Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.
On Sunday mornings, as on most other mornings, I would walk to the far side of the island to sit on a black sand beach, swim in the warm ocean and eat a packed lunch with a book as a companion. But Sundays were special. That was when the people of the village attended church and as I walked to the beach we'd stroll along together, would exchange small pleasantries as people do, people of such different backgrounds, cultures, experiences.
I was known in the village, it was a small place of small woven and thatched homes and the occasional one room, wood framed house strung out along the road and nestled beneath spreading mango and palm trees. In the yards bananas grew from tattered plants, chickens scratched about, goats tied to trees looked forlorn, a dog, always asleep, lay in a yard. Pigs were heard.
There was a store of sorts, the front of a home selling soda and crisps and bags of Nobby's Nuts; razor blades, feminine products, tins of cocktail sausages and a couple of t-shirts. There was a small, local hospital and clinic where one day along with the other gawkers of the village I stood outside and watched an operation through an open window. Nothing major but still, the staff were gloved and gowned and masked and worked to a chorus of owws and ahhs and staccato comments in a language not understood by me.
Everyone was dressed in their finest on Sundays, everyone but me who was on his way to a beach, and the torn shirts and worn dresses of the week were given way to carefully tended and pressed blouses and calf length skirts for the ladies and white shirts and good lap-laps for the men. Everyone carried a pair of polished shoes.
This was a village where people ate what they grew, ate what they raised in their yards until it could be killed, ate what could be caught on a line tossed into the ocean at dusk or dawn. Work was sporadic, money was got by selling a chicken or vegetables at the market or fruit to the yacht club in the town on the other side of the peninsula. Shoes were an expense, an unneeded item except for church and after a lifetime of walking barefoot over ground soft or stoney those feet had spread and soles thickened until there was not a shoe made that would comfortably fit them. Those feet were entities in their own right, as large as a cartoon rendering and as tough as the bottom of the hiking boots I'd bought from an expedition shop selling durable footwear. And yet, there were shoes, shoes carried in the hand of every man, woman and child. They were not laced together and flung casually over the shoulder, rather they were carefully clutched together in one hand, laces tucked neatly into the shoe and swung as we walked. Or they were clutched to the chest as the precious things they were, not risking a chance at scuffs or dirt.
We'd walk along, the people of the village and I, in silence mostly, and the mothers, like mothers everywhere fretted over the continued cleanliness of their children and glanced back occasionally at the straggling men. Then, at the edge of the village, was the church. It looked as you would expect a small church in a small village to look. It was small, white painted, shiplap wood, it had a steeple but as far as I knew, no bell. It had an upright piano in one front corner that when played was played with the clunky hesitation of an occasional musician searching for the right key. I only ever peeked inside, never stayed for a service as these seemed to go on forever in the tropical heat.
Outside, on one side of the door and beneath the shade of large trees were two benches and as each woman reached the entrance she would sit and carefully wedge one large foot after the other into her gleaming, black pumps, pumps that were made for the slender feet of city girls who never walked barefoot outside of the boudoir. Flesh puffed out of decorated cutouts, overflowed from the top and once on, the look in each lady's eyes was a mixture of pride, triumph and pain. The men too squeezed into their brogues, the opening spread as wide as it would go and the laces loosely tied. The children fretted and squirmed as their still small feet were fit into shoes they were more accustomed to wearing, they being a necessity for school. And then it was time for the service. We'd bid our good mornings and I'd walk another kilometre or so to my isolated piece of paradise and they would enter the church to hear of a paradise to come.
Once in a while I'd happen by as church was getting out and the now wilted and perspiring women would sit and unfetter their feet from the tortures of fashion and decorum with a look of heavenly bliss the minister could have only hoped for from his sermon. We'd smile at one another with the unspoken "thank heavens that's over with" floating between us.
As I said I was known in the village, known as the white man who walked by everyday on his way to a beach up the coast. I would nod, say hello or good morning or afternoon to those whose eyes I met along the walk but that was the extent of it. Until one day when a little boy started to follow me.
There was not always a happy relationship between the original peoples of the islands and the Europeans who came to dominate those lands. The Europeans earned the riches, set the rules, made and enforced the laws and and generally lorded it over the local people who saw much of their old ways disappear and their fates held in the hands of these foreigners.
Children were rarely disciplined with physical punishment but when the "fear of God" was needed to set them straight they were more often than not told to be good "or else the white man will come and get you" and so, children were generally afraid of white people.
The walk from Rabaul skirted along the bases of two extinct volcanoes and as it approached the far coast it passed over a small stream where women washed the family clothes in this fresh water. It was at this bridge one day that a little boy popped out of the bushes and at a good distance behind me trailed me into the village. I would occasionally turn my head and talk to him as we walked but he didn't answer and those times our eyes met he had a look akin to terror.
The next day he was there again, perhaps an act of childish bravado or of curiosity but again he tailed me along the road, through the town to the outskirts of the village. Again, as we walked I would turn my head and talk to him and as we approached the spot where he had left me I stopped, turned and squatted down to his level. I smiled and said hello and asked his name but the fear of the white man overtook him. His eyes got large, he said something, perhaps his name, then glanced from side to side, hesitated and lit out for the undergrowth.
The next day he was there again and walking only a few paces behind me where we could talk although it was me asking questions and him giving quiet, one word answers. The next day he again was a few paces behind me, we talked as usual but I also sensed a larger presence of many little feet and whispered voices. I stopped and turned. Directly behind me was the little boy and behind him at a further, and still safe distance, was a group of perhaps eight or ten children. The little boy smiled at me, we said hello and I asked him if these were his friends. He nodded. I said hello to the group of horror struck children, asked how they were but there were only nervous titters in reply. I said a few things and turned to resume my walk to the beach, through the village with my band of children trailing me.
The fascination that I held for the little children was brief as over the coming days the crowd dwindled to my usual little boy and a changing venue of friends. After a week or so of this I was on my way home one afternoon when one of the local men caught my eye, said hello and then invited me up to his house. This was relatively unheard of as there was a gulf between the races that was seldom overcome. To be invited to visit a home was a special honour and so I climbed the few steps carved out of the red dirt of the rise leading to his house and we shook hands. We sat on a bench beneath a tree and his wife brought us cool drinks from their thatched home. We introduced ourselves, talked for a bit and he told me the people of the village had been noticing me, had talked about me, I was seen as a "gutpella", a good fellow, someone who was kind to children and in this country like most others where children were loved and protected that was a high praise indeed.
We chatted a while, had a second glass of cool juice and after a half an hour or so I continued on my way to the far side of the peninsula and to the hostel where I was staying but from then on I would always stop and exchange pleasantries whenever I passed his home and he was sitting on his bench.
And the little boy? He still occasionally walked along with me, still a step or two back and still like all children answering my questions with one word replies. I was no longer dangerous and so the excitement of being with me, even at a distance was gone and now, most days, there were better things to do.
My little piece of paradise where I went most days was a black volcanic stretch of beach that was a kilometre or so up the coast. Once beyond the village the road became a path that snaked through the palms and more or less followed the ocean to my left. I would occasionally meet people along this path, a solitary man, always carrying a machete and perhaps herding a small group of pigs to a new feeding spot or carrying a large bunch of bananas or taro tied up in a bundle for sale in the market of Rabaul. Sometimes a woman, undoubtedly younger than the years that showed on her face, carrying a trussed chicken and toting a baby, laying in the woven string bag known as a billum that was strung across her forehead and hung down her back, would pass me with a curt nod and a look of suspicion, another toddler clinging to her as they passed the feared waitman (white man). It was a path of magic to a young man raised in the coniferous wilds of the Canadian shield and the palms trees leaning out over the ocean, the alternating heat of the sun and the coolness of the dense tropical shade and the other proliferation of exotic flora gave rise to a wonderment in me. I was awe struck by the place. I had never been to a place more untouched by the modern world and its reliance on money and the status of things. It had a rhythm that, while no doubt altered by the twentieth century, still had its roots in a time of long ago and a way of life that still today was tentatively clinging to that past.
Like so many places on the island my beach still had remnants of the Japanese occupation during the second world war. Two tilting, concrete pill boxes were the dominant feature on the broad stretch of sand and carved into the hill behind the beach was a cave that wound its way into the hillside for a good many meters. It was hard to reconcile the brutalities of that war with the tranquility of the place. What possible strategic reason could there be to occupy this island, to level the degree of brutality the Japanese showed to these people? Yet throughout the island there were rusting remembrances of that long ago war when the world came to New Britain with all the cruelty of demons bent on havoc and destruction. This lonely beach at the tip of one island in the Bismarck Archipelago, so remote and unnoticed by the world most people couldn't find it on a map, had been the scene of conquest and domination. Now on a sunny afternoon as I sat beneath a palm and watched the azure sea a small group of teenage girls appeared down the beach, yelled hello and waved, giggled and fell laughing into each others arms as they flirted with this stranger before disappearing into the forest leaving me alone with the incoming tide.
One dayI got a ride in the back of a small pick-up heading down the coast where it would drop me at the scene of another Japanese reminder of the long ago war. In the middle of nowhere the truck stopped, I got out and the driver pointed to a trail heading off into the undergrowth. A hundred yards or so later I came to another cave, this one too dug out of a hillside but bigger, big enough to hold a large boat. There was a full sized landing craft inside, set on a rail cart and poised to be pulled out, down through the jungle to the sea, a kilometre or two away, where it would have engaged the allied forces landing on the nearby beaches. But it had never been used and now for a small price a woman with the lack of a nose, it having been lost to yaws, allowed you in to walk around this piece of history. There was an elevated walkway dug into the earth and the boat now shared quarters with hundreds of bats that squeaked and fluttered around my head and as I gingerly trod through layers of bat guano alive with maggots. As I made my way around the perimeter my imagination ran riot at the effort it must have taken to construct and then have housed in that cave, this steel craft, all done in the draining tropical heat, amid privations and the spectre of death.
I lived in a student hostel run by a church. I had a room with a bed, a desk, a chair and a brilliant over head florescent light. I don't know how I came to be staying here, that memory has gone but stay there I did in my second floor room that looked out over the grounds of the church. They served breakfast and probably an evening meal because I have no memory of ever eating any where else other than the hostel or from food sellers selling "bakes" and from The Appleteaser. The Appleteaser, my one bit of necessary decadence in what was an almost lethally, healthy life.
At this church run residence for students and the odd wandering Canadian I don't remember ever talking to anyone there but I do remember sitting alone at the breakfast table each morning with my glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice and staring down at my bowl of fresh fruit all nicely peeled and diced in a plethora of tropical colours. There was mango, orange, paw-paw, pineapple and things unidentified but all good and wholesome, things that today I would pay a small fortune to have placed in front of me. But then, in those days i had eaten my fill of fresh fruit. I daily had pineapple sellers sell me sweet pineapple on a stick. I had spent more afternoons with chin and fingers sticky from the juice of ripe mangos of all types and sizes than I cared to repeat. I had sampled every bit of unknown exotica in the Pacific fruit world and it was all good. But at breakfast what I wanted, no, needed, was something sweet and something stimulating. I needed toast and jam and a cup of coffee or a pastry dripping with sweet icing and a coffee or a doughy cinnamon bun and a coffee. What I had was fruit. A few days of this and i was feeling ill. All this healthful living was wearing me down and I was listless and lethargic. I sat by the ocean and stared out to sea, too healthy to move, a stick of fresh pineapple hanging uneaten, limp in my hand.
Then, one morning I wandered, depressed and tired at eight a.m., over to the yacht club to look at the boats. And there it was, the Appleteaser. It was a small coffee shop with a counter and a small table or two and was straight out of downtown (insert name of your favourite city here), air-conditioned and redolent of coffee and sweet dough. I sat at the counter, swivelled on my stool and ordered a coffee and the morning specialty, a warm, doughy, cinnamon roll with bits of apple in it. I probably had two. Instantly I felt better and the day now shone before me waiting to be embraced and explored. Just another cup of joe and I'd be off.
Then there were the bake ladies. Bakes are sold in the same basic form throughout the tropics, a wad of dough deep fried with a little something in it. There are sweet bakes with sugared dough and a few raisins or some other bit of fruit and there are unsweetened bakes usually with a bit of fish mixed in with the dough. I discovered a bake lady on a side street in Port Moresby and ever since had been using these greasy lumps of fried dough as a general antidote to the otherwise destructively, healthy influences all around me. Still, they weren't enough to take the place of that first morning cup of coffee and a dedicated morning pastry. Now with the two of these I was ready to face the day and keep going until dusk.
One morning, filled with coffee and pastry, I was gazing out over the ocean towards a low volcano, smoking in the distance, and wondering how I could get to it when a couple of young fellows about my age happened by. They stopped and chatted and one of the things we talked about was the volcano and if visiting it was possible. A half hour later I was in an outrigger canoe being paddled by these two young men and heading across a stretch of open ocean. We landed on a rock strewn rise and climbed up an old lava flow to the sulphur crusted rim of the volcano and looked down into a caldera perhaps twenty feet or so deep with smoke coming out of the walls all around its perimeter. At the bottom was a pool of rust coloured water and tied to a large boulder and hanging down to the floor of the volcano was a massive ships rope, knotted every three feet or so.
This, I was told, was how you got in and with luck, out of this smouldering pit. The air was sulphurous and hot and after a moments hesitation I thought "Ah well. In for a penny, in for a pound", grabbed the rope and over the edge I went. The walls were hot to the touch and at each vent mounds of bight yellow sulphur had accumulated which crumbled to the touch. At the bottom the pool of water was close to boiling. I walked around, took a picture or two, saw what there was to see and then with much effort climbed the rope to the rim. The three of us walked around for a while on this desolate landscape and for a souvenir I took a lump of sulphur with me. This lump travelled with me for the rest of my trip and lasted a good few more years until bit by bit it got smaller and smaller until one day it just disappeared.
That evening I noticed the soles of my boots had cuts in them from the sharp edges of the rocks I had walked across that day and yet the two young men had walked barefoot over the same ground, had leapt from rock to rock with never a wince or trepidation as to where to put their feet. Truly testament to how tough the soles of your feet can get when used to the daily rigours of going without shoes.
Almost exactly twenty years later this smouldering volcano erupted sending a huge cloud of ash into the air, burying Rabaul and destroying the town.
I left Rabaul and the island of New Britain one morning, flew out over the Solomon Sea, over Bougainville Island, Choiseul Island to the island of Guadalcanal and the town of Honiara. Some time later in a small single engine aircraft with a few seats I landed on a grass airstrip on an island who's name I have forgotten. Landed as men, naked except for small loin cloths leaned against long spears and watched us taxi to a halt.
But there was never an island in the South Pacific that enthralled me like New Britain. Perhaps because it was my first island of that fabled part of the world but I like to think that it was a special place, apart from all others. It is surely that in my heart.
