Spontoon Island
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Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
14 March, 1937 to 18 March, 1937



Sunday March 14th, 1937

Rather a shame to have Gate Guard on the one night of the week we would have had extra sleep, but at least Molly and I had the early shift and could relax till breakfast at eight. Breadfruit and pineapple (tinned, non-fizzy) for breakfast, then out in very fine sunlight to South Island.

    Being early for a change, we stopped to investigate that solid grove of bamboo where the Chapel of the Sacred Heart used to stand. Someone had tried to clear a track into the bamboo, but it would be like trying to tunnel into the main face of Mount Kiribatori – more so in that even normal bamboo can grow an inch a day, and this is twice as energetic.

    Maria has become a very irregular church-goer of late; one expects Miss Devinski to have words with her about it but as long as Maria and Molly join us nothing is said. Not that either of them have shown interest in the Spontoonie religion – but our experiences on Cranium and Krupmark have somewhat demolished their old argument that there is nothing in it. Having seen the local Priestesses in action they had little choice but to accept the facts – which does not mean they have to be happy with the knowledge.

    It is rather like last week when I noticed Eva Schiller poring over some Archaeological magazines she had air-freighted over from her homeland, and she was pointing the “unknown and indecipherable” ancient script on some pottery that was found in a surprising location. Ada was with me and identified it as a form of very early Hebrew, which she cannot exactly read but recognised from school. Eva cast as dirty look at her as she could get away with to a third-year, and loudly and clearly repeated that it was “Unknown And Wholly Indecipherable.” Some knowledge can be to one’s disadvantage.

    While Molly and Maria sloped off to get about a pint apiece of coffee at the nearby Pie-Shop of the Sacred Steak and Kidney, Helen and I cleared our minds and concentrated to see what had been done. The plants are greatly helped by being rooted not only in the earth but the energy of the islands – Helen speculated that the same could be done on fruit trees and similar, in a few very well chosen places. A century ago it might have made for an effective miracle, but tourists today would just nudge each other and whisper that the priestesses must be running up quite a bill in artificial fertilisers.

    Half an hour later Molly and Maria had rejoined us full of praises for a far superior brew of coffee than anything Songmark ever provides. The proprietor is a crafty civet cat of East Indies extraction, a “luak” to be exact. Exactly how he gets such distinctive top-quality coffee beans is something that many furs have tried to find out over the years, to no avail. Molly tried to worm it out of him, offering him a lucrative deal if he can export a tonne a month – oddly enough he said he could never provide her that sort of quantity.

    At the Hoele’toemi compound Helen was delighted to find Marti home safe and sound – they immediately vanished to “pick flowers” for the luncheon table. Alas, Jirry is still at sea, and in a tramp steamer trying to avoid looking suspicious (such as being spotted heading across the sea lanes at thirty knots when most average ten on a good day) he may be out there awhile.
 
    The news from Mrs. H was that one of their neighbours at Haio Beach has a daughter who is getting married tomorrow, and as many furs are busy in the week working to get Casino Island ready, the family is holding the celebration and feast today. So although we were busy cooking in the morning it was then packed up in baskets ready to take down to the village on the coast. Our “Euro” costumes were rapidly replaced by grass skirts and flower leis as we tried to look our best for the occasion. Helen and Marti turned up just as we were about to head out – they did have some flowers but not many considering how long they were gone for. Molly whispered that Helen looked rather smug and full of herself, but that is probably an understatement.

    It is only about five hundred yards down the forest trails to the beach, where in a few months loud gramophones will be playing to loud-shirted tourists queuing up to buy exotic ice-creams and demanding hot dogs. Today there was a smaller but more select crowd, everyone’s noses twitching with the scent of a fire-pit being opened that must have been roasting all night. Roast pork, a Polynesian tradition but a rare sight on a Spontoonie plate!
 
    We handed over our food baskets to the bride’s mother, a very rounded and cheerful badger lady who was in charge of the festivities, and were introduced to various relatives who had come from afar. On the beach were drawn up two actual ocean-going outrigger canoes, a very traditional transport but not common any more except for the tourists. The bride-to-be and the groom were decked in their finest with fresh palm skirts, bright leis and traditional shell head-dresses; she wore a rather fine string of pearls that any European jeweller would have drooled over (and being one of the multiply equipped Polynesians of ancestral stock, she had other assets that they would drool at too.)

    I could see Helen mentally taking notes, and squeeze Marti’s paw as she looked over the wedding preparations. It seems the couple will actually be wed on Sacred Island, something that is quite rarely done now but they are both from old Spontoonie families who were amongst the first to resettle from Orpington when the “Euros” arrived. That is another reason why the feast is being held early; only the happy couple and the Priestess will be setting paw on Sacred Island, and usually the festivities and the ceremony are on the same spot. All told there must have been a hundred and twenty furs there, from as far as Dioon Island. The proprietor of the Pie-shop was there dressed appropriately; a luak at a luau.
 
    Though we were only really friends of neighbours, everyone was glad to see us and thanked us for coming. I felt my ears droop though, missing Jirry. The feast was excellent, the roast pork as fine as I have ever eaten back in England from restaurants with far more lavishly equipped kitchens, and the rest of the food was certainly of wedding quality. Helen made sure to get the recipes, and I will copy her notes. She whispered that inside six months she hoped to be inviting me to just such an occasion. Six months! It is only that long since the new First-years arrived, and Beryl tricked them into singing that very memorable spoof anthem, “Althing Bright and Beautiful.”

        It was a splendid afternoon, although I felt a little guilty for not having done much Warrior Priestess training today. All too soon we had to say farewell, leaving Marti and Mrs. Hoele’toemi to enjoy the evening celebrations we returned via her house, dropping off the baskets and getting changed back into our Songmark outfits. The compound seemed rather sad with just us hurriedly bouncing through it as if it was a school locker room; it is truly people that make a place. No wonder the Songmark prospectus emphasises its achievements rather than the facilities; a critical observer would see half a dozen second-paw wooden huts with its inhabitants crammed in four to a room. The only new furniture is bunk beds for the first years, which at least eases the desperate lack of floor space. There was hardly room for a skunk or a squirrel girl to turn round whilst dressing without her tail knocking things over – and both those species are represented in our current junior year.
 
    Back after a rather different Sunday without Saimmi or Saffina who are away busy elsewhere, but we had an excellent luau and Helen now knows better how to arrange her big day. Maria was joking that if she carries on with Marti at the current rate the wedding might have to be brought forwards. Not that Polynesians worry about such things as the bride needing an extra-large wedding dress, but in theory Helen could be thrown out of Songmark penniless and the next beach she sets paw on would be near Corpus Christi in Texas,  having been returned whence she came as our Songmark contract promises. I doubt our Tutors would actually do that, but it is not something to risk.

      We returned to Songmark well fed and still scented of roasting meats, as Prudence and Ada hungrily noticed as they signed us in. They had millet mash for the Songmark Sunday meal. Helen had a lot to say about the wedding feast, and indeed Prudence was keen to get a copy of her notes being in much the same situation with a happy day to plan this Summer. Then, Helen and Tahni have both been Tailfast more than twice to their fiancés and could marry any time they want. I keep thinking of Tahni as a fiancé rather than a fiancée; with spotted hyenas the difference is rather less than most folk would expect. If Prudence decides to have pups they will probably look as much like her mate’s as with any mixed couple – Tahni has brothers who look much like her and can pass on much the same in terms of family features.
 
    (Later) Talking with Carmen and Belle as they prepared to turn in early for their three a.m. alarm call, I discover we are starting to film on Tuesday. Our Tutors have been talking with Miss Melson, and agreed some of the shots she wants of takeoffs, landings, aerobatics and such. Doing this in Hollywood hiring Union-approved stunt pilots, aircraft and ground crews would surely cost a fortune.  The Spontoon film industry is doing very nicely on providing cheap but well qualified services such as this, and cares nothing for what Hollywood thinks. Maria says the Union bosses are all communists anyway, though I doubt it.

    I expected Molly to throw a fit over the idea of working with Miss Melson, as Madeleine X already has done by report. But she just gritted her teeth and nodded, commenting that it was all going towards helping “Megan”.  So she does not join Madeleine with a shovel on the sanitation squad those days, although she insists she is well out of even accidental camera shot. I suppose it is like the standard Native belief that being photographed captures a piece of one’s soul. If true it could explain much about what Film Frolics’ gossip pages say film stars get up to!

  
Tuesday March 16th, 1937

The big day! Yesterday was spent servicing and preparing the aircraft; my little Sand Flea is cleaned, the engine tuned and has a free oil change, courtesy of Melson Productions. We have various scenes that can be stitched into three or four films. The Sea Osprey taking off then the four Tiger Moths heading out in pursuit is a useful generic piece of action that hardly needs a director the class of Cecil B. de Mole to work out a plot “hook” for it. Similarly, the Sand Flea landing on a beach and the pilot running for cover into trees or sand dunes while the Tiger Moths swoop overhead – shooting a dramatic chase is harder than working up to why it happened. It is not too warm yet to wear full flight suits and helmets, so from fifty yards the camera will be hard pressed to tell us from suitably dressed actresses who will be making up the rest of the footage.

    Actually, finding a suitable piece of beach was much harder than it looked – as the tide goes in and out various otherwise suitable flat sand areas either flood or dry out too much. But I brought the Sand Flea down in front of the cameras for three three-point landings on various parts of Eastern Island beaches, the landing run mercifully shortened by its unique ability to slam the whole top wing down as an airbrake once the wheels are on the ground.

    Of course, not everything went smoothly. I could tell Molly was in a bad mood as she was practicing with those “weighted sleeves” that she got in Hong Kong, flicking them out of the sheaths at her wrist cuffs and hammering bundles of brushwood. She was the nearest in stature to Juanita, the Brazilian jaguar who is the dark heroine of the film, and Miss Devinski ordered her to lend Juanita her flying kit to film some close-ups by the parked aircraft. Molly says she would have wanted to boil wash the suit but has to wear it all day, and shuddered as if contemplating being infected by mange. We keep telling her various tastes are not contagious - as Helen pointed out, she had as much chance of her Maid’s costume giving her housemaid’s knee.

    Maria did not improve matters by coming in with a piece of paper and announcing Molly had been chosen to play the part of the heroine’s maid due to her experience with the costume – it was a joke, but the cameras should have caught Molly’s expression as her ears and tail went down in horror. Some things a fur cannot entirely fake no matter how good they are at acting. Prudence has said that the only time she has seen a fur’s tail actually go sideways on film is in those Miss Melson produces.

    We had some drama with one of the Tiger Moths as it was filmed landing on the Eastern beach where a good strip of beach was exposed. Things change very quickly as the tide changes, and after two “wave-offs” delaying it till the cameras were ready, Susan de Ruiz made a fine landing twenty minutes late. The landing was fine, but as she taxied to turn into the wind she ran into a soft patch of sand and the Tiger Moth was suddenly stuck up to its axles, with half an hour before the tide was due to turn. A case of “all paws to the pump” or at least to shovels and tow-ropes. There were a dozen of us working flat-out with lengths of timber and sheets of corrugated iron under the wheels, while the Tiger Moth was unloaded of the back seat, emergency supplies and such to leave it a hundred pounds lighter.
 
    Though four furs can paw-handle it easily enough along a smooth runway, it was desperately slow going. We had moved it about twenty yards before the tide began to turn, and suddenly the wide sandbank it had landed on began to get damp again. A quick “Chinese parliament” had us agreeing that by the time we had reached the sand bar it would be too soft to take off on, so we turned the Tiger Moth’s nose towards shore and started to really race the tide. A half hour of desperate work followed, where we all wished for wider tyres or quick-conversion float kits! On an amphibian we would have just waited till the tide came in and flown straight off.

    The camera crew helped out, but there were times when only so many paws could get to work in the available space, and they shot off some fairly dramatic footage. By the end of an hour we were resting above high tide line, while their “gopher” (actually a prairie-dog) ran the quarter mile to Mahanish’s and back to return with a dozen bottles of Nootnops Red. We definitely appreciated them.

    Of course, that left us with an aircraft on the dry sand beach three hundred yards away from the end of the runway. There are no walls or fences in the way, but neither are there any roads. So it was another two hours work paw-handling the Tiger Moth across the rough ground between the sand dunes laying a “track” of timbers under the wheels on soft spots before we finally had the aircraft back on the runway perimeter track. We had had to run the engine to push it over some of the trickier spots on the way, so most of us were quite sand-blasted and caked with dust having been pushing it.
 
    Miss Devinski was watching us all the time, but left us to the job while she made copious notes. I suppose that is what third-years have to expect; we had studied this in theory in the first year and have hauled all sorts of things over every surface imaginable every term since then. Susan had the idea of salvaging enough empty fuel drums from the airport to lash under the wings and convert the Tiger Moth into an improvised floatplane – it could not have taken off, but neither would it have sunk. We might have managed to tow it just offshore around the tip of the island to the nearest seaplane jetty and winched it ashore on its wheels from there – which was our plan B. The empty drums exist, we have seen a pile of them at the hangar side and there would have been time to roll two apiece down to the beach before the tide reached the aircraft. Had we been in imminent danger of losing the aircraft we might have had some assistance from our Tutors and the airport staff – at the cost of great bleeding chunks of points, without a doubt.

    Having brushed ourselves down we amazed the film crew by asking what was next on their schedule. They had expected us to take the rest of the day off and have a drink to celebrate; evidently they have not worked with Songmark before. While we serviced and inspected Song 3, the other Tiger Moths and the Sea Osprey did some low-level passes, one of them dropping a paper-filled parcel onto the sand dunes. No doubt there will be a good plot reason for this to happen; Miss Melson is filming the flying sequences for perhaps two or three films right now.

    By four o’clock I think the Songmark aircraft had notched up about thirty hours of logged flying time, which will probably boil down to thirty minutes of usable film. And I recall when a small kitten thinking films were just like school one got the cast together and did it, except having cameras on! Molly says that on some film projects they have changed directors half-way and the new arrival threw out every minute of film selected by his predecessor. No wonder Hollywood prides itself on “million dollar epics”; they probably waste half of what they spend on pointing a camera at.

    (Later) Just as I thought, Miss Devinski called in the ten of us who helped salvage Song 3 and asked for a full report on it, by tomorrow breakfast time. She wants Plans B, C and D in some detail, too. Ouch!


Wednesday March 17th, 1937

A decidedly full day, starting with my handing in the report about yesterday’s salvage operations to Miss Devinski before breakfast. Plan D had been a desperate use of the oil drums as rollers under the fuselage, which would have needed us to first take the undercarriage right off (a half hour job with everyone helping but the necessary tools were carried onboard.) Sometimes our Tutors make us demonstrate our Plan C or D, to stop us coming up with schemes that have more imagination than practicality.

    Then it was the big day; along with Jasbir and Madeleine X I headed out to Casino Island and that “Pirate’s Cove” to the East of the Casino where various small boats are berthed. The main piers are busy with tour-boats in season and supply boats year-round, which makes a twenty-foot wooden sailing boat rather uncomfortable between a jetty and twenty thousand tonnes of possibly mishandled liner.

    Although it was not such an ordeal as our three days piloting exams last year, the Day Master’s Ticket is a long and hard day where some particularly old and caustic salts try to get us lost or running ourselves aground. The wind was decidedly squally, which had the boom swinging just when one least wanted it to; getting knocked unconscious, overboard or both would not have been a “pass” mark! There was a rare Northerly wind today so we went out to the South-West between South and Main Island, and tacked our way up the Westerly coast while following a strict course that the gruff pipe-smoking otter called out. The little flotilla of three ships kept in quite good formation without any collisions, even when rounding the point near the new short-wave towers where there is a nasty tangle of currents.

    The really tricky bit was getting in and out of the North-facing harbour at Chikloota, which is narrow and edged with sharp coral. Sailing in was just a matter of aiming steady, but tacking and beating out with the wind on the starboard quarter and very little room to manoeuvre – well, it certainly made me respect still more the Noenoke fisher clan whom we shared our first Easter holiday with. Native catamarans have a quite different sail arrangement, so I could use little of what I recalled from those weeks.
 
    Fortunately we have the year’s updated charts, issued fresh for the tourist season to guide us through the shallows between Eastern and Main Island. The tide was almost out just as we threaded between the sand bars, watching a dredger at work on the tour-boat channel. The excavated coral sand is put to good use making sand-lime bricks; Spontoon is doing a lot of building these days but it is a small and scenic place that can hardly open up gaping rock quarries for building material. The only real quarry is that one on the North coast where the sculptor Mr. Tikitavi works on those distinctive bowl-shaped statues. I could have sworn that one of them turned to look at me when we went past.

    With a following wind we were instructed to go for a full-speed run into Casino Island. I raised every stitch of sail, pulled up the centreboard to cut the drag and soon we were foaming forwards at twelve knots. A quick tack round the Eastern side of Casino Island past the old Pier One, and ten minutes later I was dropping anchor in Pirate’s Cove again, a full minute ahead of Madeleine and three ahead of Jasbir. A very bracing trip, made all the more worthwhile by being told I had passed my Certificate and it would be in my letter-box at the weekend. That should make our Tutors happy, unlike most things I have done this year.

    An excellent day, indeed. I shared a water taxi with Susan de Ruiz on the way back to Eastern Island; she has been asked by the Althing to look over some of their fishery statistics. She was able to reassure them that the apparently strange variants in fish yields were entirely normal, and statistically fitted a “Poisson curve”.
 
    There was just time to dive into the dining room before they stopped serving; it was sweet potato again but after a day of hauling ropes in the fresh air it went down very nicely. Looking back over the past weeks I realise my diary is looking rather like a recipe book – we are all working flat-out and food is something constantly in our thoughts. Sleep is another heartfelt desire but it is less variable. We only have one sort around here, to collapse on one’s bed wholly exhausted and sleep deeply till the alarm clock goes. Missy K lost a couple of points this week having been found by Miss Devinski flat out on her bed at lights-out, fully clothed and snoring loudly with her boots on (not that snoring as such is a problem, else Maria would have cost us dearly by now.)

    Molly was looking pleased; the first commercial batch of fizzy pineapple is leaving the cannery tomorrow heading to the shops, and she stands to make quite a few shells out of the cans. She dipped her ears and admitted that there might be some advantages in “going legit” after all, though her idea of respectable commerce might not suit everyone. Her family connections were somewhat involved with the gangster company Murder Incorporated ™ and she would not have balked at buying shares had anyone but Beryl been selling them. I suppose that is one company fairly resistant to hostile takeovers.

  
Thursday March 18th, 1937

Just ten days before the end of term, and twelve till we head South to New Suden Thule. I certainly hope Jirry will be back before then; it has been an awfully long time. Still, a trip around the Pacific on a tramp steamer is no express service and it would be unrealistic if they always had a cargo ready to load. From what we hear, a tramp steamer that can get in and out of port in a week is doing well, and a deceptively complex “import-export” operation might call at half a dozen ports.
 
    It is more embarrassing that one might say I have seen a lot more of Lars. Well, some of him. Molly says he is working and surviving on Krupmark, where she plans to join him after she graduates. It might make Krupmark a safer place, in that the more trigger-happy denizens tend to “bump each other off” or get squashed by the rulers living on the hill, and if anyone can survive that sort of life Molly can.
 
    Beryl is selling her latest investment scam, claiming someone is planning to discreetly advertise Krupmark as an exclusive holiday destination, small tours heavily guarded with permission from those up on the Hill. Presumably the bars and less reputable establishments will appreciate the custom. I am not buying any shares from Beryl, though one has to admire her pluck and persistence. There is a girl who could profitably run a refrigerator showroom on New South Thule. If she declared herself as a money-making company it might be a worthy one to invest in – I trust in her ability to generate wealth by the barrel, but not the investments she sells to others! Managing to squeeze any actual dividend out of her could be a problem. Possibly the direct squeezing method might work, with Missy K sitting on her till she pays up.

    Out today to shoot more film footage, now Miss Melson has looked over the first batch and decided what else she needs. This time the Songmark Junkers 86 was aloft, and with Missy K at the controls it jettisoned a “stick” of what were actually sour coconuts. They landed on the beach harmlessly, but with clever camera angles it looked very like they were light bombs aimed at my Sand Flea parked at the Eastern end of the runway. It is no great editing feat to splice in stock footage of explosions, coconuts not being particularly destructive in their own right. The “sour coconut pop-skull” I remember Brigit Mulvaney over-indulging in last September is another matter entirely.

Thinking of such, Molly was chatting with one of the crew over the somewhat controversial raid on Guernica in Spain – the camera-fur was taking the Nationalist side and saying the raid was aimed at the legitimate military target of a nearby bridge and simply missed and hit the town by accident. Molly poured scorn on that, having read that the bombs used were light-case fragmentation and incendiaries, absolutely useless for smashing up masonry and reinforced concrete bridges (whenever folk come in with new horror tales of air raids, Molly immediately wants to know what ordnance was used, how the fuses were set and if the bombardier laid down a good pattern on the target. Compassion is not her strong suit.) She concedes that from what Maria has admitted, the Italian air force is full of furs who joined for the glamour and the uniform rather than any actual ability to hit a target.

When we got back from lunch, I had an unexpected local letter in my post box. I had asked Prang the Siamese cook from Bow Thai about getting “deportment” lessons appropriate to my other face as Kim-Anh. It seems she has spoken with this Malou, a fur I have not met, who is willing to give me lessons for what sounds like a quite modest sum. I shall certainly write back and try to arrange a time – as if we had time to spare these days.

    There was no time to write till evening – we scattered to our various classes, Molly happily leaping on the water-taxi to Moon Island for her field engineering courses. She says that although being able to build bridges and suchlike structures is handy, demolishing them is far more fun. She has been demonstrating a silver-grey “fire starting gel” which she has got from somewhere – I have seen her start a camp fire with it, and about a tablespoon full is all it needs. Whatever is in it, the flame is incandescently white and burns as hot as thermite, but a spark will ignite it! Definitely not something one wants to have any accidents with. We have been trained to have a healthy respect for thermite, which is usually ignited with a strip of magnesium ribbon.

    There was good news from the Allworthy yards today; that strange precision component Mr. Sapohatan wanted, has gone into production. It is some sort of structural member, made out of a high-strength alloy that few companies in the world can handle (they are sub-contracting most of the heavy forging to Brown Bailey’s in Sheffield) and has to be made to exact tolerances including weight. They have been paid, and I can relax for a little till next time I need to find the yard more work. The expanded dry-dock is well under way at the shipyard, too. Whatever orders the shipyard wins after I pass over the title to its proper owner, at least I will have left the place more capable than I found it.


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