Stranger in paradise sours a dream

By JANE PHARE

The letter I had been dreading arrived with a bundle of late Christmas mail. Postmarked Honiara, it contained words of hurt and anger. It was from Diana Hepworth, a remarkable 80-year-old woman with an amazing life story she had wanted to share in memory of her husband.

She trusted another woman, nearly half her age, with that story and now felt betrayed and exploited. Hepworth's vision of an adventure biography describing years sailing the South Pacific culminating in an idyllic life on a remote island had, in part, become a sordid uncovering of family sadness, trauma, disappointment and tragedy.

The resulting book by Lucy Irvine, Faraway (Doubleday/Random House, $34.95) makes gripping reading in a voyeuristic way. As a journalist I have met both women. Irvine, a young adventurer in her mid 20s, breezed into Auckland in 1983, having written a book called Castaway about her year on the remote and deserted coral island of Tuin in the Torres Strait. She had answered an advertisement for a wife, placed by an Englishman in his 50s who wanted to live on the island for 12 months. The book was a best seller and became a movie.

A year later came another interview, this time with an older English couple, Tom and Diana Hepworth, who had a charming story to tell. In 1954 they sailed into Auckland on their 21m ketch called Arthur Rogers, and took on an all-girl crew of six.

The Hepworths, living on a remote island in the Solomons, had returned to New Zealand for a 30-year reunion with those women.

Diana kept in touch, sending me letters from Pigeon Island (or Ngarando, which means the faraway place) in the Reef Islands, 360 nautical miles from Honiara.

Periodically the Hepworths returned to New Zealand to visit their handicapped daughter, Tasha, and they always talked about the book Tom wanted to write. After Tom died in 1994, Diana became more determined that their story would be told and began a search for an author.

Through a series of coincidences Hepworth heard about and tracked down Lucy Irvine, who was living in a remote part of Scotland with her three young sons.

Irvine turned down Hepworth's offer of an airfare and the request that she write a biography. If she was to write a book it had to be on her own terms. She would live on the island with her three boys for a year, pay her own way, and write the story as she saw it.

That combination of two determined women, each with a different view on what sort of book was being written, has produced what both sides agree is a painful outcome.

Centre-stage is Diana, regal, still elegant, with her trademark bow in her hair, firmly holding on to the Pigeon Island paradise. Back in the 50s she and Tom negotiated a lease with the Solomon Island's Government, paid money to the Reef Islanders, set up a store and began trading in copra.

For friends and family who received letters over the years it seemed like paradise indeed. It took someone with the honest boldness of Irvine to peel back the layers and tell the Hepworths' story warts and all.

At first the scene is blissful. Tasha was born in New Zealand in 1958, sailed to her island home on the Arthur Rogers and was introduced to a world in which she learned to swim, paddle a dugout and play with the Reef Island children. But by the time she was three Tasha was still not speaking.

When the Hepworth's twins, Bressin (who changed his name to Ben) and Ross were born in New Zealand in 1961, specialists diagnosed Tasha as having health problems. Trips to New Zealand for treatment proved traumatic for the little girl accustomed to an island lifestyle. Then came the diagnosis that Tasha was handicapped and mentally ill. Her condition worsened as she grew older until the Hepworths could no longer handle the violent outbursts of her chronic schizophrenia. Tasha was taken to New Zealand to be cared for in a home - something Tom had vowed he would never do.

In one heartwrenching scene in Faraway, Irvine sits with Diana Hepworth while the older woman shares family photos. Hepworth shows one of Tasha as a toddler standing in the crystal-clear waters of Pigeon, then one of an adult Tasha, dancing with another woman in the home in which she lives.

"She's still pretty, don't you think?" Hepworth asks.

Irvine's response is brutal in its honesty, describing Tasha as a fat, blunt-featured creature with an institutional haircut and institutional clothes being propelled round a dance floor, clearly in an institution.

It was a horrible moment, Irvine writes in Faraway. Both women in the photograph had something grotesque about them. But evidently not to Diana. It is a horrible moment for the reader too, picturing the elderly mother, who lovingly still sees her little poppet in the photo.

There are other horrible moments as Tasha's story unfolds. The author reveals sexual interference at the age of five by a Reef Islander who is, ironically, called on to help an ailing, elderly Tom take Tasha off the island years later when her erratic and violent behaviour becomes too much to handle.

Whenever Tasha comes back into the story she is either participating in sexual games with groups of Reef Island boys, undergoing treatment for STD, behaving increasingly strangely, or having sex with a string of local Reef Island men using a child in a woman's body.

Irvine's descriptions leave nothing to the imagination. In an e-mail interview from her home in Scotland, Irvine defends her graphic descriptions, saying she believes it to be a necessary tactic to draw in the reader: "In Tasha's case I also felt the need to express something that was, without doubt (and according to her father) a pleasurable activity for her. Otherwise her story becomes almost entirely dark. We may be shocked by what she did but she evidently enjoyed it."

Much of what Faraway reveals, Hepworth learned for the first time when her copy of the book finally arrived at Pigeon last month, dispatched in a diplomatic bag from Whitehall. Diana had not read much of Tom's diaries, correspondence and manuscripts when she handed them over to Irvine.

Hepworth's complete faith in Irvine is reflected in a 1999 Christmas letter to friends in which she wrote: "I couldn't have wished for a more dedicated biographer. How I wish Tom could have met her."

By comparison, Tasha's twin brothers had a relatively trouble-free childhood - apart from the traumas with their sister. But family tensions rose when the boys reached their teen years and naturally became sexually interested in local girls - something which wasn't in the Hepworths' long-term plan.

Both sons came up with the bride-price to marry Reef Island women and had children. Ross later married another Reef Island woman and had more children, choosing to live island-style.

Tom's fury, and at times open dislike, for his sons, who seemed incapable of helping him to run the business, is evident in his diaries.

At one stage Tom banned Ross from the island and struck him out of his will. Although the rift gradually healed, Ross did not return to live on Pigeon with his expanded Reef Island family until after his father died.

As an adult, Ben became isolated, aloof and lost in a religious world of his own, strange and sad. His Reef Island bride and child live on another island.

His mother's hope was that, on one of his overseas trips, Ben would meet a nice girl who would share his life on Pigeon Island - a hope that never eventuated.

In Faraway, Irvine reveals that during a trip to Sydney Ben took up with a professional escort and blue-movie actress called Glori, who taught him about life - mostly on a waterbed.

Though Tom was also estranged from his other son, it was Ross who fought to have his father's body returned to Pigeon Island after Tom died in a Honiara hospital in 1994.

Faraway is certainly not the book Diana Hepworth imagined. It is light years away from the version Tom Hepworth began to write. It is not the book Irvine intended to write either. "It is a sadder book than I expected to write, as Diana had painted a bright picture of Pigeon before we went," Irvine says. "Sadly, I believe that Tom never finished writing his book because he knew that so much in the island's history was dark."

Curiously, despite having cut 50,000 words from the book, Irvine still finds room to fill us in several times on her sexual imaginings over Ben. This while she is interviewing Ben and secretly admiring his chest hair: "I wanted to spread my fingers on it, grip it hard and yank him towards me for a long, rude kiss. I wanted to make him feel. Breathing deep and feeling my nipples tighten, I turned, blushing, to my notes."

For Hepworth, the raw shock of reading Faraway is evident in a brief message by HF radio telling me a letter is on its way, giving her reaction to Faraway.

"Still feeling completely traumatised. No wonder I was asked to sign a consent contract which I was led to believe was necessary before manuscript could be offered to US publishers! Love Diana."

In that letter Hepworth says she finds it hard to accept the unnecessary way in which Irvine writes about Tasha as a nymphomaniac and the horribly explicit descriptions of imagined sex play. Hepworth says that Irvine has accepted embellished stories from Reef Islanders without checking them out and that locals used the stories to justify an alleged rape of Tasha by four boys.

Hepworth is hurt at being portrayed as from the landed gentry with outdated colonial views towards black people.

"I've loved these people and found them great to work with every day I've been here," Diana says. "The fact that now I'm old and enjoy my privacy should not be portrayed as dislike of coloured people."

But she concedes that her beloved Tom had little tolerance when socialising with the islanders because "there was no meeting of minds on an intellectual level, something we had in our relationship together which he obviously prized."

Ironically, her astuteness as a businesswoman means she will benefit from Faraway and the distress it has caused. With Tom gone, the expenses of running her Pigeon Island home neverending, and Tasha's future to consider, Hepworth negotiated 10 per cent of any royalties earned from Faraway, including a movie.

Despite Faraway - or perhaps because of it - Hepworth does not deny the close bond she formed with Irvine during her stay, even describing her in a letter to a friend as being like a daughter.

In a message to Irvine after reading the book, a wounded Hepworth evinces her stoical character with a final conciliatory line: "I can come to terms with the hurtful things given time. Still love you, Diana."

* Jane Phare is an Auckland journalist and writer.