"But I Digress ..." by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

oxygen pack and retrorockets. It is a remote place of rainforests and volcanic ridges, of shipwrecks and Georgian houses and a tree on which, if family legend be true, my grandfather once carved the initials of the woman who would become my grandmother, when he passed that way between the wars.
    My grandfather was a little vague as to the precise whereabouts of that tree. He would puff contentedly on a pipe and say, “It was on a hill.” Perhaps that was his little joke. The whole of St Helena is a series of hills. It only stops being a hill when it briefly becomes a series of steep-sided valleys. I had promised – rashly, it now seems – to bring back a photograph of the initials. Could I find the tree? I could not.
    Eventually I resorted to etching in the initials with a rusty nail. I cunningly carved them high on the trunk to take growth into account, but then I couldn’t remember whether a tree trunk grows from the top or the bottom. I decided to carve another set of initials, and take another photograph, just to be safe, but as I was doing so a weather-worn local wearing a floppy hat and Wellington boots came tramping round the bend.
    â€œEee,” he said, or words to that effect. “You can’t go carving on our trees.”
    I blushed. “No, no, they’re my grandmother’s initials,” I reassured him. He looked at me with eyes that wished St Helena were a little further away from the mainland, and hurried away, no doubt to make sure his children were safely indoors.
    The only way to reach St Helena is a five-day voyage on the RMS St Helena . I had gone to sea to take a break from television, but by the time I reached the island my eyes had been sufficiently soothed by the blues and whites of the wide-stretching ocean that I was ready for a little cathode action. They do have television on St Helena, and have had for a couple of years now, but when I arrived I soon realised that TV was a controversial subject.
    â€œIt will be the ruin of this island,” one old gent told me, casting eyes to the heavens. “You can see it already. The language of the children. And the clothes they wear. And how they cheek their parents.”
    An elderly lady confirmed his forebodings. “Moral decay,” she told me. “Children see those gangsters on television, running around with guns. One of these days someone is going to bring a gun to the island, mark my words.” She leant closer and lowered her voice. “I shouldn’t tell you this, as you write for newspapers, but last month my son left his wallet on the front seat of his car, and when he returned,” she paused for dramatic effect, “it had been stolen.”
    I tried to work up some appropriate sympathy. “Window broken, eh?” I said, clucking.
    She looked puzzled. “No, no,” she said, “they opened the door.”
    I was curious to see what foul electronic outpourings could corrupt a community so pure no one locks their cars. What evil was being injected from across the waters? Porn channels? Snuff movies? I turned on the telly. It was M-Net.
    It is disconcerting to venture more than a thousand nautical miles into the pitching blue, only to be confronted by a Currie Cup rugby match when you get to the other side. I watched the Currie Cup rugby match, of course – it is something like a conditioned reflex – but afterwards I felt ashamed.
    That afternoon I walked up into the mountains and down into Daffodil Valley to find Napoleon’s tomb – bare and slightly forlorn in the shade of the towering Norfolk pines – and I tried to stand there and think about Ozymandias and the fate of all things human, and how dreams and vaulting ambition must in the end turn to grass and suchlike improving thoughts, but all the while I couldn’t shake the feeling that Marius Roberts or Gerry Rantseli was peering over my shoulder.
    And then a terrible thought occurred to me.