Author: john oakes

John Oakes was bombed by mistake by the Luftwaffe in World War II. educated in Cornwall, served in the Royal Air Force as a logistics and air movements officer, lived and worked in Libya for eight years and for three years in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. He travelled widely in Libya and Papua New Guinea, led field studies in Norway, met Jomo Kenyatta in Benghazi, Louis Leaky in the Serengeti, and John Steinbeck in Port Moresby. He was severely injured in Fiji and subsequently taught in one of the UK's oldest schools. In 2009 he was commissioned by the History Press to write about juvenile participation in war and wrote 'Kitchener's Lost Boys' about the many underaged recruits volunteering for Kitchener's New Army when the Great War began. He went on to write about Libya. His latest book, War Lord, examines the events leading up to and following the fighting in Libya triggered by the Arab Spring. He has written several papers for the War Child Journal and for the Journal of the Daniel Ceramic Circle. He is currently using his diaries recording his life as a boarders' House Master in Reading School to explore the link between boarding schools and imperialism.

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

I have just read a piece by an American travel writer about the Ovalau Club in Levuka on the small Fijian Island of Ovalau. He writes somewhat sardonically of the sad remnants of British colonial rule he detected there. In doing so he has overlooked the role played by Americans in Levuka’s history. He may not have noted that cannibalism was popular protein supplement in Fiji until Christianity took hold in the late 19^th Century. Probably the last person to be eaten in Fiji was the missionary, the Reverend Thomas Baker, who was cooked and consumed by the people of Nubutautau village in 1907, some say with his boots on. Writing disparaging stories about British colonialism is popular amongst the generation responsible for calamitous interventions in Iraq and Libya.

June, Nikki and I left Libya to live in Fiji. June and I worked for a trading company in Suva. The company, now doing business in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, had its origins in the trade store opened in Levuka in 1868, in the wild and rambunctious time of whaling, copra trading, cannibalism, fighting and carousing.

In the late 1960’s the manager of the now historic trade store asked me to help him arrange for a gang of men from the interior of the island of Ovalau to fly to Queensland for a season of work on the pineapple plantations. There was little or no employment on the island and the village men were not unhappy about it. The trade store manager was the son of a Kai Valagi (European) father and a Fijian mother. He had been brought up in his mother’s village which we were to visit together. We intended to make the preliminary and somewhat formal arrangements to get the menfolk to earn some money.

In those days, you could not fly from Suva to Levuka. You caught the ferry. It departed from a rickety jetty by a Chinese trade store some miles by road out of Suva. In so doing it avoided the time-consuming business of negotiating the gap in the reef which guarded Suva’s harbour.

You could park your car at the Chinese store for a small fee. A hut at the far end of the jetty housed a toilet which was drained through a hole in the floor under which colourful fish fed on the rich bounty left by waiting passengers. Levuka is on the East side of Ovalau so the ferry took a while to get there. I found watching flying fish and spotting turtles helped to pass the time.

The lone hotel in Levuka, the Royal, was a wooden building riddled with termites. They were consuming the hotel. It is still there so they have not been wholly successful. I have little memory of the place because the store manager and I spent a long and convivial time in the Ovalau Club about which I remember but two things. The first was the captain of a Japanese super trawler who flew into a rage when asked where his highly efficient fishing fleet operated. The second was a framed letter dated sometime during World War I and displayed on the wall. The writer was apologising for the theft of some chicken from the neighbouring island of Wakaya. It was signed by Felix Graf von Luckner, the German officer who captained the commercial raider Seeadler (‘Sea Eagle’) operating in the Pacific during World War I.

I was the lone Englishman in the club. It was thus my sole responsibility to behave like an oppressive colonialist. I did my best.

In the morning, we set off for the village in the store manager’s car. We were both nursing a hangover which in my case reduced my anxiety about driving in mountainous country. The village was somewhere in the middle of the island and the road was rough. There is a sovereign remedy for a hangover in Fiji. It is known as Kava. It is what Fijians drink ceremonially and socially. We were looking forward to the greeting ceremony during which Kava is drunk in the Vale Levu, the chief’s house.

In a Fijian village, the Vale Levu is the biggest of the straw built residences. It is usually decorated with cowry shells and rich in tapa cloth. The floor is often covered with finely woven grass mats. The chief’s bed is featured and usually has a bamboo frame containing layers of pandanus mats for comfort. The chief’s wife and children are provided with a lesser bed.

When the store manager and I arrived, we found the village men huddled in a group around a tanoa, the big wooden bowl in which Kava is prepared from the roots of the Yongona bush and from which it is dispensed in half coconut shells. Small amounts of Kava make your mouth and some of your face numb. This is probably why it is a hangover cure. A medium amount induces feelings of relaxation and renders the concepts of work and money irrelevant. Too much Kava sends you to sleep.

We entered the Vale Levu with a proper show of politeness. In the middle of the room was the chief’s matrimonial bed. He had been to the trade store and purchased the biggest modern double bed, the most elaborate headboard, the plushest matrass and the brightest of bed linen available. It was a cultural anomaly which dominated the Vale Levu; a mighty marital metaphor.

For some years, men from the village did seasonal work in Queensland.

EBB TIDE. NOT MUCH TIME LEFT

I once lived near a tidal creek in Cornwall. I rowed my small boat about on the high tide water and beached it on the estuarine mud flats when it ebbed.

I am old now. My memory is ebbing and exposing stories from my past. They have been well rotted by long immersion but some of their original form remains. As I examine them new truths begin to appear. I missed so much in my first careless encounter with them all those years ago. I must write them down before they fade away

A SMALL BOAT, A TIDAL CREEK, AND PRIMROSES

It was a flat-bottomed canvas sided folding boat. My sister and I messed around in it in the summer, often with the family dogs which were becoming more mongrel generation by generation.

I believe it was designed to be paddled ashore by heroic marines engaged in nocturnal amphibious operations during World War II. When we bought it there were no seats and the floor was covered by a rubber carpet to reduce the noise of military boots when approaching enemy shores. We bodged up some seats, fitted some rowlocks and bought a pair of oars from the boat builder’s yard in Padstow.

My parents had spotted it and purchased it in a sale of surplus stores left over from the war. I contributed to its cost by picking, bunching, boxing and despatching to Covent Garden market bunches of wild primroses. There they were sold to London florists for a few shillings. They grew in spring on a steep hill above a cliff on the opposite side of Little Pertherick Creek from our family market garden where we grew anemones, cauliflowers and new potatoes.

Little Pertherick Creek is a muddy tributary of the Camel river estuary which opens into Padstow Bay. It was almost cut off from the bay by the railway line laid long ago across its mouth. There was, and still is, an iron bridge which allowed the creek to drain into the bay and through which the tide surged twice a day to inundate its wide and glutenous mud flats.

We tied the boat to the decaying hulk of a small wooden cargo vessel which had been beached near the creek-side entrance to a long disused slate quarry. Its holds must have transported the slate to Padstow for onward transmission to numerous Cornish roofs.

The slate had also been used to build the enclosing wall of a disused sea mill just yards away behind a mound of quarry waste. The tide would rise twice a day and fill the great mill pond. As the tide fell the millpond’s energy was harnessed as the water drained through the sluice-gate to work the long-gone mill wheel.

The spring tides would bring the water up close to our tethered boat. Every now and then the alignment of the sun and moon would cause the tide to rise high enough to float it. On one such tide it broke loose and made a bid for freedom with the retreating water under the railway bridge and out into the bay.

It would have found its way into the Atlantic but for the ferry man who plied his boat backwards and forwards across the bay between Padstow harbour and the sandy beach of Rock. He salvaged it and towed it into harbour. We brought the boat home in our small and shabby army surplus van.

CHINKY ROWE’S BED

I am sure most of us in the dormitory remember Chinky Rowe’s empty bed bathed in moonlight. For most, if not all of us, the preceding day was our first close encounter with the arbitrary nature and the numbing shock of death.

That afternoon we had set out from school in a coach for our visit to a beach on the north Cornish coast. We made the same trip once a week at the end of the summer term.

Getting into the sea was always a relief for us. We lived an unhygienic life by today’s standards but that was not unusual in the late 1940s.We wore our suites all day and every day of the term and they became notably unsavoury after a while. We changed our shirts and underclothes once a week and they also developed a distinct character.

I cannot remember arriving at the beach. I got into the water and made for the rocks which thrust out into the sea on the left of the beach looking out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Three or more boys had been ahead of me and had climbed out onto the rocks. One of them had just done so and was nearest to me.

I was somehow stuck in a fierce undertow. It was around my legs and getting stronger. I felt I had reached the limit of the strength in my legs and asked the boy near me on the rocks for help. He refused.

By chance the undertow went away suddenly. I climbed onto the rocks and messed around for a while. The sea was getting high and angry.

Later we were all sitting spread out along the beach. There was a sense of apprehension. I suspect we had been called out of the sea and marshalled for a head count.

Four men carried Chinky Row’s body in a grey blanked along the beach in front of us. His inert legs dangled out of the blanket. He had been caught in the undertow and swept by it along the length of the beach.

They say you should not fight the undertow but swim along with it until you reach its end. The waves were too high that day and would have beaten him even if he knew that. He drowned alone.

His empty bed was bathed in moonlight that night. We never saw his parents.
He vanished somehow from our lives. We never talked about it.

FIJI

THE PAYING WARD

In 1967 I was in the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva in Fiji. I had been severely injured in an accident and, I am told, near death at one time. I survived the immediate trauma and embarked on the long business of mending my body in what was called the Paying Ward because we who occupied it could afford the modest fees for our operations and care. The Fijian nurses set about mending my mind with unfailing humour. My fellow patients came and went, some I fear to their respective heaven or hell depending on their religious preference.

It was not unusual that we patients should talk about death in the circumstances. One of my Fijian neighbours in the ward was from the island of Benga where fire walkers occasionally displayed their immunity from burns by running across pits full of very hot stones. My ward neighbour had walked barefooted for most of his life. When he was confined to a hospital bed for a long time the thick skin on his feet began to crack into deep and painful fissures. The famous fire walkers may have benefitted from the insulation afforded by similar hard skin on their feet I suspect.

He told me that there was a Fijian healer on the Island of Bega who could mend a broken limb with the power of his mind. I would have given him the chance to prove it had I lived on Bega.

He also told me the story of the serpent god who lived in a cave in the Nakavada mountains in the interior of Viti Levu, the largest of Fiji’s numerous islands. When you die, he said, your soul journeys into the afterlife via the serpent’s cave and it decides there and then if you go to heaven or hell. He was unable to tell me the criteria the serpent applied when making its decisions. Modern religions are more helpful in this regard and give you a checklist. That seems moderately better than hoping the serpent was having a good day when you fetch up in its cave.

WHICH DOCTOR?

It is fair to say that June saved Setiri’s life given the way things were in Fiji in those days. I was in hospital and likely to be there for some time. We could afford to pay for my treatment. Setiri was a Fijian ‘house girl’ and could not afford modern health care. In fact, she was our ‘house girl’ who lived in a hut in our garden and looked after our daughter. In retrospect, we have much to answer for in this regard.

Modern medicine was out of reach to many Fijians. They relied on self-appointed doctors who claimed to cure most illnesses. Whilst I was in hospital, I heard stories of one such person on the island of Beqa who could mend broken bones by the power of his mind alone. An outlandish tale easily dismissed but in mitigation my family, who lived in England, called on the services of a ‘wart charmer’ to exercise her mental powers on both animals and humans. It was said that warts vanished from cow’s teats after she had stared at them for some time. In his old age my father became an enthusiast for homeopathic medicine, a practice which lacks evidential support.

Setiri began to suffer from abdominal pain. She sent for a well-known Fijian lady ‘doctor’ who visited her in her hut. She advised Setiri to engage in frequent copulation to drive out the pain. She also undertook to concentrate on Setiri’s problems from afar providing she was supplied with cigarettes to keep her going. Despite her best efforts and Setiri’s’ conscientious compliance with her instructions, the cure failed and her pain increased. June became concerned and took Setiri to our family doctor. He diagnosed acute appendicitis and arranged for an emergency operation. The appendix was near to bursting and would have probably been fatal if not removed immediately. Setiri was cured and returned to work.

There was a sequel. In due course, I was discharged from hospital. I had broken both legs and my left wrist in a traffic accident. My left leg had been fractured above and below the knee and I was unable to move it. My condition upset Setiri. In return for June’s help in the matter of her appendicitis she engaged the Fijian lady who had recommended the ineffective copulation cure to exercise her powers on me.

The lady arrived soon afterwards. She carried a bottle of purple oil with which she massaged my left leg whilst Setiri and June looked on. She then told me I would be able to elevate the hitherto inert limb from the bed. She was right, the dammed thing shot up in the air. My left leg had suddenly been endowed with energy and I was forced to acknowledge the lady’s control over my mind. The effect wore off when she left but Setiri was happy that her obligation to June had been redeemed.

SHIPWRECK ON A REEF WITH DIAMONDS

Sometime in the dead of night I received a call from a senior personage in the trading company for which I worked in Fiji. I am not sure why it was me he called but I did have the experience to deal with his problem. He told me that the company’s ship, the SS Lakemba, on its way from Suva to Sydney, was shipwrecked on a reef. The SS Lakemba was an old-fashioned cargo and passenger ship which had long tramped her way from Vancouver to Sydney and back via Hawaii, Western Samoa, and Fiji. She had reached the end of her honourable life and was to be paid off when she arrived in Sidney. Now she was about to die. My caller told me a rescue ship was on its way to save the passengers and crew who would be coming ashore in due course. What, he wanted to know, could I do about it?

I had dealt with similar events in Libya. It was easy to tell him to set about chartering an aircraft to take them to Sidney and to arrange hotel rooms for them in Suva whilst we waited for the rescue ship to arrive. He asked me to see if a suitable aircraft would be available whilst he conferred with his superiors. I called Qantas and they had a Boeing 707 in Sidney we could use for a price. The ship’s owners agreed to charter it and instructed me to do so and to make the other arrangements to get the passengers from the dockside in Suva to Sidney as smoothly and quickly as possible. By the time the rescue ship, the Cable and Wireless vessel ‘Retriever’, arrived alongside Suva docks we had staff, accommodation and ground transport ready. We had also chartered Fiji Airways to fly the passengers from Suva to the international airport at Nadi to meet the Qantas charter: interesting but not exciting.

It was the consummate seamanship of the captain and crew of the CS Retriever which saved one hundred and fifty survivors four of whom were in their eighties. The captain of the SS Lakemba had kept her engines going and the propellers turning until the rescue had been all but completed. Soon after they were stopped the ship fell off the reef into deep water. It was, as they say, beyond salvage.

When the rescue ship docked, I went aboard with a representative of the wreck’s owners. I found the rescued passengers in a saloon. They were venting their frustration in emphatic terms. I stood on a chair and explained the arrangements I had made. This cheered them up somewhat. I waited with the owner’s representative at the foot of the gangway as they disembarked. A somewhat distraught passenger engaged us in conversation. This is the gist of his story in so far as I remember it.

He had joined the ship in Vancouver intending to emigrate to Australia. He arranged for his camper van to be loaded aboard as deck cargo. He would use it to travel around Australia looking for a place to settle. The camper van had, of course, gone down with the ship. He added that he had invested his savings in diamonds. He had concealed them in the bodywork of his camper van and been unable to retrieve them before he was rescued.

ON INCONTINENCE AND CORRUPTION

(I wrote this in September 2021)

A few days ago, I was admitted to hospital because I was in great pain and patiently incontinent. My prostate, like so many in the service of male octogenarians, had swollen and trapped urine in my bladder. But some leaked uncontrollably. Doctors, nurses, radiologists, pharmacists, and numerous staff who labour in offices, kitchens, laundries, laboratories, and reception desks, all combined to see me diagnosed, treated, medicated, and sent on my way with a plan of action. I am now at my daughter’s home where she and my granddaughter are doing their best to support me until I am reasonably independent.

What are my chances of being reasonably independent and, if I am, for how long? I live alone and I am within a few days of my 86^th birthday. At worst, and not unlikely, I will have to live with a catheter draining my bladder into a plastic bag strapped to my leg. Now, the apparatus leaks, and I must wear incontinence pads. So do many others I know. They will recognise the adjustments living like this requires of us. In my case my morale has leaked away into a mental sort of plastic bag, and I am forced to conclude that I am frail and incontinent. Can I still be a useful citizen, or will I add to the burden on the taxpayer and the many charitable organisations?

I am lucky to be alive during a great revolution which compares to – but far outpaces – the industrial revolution between 1760 and 1840. Some of the recent advances have made our lives so much easier and more salubrious but some have helped those who would take us all back into a brutal nightmare in which man’s inhumanity to man and women are hugely facilitated.

I am disturbed by this gathering storm and by the portents of conflict for the second time in my life. In this context my book about Libya came out on 15^th August. As I worked at it the brutality and corruption that is endemic in Libya became clearer. I hope I can persuade you to read it. It is called ‘War Lord – Khalifa Haftar and the future of Libya’. My Amazon page is here. War Lord: Khalifa Haftar and the Future of Libya: Amazon.co.uk: Oakes, John: 9781398107786: Books.

I will try to write about it and about the progress of my geriatric ailments in future posts. I hope some amongst you will do me the favour of responding with advice and constructive criticism.

John Oakes

19^th September 2021.