The last surviving player (A sporting life - Horses)

I only ever rode in a proper horse-race once in my life. At age ten, I came second in a children’s trotting race at the Hannaford Gymkhana; the prize was five shillings and a red sash. My horse at the time was a natural trotter, and it was the devil’s own job to kick her into a canter at any time. I hated her with a passion, but, well, five bob was not to be sneezed at.

Gymkhana is an old Anglo-Indian word meaning a country fair. It was an annual event in Australian bush communities – food stalls and shooting galleries and the like outside an arena where horsemanship was shown off and polo was played.

The polo ground was a far cry from the clipped lawns of Windsor Great Park, the home of the game in England. There, the beau monde bring their stables of thoroughbreds and Argentinians, and sit around sipping Pimm’s, and a spectacular festival it is. At Hannaford, sheep farmers and their station-hands charged up and down on work-horses trained to keep sheep in a bunch, and tossed down gallons of beer that were tossed up again in due course.

One year, two station-hands got into a fight over a girl who had been in my class at school; one of them forced strychnine down the throat of his rival, and sat on his head until he died. The patrons of Windsor Great Park would never have countenanced such behaviour. They kept the riff-raff out altogether, and it was only as the friend of a friend that I was there. I put on the poshest English accent I could manage, and didn’t mention The Geebung Polo Club.

The Geebung Polo Club was a fictional up-country bush club invented by Banjo Paterson, Australian poetry’s answer to Lord Tennyson. The poem was not quite The Man from Snowy River, but equally dramatic, in its way:

    They waddied one another till the plain was strewn with dead,

     While the score was kept so even that they neither got ahead.

     And the Cuff and Collar captain, when he tumbled off to die,

     Was the last surviving player - so the game was called a tie.

The Windsor polo was not the only horsey event that I ever attended in England. Besides the racing at Chepstow with local friends, there was “the following of the hounds”. My cousin Lucy introduced David and me to that during our visit to the village where my English grandfather was born and raised. (David was my chum from the boat over, immortalized – in my mind – in the “two tuppennies” story told in my blog A cupful of cold water in July 2013.) 

Lucy’s piercingly loud voice made her famous around Bath as a deranged follower of the hounds at the local hunts, and she dragged us excitedly from fence to fence in borrowed Wellies watching one of the local “hunts” do its thing.

Following the hounds is a grand old English tradition, and a surprisingly democratic one. Peasants, townsfolk and sundry others wade through the mud in a mad dash to see the horse-owning gentry and nouveau riche gallop up and down pretending to care whether their dogs caught and killed a fox or not. After the fox eventually meets its doom, all the survivors retire to their cars and eat picnics. Jolly good fun or incredibly boring, according to taste.

But it has always been flat-racing that captured Australians’ hearts, not any other horsey events. Champion horses became household words, and jockeys, folk-heroes. “You’re better stayers than Tulloch”, the father of a friend grumbled one night when we overstayed our welcome – Tulloch being a horse that had led the field from start to finish for the whole two miles of the Melbourne Cup a few years before.

A friend of my Dad’s took me aside at a party and confidentially warned me against returning via the USA on my upcoming round-the-world trip. “The thing is, you can’t trust the Yanks, Gordon. The bastards killed Phar Lap, remember.” As indeed they had, in 1932, in California where the legendary horse (yes, another Melbourne Cup winner) was in training to show the American horses how to race.

Australian doctors today are still debating who could have fed him the arsenic.

Dodging “Big Brother”

How will my grandchildren fare in a “1984” world? (By which I mean anybody’s grandchildren, really.) It’s not going to be easy for them. They’ve grown up in a world where human rights have been held up as a practical ideal, and individual rights have been respected above the collective rights of communities. 

Now human and individual rights are fading away – dismissed as a faddish fancy whose time has come and gone. The very nations that rushed to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the Second World War have baulked at submitting themselves to the Nuremberg Principles. Britain is a prize example: signing international human-rights treaties galore, but waging wars of aggression and occupation for commercial gain.

“1984” (the book by Orwell) described what we call a totalitarian society. But “totalitarian” is not absolutely total; there are always loopholes. Despite comprehensive domestic spying programs – even with electronic chips implanted in every limb – there will still be groups of individuals beyond the reach of Big Brother’s servants. The powerless will be of little concern to the ruling classes. Who cares what they think?

During our grand adventure in the ‘60s, and rank amateurs as we were, Linda and I managed to by-pass restrictions of one sort or another in several supposedly totalitarian nations. My blog-post Russian Roulette in January 2012 told of safe-enough exchange-control dodges in the USSR, and Checkpoint Charlie the month before reported our quasi-authorised crossing of the Berlin Wall. Ross did similar things, in his turn. We were all foreigners, but even so…

There usually is a way, for those who fly beneath the radar. So what we have to do, when or before the time comes, is teach our girls how to do it. Their parents were both hippies, to whom it is a natural way to live. Maybe hippies will be the models for everybody, when the time comes.

The society outlined in “1984”comprised a three-tier system of the rulers, their civil-servants, and the proletarians. The servants were monitored closely, but the proles – drugged, peaceful, incorrigible – were largely unwatched. (They didn’t feature in the book’s plot, so readers are left to imagine their worthless lives. I imagine them as living carefree lives beneath the radar as long as they didn’t get ideas above their worthless station. They were also cannon-fodder in the perpetual wars, but I imagine plenty of draft-dodging occurred.)

If for a moment we can pretend that the fictional story is actual history, we can remind ourselves that although history of any kind repeats itself, it never repeats exactly. The Western World’s current rulers may indeed be using the book as a basic “how-to” guide, but they are adding new stuff of their own as they go along. It will be enough for our grandchildren to learn the broad principles, not the details.

The culmination may occur as many as ten years from today. Perpetual war is already in place. The security-state creeps forward with every anti-terrorist drill. The lockdown by 6,000 paramilitary police of a million residents in inner-city Boston following the 2013 explosions was a wake-up call that failed to wake many of us. A collapse of paper currencies following the mother of all false-flag attacks would usher in the real deal – the freezing and confiscation of savings, enforced by martial law.

Hmmm. Maybe. But probably not everywhere. The internet is full of “preppers” – people preparing to flee to isolated communities when the SHTF and when TEOTWAWKI arrives. (If you didn’t know already: those sets of letters stand for “Shit Hits The Fan” and “The End Of The World As We Know It.) I respect their diligent preparations, and they may have identified the best escape route. But I think they’re mistaken.

IMHO (that one you surely must know!) the most effective escape will come from the mind. Being mentally prepared will be a lot more important than being physically prepared. When chased by a bear in the woods, you don’t have to be able to out-run the bear. You just have to be able to run faster than the person you’re with.

I’ve always doubted that the meek would inherit the earth: but the stoners might do, in a SHTF situation.

A Sporting Life – Rugby League

Just recently I discovered that one of our ESPN channels shows Rugby League club-matches from Australia and England. It’s the end of a long drought for me, and I’ve been watching avidly ever since. 

There was no football of any kind in our sheep-raising district when I was a boy. My boarding-school in Brisbane made us play Rugby Union every Saturday – rain, hail or shine! Kids of my size traditionally played either half-back or hooker. Yes, I was a teenage hooker – the poor bugger in the middle of every scrum. 

But League was our game of choice in pick-up games. The rules were simpler, and anyway League was far more popular with the public in Queensland. And in NSW. In all the other States, Aussie Rules was the football game – a variant of Gaelic Football.

It was my Dad’s boast that he had been present the day the Toowoomba League team beat the England touring team in the 1920s. 30,000 people were in the ground, he said. That equalled the town’s entire population, but many of the watchers had come in from the hinterland. A very exciting game, he assured me, although the crowd was packed together too closely to let him see much. No CCTV, then. "Nigger" Brown (I blogged about him and his nickname in May 2013) wasn’t playing; he’d retired by then. Dad would have given his right arm to see him play.

And, speaking of right arms… My proud boast is that I was present at the second Test Match in 1958 (“the Battle of Brisbane”), when Great Britain beat Australia. The GB captain broke his forearm three minutes after the start, and for the rest of the game he played his arm hanging loose from the shoulder – packing down in the scrums, tackling and passing as best he could. No substitutes allowed in those days. 

Four other British players were badly damaged during the game; only the one with the broken collar-bone went off. I don’t remember much about the game, but the captain’s absurd bravery is a very vivid memory for me.

Rugby League has always been passionately supported in its home regions – basically, the north of England and the east of Australia. Rugby Union was a posh-Public-Schools game, and an amateur sport for most of its life; League was a working-man’s game. 

In recent years it has become a very “matey” sport, especially in Australia. Referees’ words are broadcast to the crowd, full of friendly advice. “Hold on, Billy: he wasn’t ready. Start that again!” “Stay behind the line, you fellows.” “Give it a rest, Jamie. I don’t want to talk about it.” To the captains: “Come over here, Michael. Josh, you too. Listen, tell your guys – Hey, Michael! Get back here. I haven’t finished yet…!”

Trainers run onto the field at any old time and squirt water onto sweaty faces. The other night I saw both trainers nursing an injured player on the ground, not waiting for the ref to stop the game. Everybody’s supposed to be concerned about concussion, but if a player gets knocked about, they wait for him to find his wits again and make him walk off the field with them. Only wusses get carried off. The spirit of the England captain lives on!

The rules have changed quite a bit since the ‘60s: some for the better, some not. The old-style scrums have been abandoned in the interests of making the game faster. Tackles are limited to sets of six, where they used to have no limit at all. Illegal passes are given the benefit of the doubt more often than they used to be. Players have to be doing serious mischief to be pulled up for offside; three or four tackles can occur before everybody is back behind the ball. As long as they're not interfering with play – no worries, mate!

In my day, Toowoomba teams used to play what was called “contact” rugby, which called for players to pass the ball pretty much as soon as they were touched. Gosh, did that make for a fast game! Naturally, it only worked with players who were light and fast, which our boys were. 

Frank Drake (our magical fullback) once caught a kick behind his goalposts and ran into the back line with it. He stayed with them, handled it three more times (or maybe four; it all happened quite a distance away) as it passed up and down from one side of the field to the other and back again, and again, and scored at the other end. That’s been as memorable for me as the man with the broken arm, in its way.

No Bucket-List

It’s become the norm for middle-class Westerners to compose lists of places they want to see before they die, and the things they want to experience. Well, I dunno. I think I’m too old to do that. For the fifteen years after I left Australia at age 23, I tried to see everything that I wanted to see and to do most of what I wanted to do. I didn’t call it a “bucket-list”, just a “before-I-go-home-and-settle-down” agenda.

There weren’t many specifics on the agenda. I didn’t set out to see the Acropolis or the Bolshoi Ballet or Lincoln’s Memorial – although I did mentally tick them off as they came by. I didn’t go looking for a girl to drift through the Middle East with on ten shillings a day, and later marry. These things just happened. I’ve never been an ambitious fellow, and it’s too late to start now.

I didn’t plan to manage the Chamber of Commerce in a Caribbean tax-haven, persecuted by the local political and bureaucratic establishment. (How would you plan something like that?) It wasn’t by design that I became the grandfather of three Scandinavian kids who speak English only on sufferance.

Ross was conceived in Indonesia and born in England. We happened to be on vacation in Java, from our jobs in the South Pacific; and England was where we planned (!) to acquire a Kombi van that would take us down to the caves of Crete – as told in A Young Man’s Car in September 2013. Ross just happened to be within two months of being born when we hit England. (And he was in the van when the trip to Crete was aborted a year or so later.)

He and I bonded during my five years as his “parent of first resort” – a house-husband – between the ages of six and eleven. I never planned to become a house-husband. I certainly never expected to love a child with such fierce passion as I did (and do) my son. That was scary, and amazes me still – especially since I was absent in spirit for much of his babyhood. He was Linda’s decision, not mine.

We (he and I) pretend to believe in Loki the Norse god of luck, and remind each other that Loki has to be treated with caution and care. There’s no malice in him, only caprice – but he will withhold help if he’s disrespected. One has to meet him half-way: to hold oneself in a state of readiness for the goodies to come. The Boy Scouts motto “Be Prepared” is the same thing, of course. They must secretly believe in Loki, I think.

The three of us all have enough memories to carry to our respective deathbeds. The other two still have things to do and places to see; they have their bucket-lists. If I die first, Linda will probably go and live in Thailand; she’s been there a couple of times, and loves it. Ross has a hankering to spend a year in India, once his children are old enough to live their own lives. I’m the only one that has no bucket-list, no personal end-times agenda.

There are places I wouldn’t mind visiting, or visiting again, and old friends it would be lovely to spend time with. But I don’t believe that memories carry beyond the grave, so what would be the point?

There are things I would like to know, before I go. Every week brings newly published facts and theories about old and current history, and the development of words. Will my theories about the ancient Hebrews ever be proven correct? (The Children of Israel in January 2012, and later posts on the same subject.) And my theory that almost all European surnames are clan-names in disguise? And did the CIA really kill JFK and Harold Holt the Australian Prime Minister? Did the US authorities have advance knowledge of 9/11?

But in the end, it won’t matter to me. If the cosmos is truly infinite in all dimensions, as my friend Gerry and I used to debate (Unfinished Business, June 2013), then those uncertainties will be resolved in some alternative universes. If the cosmos is not infinite... well, never mind.

Privatisation

In A day late and a dollar short (Archives, September 2012), I grumbled about the FCO’s belated intervention in Cayman’s fiscal affairs. The FCO clerks’ chronic Attention Deficit Disorder had allowed our small-island politicians and senior Civil Servants to spend and borrow as if there were no tomorrow. "A day late and a dollar short?" I scoffed. "More like fifteen years late and several billion dollars short!"

I meant to write twenty-five years late, not fifteen; that was careless. It was in 1987 that our then-rulers opted for an income-tax as a preferable alternative to disciplined spending by government. I was involved in the Chamber of Commerce’s victory over that option (Confessions of a subversive, October 2012) – but a limited victory it was. We did vanquish the proposed income-tax, and the guilty MLAs were defeated in the next parliamentary election; but all subsequent rulers have shamelessly indulged themselves in ever more reckless borrowing.

For a belligerent nation that invades foreign countries at the drop of a hat, Britain treads amazingly softly around its colonial tax-havens. Not without reason, of course. Most well-connected British companies divert a portion of their profits to places like Cayman, and much of the loot from the invasions is channeled through the havens. Some of it ends up in the re-election coffers of friendly politicians. That’s just the way it works.

After years of pussy-footing around, the FCO clerks recently suggested – ever so diffidently – that our chaps might give some thought to a slight reduction in the scope of government. So privatization is on the Islands’ agenda at last.

So far, discussion has been limited to the possible sale of loss-making state enterprises. Our Turtle Farm is a good example of what is available. It has been losing ten to twelve million dollars a year for the past how-long. There are no recent audited accounts, so the venture is to all intents a bottomless money-pit.

Last week it was reported that a skilled turtle-feeder was earning $90,000 a year; that’s US$108,000. We weren’t told exactly how skilled he was, but it seems a bit OTT. (I myself was a skilled chicken-feeder, at the age of five, and my pocket-money was never anywhere in that range. I’m beginning to wonder if my parents were short-changing me.)

The government’s reluctance to let go of such a crony-magnet is evident in the predictable conditions for its sale – no Caymanian employees to be fired or demoted (however overpaid or underworked), a government “golden share” with the power to veto all decisions of the Directors, all debts to government to be honoured (i.e. for past subsidies), and current subsidies to be discontinued immediately. What a joke.

This Turtle Farm is several things: a commercial farm, an endangered-species refuge, a tourist attraction with bells and whistles, and a zoo with a snack shop. It occupies a block of prime sea-front real-estate, which is the only thing that any private investor is likely to be interested in. All the operations could and would be closed down in a month, if private-sector standards were applied – but will almost certainly take a year or more using civil-service standards. Full privatization of all unnecessary government operations will take the best part of a generation.

Of course selling state-owned assets is a one-off fix at any time, and when bureaucrats are involved in the selling it’s an invitation to fraud on a massive scale. It’s how Russia ended up with so many overnight billionaire oligarchs. It created a few billionaires in Britain, too, during the Thatcher years. The amounts are smaller in Cayman, but there are plenty of bureaucrats and cronies panting for the chance to pick up government assets for cents on the dollar.

Selling off the operations side would save a heck of a lot more money, every year the government didn’t run them at a loss. The best way to minimize interception by crooked public figures and their relatives is to break the businesses into separate units – and, not to rush the process. Well, we know the process won't be rushed (!), but as for the rest... Hmm. We’ll have to wait and see if maybe little old Cayman can’t come up with one or two instant billionaires. Is anybody taking bets?

Brain of the Bahamas - brackets, failed

“Brain of the Bahamas, brackets failed”, Rob the friendly cynic used to call me, after I’d come fourth in the final of the local Champion of Knowledge competition in Nassau in 1970. Dave the friendly librarian was appalled that I had missed an easy question about the Dewey Decimal System. Tchah! A mental blockage, under the pressure of a live audience on live radio. Fourth prize was a Larousse encyclopedia, which is actually quite informative about the bloody Dewey Decimal System.

I did better in the National Spelling Bee, the same year. My second-place finish there, won me a free return-flight for two on Bahamas Airways. Yee-hah! We had already flown to several of the Bahamian Out-Islands, and we planned to use these tickets for a trip down to the Turks & Caicos Islands (TCI), the furthest we could go on the airline. We would wait for the next long-weekend, to make it worth the while.

Unfortunately... The airline chose that weekend to go broke. We never got past the check-in desk, and never did get to the Turks. Twenty years later I came second in a British-FCO competition to take charge of those Islands’ offshore tax-haven administration. Not as Financial Secretary, but the office below that, I think it was; I don’t recall the title. They flew me to London for the interview, but that was as close as I got.

It’s fun winning competitions; but sometimes it’s better if you don’t win. Life is a series of small competitions, isn’t it? Small victories, small losses. John Lennon should have called his song, “All you need is luck”. He knows that now, of course.

I knew the chap who got the job. Derek was the safer choice, but he failed to raise the profile of the offshore sector much; and I might have failed too. Who knows? TCI is a strange collection of sparsely settled islands. The islands themselves are nice enough, but the politics are wild. The FCO clerks ignored the burgeoning corruption for decades, just as they did Cayman’s. TCI’s shit just happened to hit the fan first. Its former Leader of Government Business is in Brazil fighting extradition as we speak; ours is merely under arrest.

At the time I applied for that job, our local political establishment was trying to give me the bum’s rush for my part in establishing the Chamber of Commerce as an independent force for good in the community. As the Chamber’s manager, I was instrumental in fighting off the politicians’ attempt to impose an Income Tax in our little fiscal paradise. By the end of the battle, there was blood all over the carpet, and much of it was mine. The dirty story is briefly told in my blog-post Confessions of a Subversive, in October 2012.

My chances of survival in Cayman were slim, so I began applying for jobs in other tax-havens. One of them was the position of Registrar of Companies in Liberia. I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect of living in such a place, but who could tell what fortune the CIA might pay me? In the event, not nearly enough. They flew me up to Langley, but the wage was too silly, and I turned it down. I met the Scottish fellow who got the job after he’d done his three years – a Hamish Somebody. It wasn’t bad, he said, except for the civil war.

Here at home, I got by with a little help from my friends and the FCO in London, although I was blacklisted for employment forever more, and had to be stamped in as a tourist every month for the next two years. Bastards!

Was it worth the agony of winning that battle, that competition? Only just, on a personal level. But Cayman is still free of Income Tax, these twenty-seven years later; so my community has benefited mightily. And, I’m still here. There’s a few million dollars less in the bank account than I would have had, had the bullies allowed me to earn a proper living again. Ah well. Sometimes the prize for winning isn’t exactly what it says on the ticket. That's just the way it goes, right?

Small-island traffic

On our small island – eighty square miles in area – we rarely find ourselves far from home. Google Earth shows our house as an L-shaped white roof a mile south of town along the coast road, in a cul-de-sac off to the left. Linda and I each have a car – each seventeen years old, whose first five years were spent in Japan.

Such cars are popularly called “deportees”; they’re cheap to buy, and very reliable. There are probably 20,000 of them on Grand Cayman, and 20,000 other cars, mostly American. Traffic problems in general aren’t as bad as in most places, and are mostly confined to the morning and evening rush-hours.

I have no occasion to go downtown these days, but Linda drives through it along Hog Sty Bay (George Town Harbour, excuse me) on her way to work and back. It’s a pleasant drive, except when four or five cruise-liners are at anchor and their passengers take over the streets. They use the designated pedestrian crossings as often as not, which is nice, though they’re usually looking the wrong way. As a British colony, we drive on the left, and that confuses them.

Half our vehicles have the steering wheels on the left, too – just like back home in the USA – and that’s confusing. Who the hell knows what’s coming from where? The Japanese cars are like English cars: drivers sit on the right. When tourists rent cars here, they don’t always manage to remember all the possibilities.

We residents are commendably patient with them. When we see a car coming towards us on the wrong side of the road, we just slow right down until the penny drops. No cussing, no rude gestures, just that super-patient look that is more insulting than both of those.

We have five sets of traffic lights on the Island, plus a few red-light flashers at zebra crossings. The most fun to be had is at the four-way-stop junction up by the Hospital. There’s always some idiot who sneaks through in the slipstream of the car ahead of him, too impatient to allow the rest of us to exercise our democratic entitlement to move off in the exact order we arrived. Democracy is imperilled whenever a close finish occurs. It usually is, isn’t it?

What a virtuous feeling, to concede priority to a rival who may or may not have come to a complete halt a tenth of a second before us. What indignation, when the concession is not acknowledged with a pip of the horn or a wave. And what fury, when a wretched pedestrian crosses the junction and makes all the cars wait. Oh, the agony when the wretch is on crutches, or hobbling pathetically on his or her way to the Hospital to get crutches.

 By the time the fool finally makes his crippled way across, we’ve all forgotten whose turn it is to move first. What tentative movements there are then, for the first four vehicles, all being urged on by reminders from the drivers behind them.

 On mornings when I have my nine o’clock directors’ meetings, the traffic is a bit dodgy on Smith Road up beside the Prep School. Young kids are jumping out of cars and running across the road, parents are turning into or out of the designated drop-off spots, and the rest of us feel sorely put upon. It’s only a two-lane street, and two stopped SUVs half-parked on opposite sides of it reduce that to a single lane.

We childless cars squeeze past as best we can, and we resent the delay. After all, the lights by the cricket field are only a hundred yards away, and thirty seconds’ delay might cost us a green light. Cayman’s drivers are courteous, yes, and patient within reason; but there are limits. We are human. If you prick us, we bleed.

I always stop to pick up a coffee at the supermarket, where two hundred cars are angle-parked in banks of two (one on the left, one on the right), and where there are no designated trolley-paths. Again, pedestrians are saved from mass slaughter by drivers’ courtesy and patience. We give way to every shopping cart – “Go ahead, darlin’!” – never mind the dozen cars behind us backed up into the main road, and the three trying to back out in front of us. Ah well; it’s what we do.

It’s bad manners to stop and chat to a friend one hasn’t seen in a while, though, so there’s not much of that. Most of the time.

Buddy Holly’s father

It’s quite fun coming across old photos of one’s younger self. Somehow, one of mine had gotten caught up in Linda’s library of stamp-albums and first-day covers that we were sorting through last week. (After Hurricane Ivan all the albums were crammed up on the ledge above the washing-machine, and she wanted to unload some of them to a visiting cousin.)

This photo was of me in Arab dress – a professional portrait from Al Sharq Studio in Jericho, when I was 25. My Lawrence of Arabia moment, set up by our hosts in what was then Jordan. Somewhere there exists a corresponding photo of Linda: not nearly as glamorous, because in most Arab countries it’s only the men who are allowed to look cool.

I have always remembered being dressed up and photographed in Middle-Eastern gear, but I’d have said it was in Tehran in the home of one of our Mercedes drivers [reported in Cattle Class to Kuwait, April 2012]. But, no, the Studio’s name and address is on the back of the photo. We must have been staying with the owner of the Studio, but I can’t recall that, or him and his family.

It’s shameful of me to forget, but there is no ingratitude in the shame. The people of the entire region and culture were so hospitable to us, that any stand-out would have been an exception – had there been one, which there wasn't.

I tend to confuse Jericho with Jerash. At the latter, we were invited by a bunch of shepherds to share their evening meal, when their workday was done. So we dumped our rucksacks with them and went for a walk. To our shame (more shame!), we didn’t get back until two minutes after sunset – and this during Ramadan, which is the Moslem month of fasting. Hugely embarrassing!

The poor men hadn’t eaten a crumb since dawn, yet couldn’t break their fast until their invited guests arrived. We washed our hands in haste and sat down around a big circular bowl of food, and had to take the first dip. Only then could the hungry ones fall to. They forgave us. It’s a wonderfully tolerant culture, at ground level -- Western propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.

We have only a few photos from our travels together, Linda and I. I’ve never been “into” photos, and dislike posing. We have one of me lying beside the little car on a hill overlooking Istanbul, with our clothes strung around drying in the sun. And there’s one of me hitching, with Mt Ararat in the background, just before the Mercedes convoy picked us up. But after that, nothing, that I can recall; and none at all of Linda.

Nothing from Esfahan or Kuwait or Baghdad. Only the two formal snaps from Jericho. Then nothing from Baalbeck or Cairo or Cyprus – or even Mykonos, the most romantic island in the world. Nothing until our wedding in Toronto, two full years after the Al Sharq portraits.

 (For our 25th Wedding Anniversary, Linda got our local newspaper to publish a photo of us at the actual wedding – she young and pretty, me smiling in my black-framed glasses, fashionable at the time. A few days later, Roger the comedian greeted me at the tennis courts with, "Hello! It’s Buddy Holly’s father!” Which is funny if you remember who Buddy Holly was and what he looked like.)

Our home is festooned with snaps of Ross at all ages and stages, and of our grand-children. That’s what happens, isn’t it? His kids love seeing snapshots of their Dad as a little boy, just as their children will be glad we kept so many snaps of them. We have a paper wall-chart where we used to mark the girls’ heights when they were smaller. The older one is above the limit, now; but we like to keep it up for old time’s sake. Nostalgia is good.

Maybe we’ll leave it to them in our Wills. There's a thought! On the wall beside my computer as I type now, there is a painting of my great-grandmother Emily, from 1847. Cousin Lucy left it to me in her Will, together with the actual locket Emily wears in the portrait. A tattered wall-chart is not quite in the same league, but it’s the best we can manage.

Private Property

One of the best-known myths in history is that a Dutch international trading company bought Manhattan Island in the 17th Century for $24 worth of beads. What a bargain, eh? It’s not quite true. What they actually bought was a right to use the land. Exclusively perhaps, and indefinitely perhaps, but the natives of that region had no concept of private property. Their representatives not only didn’t have the right to sell (alienate) any land, they wouldn’t have even thought of it.

When native Melanesian villagers in the South Pacific Islands that European invaders called New Hebrides and New Caledonia (and the French equivalents) solemnly agreed to sell their spare land in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they were pleased when the settlers planted long lines of coconut trees and gave the villagers some of the fruit. As the villagers increased in number, they naturally expanded their living space among the trees. To them, land-use was the same as land-ownership; unused land had no owner. They had no concept of private property.

Much argument ensued. Military might defined legal right – as it always does. The natives’ resentment was still strong in the New Hebrides in the 1970s when Linda and I lived in Vila, the main trading town. The resentment was assuaged in 1980, when the first government of the newly independent nation of Vanuatu confiscated all vacant land owned by non-natives. We lost our half-acre suburban plot in Vila, bought as a speculation. These forty years later, we still feel hardly done by, and we understand the old resentment of the villagers.

Centuries ago, all land in England was deemed to be owned by the monarchy. It had been appointed directly by God, and it claimed the “divine right” that King Charles lost his head over. Today, legal title to English land is in the names of individuals, and the monarch has no say in the matter.

That’s not quite true, either. The permission of the monarchy or its deputies (or its recognized legal successors in some former colonies) is an essential requirement for all transfers of land. A tax is payable, evidence that the State’s power is the power of an owner, never mind whose name is on the Title Deed. Death duties are a reminder. So is the doctrine of “eminent domain” – the right of the State to confiscate anybody’s land.

(The power of the State to conscript citizens for foreign wars is, equally, a reminder of its right to enslave its subjects, never mind what statutes have been passed banning slavery and indentured service, and never mind what international Human Rights Conventions have been solemnly signed. Military (paramilitary) might still defines legal right.)

When the British government began its conquest and occupation of Australia, in the years following the loss of its major North American colonies, it (the government) decided to experiment with an alternative to its American practices. This time, there would be no argument with native communities over the difference between land-ownership and land-use. There would be no moral dilemma over the theft of natives’ land.

This time – and what a brilliant notion it was – this time, the natives would simply not be recognized as human! Wow. British judges declared Australia an uninhabited continent. The nomadic sub-human natives were shoo’d out of the way, and were shot like outlaws if they baulked. Well, they were outlaws – creatures living outside the protection of the law. Let them play that on their didgeridoos and dance to it!

I have blogged [Grandfathers, January 2014] that my mother’s father used to negotiate with the local native community for the right to harvest trees in the forest and to establish sawmills to cut the felled trees into timber. It was prudent to negotiate those things in good faith, but by law he could have simply walked in and assumed the right – with the permission of the registered European owner of the forest, of course…

A wedding to attend (New Hebrides)

The New Hebrides (before it went independent as Vanuatu) was a fascinating place. This archipelago in the South Pacific was and is populated by ethnic Melanesians, with a scattering of Polynesians – biologically related, very distantly – to Australian aborigines and native Hawaiians, respectively. Plus a few ethnic Europeans on the fringes, stealing slaves for Australia’s sugar farms (until 1901) or operating coconut plantations, or trading.

In the 1970s, the two nations made half-hearted attempts to establish an offshore tax-haven (paradis fiscal, in French). Their attempts were thwarted by the inadequacy of international communications. The overseas phone service was an antiquated radio link, like something out of a World War One movie. (“Do you copy?” “Roger! Wilco!” “Over and out!”)

We were connected to the world via an undersea cable to Australia during the scheduled British sessions, and one to Tahiti during the French sessions. I was once cut off in the middle of an incoherent exchange with a client in New York, when the session changed. I pleaded with the French operator (je vous en prie!), and she kindly gave me an extra three minutes.

There were reckoned to be 113 separate Melanesian languages, some spoken in only one or two villages, and four Polynesian ones. The lingua franca was and is a simple local pidgin called Bislama – described in my August 2013 blog Unexpected Places.

The territory was governed eccentrically by France and Britain in tandem – not in any Euro-bullying fashion but in cordial partnership with the local village chiefs. The European powers had only invaded in the first place, in the late 1800s, in order to forestall Germany’s presumed intentions. Their later governance concentrated mainly on the affairs of all non-native traders, visitors and residents.

When the Christian conquerors arrived, they stopped the traditional practices of head-hunting, cannibalism, and wearing no clothes, and tried manfully to stop domestic violence and revenge killings. The Native Code of the Islands (explained in my Aiding and Abetting Adultery, November 2012), negotiated by the two European administrators and the village chiefs, put the punishment of violent crimes into the hands of the Europeans. Offenders were prosecuted in The White Man’s courts, and served time in The White Man’s jails.

The British jail was a source of wonderment for us British expats. The rickety fence was designed (deliberately) not to keep prisoners inside but to keep their families outside. Why would anybody bother to escape, when his village chief would only send him back? Except on special occasions, naturally.

At one village wedding, a British Magistrate friend of mine caught sight of a prisoner he had sent to jail earlier that day. “I carefully didn’t catch his eye, and he carefully kept out of my way,” my friend told me. “Neither of us wanted to spoil the party. No harm done. He took himself back to jail before morning. I did check that.”

What is now called “community service” was part and parcel of jail sentences. Work-gangs of twenty men (violent offenders all) swarmed up and down the town streets armed with sickles and machetes, under the benign supervision of an unarmed native policeman. A chain-gang without chains…

Because old habits die hard, the jail was always full. So there was always a waiting-list of sentenced offenders who had been sent home to their villages to await official recalls by the government radio station. The station was on the air three times a day – half an hour in each of English, French and Bislama, each time: news, followed by public announcements.

“This message is for Henry Bong, believed to be (…!) on Malekula. Please meet the Motor Vessel Maskelyne at the jetty on Saturday morning. On arrival in Vila, report to the jail to commence your sentence. Also, Peter Vatu on Erromango, please meet the Maskelyne at about noon on Saturday –" [and so on until the half hour was up].

And, wonderfully, they all did report, unless they were severely sick or injured, or had a wedding to attend… I don’t know what they did if they didn’t know where the jail was, when they got to Vila. Asked a policeman, I suppose.