A small ageing Englishman lived in the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi. He was a bachelor, and his work was not time consuming. He spent much time in the cabaret in the hotel basement. It was known as the Snake Pit by its aficionados.
The cabaret acts toured the North African circuit in troupes. Spanish dancers were popular. There is an affinity between flamenco and Arab dancing.
The female artists were required to entertain the male customers and persuade them to buy Champaign. For each bottle they sold they received a small plastic token which they could cash for spending money. The Greek who ran the place called this ‘making the consumption’. It was unpopular because some customers were too demanding.
The old Englishman made no demands and was well liked, especially by the Spanish dancers. They helped him endure his sixtieth birthday with a joyous celebration in the Snake Pit, only some of which he remembered. He awoke in his room in the morning to find they had flattered him by leaving some female underwear in his bed.
He fell in love with a young Yugoslavian contortionist who was unhappy. Her troop was on the point of leaving. He wanted her to stay in town a while longer, so he took her to a rival cabaret for an audition. He asked me to go along to give moral support.

She performed her strange act before two cynical Greeks whilst he sat nearby. The morning light flattered neither the contortionist nor the old Englishman. She failed the audition and left.

The Englishman retired to live in Spain where he was sometimes visited by second rate flamenco artists who were between engagements.

I cannot remember details of the few days I spent on the Fijian island of Taveuni. The event occurred so long ago, and my aged and declining memory will only release tantalising glimpses of that strange visit.  If you are Fijian and reading this, you will understand how hard it is for people to believe I was invited to drinks in the home of Ratu Penaia Ganilau on Taveuni. That I was in the company of two Fijian princesses, Adi Samanunu Cakobau and one of Ratu Penaia’s two daughter, Adi Sivu Ganilau I think, makes the story sound even more fanciful, but it happened.

Sometime in the 19^th Century Christian missionaries decided how to spell and how to pronounce Fijian words in English. They made it more difficult than was necessary and explanations are needed occasionally. So, the title Ratu is used by Fijian men of chiefly rank and Adi – pronounced Andy by me and others – is used by woman who are of similar status. The English pronunciation of Cakobau is Thakombau. I apologise for this bit of pedantry.

Let me begin by telling you who Ratu Penaia, Adi Samanunu and Adi Sivu were. Ratu Sir Penaia Kanatabatu Ganilau GCMG KCVO KBE DSO ED, to give him his full quota of honours and gallantry awards, was a great Fijian personality called ‘Ratu Penny’ by Queen Elizabeth II who liked him a lot, as did most people who met him. He was a hard drinking, Rugby football loving soldier and statesman. He was to become the last Governor General of colonial Fiji and the first President of the Republic of Fiji soon after it achieved independence as a nation in 1987. Adi Samanunu was the daughter of the late Ratu Sir George Cakobau the Paramount Chief of Fiji and also its sometime Governor General. He was the grandson of a reformed cannibal and King of Fiji, Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau.

Adi Samanunu Cakobau became a diplomat and government minister. She was a Fijian chief in her own right and a gracious lady even when she was young. Kipling, the much-maligned Imperial poet, would surely have said ‘she walked with kings – nor lost the common touch’. If he had, he would have been right.

Adi Sivu Ganilau has taken a leading role in demanding compensation for the Fijian sailors probably contaminated by radioactive fallout during the British nuclear weapon tests over the Christmas and Malden Islands – now known as Kiribati – in 1957. Orange Herald, the largest British nuclear weapon was released from a Royal Air Force Valiant bomber and explode high over Malden Island on 31^st May 1957. Amongst those present on board a Royal Navy warship in the vicinity was a contingent of 39 Fijian Naval ratings. Ratu Penaia visited them as one of three Fijian’s notables invited to observe the test. He was one of those who went ashore on Malden Island after the event. His feet were too big to fit protective rubber boots, so he went without, and it is likely that he was contaminated by radioactive fallout. He was to suffer from Guillain-Barre syndrome and died of leukaemia and sepsis in December 1993. Fiji finally paid its own remaining veterans of this and other British nuclear tests some compensation in 2015. Has the UK government offered to help? Probably not.

There were two Pacific island trading companies of note doing business in Fiji. I worked for one of them and probably set back its attempts to enter the tourist industry. The rival company had built a hotel on the Island of Taveuni and invited travel agents and airline representatives to sample its delights. I was amongst them as was Adi Samanunu and Adi Sivu. We were there at the same time as an Australian TV crew. They had discovered that you could send a waiter up a coconut tree to throw down a few nuts. You could slice the top of the nuts and pour in generous measures of vodka which blended with the cool coconut water, and you had a superb but near lethal beverage which encourages you to appreciate the qualities of the hotel and to recommend it to potential clients.

Amongst our pleasant duties in the cause of tourism we were invited to Ratu Penaia’s stately home. It was made of natural material and the roof was supported by hardwood ridge posts. I vaguely recall some fine Tongan or Samoan mats. These mats are highly valued, and the Tongans used to bring them to Taveuni and trade them for beautiful red perroquets, or, it is whispered, the loan of a few wives for a while. The latter exchange may have benefitted Taveuni’s gene pool.   The beautiful birds are sometimes called Red Shining Parrots or Taveuni Shining Parrots and are now endangered. There are still some in western Tonga.

Ratu Penaia offered his whisky in bottles with a generous invitation to ‘help yourselves’ which made close observation of the architecture difficult. It also makes the accuracy of some of this story suspect, but I like it this way.

When a Fijian chief’s residence was built in pre-Christian days each ridge post required a human sacrifice. One of the chief’s team of skilled craftsmen willingly gave his life for the honour being buried in the post hole. A sobering story.

Military kit soon acquires a name amongst military folk. Webbing is one such. It is the name we use for the harness and carrying pouches worn by soldiers during, and for some time after, World War II. It was made of stout cotton webbing, hence its name. It was secured with brass buckles which required constant polishing as did boots, shoes, badges, and barrack room floors.

The second time I encountered it I was in the Royal Air Force and of the lowly rank of airman 2^nd Class undergoing my recruit training.

Compulsory National Service was in force. Most men of 18 were required to serve in one of Britain’s armed forces for two years. Ladies were not required to do so. Thousands of young males were assigned by a remote bureaucracy to one of the three main arms of the British military. They were dispatched to camps where their civilian identity was removed and replaced by a military one. I was amongst them. I had been accepted to train for a short service commission in the Equipment Branch of the R.A.F. for which prior basic training was needed.

The first step was to divest us of our civilian clothes and replace them with an RAF uniform. Thereafter we drilled repeatedly on the great parade ground wearing our heavy boots until we responded in unison to words of command. We learned, amongst other things, how to handle our Lee Enfield .303 rifles, salute officers, read maps, polish linoleum floors, and to bayonet straw dummies suspended from frames. We were instructed in all these skills and more by men with loud voices, a predisposition for disciplining others and a jaundiced view of officers. One of them explained to us that ‘officers is shit’.  We called the process square bashing, but you may know it by its American version as boot camp. We spent three months doing this in deep winter in bleakest Staffordshire.

I wore full kit on my way to my grandmother’s house from an RAF station which specialised in square bashing sometime in 1955. I was on leave. I carried a large square webbing pack on my back in which I stuffed such things as a waterproof cape, a housewife, shoe polishing gear and spare underclothes. There was a water bottle at my side and small, but empty, ammunition pouches on my chest.

All this webbing was support by a canvas belt fastened by a brass ‘hook and loop’ buckle and with two brass buckles at the back to secure the braces on which the webbing packs and pouches were attached. I carried a white canvas kit bag over my shoulder and wore my airman’s hat as casually as I could.

I recall walking along the black cinder path from the last bus stop of my journey, past the little grocery store, through the council estate and over the canal bridge to my grandmother’s house where I was to spend time before the next stage of my training.

I had met webbing before as a young army cadet in my Cornish boarding school. At the age of 13 we boys were dragooned into army uniforms and taught military stuff such as what to if a Bren gun stops firing, how to march in time, salute officers and read maps. Whilst so doing our trousers were supported by an army webbing belt.

Our leisure time was unsupervised. Violence was commonplace amongst us. When we were driven inside by harsh weather, we spent time in the large schoolroom heated only by a log fire before which we jostled for a place to warm our backsides. Singed trousers and itchy chilblains were not uncommon.

It was here that I witnessed a small boy cruelly and extensively beaten by a large youth with an army webbing belt. I was later to fight the large youth in a bout of Cornish wrestling. Cornish wrestlers wear a short canvas jacket. He tried to strangle me with mine when he thought the referee, the Stickler, was unsighted. I met him in the boxing ring later with a little more success.

God, Latin, and the cane were the authorised version of our education. We lived in another and more brutal world.

It is a long and remote river is the Sepik. It wanders some 700 miles or so through hostile country from the Victor Emmanuel Ranges in the Central Highlands of New Guinea to disgorge itself abruptly into the Bismarck Sea a few miles east of Wewak. Unlike the Fly river, its southern cousin which drains into the Gulf of Papua, it has no delta. There must be a reason for this. I never stopped to ask why.

I got to it only once and that was in 1968 when Papua New Guinea was administered by the Australians. The company I worked for had acquired a chain of travel agencies situated in the main towns in Papua New Guinea. The company bought it from a feisty lady who was keen to get away from a bad divorce and make a new life in Australia. It took me some time to realise that my employers had been too easily persuaded to make the purchase. A lack of due diligence may have been the cause, or I may have screwed the business up being too young and less than well at the time I took it over. You can take your pick should you be so inclined.

I had been sent from Fiji to manage the business and was just recovering from multiple injuries sustained in an accident. Most of the bones I had broken had mended. My left femur, however, had not. It was held together by a device invented by the German surgeon Gerhard Küntscher during WWII. It was a metal rod hammered down the cavity of the femur to hold the broken bits together whilst the bone healed. One of the problems with the device in those days was that it allowed the bone to rotate about the fracture, and my left foot began to point inwards. I found that alarming.  Surgeons have recently cured this problem by drilling nails through the bone into the rod.

I was making a familiarisation trip to see for myself the potential tourist destinations around Papua New Guinea. That is why I was traveling up the Sepik river in a canoe hollowed from a huge cedar log. A crocodile head was carved on its sharp end for luck. I was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair behind the aforesaid feisty lady who was similarly seated. We were also accompanied by an Australian crocodile skin trader. The owner of the canoe, a small local man, sat at his outboard motor wearing an imitation pith helmet and smoking tobacco rolled in newspaper. The refreshment available was small tins of Craft cheese and a bottle of Cognac. This was supplemented after a while by the purchase of some fresh coconuts from one of the riverside villages.

The crocodile skin trader had a double purpose. He intended to make money as my tour guide and to purchase some skins recently pealed from crocodiles which he would sell via a local trade store to someone in Singapore whose name sounded like Arshak Gallstone. The said Mr Gallstone had a factory in Singapore where he cured the skins and made ladies handbags and other ‘accessories’ from them. My interest lay in the possibility that Japanese tourists might be persuaded to make a trip down the Sepik river to see where their fathers or grandfathers had fought in WWII.

The Japanese had occupied New Guinea during WWII. Between July and November 1942, they attempted to expand their Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere into Papua by forcing the Kakoda Track through the Owen Stanley mountains but were thwarted by the Australians who defended it heroically. The defence of the Kakoda Track is now a part of ANZAC history. Had the defence failed the Japanese would have had a foothold in Australian territory.

In 1968 there was still plenty of evidence in New Guinea of the strange brutality the Japanese had visited on the Australians they had captured. I was aware of the hostility Japanese visitors engendered, especially those who adopted military uniforms when they visited their ancestor’s graves. Even so we did a fair trade in Japanese ‘battlefield’ tours of Wewak, Madang, Lae and Rabaul. In Rabaul there were some old Australian WWII veterans who had been ‘Coast Watchers’. They had spent time alone and in great peril on remote islands reporting the movements of Japanese shipping by radio to the Australian navy. They were less than happy to welcome Japanese tourists.

We had set off upriver from Ambunti in the early morning and aimed to reach a village known to the crocodile skin trader before sunset. Here we would stay in the Haus Kiap, that is the house built and reserved for Australian District Officers and government officials. It was built on stilts to make it harder for ants to get into the house and to avoid inundating the residents when the Sepik river flooded the village.  It had a somewhat flexible floor made of split cane. The floor’s flexibility was disconcerting.

On the way upriver, we had stopped at a village or two and traded for fresh skins. By the time we reached our destination we had consumed a good portion of the brandy and acquired several potential handbags. When the canoe stopped the mosquitoes attacked in the still air. I crushed a squadron of them feeding on my forearms. They were bloated with blood which burst out of their abdomens and smeared my skin red. The females of these voracious Anopheles mosquitoes were vectors of the Malaria parasite. I was not infected. Perhaps they did not like the brandy.

We reached the Haus Kiap village and sat for a while talking to a group of village men with aid of the official village ‘talking chief’ who spoke in a ‘Pidgin’. My broken leg was a source of embarrassment. In the New Guinea Pidgin, I was known as the ‘big fella ‘im leg ‘im bugger up’. To add to the effect this unfortunate title had on my self-esteem, ‘crippled limbs’ were thought by natives of the Sepik villages to contain evil. My ‘rotated’ left leg and my ungainly limp made me the object of some suspicion in the village.

We slept on bunks in the Haus Kiap from whence I could see the Sepik river gleaming in moonlight through the open door. I stumbled out of my bunk, through the open door and down the steps for a call of nature during the night. On the way back, the treacherous split cane floor attacked me. The cane was not distributed continuously across the floor and my injured leg pushed through a gap leaving me with one leg dangling through the floor and another at right angles to it on the surface. I manged to extract myself from this undignified position. The dangling leg had been scoured by the sharp ends of the split cane and needed first aid.

We made our way down stream the next morning. We passed a side channel at the entrance to which some men in a canoe made gestures in our direction. They clearly implied we were not welcome. The Australian guide told us this story.

Somewhere down the side channel was the ‘Village of Angry Men’. During the WWII some Australian prisoners of the Japanese had escaped and somehow reached the village. They were closely pursued by Japanese soldiers. The Australians dived into the thick bush and hid. The Japanese told the villagers they would kill some of their menfolk if the Australians did not give themselves up. Despite some frantic hollering from the villagers the Australians remained hidden. The Japanese shot some of the village men. The villagers, who were innocent spectators of the war, blamed the Australian fugitives – and by extension all white men – for the barbarous act. That is why the men in the canoe at the entrance to the side channel had made their anger clear as we passed.

When WWII ended my parents bought a small farm in Cornwall.

I am not sure what motivated them, but we moved to that remote county on VJ day. My mother was to supplement the farming income by taking paying guests during the summer and my father was to build up a small herd of Channel Island milking cows which would provide us with a basic living. He reserved two fields adjoining a tidal creek as a market garden plot on which he was to grow flowers and early new potatoes.

My mother advertised for paying guests by saying that our house ‘overlooked Padstow Bay’. That was true but only from the window of one of our single bedrooms.  To save her from prosecution under some law against over imaginative advertising my father constructed a viewing site in the back garden so that visitors, with a little exertion, could truly see the great bay from the premises. My mother, ever innocent, would encourage the visitors to look inland where they would spot Cornwall’s very small mountains, Brown Willy and Rough Tor, up on distant Bodmin Moor. In her imagination the Cornish version of the Arthurian legend came to life. For her Excalibur might yet reappear from the depths of Dozmary Pool in the hands of the Lady of the Lake. And so, the paying guests occupied our house throughout the summer. We slept in the garage on old camp beds and illuminated our evenings with candles. The garage doors were hung badly and when the fierce Cornish gales blew, we plugged the cracks with sacks and wore our day clothes in bed for warmth.

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.