March 2020

I thought you might like to read something different to the usual fare of our current situation. I submitted this draft for a magazine. I’m not sure it made the cut but maybe you my friends and family, might enjoy a light hearted essay about my childhood and have a giggle:

The early daybreak light before the sun rose was the start of our day, and my alarm clock was Granny’s voice in her Palmerston Island -dialect of English saying, “Get up for the prayer”. Sometimes I’d stay lying not wanting to arise, aware of the scent of the kerosene lantern that lingered in the morning air. My mother would shake me up with an urgent whisper, “Baby get up.” No one stayed sleeping through morning prayer.

Prayers was a daily part of our life in Palmerston. The evening prayers at sunset was preceeded by the ringing of the big ship’s bell which sent us scurrying home from our games. It hung in the corner-front verandah of the Big House, my great uncle William Marsters’ home. His sister, Elizabeth, was my great grandmother and was known as One Gal, William Marsters’ favoured daughter. Her eldest child, Tehinano, was my grandmother who died in the cyclone of 1926. Mum was 2 years old when that cataclysmic event happened and she was brought up by her mother’s sister Sarah, whom we called Granny.

The house had a thatched coconut roof and walls with a raised wooden floor. The posts were native timber, milled from the trees growing on Palmerston which is my birth place. The sides of the house had large hinged sections from the floor to ceiling called ‘lifting’. Someone would be despatched to “Go put up the lifting” to bring in the sea breeze for Granny’s benefit; she suffered badly from asthma.

Breakfast was often yesterday’s leftovers, usually fish. Weetbix and cornflakes was as uncommon as the supply ship which came from Rarotonga, some 280 km southeast of us.

My brother and I had daily chores; to sweep up the fallen leaves, fetch water from the well or the water tank for a morning wash, and help Granny to feed the chickens. ‘Helping’ meant sitting by her and biting extracted coconut flesh into little bits and tossing them out to the chickens that came running. Instead of tossing, sometimes I would chew and swallow and Granny smiling, would gently chide me. “Baby, it’s for the chickens, not you.” I was always “Baby” not Stella or Sarah, her name given as a middle moniker. Granny had a special part in my life: she was the midwife at my birth.

Some of the men of my mother’s generation and their fathers were superb craftsmen – building longboats and canoes for fishing and transporting people, loads of coconut, copra and supplies. Once, when returning from Rarotonga on the schooner Tiare Taporo, we came ashore on my uncle’s boat. I was four and was seated on my mother’s lap, wrapped tightly in her arms. Her brother steered with a long oar and as we approached the passage in the reef, ropes were thrown out to men standing on either side. A call was made to, “Pull away.” The men pulled, and the oarsmen on our boat leaned into their oars; a heart-stopping thrilling ride on the swell of a wave.

In the earlier part of the century, school was held in a house at the end of the road towards the lagoon and the curriculum was supervised by the London Missionary Society (LMS). Each child had a slate and chalk to write with. They were supposed to have their own rag and bottle of water to clean the slate. Spitting and using your hands was not allowed; a rap across the knuckles was the stinging consequence.

When I was ready to go to school , it had been built inland in its present location for protection from cyclones. Named Palmerston Lucky School, there were two large rooms and books and pencils were supplied. I would dawdle on my way to school watching the sea birds flying above the tree tops. The path ran alongside a cemetery, the rocks exposed in the crumbling concrete graves of people from long ago and that of my grandmother.

My school lunch was often uto (coconut kernel) or ‘tachi cake’ – a sweetened, crispy pancake of plain flour and water. Sometimes I was given my favourite: a piece of smoke dried or dried salted fish. Because there was no electricity (therefore no freezers), fish had to be preserved by smoking, drying or salting.

I was once given a task to keep the flies away from the drying, salted parrotfish fillets hanging from their tails over wooden rods. They were my absolute favourite. I walked up and down the rows with the tip of a coconut frond in each hand to fan away the pesky flies.
When the sun’s heat became unbearable, I sought shelter: squatting and crawling duck-like beneath the rows. Now hanging tantalisingly close – just inches from my face, the inevitable happened and I surrendered to the irresistible aroma of sun-dried fish. “Don’t eat the fish,” mum had said. She might as well have had said “Don’t breathe!” To avoid detection , I pinched off random bits. It didn’t save me. At dinner one night, my uncle casually said, “We have some big flies with really big mouths, eating the salt fish. They bite here and there. Really clever flies we got.” I didn’t say a word. A guilty red flush spread over my burning face.

The next day I had a new chore – to collect fallen coconut branches. It took all of my seven year old strength to drag one branch to the pile for burning but I didn’t mind. I’d had enough of walking in the hot sun and my craving for salted fish was satisfied. Temptation had also been removed and safely stored out of my reach.

If you search on Google for Palmerston Island and William Marsters, you will find a plethora of information about our island atoll and William with his three wives. It was recently named as one of twelve most isolated and least visited places in the world.