa Langa Lagoon,’ they say, when I have registered. ‘And the artificial islands.’
After breakfast I walked down to the wharf and the market, past the little police station and Chinese stores with shelves piled with umbrellas, corned beef tins, Johnson’s baby powder, cans of pilchards and Ma Ling roasted goose, Lux soap, soy sauce and Creamy Custard biscuits, ladies’ ‘frilly undies’ and much else.
In the open market, sixty or seventy tuna fish lay in the sun on coconut fronds, and a boy with almost white hair waved branches over them to keep off the flies. He had a Union Jack patch on the pocket of his open shirt. Mullet were laid out, too, and eels, and a yellow and black striped fish that looked too beautiful to eat. At a vegetable stall, a man said, ‘Wata cabis,’ pointing to bundles of cress. ‘Bitalnat, kokonat from garten’ – meaning ‘from a plantation, not wild’. There were bamboo stems filled, as ice-cream fills a cornet, with taro mixed with milk – ‘Not bulamacao’, the stall-owner said, ‘but kokonat. Custom milk.’ Bulamacao meant ‘cow’, I knew. Decades ago, some white man landed the first bull and the first cow in the Solomons, and said, ‘See – a bull and a cow!’ But the islanders thought he referred to each animal by that term, so ‘bulamacao’ entered the local pidgin. ‘Custom’ means ‘traditional’. All this I learnt from a pamphlet I had bought in Honiara called Pijin Bilong Yumi (Our Pidgin).
Among the rows of betel nut and sweet potatoes and bananas a large, fat young man, with a T-shirt splitting over his pot belly, shouted at me, ‘G’mornin’. I’m Andrew from the Gilbert Islands. And you?’ An old man with a tattooed face came up, shook our hands and said something. ‘Ah-ha! That’s nice,’ Andew explained in a foghorn voice. ‘He said to us “Bless You”. That’s nice.’ Andrew walked with me round the market. He was a well-driller, visiting a sister married to a man in the post office here.
‘Auki is very quiet and good,’ he bawled at me. ‘In the Gilbert Islands always drinking trouble, fighting.’ He seemed drunk himself, despite the early hour, and I was mildly alarmed. He swayed away towards a man loading wood into a ramshackle cart. ‘Ha, John!’ he roared. ‘When’ll I get the ten dollars you owe me? Eh?’ The man laughed and so did other men standing around. Andrew, I was relieved to see, laughed too. ‘You want a fight? Hey, wanta fight?’ He rolled about the street shouting with glee and the whole street laughed with him.
*
Auki is a tiny place at the head of the large Langa Langa lagoon, the limits of which are clearly marked by a thin, white line of waves breaking over coral, and by outcrops of the coral itself, which although a beautiful turquoise underwater reveals ugly blocks of jagged lava above it. From the canoe which Andrew arranged to take me down the length of the lagoon I saw floating coconuts like dozens of severed heads – appropriately, for Malaita is an island of former headhunters. Men in ragged shorts fished from small, village-made dugouts.
A line of man-made islands runs the length of the lagoon, created by the patient piling of coral block on coral block, and then the piling of earth on top of that. These artificial islands are topped by coconut palms and hamlets of sago-thatched houses, and ride offshore like men-of-war in battle line. By putting the seawater ‘moat’ between themselves and the envious head-chopping warrior tribes from the interior of the island, the ‘saltwater’ dwellers on the coast had escaped an age-old persecution. There is something oddly silent about these beachless excrescences. And a strange absence of birds, except for the black, piratical frigate birds that lazed about the taller trees.
At the far end of the lagoon, I asked the canoeman, ‘Can we land?’
‘With permission.’
We were allowed to land by a plump, short man of about forty-five, wearing shorts but no shirt or shoes, whose curly hair, beard and moustache were more mauve than black. ‘I show you,’ he said. His name, he added, was Peter. He led me through the small wooden house around which fishing nets were hung up to dry. Then he showed me many graves, some half smothered by undergrowth. ‘That grave is four days old,’ he said, pointing to a few melancholy stones with faded paper flowers strewn about like refuse. Later, coming to a hut, he said, ‘This is taboo house, not for tourists. Here no girl can go in, only men.’ It was his house, he said. ‘And here I keep skulls of the aunties, father and grand-grandfathers. My family skulls.’
‘They bring good luck?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes they give lucky. But the missionaries come to spoil things, saying to me, “You under mission now; do not listen to spirits, don’t talk to them.” But I should talk to them, because in my custom I ask the spirits to help me. I should ask them. Sometimes they give lucky.’
‘I’m sure you should ask them,’ I said.
At a raised ‘bed’ of stones, Peter stopped. ‘That’s where we put chief’s body. We put chief’s body on those stones. Rain come and cover him until body’s rotten.’ I thought: The smell – but he anticipates me. ‘We put plants on the body so smell them through all the village. When all flesh is gone, we put the skull in a small basket and take it to water and wash it and keep it to show. Then bury the bones. When new chief dies we bring new body to the stones for rotting.’ I stooped to peer into thick bush. The empty sockets of skulls looking back at me, half hidden in the shadows, had a wide-eyed look, seeming to ask a question – a question that expected a funny answer, because the jaws were already grinning. Shifting light gave them a kind of false life. Uncomfortable. Nearby, in a shaggy-roofed house, women were singing old songs; the sound was as soothing as the sound of lagoon water lapping the coral.
We wandered on: more houses, taro and yam gardens over a plank bridge – ‘taboo for women’ – big banyan trees. Boys trailed fishing lines. I saw Peter’s log dugout which he had bought with the traditional money of Malaita – strings of threaded shells. ‘Buy wife, too, with shell money.’
It strikes me as I write this that, for some reason, many of the lively younger people were away, perhaps at school. So, despite a number of infants and small boys, a few smiling women and old men, and the courteous welcome that Peter of the mauve hair gave me, the atmosphere was a joyless one. Of course the talk of skulls and rotting corpses, and the isolation one felt here, had depressed me. Life and death seemed disconcertingly mingled. In
fact, these artificial islands were a bit too much like floating cemeteries to be comfortable. But the care of the skulls and spirits was not based on the sadness of irretrievable loss. Surely, the point of it was that the lamented dead ones lived on through the skulls? I half remembered something about all this in Arthur Grimble’s book, A Pattern of Islands, and later I looked it up.
The seen and the unseen made but one world for them [the Gilbert Islanders, in this case]. The belief was that the more recently departed could and did return…. They wanted to see what their descendants were doing. The skulls were preserved … for them to re-enter as they liked. If skulls at least were not kept, their ghosts would come and scream reproach by night with the voice of crickets from the palm-leaves.
Yet there was love as well as fear in the ancient cult of the ancestor, and often love predominated. I liked the story Grimble told of the old man whom he found blowing tobacco smoke between the jaws of a skull. The old man explained he was ‘loving the skull’ because his grandfather – who was inside it at that moment – had been very good to him when he was alive. He had chosen tobacco as his offering of love because, as far as he knew, there was ‘no supply of that luxury in the ancestral paradise’.
*
At the Auki Lodge that night I discovered on the verandah an American professor of biology with two young assistants from New York. They were collecting Malaitan bats, they said, or hoped to – they had had difficulties on that score with the Government. Officials in Honiara feared that their collecting would seriously deplete the local bat population. Was that likely, I asked.
‘Hardly,’ the professor laughed. ‘We may take away, oh, two hundred skins and stomach contents for analysis. And a number of parasitic fleas.’ He introduced himself – Goodwin was his name, from Colgate University, New York. He estimated there would be twenty-three species of bat on Malaita, each species consisting of several million individuals. ‘We’re talking of several billion bats here. In caves. In trees. All sizes.’
As we talked on the verandah, stabbed by a maddening swarm of mosquitoes, creatures like large birds flapped slowly overhead, black and ponderous against the evening sky. Owls? Vultures? ‘My God. Fruit bats,’ said one of the two young men.
From a sackful of squeaking, moving things he took something that looked like a flying mouse, and held it up by the tips of its black, membraned wings, stretched like very thin leather. It wriggled and tried to bite his gloved hands.
‘How will you kill these bats?’ I asked him. ‘I half imagined the two younger men rabbit-punching them on the backs of their diminutive necks.
‘Oh, they’ll die in the sacks,’ the professor said. ‘The temperature will do that for ’em.’
When I ventured a remark about the vampire bats of Europe, the professor feigned indignation. ‘I must tell you,’ he said, ‘that no vampires exist in Europe – not even in Transylvania. Of course, vampires do exist in South America. They like to suck your toes when you sleep. Their teeth are so sharp that they won’t even wake you.’
‘Fruit bats?’
‘Fruit bats eat fruit,’ the professor said, severely. ‘Not humans.’
As I left the garden to search the shops for a mosquito killer, fruit bats as big as brown owls flew heavily past, aiming for a nice sheltered place in which to hang upside down and sleep. Whatever the professor said, they looked like the Dracula family returning from an evening’s blood tasting.
I took to bed with me the guidebook to Solomons pidgin, and made a note, as I had in Rabaul, of phrases that especially pleased me. An expression I found particularly appealing was Tingting bilong me, meaning ‘I think’.
Slip, of course, was ‘sleep’. I slept.
Fourteen
The jungle-covered mountains and ravines towered up over the corrugated iron rooftops of little Auki, where boys, with hair so palely yellow that they looked like little old men, fished from the pier. Malaita looked like a huge shark on the map. ‘No white man,’ Jack London wrote, ‘was sure of Malaita crews in a tight place’; and the Solomons, he found, were full of tight places. A Captain Jansen, with whom he sailed, advised London and company: ‘You’d better bring your revolvers along and a couple of rifles,’ adding, ‘I’ve got five rifles aboard, though the one Mauser is without ammunition.’ The bushmen, apparently, were armed with Snider rifles – the generic term for any old rifle. They also had ‘tomahawks’: in fact, the European master of a local vessel had been ‘chopped to pieces with tomahawks’ quite recently. ‘Murder,’ London wrote melodramatically, ‘stalked abroad in the land,’ and the air ‘seemed filled with poison’.
I wondered if all this was not a bit of an exaggeration, a literary aid to London’s he-man image. I felt nothing here of the menace I had felt growling at me on the shores of Bougainville. In Auki, I knew from a friend I had consulted in Hong Kong, resided a man called John Freeman who was the district magistrate, and might know something of Malaitans and their fairly recent history.
Philip Smiley, my friend in Hong Kong, had been Freeman’s predecessor in the job, and had had several years’ experience of Malaitans in the 1970s. He had given me a travel book, Bride in the Solomons, written by an American, Osa Johnson, about a visit she and her photographer husband had made here after the First World War. Philip’s own close acquaintance with Malaitan affairs was reflected in the inscription he scribbled on the title page: ‘To Gavin, en route to Malaita, from one who had many brides there (albeit ephemeral ones)’.
I found Freeman in a four-roomed office with louvred windows in a low-ceilinged bungalow. Portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh (the independent Solomons remained in the British Commonwealth) stared down at his desk from a wall, and hopeful Malaitans with urgent petitions stared at him through a window from a bench under a coconut thatch roof.
Freeman was a good-natured young man with a black beard, a wide mouth with a good many healthy-looking teeth, and a skin browned by the Solomon sun. He had, he said, come here willingly but by chance. From Cambridge University he had tried to join the Foreign Office, but having failed the interview he had decided to settle for the law, and found himself in Birmingham. There, one of those strange things you read about happening to someone else actually happened to him. He saw an advertisement: ‘Magistrate Needed in Solomon Islands’. He applied at once. He would do two years here and return to practise law in England. ‘Two years is enough – or that’s what I think now. I deal with living people and that’s what I like.’
Freeman lived with his wife, Alison, in a tiny house on a hill overlooking palm trees. It looked as if it might slide down the hill in the next good rainstorm.
‘Sorry we can’t put you up.’ The spare room was occupied, he explained apologetically, by two parakeets named Joyce and Francis, ‘after the Chief Justice in Honiara’, and in the kitchen a possum looked at us from a wooden box with a wire-netting door. ‘We were offered him in the market,’ Alison Freeman said. ‘For kaikai – for food.’ The possum’s eyes were ungrateful buttons in a woolly overcoat.
The Freemans had few luxuries. The Government couldn’t afford even to give them a jeep, although Freeman was expected – and wanted – to know as much about his sprawling district as possible. He had to borrow one before he and Alison could visit a favourite place on his day off: a cool, clear river pool where they could swim like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden under beautiful trees, festooned with creepers.
The Malaitans, in John Freeman’s opinion, were very Irish: charming, hardworking, tradition-minded. They cared more about land ownership than things like sex or violence, although there was often violence about land ownership.
‘I think one of the nicest things is walking down to the courthouse every morning to see all the prisoners I’ve sentenced sitting around, with great long bush knives, saying to me, “Oh, good morning. Hello!”.’
John Freeman walked with me to the courthouse, a long brick building with large, paneless windows. A few benches stretched
from wall to wall. A magistrate’s bench and a handsome, hand-carved magistrate’s chair under a painted wooden royal coat of arms were lit by strips of neon. In the doorway someone had left a squashed can of lager.
Malaita was rather a moral place in Freeman’s opinion. ‘Jolly strict.’ He showed me one sort of deposition he’d had to deal with: an incest case – there weren’t too many of them. The defendant had been tucked up with his wife and daughter, Surara, and his other children, and, well, his statement went on:
Me sleep long house bilong me, withem wife bilong me, daughter bilong me, Surara and olketa small piccaninee more. Time me lookem calico [clothes] Surara, him come out and him no wear underpant. From time me lookem this one, me start to think wrong long hemi, when me kasi holem [catch hold] and me fackem now.
But, his statement continued, his wife was roused by this untoward activity –. ‘Time me go ahead for fackem, missis bilong me hem wake up and hemi tok long me’ – and now he was in trouble.
I forget what punishment Freeman handed out.