At the end of the island where I live we are waiting for John to come back. At the other end, which we don’t ever visit, they are waiting for Philip. But we will see John back here long before they see Philip. John is a legend. I suppose Philip must be too, but our legend is better than theirs. That’s because ours is true and theirs is made up. I know this because my grandfather said so. He has actually seen John and knows he is real, but he hasn’t seen Philip. He thinks the people at the other end of the island made Philip up out of their own heads, just because we had John all to ourselves down here.
Grandfather is now a very old man, and it was when he was only a young boy that he saw John. It was at a time when huge ships, loaded with massive guns, went sailing past our island. Some people came from other islands and talked to our people about what was happening there.
It seems that on some of the larger islands people with much lighter skins than us arrived in big metal birds. They wanted to stay for some time, and they told the local people that they needed to attract much larger birds, but in order to do so they would have to clear away some of the forest and build a special track on which the birds could land.
This is what they did, and after the birds began to arrive, and the people had built huts near the end of track and really nice huts for them to live in themselves, all sorts of strange things started to arrive that were taken out of the birds and into the people’s new huts.
These people didn’t seem to do any work. They didn’t grow food or climb trees to gather coconuts, they stayed in their huts and the food arrived inside the birds, or so it seemed.
Some of the local people helped with unloading the birds, and what they unloaded was called “cargo” by the newcomers. It was wonderful stuff. They had boxes outside their huts that made whirring noises, and when this happened the inside of the huts were brightly lit, even if it was long after dark.
They even had boxes in their huts that cooked their food or kept it fresh during hot weather. One or two of them would go round the island in metal boxes that moved all by themselves.
This went on for some time, but one day all the people got into the metal birds and flew away, taking all their cargo with them.
Grandfather told me that some people on other islands wondered if there was a way of getting metal birds to come down and bring some cargo for them. What they did was go into the forest and cut down some of the trees in a long strip, just wide enough for a metal bird to land on. They built some huts at one end of the strip, just like the ones that the white-skinned people had built so that the cargo could be stored there before it was taken to their own huts.
Do you know, I’m just not sure if any cargo did land there, however much the people raised their hands to the sky and asked a metal bird to come down and land on their forest strip.
But we have something a lot better on our island. We have John Frum. At least, that is what everyone calls him. He came to our island once, a long time ago, but I’m not sure if he came in a metal bird or on a boat. He stayed for some time and then he went away again, but everyone just knows that he’ll come back one day. And when he does come back, everyone will be so, so happy because he’ll bring lots of cargo with him for everyone.
Grandfather has told me lots of stories about John Frum and all the wonderful things he did. He made people better when they were ill, by making them swallow tiny round pieces of food. If they did this for a few days, all their pains went away.
I have heard lots of other stories too, but I can’t be sure that they were all true. It was said that he could make a dish of water taste like anything you wanted it to be. When it was hot in a pot on the fire, he would drop some powder into it and it would smell wonderful and taste like nothing anyone had known before. John Frum had said that all the people where he came from drank this every day when they got up and it made them work so much better. He called it Caa Fie.
Some people said that John Frum could fly in the air and turn himself into birds or bats. Could he? Well, if he could make Caa Fie, who knows what he could do?
We had John Frum all to ourselves. At the other end of the island they say had a visit from a tall handsome man in a white costume who said his name was Philip. They asked him who he was and he said that he was the husband of a queen from a far distant land, and that this queen actually owned the island. That sounds very odd to me. If he was the husband of a queen, surely that would make him a king? It doesn’t add up. That’s why I think they invented him.
No, we’re far better off with John Frum, who’ll come back one day and bring lots of Caa Fie and other things with him. I asked Grandfather one day why he was called John Frum. He said it was because he had said – in a very funny voice that dragged out all the vowels, that he was “Jahn Frum Armorica” or something like that. Nobody was quite clear what the last word was – it might have Ormerocaw or Hamvericore or almost anything. So everyone just stuck with what they could agree on, which means that we are all now waiting for the return of our very own John Frum.
© John Welford
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