More New Tales of the South Pacific by Graeme Kennedy

Author:Graeme Kennedy [Kennedy, Graeme]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pacific Island life, short stories, Tonga, Samoa and American Samoa, Fiji
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2014-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE WAR YEARS

ON 7 DECEMBER 1941, THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOUR – the United States was in World War II.

The massive American military machine built a fighter base at Faleolo where jet airliners now unload tourists, and Apia Harbour became an important supply base with warships anchored in the bay, and huge, ugly landing craft lumbering ashore to spill out the cargoes of war.

“One day soon after they arrived, I was outside my club watching the men unload on the beach across the road,” Aggie says. “It was a terribly hot day and they were carrying gasoline ashore, looking very red and tired.

“I walked slowly across the road to them, tapped a sweating Major on the shoulder and said: ‘Sir, I bet you’d like a nice cold beer.’

“He hesitated for a second – he thought Western Samoa was still under prohibition – but then he drawled: ‘Lady, lead me to it.’”

That single remark, the first American voice she had heard, was to be repeated untold times to create and build the Aggie Grey legend.

Aggie Grey and Bloody Mary are names long synonymous with all that is wild and wonderful about the South Pacific. Both unforgettable ladies earned their fame over decades of exposure to a public dreaming of an unattainable paradise of swaying palms, beautiful island women and clear lagoons.

Bloody Mary, inspired by a betel-chewing Tonkinese copra plantation worker in the wartime New Hebrides, is immortalised in Michener’s classic as a tough and conniving itinerant with little regard for her French employers – or any other form of authority.

Aggie, hostess and confidante to US servicemen at her waterfront Apia bar, became famous throughout the Pacific for her generosity, humour and genuine concern for the young transients bound for the coral battlefields further north.

But while the comparisons and attendant international publicity had done no harm to her splendid Beach Road hotel, she long ago turned her back on her mythical counterpart.

“I do not take it as a compliment when people say I am Bloody Mary,” she says in the late afternoon shade under the poolside palms. “I have fought against this for a long time, but still they believe I was her.”

While locals supported her little club, it was the Americans based in Samoa or passing through who fostered the legend.

“Those first servicemen who came in, sat on my back porch where it was beautiful and cool, and they stayed drinking until night,” she recalls.

“The word spread and more and more officers and youngsters came to my place to drink beer and whiskey – they were lovely people, always very polite and helpful, and never any trouble for me.”

For the Americans, the club was an oasis in the uncomfortably hot tropics thousands of miles from home – so they made it their own.

“As soon as they started coming to my place regularly, they wanted meatballs, relish, tomatoes and all the food they were used to in the States,” she says. “I told them I didn’t know much about that sort of

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