Coconut Chaos Diana Souhami (classic books to read txt) 📖

I called on Charlie Mo. He hovered in a store cluttered with condensed milk and rolls of linoleum. I gave him Rosie’s letter and hoped he’d offer me a bed for the night away from the ocean and my companions. He read it and shook his head. It was something about a gun. He smiled and said he regretted there was no place for me to stay, but he waved his hand at green beans and sweet potatoes, offered me food from his shop, gave me a carton of kiwi juice, and asked me to take a letter to his daughter in Tahiti. She’d meet the plane.

I walked the coast with a bag of vegetables. I wondered about Chinese people on these little islands. In 1864 William Stewart, a British businessman, created a vast cotton plantation at Atimaono in southern Tahiti. He obtained a permit to import a thousand Chinese workers. Nine years later the plantation failed, he went bankrupt and the Chinese turned to market gardening, opium-dealing or general trading. Thus the accident of dispersal and the struggle to survive.

I came to another cavernous building, another memorial, like Laval’s cathedral, to colonial disregard. It was a sombre, iron, windowless container, a fall-out shelter built in the 1960s by the French when they’d started blasting nuclear bombs in Polynesia. In 1962 General de Gaulle moved the French nuclear testing centre from the Sahara to his colonies in the South Pacific. No French leader would agree to these tests in his own country. The tiny atoll of Mururoa close to Mangareva was chosen as the site. Eighteen thousand French troops were stationed in Tahiti. The first bomb, a plutonium fission device, was detonated on 2 July 1966 from a barge anchored in the lagoon. The blast sucked all the water from the lagoon into the air then rained it down. It was goodbye to everything that lived in those waters – all those creatures of the deep. The islets on the encircling reef were coated with the corpses of irradiated fish and clams. The coral died.

Seventeen days later another bomb was dropped from a plane sixty miles south of the atoll. Two days after that an unexploded bomb cracked in the sea and plutonium spilled over the reef. On 2 September a 120 kiloton bomb was dropped from a helium-filled balloon. The New Zealand National Radiation Laboratory monitored heavy radioactive fallout in the Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji and Samoa. Over the next eight years another forty-four French bombs, including five hydrogen bombs, were detonated in the skies near Mururoa. In 1974, after boycotts of French goods and airlines and proceedings against France by Australia and New Zealand in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the next French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, ordered that the tests be conducted below the surface of the sea.

Forty-six shafts were then drilled along a fifteen-mile strip to the south of the reef. The atoll was blasted to bits. Radionuclides leaked into the sea. Storms and typhoons brought giant waves that washed nuclear waste chaotically each and every way across the ocean. On Mangareva and many other islands people became ill with ciguatera – fish poisoning caused by algae that multiply when coral is killed and infect the fish’s food. The sufferers endured headaches, vomiting and fever. Cancers formed: leukaemia and tumours.

I stood in the ugly, rusty, disused fallout shelter, a monument to a more heinous imposition than Laval’s. All the Mangarevan people had been herded into this windowless can for forty-eight hours at a time, breathing filtered air, while the nuclear bombs were exploded. The blasts were heard on Pitcairn Island 300 miles away, they echoed under the sea, they made great tidal waves.

After this devastation came the reparation of money. An air of unearned prosperity then defined the island. Goods of every sort were sent from the ‘mother country’. The islanders were given cash and prefabricated houses. Local wood and stone were no longer used in building. Every household had a four wheeled-drive vehicle, though the island road went nowhere in particular. A new jetty was built and an airstrip with twice-weekly flights to and from Tahiti.

The Mangarevans had called their land their fenua haohi. It was sacred. It had been defiled. They became dependent on subsidy and compensation, their autonomy gone, forced into a sort of nuclear prostitution. The fish in the sea were still tainted. The Pitcairners might hope for links with Mangareva, but the island had nothing for them and wanted nothing from them. The Mangarevans did not think of Pitcairn. They spoke French, not English. A supply ship from Tahiti arrived regularly with fruit, vegetables and all the produce they needed.

It was dark when I reached the jetty. The moon was full and stars sparkled. Lady Myre was in the sad bar with the yachties. She accused me with her eyes and an untypical reserve. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, like a disapproving spouse. A mixture of oysters, hashish and sunshine had left her pink-coloured and fractious. She’d looked for me, then gone to an atoll with the Belgian vagrant. He’d given her a large bright parrot fish to cook for our supper.

It had been a difficult day, she said. First I’d disappeared, then the nice policeman had told her she’d only be allowed two pieces of luggage on the aircraft. Kurt would have to take the rest to Tahiti or Samoa. She’d meet up with him again some sunny day. Meanwhile, if she was short of anything, she knew I’d sort it, I was such an organised little mouse.

The Braveheart was to arrive the following day from Pitcairn with the officials who’d served their three-month stint. Their crossing had been calm and they’d swum from the boat in the deep still ocean. They knew of our peril at sea. Captain Jolly had made radio contact with Kurt and checked with the Mangarevan policeman that we’d arrived safely.

I was pleased to