A Place Called Home (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 2)

by Andrew Wareham

  "You're going back?"

  Ned eyed the colonel with incredulity - the man was not canny.

  "Yes, indeed! Can't let little setbacks put us off. Where would the Empire be, eh, if we let minor natural incidents deflect us from our path? Of course we go back!"

  The casualty figures in France made a sudden sense - to this sort of thinking it was logical to march men into the fire of massed machine guns. Defeat to them lay in acknowledging the unpalatable, not in mere death.

  "Not to worry, Hawkins, much has survived. There is food and to spare. That Catholic missionary, Father Joseph, tells me that you hired boats and brought the better part of two hundred tons of food and stuff out."

  The colonel seemed almost disapproving, disappointed in him. Ned wondered why, then realised that he was under suspicion of profiteering, cornering the market. He was indignant, hurt as only the dishonest can be when, rarely, they are unjustly accused.

  "You may remember, sir, that the official emergency stocks were not released, sir. Doubtless the water-sodden remains are under six feet of dust down at the docks, sir. In the absence of official aid, sir, I used my own money and time to secure some stocks out here, where they will be useful, I trust. Later, sir, when all is over, we will discover how much has been used and I will inform you, sir, with detailed bills and vouchers, how much it has cost me. The mission has, very kindly, allowed me free use of their schooner and warehouse, as a public service, sir."

  "Yes, well, just what I thought, but you know what some people are... no trust... no faith in humanity. The mission opened the stores to us against the QM's signature."

  "My instructions, sir. Military against quartermaster's dockets; civilians according to need and unrecorded. The government's got money enough, it can pay. Most of the ordinary people though, they're on their beam ends - businesses gone, stock lost, homes flat, even the bank closed. They don't need me dunning them for the food they eat and the bit of canvas they sleep under."

  Much moved, the colonel silently shook Ned's hand and turned back to work. He could be heard at a hundred paces, gently chiding his staff for their dishonourable suspicions.

  Ned rode off to Vunapope, speaking to no one, clearly offended. The first indignation gone, he started laughing inside as he realised that his instinctive self-preservation had furthered his reputation for public service. He was now a respected man in the colony, a leading light: an example, he could hear the colonel saying, that many would benefit from following.

  Father Joe greeted him with a blessing, told him that he was organising a team of men with a wagon to work their way along the coast to Rabaul. Aid must be taken to the survivors, if any remained there.

  "Most had gone, I believe, thanks to the warnings and help they received, but a few will have stayed. There are always a few who cannot be told."

  "Hardly worth the effort of saving them from their own folly, Father Joe."

  "They have wives and children and, Herr Ned, they would hardly otherwise be human. Error is the province of mankind. Shall we see you in our church? There will be a Mass of Thanksgiving, and your name will be mentioned among those worthy of our prayers."

  "Not me - though Jutta might wish to come in, I will ask her. Mind you, Father Joe, was it in my hands, I would not be thanking God for surviving this volcano - I might be more inclined to ask why he set it up in the first place!"

  "God's ways are mysterious, and not ours to question."

  "Better send for Sherlock Holmes then, and solve the case, for you'll need a better answer than that before you get me inside your place! I reckon Queen Emma had the right of it."

  Father Joe permitted himself a rueful, reminiscent grin. "While the Bishop is not in earshot, Herr Ned - you have a point. She had no patience with the Church, but many's the glass I drank at her house, Gunantambu, off-duty, you might say. A wonderful person, even if more of a sinner than many!"

  The Wet Season came in early that year and in the wastes of Rabaul the frangipani bloomed, always first flower of all to recover. The bay slowly cleared and survivors returned to their villages.

  Losses in the end proved to be slight, only Matupit, of the large villages, having suffered greatly.

  Fewer than a quarter of its people returned to Matupit. Some chose not to return to the bad luck place but most of the missing were dead - drowned, buried or burned; gone and unaccounted for.

  From the Beehives, there were none to return - perhaps they had thought themselves safe out on the water; maybe they had feared to set sail in the first throes of the eruption. Whichever, no trace remained of them and none chose to replace them on the stumps of islets remaining.

  When George's first birthday came there was little reminder of the days of fear.

  A few gaps in the plantations, filled with fast-growing seedlings. Masters' houses with new patches and paint. Whole villages in which every hut had newly woven cane panels, fresh and bright. The people mostly lived and worked and laughed and sang again - it had not been so bad!

  Memory, selective always, began to downplay the drama and to excise the terror, to exert a benign censorship - false and murderous of their future as any censorship always is. The verdict was that they had survived all the volcano could throw at them - no worry!

  The military administration had found itself unable to reimburse Ned for his emergency expenditure; there was no category in the Army Stores Manual headed 'Supplies, Emergency, Volcanoes, for the use of', therefore the concept did not exist and they could not have been purchased. A little ingenuity on the part of the QM, used to such dealings, enabled the authorities to write off their own warehouse stocks of all natures and declare them 'destroyed by eruption' - a category that did exist; they then paid Ned, as contractor, one hundred pounds sterling to clear and dispose of the contaminated remains. Half of the rice and all of the tinned goods were unharmed and were gracing the shelves of the Chinese stores within days, followed by a large stock of refurbished and polished 'army surplus'.

  Ned cleared more than a thousand overall. He suspected that the Chinese had done much better - but everyone, always, knew that the Chinese had profited, it was folk wisdom that they always would.

  News came through, patchily and out of date, that the European stalemate had finally broken, Germany had been starved into submission. There was movement on the Western Front and a great breakthrough out of Salonika and into the Balkans and Central European heartlands.

  The War was effectively ended - they did not realise that this was no more than a hard-fought first round. They began to celebrate, cautiously, and think of peace and a return to the century of calm that had typified the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

  Normality, it was expected, would prevail again.

  They were quite right - but Twentieth Century normality was very different to anything that had gone before.

  Ned brought all of his careful plans out of storage and cautiously began to cement his peacetime prosperity.

  The demand for munitions must cease and so the price of coconut oil must fall. Ned sought an appointment with the colonel.

  They discussed routine business as always and Ned collected the signatures he needed and presented his reports for approval; then they relaxed for a few minutes of social, friendly conversation at the close.

  "Almost over, sir."

  "Last lap, Hawkins, winning post in sight. Thought it would be a sprint. Turned into a ruddy marathon!"

  "I'm glad it's done. I'm a civilian at heart, sir. Back to being a businessman and make some money, or try to. Get that bloody oil plant off my back, at least!"

  "What's the problem? I would have thought the salary from the Administration would have been welcome!"

  "Salary? Expenses only, sir, and not always all of them. My fault, in fact, sir. You remember how it was, the pressure we were facing to produce - I never had time to do everything I should have. I just got it going and met the costs and bills as they came in - I just paid them."

  "Good God
, man! Do you mean that the Administration never took it over?"

  Ned nodded, manfully admitted his culpability.

  "Christ, man, I'm not blaming you! It's myself at fault for not getting it done. I was so glad to get the production they wanted that I never made sure it was all squared away properly. Look, I'll see what can be done, urgently!"

  Ned left it at that, satisfied that all would come right - he had told the colonel no lies, and very little truth, had let the man come to his own conclusions. The colonel could work it out for himself, decide on his own course of action. Any result would happen to Ned, not be initiated by him - and if it transpired that he came out richer, well that would be very nice but none of his contriving.

  Within days the colonel received news of his posting. He was to be shifted back to Australia with a promotion, a reward for faithful and efficient service and a preliminary to compulsory retirement. He would be put out to grass as a substantive brigadier, dumped as a warhorse who had somehow had come to the end of the world's greatest conflict without ever seeing battle. With his record of success in New Guinea he could confidently expect to be invited to take a major office under government and carve himself out an equally glorious peacetime career.

  With that normal, hysterical, bustle of instant action that the military substitutes for efficiency, the colonel found himself with two weeks in which to hand over nearly four years' work. With masterly skill, he found a solution to the coconut oil problem - he created a file for it.

  He took a creased cardboard cover from the re-use stock - too wise to put documents dated 1915 in a 1918 issue folder - and wrote an order to Ned to set up an oil processing facility, 'as discussed verbally'. He authorised him to use his own funds pro tem as a wartime expedient to meet urgent need. Annual reports already recorded Ned's progress and they were inserted in the proper place. Financial statements noted that the plant was operating on a cost-plus basis, was privately owned but under military control. He closed the file with a very formal statement of Ned's public-spirited assumption of the burden and the thanks of his Administration. He sent the file to the Advocate-General with a covering note requesting that he should tidy it all up legally.

  The Advocate-General, who was coming rapidly to the end of his military attachment and was looking forward to a return to civilian life, had no time to investigate the matter, took Holmes' word for its probity. He prepared the papers for the creation of an Australian company, sent the documents to Ned for necessary signatures and assured him that his own firm in Brisbane would see to the business for a minimum fee to be dealt with later.

  Ned was very polite, perplexed and thankful. He was a simple agriculturalist and back-country policeman, knew nothing of these citified business things; he debated finding a grass-stem to chew, thought that might be to overact a fraction. The military was pleased to assist, to look after one who was almost of their own, whose heart was very much in the right place. They even set up a second company for him, one that owned Vunatobung, the majority of the shares assigned at his insistence to Mrs Jutta Hawkins, the rest in trust to Master George Hawkins. Some of the legal department applauded the delicacy of feeling that forbade Ned to take formal ownership of his German wife's inheritance; others thought he was foolish to let a woman own the family wealth. None appeared to notice that the plantation had lost its last alien contamination. A place owned by an Australian company could hardly be deemed German, could not come under the scrutiny of any post-war committee for the disposal of enemy property.

  Soon after Armistice Day - celebrated very little in the Hawkins household - Ned presented Jutta with the documents, placed high on the table out of the reach of toddling hands.

  Jutta read, slowly reread, the documents, was moved to indignation. It was Ned's work that had created their prosperity, should not he have the ownership?

  "No way, love! Sometime next year or the year after, they'll be shifting the confiscated places, letting them go dirt cheap to men who have served their country. They won't pass them on to wealthy owners, only to poor blokes without an acre of their own."

  "Ja, of course. You deserve a plantation for all that you have done! But what happens to the people, the Meiers and the others who have been dispossessed?"

  "They were given parole, and the Administration says they broke it. Whether they did or not, who knows? Some of them might have... maybe. They'll be put aboard ship sometime soon, sent back to Germany."

  "Suitcase in hand, no money, no work, to a defeated, starving country. Wonderful!"

  "They lost."

  "And we won, and make the profits. They will have to sell up the little they have to survive, the women even forced to dispose of their precious jewels."

  She looked down at the diamond ring Ned had given her, her most treasured possession, her first gift from her husband.

  Ned saw and sadly nodded, knowing all that it meant to her. Her Christmas present was in his safe in the office, a somewhat more valuable set of necklace and earrings bought from a soldier with his stock of illicit spirits. The soldier had had no way of selling looted jewellery, but could dispose of a case of Bundaberg rum for hard cash from his mates. There was more in the safe, some to be disposed of down South in Australia at a later date, some to be future presents.

  The Chinese community would have bought it from him, but at the price of his reputation - they owed him much, but looting was nonetheless low. They had observed his manoeuvring over the oil plant with delight - any government was the enemy, was fair game - but would have thought less of him for picking up the possessions of the losing civilians.

  Faces changed. Khaki disappeared and was replaced by white drill and pink skin. The Administration was restructured so that government could continue as before, but differently, because military red tape would disappear in the interests of efficiency. Ned was privately amused, having heard it all before, said by equally po-faced bureaucrats just as convinced of their own originality and virtue.

  Ned was summoned to Rabaul where he was sat before a small committee of public servants and was asked to describe exactly what he had done, what his functions were. They were very polite to him - they had heard of old tropical hands and had been warned that he had no time for fools.

  They listened with amaze as he listed his various functions, and then asked him to inform his staff that they were to become public servants.

  "No staff, gentlemen - no men to hand to do it, so I ran everything meself. The nearest thing to staff would be the under-managers employed by each plantation, and they are on the plantation pay-rolls, not Administration."

  Mixed-race and Chinese Administration employees would have been sacked on the spot, replaced by proper people. Working for the plantations, their jobs were secure at least until the places themselves went into new hands.

  Ned was thanked and his services were formally recorded. He was told that the Federal Government would hear of all that he had done. He was not excessively impressed. They paid him off with six months' salary in lieu, which pleased him far more.

  He was replaced by a department of fourteen public servants in various grades, all newly arrived from Australia. After a month he was begged to accept part-time employment as an advisor, at twice his original salary. He was delighted to assist them to develop a policy for the disposal of confiscated German assets.

  In the Australian autumn he installed the best of his managers at Vunatobung and booked a passage with the Holt line. Two days in an island boat took them down to Samarai to board the ship. The Trobriands port was bustling, decaying, still crazy with gold fever but slowly beginning to realise that there was just enough gold deposits to excite hopes, too little to pay for mines. There were empty warehouses at the docks, the stores in town were seedier; the boom was over.

  They took the two best first-class cabins, after a slight contretemps with a First Officer who did not approve of black nursemaids occupying his staterooms. A pistol waved under his nose solved the argument - he had bee
n long enough on the Islands run that he could not be sure Ned would not shoot.

  Less than two weeks saw them in Sydney, on holiday at last, relaxing in the biggest hotel Ned could find.

  They returned to the Islands after a month in the big city, both glad to be going home; they were not city people, could find no pleasures in being part of a frenetic mob. It was wonderful to be able to patronise shops – a new experience for Jutta; but there was a limit even to gazing in store windows.

  The last day they spent hanging over the rails as their ship passed up the channel between East New Britain and New Ireland as the islands were now officially named.

  “Kokopo looked much the same as ever, my dear. Raluana is unchanged. The harbour much the same – it’s good to be back!”

  “There are soldiers at the wharves, Ned. That is the band, look. There must be some man of importance on board.”

  They could not think who, were aware of no officials in the other first class berths.

  The Governor was driven down to the wharf as the gangway was placed and Ned and Jutta were led to the fore.

  The band played the National Anthem and then broke into Gilbert and Sullivan airs, played low in the background as the couple were presented to the Governor, who they had already met.

  The Governor launched into a formal speech which culminated with him announcing his great pleasure in awarding Ned the insignia of the MBE, followed by the King’s Police Medal.

  This being the first such awards made in the new Territory, the Governor was particularly pleased to have the privilege of informing their worthy recipient in person.

  There was much applause.

  Ned had heard of neither Honour and had no idea of their significance, but it was obvious that they confirmed his status as leading planter on the Island, and made it a certainty that he would be granted one of the confiscated German places – a man of his importance must be more than just the manager of his wife’s plantation.