We moved to all six verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ and again Lady Myre’s performance was extravagant:
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
She departed on an unnerving descant of her own devising, and alarmingly stressed the words ‘wretch’, ‘lost’, and ‘blind’. No creature could have been more incongruous on Pitcairn Island and I wondered at the strange accident of dispersal that had landed her there.
As we walked down the lane together Rosie commented that Lady Myre had a voice in her.
‘Yes,’ I said, with ‘Bread of heaven’ resounding in my head. I sensed Rosie was longing to get out of her blouse and into normal clothes. I wanted to tell her to use it as a shoe cloth, that it didn’t matter, I’d made a mistake, not known where I was going, what to expect, or what she’d like, want or need.
She talked of the islanders’ conversion to Adventism. Of the two Seventh Day Adventist evangelists in the Napa Valley, who in 1876 read of the Bounty story and the Pitcairners. They filled a box with religious tracts and sailed from San Francisco in a schooner called St John. It was the first of six crusades. All the Pitcairners converted within days. They were baptised, they repented of all sin and agreed to live by the Ten Commandments. The pigs were shoved over the cliffs: pork was forbidden, so was shellfish, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, homosexuality, bestiality, abortion and sex outside marriage. But the big thing about Adventism was the imminent Second Coming of Christ, when the righteous dead would be resurrected to meet up with the living righteous and Him. Sinners would stay dead for another thousand years. This coming was supposed to have happened in 1884, but Rosie thought it could be any day now.
She regretted that the island had no resident pastor at this difficult time and feared there might be a move against Adventism. There was talk of a Church of England pastor being sent to Pitcairn. These were uncertain times and none of them knew what the future held. But for the present it was boring when only Hank or Michael Young preached the sermon every week. Perhaps I’d like to have a go at it. Or Lady Myre.
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I wondered if I’d turn out to be one of those strange travellers who holed up on the island from time to time and shaped its random destiny. Like John Buffett, a twenty-six-year-old shipwright from Bristol. He arrived on a whaling ship in 1823. Within eight weeks he’d married Dorothy Young and taken over as pastor in the church and sole teacher in the school.
Five years later a pseudo-aristocratic English scoundrel called George Nobbs arrived. He forced the islanders to serve him, flogged them with a cat-o’-nine-tails, made them forfeit their land if they fornicated, fathered two illegitimate children and became alcoholic on liquor from a still he devised.
Or there was Hettie André, who in 1893 sailed from the Napa Valley, set up a Seventh Day Adventist school, taught the islanders basket-weaving and wood-carving, discouraged them from dancing and made them wear long-sleeved blouses to cover up their arms.
Unsuitable people became heroes and leaders. I’d seen in the Greenwich Maritime Museum that an amnesty had been granted to John Adams in 1825 because of all he was deemed to have contributed to the Pitcairn community. I wondered about the content of my sermon. Perhaps I might talk about my mother’s demise and the interruption of the linear narrative of my life with Verity. Or I might tell the congregation that they were living in the chaos of postmodernism and that the Jesus myth was obsolete. I’d advise them to leave the past behind, think of the island as a microcosm and try to create a place of fairness, a paradise of the world. Then I’d say, ‘Turn to hymn number 398: “Lift up your hearts, lift up your voice”.’
Lady Myre was in my bed under the net, moping. She said she was desperate to go home. It was all too much, going to church on Saturday and eating coconut pudding, which was bad for her cholesterol count, instead of lemon sorbet. She’d missed five consecutive instalments of Sex and the City and she wanted to sit in a restaurant and have a proper meal with waiters serving her. She said she pined for a dressed crab in Wheeler’s. She wanted to hang up her clothes, soak in a bath, talk on the phone to her friends, sleep in a comfortable bed, have the papers delivered. I told her she could get Sex and the City on DVD and that one of the good things about travel was that home seemed so special when, after many adventures, one at last returned there.
Barbara invited everyone on the island to a party for her seventieth birthday. She was from Florida. Six years back she’d been on a cruise that stopped at Pitcairn for two hours, and she’d spent the time talking to Charles Young. On its return from Easter Island to Auckland the ship stopped again. They talked for another two hours, he then flew to Florida, they married in the Little Church with the Big Heart and together travelled back to Pitcairn.
Between them they had seven children from previous marriages. The shack they lived in looked as if it had been trashed by an intruder determined to find a small, well-concealed
