Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘You goin’ to church?’ He didn’t even growl. His voice was a soft drawl, low enough to be barely audible.

  ‘No, I’m going to Honiara. And you?’

  ‘I have my own church,’ he murmured with the faintest of smiles. ‘Colson’s Witnesses.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m Colson,’ he said, plucking at the curly hair over his ears. He pointed to the outrageous tam o’shanter. ‘Irish Colson,’ he said, and he and his friend giggled quietly. ‘Where you goin’ in Honiara?’ Colson asked.

  I would try to take a ship to Fiji, if there was one going there. If not, I said, I fancied the western islands for a few days. That visibly interested Colson. He, too, was heading for Honiara. From there he would go by boat to a timber camp at Viru, he told me – the purple pom-pomnodding agreement with everything he said – that lay on the way to the western islands. He would be there the day after tomorrow. He would try – he didn’t sound very happy about it – for a job there.

  ‘But I may not like Honiara,’ he whispered. ‘They may not like me. So suppose I come with you? I am very quiet man. I can cook. I can be bodyguard, exceptin’ I have no gun.’

  ‘Will I need a guard, Colson?’

  ‘If you do, I am your bodyguard.’

  ‘Thanks for the offer.’

  ‘’S’all right,’ said Colson.

  I thought quickly. I wanted to meet Solomon Islanders. Colson was a Solomon Islander and spoke English. ‘I might be passing by your timber camp in three days’ time,’ I said. If I wasn’t off to Fiji instead….

  ‘I’ll be waitin’ on the wharf at Viru,’ Colson said, immediately. ‘In three days I join you on the boat, the Yu Mi Nao?’

  ‘If I’m on the Yu Mi Nao.’

  ‘I show you west Solomon Islands.’ The pom-pom nodded encouragingly. ‘I am very-good Colson. You’ll see.’

  ‘In that hat, very-good Colson, I can’t miss you at the wharf, at any rate.’

  Colson released a little shriek of joy – ‘Ha-heee!’ – whipped off his tam o’shanter and began furiously teasing out long strands from his yellow frizzy mane; I came to recognize this nervous habit of his. It was a perfectly acceptable one. Other islanders, I had noticed, were vigorous nose pickers. ‘In three da-ays. Yeah!’ His tattooed whiskers positively bristled.

  *

  In Honiara I pursued my efforts to find a passage to Fiji. Kind Gerry Stenzel managed to call Tarawa, the main port of the Gilbert Islands, about twelve hundred miles north-east of the Solomons. The master of a ship due to arrive in Honiara soon would agree, he thought, to take me there. He wanted to find out if an Australian ship he’d heard of would carry me from Tarawa to Fiji. My hopes were dashed. From Tarawa the answer came: no – the ship’s owners in Australia wouldn’t consider a passenger they didn’t know personally. What then …? ‘Well, a Sofrana Lines vessel is due here in two weeks. And there is always the old Ann. She might be ready some time soon, to go … well, somewhere,’ he laughed.

  Hanging around the yacht club and the hotel wouldn’t do.

  ‘I’ll go to the western Solomons,’ I said. ‘Just a few days.’

  ‘Might as well,’ Gerry said. ‘Not too long, please. You never know what will happen with the Ann. And Roy Clemens, her owner, won’t hang about for you.’

  And so, twenty-four hours later, the cargo-passenger boat Yu Mi Nao, en route to the tiny western island of Gizo, pulled alongside the wharf at Viru with me on board.

  It was a night stop. The little ship’s searchlight illuminated a patch of jungle, coconut trees, the toy-sized wharf. People stood waiting for us, holding parasols. Canoe shapes, half seen, drifted round us. Our gangway, once down, was the centre of a laughing mob of wild young men who charged up the ramp as medieval soldiers would storm a castle’s drawbridge, and rushed in a beeline for the snack bar. It was an operation that had been perfected by much practice. In no time, like successful looters, they had carried ashore with triumphant shouts virtually every loaf of wrapped bread. Bread seemed worth its weight in gold here.

  I might have been in the Congo, or in Borneo. The floodlit clearing, the sago-thatched huts, the little wharf looked like a film sequence out of Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands. Where was Almayer? I remembered Conrad’s description of a sweating white man in shabby drill trousers and singlet, a man with a harassed, Dutch-Eurasian countenance, round and flat, with a curl of black hair over the forehead and a heavy, pained glance. I pricked my ears for a voice with a bitter tone grumbling, ‘I have a pretty story to tell you….’ But I was the only white man there that night.

  I leaned over the rail and searched the shouting ruck for a tam o’shanter with a purple pom-pom. I didn’t expect to find it – but there it was. Colson strolled on board with what I suspect was a deliberate show of nonchalance – and drawled with his slow, leonine smile, ‘You goin’ to Gizo? Not Fiji? I can come with you?’ I would have to leave him in Gizo when I returned to Honiara, I told him. Now, I would give him his fare to Gizo.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. He had an overnight bag in his hand, otherwise he was the same. ‘With you I see places I never seen. Places in my own country.’

  ‘It’ll be brief,’ I warned him. And he repeated, ‘That’s fine,’ in his low, almost inaudible voice.

  Now I looked at him again in the indirect light of the ship’s searchlight. He really had a lion’s face. Yellowish hair on his tawny cheeks under the yellow fuzz that swept up and out, like a mane; a short nose, a good, wide mouth with hints of hair at the corners; a sleepy lion’s green-broad eyes; the three parallel lines of tattoo shooting out from the corners of his mouth across his cheeks. He pointed to them: ‘Pussy cat tattoo.’ His chest and arms were oddly blotched as acid blotches a lacquered table top; and there were other tattoos – on his biceps and forearms: anchors, a cross and a swastika (a Buddhist swastika, not Hitler’s). Out of his hair a long stalk of grass stuck from one side and a red pencil from the other. Soon we wandered off to get two cups of tea from the snackbar which by now was quiet, and as utterly stripped of bread as a plant’s leaves are stripped by locusts. Colson walked with a slow, controlled, swaying motion, swinging his broad shoulders as if to some rhythm in his head.

  ‘Poor, poor, beautiful me-e-e-e,’ I heard him singing, falsetto, as he went. It was a popular number on the Solomon Islands radio hit parade.

  *

  Here my notebook reads:

  At dawn, Gizo. A number of stops during the night, all more or less similar – a wharf, sheds, shouting people. Each time the tannoy annouces: ‘You come here on board buy wanpela nice ticket,’ signing off the announcement with ‘End no more.’ At the stop before Gizo, I note things being disembarked: one kitten in a box – a .22 rifle – two huge cases like coffins marked for the Commissioner of Police – one old dartboard – a case of lime cordial – a case of Bell’s whisky – a kettle – one outboard motor – a case of Foster’s lager – a variety of battered suitcases.

  Near Gizo, reefs ugly brown above the surface – the waters are full of them; the ship zigzags through this deadly maze of coral following a pathway of markers to avoid them, but the captain, in shorts, sandals, dragon-stencilled shirt, gazes about him through dark glasses without concern, his mouth smiling, betel-stained. Jolly, bright underwear waves like bunting on a line behind him.

  ‘Kennedy Island,’ he says pointing, and I see very nearby a tiny island with a rim of sandy beach, apparently only a few dozen paces across, with tall palms thrusting up from it like hatpins in a vivid green pincushion. At first, I can’t understand the significance of the name, but it was here that the PT boat containing the future President of the United States was rammed and sunk by a Japanese warship, and John F. Kennedy was washed up onto the white sand. Its real name is Pudding Island, Colson says. It is exactly like everyone’s idea of a shipwrecked mariner’s desert island. I look for an emaciated man in rags waving an oar with a tattered shirt tied to it, signalling distre
ss.

  Colson’s English is good. He was at a secondary school with Australian teachers – missionaries. He had worked briefly with a fly-by-night Australian who went broke operating a peanut canning factory in Honiara and disappeared Down South. Colson scrounged two years’ work in a Lever Brothers plantation. ‘Then I met you,’ he says. ‘Lucky Colson.’

  ‘When I leave you,’ I ask, ‘what will you do?’

  ‘Go to Auki to see Honey-May – my girlfriend.’

  ‘And marry her?’

  He shakes his head, ‘No, only ask her…. Oh, I don’t know.’ He laughs in his secret fashion, hardly opening his lips.

  At the Gizo Hotel. I sit in the bar with Colson, drinking beer. Soon, we are joined by two white men; both are tanned a deep copper. Old Hands. One says: ‘Remember, I have some knowledge…. Never count on what islanders say.’ He looks tough and sixty-something. Years ago, he tells me, he was in the shadowy business spoken of as ‘voluntary recruitment of labour’ – he uses this phrase with a wry twist of his thin lips; in the Bad Old Days it was often a thin euphemism for blackbirding. He has the wrinkled eyes of a hunter in the tropics. ‘Then I shot crocs for a bit.’ After that he’d bought a boat and gone in for island trading. Now, he keeps a waterfront store on another island. ‘Drop in,’ he says.

  Next morning, a bit of luck.

  A boat lay alongside the little wharf that the Yu Mi Nao had brought us to – a small motor vessel with a government flag and the name Lanalau on her stern. Several very black men on her deck (Colson looked pale by comparison) called a cheery ‘Mornin”. They were setting off at any minute, they said, with a government doctor on a two-day routine visit to Simbo Island, the smallest outpost of land in those waters. ‘Come on,’ they said.

  ‘Like to go?’ I asked Colson.

  ‘I follow you,’ he replied, quietly.

  ‘We’re off, then.’

  *

  The next two days were filled by quick dashes ashore against a background of calm, glassy seas, or vicious torrents of rain that always seemed to envelop the little vessel, like the blinding sprays of a car-washing machine, whenever the captain began to edge her through the worst of the reefs.

  Colson was immediately useful. I gave him money, and he ran off (‘For me, cheaper!’) and bought rice, coffee, corned beef, tuna fish and canned Japanese roast goose. He thoughtfully added to this, on his own initiative, a twenty-four-can case of beer. He and I shared a twin-berth cabin about the size of a large shoebox, but then the vessel as a whole was tiny. Her bearded captain was as black as his crew, which was explained when he told me he had been trained by the Royal Navy instructors in the days when the Solomons were British. Of the crew I remember Caspar, young and round-faced; Rawnesley from Santa Cruz, the ‘Far East’ of the Solomons, with filed teeth; big George, the engineer, who came from Malaita; and small Jesio who strolled about with a mug in his hand, announcing, ‘Me tingting laik drinim Milo,’ a reference to a health drink popular in the Pacific.

  The government district medical officer turned out to be a small, slender, middle-aged man with a fringe of beard and a lively, talkative manner. He was delighted to have us with him, he said. He was going to inspect some village clinics. He laughed a lot – sudden falsetto outbursts of laughter expressing exuberant life. Indeed, the little vessel echoed with the crew’s own expression of exuberant life – hoots, whistles, cries and shrieks as if exotic birds had escaped from an aviary and come to roost on the bridge, in the tiny galley, the cabins. Solomon Islanders were an exhilarating experience in themselves.

  Our ports of call were ragged clearings in jungle that came down to the shore. Inside the sheltering lagoons, mop-headed palms and the beautiful flowering trees of Melanesia screened the village huts, schools and clinics from the sea. Small, dun-coloured herons flapped about the brown lumps of coral on the shore. Women and boys in canoes trailed fishing lines.

  Time after time the ebullient little doctor, Balthazar, was ferried to land by a couple of crewmen in a metal dinghy. He was well known here. People waved at him from the bush, and crowded round. A boy with an open gash on his forehead ran up to him, the slogan on his shirt saying: ‘Iu mi evriwan brata.’

  ‘Hello, brother,’ the doctor said, and led him to the little clinic with a corrugated iron roof. Grassy paths led us through avenues of coconut palms. Skins here were midnight black and men and women wore hibiscus flowers in their fuzz and cowrie shell necklaces. They stared and smiled at me as if I were Gulliver.

  At some stops we offloaded iron roofing and planks of wood.

  The Lanalau refused to start again after one call, and Balthazar peered over the stern and cried out in alarm, ‘Ah! We’re buggered up, is it? Oh!’ But we soon started again, and he threw up his hands, giggling, ‘Oh! What a relief,’ while the crew drummed on the wheelhouse roof to celebrate our small deliverance.

  I had told Colson to share our rice and tinned food with the crew. Colson was pleased by this demonstration of democratic feeling. But he went further. Unasked – and after dark – he distributed most of the beer, too. The crew became red-eyed and giggly. Luckily we soon pulled into a creek for the night, and then the crew’s tipsy shouts and hoots reverberated harmlessly round the ring of huts and thick bush that circled the jetty. Villagers came aboard, and soon Caspar rolled up to announce, indistinctly, that, ‘All girl here wan’ good time.’ Hiccupping, he led his friends ashore towards lantern light in a hut from which sounds of ribald laughter and excited voices drifted down to the water. Women’s voices predominated, and I sat in a deckchair under the stars with a book, hardly expecting to see the crew again that night. But after a short time they returned, pursued by angry female voices. Colson was back first – ‘Too many people drunk,’ he said sheepishly. ‘Too much noise. Girls say no.’ He wavered off to our cabin singing in falsetto – ‘Poor, poor beautiful me….’ Subdued, the crew sat about, smoking, talking, giggling, their high birdcalls intermingling with the more infernal noise of pop music from a transistor radio.

  *

  Next day I followed Balthazar ashore to a village that lay like the unreal creation of a film company or a romantic novelist, up a path green and slippery with night dew between the dark, thick foliage of mango trees. An old chief, speaking English in weak but spirited tones, met us, and when the doctor was inspecting the tiny clinic (its cupboards were full of medicine) he told me his four hundred people sold copra, nothing else. Fish? No. Why? No need. Bushnut trees dangled their white, flowery concertinas, the mangoes provided shade. There were big wooden houses here among flame trees, which the old man called fire trees. Laughter and shrieks came from inside them. A young man with ‘Star Wars’ on his singlet held my elbow when I looked like slipping on the ground and I asked his name.

  ‘Smith,’ he surprisingly said.

  ‘You work?’

  He said he did not.

  ‘Go to school?’

  No, he emphatically conveyed with a brusque shake of his fuzz. He stopped at home, he said.

  ‘Sometime he make house of sago,’ the chief explained. ‘Sometime garden work. Sometime fish.’ Smith nodded confirmation.

  ‘It’s a good life or a bad life?’

  ‘Oh, a good life,’ Smith and the chief answered together in matter-of-fact tones. Smith took my hand and led me to the riches of their luxuriant world. Mangoes, oranges, limes, bushnuts, yams, taro. Chickens ran alongside us expectantly.

  Looking down to our little boat, we could see the water churned up in white spurts as if someone was spraying it with a heavy machine gun. Fish. Smith of ‘Star Wars’ said, ‘This time is time bilong smallpela bonito.’ Bonito, yes; but out here any time I imagine is the season for fish, big or small. What more did they want?

  No wonder that, as Gerry Stenzel had said, disgruntled office workers in Honiara, reproved by the employers too sharply for their liking, simply walked out of the door – and kept on walking until they reached their villages. Their villages had everything th
ey needed. Well, practically everything. The old chief went on to say that, of course, they had to buy kerosene, corrugated iron for roofing, and canned tuna fish from the market. Tinned fish? Living fish leaped in the sea beside them. They needed canned tuna as much as they needed Australian beer.

  The old chief and his people live in a place some people in Asia or Europe would call paradise. They even had medical attention – here was Balthazar to prove it. But that evening, from his deckchair, the little doctor murmured, ‘Primitive life, eh?’ nodding towards the coastline where the trees stirred under a theatrically bright moon. His tone was disparaging. Evidently he wanted to see cement and tin roofing, housing estates, heaven knows what else.

  ‘There are primitive places and primitive people in America and Europe. Ugly, violent, crude, loud, hollow.’

  ‘Primitive. Too much custom,’ he said, meaning tradition.

  ‘Well, keep the good custom, throw away the bad. Be proud of good custom. It belongs in the Solomon Islands.’

  A silence fell between us. Then Balthazar said, ‘Keep what good things?’

  ‘Take laplaps. Laplaps are useful, cheap, comfortable, pretty. You have been told to throw laplaps away and wear trousers. Who told you? Australian trouser manufacturers?’