Where the Sky Meets the Sea

Bali Ha'i - a still from the 1958 movie South Pacific

Across just a short stretch of ocean from Tahiti lies the mysterious island of Moorea, nine miles NW to be precise. According to Polynesian legend, the island’s volcanic ridges constitute the second dorsal fin of the fish that became the island of Tahiti – that’s how close the two islands are. Anyone standing on the shores of north-western Tahiti has a magnificent view of Moorea’s dramatic jagged skyline, made famous around the world by the film South Pacific, in which it appeared as a stand-in for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s invented island of Bali Ha’i.

Throughout many years of research in library reading rooms and hunched over my computer, I’d read account after account of this awe-inspiring view of Moorea and had come to think of it as being almost a mythical place, like Shangri-La - or indeed Bali Ha’i itself.

Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick) wrote in 1842 of the “the romantic elevations of Eimeo [the old name for Moorea], high above which a lone peak... shot up its verdant spire.” Thirty five years later, the Scottish artist, Constance Gordon-Cumming described the island as looking “weirdly grand; huge basaltic pinnacles of most fantastic shape towering from out of the sea of billowy white clouds, which drifted along those black crags.” In 1891, the American painter John La Farge brought an artist’s perspective to his description of the sunsets behind Moorea, “the fantastic island that has made a distance of blue and gold to our days at Papeete... even in the evening or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the sky behind it.”  

In 1914, the American writer and traveller Frederick O’Brien described Moorea as:

“the most astonishing sight upon the ocean that my eyes had ever gazed on... Its heights were not green like Tahiti’s, but bare and black … a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle... The confused mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes, dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti’s, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely different in their impress upon the beholder.”

And in 1951, James Michener, whose stories of his wartime experiences in French Polynesia were the source for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s libretto for South Pacific, wrote, “From Tahiti, Moorea seems to have about 40 separate summits: fat thumbs of basalt, spires tipped at impossible angles, brooding domes compelling to the eye. But the peaks that can never be forgotten are the jagged saw-edges that look like the spines of some forgotten dinosaur.” 

I longed to stand where these people had stood, looking out at that haunting island with its primordial mountainous skyline, but the cost of a trip to Polynesia was more than my husband and I could justify. But in late November 2007, encouraged by my then agent, we took a leap of faith, maxed out a credit card, and got on a plane to Tahiti so I could see the place I was writing about with my own eyes. 

After a long delay at LAX and an eight-hour flight across the Pacific, we arrived in Tahiti at night, dog tired and travel stained. We were driven in a rickety cab through the humid darkness to our hotel. It was very late and we were dying for sleep, but the air conditioning in our room refused to work, which meant a laborious process of repacking and moving to another room before we could fall into bed.  

We woke next morning to a hot and beautiful day. Our room looked out onto the cargo ships docked in the port of Papeete and the green hills behind the town. An interesting view, especially as everything in Tahiti related in some way to my book, but with nothing very fantastical or mystical about it. But then my husband, who had gone off to explore the hotel while I showered and dressed, came back to the room in a state of suppressed excitement. He led me down a flight of stairs and out to the edge of the hotel’s infinity pool and pointed.

And there it was on the horizon, looking exactly as I expected, exactly how it had been described. And that was the moment when I realized I was finally there, standing in the land where I’d been living in my imagination for so long - and promptly burst into tears.

Moorea in the morning

 

 

Moorea in the evening

 

Daisy Buchanan in the South Seas

The House of the Columns, Mahina, Tahiti

 

During my recent reread of The Great Gatsby, I was surprised to discover this sentence: “Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.”

Thus began the troubled marriage of Daisy Fay from Louisville with the “low thrilling voice... bright eyes, and bright passionate mouth” and Tom Buchanan of Chicago with his “sturdy physical egoism” and “peremptory heart.” I began to wonder how it might have been if Tom and Daisy Buchanan, in the course of their South Pacific honeymoon, had set foot on the island of Tahiti.

According to the novel, the couple left for their wedding trip in June 1919. Their most likely route to Tahiti would have been via San Francisco on a steamship of the Union Line. After 10 days of shipboard life, they’d have arrived in the port of Papeete, with a pilot boat guiding the steamer through the gap in the reef. “Going to the ship” was still a ritual for Tahitians because the sea was still their main lifeline, even though the island was now connected to the rest of the world by telegraph. So every time a ship docked, the whole town came down to the Quay du Commerce dressed in their best, most gaily colored clothes to greet returning family members, arriving colonial officials, or visiting dignitaries. 

As the Buchanans came ashore, they would have noticed that the temperature was no more than a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. June is a winter month in the southern hemisphere, which means that the couple wouldn't have had to contend with the stifling heat and monsoons of the Tahitian summer.

They had arrived only a few months after the end of the terrible Spanish flu epidemic that had decimated Tahiti’s population. A majority of the older generation had been wiped out, taking with them most of the accumulated knowledge of the island’s ancient heritage and customs.

It was also less than a year since the end of World War I. The war had cut off the flow of American and European visitors to the island that had been more or less continuous since the mid-1800s. The flow would resume with a vengeance the following year – 1920 – with the arrival of the American painters, Jerome Blum and George Biddle, the Russian writer Elsa Triolet, the French writer Marc Chadourne, and – most significantly ‒  the American writers Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall who went on to write Mutiny in the Bounty and many other books about Polynesia.

There were no proper hotels on the island in 1919 – just a lodging-house called the Annexe. Its rooms contained only a double bed with mosquito netting, a chair, and sometimes a bureau. The showers and toilets were on the ground floor, and none of the rooms had a door, only a half-length curtain to let the air circulate from the verandas. For Tom and Daisy, used to drinking mint juleps in a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, it would have been quite a culture shock.

But it’s unlikely they would have had to resort to such basic accommodation. As soon as they stepped off the ship, the Buchanans would have produced letters of introduction from other Americans and instantly been swept up into the generous embrace of the Salmon and Brander family.  

For many years, the main point of contact for visitors had been the family paterfamilias, Tati Salmon, the chief of the Teva clan, but he had died six months earlier in the flu epidemic. His oldest son had also died of the same disease on the same day, and as a result, Tati’s younger son, Mote Salmon, was now chief of the Tevas. As soon as Mote knew the Buchanans were in town and in need of accommodation, he would have put his father’s house in Papeete at their disposal, complete with a cook and various attendants.  

Mote would also have arranged for the young couple to come to stay at the family’s house at Papara for a traditional taamanu or feast of roast suckling pigs, breadfruit, taro, fei (wild bananas), and freshwater shrimp – all wrapped in banana leaves and cooked under hot stones in an oven dug into the ground (ahima’a). The diners would sit cross-legged under a bamboo awning, each woman crowned with an elaborate wreath of native flowers and the men with others made from pandanus leaves. They would eat the food with their fingers from banana leaf plates, using coconut half-shells filled with water as finger bowls.  

Mote’s cousin, Norman Brander, was another enthusiastic and generous host. One American visitor in the early 1920s described Norman as “...a very highly cultured and delightful man... He is very English until he hears Tahitian music, whereupon he becomes Tahitian. His eyes begin to sparkle and he cannot keep his feet still.” Although Norman had only recently lost his wife in the flu epidemic, he is still likely to have treated Daisy and Tom to one of his famous fifteen-course Chinese dinners in Papeete (almost a quarter of the city’s 3,000 inhabitants were Chinese and many had opened restaurants). And he would no doubt have invited them to stay at the Brander family’s beautiful House of the Columns at Mahina, which he had inherited from his brother. Shaded by rows of enormous coconut palms, the French colonial house faced out over a beach of black volcanic sand to the lagoon and the roaring Pacific beyond the reef – a perfect paradise for any honeymoon couple.

Back in Papeete, the Buchanans would have called at the house on Broome Road to pay their respects to ex-Queen Marau, now almost 60 years old and large of girth. The Queen, always regal, was mostly gracious to guests but could sometimes be difficult. George Biddle described her behavior at a Christmas gathering in 1920, “The old dowager Marau... was in an execrable temper. She cast a damper over the festive family gathering. They are all mortally afraid of her.”

Ex-Queen Marau

 

But the Queen’s daughter, 32-year-old Princess Takau, was always a charming hostess to overseas travellers, organizing expeditions to beauty spots in the island’s interior. Biddle was impressed with her, “Takau is a woman of dignity and intelligence... She speaks French perfectly but with a charming soft drawl... She is interested in art and... is proud of her ancestry and the legends and folk art of her people.” Her friendliness and ease with guests did not prevent her from having a strong sense of her own status. Disappointed in the quality of singing at a himene that she had organized for Biddle, she interrupted the singers and “...spoke to them quite sharply. She upbraided them for singing with so little spirit; told them she had expected a better performance... She spoke with great self-assurance and simplicity. Her words were a royal command and galvanized the himene.” No doubt the Buchanans would have found the Princess to be equally solicitous on their behalf.  

Princess Takau Pomare

 

Although the Buchanans’ visit to Tahiti is merely a fiction of mine (by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald), this is a very real depiction of the open-handed hospitality extended to foreign guests by the Salmon-Branders over many years.  

After all of this Polynesian abundance, it was time for the Buchanans to get back on the steamer to the United States. By August, they were in Santa Barbara where Daisy discovered she was pregnant and that her husband had cheated on her with a chambermaid from their hotel. Four years later on Long Island, Daisy encountered an old flame, and the tragic and iconic story that is The Great Gatsby began to unfold.

 

The Restless Eye

"Night Windows"  Edward Hopper, 1928

Staying with the early decades of the 20^th century, I am reading The Great Gatsby for maybe the fifth or sixth time and continue to marvel at its linguistic perfection. Here still are the eternal images that define the book – Daisy and Jordan Baker in the windswept drawing room with the billowing curtains, the enormous bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg towering over the ash farm by the train tracks, Gatsby stretching out his arms to the light at the end of the dock. But this time I was struck by a passage that I had swept by on my previous readings, a passage that brought to mind the evocative urban paintings of Edward Hopper.

In 1922, Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a young man from the Midwest who is learning the bond business in the “white chasms of lower New York.” In the evenings he would have dinner at the Yale Club and then stroll down Madison Avenue and over 33rd Street to Pennsylvania Station to take a train out to his solitary little house on Long Island.

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.”

 

 

Drawing the Tides

 

Adelaide Clemens as Valentine Wannop in "Parade's End"

Back in the early spring, I was reading and blogging about Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy about the social upheavals that preceded and were prompted by World War I. The novels had recently been dramatized by the BBC and HBO in a version brilliantly adapted by Tom Stoppard.
 
One of the three leading characters is Valentine Wannop, the young pacifist suffragette who is in love with Christopher Tietjens, the complicated hero who is out of step with the age. Valentine is a strong, confident young woman who is utterly sure of her feelings for Tietjens but utterly unaware of what happens behind the bed curtains.

“Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it was thus love worked upon the body ‒ and that it would stop for ever at that!

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides.”

It was this ignorance about the mechanics of sex on the part of young women in the early 20^th century, which leads my character Celia into profound and heartbreaking trouble in Albion’s Millennium. Brought up by fond but physically distant parents, deprived of any closeness with men, the only person with whom she was likely to experience any semblance of natural physical relations was her boisterously affectionate older brother. And of course it made her particularly unprepared for this kind of encounter:

"...in the midst of the din and clamour of voices and the clink of knives and forks, Celia remembered being in the lane from the Mummersford estate farm late one hot afternoon, angry with Makepeace for some quarrel they’d had. There was the smell of new-mown grass from somewhere, but the lane was very dry. She raised little explosions of dust with every step. Every leaf in the hedgerow that grew high above the lane had its sheen of dust. She ran her finger over one, exposing the dark, earthy green underneath. The leaf was like the tongue of an animal with a groove down the middle. She’d been carrying a stick, a stout oak branch, satisfyingly gnarled yet with bark smooth to the touch. Perhaps the quarrel with Makepeace had been over the stick, she couldn’t remember. She had used the stick to whack the hedgerow, making the dust fly in billowing sheets of white. It was satisfying to hit out at the hedgerow till the sweat curled under her arms, hearing the vegetation crack and bend under her blows. It made her feel powerful to make the dust fly and the hedge crack, as Makepeace in their quarrel had made her feel thwarted, small, and completely insignificant.

So she was not afraid at first when the man stepped through the scrim of dust she’d raised as if onto a stage. He was dressed in a shabby coat with frayed cuffs, that much she saw immediately, and his boots were very worn. A tinker, a beggar man on the road to the big house, poaching maybe. Celia glanced down at his hands, expecting to see a rabbit trap, its brutal teeth slick with blood. But what he held reverently in grimy open palms protruded from the opened buttons below his leather belt, something long and hard, mottled and wrinkled like a root pulled from the earth. It twitched and writhed and seemed to reach towards Celia with a life of its own, and the more she stepped back, the more it seemed to grow towards her like a monstrous plant."

Born before Gatsby

The wiry old lady with a fuzz of neat brown hair, and a surprisingly young-looking face was an avid reader. Ignoring the tumult all around her, the banging, whirring, and rattling of the ward’s daily life, her head was always bent over a book. Only when interrupted by the arrival of the lunch trolley or the blood pressure machine would she stop reading, turning down a page corner to mark her place.   

Whenever the nurses came round the ward to distribute the drugs, they made each patient tell them their name and date of birth to confirm their identity. That’s how I learned that the reading lady was born in 1923.

If she’d said she was 90, it wouldn’t have struck me in quite the same way. That would have focused my mind on her longevity, not her history. But 1923 was a really long time ago. It struck me that the little old lady sitting opposite me had been alive in a world before The Great Gatsby, before A Passage to India, To the Lighthouse, Gone with the Wind, or any of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. And Proust was still propped up in his bed in Paris writing the last two parts of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

1923 is also the year that I am trying to recreate in fictional form.  It is the last year of the first volume of Albion’s Millennium when everything comes to a head for my two main characters – Celia and May. In the last chapter, they meet by accident in the Ladies’ Waiting Room at Victoria Station in Nottingham, each on the cusp of taking a huge step towards changing their lives in a drastic way. In the end, one of them goes forward and the other turns back, and their decisions will influence the paths they will take for the rest of their lives (which will, if I live long enough, unfold over four more novels).

All I can know about 1923 comes from contemporary memoirs and black & white photographs. The best I can do is feed this material into my imagination and try to conjure up the sounds, sights and smells of that era - the coal smell of a steam train, the rattle and spark of an electric tram, the smell of orange peel, sweat, beer, coconut, trampled grass, and horse dung at the fair. A vanished world that this little elderly lady across the ward once heard and saw and breathed.  

The ladies in the ward all had names straight from the servants’ hall of Downtown Abbey – Violet, Olive, Sybil, Lillian, Phyllis – and this one was no exception. Her name was written in bold black marker on the panel above her hospital bed – “May.”

I like to think it was a sign.

 

Down the Rabbit Hole

"A Study of Anna Kuerner"  Andrew Wyeth

There was another ward before this one. It was an acute care ward where many of the women were quite ill and their minds had parted company with reality, either permanently or because they were pumped full of drugs. It was like being in a hedge full of twittering birds punctuated by sudden silences and equally sudden outbursts of shouting.   

Little Olive, 93, had skin the color of her name and a shock of white hair, and could leap out of bed and scoot along so fast on her walker that the nurses had to put an alarm on her bed. She’d call out to whoever was passing, “Can I have a glass of plonk? This isn’t much of a party. No wonder the men didn’t come. I expect they’ll be along later.” Once, she suddenly started calling out names as if on a roll call – “Daphne! Margaret! Marigold! Sally!” Later my mother told me she'd overheard that Olive had been a land girl during the war.

Noreen turned 88 during her stay on the ward and sat grumbling in her childlike voice amid the balloons and cards, talking to a person invisible to the rest of us: “Could you get me my bag? I need to know where my things are. I can’t get it now. I want to walk on these feet. I haven’t walked on them for ages. I’m deaf and dumb – I need a bit of help.” Her daughter told me that, in her delirium, Noreen had been harking back to her days in the ATS in World War II. “She had a wild old time of it in those days. She had what they call a Good War.”

Then there was the posh lady whom I called the Mad Hatter and my mother dubbed the
Hedgehog Lady. She combed her hair the wrong way incessantly, sitting on the side of her bed and murmuring pleasantries to herself in an upper crust voice, pausing now and then to spit up into a dish. She seemed to be obsessed by her apple which she never ate. Like Olive she seemed to think the hospital was a hotel. When she was admitted to the ward late one night, she asked the porter, “Is it too late to get a drink? A little Scotch maybe?”  

Some of the women talked and talked every minute they were awake. It was like hearing one side of a very personal phone conversation, though, like good Brits, we all politely pretended not to listen.

Joan, a dignified lady with a deep voice and a proud beak of a nose, talked a lot about religious services, sometimes weddings but mostly funerals. “You know the undertaker? Well, I stayed there overnight and I don’t recommend them.” There were also long colloquies on private family business – whether real or imagined. “You want too many things in life. You’ve got a good income and Laura’s working as well. She’s equally to blame. She comes home and has bought this and that. Well, we’ve done what we can to help you in life. I’ve worked hard this last week so you’d have extra money for your wedding.”  

And throughout the course of one long morning, Leonora, a large feisty woman, who had to have been a home economics teacher in her former life, took us through a baking lesson. “Are you watching them apples? You don’t need no water for a crumble. Come on, girls. I dread to think what that apple crumble will be like.” And then unexpectedly, a burst of invective, as if her phone lines had crossed, “You’re a right bloody head case. She ain’t taking you back. I hope she jolly well dishes you.”

Above all, the ladies would call out for people who weren’t there. Kathleen, a snaggle-toothed old lady in the bed opposite my mother’s, called out, “Mike! Mike! Brenda! Brenda!” all day long – to the nurses, to the visitors, but mostly to me whenever I passed her bed or caught her eye. Were these her children? Her siblings? Or people of her imagination, the people she hoped would come and rescue her from that hospital bed and from the disturbing kaleidoscope of images in her unmoored brain.   

Through the Looking Glass

A ward in the Royal Berkshire Hospital in the 1930s
(Medical Museum Picture Library, RBH)

From high up in the Royal Berks Hospital, you can see the sky changing constantly over the rooftops of Reading. Sometimes squalls of rain pass across the view, and the wind sucks at the picture windows that only open an inch or so to let in some air. At other times the sky is a classic blue laced with white cotton balls, or sun rays streak down eerily from behind layers of thunderous-looking clouds.

There is life out there beneath that sky. Cars come and go from the car park, its utilitarian concrete stained with damp. There is the inevitable gas works shaped like a modern coliseum, and a church spire peeks up through the treetops. Buses go up and down Craven Road and, beyond the red brick villas opposite the hospital, boys from a private school play cricket in the watery sunshine.

Beside me, my mother dozes with her glasses on, propped up on a Himalaya of pillows. She sleeps despite the eternal symphony of machines beeping and whirring, feeding drips and oxygen to the other women nodding off in beds and chairs across the bay, and of bin lids banging as the nurses discard their plastic aprons and gloves. A telephone rings and rings at the distant nurses’ station, and many times a day the rattling wheels of a trolley signals the approach of meals, medicines (“Time for your tablets!”), tea, and the ladies who mop the floors, trying to mask the faint smell of faeces with disinfectant. 

At 2 o’clock the visitors begin to drift in, hovering at the mouth of the bay, afraid that stepping over the threshold will drop them down a rabbit hole. They perch on their plastic chairs from the day room, the men too jovial, too bracing – hahahaing to cover up their unease in a ward full of elderly women in their nighties. Meanwhile, the women visitors fuss about the tray tables, pointlessly rearranging the water jug here, the specs there, the tissues, the juice bottles, crossword puzzles, biscuit packets, and hand creams, like some kind of arcane chess game.

I overhear snippets of conversation straight out of an Alan Bennett story. “You don’t know what people are like, do you?” “Even though it was ever so cold this morning, I put my washing out. But before I came away, it started to rain and I took it all back in again. And now look at that sunshine!” “I can’t go out except in a wheelchair but I do manage. I don’t go mad. I said to the doctor when he came round to take my blood, what am I doing in here?” I scribble them all down as I hear them because this vigil, like everything else in life, is material – a window into other people’s lives and stories.

The nurses who take care of these frail elderly ladies, many of whom have wandered far beyond the borders of perception, are a remarkable caring collection of individuals. After the evening drug round, as the ward settles down for the long night, I drive home to my mother’s  flat, strangely empty without her and yet full of her presence. As I try to drift off to sleep, the voices of those nurses - Irish, Romanian, Italian, Botswanan, Cameroonian, Welsh, Glaswegian - go round and round in my head in their multitudinous lilting accents from all over the world.