Saying It With Flowers

Flowers

A controversy about whether or not to keep the bathroom door locked which swept Sydney recently recalls how the late Harold Markham settled the question in his Solomon Islands homestead, “Segi”.

Readers of Michener and other writers on the Islands will recognise Markham as the Solomons’ most lavish host.

“Segi” was a show place in which Markham had acclimatised trees and plants from many parts of the world. Markham’s bathroom. with its adjunct roofed with leaf, stood, like his large, comfortable house, on higher ground and was reached by a path which led through a corner of his garden. Neither the bathroom nor the inevitable cubicle nearby had doors.

“Who’d want to shut out a

view like that”? Markham would enquire of his guests in a magnificient voice that could be heard a mile across Marovo Lagoon, over which the necessary buildings commanded a broad vista.

Markham seldom lacked visitors and as most of his guests were passing schooner men nobody bothered about the absence of doors.

But rare lady guests sometimes found the al fresco lavatory arrangements embarrassing until their anxiety was put at rest in characteristic Markham fashion.

The path to the privy led past a magnolia tree and the signal that a guest was in occupation was a solitary plucked magnolia bloom lying on the coral paving.

On returning to the house the guest tossed the flower into the shrubbery and so gave the “all clear”. Only a poet’s mind would find a picturesque solution to what could have become a trying domestic contretemps. — Bill Baverstock.