Nineteen

“Once more unto the beach…”

In which I do not run for my life – do not lose my shirt – do not look down – but do eventually find my feet.

Through the perfect blue, percolated with necklaces of tiny iridescent bubbles, I could see two strange, white sea creatures swimming towards my face, their tentacles flailing upwards. After a moment of mild panic I realised that they were my hands clawing for the surface and breathed a deep sigh of relief. This, of course, proved to be a mistake.

Luckily at that moment my head broke into the air and, confused by this sudden series of events and coughing violently, I pinched my nose. Below me I could see my legs kicking out seeking the set of steps that was going to take me to the safety of a deck chair and a warm towel but this was a new kind of swimming. From where I was floating, which, thankfully, I appeared to be doing quite easily, there was not a lifeguard in sight nor, it seemed as I swung myself around in a circle, a canoe.

Of course, modern outboard motors are equipped with what is known, strangely, as a kill switch. A line attaches you to the engine and should man and machine part company a plastic key snaps out of its clip and everything stops. Unfortunately, this was not a modern engine. What was more, Tassels, for greater snoozing and fishing potential, had customised the twist throttle handle so that it would stick where it had last been set. As I had hit the water I had crossed my fingers that the engine, for a reason best known to itself, would stall. It did not.

My sunglasses were now balanced precariously on my top lip, so having nothing better to do with them I wiped the gathering salt crystals from the lenses, put them back on and looked around again. I had hoped to see the canoe bobbing in the water as a horse that has lost its rider grazes patiently, waiting for him or her to stagger to their feet. Instead I glimpsed the boat carrying on with a steady putter and in a perfectly straight line for the narrow passage between the two islands of Kiri Kiri. With it went my vegetables, my drinking water and most importantly my inflatable life jacket.

It was a moment to take stock.

Right.

So here I was treading water. Water that I seemed to remember from a chart I had once glanced at in Gerry’s office was approximately five hundred and forty-three metres in depth. It was clear, quite clear – deep breaths – that I had two and only two options. Option One, I could head for land – far distant land – or Option Two, I could stay where I was which, for the moment at least, I found relatively easy to do. In fact so warm and buoyant was the water that it was possible to lie fully stretched out on my back and, as long as I did not let my deep breath go, float like this with only the minimum of hand and foot movements.

It was Option Two then. I would just stay here until I was rescued.

It made sense: the last time that I had swum any distance had been in a suburban London swimming baths. I had been eight at the time and had received a sew-on badge for swimming twenty, possibly twenty-five yards backstroke. I remembered it had been something of a struggle. No, I would just wait for someone to pass by and pick me up. Someone was bound to turn up.

As the swell lifted me, I strained up as much as was possible and looked around. Miles of open water, no big boats, no little boats, in fact, nothing in sight at all. As I swept back down the slide of water, I tried to remember the number of boats that had passed me in the day but my efforts came to nought. Even the elk or moose seemed to have disappeared.

Of course another perfectly valid reason for not hanging around unnecessarily in the water was of course the fact that the sea was absolutely brimming with sharks and sharks are funny things. Somehow they manage to instil fear in practically everyone and I fitted uncomfortably easily into the practically everyone category. I tried not to look down.

One of the glories of the Solomons, and it was well documented, was that their seas contained one of the largest number of different species of sharks in the world. Mako, tiger, hammerhead, white tip, black tip, bronze whalers, grey whalers, big ones and small ones, long ones, thin ones, short ones, flat ones, slow ones and fast ones – they were all well represented and all had in common, apart from horrible little black buttony eyes and totally undiscriminating taste buds, huge excesses of razor-sharp teeth. Rubbing one against the other, I was heartened to discover that both feet still seemed to be present and intact.

Of course the statistical chance of being attacked by a shark is, apparently, incredibly small. It did strike me at that moment, however, that all the statistics that I had ever heard quoted were based on samples taken from a broad range of the population. This broad range presumably included people who were, at present, walking down city streets, sitting in offices and traffic jams, watching television or in the bath, where clearly the chances of being eaten by a large fish were slim or at least significantly reduced. It had to be admitted, therefore, despite my every effort to think of a scientific reason why it should not be so, that I was running rather more of a risk than the average. I started to swim.

Interestingly – to change the subject and think of other things – the front crawl, the stroke preferred by modern athletes, certainly the swimmers, had been invented in the Solomon Islands. White traders had spotted the islanders performing this peculiar but effective action and had adopted it as their own. Not that that was of any great use to me; I had never got further than the backstroke. Nevertheless, by now, I reckoned I had already quadrupled my personal best. When I bored of gazing at the sky, I turned onto my stomach and adopted an entirely new style, half frog, half drowning puppy.

Initially I found the going relatively easy and if I alternated my two different strokes then I could rest various hitherto undiscovered groups of muscles. They were having the shock of their lives.

My shorts, bought in an army surplus suppliers in Brisbane made of a thick, heavy-duty cotton and furnished as they were with numerous pockets for water bottles, cigarettes, Swiss Army knives etc, had proved to be excellent on dry land. Sadly, now wet they had developed the drag coefficient of a couple of heavy bags of shopping. Fond of them as I was I was going to have to let them go along with a smart leather belt, one of the many that I had received as birthday presents over the years.

Grimble had, under circumstances that I forget, been asked to remove his trousers. He had refused:

“Dead or alive, said a voice within me, an official without his pants is a preposterous object and I felt I could not face that particular horror.”

I, however, was not an official and anyway this was only what Crusoe described as just another moment in the ‘uneven state of human life’. So I stopped, wrestled the buckle undone and yanked the buttons apart. Putting my thumbs into the waistband, I pushed down. Anyone who has tried this manoeuvre will know that it is actually very difficult to perform if you are trying to keep your head above the water. In fact it is almost impossible not to do a backward somersault. After rather a lot of unseemly struggling, I eventually had them around my ankles. With a flick of my feet they fell off and sank below me.

Too late did I realise my mistake. In the process of divesting myself of my shorts, I had also managed to remove my underclothing. A pair of medium-sized expedition-model boxers were now also commencing their half kilometre descent – somewhat to the consternation of any passing sharks, no doubt. In an effort to retrieve them I scrabbled around below me but to no avail. They must have sunk quickly, wrapped as they were in my leaden shorts. At least swimming was much less difficult now that I was dressed only in a T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, naked entirely from the waist downwards. In fact it was almost a pleasure.

More worryingly, though, I knew that my arms were beginning to tire. If I lay on my back and just kicked with my feet then I could rest them but progress was painfully slow. The quicker I could get out of the water the better. I was still not a little preoccupied by underwater predators and my newfound semi-nudity had done nothing to improve my confidence. At least the swell seemed to be lessening and in the calmer water I could clearly see the two hummocks of Kiri Kiri. One moment they looked to be almost within touching distance, the next they seemed about as attainable as Alpha Centauri. Of the canoe there was no sign.

Suddenly, as I paddle-steamed along on my back, my head connected with something hard in the water. Letting slip a popular vulgarity at top volume and possibly more than once, I splashed epileptically away from the object. Thankfully whatever it was did not seem to be following. I waited, my heart prevented from bursting completely out of my mouth by the firm clenching of my teeth. Strange though it may seem, up until this point I had not felt anything more than a vague sense of unease, a feeling that I was in trouble but that somehow, at some time, my feet would touch sand beach again.

Now I was truly frightened, terrified in fact, and the fear came over me in waves. Drowning or being eaten had only been a televisual concept until then – something that happened to other people and then only on the news. All of a sudden it became a very real possibility. Here I was in the middle of the sea, half-dressed, with nothing more than a pair of Polaroids to protect me and I had just been attacked by an unseen aggressor.

Marvellous.

What I would have given at that moment to be back in my classroom. Leaning against a radiator teaching Robert and the rest; a whole class of Roberts if need be. The bell would ring and everyone would disappear through the door, wishing me goodbye until tomorrow. I would wrap up against the cold and switch out the lights. With a frost shimmering in the air and coming down to settle in a fine layer on the ground, I would cross the echoing courtyard and get into my car. After a stop at the local pub for a beer and good company, I would arrive back at the house for a bite to eat in front of the fire, watch a film and make my weary way to bed. Home sweet home.

Instead, I was bobbing helplessly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the cusp of extinction or at very least running the risk of a very nasty nip. But I would not give up without a fight. Mmmm Britannia, Britannia mm mm mm. My humming bubbled the surface of the sea. I turned grimly about, seeking out my attacker – and then I saw it…

As it transpired it was a coconut, a green shoot sprouting from the top. Then another one and another. Swimming to them, I collected them with outstretched arms. They were surprisingly buoyant. Using them as a float, I settled down a little and kicked on with my feet. Reaching the islands was now a distinct possibility and I allowed myself a small smile. The sun had, however, now touched the water’s edge, setting it alight and it would, I knew, drop quickly out of sight. There was always a period of the night that was particularly dark, an hour or so between the setting of the sun and the appearance of the moon to cast its neon shadows across the islands. Once the sun was down, I would not be able to see a fin in front of my face. I splashed on.

It made little difference which of the two small islands I headed towards as they were, as far as I knew, both uninhabited. Beautiful, circular, fringed with white sands and tufted with palms, they were the perfect get-away-from-it-all destination.

It had already crossed my mind that nobody was likely to come looking for me. The villagers were not expecting me to come back for a couple of days and if I did not arrive at Beulah the Kings would presume that either I had not managed to get any transport, that the weather was too rough to leave home or that, as often happened here, I just could not be bothered. As there was no telephone or radio in the village, there was no way of checking. I was not unduly worried by all this as the channel between the two islands was a pretty busy thoroughfare and I was sure to be able to hitch a ride, either back home or on to the school, whichever came first.

I was now exhausted but had lasted much longer than I had anticipated. Only a few hundred yards to go before I hit a small spit of sand, lit orange by the last rays of the sun, and I would be home and dry. Unexpectedly, I felt a sudden sting on the ankle. At first there was a sharp stab. A while later numbness set in, like a foot gone to sleep, and then pins and needles began to prickle their way up my leg. Just as I was considering the possible repercussions of this creeping paralysis, the symptoms seemed to settle and within five minutes it had dulled to the sort of pain you might feel if you were a steer that had just been branded. I looked around as best I could and was just able to detect a number of small bubbles on the surface – the jellyfish that I had seen earlier. Imaginary stings covered my body as, nervously, I pushed on. I was not well-protected.

Eventually, finally, I experienced the delicious sensation of the sand grazing my elbows and knees. After a careful inspection for teeth marks it appeared that apart from a nasty pink swelling on my ankle and a further last-minute one on my left buttock, I was unscathed.

On the other hand I was incredibly thirsty. Kicking one of the coconuts that were hobbling randomly in the surf where I had dropped them, I sat down in the warm surf and rubbed my toe. My tongue was as dry as a yam. Then one of the nuts tapped me on the leg.

“Hello? Hello?”

Picking it up, as the light bulb lit above my head, I shook it.

“Wakey, wakey!” it sloshed patronisingly.

It is here that I must break and write a few words of somewhat grudging gratitude to the coconut because although at times I found it a supercilious, even occasionally downright unhelpful form of vegetation, without it I would certainly have spent a considerably less pleasant sojourn on my desert island.

This extraordinary tree provides an impressive range of products and fulfils so many vital daily roles it is difficult to imagine how the people of the Solomons would survive without it. So intrinsically important is it that a lease of land in the islands has a maximum tenure of seventy-five years – the life of a coconut tree. When the fruit is ripe it obligingly falls from the tree and is ready to be harvested. The nut, as seen on the shy at a village fête, is encased in a thick fibrous husk that breaks its fall, rebuffs intruders and happily makes it buoyant should it fall into the water. Once the husk is stripped away the nut is chopped in half to reveal two white hemispheres of kernel. The flesh, grated from the inside with a sharp instrument similar in appearance to that which is used to curl butter in smarter restaurants, is used as a flavouring for rice or the wallpaper paste that is tapioca pudding.

Alternatively the two halves of kernel are dried over fires and packed tightly into hessian sacks. These sacks are shipped to oil-processing plants where the kernels are crushed for the oil that is exported to the rest of the world to be used in vegetable oils, soaps and margarines. Its leaves are woven into strong baskets for carrying vegetables, clothes and babies and it is from a ‘table’ of these same leaves that many a feast has been eaten. The tough bark is stripped off and used to make rope, whilst the trunk itself is used for building bridges, houses and canoes. Most importantly, though, the nut provides milk to drink – if you can open it.

Umpteen times I had watched youngsters stripping off the husks of coconuts with effortless ease. The prescribed method was to take the coconut in both hands and stab it onto a sharp wooden spike planted firmly in the ground. I did not have one. I broke off the branch of tree, pushed it, with little jumps of exertion, as hard as I could into the ground and stepped back. It fell over like a fainting guardsman. I tried harder and this time it snapped.

Swinging like an unlikely Tarzan on a thicker branch in an attempt to break it off, I noticed that the stump left by the first branch had a jagged point to it. I picked up the largest, most appetising nut I could find and bashed it on the stick. It bounced off. I tried again with more success. It stuck – solid. Eventually, with a splitting, rending noise of ripping fabric, the husk began to tear away as I twisted. So, turning the nut, I repeated the procedure. Some more tore off. After about half an hour, I had stripped away most of the husk and although it was not very professional there were no points being awarded for style or technique.

Now all I had to do was smash open the hard kernel. I tried hurling it on the ground but it thudded dully on the sandy soil. I bashed it on a tree a few times but the reverberations hurt my soggy hands. I even tried to throw it at the tree but my aim was poor and I missed five times for every one time that nut and tree connected. On one occasion it rolled into the shrubbery and I had to look for it like the lost ball at a village cricket match. For a little while, as I desperately dug around in the bushes, I thought it might have to be match abandoned.

Giving up on the tree method, I walked round the island trying to find a stone on which to crack my nut. Five minutes later I had all but walked around the entire island. It was only when I was a few yards short of my starting point that I found the perfect stone – a stone designed for the cracking of coconuts. I smacked my refreshment down a couple of times and it started to leak. Holding it over my mouth, I let the liquid drip down into my mouth. So delicious was it that I toyed with the idea of opening another but by now I had expended my not substantial store of energy.

My shirt as a pillow behind my head, I made myself as comfortable as possible on the sand. The warm breeze blew over my naked body but by now, fortunately, it was properly dark and I am spared the embarrassment of having to describe the scene further.

Now, with my eyes closed, I had the chance for the first time to reflect upon my new position in life and found myself, somewhat against my will, agreeing with the profoundly obvious conclusion that Crusoe had come to when first castaway.

“EVIL: I am cast upon a horrible desert island, void of all hope of recovery.

GOOD: But I am alive…”

Although I should have stayed awake longer worrying about my situation, as luck would have it, fatigue took a hand and I quickly fell asleep lulled by the night song of that wonderfully named bird – the spangled drongo.