Bastille Day In Santo

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31221, 19 November 1966, Page 5

Bastille Day In Santo

(Specially written for "The Press” bp

KATHLEEN HANCOCK)

THOSE early Spanish were a verbose lot. Where one word would do to name some new place on the map, they had to have anything up to a dozen. The classic example is, of course, the Columbian city of Bogota. It was originally christened “Santa Fe de Bogota del Nuevo de Granada de las Indias del Mar Oceano.”

In 1606, the New Hebrides island of Espiritu Santo started off with a handle not quite as long, but equally rolling and sonorous. De Quiros, exploring for the King of Spain, called his South Seas landfall “Tierra Australis del Espiritu Santo.” It’s a lovely name for a lovely island but the locals shorten it to “Santo.” The drop into the airfield there is breathtaking. It is an old war-time airforce base carved out of the jungle. Great walls of creepershrouded tropical forest surround the strip and even a big plane seems suddenly puny in the face of nature run riot. One Hotel There was not much choice of hotels in Santo. In fact, there was only one. It was a relic of the Pacific war, too, or at any rate it had been put together from relics. Bits of it were Nissen hut, other parts seemed to be made of old packing case. Lengths of airstrip matting had come in handy for odd fencing and a two foot open drain ran round the lot. It certainly had atmosphere. When I was up there, the “patron” was a sad bearded man, wearing gold rimmed spectacles and a defeated look. He looked a bit desperate when I asked for a room. It turned out that I was the only guest—l suppose I upset his routine a bit. However, when I had signed the arrival card that you’re given in all French hotels, he led the way to my bedroom.'

First we went through a dark cavern of a kitchen, where a chef shouted hysterically at a collection of Melanesian cook-boys. Stacks of logs mounted almost to the ceiling on either side of a huge, black, wood-burning stove that took up most of the end wall. The temperature in the kitchen would have put a ship’s boiler room in the shade and the chef ran with sweat, while he carefully squirted rosettes of mayonnaise on tiny hors d’oeuvres. Shaded Spot My bedroom opened in to a courtyard on one side and the street on the other. The washbasin was ringed with the grime of innumerable occupants. I wandered along the passageway and discovered another courtyard, this one overhung by a giant hau tree. Even at noon, with a brazen sun beating down, there was a kind of twilight there. The twisted branches of the tall tree hung like a

great umbrella over a shabby aviary. You could just make out two lovebirds sitting on a perch in gloomy silence. Amber blossoms the size of teacups drifted down to carpet the ground, and there was a black cat stretched along a low branch. It looked at me with a malevolent yellow eye. It was all very Tennesse Williams indeed. Luckily, I had one night of this rather special “ambiance.” I discovered the food was marvellous, but then you had said everything. The next morning I said goodbye to the melancholy manager, and went to stay for a week on a plantation on Aore, just across the Segond Channel from Santo. ' My planter friends urged me to stay at Mao's Tahitian establishment when I went back to Santo. It wasn’t so much a hotel, they said, as a bar, but there were a few permanent boarders, and Mao would probably fit me in, if my friends took me along and introduced me. Spotlessly Clean So I meet Mao and his lovely, big Tahitian wife, who looked like something straight out of Gauguin, and moved into a room at the back, gay with curtains and bedspread of flowered pareu cloth. The place was as clean as a new pin, and there was always some music going on, night and day. Mao, himself, was still suffering a bit from nostalgia after a holiday back home in Tahiti, and he tended to sit about looking pensive, and playing plaintive island songs on his guitar. But when some of his Tahitian friends dropped in, there was always a lot of laughter, and someone would play an accordion

and the place would be full of gaiety and noise.

Usually nothing much stirs the dust in Santo's main street. An occasional jeep, a group of Melanesians sauntering along hand in hand, perhaps a solitary bushman down from the hills, wearing nothing much but a broad bark belt, that’s about the extent of the traffic.

But I happened to be there for Bastille Day, the one day when things move in Santo. Bicycle Race Early in the morning the straggle of street was thronged with mop-headed . Melanesians starched and shining in flowered “Mother Hubbards.” Graceful Tahitians sauntered along, men and women, with a flower behind the ear. Planters had come to town in jeeps and trucks and the whole place, British, French, Tahitian, Vietnamese, Tikopian. Melanesian, Chinese, gathered to watch the sports on Santo's equivalent of the village green.

There was the inevitable bicycle race, with champagne for the winner. The French Navy, about 30 strong, marched through town with a great deal of tootling of fifes. And Mao hung a sign outside his bar—it said “bal le soir.” Mao's is the hub of Santo. Most of the town’s business is done over the big, semi-circular bar.

There had been tremendous preparations all the week for the Bastille night ball. Madame Mao had been busy for days cutting up gay yeilow flowered pareu cloth into frills for the rafters and the bar. Fountains of green leaves and blood red ginger plant had shot up overnight round the pillars that sup-

ported the roof. The big-eared French kitten went mad with delight skittering up these wonderful new trees, and crashing down through the leaves.

That night the first customers drifted tn about nine. There was a big French ship in port Tourists turned up in force, looking a little out of place, as tourists tend to do. Madame Mao gave me a shell wreath for my hair, land Germaine, who helped I behind the bar, hung a let of brown and white shells 1 round ray neck. They embraced me on both cheeks, land 1 really felt part of ] Santo. Everyone I )ance<l My planter friends arrived from Aore to join me. Soon | the tables were full of the | polyglot mixture of people I that make Santo the kind of ■ place it is. French officials, (British agents, Somali seamen, hard-bitten sea cai>tains, Tahitian dressmakers. I planters, traders, lovely Vietnamese girls, elegant [tourists everyone danced with everyone, but not too often with the same partner. That’s considered compromising. The ship's pastrycook smelt of icing sugar. 1 talked to a French seaman who read Baudelaire.

Mao’s ball was gay—it sparkled like champagne. With his group of Tahitian boys Mao produced superb dance music—there was nothing melancholy about him now. His dark eyes shone as he played his accordion, and every so often he’d let out a wild Polynesian yelp. I caught Madame Mao's eye as she handed drinks, and she laughed, “Mao has recovered from his ‘nostalgic,’ ” she said.