"THE ISLANDS OF DESIRE."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19608, 9 April 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

"THE ISLANDS OF DESIRE."

A CHEERY ODYSSEY. As Mr. Clifford Collinson sat one day, some years ago, at the piano in a Sydney hotel picking out with one finger the notes of that deathless ditty "I'm for Ever Blowing Babbles," he fell into conversation with a fellow-guest who chanced to be a Government official in the Solomon Islands. That was the end of his musical efforts and the beginning of an odyssey which, starting with a casual invitation for a month's visit, extended into years and finally saw this modern Ulysses firmly established as trader and planter in that vertitable home of the sirens—the South Sea Islands. The story of his wanderings—or judicious selection from it—he now gives to the world in "Lifo and Laughter 'Midstthe Cannibals" (Hurst and Blackett), and all lovers of good writing and gay humour will be grateful for the gift, Mr. Collinson's literary style possesses that charm, beside which, as the Barrie play put it, "nothing else matters . . . and if you haven't got it, it doesn't much matter what else you do have." This is not intended to imply that the book consists entirely of luscious purple passages. For, in the writer's own wo.'ds, "I want to disabuse the mind of anyone who imagines that a white man's life in the South Seas —or at least that of a planter and trader —is a lazy one. All the South Sea plays I have ever seen depict the white man as speuding most of his time drinking whisky, and the remainder in being made love to by unnaturally beautiful native girls. This is an illusion which, by constant repetition, has come to be regarded as settled fact, but whilst admitting that there may be some fellows as lucky as that, truth compels ine to state that as a general thing the white man in the tropics is an extremely hard-working and fairly moral person." However, to thosi; chained to the "desk's dead WQod" in more prosaic latitudes, life in the South Seas will always have the glamour of magic casements about it. Where else could the following incident have occurred ?: —"During the third month of my stav with Markham a sad catastrope occurred—we found that the cook-boy had lighted the stove with our one and only calendar! We were, in fact, adrift upon the Sea of Time ... So Marko put out upon the sea (of water) in the hopes of getting information on this important subject. On the third day they sighted a small island schooner. A tousled head appeared over the rail. "Hoy," shouted Marko, making a funnel of his hands. "What day is it to-day?" The tousled head vanished and the form of a somewhat disreputable gentleman re-appeared at the stern, waving a bottle, "'s my birthday!" he cried. Pidgin-English, the lingua franca, of the South Seas, is the subject of an entertaining chapter. "Pidgin-English lie no hard along savvy—maybe he hard lickalick (little bit) but he no hard too much." It is doubtful whether, this opinion would be endorsed by those who meet with the dialect for the first time; and the difficulty of conveying instructions clearly is illustrated by the story of Vorni and the boiled egg. Yorni, a new house-boy, had been told to boil an egg for his master's breakfast. "I lent him my watch, and said to him, pointing to the minute-hand: "Now, Vorni, time this big fella hand he walk about four fella mark, all right—egg he boil finish —savvv?" "Yes, master, .me savvy," replied Vorni confidently. After about ten minutes had elapsed I went into the kitchen to see what was happening, and found the boy -peering into the steaming saucepan with a very worried expression on his little brown face. He looked Hp and said: "Master! This big fella hand, he no walk about—he stop along one fella place all the time!" And this was scarcely to be wondered at, because the chucklehead had put my watch into the saucepan along with "the egg and hard-boiled them both!" Early, rising has no terrors in the Solomons. "A winter dawn in England is a gruesome business —ah! that hopeless searching for mislaid socks and fugitive collar-studs in the dreamy half-light of a cold and foggy morning.- It is different out here! The sun comes up like a warrior over the glittering horizon, and as I stand on the verandah I can sniff the sharp tang of wood-smoke in the cool air of aawn —a fragrance that morning cup of tea on the verandah. Yet, in spite of the "go-fever" in his blood, in spite of the manifold temptations of the tropics, Mr. Collinson, like Gilbert's famous admiral, "remains an Englishman." At last he returns to "the white cliffs of Dover and the soupv-green waters of the harbour. I scandalously overtipped my porter for sheer joy of his honest English face, mislaid my passport, and swore happily as I searched my pockets, only to be told smilingly to "Pass, friend! You're an Englishman all right!"—rolled through the Garden of England with the westering sun shining ion green fields, and red-cheeked apples and pointed coast-houses, and at long last, slid to a thrilling standstill beneath Victoria's echoing arches."