5. Hama Batu

I remember Hama Batu as a child. He was no more than a year or two older than me and he would sometimes speak to me, almost at random, since he and I were never close. He would come up to one and put his hand on their shoulder.

“Have you heard,” he would say “what the wind in the trees is saying?” or

“Did you know that the sea is deeper than the land is high?”

He used to frequent the Book Room in those days, listening to the conversation of the Readers and we all expected that he would join their trade but, in the event, he was called to be a Gardener. I can remember his first sarong, dyed plain green. He seemed destined for great things and rumour had it that Our Granny was especially fond of him. Or perhaps people just believe that because it is a part of the stories that surround him now.

One of the Readers I work with has a brother who is a Gardener. He says that none of the stories are true. For example, he says that the flowers that Hama Batu grew in Our Granny’s garden were never any larger than normal and that it would be unthinkable for a junior Gardener to take them in to Our Granny’s house and arrange them in vases for her. The Gardeners who were there at the time say that Hama Batu never took even one meal alone with Our Granny, let alone sitting with her night after night and listening to her conversation.

On the other hand, no Gardener would ever admit that Hama Batu had any knowledge of Our Granny’s mind now, or then, or ever. In their view, the Fundamental Truth society and its founder are liars and renegades who will never be forgiven. As they tell it, Hama Batu was strange from the beginning. He refused to eat with the other Gardeners and remained as thin as a stick all the time that he lived in Our Granny’s house.

He allowed weeds to grow in the lawns and flower beds and his crops of beans and pineapple were never up to the expected yields. He would spend hours alone, sometimes talking to himself. At some point he attacked the Head Gardener and threatened to burn down the gardens with Tractor fuel. This precipitated his expulsion and only then did he start to speak of the Fundamental Truth that he had discovered. It was even later, they say, that he began to claim that this Truth originated from Our Granny.

When Hama Batu first left the gardens, he disappeared from view for many months. This is the famous time in the wilderness when his followers say that he went about every part of the island, from the rocky shore of the South point to the swamps of the North. He spoke to the people he met and to the birds and the animals. He listened to the voice of the wind and the rain. When he returned to the village he began to tell people that they should live more simply. He said that the beauty of our island was spoiled by the fields. He told anyone who would listen (and many who would not) that we did not need to cultivate so much land in order to live.

I met him again at that time and much of what he said sounded very reasonable. He believed that with only places for a fixed number of Guardians, Readers and Gardeners the island needed to find a role for the rest of the people who had nothing to do with themselves but drink and cause trouble. He wanted to encourage young men to learn to hunt as their fathers had and to teach them about the wild fruit and food that could be gathered in the forest.

It did not take him long to run foul of the Guardians of course. They held him locked in their shed and it is easy to imagine that the stories that he was not treated well are true. In the end, I suppose, they got tired of having to feed him and put up with his strange views for it is certain that whatever they did, they could not change his mind. In fact, it appears that his opinions were only made more extreme by his period in captivity. His hatred of The Tractor seems to owe a good deal to his hatred for its Guardians.

When he was released he began to say that Our Granny had come to see him in jail and explained that the Guardians and their Tractor were to be destroyed. If they could have, I think that the Guardians would have caught him and killed him at that point, but he had returned to the forest and it seems that he was living there with the savages. He only returned to the village under cover of the night to speak to the young men who had failed to find a career in the Guardians or the Gardening and try to recruit them.

At first, of course, no one was particularly interested in or worried by Hama Batu and his doings. Most people thought that he was a little mad and, at the time, we had worse problems to deal with. The Tractor had broken the left radius rod of the front axle. The Guardians made replacements of the hardest wood they could find but even though they were much thicker than the original metal, they lasted only a few hours each so that The Tractor was out of service for much of each week and the ploughing and planting were severely reduced each time a new rod was laboriously cut by hand.

This episode underlined how much the village depended on The Tractor. Even though the Guardians co-opted the unemployed and issued them with picks and hoes, they were not used to the work and could not cultivate the fields in time for a successful planting season.

Of course the Readers came in for much criticism when they could not provide a way to repair The Tractor. I remember sitting in the Book Room working at my table while an angry mob of drunken villagers and Guardians shouted taunts and insults and threatened to break in and burn us out.

It was, fortunately, at the peak of this crisis that we gained our understanding of the transformer needed to revive the arc-welding equipment. Our initial attempt was very experimental and patched together. It is a miracle that no-one was blinded by the arc but, following the instructions, we were able to link the belt of the electrical generator to the power off-take of The Tractor and to weld the broken radius rod so that The Tractor was once more fully operational.

The vindication of the Readers who had achieved this coup was complete and even the Guardians were prepared to concede that the Books were of some use. For Hama Batu and his renegades, however, this was the evidence that the Books and The Tractor were as bad as each other. This was to be a problem for us all as time passed and their influence grew stronger.

In some versions I have heard of this story, the Fundamental Truth society even claim that they were responsible for the original damage to the radius rod and that the Readers were acting directly against them when they repaired it. I know this is not true because the original damage was a simple crack caused by a collision with a tree stump and the rod actually broke in the workshop as it was being straightened but the story has its power, nevertheless, among the ignorant in the village and beyond.

Thinking back to this period, the mechanical reliability of The Tractor was not the only thing that distracted attention from the activities of Hama Batu. The other topic may seem less important, but to most of the population of the village it was of much greater interest: football.

The Americans were great sportsmen and they had dedicated a section of their airfield as a sports ground, on which they played football and baseball. When they left, baseball gradually became less common but the popularity and intensity of football games increased and grew.

In the absence of the elaborate equipment used by American players, the game has changed and adapted. In many ways, the game we play today is far more robust than what the Americans left. Children who grew up have practiced their passing using coconuts and this is now the most popular form of the game. Naturally, without boots, the idea of kicking has disappeared from the game and the focus is on carrying and passing a coconut from one end of the field to the other.  The original complex rules have been radically simplified and the game is now much more continuous, with players carrying and throwing the ball at will and fierce battles taking place for position all over the field.

The hero of the hour is the one who carries the ball (we still use the term, in the American language) across the opponent’s end line and rivalry between different sections of the village is actively encouraged by the Gardeners, who will bless the different teams in the name of Our Granny  at the start of each session. Particularly successful players are rewarded with the finest food and clothing and youngsters tend to follow them around in the hope that their ability will somehow transfer to them.

At the time that Hama Batu started to recruit his band of ‘Shadows’, two major Football issues absorbed the village. The first was the championship match on Our Granny’s birthday. The second was the Football ground itself.

When I was a child, a picnic was held each year on Our Granny’s name day at which everyone joined in to play games and celebrate. Over the years, this has developed into a much more organised event and the Football game played on that day is now very much the climax of the year for the island. All the village teams are eligible to compete and, during the course of the year, all but two are eliminated so that the winners of this one game are the champions of the island for that year.

Naturally this is a great occasion for celebration for everyone – players and spectators alike – with the whole population coming down to the ground to watch the spectacle. Even the least partial person is expected to turn out wearing the colours of one or other of the teams. For those who have followed the contest throughout the season, this is the moment for which they have waited a year. Their support for their team is likely to be quite reckless, with arguments between the different groups of spectators perhaps more likely to result in injuries than the game itself.

Our village comprises a number of sections or fractions, each with its own team. By the end of the year, all but two of the teams will have been eliminated. In this particular year, the two teams remaining were the team of the Field and the team of the Hill. They represent the opposite extremes of the village. The Hill is the preferred location, cooled by the sea breezes and close to the hedges surrounding Our Granny’s garden. The Field is near to the Tractor shed and therefore inhabited by people who are unable to live elsewhere.

The Hill is accustomed to recruiting the best players from other fractions while the Field must generally rely on its own resources. When these two teams meet at the year end, the rivalry and animosity both on and off the sports field reaches great heights.

The Hill, at that time, relied on a player called Abakano, who had been born and brought up down in the Field.  After initial success playing for their team, he had been recruited to the Hill so that he was regarded by some supporters of the Field as something of a traitor. In spite of this loss, the Field were able to boast a number of players of extraordinary capability so that they were expected to win the match on this occasion. The resulting tension had intensely absorbed the minds of everyone in the village in the weeks leading up to the game.

The other element that was unusual in that year was one of our periodic land crises. From the time of the Americans, it has always been the case that, over the years, the productivity of a particular piece of land tends to decrease. Today, as we learn to live within the constraints of the resources available to us, we know more about how to refresh the land than we did at that time. Even now, we are always in search of ways to bring more land under cultivation but, then, we were very dependent on continuously finding new spaces to farm.

For some years, therefore, the Guardians of The Tractor had had their eye on the Sports Ground, a prime piece of fertile land right near to the village itself.