Twelve

“The Big H”

In which I attempt to make a good impression in the ‘Yacht Club’ – but find nobody in a position to judge – am rescued and experience the delights of Honiara High Society.

Honiara, as I quickly discovered, is the unsightly boil in the navel of the otherwise dazzling, seductively beautiful Solomon Islands. Fortunately, however, it is little more than a minor blemish because, as Gerry had pointed out, the capital, sitting stupefied in the heat of Guadalcanal Island, is no Mexico City. In fact it is more reminiscent of the cardboard set of a low-budget spaghetti western.

Slouching like a hungover vagrant against the foothills of Tandachehe Ridge, Honiara gazes blearily out across its one main street to the sea and the marine breaker’s yard that is the wreckage-strewn stretch of water that runs between Guadalcanal and the Florida Islands. In 1942 this had been the stage for some of the largest-scale sea battles in history.

Local intelligences had informed the Americans that the Japanese were building an airstrip at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal as a springboard for the further invasion of Pacific islands including New Zealand and Australia. The US Navy decided it was time to act. The subsequent Battle of Savo on the ninth of August 1942 proved to be one of the greatest defeats in their naval history. Subsequent counterattacks here and in the Western Province on the islands surrounding Randuvu did finally force the Japanese back and the terrible bloodshed in this quiet corner of the world proved to be a turning point in the Pacific campaign. Seventy warships and more than a thousand planes were destroyed but the loss of life was so great that the actual number of men killed is meaningless. Suffice it to say that this now quiet piece of ocean is now known as Iron Bottom Sound. Ironically or fittingly or perhaps both, the building of the present-day international airport was financed in 1996 by the Japanese government.

Mendana Avenue, the main strip, now served as an unsurfaced obstacle course for the convoys of battered, imported cars and pick-up trucks that jolted and jounced up and down through the dust that hung permanently over the town like a comic-strip fart.

Arching my back, perhaps a little like a matador, I managed to avoid the cement-grey splash of a puddle thrown up by the wheels of a bulging minibus. It groaned on, hooting asthmatically, through the crowds that had chosen to come to live and wheeze in this grimy metropolis, in search no doubt of wealth and fortune and the heaps of cheap, plastic crap that were emblematic of much-admired Western prosperity. Dick Whittington, despite exhortations to give Honiara a second chance, would have taken one look and run.

“Get down to the Yacht Club,” Gerry had advised. “There’s always loads of people at the bar. Sure there’ll be someone there who’ll be getting you pointed in the right direction.”

Leaving the shade of the hotel entrance, I had successfully negotiated the main road and set off down a side-street which led towards the docks. Ahead of me were open metal gates and I could hear the hubbub of noise inside as the members of the Point Cruz Yacht Club assembled for lunch. I signed my name in a visitors’ book and went in. The clubroom had, it seemed, been designed by someone with qualifications in aeronautical architecture and was open at one end to tepid sea and at the other to a concrete wall. Fans feebly stirred an atmosphere of outdated exclusivity and wafted the smell of stale tobacco and narrow-mindedness over almost entirely white heads.

A lengthy bar ran down one side at which were sat a dozen men each with a glass or sometimes two in front of them. Not wanting to look out of place, I ordered a beer. As I waited for it to be poured, I smiled and muttered hello to the gentleman who, dressed in shorts and socks, both knee-length, sat on the next stool. Turning, he looked at me as if I had just asked whether I could purchase his daughter at a substantial discount. With something between a snarl and a snort, he slid from his seat and made his way unsteadily to the other side of the room.

“Bloody man just came up to me and started talking. I’ve been a member here for nearly seventeen years. Seventeen bloody years, and he just starts talking to me. Jesus!” he complained loudly to a deaf waiter.

Uncomfortable, I paid for my drink and, turning from the bar, smiled weakly at the man who sat on the chair on my other side.

“Ahh, y’down wanna lissen to him. M’serabl’ol’bugger. Alwez m’serable,” he said kindly if a little incoherently. “Jus’arrive?”

“Well, yes, just this morning.”

“Don, m’name’s Don.” He wiped a moist hand on his shirt front and stuck it out. His head, shining from ear to ear under the few strands of black hair that were scraped over his scalp, wobbled slightly as, with no small effort, he raised his eyes to meet mine. He belched and some little while later put his hand over his mouth. “Juss’ask me anything yer need t’know, anything, an’ I’ll tell yer.”

“Well as a matter of fact, I’m trying to get to Chinatown.”

Only when he reached for a pile of beer mats and began to lay them out with the utmost concentration on the counter did I realise my mistake.

“Right, Shinatown, right. So thississus – the yoclub.” He stabbed at one of the cardboard squares, which went spinning away onto the floor.

“No, shorry thississus.” He managed to pin another one down. “Where didju say you wannid to go? Shinatown? Yushed Shinatown?”

This was a disaster.

“Excuse me, it’s Will isn’t it?”

From the floor, where I was making an escape attempt under the guise of looking for the errant beer mat, I looked up at a friendly, attractive woman and a shaven-headed, smiling man.

“You don’t remember us, do you?”

“Oh, hello!” I said, dredging my memory. “I…umm…”

Then fortunately it came back to me. “Yes, yes. It’s Jane and Nick, isn’t it? We met at the rest house. How are you?” I asked a little too effusively.

“Shinatown…”

“Good good, thanks.”

Jane was an agricultural adviser who worked for one of the bigger aid agencies. Nick, her husband, was the skipper of a trawler but was on leave and along for the ride. They were both from New Zealand and I had enjoyed meeting them in Munda, where Jane had given a series of workshops about growing vegetables on the steps of the airport building. (That is to say, the lessons took place on the airport steps and concerned the cultivation of vegetables – anywhere.) I had sneaked into the back row.

Unlike most of the other charitable types who wandered through the islands, she exuded an air of efficiency and knowledgeable professionalism. She had also seemed to be more interested in making progress than in making purchases in the guesthouse’s tiny gift shop, which seemed to be permanently a-bustle with young men in ponytails and sandals and earnest girls in long floral dresses, murmuring in awestruck tones, “Mom’s just going to love this” or “Honey, he says he doesn’t take US dollars. Can you believe that?”

I managed to extricate myself from Don, who was staring uncomprehendingly at his map, by assuring him that his directions had been excellent. He nodded in serious agreement and set about the not inconsiderable task of getting his glass off the bar and at least some of the contents into his mouth. We retreated to an unoccupied shelf that surrounded a pillar in the centre of the room.

Asking me what had brought me to Honiara they waited patiently as I somewhat long-windedly explained.

“But I could have done without the dolphin-hunting,” I finished, feeling queasy at the memory.

Jane laughed. “I tried to set up a village-based beef cattle project in Makira but when it came to slaughtering them, the villagers had become so fond of them that they had given them all pet names. They refused point-blank to allow anyone to get near them. Eventually they knocked down the fences of the paddock and let them go in the middle of the night.”

You say tomato and I say tomato.

“Right, we better get going,” she said as she scooped up her keys from the ledge. “Where are you staying, Will?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure at the moment,” I admitted and so with a generosity and hospitality that the English find overwhelming as well as slightly odd, they both immediately said that, of course, in that case, I was to come and stay with them.

“We’ll sort you out. Let’s head on up to the house.” She jumped up enthusiastically.

“We’ll go to the Gas Shop tomorrow,” Nick said enigmatically as I clambered into the back of the white four-wheel-drive pick-up, admiring the pink, swirly artwork on the side that read ‘Solomon Islands Women’s Agricultural Advice Support Group’. I bounced about as we rattled up and over the deep ridges that ran down from the crest of hills encircling the town. As we rounded a bend I caught a glimpse of the interior of the island, of flat pastures and leaf villages. Nick gestured out of the window with a flick of his thumb.

“See that? That’s GRA territory.”

If a day walking around the town was a tiring, depressing and dirty affair with not much to recommend it, then it seemed that a day walking around outside the town was a worrying, risky and, on occasion, downright dangerous affair with nothing at all to recommend it. Outside the city limits of Honiara was bandit country, ruled by the GRA, the Guadalcanal Republican Army or one of its various guises – these young troublemakers changed their name every time they watched a new Hollywood action film on their stolen video player.

Initially they had banded together resentful of the influx of ‘immigrants’ from different Solomon Islands who had come to Honiara. In order to prevent them spreading further into the island they had arranged roadblocks at either end of the town. The ‘immigrants’, in order to protect themselves from these hooligans, had arranged their own roadblocks on their side and the result was stagnant gridlock. Honiara however was to all intents and purposes blockaded and deliveries of supplies could only arrive by sea. Now the GRA sat in the outback and waited for something to happen. So far nothing had, but they had contented themselves in the meantime with some fairly leisurely looting of abandoned outlying houses and a subsequent modicum of arson.

Equipped with home-made weapons fashioned out of rusting lumps of metal salvaged from Second World War dumps and loaded with handmade ammunition, the GRA were to be considered dangerous more for their lack of organisation and discipline than their fire power.

The situation was nevertheless still taken seriously enough for the double checkpoints at either end of the town to have remained in place. It goes without saying that it was within the confines of these roadblocks that I proposed to stay.

Despite this, Honiara was still of course a much safer place, in terms of risk to the individual, than the vast majority of European cities and compared to any American one it was a walk in the park, although admittedly a pretty scruffy one.

Pulling up on a circular drive we climbed out in front of a brick villa built rather precariously out over a sharp incline. Negotiating a guard dog with a shameless nose and a saliva imbalance, I followed my friends in through the front door. It was only then that I realised how long it had been since I had visited a ‘real’ house. There were tiles on the floor, glass in the windows, switches on the walls and, enshrined in an alcove of the open-plan living room, a television set. I felt slightly overawed.

“Here you go. This is where you are,” Jane said, opening a door off the hallway.

Lit by a floor-to-ceiling picture window, it was a grand room furnished with cupboards, a dressing table with mirror and a four-poster bed, which, draped as it was with a mosquito net that hung from its centre, looked like a mediaeval caravan. I tested it and the water-filled mattress wobbled like a huge jelly. Through another door on the far side was a bathroom with two wash-hand basins, a bidet, a bath and a separate shower. I counted. Ten taps. Nine more than in the whole of Mendali.

Thoughtfully I walked around running my hand over the wooden and plastic surfaces. As I looked out of the window across the swimming pool to the sea, much of the town was hidden from view by trees and Honiara suddenly began to look quite appealing.

“What a great place,” I exclaimed as Jane took some folded towels from a cupboard and placed them on a chair by a trouser press, into which I had every intention of slipping my shorts at a later stage.

“It is nice but it isn’t ours. Actually it belongs to the Deputy High Commissioner. He and his wife are away on leave at the moment. All the people who normally look after the house, all the servants, are on holiday. We’re just house-sitting. Talking of which, we have been invited to a drinks party by one of the big aid agency bosses this evening. Would you like to come?”

Certainly I would. “Unfortunately I don’t really have any clothes to speak of.”

“Just borrow some of Nick’s. They should fit you.”

About an hour later, having showered off the dirt of the day and played around for a while with the bidet, which had a jet that nearly but did not quite hit the ceiling, I squeezed myself into a pair of Nick’s slightly too tight, very much too short, beige chinos. The four inches between five feet ten and six feet two represented a larger difference in size than Jane had imagined. Unfortunately, this made sitting difficult and bending over an impossibility. It seemed, though, that my sense of fashion, never a strong point, had slipped so far down my list of priorities that I happily zipped myself into a pair of borrowed ankle-length grey boots with pixie points. If I crooked my legs slightly, they almost met the bottom of my trousers. I found some Indonesian aftershave in a cupboard in the bathroom (at least I think it was Indonesian – and aftershave – it certainly smelled pretty powerful) and giving my shirt a good dousing, I popped it back on. Practising a couple of dance moves in the mirror as I passed, I went out of the door and without further ado was whisked off to the party.

With a crunch of spotless gravel we swept up in the Women’s Agricultural Advice car to the door of a Grand Residence. Nick rang the doorbell and a Solomon Islander uncomfortable in waitressing uniform opened the door. It had been a few years since I had done any regular gate-crashing, so I was feeling rather nervous. I crouched and felt the comfort of trouser meeting boot as we went in.

“Darlings!” swooped a woman dressed in a tired green velvet dress and pearls. She held a champagne glass and a crumpled paper napkin in one hand and a cigarette, complete with gravity-defying ash, in the other. Crumbs of puff pastry peeked from her cleavage and dusted the sides of her heavily lipsticked mouth.

“Paula, we have brought a friend, Will. He lives out near Munda, you know?”

“The provinces, how wonderful.” She planted a kiss on my cheek which succeeded in being both wet and sticky at the same time. “God, I wish I could go somewhere like that…anywhere in fact.”

I straightened up, fearing knee-lock.

“I hope you don’t mind me just turning up like this…”

“Mind, why should I mind? More the merrier.” She grinned lopsidedly and fiddled playfully with her pearls. “Just hope you don’t mind all the unbelievable bores that seem to have turned up tonight. Now where did I put that fucking gin?”

She steamed off in the direction of what appeared to be the lavatory, leaving a trail of ash and smoke in her wake.

“That’s the wife!” chuckled Nick. “Just wait till you meet ‘His Excellency’! Right Royal Ronnie, we call him.”

We walked down a short, wide flight of steps across a near-empty room and through some French windows out into a large garden. The air was heavy with airport boutique perfume and a strong scent of self-importance.

Just as people like to join clubs to re-enact the battles of the English Civil War or dress up in 1940^s clothes to dance the jitterbug, so now I appeared to have stumbled upon a reunion of the Colonial Debauchery Appreciation Society, whose members’ aims were to talk at great length, generally on the subject of the person who was speaking, and drink the assembled company under the table. The meeting was really going very well.

Like Grimble’s social world in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the ex-pat community had always been small in the Solomons, which being some several months of travel away from family and friends, had not featured in the top twenty popular far-flung outposts of the British Empire. Indeed for many years they were run almost single-handedly by Charles Morris Woodford, who had been appointed as the first British Commissioner over the protectorate in 1896. For nearly twenty years, with only a couple of dozen men to help him, he had been responsible for 100,000 islanders, most of whom were enthusiastic head-hunters. Drawing only a civil servant’s wage and living in the most basic of circumstances, he had ‘governed’ the Solomons until 1915 when he had retired. In all that time he had remained resolutely unarmed, attempting instead to convince the warlike islanders of the benefits of peace. In his time he had installed a system of government and justice that was still in operation today.

How he might have enjoyed the lifestyle of the aid workers who had flooded the country since independence: the return flights home, the houses, the cars, the diving lessons, the health and pension packages and, of course, the strings of zeros attached to the tax-free salaries. These were all, it seemed, basic requirements. Mind you, if he had had, as part of his job description, to attend many functions like this then he might have been less envious.

A stage overhung by bobbing trees was being set up for a performance by a local pipe band in traditional dress of leaves and shells. They were starkly in contrast to the guests dressed in limp suits and damp, dated dresses. The drink appeared to have been flowing for a little while and I was greeted by a number of strangers as they careered past. Most were already shouting. A pale South African brought us drinks. Grasping three glasses in one hand, he filled them to the slopping brim.

“Great party, yis, great party. You can always count on old Ronnie for a great party. You British, mon?” he asked me as he handed me a glass with a circular motion of his arm.

“I am.”

“Well, cheers, old chap,” he laughed, not unpleasantly, and raised the bottle of wine above his head before taking a swig from it.

Nick and Jane were quickly lassooed by some Americans they knew and I stood alone surrounded by an ever-increasing barrage of noise, catching snatches of conversation.

“So why don’t you let the dog use the front door and the house girl can just go round the back?” said a severely plucked woman, her lidless eyeballs swimming with burst blood vessels.

“I don’t mind but I don’t want either of them using the pool,” replied a man. His bottle-black hair and grey roots shone in the loops of festive lights.

“You can buy real Italian mozzarella from that new store by the open market. They make it in New Zealand from yaks or something. Fly it in. It’s pretty good the sort of supplies they can get in these days.”

“When we next go on leave Margaret says she is going to have a face-lift.”

“Bout bloody time too!”

“Yeh, but the worst of it is, I’ll have to pay for it. No chance of getting that on overseas expenses, I suppose, eh? Ha, ha!”

From inside a smart-looking shuttered veranda came a gale of laughter and the wet smash of a dropped bottle.

“Naturally, our aid programme is ze best in ze whole Islands; it is how you guys say, bloody marvellous. Next year ven Dieter vill be taking his retirement I vill become Direktor – pretty good, huh?”

“Listen, mate, why do you think your programme is so…”

“So who have we got here?” a voice boomed in my ear. “Who invited you then, friend?”

“Er, well as a matter of fact…” I found myself looking at a crooked, skinny man in his fifties. His thin, cigarette-smoke hair was brushed straight backwards accentuating the size of his nose. This extraordinarily long but lumpy appendage was the colour of the claret that he sniffed as he swilled his glass. His watery eyes blinked as he cut me off in full falter.

“What’s your name, young man?”

I told him.

“Well, I’m Ronnie and it’s good to have you on board. Let me show you around, introduce you to a few people.”

Gripping my shoulders, he propelled me along, like a shopper pushing his trolley as we wheeled through the crowd.

“Susan, this is a new chap in town. Look after him and do try not to be too miserable.”

“Yes, Ronnie,” Susan answered meekly. Susan’s husband was ‘in oil’ and their three teenage children were at boarding school in England. “I would much rather they were here but I suppose it’s for the best. And, of course, the company pays for everything.”

I made a vast error of judgement in telling her that I had once been a teacher myself. This prompted her to pull out a picture of her offspring and give me a tearful blow-by-blow account of their academic progress, or, in one case, lack of it.

“Freddy has never been that good at school things, you know. Pretty good at all sorts of other things like er…puzzles and that sort of thing, much better than me, you know; he’s not thick, I mean…” She stared at the photo thoughtfully. “I was absolutely hopeless at school, and I don’t think I’m thick, although Gerald always says I am. Do you think I’m thick? Sorry, what was your…?”

The pipe band struck up, beating out rhythms on lengths of bamboo and singing about goodness knew what. Nobody looked round or paid them the slightest attention apart from an automatic smattering of applause at the end of each song. Nick pushed his way through the crowd, making a face.

“When you are ready to go just give us a nod. OK?”

I nodded.

Jane was looking pained by a lengthy discourse on European involvement in the Solomons, which was being delivered by a fat Finn who was at least sober. She was delighted to get away. We had just made it to the front door when we were stopped in our tracks.

“And where do you young things think you are off to?” It was ‘His Excellency’.

We made some excuses about having to get up early and having a busy day tomorrow. Ronnie made some deeply improper suggestions about the real reasons we were leaving and offered to see us out. At the car we were poised to say our farewells when he suddenly turned a strange shade of off-white, gurgled, staggered a few paces, leant against a palm tree and threw up copiously. We waited in embarrassed silence. He eventually came back wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Sorry,” he whispered with a spittle-flecked smile. “Just had to clear my throat.”