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Crusoes of Sunday Island

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — Afterwards

page 186

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Afterwards

There can be no happy ending to a broken dream.

All that now remains to be told is the brief story of the later years of Thomas and Frederica Bell, and of the patterns of life worked out by their sons and daughters.

Bell returned to New Zealand a saddened and almost broken man. Yet so cruelly strong was the spell Sunday Island had cast upon him that he went back again to Denham Bay a year later with his wife and younger children, and remained there for the following five years. The final departure took place early in 1914, when the menace of German raiders in the Pacific led the Government to arrange the family's evacuation and return to New Zealand.

Tom Bell was then in his seventy-sixth year. When nearly eighty years old, he obtained a position as night-watchman with a boatbuilding firm in North Auckland. One of the inducements that had led him to take the job had been a promise that if at any time the firm were sending a ship to the Kermadecs, he would be given a free trip to Sunday Island. But no ship ever made the journey. "If they had taken me," declared Bell many a time, "they'd never have got me back!"

Such was his amazing strength of purpose that a few years before his death, he wrote to Bess saying that if only he could raise the sum of twelve pounds, he would make a trip to Wellington "to see what the new Government would have to say about my claim."

He died a few days before his ninetieth birthday, after having lived for some years with his daughter Hettie in page 187 Pahiatua, a country town in the Hawke's Bay district. Mrs. Bell died in Auckland a few years later, in her eighty-first year.

Three sons served in the First World War. Two returned, but the family were never able to discover the fate of Harry. Roy Bell went to Norfolk Island and made his permanent home there. Now in his seventy-sixth year, he is one of Norfolk's best-known settlers, a first-class photographer, and a noted authority on the plant and bird life of the island and also of the Kermadecs and other Pacific islands.

Of the three remaining brothers, Tom died some years ago. His two younger brothers Jack and "King" still live on their farms in Auckland's Waikato district.

The three older girls married a few years after leaving Sunday Island. Hettie made her home in Pahiatua, and as a maternity nurse justified her father's early dictum that if she turned out "half as dam-fine a nurse as her Grandmother Bell, she would do." She died in her eighty-third year.

Mary, quiet and endearing in grown-up life as in childhood, never very strong, married a sea-captain and died when her first baby was born.

Bess, hardiest and most enduring of them all, married an Auckland business man. As the mother of three sons and a daughter, she has always lived an active, busy life, assisting her husband in his business, and later in the management of a farm. Now in her eighty-ninth year, she keeps house for her youngest son on a North Auckland farm.

The two youngest daughters have long since made their homes in Canada and San Francisco.

After the final departure of the Bells in 1914, Sunday Island remained unoccupied until 1926, when Alfred Bacon returned with two companions, with the idea of page 188 settling there. Within a very short time, one of the men died from blood-poisoning, under tragic circumstances. The other two were taken off in a state of distress by a passing ship.

In the 'thirties, Bacon, still under the island's spell, returned to live a lotus-eating life that lasted until 1938. In that year, the New Zealand Government at last made practical use of the island by establishing on the North Beach Terraces a radio and meteorological station. The last of the island's long line of Crusoes was then requested to quit.

After Mrs. Bell and her daughters left in 1914, no woman set foot on the island for nearly thirty years, when the wife of the radio station manager arrived to share her husband's life there. She left after the first year.

Early in 1950 a Pacific cruising family landed on the Fishing Rocks for a brief visit ashore. The daughter fell into the sea while being landed on the rocks, and made her way to the station to dry out in exactly the same way as Bess Bell and her friend had done sixty years earlier.

So far as anyone knows, no child has been on Sunday Island since the last of the young Bells grew to manhood and womanhood there.

Where Tom Bell built his home on the Terraces, there now stands a staff hostel equipped with every modern electrical device and labour-saving appliance. The spring in Nightbell Gully flows into a fifteen thousand gallon reservoir, from which ample supplies of water are piped to the hostel.

A grove of Norfolk Island pines, growing from seed planted by Tom Bell on Fleetwood Bluff nearly eighty years ago has reached the noble height of 120 feet. The grape and passion fruit vines and Tonga beans that covered his garden trellises and neighbouring trees now run riot through the forest that has long since taken into its green arms all trace of the Bells' gardens and planta- page 189 tions, save some orange trees, and a few moss-grown peach and apple trees.

Even the name "Sunday" Island is almost forgotten, save by those with memories of the Bell saga. The New Zealand Government has now restored its original name, "Raoul."

*            *            *            *

The long story told in many conversations, all questions answered, the letters, diaries and photographs laid aside, Bessie Dyke leaned bach in her chair as we sat together on the verandah of her country home. In the quiet of the summer evening, her still-clear blue eyes fixed on a sunset gleam of water, it seemed as though Thomas Bell's intrepid daughter was looking down the vista of a lifetime, listening once again to the murmur of surf on a rocky shore, and the music of a violin playing the beloved tunes of long-dead yesterdays.