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.
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.
DON'T KILL ME NOW 