Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Balthazar whooped with laughter.

  ‘Or the missionaries? Does God wear jeans, Balthazar?’

  ‘Whoo-oo! Haa-eee!’ he hooted, joyfully slapping the sides of the deckchair.

  ‘Another thing –’ I pressed on – ‘take those cheap sago-thatch roofs. They keep out rain and heat. Why import expensive corrugated iron? Isn’t iron very hot?’

  ‘Very hot,’ Balthazar giggled.

  ‘So, why not save money with cheap, cool sago roofs?’

  ‘Good idea! Good idea!’ Balthazar cried, fanning away mosquitoes with his hand. ‘Custom belongs to us. You’re right.’ But whether he really thought I was right I shall never know. Balthazar was a gentleman of infinite tact and courtesy.

  *

  The Lanalau’s course south of the islands took her into the exposed water of the five-hundred-mile-wide Solomon Sea, and here she plunged and corkscrewed horribly. Rain fell in relentless grey curtains with the sinister hissing of a thousand cobras. With the naked, anxious eye the many reefs I could see on the chart were masked by the rain and waves. Reefs become strips of turquoise neon under the sun, but sunshine had vanished.

  We plunged abruptly, right or left. Peter, the captain, knew them all – the gaps in the reefs – by instinct, he assured me. Sometimes he stuck his head out of the wheelhouse to peer through the lashing rain at a shoreline that seemed to play a game of nerve-racking hide and seek with us. The merest glimpse of a tall tree perhaps, or a makeshift beacon, would have helped, but whether he saw me or not, he remained unruffled; a fine island seaman. I suppose we heaved and bounced over coral that could have ripped the Lanalau’s bottom out in a trice, and I was glad this was not some chrome-covered rich man’s floating gin palace from Sydney, chancing its luck. And there was another comfort: dolphins rushed along with us. Playful, muddy brown under the surface, slate black when they arched over it – up and over and down in twos and threes – they slid smoothly back into the trenches of the waves, leaving an impression of old friends too briefly seen. I felt that whatever happened they would pick me up and carry me to shore.

  And this outside shore was wild and rocky. When the dinghy was lowered, its outboard motor had to struggle against breakers, and villagers ran down to lay out coloured cloths to mark hidden rocks. Balthazar, who had to scramble ashore and back, was a brave man.

  *

  Later, Colson washed his hair: a long operation, involving much water and soap. After a superficial drying with a towel he pruned it, pulling the crinkly strands out straight and carefully snipping their ends off. Then, he sprayed it all over with insect repellent, explaining, ‘Sometimes insects go in.’

  Later still, I heard his murmur from the bunk above, ‘I’d never see all this but for you. So many places today and yesterday, because I’m with you.’ Like a spider, his hand dangled in the dark near my face. ‘Shake my hand,’ he said, and I did so. The sweet smell of insect killer filled the cabin, and the soft snick-snick of Colson combing his nice clean fuzz lulled me to sleep.

  Next morning, the Lanalau rounded the southern point of Vella Lavella Island. At the sight of the vivid green speck of Kennedy Island, and beyond it the waterfront of Gizo, the crew began to chant and drum with their palms on the side of the wheelhouse, as if they were a war canoe charging an enemy, but these sounds meant joy for a safe homecoming. I said goodbye to Captain Peter, Rawnesley, Jesio and the rest.

  Balthazar said, ‘Come and live on my island.’ He giggled. ‘Under a custom sago roof. Not expensive Australian tin.’

  ‘Wait for me,’ I said.

  I was flying to Honiara next morning on the little inter-island twin-engined Solair plane, and before that I had to say goodbye to Colson, too. When morning came he was a sad sight. He paced about my hotel room, moaning to himself and looked so forlorn and abandoned that I put my arm round him and tried to reassure him about the jobs he would find. But, of course, he knew more about the lack of jobs than I did. But at least I did not leave him utterly alone in this distant part of the Solomons. The islanders, Colson had already explained, had evolved an admirable social safety net called the wantauk system. A wantauk is a fellow islander who speaks your dialect (the word is pidgin for ‘one-talk’, a man who shares your language). A man exiled for reasons of work, or travel could expect the automatic help and hospitality of anyone from his island, even of a stranger. (If this system existed in Britain, a Scotsman meeting a fellow Scot resident in, say, Wales, could greet him as his wantauk.) Now, I was relieved to hear Colson say, he had discovered from the Lanalau’s crew that a Malaitan in Gizo came from a village near his own. The man was a policeman. Colson had never met him, but this, he said, didn’t matter.

  ‘How many days can you stay with your wantauk, Colson?’

  ‘That’s up to me. I maybe stay one week, two weeks, then I go.’

  Even with the unstinted hospitality of Arab tribes, he would have been expected to move on after three days. I waited with interest to see what would happen.

  As Colson had predicted, the policeman instantly accepted his duties as a wantauk. He was setting off to work when we met him, but that didn’t matter in the least. He smiled and shook hands, listened to Colson’s explanation and request to stay, and promptly said, ‘Here are the keys of my house,’ handing them over as though Colson was a blood brother who had been away in Honiara for a week. ‘Food is in the refrigerator. Cook what you like. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back this evening.’ I was astonished, and had to force myself to remember that he had never set eyes on Colson before that morning The wantauk system balanced the lack of generalized hospitality.

  Nevertheless, Colson was still despondent. He shuffled his feet under the trees near the water, removed his tam o’shanter, and twisted it in his hands, moodily crooning, ‘Poor, poor beautiful me,’ and regarding me woefully. In the last minutes before the motor boat came to ferry me to Gizo’s little airstrip, he muttered, ‘I’m a poor lost guy,’ in such pitiable tones that I put my arm around him again. Even his tattooed ‘whiskers’ seemed to droop.

  I said, uneasily, ‘What will become of you, Colson?’

  He scuffed his bare feet in the dust. ‘I’ll look for work. Maybe find some work here. Some plantation here … very difficult.’

  ‘Write and let me know what happens,’ I said. ‘Promise?’ When he had promised (he bumped my shoulder with his head in an awkward, affectionate gesture as he did so), I gave him some money to be going on with, and a long shell necklace I had bought as a reserve ‘store’ of local custom currency. He stood waving after me until the motor boat was almost at the island airstrip.

  His letter caught me up a month or two later, and its tone was happier than I had expected it to be. He had found work in a forestry camp near Gizo. ‘Dearest G. Young, my work is everything always in good condition. Except, poor, poor beautiful me! Getting all hot and scratched by wood branches. Penniless, hopeless, all alone in the world. I am longing to talk to you again. You must come back.’ It was written in a remarkably fluent hand the missionaries had taught him, and it was signed, ‘Your everlasting friend, Irish Colson (The Lost Guy).’

  Sixteen

  The little room smelt vaguely of oil, ageing files and urine. The owner of the Ann, Roy Clemens, unshaven, friendly, stood in shorts shuffling some customs forms at a small untidy table in the hole-in-the-wall office facing the harbour. I had walked past it twice; it was easy to miss. He said in a pleasant way, ‘Five days to Suva with luck – sixteen hundred miles or so at ten knots if you have good weather. You should just about fit into the second officer’s cabin. It’s about six foot by four. A bit stuffy perhaps.’ I wanted to get to Suva by sea, so I wasn’t complaining. We were to sail that evening, Roy said.

  A large-boned impassive islander – but not, I judged by his lack of fuzz, from the Solomons – was standing by the table; he said to Clemens, ‘Hawaii weather station broadcasts a depression over New Caledonia. Could be bad weather.’ Clemens introduced me: this was the
Ann’s captain, a native of the Ellice Islands north of Fiji, which with independence had taken the name of Tuvalu. Ellice Islanders, like their neighbours the Gilbertese, are fine sailors, everyone agrees, but they can be heavy drinkers, too, and formidable brawlers.

  ‘Call me John,’ the captain said pleasantly in a low, unassertive voice that reminded me of Colson. He had a boxer’s face, calm eyes, short hair, very long arms, and a hand large enough to overwhelm my own when he shook it.

  ‘No grog on the Ann, I’m afraid,’ Clemens said as though he were a mind reader; a vision of drunken brawls in the middle of the cyclone seven hundred miles out from Honiara had indeed momentarily arisen to appal my mind. ‘Not my ruling. The crew are all Seventh Day Adventists or something. Teetotallers, anyway.’ I was glad to hear it. ‘Still, I expect you can arrange … er, for yourself,’ Clemens added with a wink. As for food, the captain now put in, I should buy some canned stuff and a bag of rice.

  ‘Oh, and the other chap,’ Roy Clemens added. ‘He can bunk down over the steering gear. There’s an awning over it.’

  The other chap? Yes, Clemens explained, there was an Englishman, James Barclay by name, who had recently arrived here from Fiji in a yacht, the Camping Loo – odd name; she was lying off the yacht club just now. Her owner and his navigator, also Britons, were waiting for a spare engine part to arrive from Australia before sailing westwards to Bali, but Barclay couldn’t wait and wanted to return to Suva the cheap way, by sea. ‘He’ll be good company for you,’ Clemens said pleasantly, adding: ‘I hope.’

  I hoped so, too. I don’t much like travelling with Europeans; I travel partly to get away from them. I soon met James Barclay, a stocky, bearded young man with an Etonian accent and a friendly manner, drinking beer in Honiara’s little yacht club. I knew after a few minutes of small talk that we would get on – and this despite the fact that among his first words were, ‘Of course, you know that ham radio operators are talking about a very, very low depression in our path to Suva? That could mean we’re just about certain to run into a rather bad cyclone.’

  ‘Surely they won’t sail if that’s the case?’

  ‘Oh-ho, don’t be too sure. They’re a pretty foolhardy lot in these parts.’ That didn’t sound too good. Never mind. I packed my metal suitcase and took it to the Ann. Then I went off to do some shopping. A bottle of gin first – if we were going to go down in a cyclone, I might as well go down happy. Then rice, tins of Ox and Palm corned beef, sardines, pilchards, Kraft cheese, sweet biscuits, a tin opener, a plastic plate and mug. It seemed a lot for five days, but supposing bad weather or engine failure turned five days into fifteen?

  A fight had broken out in the street near the hotel. A bad melee: ten or twelve infuriated men were beating each other with clubs, and hurling huge stones that could have cracked open a skull. One man, holding his opponent by the fuzz, was beating his head on the asphalt. To avoid this, I plunged into a bookshop and emerged when peace was restored with an Agatha Christie novel, a Ngaio Marsh mystery, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  A New Zealand warship was in and its sailors had bought some unusual T-shirts. On one I read:

  If it’s safe –

  Dump it in Tokyo

  Test it in Paris

  Store it in Washington

  But …

  Keep My Pacific Nuclear-Free.

  Wouldn’t the ship’s officers judge that bad for discipline? Earlier that day I had seen a Solomon Islander wearing a T-shirt that said: ‘Nuclear hem save killim iumi evriwan’ – a sign of what Gerry had said was growing irritation, from Tahiti to the Solomons, with the French nuclear tests in Polynesia.

  It was a miserable departure. As darkness came, rain fell on Honiara like a curse. I pulled my anorak on over my Chengtu T-shirt and met James Barclay at the yacht club, drenched by the few minutes’ walk from the hotel. All we had to do was wait for a member of the crew of the Ann to come and tell us when the captain intended to sail.

  We drank farewell beers with Gerry Stenzel and Fritz Markworth, and James’s two mates from the Camping Loo, glimmering just offshore. The club was filling up in preparation for the weekly film show – this time Young Winston. Neither the subsequent cries of battling men and sound of exploding shells on a small screen suspended from the rafters, nor the beer did much to distract my thoughts from the sixteen hundred miles of exposed Pacific that lay ahead.

  ‘Ship sail soon,’ a voice said out of the tempest.

  ‘Send a cable from Suva.’ Gerry shook my hand. ‘Just so we’re sure you’ve actually arrived.’

  ‘Not the reassuring words I need at this moment, Gerry.’

  I heard James’s former shipmates mocking him with warnings about the cyclone ahead. Then, stumbling miserably through enormous puddles, we made our sopping way to the port.

  The Ann lay passively enduring the deluge alongside a short pier. Last-minute loading cluttered her small foredeck with tackle and wires and hatch covers. Roy Clemens stood on the jetty with a couple of cronies. A dinghy was being winched from the ship to the shore; I hoped there were others still aboard, and Clemens called out with a laugh, ‘There’s a brand new inflatable life raft in the stern. Don’t worry.’ Once again he seemed to have read my mind.

  ‘The third officer’s name is George,’ he added. ‘I should find his cabin right away, if I was you.’

  I ducked through a low doorway under the bridge – the Ann was Japanese-built, I could see that. A squat, smiling Solomon Islander stood by a cabin door. ‘I’m George,’ he said. ‘This my cabin and you take it, please.’

  ‘Thank you, George,’ I said. ‘Where will you sleep?’

  He said amicably, ‘I sleep with friends.’

  My metal suitcase almost filled the cabin. Six feet by four, Roy Clemens had said. For someone my height it seemed even smaller, but I found I could make myself quite comfortable by resting one foot on a shelf near the door and the other on the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk. I might have hung a foot out of the small porthole, but it was too near the water level. A tiny wall fan beat away against the clammy thickness of the air. ‘Forget Me Not, Darling’ was embroidered on George’s pillowcase. I hoped my sweat wouldn’t ruin it.

  At 10 p.m. there was much shouting, and the Ann shuddered into life. Above the metallic pump-pump-pump of her engines Roy Clemens called ‘Good luck’, and we moved slowly into the sodden darkness of The Slot. It seemed a long time since I had sailed down it from Kieta with Captain Luc on the La Pérouse, but now it would lead us out into the hazards of the greatest of all the world’s oceans.

  I poured a mouthful of gin into its bottle top, drank it, and lay down on George’s bunk. I felt like Alice after she had tried the bottle labelled ‘Drink me’ and become a giant in the house of Bill the Lizard.

  *

  The next morning my embroidered pillowcase was wet and yellowing with sweat. The rain had stopped. Stooping to avoid bumping my head on alleyways and lintels, I found James Barclay sitting in sunshine on the forehatch. He said he had tried to sleep under a crude awning on the hatch top, but the rain had been too much for him and he had slithered aft to the flat wood platform over the steering gear. Here he had found the captain’s huge muscular bulk sprawled half-naked and asleep, oblivious to the hideous racket the gear made. Forced below, he cautiously settled down on the minuscule dining room table in the crew’s quarters. Ignoring the intermittent snores and farts of sleeping sailors in the shadowy bunks around him, he passed the night, sleeping an hour here and there. It had been difficult, he said, to avoid being rolled onto the deck by every movement of the ship.

  Rust-bucket was the word for the Ann. She was only fifteen years old, Roy Clemens had said, but she looked more. She’d had a new bottom since a grounding in Japan a year or two ago, John the captain said, but that operation had done nothing for her looks. Her narrow, stubby funnel seemed to have been sprayed by small arms fire from close range. A painted mermaid posed on it, flourishing impressive breasts with vivid gr
een nipples and a purple fishtail. The same bilious purple covered rust patches all over the ship’s superstructure, like dabs of iodine on a mauled leg.

  Yes, rust-bucket was the word. What would Julian Gomersall and Jim Bird have said? All the same, I had a feeling that the Ann’s appearance wasn’t of the smallest importance; it was her engines that mattered. To be caught in a cyclone with engine failure…. But I wasn’t going to think of anything like that.

  *

  My notes at this point actually show a new optimism.

  After the gloom and rain, the shambles of yesterday’s departure, I’m glad to be here. (Will I be saying this all the way to Suva?) Malaita ‘runs out’ to port; St Cristobel to starboard. We need chairs! There’s nowhere to sit except on the two hatches or the steering gear platform, and they are often occupied by sprawling members of the crew.

  We have nine men aboard, apart from John the captain. They are all islanders, but not in the least alike. After George, we met the chief engineer, who came up on deck to supervise an abortive attempt to catch fish – there doesn’t seem to be much fresh food aboard. The chief is also called George, to James and me simply ‘The Dwarf’, because he is one of the shortest men we have ever encountered. Stout, bearded, and forever puffing on a long, thin pipe with a thimble-size bowl, he gazes imperiously about him, dignity personified. As the Ann putters through an agitated area of sea in which bonito leap like minnows in a village pond, the Dwarf takes charge of fishing operations, shouting, ‘Slow down’ in Napoleonic tones to John on the bridge. Our two fishing lines quiver taut over the stern rail as the bonito take hold, the Dwarf snaps orders, the crew shout back, but we lose the fish.

  Breakfast – on the steering gear housing – is instant coffee, bread, jam, butter, brought up to us (and Shem, first officer) by Richard, a lolloping deckhand from the Santa Cruz group. Richard is of alarming aspect, nineteen years old, he says, with fair fuzz on his head and light hair on his bare chest. Huge buttocks, protruding like a shelf, put a permanent strain on his blue and white laplap. But it’s his mouth that startles. A very wide mouth, cavernous nostrils and forward-thrusting teeth as big as organ keys – the unsettling image, in fact, of the appalling wooden masks on sale to tourists in Honiara. Nevertheless, poor Richard seems extremely amiable. ‘Learn English from Christian father,’ he lisps. And he tells me, ‘I am Jehovah.’ He means a Jehovah’s Witness, but Richard, too, is re-christened; for us he has become for ever ‘Jehovah’.