Conversations & Encounters
Tete is incorrigible. He brought a tin of fruit and no plate and his usual comment ‘I am forget!’ and roared laughing. He always dons a shirt to serve me. More roars of laughter after they’d returned and a piece of corrugated iron wall fell down. Like unruly schoolboys some times.
Other Francis, (the one I didn’t know, whose now gone back) had a very odd sense of humour but very good worker. Would tie your legs together and fall over himself laughing when you fell.They all laugh very easily. The joke of fish bent stiff in odd positions from the deep freeze has never worn off! Francis used to do alot of night fishing. He caught a monster carronx on a night line by the building site. 116lbs with four roes of 1 kg each. Wouldn’t put it on champ later for deep freeze but staggered to village, bow-legged with it on his head to make sure everyone saw it at 5.00 a.m. He even got the manager out of bed.
Jo the cooks' boy came to my door with a ‘Yes, Madam,’ and presented me with two new green nicker nut pods tied to two pieces of string (nuts inside not as our boys thread conkers). I tried to ask if they the played game – as in West Africa, but he didn’t understand. I think they do. Jo just laughed and left them with me. He brought me a bunch of flowers the next day, lomatophyllun like aloe - a second crop. This was the vase of flowers I received the first day.
After lunch I was soon joined by 5 year old Patrick, an inveterate smoker – a cure for eating dirty clothes, Spindly legs but gorgeous smile and chatting all the time. He’s poking everything with stick – fatal fascination for the thousands of feather stars with 4” long arms but he poked quite gently. We were studying the marine hermit crabs which live at low a water in knobbly whelk shells almost indistinguishable from knobbly casuarina cones. Blue thorax, head and stalked eyes. Black claws sometimes with white and purple legs. Very slender. A few like this in different shells but mostly piles of knobbly ones, 20-30 together.
Suddenly Patrick tensed and straightened, and pointed about 10 yds ahead, raced across and jabbed – so like a little egret fishing that I couldn’t believe it. Must have very good eyesight. What he’d seen was a 7” long puffer fish which by the time I got there was well and truly puffed to at least 6” broad. Soft when he poked it, like a balloon. Patrick a little frightened, stood in water up to ankles and poked gently from as far as he could reach with a stick or threw a few stones. Slow flaps of long based uniflated tail and little wispy brown pectoral fins going 19 to the dozen but made no effort to get away, allowing itself to be tipped over - pectoral and tail fins going fast but sending it more or less round in circles in same reef pool, but as soon as we left it swam away with no more rotations and posiibly deflating a little but too well camouflaged to watch it far.
Cook (Ellie) – looking interestedly at the aquarium. ‘I can’t think why it boil in the corner?’ (Derek’s aerating bubbles). A good thought. Air bubbles in water usually mean boiling.
Man roared laughing at the import of exactly the same sand from Mombasa that we have on the island. A) People said no sand here. B) People said that there was sand here but too limey and they needed silica sand – but Mombasa is limey too! Can use it but need special cement.
Jacks haircut pre his homecoming to USA to a crop of weddings last time. “I went to a fisherman who was supposed to be a barber. He grabbed my hair, said “Barbe?” I expected a trim but he grabbed a handful and lopped one whole side off, then the other before I realised. With a rusty razor – must have been in sea water for a year, put his thumb in my left eye, the way you hold a fish and a forefinger in my ear and held me rigid while he scraped the rest off. Deigned to say after that the razor wasn’t the very sharp. It was a traumatic experience, I let it grow again.
