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Dream Places

(By John Guthrie )

My Uncle August used to say, “Work, if thou be God's curse, what can His blessing be?” but apart from this there has never been any actual insanity in our family. For this reason, I suppose, I have never been able to have splendid dreams about the unattainable.

At least, not since the age of five, when I wanted to be the circus lady who did the trapeze work.

But looking back on the boy who had the same name as myself, I can hear now quite plainly the voices of older people saying to him: “Don't dream,” and “Wake up, dreamy,” and “God bless my soul, the boy's always dreaming.”

That, thank goodness, seems a very long time ago.

There are people who are always dinning into one's ears that one's childhood days were the best in one's life. They are frightful liars. It is no fun for any boy to have people roaring in his ears all day, “Wake up, dreamy,” and “Don't dream,” or to hear them say in an impersonal way as if you weren't in the room, “God bless my soul, he's always dreaming.”

This, to my mind, is the chief advantage of becoming an adult. Then you can do the roaring. But you lose something too. It's like the whole scheme of existence, planned with a kind of superb low cunning to ensure that what you make up on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts. For when you grow up, you can do the roaring but you can't do the dreaming.

At least, not nearly so well.

When I sat down to this article, I set out to find my dream place. I found I had one. It was Fiji, but I had been there.

It is a bit perturbing to find a dream come true. It leaves a little less to live for. No doubt the happiest one is he who is still single-mindedly chasing his dream until the moment he dies.

For years my dream place eluded me, and though often I ate my heart out in disappointment, I had all the thrill of the chase. It was only a matter of time, I knew, until I got close enough for the kill.

And then, one winter day, I sailed proudly third class, being hard up, from Auckland. The big mail steamer cut swiftly through the waters away from rain and cold into the endless sunshine. There was the blue of sea and sky and a breeze played on our cheeks. Inwardly I had strange romantic stirrings. I was going to the place of sunshine and laughter and flowers.

After five days, we landed at Suva. But it was not, I soon found, my dream place. For Suva is a town rather like an army composed of colonels.

There is little hemp-spun humanity amongst the European people there: it is all superfine cloth. The baths custodian was a retired hotel proprietor; the man who went round with the town rubbish lorry looked like an ex-army officer; the caretaker of the sports-ground spoke with all the refinement of a prince of the blood.

The police were exquisitely bred young men, but if you called a police officer “Constable,” you would probably have been arrested.

For Suva, it soon appeared, is the Home for Lost Dogs with Pedigrees, and the white man is very much the Lord of Creation.

Besides, it was damp. Lord, how it was damp!

So I went in a filthy packet boat called “Andi Thakabau” to the other side of the island. Being the only white passenger on board, I travelled saloon with the aristocracy—a Chinese, a babu Indian, and two half-caste Fijians.

Up on deck there were Indian coolies and traders, Fiji boys and women, half-castes, bearded Sikhs and Punjabis. At night the Indians took off their turbans and combed their long flossy black hair, twisted it into a pigtail with twine, and tied it in a neat knot on the crown of the head.

In the evening they unrolled mats and slept on the deck or sang wailing Indian songs or chanted Fijian tunes to the page 23 mosquito ping of the ukelele. They were all very fond of spitting.

The sky was clear and dry with a heat altogether different from the moist cotton-wool of Suva. All afternoon we wound in and out of coral reefs.

On the skyline, where the blue of sea and sky met and lost each other, small coral islands seemed to float between heaven and earth. All the time the garrulous Indians yapped.

We puffed malodorously through heavenly waters, past gleaming yellow backs of coral islands just pushed up from the sea, past coral islands overgrown with palms, and past beaches that were really golden.

Two days later I caught a sugar train, stepped off at a lonely small bay and climbed up to the Sahib's white bungalow—the only European habitation for fourteen miles around—on the hill.

From the verandah you looked straight down the steep hillside on to the light blue water of the bay. Tail coconut palms fringed the shore and fifty yards out was a small coral island.

In a wide semi-circle, the creamy reef was thrown around the mouth of the bay, and all day and all night the waves roared as they smashed themselves on it into foam. For a space inside the reef the water was lilac, but outside it was darkest blue.

In the garden, bright red and pink hibiscus flowers and brackets of golden flowers that they call God's candles, just stirred in the breeze.

They were long, lazy days at the bay, objectless days with no thought of the future. You lorded it there. You sat in a long canvas chair and called for the Indian servants—for Siroot the Strangler, Gug-Raj the Rogue and Ramchiren the Fool. They came at your bidding like the slaves in the Arabian Nights.

“I milk fifteen cows,” the Sahib used to tell me proudly. It was false; he never milked one. The cows were milked by Gug-Raj the Rogue and Ramchiren the Fool.

“I am going to dig up some of my potatoes,” the Sahib used to say, and he would go into the garden and watch Siroot the Strangler use the spade.

He called it work, watching the boys do these things, but I don't think my Uncle August would have thought so.

Evening would come. You sat on the beach to watch the sun go down. It left the western sky the colour of rose, and covered the surface of the bay with gold leaf.

Two Fijian boys, fishing on a catamaran, bent motionless over their lines. Away on the left, the gray breakers rolled on with the roar of a timeless train.

The dark closed in, and the moon rose at the full. The leaves of the coconut palms glistened in the moonlight as if they were wet with rain.

For three months it was like that.

Until, once again I seemed to hear those very familiar voices saying, “Don't Dream,” and “Wake up, dreamy,” and “God bless my soul, the boy's always dreaming.”

So I came back again.