Fear Drive My Feet (16 page)

The terrible loneliness I had felt when I waved goodbye to Ian, a vanishing speck
of khaki against the green mountainside, was not to assail me again; for one thing,
life became too busy for loneliness to have a chance. And again, Lethe River itself
has no greater power to bring forgetfulness of all past things than New Guinea's
mountains. This green, strange, wild country had become home. My everyday companions
were half-naked black people; pidgin came more readily to my lips than English; the
seething movement of a big city had faded to the faintest memory, and even a piece
of ordinary bread would have seemed unfamiliar. The crude thatching that sheltered
me at night had become as homely and comfortable as the roof I was born under.

To make friends with the natives from the surrounding villages was my first aim.
If these natives were hostile,
the Japanese could capture me as soon as they chose,
but if they supported me wholeheartedly it should be possible to escape even from
intensive enemy patrolling. Therefore I set about learning the local dialect, and
before long was able to talk reasonably well about everyday things.

Each morning, as I ate breakfast in the sun, a couple of bright-faced youngsters
would squat at the edge of the veranda, to teach me new words. When I made a slip
they would rock with shrill peals of laughter, and then they would put their faces
close to mine, repeating the words patiently over and over until I mastered them.
They were good teachers, and I used to reward them with some trifle like a packet
of biscuits or a box of matches. Strange sounds not used in the English language
were much easier to distinguish when made by the children's clear voices than in
the adults' deeper tones. Conversation practice was at night, when some of the older
men would sit in the house yarning and smoking in the dark. When I stumbled badly
they would chuckle and nudge each other, and help me out of difficulties with a word
of pidgin. They seemed pleased that someone was taking the trouble to learn their
tongue, and for my part I felt flattered every time I used a new phrase successfully
and they complimented me on my progress.

Each morning that I remained in camp we sat on the rising ground above the house
and waited for our bombers to make their daily raids on Lae and Salamaua. The buildings
of Lae itself were hidden by the low hills just behind the town, but the famous ficus-tree
stood out clear against the skyline. Salamaua, across the waters of the Huon Gulf,
was in full view, though of course much farther away. Often, through the binoculars,
we saw fierce fires raging, and pillars of black smoke creeping higher and higher
into the sky.

Our planes used to make their runs quite low over the house, and we could count them
and see all their markings clearly. It was strange, after they had passed, to see
the first puffs of smoke from Lae's anti-aircraft guns bursting silently round the
planes like little balls of cotton wool. Forgetting the slow speed at which sound
travels, one wondered at the silence. Then, when the air was full of puff-balls,
the first sound of the explosions would thud echoing up the valley.

I found the bombers were great company and encouragement, and used to wish that I
had some way of telling their crews that every strike they made was excitedly cheered
by a little band of natives and a white man standing on the hills behind their target.
‘Olaman! Make 'im savvy you!' the police used to cry every time there was a particularly
heavy explosion. ‘Hey! Japan 'e sorry too much now!' the Bawan kanakas would shout
as the smoke climbed skyward.

Sometimes the raids were less successful. The American planes had particularly bad
luck, and several times all their bombs fell into the sea. Such a detail had small
effect on the exuberance of the communiques from General MacArthur's headquarters,
for I checked back on them every time I visited Bob's. If one believed these announcements,
never a bomb was dropped in New Guinea that failed to find its own special little
target. A native from a coastal village near Lae told us with a grin that more often
than not the raids made from a high altitude were ineffective – except that they
saved the Japanese the trouble of fishing, for the explosions stunned or killed thousands
of fish, and small boats were always held ready to pick them up when the raid was
over.

Any raid, however, was good propaganda material for me. The Japanese were spreading
stories among the natives
that there was scarcely a white man left in New Guinea.
These tales were beginning to filter in to the Wain country, and might easily have
been believed – for, after all, there was only one white man they could actually
see. The raids, in ever-increasing strength, were a more effective answer to this
Japanese propaganda than I could have hoped to provide.

My days at Bawan were a constant round of calls, some social, some business, and
some which could not quite be fitted into either category, though one had a shrewd
suspicion that business of some sort was at the bottom of them. About ten o'clock
the grassy clearing in front of the house would become filled with chattering women
from the surrounding villages bearing food. Each woman made a pile of her own food
and stood by it while I went down the line asking each one what she wanted. Almost
always salt was the answer, and Watute would follow me and deal out an appropriate
quantity to each. Sometimes they asked for newspaper, of which I had plenty, or razor-blades,
of which there were still a few among the trade stores. All their loincloths were
wearing out, so occasionally, for a very large pile of sweet potatoes, I gave a strip
of calico. In this way I bought, in addition to sweet potatoes, taro, bananas, and
lavish supplies of introduced European vegetables. I was never once short of tomatoes,
ordinary potatoes, sweet corn, cabbages, or beans, while several dozen eggs a week
was nothing unusual. Every now and then someone would come along with a fowl, for
which I gave two or three shillings, or perhaps a couple of razor-blades.

We bought far more food than we really needed, but it helped the people to get some
of the trade goods which they had lacked for so long. Besides, I did not want the
women to have to carry bundles of food home again.
Their visits kept me in touch
with the villages, too, and helped me to preserve friendly relations and to hear
the local gossip. The police and other native boys were also able to have plenty
of food: the more contented and comfortable they were in camp the better, for they
had to face such great danger and discomforts on the track.

Buka often went out in the afternoon, with a shotgun Ian had left me, in search of
pigeons, which made very fine eating. As we had only a couple of dozen shotgun cartridges,
he was rationed to one shot each day, but he often managed to bring back two birds,
having walked round for hours until he found two sitting close enough to knock both
with one shot. To complete the diet Ian had somehow, somewhere, found a few goats,
which gave a pint or two of milk a day. Food therefore presented no problem, so long
as one had salt or other trade goods to exchange for it. As I look back on this part
of my life in New Guinea, I don't wonder that the boys at Bob's jokingly accused
me of taking the risk of living in the Wain for my stomach's sake!

Another market I conducted daily was for brus, the native-grown leaf tobacco that
was planted round almost every house. The leaves were picked and hung to dry underneath
the house. When partly dried they were attached to a long length of thin vine at
intervals of an inch or so. This was wound up tightly, and the whole bundle was bound
with other pieces of vine. The result was a tight sausage-shaped bundle of tobacco-leaves,
very aromatic, from which one could get really good smoking tobacco. The quality
varied from leaf to leaf, and after a while one developed the knack of selecting
a good leaf. For more than six months I smoked nothing else but brus in my pipe,
and I grew to like it as well as any store tobacco. In a few weeks I had bought over
two hundredweight of the stuff,
which we hung on the veranda of the house. I intended
to take it all back to Bob's, where the tobacco famine for both whites and natives
was acute. This trade pleased the natives very much, for before the war the mission
had bought quantities of it. Now the villages were able to dispose of part of the
surplus that had accumulated.

Many people came for medical treatment, frequently offering food in payment for quinine
or for a dressing on a sore. But we took no payment, for we had enough food, and
Ian had left plenty of ordinary drugs and medical supplies. Unfortunately there was
no hypodermic, so I could not treat the many cases of framboesia, or yaws. This is
one of the commonest and worst diseases in New Guinea, and produces huge revolting
ulcers, rather like some syphilitic sores. It clears up almost magically after two
or three injections with an arsenical drug, and the hope of getting treatment made
people drag themselves to Bawan from places three or four days' walk away. Mothers
who had carried infected children from distant villages would ask hopefully if their
piccaninnies could have a ‘shoot', as they called the injection. When told no, they
would turn away sad-eyed and patient. Life was always hard for them, and they met
calamities like disease and hunger with a philosophical resignation that civilized
races have forgotten.

Jock told me that the pidgin word ‘shoot', for injection, was once amusingly misinterpreted
in peacetime. A group of kanakas were waiting at a hospital to receive treatment
for yaws. Lunch-time came and the three white men attending to the patients went
to eat. Two of them were old hands, and the third was a young man, a new arrival
from Australia. ‘We'll shoot those boys after lunch,' one old hand remarked. ‘Yes,
might as well finish them all off in one go,' the other agreed. Neither noticed the
look
of horror on the younger man's face, and while they ate heartily he sat there
and left his plate untouched. After hearing a couple more casual references to ‘shooting
the kanakas' he pushed his plate away and stamped from the table. ‘You people get
hardened to anything up here!' he stormed. ‘As far as I'm concerned, they may be
black but it's still plain bloody murder to shoot them!'

More ceremonious calls were made by the village officials from all the surrounding
communities. It was common for ten or a dozen luluais, tultuls, and doctor-boys to
arrive to have a talk and smoke some of my tobacco. They often gave me useful information
or passed on village gossip, all of which helped to build up a complete picture
of what was happening in the country. Watute used to talk to them for hours in the
house-police, and often they would stay overnight with him, helping to eat the enormous
pile of food which was always on hand. Watute was a shrewd fellow, and his long service
as a detective in the police force had made him something of a psychologist. A tultul
who called upon Watute with a secret in his mind usually went away having said more
than he intended, and perhaps without realizing how much he had said, so skilful
was the questioning.

We gathered that the Japanese, though still inclined to confine their activities
to the coast, were now warily extending patrols up the valleys, and all the villages
near Lae were now completely under their control. The villages of the Wain and Naba,
which had never been visited by the enemy, and had had no contact with them, would
almost certainly assist me if there were any trouble.

However, there were villages whose allegiance wavered and which I classed half-way
between the ones completely enemy controlled and those which supported me, for some
of them had been trading with the enemy as well
as visiting me. It was chiefly villages
of this sort I had to fear. A native of, say, Wagun village close to Lae, could safely
be treated as an enemy. The luluai of one village who came to see me had obviously
had dealings with the enemy, and yet I did not wish to antagonize him and prejudice
my chance of winning him over to our side. So I was obliged to let him wander about
our camp, though I took the risk that tomorrow would find him in Lae telling the
Japanese where we were. Circumstances had made shrewd politicians of these natives,
for they were caught between two opposing forces and were determined to side with
the ultimate winners. They sometimes argued with me that the Japanese were so numerous
that they must win. ‘Look,' they would say, ‘you know for yourself there are now
more Japanese in Lae alone than there were white men in the whole of New Guinea before.
The Japanese must be stronger.'

I would point to our air raids. ‘If the Japanese are so strong, why don't they stop
those aeroplanes from bombing them?' I asked. ‘Every day more and more of our planes
come over; we are getting stronger and stronger, and will soon finish the Japanese
off.'

They would rub their woolly heads and look worried. ‘Yes, perhaps,' they would say
with a shrug, and go off puzzled, trying to decide whether to back the side that
had many men or the side that had many aeroplanes – a small-scale edition of the
problem that arm-chair strategists were arguing about all over the world.

Some days I would spend walking from village to village, learning all the streams
and paths and short cuts, and stopping to talk to the people as they worked in their
gardens. By arriving unannounced, and doing away with all the ceremony that usually
attends the visit of a patrol officer, I managed to get the people to accept me as
someone who really lived among them – not one of themselves, perhaps, but at any
rate a sympathetic fellow human, instead of an irritating visitor who made them waste
time by lining up to be counted, and who told them that their village was not clean
enough. As time passed I felt more and more confident that these people trusted me
and would help me if they could.