Page 193 - Exile-ebook

192 AN EXILE OF THE MIND THE GRAND DAME OF LEVUKA 193

Levuka set among coconut and mango trees along the beach front. Market day in the old town of Levuka.

When Dora was a child she was other parts of Fiji I had visited after reverend ended up in the cooking pot. cross-legged like a Buddhist monk to
told by the old folk that hardly a leaving Bougainville on a cargo ship To add insult, the chief attempted to hide my feet.
day went by without a punch-drunk 20 years earlier, but nothing quite eat the cleric’s boots. Duncan Creighton, a Scotsman
sailors' brawl or other disturbance. equalled this. On a visit to a local chief I was far from home, lived on Mission
It was said that visitors coming into In the cool of the evening Dora careful not to go anywhere near the Hill in Levuka. His colonial house
port knew they were getting close to and I would sit on the veranda with vicinity of his head and not to point was reached by climbing 199 steps
Levuka by the gin bottles floating a bottle of whisky and I would listen my feet towards him which was up a very steep incline. He wasn’t
out on the tide from the harbour. to her tales of a life in colonial days also taboo. Kava was then passed dressed up to the nines in his tartan
We rented a self-contained bit of sheltered from the anguish of the around in a communal coconut shell kilt when I knew him.
Dora’s spacious colonial house where world. In the evening tunes from the scooped from a large pot of muddy That honour was reserved four
she lived alone. The four-acre property 1920s were belted out on her grand liquid. Important to set the face in years later for Sir Peter Ustinov
of carefully manicured gardens looked piano until the wee hours. It wasn’t a fixed grin as the brew was poured when he interviewed Duncan dur-
over a broad expanse of the South to Anna’s liking and she returned to down the throat in one gulp. The ing the filming of Planet Ustinov:
Pacific high up on Nigau Hill. Australia. dreamy after effect it produced soon Following the Equator with Peter
As I swung from a hammock The last person to be eaten in turned to embarrassment as I tried Ustinov. An entertaining documen-
strung between two mango trees, Fiji was a missionary in the 1860s to get up and found my legs didn’t tary retracing the steps of Mark
sipping juiced mangos fresh from who unknowingly insulted a chief work. Paralysed from the waist Twain one hundred years before
the trees I was swinging on, I recalled by touching his head. The unlucky down, either from the kava or sitting when the famous author was skint