Pacific

Cadet

Amusing Story From ‘Corona’ By Sir Arthur Grimble, KCMG

IWAS nominated to a cadetship in the Gilbert and Ellice Is lands at the end of 1913. The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Dominion over palm and pine (or whatever else happened to be far-flung) was still, for a vast number of Englishmen, the heaven-conferred privilege of the bulldog breed.

Your uncles all said you’d never be a leader, my boy, if you weakened on that point. The Colonial Office said, more guarded ly, that you could hardly pass your probation as a Cadet unless you showed qualities of leadership.

Did Downing Street mean the same thing as your uncles? Well at least my Resident Commissioner on Ocean Island did not. Not for Cadets, anyhow. He told me at our first interview that he didn’t want any of that heaven-born stuff from me, please. It would suit him best if I were to confine myself severely to learning just a few things not yet revealed to Cambridge or the Colonial Office.

I was the first of the species Cadet to be injected into the Cen tral Pacific, he continued: I should find a number of competent people more than eager to teach me what was truly what. By way of facili tating their business, he had de cided to make me everybody’s bottle-washer in turn.

I was a mild young man, and it was a great relief to me.

“Everybody” meant, first, the Re sident Commissioner, an expert on the Secretary of State’s business; second, the Chief Clerk, an expert on the Resident Commissioner’s; third, the Head Accountant and Customs Officer, an expert on the Chief Clerk’s; and last, the Officer in-Charge of Police and Prisons, who did practically everything for all of us but didn’t talk about it.

Between the four of them I was kept pretty busy at the various paper routines, but there were also outside jobs to learn. No Public Works Department existed in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands at that time. District Officers had to un dertake quite a number of small building ope".; dons for themselves, and the idea was to get me a bit educated in such matters before I began to run away with Empire building on a large scale.

It was a very good idea indeed, and I liked it, but it occasionally cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

Take, for example, the case of the Res’dency cistern.

Water was a problem on Ocean

Island, and they were trying to meet it when I arrived. One of the first odd jobs I had to learn was how to blast twenty foot pits in the rocky earth for laying down concrete storage tanks. The actual work wasn’t difficult. You got someone to drill holes in the rock; you pushed sticks of gelignite, with de tonators and fuses attached, into the holes; then you tamped them in, lit the fuses, and ran for your life, I chose the Residency back-yard for my first independent blasting operation, a tank had been ordered for it. My only real mis takes were that I chose a Satur day afternoon, warned nobody, and used 300 per cent, too much gelig nite. The immediate result was an explosion of volcanic force.

The surface of the back-yard rose bodily into the air, and boulders of gigantic size fell crash ing through the Residency roof into the dining room. The Resident Commissioner and his lady were taking their siesta at the time.

They addressed me at once, and both at once, from the verandah, in their underclothes. I could not help feeling that the things they said of me were extraordinarily true. It was time I learned about the Customs.

The Customs work on that reef bound island could be exciting, be cause it took in. as a side-line, the landing of mails and small cargo for the Government. Our boat’s crews were made up of hand picked Ellice Islanders. There are no better oarsmen in the world, and nothing less than all their skill was needed in rough weather. The ships lay out in an unsheltered bay; the entrance to the boat harbour was a narrow passage blasted through the reef, wide open to the ocean swells. In the wes terly gales that blew up between September and March, the passage became a hell’s cauldron of raging surf and snarling back-suck.

TWO days before Christmas, 1914, a trading steamer bound for the Gilbert Group came wallowing into the bay and sig nalled about 4 p.m. that she had on board a new porcelain bath and three cases of whisky for the Resi dency. Would we take delivery at once, please, as a westerly blow was starting and the captain wanted to make for Tarawa that night.

The boat-passage looked awful to me. I certainly should not have tackled it ordinarily, but, as a

matter of fact, the whisky wasn’t only for the Resident Commis sioner: it was for everyone on the Government Station. The cheeri ness of our Christmas festivities was at stake. I had in mind what my four masters would say to me if the stuff wasn’t landed. So out we went.

We found the porcelain bath al ready waiting for us in the ship’s slings. Have you ever tried to catch a bath in a boat from a ship that’s rolling twenty degrees? There it goes at one moment, hurtling up and away from you, as the vessel wallows to windward; and there it comes now, roaring down at you with the whole ship’s side, as she takes her leeward lurch. There’s just an occasional moment or two between rolls when you can snatch it on board without scuppering yourself.

We waited half an hour for our chance in that brutal seaway; but we did get away with it when it came, thanks to the superb boat’s crew. I was so braced with the thing that I actually enjoyed shoot ing the boat-passage on the way home.

“This is the life,” I thought, as I opened a note that was waiting for me on the boat-jetty. The Resident Commissioner had watched us through his telescope. He had written to congratulate and thank all of us. “And please,” his letter ended, “have the whisky brought straight up to the Residency, and join us in'a drink.”

It was the proudest moment of my life —except that the whisky wasn’t there. In the excitement about the bath, I had left the ship without it.

There was only one thing to be done.

Dusk was falling as we got out to the ship again. I was greeted by a torrent of abuse for holding her up, but we got the three cases aboard somehow. Then, off we started on the homeward pull . . . and we pulled, and we pulled, and we pulled, and we gained not a yard shorewards. No boat’s crew in creation could have made it against that current. We were in the wrong end of the tide-rip that was scouring the bay. We found ourselves being swept round a point into the open Pacific.

In the end, after dark, the ship had to take us all on board, and we slept the night there. It was only three o’clock the next after noon that the weather abated, and the captain got rid of us. The ship was standing away round the point as we landed.

“Well,” I thought, “we’ve done the trick anyhow. It’s Christmas Eve, and here we are with the goods,” Yes. that again could have (Continued Next Page)

iroved one of my life’s high noments —if the whisky had been here. But it wasn’t. The boat aptain and I scrabbled wildly hrough every nook of the boat, )ut it just wasn’t there.

And then the piteous truth came »ut. Two men of that devoted crew lad risked a lot the night before o get the liquor safely back on the hip when I had left the boat. }nly, they had forgotten to say o before our return to shore.

Not a thing more could be done ibout it now. There was the whisky nerrily steaming away to Tarawa.

When I got to the Residency, the rhole Government staff, with wives ittached, was waiting to greet me. rhey cheered me from the front teps as I approached. They lapped me on the back. They vere waiting to divide the whisky.

Vas it following me up at once?

JLy word, young Grimble, they aid, we’ll drink the first one for t>u when it arrives . . . but let he curtain fall.