Free Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

with Biggles or in the serials in
Tiger.
    Do not then (I tell myself) underestimate the hollowness of this cancelled expectation. You in your generation were brought up to anticipate war, no matter how much a pacifist you may be and no matter what later vistas of actual napalm did to your fantasies of derring-do. You are thankful you never had to fight, you are fashionably mocking of the military mind, the macho politics of confrontation. Yet underneath it you are utterly cynical about peace, to which the human race is so genetically unsuited, since youhave seen that the one thing at which man excels and into which he puts his whole heart is blood-letting.
    *
    Now the thought comes: in my private war with my own past the English landscape really serves as the battlefield. I love foreignness in landscapes to the exact degree with which they violently contrast with my inherited notions of how a landscape ought to look. Whatever my sense of loss it now needs other metaphors to express itself.
    Which is why I am filled with pleasure by the millipede in my path, a very un-English affair (but with the contours of a London tube train), as thick as a small cigar, six inches long, glossy brown and with its yellowish legs seeming not to move individually but to produce waves travelling its length. I feel these waves ought not to be moving in the same direction as the millipede but backwards, rather as oar blades are left behind in propelling a boat forwards. The effect is disconcerting, like the wheels of cars in early movies. The millipede ambles off in his own familiar landscape of gigantic obstacles easily surmounted by his flowing legs and enemies to be dealt with by his nasty bite. He too is a gleaming fossil, very much alive in the sunshine.
    *
    No sooner have I explored Tiwarik than I must establish a daily routine to keep myself supplied with fish. An essential part of my scanty luggage brought down with me from Kansulay are my two home-made spear guns, the long one for daytime use, the short for nights. I am in love with my task, with the sea itself. I am also in love with the coral reef which surrounds the island, with the shocking beauty and variety of the living creatures it supports. This reef is the kind known as a fringing reef (as opposed to an atoll) which often follows the contours of an island or a coastline for miles at a stretch, broken only by such things as the mouths of rivers, for silt and fresh water are inimical to the polyps which form corals. There is also a fringing reef off Kansulay but there the reef slope on the seaward side is comparatively shallow and the bottom only about thirty feetdeep, a bed of sand which slowly shelves for a mile or more offshore. Consequently there are fewer and smaller fish at Kansulay for the coral forms are neither so elaborate nor varied. Here at Tiwarik, though, the reef slopes steeply beyond the shallows, a multicoloured cliff face dropping abruptly into aquamarine and purple depths thickly grown with algae and patrolled by deep-sea fish including several species of shark.
    Arman has arrived in the
Jhon-Jhon:
he and his crew of four are going off round the far side of the island for a morning’s fishing. He has brought me two jerrycans of fresh water and Intoy, who leaps off the prow into the surf holding a spear gun of his own. Arman helps me carry the water up to the hut where he examines my
panà
, trying the barbs with his fingertips and stretching the elastic experimentally.
    ‘You have a flashlight?’
    I dig out the torch I have waterproofed by means of a motorcycle inner tube and an additional lens cut from a piece of glass. He examines it critically, testing the switch.
    ‘We’ll go fishing one night,’ he says. ‘Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.’
    ‘It’ll have to be late,’ I say, trying to remember when the full moon had set. Darkness is essential for good night fishing; moonlight makes the fish lively.
    ‘About one o’clock. Did you see the moon go