How the Cook Islands saved my life
Anna Selby ditched the daily grind and made her escape to remote Polynesia with two suitcases and a three-year-old in tow
What is it we’re all longing for right now? To get away? Certainly. To get right away, somewhere beautiful where peace of mind may finally return – the ultimate desert island idyll? You bet. You don’t need a pandemic, though, to feel this way.
For me, it had all started as a pleasant enough daydream. “Just imagine if…” I said to my son Christian, then three. And I did imagine, frequently. It was 1996 and, on the surface, I seemed to have things mostly under control. I’d found Christian an excellent nursery from 8am to 6pm while I worked. Then I worked again after he had gone to bed. I was consumed with the usual maternal guilt and exhaustion. But also, quite simply, I missed him. Having been on our own from before his birth, we felt not so much bonded as superglued.
Three years on, though, we couldn’t go on like this. It was hardly an unusual situation for a single mother, but I was running on empty and, at night, my mind whirring through endless formulations of the hours/money/work equation, it seemed our life had become as fragile as a house of cards. I didn’t dare breathe the smallest hint of change for fear it would all come tumbling down. Fortunately, it occurred to me to consider a change of gale-force proportions.
Naturally, I did my research. As a woman travelling alone with a small child, there were certain criteria: no serious disease; no poisonous snakes or spiders; no wars or civil unrest; low crime rates; affordable; weather that was great all year round; a place where they really liked children. Quite a list.
With the plan still more of an idle daydream than a realistic solution, I started to look at the practicalities – and found, to my utter shock, that every tentative query was met with a resounding yes. It seemed almost that fate was propelling us onwards: we could live off the rent from our flat and, as a journalist, I could pick up work as we went along. I locked up everything but the essentials in a handy loft space, set up our first two weeks of accommodation, and in a mere three months, the plan was set.
And so I found myself one Saturday morning with two very large suitcases and a three-year-old in Heathrow Departures. Our destination was Rarotonga, capital of the Cook Islands. What was that about desert island idylls?
The Cooks gained independence from New Zealand only in 1965. English is widely spoken and the country is part of the Commonwealth. But any British influence lies like the thinnest of counterpanes over Polynesian culture. The local dollar coin bears the serene profile of HMQ. On the obverse is Tangaroa, the fat little phallic god of the Pacific.
After what seemed like weeks of breathing sterile aircraft air – it was 30 hours since we’d left London – the infinitesimal speck of Rarotonga appeared in the world’s biggest, deepest ocean. As we got closer, we could see the mountainous jungle at the island’s heart, its jagged peaks wreathed in wispy cloud. The white sand of the coastline was surrounded by a translucent lagoon, with the rollers of the Pacific breaking against the coral reef. We had arrived.
Our enfeebled senses were bombarded from the moment the aircraft doors opened and we were wrapped in a blanket of hot, humid air scented with damp earth, gardenia and coconut oil. In the tiny airport we were garlanded with eis and, waiting for passport control, watched a man with a ukulele and a grass-skirted dancer on a dais. My sense of unreality was deepening by the moment but Christian was as blithely accepting as only a small child can be. Within minutes of our arrival, he’d found a bucket and spade and was happily digging away as if we’d just popped down to Brighton for the weekend.
I took to life in Polynesia almost as rapidly. This was a surprise. After our beleaguered life in London, I’d feared that in some alien culture we would have to cling together even more fiercely. In fact, the opposite happened. Life became easy. The hotel where we first stayed rented us one of their workers’ cottages though I’d already bought the local newspaper (A4, eight pages) to find us a rental. “Crime Round-up” caught my eye. There were three items, the most serious being a police call to a house where a teenager had been rude to his auntie. He promised he wouldn’t do it again. This wasn’t a different country – it was a totally different planet.
I found Christian a pre-school, Te Uki Ou. Here, everyone (including the teacher, Auntie Bea) left their shoes outside on the verandah. All the children helped look after the school, sweeping their classroom and picking up fallen leaves from the field that was their playground. Song and dance were on the curriculum. One evening, when Christian was having his usual bath in the sink, he started singing. The tune was familiar but the words were incomprehensible. It was Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat in Cook Island Maori.
In the mornings, Christian went to Te Uki Ou while I worked. In the afternoons, we went to town, explored the island or hit the beach. We went out on the lagoon with Captain Tama in his thatch-roofed boat. He would dive into the water and come up wrestling an octopus – his supper. We had adventures with canoes and snorkels and sea slugs. Christian soon discovered they would spray out an arc of liquid (I was never quite sure what that was) when gently squeezed – living water pistols.
We visited other islands in the group, most frequently Aitutaki, an exquisite triangle of turquoise lagoon with a few scraps of land clinging to its coral reef. We got there by prop plane and landed on a coral runway. It takes an hour, because the Cooks are nowhere near each other. The 15 islands are scattered across 21 million sq km of sea. In Aitutaki’s warm lagoon, gaudy fish would nibble our toes, giant clams gaped from their sandy bed next to bright blue starfish, green sea turtles came to breed and, beyond the reef, humpback whales passed by on their annual migration. My blood pressure plummeted and our pace of life slowed to an amble.
On Atiu, we stayed in one of the four rooms of the only hotel. We’d been there a few days when Paul, the New Zealand Deputy High Commissioner, turned up and hosted a dinner to which I was invited. Paul and I had spent the day scrambling through Atiu’s underground caves in search of a swallow that, like a bat, uses echolocation to find its way to its nest. The dinner, though, was, unusually, an adults-only event so I had to find a babysitter. Mrs Aku was a charming middle-aged woman who arrived promptly at 6.30pm on her motorbike. “Is he ready?” she asked. “Ready?”
“Yes, he’s coming to our house.” And off they went, Christian clinging on behind Mrs Aku and screaming with delight as the motorbike bumped its way down the dirt road. She returned at 10pm alone. “Can I have a nappy?” “A nappy?”
“Yes, he’s staying the night.” Christian was returned at 6am, euphoric at having spent the night in a bed with five other children. In Polynesia, you are rarely on your own. Privacy is a concept that is unknown here, and solitude is abhorred. The fact that we were travelling alone raised questions among the locals. Having established that I was single, complete strangers would offer themselves, their brothers, their cousins or uncles as prospective husbands. They could scarcely believe our solitary condition and their concern for our loneliness was quite genuine. Marriage itself was no great matter – much more important is being part of a family. This, it was generally felt, was what we most needed.
Christian’s hair had turned silver in the sun and we were naturally objects of the most intense curiosity. Polynesians are unnervingly direct and every time we met someone new, we had to go through the obligatory Q&A session. “He your only boy?”
“Yes, I’ve just got the one.” This was enough to give any islander pause for thought – why would anyone have just one when it was well known that parents and grandparents vie for the privilege of bringing up children. (Grandparents traditionally have first dibs on the first-born of their children’s children.)
Days and weeks went by, peppered with the most local of events – the National Dance Competition (Cook
‘The local dollar coin bears the serene profile of Her Majesty the Queen’
Islanders are considered to be the best dancers in the Pacific), Independence Day celebrations, the National Coconuttree Climbing Competition. Saturday Island Nights were high-octane singing and dancing, the traditional stuff with hakas, grass skirts and coconut bras for the tourists, followed by the disco at Trader Joe’s or the Banana Court.
Sunday umus (the weekly feast cooked in an underground oven) followed two-hour church services with everyone in their best clothes belting out perfect, unaccompanied four-part harmonies. Out of curiosity, I went along to a political meeting and met the PM. He was wearing shorts and had a hibiscus flower behind one ear.
On Rarotonga, we travelled around on the sunshine yellow local bus. There are, in fact, two – the clockwise bus and the anti-clockwise bus – taking 50 minutes to circumnavigate the island. Christian’s favourite seat was, naturally, the one at the front next to the driver.
One day, to his dismay, he found it occupied. A young man was sitting there. He was naked except for a pair of ragged shorts, wore the intricate Polynesian arm bracelet tattoo and had a bushknife balanced between his knees.
“Excuse me,” said Christian. “May I sit on your lap?” “Sure,” the man replied, grinning. (The answer to all questions in the South Pacific is “yes”.) He hauled Christian up and they chatted amicably all the way into town.
Four years after our year away, Christian and I went back, visiting his old school in Rarotonga (the one with its own beach – you don’t get many of those in London). Why, Christian asked, did we ever leave? Couldn’t he have gone to school here? It had seemed important at the time that he didn’t miss out on school at home but, looking back, I could see his point. And, after the year we have all had, I think the restorative powers of the Cooks could be just what we need again…