Coconut Wireless by Nicola Baird

Author:Nicola Baird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, adventure, vso, south seas, heartwarming, coconut, south pacific solomon islands honiara walkabout melanesia peace corps, headhunters, travel romance, holiday read, working holiday
Publisher: Nicola Baird

CHAPTER 14: SECRETS

THE LABOUR LINE is an official squatter camp squeezed between mango and flame trees. The breeze-block dormitories could look out to sea, but the unglassed, ripped mesh of the window frames face inland towards an overcrowded strip of dust kept from spreading by another long, one-storey building built in just a day by the Americans back in the 1940s. It’s now used as a police station, but no amount of paint, of whatever colour, can transform this dingy grey building perhaps because it backs on to the Kukum highway – the only road in and out of town along which a growing number of vehicles rattle over potholes throwing up dust and litter with every touch of the accelerator. People come to this police station after small problems, a copra sack stolen, a lost document or for traffic accidents (cryptically reported as RTA in the newspapers). Watched by the bored residents of the Labour Line they wait behind an old-fashioned butcher's counter while the duty officer sorts through pile, after pile, of paper in a time-stalling bid to assign a unique incident number.

Indeed for everyone Labour Line is a place for waiting, for frustration, for tears. A good life would not include a spell on the Labour Line with its 24 hour bubble of noise, dirt and unpleasant smells. To be an elder dying here would not be right at all.

But at Christmas time the place has an unusual charm though – with trees of ripe mangoes, plenty red flowers on the flame trees (like decorations for little baby Jesus) and because so many of the single men go home to their villages there is also enough space to swing your broom, stretch your arms and find a place to sleep. Even this brief respite can’t stop the growing envy simmering from every resident forced to stay on the Labour Line.

Suppose you were a frigate bird, one that unfurled your wings and flew from Auki to Tulagi just for an early evening stroll and you decided to detour over the big island, Guadalcanal. What would you see? Blue, blue water over the Coral Sea, paler blue along the passage and then slowly coming into view endless folds of uplifted hills - all long ago shaped by volcanoes, fire and the bursting energy of the inner earth - now covered with a thick tapestry of green rainforest. And then you'd see the plains of Galacana, some abandoned scrubby lands spoilt by sea water flooding after Cyclone Namu and the regimented lines of oil palms planted by Levers. You'd see a road, not yet busy, certainly dusty and you'd see it lead from a logging camp way down on the east snaking past an airfield, built on the blood of American and Japanese servicemen in the white man war, and on towards a ramshackle dot-to-dot of houses. Flying lower you'd soon reach the beautiful capital of Honiara: a place of too many people, most with no room to stretch even a baby beak.

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