Timely Arrival

At this point of imperial history, no such luxury was known in the Western Pacific High Commission services as passage grants for grass widows like Olivia who wanted to visit their husbands in the field. But Olivia inherited that small legacy in 1923 and splashed the lot on a visit to the Gilbert Islands when I had been six or seven months at Tarawa. She reached me, alas, only to find our station plunged in sadness. A month before her arrival, pneumonia had robbed our new cadet-in-training—young Scooter, as all of us called him—of his adored little son.

The blow had been the more bitter for Scooter because, on the night the little boy died, our senior medical officer Kitson, the only doctor there, who was himself to die of Bright's disease only a few weeks later, had been too sick to leave his bed. Even if he could have been aroused from his semi-comatose state, he could have done no more to save the child's life on that night of crisis than, for the last week, he had been courageously battling to do. The sulpha drugs and page 149penicillin were as yet unknown to medical science, and Betio hospital did not run to oxygen tents.

But neither Scooter nor his wife could ever after be persuaded that Kitson had not been, through wanton neglect, the killer of their son. The hate and despair they nursed defied all consolation, and seemed to flow from them through the station like some dark river, while Kitson, sick beyond hope of cure, lay in his house waiting for death to take him.

It was a tremendous relief when, out of the blue, the Fiji government's motor yacht Pioneer broke in upon us. The Pioneer was a comfortable little craft of perhaps 400 tons— the ex-playboat of an American millionaire—which our High Commission territories had helped to purchase and were glad to get on occasional loan for local purposes. She had come now to take me on a tour of the colony instead of Reggie McClure. Reggie, for health reasons, had had to take vacation leave rather suddenly and I was to carry on for him until his return.

So we were able to get our poor Kitson across to Ocean Island at once, where he could lie in a good hospital with kind Dr. Gould and a trained nurse to attend him, while Olivia, instead of coming on tour with me, stood by to make a home at the residency for his grief-stricken wife.