17. Manaku Jim

Divos Paitor was appointed as Captain of the Guardians of the Tractor of Morakeewa on the death in service of Manaku Apu. He had been among the original recruits when the corps was set up and he had the classic Guardian mixture of discipline and loyalty. With twenty five years of service he had become the most senior Lieutenant Guardian on whom the whole organisation depended.

In spite of this, his appointment as Captain was never a foregone conclusion. It may be that if Manaku Apu had not succumbed suddenly to a heart attack without leaving a clear plan of succession, Paitor would have remained second in command for the rest of his life. Privately, many people thought that Manaku Apu had intended his son, Manaku Jim to succeed him.

Our Jim had been given an American name and he joined the Guardians as soon as his voice broke. By the time that his father died, ten years later, he was already a Lieutenant. As a trooper, he had been brilliant but erratic, the best marksman in his cohort and a talented mechanic. Early shifts, however, were not his strong point and evenings were always his private time.

In general, a relationship with a Guardian was something that appealed to the women of the Village and Manaku Jim was handsome and affable; kind enough to try to oblige all the women who wanted to know him. To some, it appeared that his career moves had been determined as much by the need to move him out of trouble as by the normal promotion mechanisms. Even as a junior corporal, he had already fathered a number of children but he was protected, both by the position of his father and by his relationships with the Gardeners.

As a child, he had been a favourite of Our Granny and the Head Gardener was his godfather. His evenings were often spent with Gardeners and he had a group of close friends among the Guardians with whom he would go drinking. Despite his swift rise through the ranks, he also remained a popular figure with the other Guardians for his generous nature. He was always prepared to admit his errors. He never took credit for someone else’s work and people felt it would have been unfair to blame him for the accident of his lucky birth.

On the death of his father, Our Jim would probably have succeeded him had he been in the right place. Jim was supposed to be on duty the day his father died but he had persuaded a friend to cover for him and, when he was sent for, no one could find him. It later emerged that he had gone with another friend and a group of girls to a beach house that his father owned. They had been swimming and barbecuing and only returned two days later, by which time Paitor was already Captain.

To give him his due, Jim never complained about being passed over. He would laugh and say that he would never have been as good a leader for the Guardians as Paitor and that he was far happier as a simple Lieutenant. With his father gone, Jim took, if anything, even less interest in his career as a Guardian. He still retained an office in the Hangar and turned out for ceremonial occasions, maintaining a friendly relationship with Paitor and acting as unofficial liaison officer between the Guardians and the Gardeners. He and his associates among the Guardians were famous for their long lunches and riotous evenings.

The forged tokens had presented a major problem for the authorities on the island. A token entitled the bearer to a certain amount of corn, sugar, drink, cloth or fruit. As the extra tokens were redeemed, the supplies of first one then another commodity were jeopardised. Villagers who came to redeem their tokens sometimes found that there was nothing available and, once a system of allocations was established, they were given less than they expected.

There were massive protests and, on several occasions, the Guardians had to break up crowds of chanting protesters surrounding the hangar. Those who felt they had not received their fair entitlement made complaints were both to the Guardians and the Gardeners and many villagers appeared to Our Granny’s courts in an attempt to obtain full measure for their work. A public announcement had been made that the forgers would be tracked down and severely dealt with.

As the network of those who had attempted to pass off the forged tokens was rounded up, rumours surfaced that Our Jim was in some way linked to the fraud. His expenditure was well known to exceed his income from official sources. He had one of the largest and most luxurious houses in the Village, many children, servants and threw frequent, expensive parties for his friends. He was rumoured to owe huge sums of money.

In the end, a Guardian Technical Trooper was arrested and found to be in possession of a cutting press and a large stock of fake tokens. The procedure for passing the tokens to the next link in the chain to presentation was unravelled and documented. One of Our Jim’s sidekicks, a Guardian Sergeant called Fawks, was arrested while collecting new coins obtained by exchanging false tokens. It was shown that he had paid a large sum in the new money to Jim, but this was explained as the repayment of money that Fawks had borrowed from him to pay a gambling debt.

All those arrested for passing false tokens were brought to trial and made an example of. A special public courtroom was prepared in the hangar and the culprits were offered the option of pleading guilty to a minor offence and apologising to Our Granny, with a short flogging as punishment. They had all been caught in the act and it was not difficult to persuade them that taking the risk of being found guilty of the much more serious additional charge of disrespect for Our Granny, with its weightier penalties, would not be in their best interests.

A platform was placed at one end of the court, with one of the Gardeners, in the maroon formal sarong of the second to highest level seated on a high backed chair to judge each case in turn. On each side, he was flanked by an escort of Guardians and a number of more junior Gardeners – dressed in yellows and browns – seated at benches.

The accused were brought in, one at a time. The charges were read out with an explanation that, in passing false tokens, the accused had stolen from all the people on the island. The offenders had reduced the value of the work everyone else had done by taking more than their legitimate share of the payment. They were then allowed to make their apologies to Our Granny and to the people of Morakeewa before hearing their sentences. The courtroom was crowded with spectators. The idly curious, as well as the friends and families of the officials and the accused come to see the trial and, later, to watch the punishment.

As each flogging took place, the Sergeant in charge of the punishment detail read out again the details of the crime committed and the way in which it affected the whole island. Predictably, this excited the crowds of spectators who called out angrily, encouraging the officer who administered the whipping to put his back into it, taunting him if he appeared to be letting the culprits off lightly and sometimes throwing fruit and rubbish.

The forger himself was both flogged and imprisoned. Fawks was the only one not to plead guilty. At his trial he attempted to defend himself by suggesting that Our Jim might be implicated but this was disproved by several witnesses of unimpeachable reputation – Guardians, Gardeners and ordinary people. He was found guilty of Disrespect, flogged, expelled from the Guardians, banished from the Village and sent out into the forest to fend for himself.

Our Jim, himself, made a public statement of regret that a friend of his, a person that he trusted implicitly, should have been involved in this reprehensible scam. He met suggestions that he should return the money that Fawks had paid him with a flat refusal. The money was his, he claimed, and he had no reason to return it simply because Fawks had subsequently engaged in criminal activity. In any case, since Fawks had now left the Village, there was no one to return it to.

The punishment of the culprits was widely publicised so that everyone, whether they had attended the trials or not, would be warned of the consequences of disrupting the smooth running of the Village. The Gardeners were careful to distance Jim from the affair. Their official stance was that he was an innocent victim and that it would be impossible on principle for a member of Our Granny’s immediate family to do anything to harm the Village she had founded.

Privately, they were at great pains to prevent anything that might damage her reputation among the common people, and a number of individuals who suggested that Jim might have played a more significant part in the affair were punished for sedition. In any case, Jim’s generosity and his reputation as a lovable rogue tended to work for him. Everyone knew that he might get up to mischief occasionally but no one thought he would engage in serious criminal activity on the scale of the Token Scandal.

With confidence restored, the new coins were a great success and the construction of the stadium was able to proceed smoothly. Their lower value meant that they could be used for smaller purchases, where previously transactions valued at less than one day’s labour had been hard to carry out. Some people worried that if all the coins were presented at once the Guardians would not be enough goods but this proved not to be a problem.

People tended, instead, to save the new coins so that the cost of building the new stadium could be paid in future years. Occasionally someone would point out the danger of having so much money in circulation and calculate the amount that each man, woman and child in the Village would have to pay back but most of the time they were not worried by it.

Our Jim, his problems of debt and dependency conveniently resolved, continued to be a popular figure in the community. He had always maintained a friendship with the football coaches and, as the construction of the stadium was completed, he was invited to become the patron of the team of the Field, working to recruit better players to their cause. Ultimately, any promising football player was able materially to improve their career prospects by having Jim’s patronage.

Jim’s rakish lifestyle did not slow down as he grew older. He was never far from some whiff of scandal and mischief, which meant that gossip about him was always in circulation, eagerly collected and retailed all through the village. Wherever he went, he was watched with a mixture of censure and envy, as famous as his friends, the football heroes; perhaps even more so.