'oJere through school." W1 th my fears thus dis~uised as maternal virtue
r felt better than I ever had before about sitting in a boat watching
other people go into the cave.
Last year both my girls were through school, I was free to do any
foolish thing I wanted to do, meanwhile time had played its usual
tricks as my rusty hair was almost white and 1 could hear the villa~e
children referring to me as "that old papalangi woman who lives on the
beach", therefore 1 told myself, not without a sense of relief, that
for me the time of diving into caves had pnssed and I was too old for
such antics. I accepted my defeat so gracefully and so finally that I
wrote it into a chapter of a book and so, I thought, laid for all time
the old ghost of my desire "to get in."
This year my daughters are back in Tonga teaching in Nuku'alofa.
When they came home to Vava'u for the May holidays they brought with
them a houseful of their friends who had read my book and knew of my
long failure with the cave. One night we all sat in the living room
discussing it and suddenly in a lull in the conversation, Tom, a tall
blonde New Zealander, who has that most wonderful of all qualitites,
the ability to inspire confidence in his hearers, looked across the
room at me and said, "1 can take you into Mariner's Cave."
As he spoke my fears and my years dissolved. "Are you sure?" I
asked. "Certainly", he smiled. For a few minutes I let myself believe
him and then I laughed and said, "That's not good enough, Tom, I'd have
to come out again, too." "I'll bring you out, too", he said and
although he's not yet as old as my fears, 1 found myself believing him.
A few days later my niece and her husband from England arrived and
we decided to make up a small party to show them the harbor, just the
two of them, my daughter Tami, Tom and myself.
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
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