Ko na mauri Kapikitoria
Victoria Ward, Tuesday, November 24, 2009

50 years ago tomorrow, I was born on Tarawa, a coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean, capital of what is known now as Kiribati and was then the Gilbert and Ellis islands. My mother struggled with a long labour, and eventually, a forceps delivery by a drunken doctor who, as labour dragged on, took himself off at one point for a top up and to read up on caesereans, which he’d never performed. Although by no means the family linguist, she gave birth in Gilbertese. My father waded through shark infested waters, his bicycle held over his head, to visit us in hospital.

How did my parents, a young couple from Northolt and Greenford in the suburbs of west London, end up in the Gilberts, now Kiribati? It’s a storytelling story. When my father had his interview with the British Colonial Service, he was still smarting a bit from not having got into the BBC, but determined to impress. When asked where he’d like to be posted if he were offered a job he showed off a bit. ’I’d like to go to the Gilbert and Ellis Islands’ he said, as he’d been mugging up for the interview by reading ‘A Pattern of Islands’ (1952) by Arthur Grimble. And so they did. This was 1955 I think. How odd the things careers turn on.

It’s quite well documented in the family archive, because my parents made a lot of tapes and films to send back to their families (multimedia by boat not broadband), and includes some fascinating and improbable film of my mother swaying on silver sand beach in a grass skirt with cigarette in one hand and a gin in the other. They lived on the haunted side of the island, with magic, and spirits and a gentle murderer on day release for a gardener.

In 1957 my father was sent to cover for the leave for District Officer on Christmas Island. He set off with a boatload of Gilbertese who were to work the copra plantations and a set of secret instructions that changed half way there when the British government decided to gear up for one last set of nuclear tests known as Operation Grapple.

So it was that my father ended up responsible for the civilian side of things in the Christmas Island Bomb test of November 1957. All the islanders, and their animals (regarded as part of the family not as pets) were taken off the island and watching films below decks when the bomb went off. Explaining why they needed to be evacuated, my mother called on the other world they assumed to be part of their world and described radiation as invisible magic poisonous rays that would do them harm.

My parents were on deck with the captain. He told them to close their eyes and put their hands over their faces as the bomb went off. Even so, says my mother, it was the brightest light she’d ever seen. As they turned back to look they saw the mushroom cloud and then something dark and low and flat heading towards them. At that stage in testing, no one really knew much about the counterblast, but the captain figured out what was going on and yelled at them all to brace. They did. They rocked, but they survived.

When I was born 2 years later, and then my brother 3 years after that, and for many years afterwards, my mother was haunted by the worry that perhaps her exposure to the test might in some way have harmed us, and my later my father entered into a long, and not particularly fruitful, correspondence with various government departments telling them that the precautions for everyone involved had been inadequate. This story still goes on, although not with my parents involved.

I have, for several years, intended to write the story of my parents, sent out to man the dying embers of the British Empire, and caught up in the relatively early stages of the Cold War when each country was still pursuing its own defence research. He seems to me to have stood, for those brief years, at a pivot in history, and so to have had an extraordinary view, even if it was only from about 8 feet over sea level on a set of islands which will, will global warming, be the first to go (and were the first place from which the Millennium could be seen to dawn on the horizon). My working title for this (one of many unwritten books waiting for that elusive private income and magic mortgage removal by means that are still beyond me) is Unexploded Ordnance, which is the sign you see everywhere on Orford Ness, now a National Trusts site, but a military testing ground for most of the 20th century. It was here that the Grapple test bomb triggers were tested.

A visit to Orford Ness in 2006 suddenly gave me a huge yearning to piece the story together, and I wondered about the echoes between a shingle spit in the North Sea and a coral atoll in the Pacific ocean: was the flat bleakness of the Ness part of an attraction to my birth place? I started to google and find chat places to register my interest, and it was this that led a BBC researcher to find me, and through me my parents, when she was gathering witnesses to the tests for a Reunion programme, part of a BBC radio series. The link to that programme, broadcast in August 2008, is broken online, but I’ve a copy here if anyone is interested.

It was only in listening to it that I found out for the first time the stuff about my mother’s radiation explanation, or her fears for me and my brother, which tells me something about the accidental omission and supression of parts of a story if passed down only to familiar ears. With new listeners and other witnesses, and Sue McGregor asking the questions, they told a whole new story than the one I’d become familiar with.

On Sunday, my parents, my partner, my daughter and I went for lunch at the Old Fire Engine House in Ely, the flat fenny part of British, where the cathedral rises like an island out of the mist and rain, to celebrate my birthday and my father sang for me happy birthday Victoria in Gilbertese.

That’s two blogs in a row where the long sweep of history has shown itself to be central. I wonder what that means.