Skiddlethorpe and other stories

by Peter D Wilson

sorry, but it just isn’t on.”

  Carpenter was crestfallen. “I hadn’t realised. The map in the book didn’t have a scale.”

  That gave Norris an idea. “So the girl herself doesn’t know how far it is?”

  “I don’t see how she could.”

  “Well, then. How about a little harmless deception? Makin’s the northern tip of the whole group. Here’s Tarawa atoll, and at the northern tip there’s this other little island. That’s about twenty miles away. After twenty miles of choppy water in a small craft, no one’s likely to complain that it isn’t far enough. And they won’t have any idea of what either island looks like.”

  “Just as well. The situations are totally different.”

  “But you won’t see that from sea level. And these islands are never more than a few feet higher.”

  Eventually it was agreed, and an explanatory notice posted inviting interest. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of alternatives, there were more than enough signatures to warrant a lottery for places, although of course Miranda as originator of the idea had one automatically. Norris suggested that Carpenter deserved the same privilege, but he waived it; he had other ideas.

  However, the rest of the passengers still needed consideration. A possibility arose with the discovery that a Joe Goodwin, son of an American survivor from the battle for Tarawa in 1943, now lived in Bairiki, the next village along the southern arm of the atoll; he had heard so much about the fighting that after retiring from a hectic business career he had come to see the place for himself, been charmed by the leisurely pace of life and decided to stay. Norris had never before heard of the battle and found that he was far from alone in his ignorance, so something on the lines of a lecture might be appreciated. Goodwin was willing, and so it was arranged.

  He started with a summary of the strategic situation. In the eight months after Pearl Harbour, Japanese power had extended to a line between the Aleutians in the north and the Gilberts in the south. The expansion was halted with the failure of the attack on Midway Island, and the rest of the Pacific war was its painfully slow reversal by American and Australian pressure.

  Betio Island, the south-western tip of Tarawa, had been heavily garrisoned with an airfield posing an unacceptable threat to the American westward advance further north, though an invaluable asset if it could be captured. It was therefore taken in a three-day battle that left the garrison virtually annihilated, though with over three thousand casualties on the American side too, a third of them fatal: a miscalculation of the tide had left conventional landing craft stopped at the edge of the reef and sitting ducks to intense fire from shore positions that were supposed to have been destroyed by the preliminary bombardment. A lot of the wrecks were still where they sank.

  “There might be some interesting diving there,” someone commented.

  “No chance,” said Goodwin. “Not all the dead were recovered, so they’re effectively war graves, and there’ll be tons of unused ammunition still lying around, probably in a thoroughly dangerous condition by now. It wouldn’t do to bump into any of that.”

  “And how many Japs were killed?”

  “Figures differ, but around four and a half thousand. Only seventeen surrendered. But according to some of the surviving Korean labourers they’d brought in, one unit tried to make a break across the lagoon, probably hoping to reach Buariki. That’s the last sizeable island in the north of the atoll. There was a rumour at the time that a boat of some kind came to grief nearby. Certainly over a hundred men got there by the long way round and had to be mopped up later.”

  Meanwhile Carpenter’s plans were set in place. He had found someone with a fast boat that could get him to the pseudo-Makin before the main party. To add a little spice to their experience, he would have it put about that he had suffered a heart attack during the night, then during their lunch break he would walk northwards past them along the coastal path in the manner of Grimble’s supposed ghost.

  It was crucial to the plan that his supposed illness should be made known to the expedition, equally that no one should investigate it too closely, so he briefed Sally Cartwright, one of the ladies he had found more discreet and very much more agreeable than most, who thought his scheme highly amusing. He was particularly anxious that Constance Baraclough, a lonely widow he had been assiduously avoiding since a rather ambiguous episode early in the cruise, should be deterred from any attempt to “comfort” him in his indisposition. If she persisted he was to be in hospital under observation and on no account to be disturbed.

  On the genuine Makin there would have been no chance of going astray, but as it was they would have to cross Buariki which might be another matter, so together with Sally he consulted the navigating officer. Fortunately there was an annotated satellite view on the Internet that showed one important difference, readily avoided. It would be best to land at the village and follow the path to Naa islet; if there had ever been a real gap it had now disappeared.

  Come the morning, Mrs. Baraclough was indeed hard to convince that there was nothing she could usefully do for Carpenter; Miranda too was concerned about him, and blamed this distraction for the vagueness of her feeling that they had reached the landing point much earlier and with less exposure to the Pacific swell than she would have expected. Nevertheless, when half a mile from the village they reached a fork in the road and took the right rather than the left branch, she objected that according to the book, visitors to the island should follow the western route.

  “We haven’t reached that point yet; there’s still a mile and a half to go. We checked last night, and that path to the left just peters out in the bush. Things have obviously changed a lot in the ninety years since Grimble’s time; it’s hard to tell where this island ends and the other starts, as there’s a strip of land all the way.”

  That more or less satisfied her, though she still had a nagging feeling that something was wrong. It intensified on the further islet when the path veered away from the shore a hundred yards short of the point, but Sally pointed out that it would be natural if the villagers were to avoid the Place of Dread where the terrible spirit judge held court. That at least was reasonable, though the place itself when they walked to it along the beach seemed no more dreadful than any other.

  “That’s because you don’t have centuries of superstition behind you.”

  It seemed rather an anticlimax, so the party withdrew to a glade in the bush where they could get some shade while eating their lunch. Afterwards one of the more fastidious ladies decided to wash her plate in the sea. The tide was low and she had to go some way out, where she could see round a bend in the path. On her return she commented that someone was coming up from the south.

  “A villager?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  As the figure approached Mrs. Baraclough suddenly caught her breath. “It looks like Major Carpenter.”

  It did indeed. They all watched in silence as the figure trudged by, completely ignoring them. Someone called out, but it took no notice, going on across the beach and into the shallows. Suddenly it stumbled; there was a violent explosion, and a burst of water, coral fragments and other things was hurled high into the air.

  Miranda, standing beside Sally, clutched instinctively at her arm, but it wasn’t there. Sally had fainted.

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  FOWLER’S CAVE

  “And what brings you here, young man?”

  Molly Birtwistle wasn’t normally inquisitive - curiosity was not encouraged in Skiddledale - but a visitor to the valley, and evidently an Australian at that, was an event so far beyond normality as to give her some excuse. The phone line had been down for some days, mobiles never worked in the valley, and the man had arrived unannounced at the pub asking if he could take a room for perhaps a week. Business had been slack, and his custom was not to be despised, so he received what amounted to an open-arms welcome from Jack: “Aye, lad, I think we can put thee up.” Molly had been too busy adjusting her programme
, and providing a decent evening meal for the visitor, to ask any questions earlier, but she could now relax a little.

  I heard about all this from my uncle Ned, who had popped in for a pint that evening. Not a native Skiddledaler, having inherited his house from a fairly distant relative, he understood but did not share the habitual taciturnity of the valley, and gladly treated the stranger for the sake of more interesting company.

  After mutual introductions at the bar, Nick Goodwin explained that one of his forbears, Tom Fowler, had come from the valley but had been transported for poaching and breaking the arm of a gamekeeper on the estate of a landowner in the next valley. There was a bit of history there. Tom had somehow become friendly with Sir Archibald’s son Timothy and on one occasion when the squire’s cricket team was short of a man, Tom was pressed into service and saved the match by scoring a crucial twenty-odd runs at the tail end. Nevertheless he was afterwards snubbed as a social inferior and bore his resentment to his death; hence the poaching raids in later life.

  In his teens he had spent much of his time exploring the unfrequented head of the valley with his dog, Spot. In one place the collapse of an underground cavern, goodness knows how many thousand years before, had left a kind of amphitheatre now sparsely occupied by