The Coconut Book by Richard Maynard

Author:Richard Maynard [Richard Maynard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285641242
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

It hasn’t rained now for two weeks. There is no fresh water and still no coconuts, so I have to resort to drinking from the brackish soak. The tides are higher than normal because the moon is fat and close, and the island shrinks accordingly. There has been a lot of wind lately and it gets very cold. But no rain. The sea is choppy and there are strong currents off the shallows which prevent me from visiting Reef Four. The boredom is overwhelming. I play chess but am already starting to cheat with myself, which is plainly absurd. There are other games that I’ve devised, physical games involving bowling empty coconut shells or throwing stones at designated objects, such as a wicket of sticks or a hole in the sand. There is a variety of these games but they are basically similar and soon become tedious. They are games of accuracy and timing and, without competition to make them relevant, there is no measure of merit or stimulus for improvement. I have considered unravelling the wool in my socks and reknitting an improved balaclava. Although I don’t know the skills of knitting, it has always seemed a simple enough technique, and the manufacture of two needles would present few problems. There is in me a streak of what can only be described as pig-headedness, for even now, I balk at the idea of doing women’s work; but it is only a mental balking emanating from the falsity of male ego, and I shall most certainly make an attempt to knit, even if the attempt is a form of self-justification. There would be an irony in believing that a woman might possess a skill making her more fit to survive alone on an island than I am. It is an exaggerated concept, of course; many men knit, and not all women. Martine certainly didn’t, and I can’t recall that Monique did, either.

But would a woman survive as I have survived in the same circumstances? My instinctive reaction to such a question is almost scornfully negative, but what assets do I have that a woman doesn’t have? Well, there are the dubious benefits of muscular superiority, and in some instances that is an equally spurious claim. What is more, that asset hasn’t really been a factor in my survival. I swim and dive well, and that was always a talent, but I’ve known several young women who surpassed me in those activities. No, upon reflection, the only time when physical strength might have been an asset was in climbing a coconut tree, but if I had conceived the idea of a peg ladder earlier, that wouldn’t have been necessary. I suppose a woman could not have carried the heavier rocks up from the sea bed, or caught a turtle in the sea as I did, but neither factor would have meant non-survival.

Yet could a woman have accepted the mental agony of aloneness, could she have coped with this aspect as I have done? In that, I think, lies the essential difference.

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