Bows down and shoulders hunched,
St Helena
rammed her way around the island, which was illuminated by sudden shafts of sunlight, instant rainbows, and over which streamed veils of cloud. We reached the southern edge—a cape where the three-masted barque
Italia
had been wrecked in 1892, bringing the surnames of Repetto and Lavarello to the island, where they still survive—but the wind refused to calm. In fact, as we pummelled our way further and further around, it became clear that this, unique among all islands I have known, is a place without a lee—there is nowhere to shelter. The gales either blow around the island in some devilish spiral, or else pour as a katabatic torrent up and over the mountain, striking anything below, no matter at what quarter of the compass.
Without doubt the little green schooner in which I had been planning to make the voyage would have suffered terribly in the storm. Had we been under sail, and north of the island, we could barely have escaped destruction; had we tried to run downwind we would have been blown miles away, quite possibly dismasted, probably overwhelmed. The only escape would have been to hack the halyards with knives and get the sails down in an instant, and run before the weather under bare poles. But I fear we would have reacted too slowly: Tristan weather has a speed and a force to it that is terrifying, and even the old master of our ship, well-found and solid though the vessel was, scratched his head in disbelief and wonder as the winds began to die and the barometer to climb back. Even he had never seen anything like it.
We spent the remainder of the day tacking gently to and fro off the Edinburgh coast—coming in to the anchorage, steaming ten miles out to sea, returning to home waters, and back again. We had a couple on board, the Robinsons, who were hoping to see how their son David, the island doctor, lived, but who now knew they would never be allowed to land, since Mr Robinson was too old, and his wife had her leg in plaster. The islanders had radioed across that only those who were fit and fleet of foot could hope to make it safely to shore, if the swell ever did die down; the couple called
their son on the radio, and he promised to stand and wave to them from the green in front of the Administrator’s house. But they never saw him: whenever he was waving, the ship was steaming the wrong way, and during those moments the ship was close enough and pointing in the right direction their son was on the radio, or dealing with a patient. ‘Everyone here’s got a cold,’ he explained. ‘It must have come from the
QE2
. Some of our people went aboard her, and once one brings a germ ashore it goes round like wildfire. So I’m pretty busy, like it or not. I sometimes wish ships didn’t call at all. They may bring the mail, but they bring all sorts of illness, too.’ But he added that he was, after all, being paid to deal with illness, and a good epidemic kept him from being bored.
The replacement doctor, Paul Kennaway, with whom I was sharing a cabin, had brought along the Medical Research Council papers with the results of the detailed studies of the islanders that had been made during their exile in Britain after the eruption. Nearly half of them had asthma—‘hashmere’ being the local word—and almost as many had a plague of parasitical worms. There were signs of inbreeding, too—there had been no new blood injected into the island stock since the early part of the century, and there were problems with eyes, for instance, that owed much to the too limited genetic pool. Asthma was still a serious illness on Tristan, it seemed. Few of the men left home without a Ventolin ‘puffer’—even the hardiest of seamen were afflicted—and when the wind was from the east, and sulphur fumes from the volcano were wafting over the settlement, the sound of wheezing and coughing drowned out even the crash of the surf and the howling of the gales.
The night passed quietly, and the wind dropped to the merest breeze. The settlement was a cluster of lights until ten o’clock exactly, and then the generators at the crawfish factory were switched off, and every light died. I thought I could make out a few windows lit by flickering oil lanterns and by candles, but it might have been imagination: the community seemed to have been snuffed out of existence, and all around was the impenetrable blackness of an overcast night at sea.
Next morning the surf was still running high between the tiny
moles of Calshot Harbour—great breakers would regularly crash between them and wash right over the masses of concrete dolosse blocks (said to have been shaped after the design of a sheep’s anklebone, and at the core of all new harbours constructed in the southern hemisphere, and to have made their South African inventor millions of rand). But the islanders seemed to think a landing might be possible later in the day, if the weather held. By nine, with the wind now just a gentle and fitful wafting from the south-east, we heard the putter of an old Lister engine, and a blue-and-white boat, flying the Union Jack defaced with the great seal of the colony of St Helena, made its way out towards us. A few minutes later the Colonial Administrator, and the first seven Tristanians to be permitted out of harbour, were standing on our foredeck.
The islanders were tall and tough-looking, with long-jawed faces and olive skins, tanned by years of exposure to the winds and the sea. They wore identical blue boiler suits, and though some were blond and Nordic, and others dark and Mediterranean, their faces all had a strangely similar look, as though they might be close cousins. Their similarity—of dress, of face, of mannerism—they were all given to broad smiles, to courtly politeness, and to an air that managed to be at once proud and deferential—was vaguely frightening, as though these were aliens from a different planet, making their first contact with what they called ‘the houtside warl’. One, an immense man who was known to all as Lofty, had an oddly deformed left eye; but he had an almost childlike air of fun about him, and was joking and laughing with all around so that I was minded to compare him with Lenny, in Steinbeck—a gentle giant, slightly out of step with the rest of humanity.
All these islanders, indeed, seemed to step to a subtly different drum—they spoke a pure, though oddly inflected English, they flew the colonial flag, and they carried pictures of the Queen and her children. But there was a difference about them, as though they were detached by more than mere distance and stormy sea from the mainstream of human society. They were British in name alone: before all else they were, without a doubt, Tristanian.
The Administrator, in sharp contrast, looked as though he had
stepped out from the members’ enclosure at Cheltenham racecourse. Roger Perry, a naturalist, a writer, a specialist in llamas, the flora of the Falkland Islands and the animals of the Galapagos, had been on Tristan for six months. He had come out for the morning’s journey, and the first formal greeting with his Governor, in classical British dress: a brown trilby, a tan suit, stout and brilliantly polished brown shoes, a silk tie and a silk pocket handkerchief. He needed only a pair of binoculars and a form guide to complete the picture.
The Governor stepped into the waiting boat, was joined by two Whitehall officials, the Administrator, the seven Tristanian boatmen, and I climbed in just as Lofty cast off and we were whirled out on to the waves. We chugged towards the harbour and waited, the boat turning in small circles until one huge wave raced in towards the land: the steersman, his jaw set firm, his hand clamped on to the tiller, gunned the engine, rode on to the crest of the wave and shot through the harbour entrance six feet above the levels of the moles.
It was all over in five seconds. The water was still and calm inside, and there were dozens of helpful hands reaching down to haul us up. A minute later and, my legs unsteady from all the days at sea, I was standing on Tristan soil, watching an Imperial ceremony of great familiarity, played out in touching miniature. The Tristan Boy Scouts and the Tristan Girl Guides, dark youngsters in the brown and blue uniforms sent down from Buckingham Palace Road, stood at attention. A bugle was blown, a banner was raised, a salute was made, an anthem was played—and the Colonial Governor of St Helena was formally welcomed on to the tiniest and loneliest dependency in the remanent British Empire. I found I was watching it all through a strange golden haze, which cleared if I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand: the children looked so proud, so eager to please, so keen to touch the hand from England, from the wellspring of their official existence.
They all looked as though they were trying so very hard to be British, out here in the middle of nowhere. I found it deeply affecting. I wasn’t alone. I looked around, and saw a young woman
behind me, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She was a teacher’s wife, she said later: she had never seen anything quite so touching in all her days. It was proof positive, she said, that there was some good in the old country yet, if the youngsters were still so keen, and had arrived on the quayside without being told, or ordered. ‘They just knew they had to come down and salute him,’ she explained. ‘They’ve been looking forward to it for ages.’
Ahead of me stretched the village—a cluster of houses, some roofed with tin, some thatched, all with gable ends of soft basalt. All of them had a split front door, the upper half open, the lower half shut to keep out the chilly breeze. The small number of expatriates sent out to help run the island—two teachers, the doctor, the South African padre, the Colonial Treasurer and the Administrator—lived in wooden prefabricated houses, painted black with creosote. There were hedges of flax on all sides, which helped break up the wind, though the Union flags fluttered briskly, and it was better to keep walking than to stand around in the cold.
But the village was clinging to the edge of a monster. Behind, like a stage set, was a sheer wall of grey, the great basalt cliffs rising to the island summit. The wall was 2,000 feet high, and it was evident that stones were falling with terrible regularity—indeed, one massive section of the cliff had broken away at the time of the eruption, and the pale grey scar, with millions of tons of debris spilled in a fan below, served as a potent reminder of the power of the land, and the weakness of those who dared cling to it. Wisps of cloud floated along the upper reaches of the cliff, and all above was invisible, cloaked in thick grey mist, wet and inhospitable. A few sheep clambered up the crags, and cows wandered on the village outskirts. Once I saw an old woman sitting sidesaddle on a donkey, riding back along the colony’s only road from the Potato Patches, two miles from Edinburgh to the west.
I walked through the village towards the new volcanoes, towards the house I had been told was home to a middle-aged lady named Emily Rogers, about whom I had once read a touching story. Derrick Booy, who had served on Tristan as a naval radio operator during the Second World War, and who has written perhaps the
most sensitive of all the few accounts of Tristan, fell briefly, but hopelessly under the spell of a girl then called Emily Hagan:
The night air was an enveloping golden presence as we stood at the break in the wall. I was conscious of bare, rounded arms, and the fragrance of thickly clustered hair. The lingering day was full of noises. As the sky darkened to a deep umbrageous blue, speckled with starlight, and the village was swallowed by darkness at the foot of the mountain, from somewhere in that blackness came the throaty plaint of an old sheep, like a voice from the mountain. From that other obscurity, silver-gleaming below the cliffs, came the muttered irony of the surf.
The girl waited only a few minutes before her full lips breathed ‘Good night’ and she slipped towards the house.
‘Shall I come to see you again?’ I called softly.
She may or may not have answered ‘Yes’. If she did, it was probably from politeness.
Derrick Booy saw her many more times, and they held hands before the fire in the Hagans’ old house, Emily’s face bright in the guttering light of a bird-oil lamp. And then, as war so often demands, the young sailor had to leave, suddenly, and with no notice and no alternative. A ship arrived to pick the party up, and the pair—if such they ever could be called—were forced to say farewell:
The watchers on the beach were all very still, the women sitting again in their gaily dressed rows, as if waiting primly to be photographed. None of them waved or cheered. They just sat watching. All looked very much alike, young and old. But there was one at the end of a row, in a white dress with a red kerchief, bright red, over smooth, dark hair. She sat perfectly still, staring back until she became a white blur. Then her head went down, and the woman behind her—a large one in widow’s black—put a hand on her shoulder.
Emily Hagan married Kenneth Rogers ten years later, and the BBC once broadcast a programme from the island, and included her voice—a woman with ‘a nice face’, the interviewer remarked. I
wanted to complete the story by talking to Emily, and made my way to her house. Kenneth, a bluff, kindly man who pours beer in the island’s only pub, knew what I wanted the moment I stepped up to his neat, fresh-painted door.
‘You’se wanting our Hem’ly,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’ wish to be unfriendly, sir, but I’d be grateful if you’d respect our wishes and forget all you’d read in that book. It hurt us all. It was all a long while ’go, and we’d jes’ as soon fergit.’ He was gracious and polite, but firm. And other islanders told me the same story—about ‘our Hem’ly’, and about themselves. They did not care for people writing about their private lives, and publishing the detail in ‘the houtside warl’. They—the 300 Swains and Hagans and Rogers, Greens, Repettos, Lavarellos and Glasses—were an intensely private people, who wanted their privacy protected. There was no hostility towards the curiosity of outsiders—far from it; the friendliness of the islanders is memorable, their hospitality to their tiny annual crop of visitors has become an ocean legend—but they all wished it would never happen. And they knew I was there to write: there are two ham radio operators on Tristan, and they knew all about me and the purpose of my voyage, long before I had even flown to Tenerife. ‘Mr Winchester—you’ll be careful with us now, won’t you?’ one man said, when I recounted Mrs Rogers’ reluctance. ‘We’ll have to live with what you write for years to come. We’ll read your words a thousand times. So be careful, for our own sakes.’