Essays

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Two paragraphs stood out as most pertinent. One recorded the pair’s first meeting:

The night air was an enveloping golden presence as we stood at the break in the wall. I was conscious of bare, rounded arms and the fragrance of thickly clustered hair. The lingering day was full of noises. As the sky darkened to a deep, umbrageous blue, speckled with starlight, and the village was swallowed by darkness at the foot of the mountain, from somewhere in that blackness came the throaty plaint of an old sheep, like a voice from the mountain. From that other obscurity, silver-gleaming below the cliffs, came the muttered irony of the surf. The girl waited only a few minutes before her full lips breathed “Goodnight,” and she slipped toward the house. “Shall I come to see you again?” I called softly. She may or may not have answered “Yes.” If she did, it was probably from politeness.

And the other notes the mechanics of their eventual parting, recorded after Lieutenant Booy had boarded the whaler that would take him out to his waiting navy ship, and away.

The watchers on the beach were all very still, the women sitting again in their gaily dressed rows, as if waiting primly to be photographed. None of them waved or cheered. They just sat watching. All looked very much alike, young and old. But there was one at the end of a row, in a white dress with a red kerchief, bright-red over smooth, dark hair. She sat perfectly still, staring back until she became a white blur. Then her head went down, and the woman behind her—a large one in widow’s black—put a hand on her shoulder.

Whatever her feelings for the jolly Jack tar, ten years later Emily Hagan was married to Kenneth Rogers, an islander who had been employed as a mess boy by the visiting naval party, and who after the war worked both as the island’s baker and a butcher. By the time I got to Tristan he was in his sixties, working as a part-time assistant barman at the Albatross. But the very moment I fetched up outside his tiny thatched cottage, notebook in hand, he knew exactly what I wanted. “To see our H’em’ly, I suppose,” he said, glumly. He knew just why. He didn’t want to let me see her. He placed himself four-square behind his garden gate, keeping it firmly latched.

He gave me a stern lecture, all the more touching by being couched in his elegant and ancient English. He said he wished I would purge from my mind all that I had read in the “navy man’s” book. The revelations, he said, had “hurt us all. It was all a long, long time ago, and we’d just as soon forget it.” He was courteous, kindly, firm. And two days later, just before I left the island for good, he came down the harbor to see me off. “Remember,” he said, “whatever you write will last for years; we back on the island will pore over it and analyze it a thousand times. Be careful what you write—for our own sakes.”

But I have to confess that, when it came to writing, I ignored him. I began work on a book about all of the remaining outposts of the British Empire—for my visit to Tristan was but part of two long years of wanderings that took me from Pitcairn to Diego Garcia, from Bermuda to the Falkland Islands, from Hong Kong to Gibraltar, and to all those other weather-beaten relics of Imperial Britannia. When I came to the Tristan chapter, I decided that I would in fact tell the story of Emily Hagan and Derrick Booy, in full.

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