One Night of Horror in Santo

By Rosa Moore

TWENTY-SIX light-hearted passengers left Tulagi by flying-boat, Sydney bound, one Monday morning late in March. Twenty-four hours later, grey faced and crumpled, they gazed stiffly at the morning shoreline of Santo Espi ritu. . . .

Our trouble was that we had emerged from the poliomyelitis area of the British Solomon Islands into the polio-free New Hebrides. And, somehow, the earlier assumption that, as polio contacts, we were all to spend the night, while our flying-boat refuelled, in a hut suitably segregated for quarantine purposes, went entirely astray.

We came down into Santo’s harbour in the late afternoon.

Up came officialdom in a launch, wag ging a yellow flag; officialdom palavered with the flying-boat personnel; official dom poked a head briefly into the air craft, shook a black beret disapprovingly and withdrew; officialdom made a state ment and chugged away.

Through our preoccupation with over night bags, a humorous idea obtruded: “What if we have to stay on board all night. Ha, ha!” Followed by another: “Don’t look now, but you’ll be sleeping tonight in that upright chair of yours.”

The aircraft personnel did their best for us and our fate seemed to hang in the balance for some time. But it was so. We could not be quarantined on shore. Men, women and children must curl up cosily on board the plane.

A barge, putting out from the shore, led to the rumour that the inhabitants were on their way over to show that they wouldn’t even touch us with a barge pole.

But is proved to be the start of our refuelling operations, conducted by a trio of native experts.

Naturally, passengers seized the op portunity for a brisk stroll up and down the little barge as it rocked against the aircraft’s side, and naturally they breathed all over the bargees; and a few odd visitors later seemed rather to wear other holes in the quarantine precau tions.

In a spirit of dignified resignation, we did our best to settle stoically for the night. The baby of the party was philo sophical about sleeping in his stroller; two older children were balanced pre cariously and unphilosophically on suit cases and duffel bags, in the luggage compartment. Several adventurous males went aloft to sleep on the wings.

The rest of us groaned and threshed

about in our chairs. Lights went off at 10 p.m.

IT was. one of those long, long nights— brilliant with moonlight, breathless with tropical glamour, broken with snuffles and snorts, and full of the move ment of 34 (including personnel) restless souls.

THIS short article is written for your entertainment.

But you are invited to consider the absurdities of the poliomyelitis quaran tine, still imposed in some of the South Pacific ports by official Bumbledom.

Clearly, quarantine has been a farce in most places. Where imposed, it has been more honoured in the breach than the observance. If there were any danger of the disease in the Islands, there would have been grave epidemics, long since, in Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia. Solomons, Tahiti. But there has been no outbreak at all.

Yet the silly procedure described in this article is still being insisted on in some places.

Dark shapes moved heavily as sleepless bipeds stumbled about in search of a better spot. With rhythmic precision they fell over Father W., done up in a cocoon of plaid rug, who slumbered deeply on the floor; or they collided with prone Mrs. Y’s toes protruding into the alley-way.

Rain fell, and the adventurous males descended from the wings, fell over Father W., draoed themselves on lug gage, twined themselves around the gear in the plane’s nose, and pillowed their heads pathetically on the bilge.

It was a sad, sad scene to the sleepless —who witnessed in the shafts of moon light the lurching, the clutching, the sideways slip in the unsympathetic chairs of those in the toils of Morpheus. The air was heavy with uneasy dreams and tortured muscles, yet alive with uncon scious sighs.

With dawn’s grey light, surrealist shapes writhed erect and turned back into the familiar passengers of yesterday The horrid night was over. We were in tact, if wild of hair, haunted of eye, bent into curious shapes, and filled with self congratulation.

On Santo’s shore, neonle were thinking of taking baths, shaving, sitting down to breakfast, riding in jeeps; but we had battled with the unknown and the un comfortable. and needed only the aid of a chiropractor and a masseur to be able to take up normal human attitudes again.

There seems no moral to add to this because, before we removed our offensive presence from that memorable spot, four of Santo’s citizens (two of them children) came aboard to travel in our unhygenic midst to Noumea.

And Noumea showed no interest what ever in our contaminated state. Instead, unlike their anxious compatriots in Santo, the French officials sent us to stav overnight in a hotel, and we were allowed to behave like anv other tourists in puzzling over the strange ways of the franc.

Except that by now, after our night of horror, we limned about sneezing, and complaining of pains in the back of the neck and the lower limbs just like any genuine poliomyelitis victim!