A South Seas Spell

Over 40 years ago we had the enormous privilege of living in the Fiji Islands for several years. We spent some of our happiest times in that enchanted place and the memories haunt us still, in the nicest possible way. Recently I was looking through the things that we had brought back to Scotland, the fans, the mats, the tapa cloth and the shells and seeds picked up on the white coral beaches. The latter I have mounted on a circle of hazel twigs, in the hope that they will help keep the memories alive, because, as June Knox Mawer so eloquently puts it in her writings on the South Seas:

"With every day that passes the figures on the shorelines grow smaller. The smells of the land grow fainter too, woodsmoke and frangipani, the coconut oil and the hot moist green of the inland forest. The sound of drumming is dying away, the flood of singing voices, the haunting bass and treble of ocean and lagoon."