Call of the Bell Bird

by Jennifer Kavanagh

  The weather at the outset was disappointing: strong winds and rather chilly. On our first morning, we went for a beachcombing walk in the rain along the beach to the tip of the island. Not a person was to be seen for several hours, just a couple of birds, molluscs in their shells, and one set of dog tracks. Fine, pale sand, tranquil turquoise and blue sea – the stuff that dreams are made on. And beyond was the roar of the ocean at the edge of the reef. There was harmony between us and in the world around as we walked, paddled, talked of theology and shells. On our return, Kanoli presented us with some delicious chocolate cake, made for her daughter’s school.

  That evening we were joined by a Danish couple who, with Stephen, did a dance on the beach to bring out the sun, while I swam in the rain, laughing at the sight. And, lo and behold, the sun appeared in a glorious sunset before we retired for the night. I read Mutiny on the Bounty while I was there, enjoying the descriptions of islands close to ours. The mutiny itself happened off the nearby island of Tofua and the crew had landed for a while, but the islanders drove them off, killing a seaman in the struggle.

  One morning we were awakened at 4 a.m. by the strong beat of a drum. Stephen shot out of bed to see what was up. When I heard the tolling of the village bell, I too got up, sure that there must be a shipwreck or similar emergency. It turned out to be a call to prayer. Drawn by the sound of stentorian singing, I tentatively entered the back of the nearest church to find, sitting in lamplight, one elderly man, one young woman and two elderly women in hats, generating harmony of a power such as twenty might create. They were singing with their entire bodies – a raw, magnificent sound. When the generator provided electric light, I saw to my horror that, apart from being unwashed and without underwear, my jumper, donned in the dark, was inside out, and everyone else was in their best clothes.

  We developed quite a routine. A torch and a bottle of rainwater on either side of our saggy bed each night, the lighting of the hurricane lamp. Stephen rising early for his morning run along the beach, little boys, running with pigs, laughing at him. We then watched Assa disentangle the night’s catch from the nets: a pailful of spotted, striped and orange fish. Making breakfast, then taking a packed lunch of crackers, processed cheese and a tomato. Cold showers, the ubiquity of sand and I, almost permanently barefoot, rinsing the sand off my feet in the tap before entering our fale.

  Once the sun came out, we were in our element. One day we asked Assa to drop us off on a neighbouring uninhabited island – reputed to have the most beautiful beach in Tonga (the world?) and good for snorkelling. Stephen snorkelled and I later went out with the mask over my eyes – I felt claustrophobic with the mask over my nose – and saw, for the first time in my life, a coral reef. I was so overwhelmed by the tranquillity and beauty of it, the coral itself and the myriad of brightly coloured fish, that I came ashore and just sat on the beach and wept. The sun was scorching. The flaws in our Paradise were flies, vast black sea slugs, swift-moving big black crabs that looked like tarantulas and bumped into me as I sat on the beach, and the fear of stone fish and eels, both pretty vicious. I wasn’t too keen on starfish close to, either: the plump and fleshy black one I saw in the shallows was very different from my idealised image.

  ’Uiha sees very few tourists. For that reason it was quite hard to penetrate the lives of local people. They kept themselves to themselves, apart from the children, who accosted us as we walked from our village to the other, past the school that serves both. There were hordes of children in smart blue uniforms on foot or on bike, playing marbles, trying out their English on us, alternately sweet and tiresome. We had several other encounters on the walk, particularly with the town officer, who was mayor and policeman in one, a stocky confident man who offered us the use of his boat; and with a young woman gathering palm fronds for a fire, who offered me food. Earlier in the day, as I walked on the beach alone, I had met a large bare-chested man carrying a machete. Unsure whether his intentions were friendly or otherwise (given the reported attitude of men here to women on their own) I turned back.

  The village hall was the venue for a couple of important events while we were there. I sat in on one, held by a couple of young women lawyers (there are eight women lawyers in the whole of Tonga) from the main island. They had been given a UNESCO grant to conduct surveys throughout Tonga on the subjects of domestic violence, sexual abuse and land law. I talked afterwards to the young lawyers, who ate at our resort: a new generation of Tongan women, leading the way to emancipation.

  The other event was a workshop on electricity, which was going to be introduced on the island the following year. It was to be co-operatively owned, as was the water. One of the woman facilitators came into our compound and flopped down on the ground, recovering from her journey and the heat. A big handsome woman in middle age, Mele was an interpreter for the New Zealand speaker who had come over for the workshop.

  It was an extraordinary encounter. She was eager to hear of our fellowship in Quaker Meetings, warmed immediately to the idea of group silent worship. In an over-busy life as head of the Sunday School in her Methodist church, with a full time job and six children aged 4 to 16, she found a lack of communion with God. She told me she had recently skipped an afternoon church session to spend time alone with her Bible, and was surprised to hear that we were more interested in the spirit from which the Bible comes than in the Bible itself. Also, that we believe in a direct unmediated relationship with God. She understood intuitively, asked the subjects of my “meditation” today, “as we will probably not meet again”. When we parted, after just half an hour together, she said, “I will never forget you.” Nor I her.

  I had fewer hot flushes at this time: there was no stress and few rows. I was getting fitter again, and I was singing, always a measure of my morale. Some local children loomed up on the beach one night when Stephen and I were lying in hammocks looking at the stars. They laughed and poked at us, but then they asked for an English song. We asked for a Tongan one, which was lovely, then got them singing an English round. Stephen noticed one child who could not speak, so to involve him we taught them Hokey Cokey, which was a great success. Inevitably after that we were approached at all hours of the day, and asked for Hokey Cokey.

  Tonga has a traditional culture with strict codes of behaviour, and it is a surprisingly sexist one. No women may inherit or register land. There are constraints on how women dress (no shoulders or arms showing) and if bathing, we are expected, as in Muslim countries, to do so fully clothed. I swam in my costume out of sight of the village, so as not to offend local sensibilities. Men can be fined for not wearing a shirt. The women’s dancing is static with decorously gentle and submissive arm movements and gestures of the head. The men’s, however, is dynamic, strong and sexy – they have good solid, fit-looking bodies.

  It would seem that this prudishness stems from the missionaries. Religious observance is certainly important, with no tour guiding, work or swimming allowed on a Sunday. In our village there were four churches: Tongan, Congregational, Baptist and Mormon. It was hard to spot the Mormon church; to begin with we had mistaken the tidy, fenced-off compound with its forbidding-looking building for a prison. Many of the people we met were Mormons, including Kanoli, who told us that during her training she had been sent to the States on secondment, and had not been allowed to contact home. A Mormon taxi driver in the capital told us that his faith taught him to listen to his wife and spend time with his four daughters, but he still wanted a son! We suggested to our host, a grave and hard-working man, that it would be good to have an evening together to talk about their faith, thinking we would be able to share a little about Quakerism too. Sadly, Assa couldn’t find the time, but, as we left, he asked for our names and address, so that he could ask one of his Mormon brothers in the UK to come and visit us. Not what we had in mind!

  Although I knew that the catch was a mainstay of the island’s diet, I found it distressing most mornings to see a number of fish still alive, flailing in the nets,
drowning in the air. Distressing too to witness the fear of a pig in a sack, taken on our boat trip one day on our trip to Pangai, and another, squealing desperately, tied up and trundled along in a wheelbarrow. And one night we decided to treat ourselves to dinner cooked by Kanoli, and she presented us with the largest lobster I had ever seen. Such a magnificent beast and such a cruel death. I had given up eating lobster some years before, but found it difficult to refuse. Why was I not a vegetarian?

  One day I found a crawling shell in our fale. I had never seen shells living and moving till Tonga, never felt the immense richness of living beings till now. Reading a chapter on “God in the World” in The Perennial Philosophy was wonderfully apposite and thought-enriching as a confirmation of all we saw about us – the beauty of the sea, a palm tree, a shiny black patterned cowrie, a coconut fallen from the tree. A God of the fullness as well as the heights, all inclusivity.

  Chapter 9

  Among Friends

  I do not think that I am alone in my certainty that it’s in my relationships with people that the deepest religious truths are most vividly disclosed.

  George Gorman, in Quaker faith and practice

  While we were away, the worst of the foot and mouth epidemic was raging in England. Other countries were at pains to protect themselves, and on arrival at Auckland airport, New Zealand our boots were taken away and washed. I had not had any intention of going to New Zealand, but it was on our route from Tonga, and in the event I was overwhelmed by the friendliness and calm efficiency of the people we met. After Customs there was a free phone, free tea and coffee, excellent information services, an ATM and, right outside, an airport bus that took us to the doorstep of our destination with courtesy and despatch. When we came back to the airport a week later for our flight to Australia, we discovered that it had left three days before – we had forgotten to update our schedule. The airline staff not only did not charge us for the change, but put us on a specially expedited entry at our next stop. Astonishing.

  While in Auckland we stayed next to the Quaker Meeting House, in a guest house run by highly professional wardens. Alan and John were actually the wardens of Melbourne Meeting House in Australia, but they had done a swap for a couple of weeks. Both of them had English connections. John, a quiet gentle man and an artist of distinction, was from East London, and bore an uncanny resemblance to an uncle of Stephen’s from the same area. Alan, who is a New Zealander and was back on his own turf, had run a stall at Camden Lock, near our own flat in North London. They were friendly and generous while maintaining their necessary privacy and distance.

  Auckland was the one place in which our talk “Are Quakers Christians, Mystics or Social Activists?” did not go down well. It was a sophisticated audience, and we felt we were telling them nothing new. Unlike British Quakers, who examine themselves painfully on the subject, they did not feel that the question of the Christianity or otherwise of Friends was an issue, and, as for social action, we felt we were teaching our grandmothers to suck eggs.

  Friends took us in hand while we were there, and we met Clare and Linley, sisters deeply involved in Quaker work. Linley was Clerk of the Asia-Pacific section of a Friends’ committee, and was an invaluable source of information as we travelled round “her” region.

  There was little chance to explore in our one week in New Zealand, but we did spend a few days in the Coromandel Peninsula, travelling by bus. We stayed one night with Quakers in a house on the edge of a nature reserve near the town of Thames. Philip and Phoebe are off the grid, existing on solar energy, a model of simple living. After a slow start, we had a lively discussion, especially about homelessness, and it turned out that they had helped process books for our mobile library when they visited London. We had met before!

  In the morning, there was a lovely dawn chorus. We had been starved of birdsong and, in a land without indigenous predatory mammals, there are a lot of birds. Phoebe is involved in the preservation of indigenous species of flora and fauna, and resistant to foreign ones. But there was a wide variety of both as we walked in their extensive grounds and into the bush. We crossed a swing bridge; a “sway” or “hammock” bridge might be more appropriate – definitely not for the faint of heart; and in the evening I went for a second, more substantial, “tramp”.

  Our visit to Christine, a Servas host and resource teacher, was most timely. She had read advertisements for Quakers in the paper and had thought of writing off for information. As we swam in a hot springs pool, I answered her questions, and found her heart open to all that Quakerism stands for. On our last night, the three of us sat on the beach, wrapped up against the cold and eating fish and chips, with the stars bright overhead and the sound of the waves barely visible a few yards in front of us.

  It was mid-October and the half-way point in our journey. After six months, many of my clothes were darned, and a dress, a pair of trousers and a swimming costume had been discarded and replaced. Medically we were pretty sound: I had had one spell of diarrhoea, in Bolivia, and now had a broken crown on a tooth; Stephen had had a chest infection in Peru and now was on antibiotics again, this time for a streptococcal infection (horrid yellow eruptions on his head, eye and foot). Stephen confessed that he was tired of moving on; I was still excited and keen, missing my kids and friends, but not homesick for any place, work or routine. If Stephen and I had been getting on better, I would not have felt so alone.

  In Australia our time was thoroughly organised by local Friends, who had emailed us in South America: “Would you be free to give talk on Friday 13th at 5.30?” Three months ahead we had no idea where we were likely to be. We were on another continent in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense. But once there we were enfolded in Quakerdom, and we felt at home. In Sydney, in any case a lovely city, we were rescued from a rather unfriendly Quaker guest house by the kindness of the former clerk, Cathy, and her English husband Barry. Canberra, denigrated by all we met, was lit up by the graciousness of Katherine who had stayed with us briefly in England and her lovely husband, Glynne, who sadly died a few days after our departure. In Melbourne we were looked after by James who had never met us before but was prepared to host us for a whole week. He worked for a community organisation that helped problem families, and asked if I would talk about microcredit at their AGM, which I did, not expecting an audience of a hundred or so. After our return they emailed me about the design of a feasibility study and in January 2003 started a pilot project with Iraqi refugees.

  Stephen and I gave our usual talk in several places, and also talked about our travels at Victoria regional summer camp. Stephen, speaking from his heart about his spiritual doubts, found the audience much in sympathy. Frances, a friend of one of the members of our own Meeting, and who had visited Westminster in the past, generously took us out in her car for a day and a picnic in the Dandenong hills. It was there that I discovered that wild birds do not have to be afraid of human beings. Never having been shot at or pursued, they came to us, perched near us, obviously unafraid. It was such a startling revelation that I felt out of time – as if I had been given a flash of the eternal, a glimpse of what might have been possible in a pre-Lapsarian world. It was a realisation that was to be underscored later, in other landscapes.

  I find it hard to describe the bits of Australia that we saw: so English in some ways; so different in others: the light, the foliage, the brilliance of the birds, the sparkling water in Sydney Harbour, and the physicality of the lifestyle. It always sounded boring when people described it before we went, but felt attractive and natural when we were there. I was quite childlike in my response to the birds – and others much amused. In Sydney’s botanical gardens the proliferation of ibises, which I had never seen before. In Canberra the crimson rosellas – primary blue and red flashing through the air; and in Katherine’s garden a king parrot, magnificent in its red head and green wings. The brilliance of their colour was the epitome of “exotic”.

  Where we went there was very little sense of pover
ty or crime, though both exist, and very little evidence of aborigines. Quakers in Australia have the same struggles with government policies, particularly on the subject of asylum seekers, and in tagging along with Bush in his “war against terrorism”. We went with some Friends in Canberra to an ecumenical forum on refugees, held in a “Uniting” church (they prefer the continuous present to the past participle). United the meeting certainly was in its open-heartedness to refugees, and its condemnation of the government’s fortress mentality. I offered solidarity from a British perspective, saying that they were not alone in their struggle against bigotry. In Australia the appalling sinking of a refugee boat the previous month, drowning 350 people, including children, seemed to have moved the nation, and seemingly shifted public opinion a little (though as the election proved soon after we left, not enough). At the meeting there were calls for action, calls for the taking in, at the very least, of unaccompanied minors held in detention, reminders that as Australians they had a shameful history with their own indigenous people, and were now repeating it against foreigners in need.

  We did not go into the interior where we might have found ourselves in a foreign land. I had set time aside to visit a friend whom I hoped to pin down in some other part of Australia – ready to fly out to see her – but we lost contact, and I never tracked her down. But we were also seriously considering a complete change in our plans that would have taken us across Australia and into the outback.