Just No Trouble At All

“Dang! Bang! Clang!”

O The raucous ringing of the store bell shatters for a few brassy seconds the customary quiet of the village, and heralds another day. The boys hitch up their lava lavas, leave their houses and come down to work.

We on the “hill” leave our breakfast tables and plunge into the day. I pick up a tin of cigarettes, pocket another box of matches, and scramble down the muddy track.

At the store, I open the small door in the big door, and climb inside the store.

Bella is hot on my heels. She is a good dog and is going to have pups. I have already promised 25.

Inside the store I take a quick look around —what for I do not know. Force of habit mainly, I suppose. I close the small door and open the big door, Aleck, my boss boy, and his minions come from around the corner and begin by sweeping the floor and knocking things over.

I begin by sitting at my desk, lighting a first cigarette and planning a day’s activity. The plan usually runs some thing like this: “I'll get the three sheds cleaned up, and the shelves in the store replenished, and if business is slack I’ll go through that basket of letters and see what has to be answered and filed, and then I’ll answer and file them and tell Maki to clean the refrigerator, and watch that he does it properly, then shift the baro meters and compasses and put them where the clocks are, so everybody who comes in can see them. When I finish that it might be a good idea to mark off the new stock, and tell Maet to go out and get me some razor blades, and take a letter to so-and-so, and enter up the copra brought in yesterday after noon, and get the dock ready for any copra that might come in to-day. Then it will be morning tea-time and I’ll take time out to have a smoke and a cup that cheers.”

All this thinking goes on aloud.

I GLANCE at my watch which prob ably says seven thirty, and the store clock, which if it is working, more than likely points to anything between five past two and next Wednesday, and I tell a boy to open the store.

“Allez! You open ’im.”

He greets this direction with a look of blank and marvellous-to-behold amaze ment, as if opening the door were an unheard of thing.

The vanguard of the day’s army falls in, and a stream of babbling, squabbling, rowdy Tonkinese fills the store. No sound above them can be heard. A few Euro peans drift in, and soon a sea of smiling, scowling, grinning, toothy and toothless faces surrounds me.

Experience has taught me that they all have more time than I, so I calmly light a cigarette, size up the waiting mass and plunge in. Before me on the counter I have ready sundry debit books and odd scraps of paper.

My first choice falls simultaneously on a Frenchman, a Tonkinese and a native.

All three talk at the' same time and somehow, by a miracle I suppose, they are all heard and served, likewise, simul taneously.

The Tonkinese may get the native’s order and the native may get the French man’s and the Frenchman may be sent away with something altogether different

from what he had in mind. But they all get a smile and a friendly word.

Counter conversation may run some thing like this; “Bonjour, monsieur. Que desirez vous?

You fella you make ’im wha’ name ’ere.

Merci beaucoup, nine-and-six a kilo aux soixante seize francs. One storeboy take ’im small case ’ere 'long put ’im all something ’ere ’long ’im. You say you did not get that case of biscuits last week?”

So the conversation runs, with no breaks for punctuation and little for breath.

GRADUALLY the first rush runs itself out. Tonkinese waddle away with cases of gin and brandy; natives are happy with their two shillings worth of tea and one-and-sixpence worth of sugar, and a carefully calculated fifteen and ninepence worth of calico; the Frenchman has gone and left an order with you and you have promised him that you will

By Trader Jack

have it delivered to his ship to-morrow afternoon. You make a mental note that you must “collar” one of the store’s two decrepit trucks when it pauses for a moment on its breathless, round-the clock activity.

Calm restores itself out of what could easily have been chaos, but the remark able part about the whole thing is that it never resolves itself into such an abandoned state as that. The old theory of “take your time” saves the situation.

JUST when you think you have a moment to get to your typewriter and finish off the Indents which should have gone to Sydney last week, a trader comes in with a long list, and a yen for a yarn.

He bemoans conditions as compared with what they were 20 years ago, and gives you a detailed account of his activi ties; while you spend the time thinking how you will shift the hardware down to the next shelf and go through the fancy goods properly, and sort out the odd items of grocery which seem to have got mixed up in them, and restore them to their rightful place.

“You remember that case of biscuits I got from you last month?” the trader asks.

“Yes,” you say. But you do not, be cause you have sold a thousand since then. But anything to keep him happy.

“Well,” he replies, “some of them were rotten.”

“They were?” you ask, astonished that such a thing could have happened, even though you would have been more sur prised if it had not.

But you know him well and he is honest, so you make up the loss and join him in wailing about the way things are done these days.

“Have you seen so and so since I was last over?”

You do not know whether you have or not but “yes” or “no” is equally suit able, so you say whichever comes first.

“He told me he .would leave a dozen duck-eggs with you. Have you got them?

No! Well, will you keep them for me and ask him if he got those spark plugs for his engine he was wanting last year.” He rounds off this miscellany, which is more in Dorothy Dix’s line than yours, by ask ing: “It won’t be any bother will it?”

“No trouble at all!”

So you make a note of it, right before his eyes, and put it on a nail on the wall along with a thousand other notes dating from anything up to a year ago, all aimed at reminding you to think of such varied things as telling John Jones never to put more than three duck-eggs under a ducky hen, and prompting Tom Smith to buy a collar for his dog!

BY the time this client is gone you should be a neurotic wreck—if you are the neurotic type—but as you are not, you are still, more or less, cool, calm and collected. You believe in the philos ophy that what cannot be done to-day will be done to-morrow; because, if you do not you will go mad.

As he goes out the door, he promises he will be ‘‘back to-morrow”. Though why he should be, you cannot imagine.

By this time, all thoughts of cleaning up the hardware are forgotten and you throw yourself into a wild “cleaning up of the files.” Just as you start an indig nant female client sweeps in, and as you stave off her tears, she implores you not to forget her tomato sauce next time.

The time has now arrived, where, if that plan over the first cigarette had held, you would be sitting down drinking tea.

But you can’t, because someone with nothing in particular to do has dropped in.

Even while you are wishing him miles away you are leaning over the counter thinking how you will organise a proper unloading of the next ship only interrupt ing his one-sided conversation with a “yes” or “no”, dropped in the right places by sheer experience. You do not voice your thoughts and tell him to take him self 20 miles away, because he is a good client and a good friend. He has brought you in meat, fruit and vegetables from his plantation many a time.

But you do wish him away, and quickly!

When he does go the tea is cold and it is 11 a.m. and time to knock off. You want to finish that book, or write that letter. But even though you drop the broad hint of telling the store boys to “close ’im up altoget’er,” and call out in a very loud voice to the cook asking him if “kai kai belong you ’e ready?”, the lingerers in the store do not go.

Finally they do go; but your three hours’ noon break—which you were going to use to clean up the bulk shed —has been re duced to one hour, because you promised someone you would take a look at his copra at 12.30 and give it the OK.

“No trouble at all,” you assure them.

But you should ask them if they will be a witness for the defense in the event of your committing what you feel would be

justifiable homicide.

By flying from Nadi to Mascot, 1,980 miles, on May 15, in 7 hours, 10 minutes, a BOAC airliner, a DC6, clipped five minutes off the previous Fiji-Sydney record, which had been made by a similar machine last November. The plane flew at 270 m.p.h. * * * The Banks line cargo steamer “Meadowbank’’ arrived at Honiara from Townsville on May 20. She will load for Britain the biggest post-war ship ment of Solomon Islands copra—2,3oo tons.