A Bird on My Shoulder (5 page)

When we stepped onto the tarmac to see a long line of dancing women wearing identical costumes to the one Susannah had worn in London so many years before, my heart was racing.

I could not wait for the official greeting party to finish, and as soon I could break away, I approached one of the dancers. Underneath the resplendent headdress was a face I felt was familiar, shining with sweat and bright red paint.

‘Hello,' I said, shaking her hand. ‘I am looking for a friend. Do you know Susannah Wamp?'

The young woman's face opened up into a broad grin.

‘
Em i cousin bilong mi
. She is my cousin.'

We were only staying in Mount Hagen for a day, so with a sense of urgency I asked for details about how I could find her.

The official party was moving off the airstrip and into several waiting minibuses. ML began to frantically signal to me to hurry up.

‘She is a friend of mine – I met her in England,' I said, wishing I could speak Tok Pisin more clearly. I often felt clumsy with this apparently simple language, stiff with the echoes of an old colonial. By now, several other dancers had gathered around and were listening to our conversation. ‘Do you know where I can find her?'

‘
Em stap long Hagen Park. Em i wanpela tisa
. She's at Hagen Park. She is a teacher.'

I looked around at the gathered faces, so strange yet so familiar. ‘Thank you,' I said, ‘I have to go,' and gestured to the waiting bus.

I felt a hand on my arm.

‘
Mi save nem bilong yu. Em
Lucy,' the woman said, smiling. ‘I know your name. It's Lucy.'

•••

Shortly after we arrived in the shambling town of Mount Hagen I managed to slip away from the official business lunch. I must have cajoled someone into driving me to Hagen Park School, because the next thing I remember, I was sitting in the back of a car heading down an empty driveway towards a row of classrooms. A few students straggled towards the gate in crisp white shirts under a blistering afternoon sun.

My spirits sank. If school was over I had missed her. I had no phone number, no way of escaping the tight schedule once again to go looking. With a heavy heart, I asked the driver to take me back to the hotel. The bus would be leaving for the airport in less than an hour.

Just then a half-empty minibus appeared on the drive. As it manoeuvred past us on the narrow road, I looked across and suddenly caught sight of a face I had held so lovingly in my memory for almost a decade, staring back at me with astonishment.

The two vehicles suddenly braked and there were whoops of excitement as Susannah and I hurried towards each other and hugged on the dusty road.

‘You're here,' she kept saying. ‘You're here.'

•••

Seen from the air, the jungle landscape of the PNG highlands was rugged and mountainous. People had settled in tiny hamlets barely visible through the forest canopy, or in larger villages where the houses were built in rows. The land was covered with the most exquisite patchwork of vegetable gardens.

When I arrived a few weeks later in Susannah's home in Wilya village, the noon sun was beating down. In the valley, the women were gossiping and laughing as they washed their clothes and scrubbed the dirt off newly dug potatoes.

Low-lying thatched houses with hand-woven bamboo walls were nestled into the hillside, surrounded by mounds of sweet potato, corn, taro, pineapples and carrots. Susannah led me up a long, steep valley to a small house where thin curls of smoke wafted into the air.

We sat on the floor in her unadorned home, catching up on the events of the last ten years. A small Bible and a sign printed on bark were the only items in the room.
Yu no ken pret
, the sign read.
Yu mas bilip tasol
. I asked her what it said.

‘Do not be afraid,' she explained. ‘Only believe.'

I discovered a great deal about Susannah that weekend. I had not known it at the time, but she had been a nun around the time I met her and, shortly after her trip to London, she had left the convent and given birth to her only son, Edward.

I also learned, to my surprise, that her father had been knighted by the Queen and was Sir Wamp Wan, a polygamist with six wives and fourteen children. He had been one of the first indigenous leaders to meet the Australian gold explorers Mick and Danny Leahy and Jim Taylor on their ground-breaking patrols in the 1930s, expeditions that opened up for the first time the extraordinary hidden world of central Papua New Guinea.

After lunch we walked to a nearby hut, where we found Sir Wamp slouched on a wooden bed, a loop of plastic rosary beads dangling from his hand. I noticed two fingers were missing. Susannah later explained that, as a sign of mourning, he had chopped them off after the deaths of one of his wives and an aunt.

‘This is Lucy, a friend from England,' Susannah said.

He smiled in greeting and held out his hand. His fingers were cool and dusty.

When he spoke to Susannah, the sound of his language, Melpa, was tumbling, guttural, like a fast-flowing river. She nodded and pulled out an old cardboard box from under his bed while I sat on the dusty floor. ‘He wants me to show you these.'

Inside the box was a tattered photo album with faded captions. There were pictures of Sir Wamp at the Ford factory in England in the 1960s, shaking hands with a grinning manager; Sir Wamp in an ill-fitting suit outside Buckingham Palace; Sir Wamp smiling nervously on the steps of an aeroplane.

Susannah opened up several yellowing letters with impressive letterheads. In one, Lord Louis Mountbatten thanked Sir Wamp for organising the spectacular ‘turning head' courtship dances that were conducted on the nearby ceremonial sing-sing ground.

‘When the white men came, Daddy heard people say that there were some dead spirits – white dead spirits,' she said. ‘People said these white spirits might be killing people off. They were so frightened!' She briefly spoke in Melpa to her father and Wamp laughed softly. ‘Daddy said he was not afraid. He told the people they should make friends with the Australians, but not touch anything that belongs to them.'

Susannah explained that her father had walked through enemy territory to meet the Australians and was pleased that they treated him with respect. ‘Daddy says Danny Leahy saw our system of making gardens. He told him this was a well-organised society.'

Sitting in Wamp's house I felt an incredible feeling of déjà vu; this was the encounter I had always imagined all those years ago, sitting in a quiet library so many thousands of kilometres away in another world.

•••

Shortly after we arrived back at Susannah's house, she said she had an errand to run and would be back in an hour. I sat
outside on the grass looking down into the valley, listening to the children play, soaking it all in.

When Susannah came back she was carrying a shopping bag.

‘Where have you been? Did you go back to town?' I asked. When I'd arrived that morning Susannah had organised for a relative to take us in his car from the airport back to the village along a winding and rocky road. It had taken several minutes by car, so it must have taken her about half an hour to walk to town and back. Saying nothing, she disappeared into the house, eventually emerging with two small plastic bowls.

In each bowl were some small wild strawberries (she told me later she had grown them in her garden) and a blob of fresh cream she had somehow found at the town supermarket.

‘For you,' she said, handing me a bowl with a shy smile. ‘English afternoon tea.'

6

Love woke me from an unknown sleep.

Shortly after I met Julian, my father Tony arrived from England. I waited at the airport for him to walk through customs, looking for a short man with dark brown curls swept back into an aristocratic bounce. At last I spotted him, striding through the crowds with a delighted smile.

At sixty-seven, my father could still exude all the energy of a younger man. I knew that he would love Papua New Guinea; he had a rare gift for making instant connections with people.

‘As you can see,' he announced as we hugged, ‘I am wearing my Empire shorts and appropriate footwear.'

I looked down to see his legs poking out of a pair of towelling socks, his feet encased in a pair of sandals. I groaned with mock disapproval – he truly was the image of an Englishman abroad and had partly done it on purpose to embarrass me, I was sure. My father's feet were so small he still went to the
boys' section of the shoe shop and we had all laughed when my mother discovered an old school report of his which read:
Though small, is nimble
.

My father was composed of two personalities. One was a natural eccentric, full of warmth, playfulness and humour; the other was a reclusive intellectual who brooded on the past. As a child I quickly divined that I must never ask him certain questions; so much of his past seemed to be accompanied by darkness, by memories that must never be prompted.

I was once given a photograph of him as a teenager, sitting at a school desk in the half-light of an English winter afternoon. Thick cloud, slung low like a hammock, obscured the faint sun. I could imagine him in an austere schoolyard: a boy in a pale grey suit with cold knees, surrounded by high windows and shouting boys.

My father was the youngest of three sons – all very creative but quite unusual men. None of them had flourishing careers despite their enormous intelligence. They were all lucky or smart enough to marry extremely bright and capable women.

It was something of a risk having him visit me in Papua New Guinea, as experience had taught me that his mental state could be unpredictable, but I felt reasonably confident that there would be enough distractions to keep him stable. If not, then I would simply have to deal with it.

‘My God, the heat!' My father was sweating profusely and wiping his face with a large white handkerchief.

‘Are you feeling okay?' I asked as we walked to the car.

‘Absolutely,' he said. ‘I've never felt anything like it. It's quite marvellous but I could really do with a cold drink.'

On the way home he talked constantly, his excitement palpable. He greeted Geri with warmth, even making jokes about how hard it must be to ‘keep Lucy under control'. Geri just kept squeezing his hand and saying ‘Oh! Oh!
Papa bilong
Lucy.' I woke him several hours later from a deep sleep, his hair now wilder than ever in the humidity.

‘Good God. Where am I?'

‘You're in Papua New Guinea.'

‘How marvellous.' He brushed his hair back with the flat of his hand, grinning.

•••

A brooding sunset was just beginning as we sat on the veranda. When I had told Julian that my father was visiting he was very keen to meet him.

‘Sorry, I'm a little later than I'd planned,' Julian apologised as he walked into the house with a bag of clinking beer bottles. ‘How's your father?' Dressed in a checked blue shirt and cream trousers, he looked very debonair.

‘Fine, just a bit jet-lagged,' I said.

‘I've heard so much about you,' my father said, standing up to shake Julian's hand. This was so typical of his humour – I had told him absolutely nothing about Julian at all.

‘He's very nice,' my father whispered when Julian went to the kitchen to pour the beer. ‘What was his name again?'

‘Julian.'

‘Well, Jonathan,' my father said as Julian returned, ‘it's very good of you to come and see me.'

Dusk soaked into night as we chatted away. I sat and observed them both, silhouetted against the night. They were seemingly quite different characters – Julian reserved and gentle, my father ebullient and energised.

‘Lovely chap,' my father said with a slightly wistful tone after Julian had gone. ‘Yes, very impressive,' he repeated, looking at me.

I didn't say anything.

‘But he must change those ridiculous glasses.'

•••

In a very short time it became clear to me there was no possibility my fledgling relationship with Julian was going to creep quietly under the radar of Port Moresby life.

‘I hear you're going to be at the picnic on Sunday. I'll see you there,' said someone I hardly knew as we stood in line at the supermarket.

‘You're a breath of fresh air,' one woman said, affectionately squeezing my arm. ‘He's been quite lonely,' said another. I wondered if she was implying that Julian might be desperate.

At first I found it quite intriguing to be the subject of people's curiosity. While I was unused to such scrutiny, it was partly because I had unknowingly edged onto the stage of a much larger story. Julian and Charmian's marriage had spanned more than twenty years and several continents. As a couple who had lived in Port Moresby since the late 1970s, they had been both well-known and well-loved. Julian had worked as a barrister for Kirkes Lawyers and Charmian was an accomplished academic editor. Her unexpected death in 1993 had clearly devastated their family and their tightly-knit group of friends. Julian's father, Victor, had also died in the accident.

So when yet more change came to Julian's life, while some were happy for him, it also struck a jarring note for many. I was very conscious of this discomfort although it was rarely directly expressed; there was another history and greater loyalties, a vast network of connections across time, of bonds and experiences which I knew nothing about and to which I simply did not belong.

•••

Early one morning while my father was still sleeping, Julian and I went horseriding in the foothills around Port Moresby. As we spent more and more time together, I was discovering not just
how physically fearless Julian was, but how much energy he had. It was ironic that, despite the age difference, far from Julian having to keep pace with me, I was the one who constantly struggled to keep up with him.

Julian had started riding at the age of fifty because, he said, everyone else in his family had learned to ride and he wanted to be able to play polo with his sons. Even after he'd been thrown from his horse and landed on the roof of a car, breaking his collarbone, his enthusiasm for the sport was undiminished. Julian simply put up with a permanently lopsided shoulder and carried on. At a time when many men his age would be slowing down, it seemed that he was speeding up.