MY husband was sent to be District Officer at the end of September 1961 and remained there until the end of his first contract in 1963. After the wet months living in the nurses quarters in Nausori, it did not rain for six weeks. We fell in love with Sigatoka!
Arriving in Sigatoka, we found ourselves living in the DO’s house on the top of the hill above Lawaqa. The drive went half way up the hill to the garage and you walked the last bit of the hill. The house was a large colonial wooden house, the verandas around it were roofed and an integral part of the house. The front one had a grass lawn outside and a view down the Lawaqa Rd, playing field and DO’s office and Court house and the local provincial office with the small town beyond. That veranda became our sitting room. Our bedroom was the corner area off this. The back veranda had a door that led down a path to the kitchen that housed a wood burning stove. On the corner of this veranda was the flush toilet and the only running water in the house. Outside was a small concrete building that housed the shower. The slopes on this side were a vegetable garden maintained by the prisoners from the local gaol.
We set up a kitchen on the back veranda which housed a long wooden table, with our own gas stove. Fiji Gas delivered cylinders when required to all parts of Viti Levu. I lived a quiet life at the top of the hill. We had a house girl who cleaned the house and did the laundry. Her name was Alisi.
One afternoon, to my great surprise, three European ladies arrived on the door step. Of course I was delighted and offered them a cup of tea. But no! They had come to deliver their cards, which they handed me and left. This left me astonished, I had never known of anything like this. Murray explained to me in the evening. This was an English custom from Victorian times. The ladies were Australians from the Colonial Sugar Refining Company who had a centre at Cuvu not far out of town towards Nadi and Lautoka. They had Tennis Courts and invited us, but Murray did not often join them. We preferred going to the beach at Cuvu and enjoying the sand and a swim. The Fijian Hotel built on the nearby Yanuca island was still a future treasure.
Occasionally we would receive a visit from another government officer and as we finished our evening meal he would engage Murray in the latest rumours going round the civil servants. Murray would be terrified that I would hear some government secret. He took very seriously the Official Secrets Act that he had been made to sign on arrival in the country. He never discussed his work with me!
We soon came to know the local Doctor, Dr Cecily Hands, originally from New Zealand who had spent many years in India as a missionary doctor. She came to Fiji when her father who was a priest in the Anglican Church in Fiji. When he became old and retired to Lautoka Cecily came to be with her parents.
After her father died, she bought a little house at Korotoga, just along the coast from Sigatoka in the direction of Suva, brought her mother with her and set up her medical practice with an office in Sigatoka. She was always open to anyone in need and became very well known in the whole district. She employed a young Indian girl who became her nurse assistant, known as Grace.
Saturday was an interesting day for me. Each week we visited the vegetable market at the other end of the town. We also called in the local Morris Hedstrom grocery shop for other household and food needs. Each week, from the market we brought fresh vegetables of different kinds and fruits, exploring produce from the Sigatoka Valley we had never met before. I remember one fruit, known as Wi, that had dark green skin. Inside it had a centre nut that was overed in bristles, I boiled it and put it through a strainer to get the thick juice. When sweetened it tasted of gooseberries and my husband enjoyed it with custard as a dessert. Later I came to make jam with it. It was years before I discovered why the ladies would sometimes giggle when I bought it. The iTaukei use it for morning sickness and I was becoming more obviously pregnant.
In those early weeks I would sometimes accompany Murray on his trips up the Sigatoka Valley. Not far up the road was the local Agricultural Station. There was only one European family here, Peter Thompson and his wife Valerie. Peter was an amazing man. He spent a good number of years in Fiji and while in Sigatoka at Nadroloulou brought in fruits from Hawaii to be grown in the district. I shall never forget the passionfruit that became the juice for our little son as he began to grow.
They are still available in the Suva Market and still known to i-Taukei as grenadilla, the local fruit they are related to. We have some growing in our garden and when available they are included in my breakfast fruit dish. Peter also started a business for local youth making brooms with local sisal. Valerie started her only little business. She collected colourful small pebbles and shells from the local sandy beaches and set them in fibreglass moulds to sell to tourists. I have two stands for glasses that I treasure. Peter and Valerie had a little daughter. We used to visit them sometimes at the weekend. Valerie became a good friend and I would ring her for a chat during the week. The phone in those days was very simple. You raised the handset and asked the voice of the Operator for the number you wanted. Often I would call Val to be answered by the news that she had gone into town for the morning.
Further up the Valley was a tobacco farm managed by an English man who was working for the international cigarette business. We came to know this family quite well and like with the Thompsons, we kept in touch after they left Fiji. Recently one of their sons came to visit Fiji and we went round the recently upgraded Fiji Museum together.
The long miles up to Keiyasi, the end of the road in those days would take Murray away from home for a long day. However, late it was he would drive home to sleep in his own bed. He never stayed a night in a village, missing a pleasant experience that I have enjoyed quite a number of times when doing some work for the church or teaching mothers in villages to set up playgroups and kindergartens, using the methods of hands-on learning through exploration of the world round them. Playing with different-sized utensils, exploring sand shapes. ABC was to come later in school. As far as Murray was concerned, I think the government realised he was not suited to district work and gave him office work from 1964 onwards.
One night on his way home he was stopped by the sound of a puppy screaming for attention. He picked up the little bundle and we fed her carefully. She became known as Judy because her demanding puppy voice reminded Murray of the Punch and Judy shows of our young days. We had her neutered by the local Vet when she was old enough and she came with us to Suva, living to a good old age.
The nine months passed quickly and as the time for birth drew near Dr Hands wanted me to go to Suva for Dr Lancaster to oversee the birth. We prevailed upon our friends at Koronivia and they gladly took me in, even though Jenny had a young daughter and was only about a month from the birth of her second child. I spent a week there and Murray came over at the weekend. On the Sunday there was a lunch party in one of the homes to which we were all invited. As lunch was beginning to be served, I said to Murray “I think we had better go”. Our first child, Robert Aird Murray, was born later in the evening and Murray left to return to Sigatoka soon after. The next few days were spent learning from the nurses in the Morrison maternity ward how to feed and change my new treasure. At the end of the week Murray came again and we planned to travel back. But no! the Matron, who it turned out had never travelled the road, forbade it and Dr Lancaster agreed so it was back to Jenny for another week before we brought him back to Sigatoka. In the Serua district there was a lonely house on a hill above the sea. A European couple lived there and we would sometimes call in on our way back from Suva. We called in this time and they were thrilled to meet our new-born son.
Now the daily routine changed with the baby to be looked after. I was determined to raise myself any children we had. So Alisi would sometimes help with the endless washing of nappies – no bought throw-aways that nowadays produce so much dangerous and unnecessary rubbish, polluting our rivers and seas. We took Robbie, as we called him, down to see Dr Hands and she kept us up to date with necessary injections. Dr Cecily Hands became a very close friend and her home was a haven away from home when we lived in Suva. In her older days she would love to visit us in Suva. When we bought our own home she loved to come and stay and take advantage of the bath that was installed in the bathroom.
Quite early on someone lent us a good old-fashioned perambulator. Robbie was still very young when there was a big women’s gathering at the provincial compound that I needed to attend. I tucked my treasure into this pram and took him with me. I was surprised, and rather nervous, when I saw the women had removed his covers, lifted him out and he was being loved and cuddled and handed from hand to hand. A big lesson for me in i-Taukei custom.
Church in those days was for us a holy communion service held in the Court House, when the priest came visiting for the weekend from Lautoka. Dr Hands kept us up to the mark on other Sundays. The visiting priest, a bachelor, would sit with us on our veranda and I, not wishing to miss any of his short time with us would pick up the hungry baby and feed him, somewhat to the dear priest’s embarrassment.
Murray arranged for us to receive the daily copy of the Fiji Times and I would read it while he was away at work. One time I read an article about the prison in Suva and their successful bakery, encouraging people to buy. The article described their delicious “hand-baked bread”. I wrote my first letter to the Fiji Times jokingly querying the safety of the prisoners with their “hand-baked bread” getting their hands burned in the process. We left next day for a visit to Suva returning three days later to find three loaves sent from the prison on our door step sadly grown mouldy waiting for us. I wrote a letter of thanks, without mentioning the sad end to their beautiful bread.
Murray’s first three years was coming to an end and having secured a second contract we flew out to the UK after only just two years in Sigatoka. I remember arriving at Heathrow, not the busy crowded place then, and watching over our little treasure, only just able to walk, stumbling around in his nappy, after the long time of restraint in the aircraft. I have few memories of that first leave. I think it must have been that Christmas when just 18 months old he was given a tricycle by Murray’s sister, his aunt Sylvia. He sat on it and, shown how to push the pedals and steer, to my horror, he was off and away. Sylvia was a very careful housewife with no husband or children at that stage and I imagined her furniture being battered by this little horror. But no! he had a natural way of steering without touching anything. I was amazed. No wonder he became a very successful helicopter pilot when he grew up.
Soon after Christmas we set off for Fiji again flying that was so much simpler in those days. There were fewer travellers and we would usually find a stretch of three empty seats and sleep quite comfortably.
The first years in Suva will follow when I have set my old memory at work again.
TESSA MACKENZIE is a retired teacher who designed Fiji’s Nobel Banner Blue flag.
