Princess Bad Banana
SIR,—The "account of the Queen of Tonga prompts me to add some of my own recollections of her and her family nearly thirty years ago. I happened to be for a year in charge of the junior house of a large girls' school in Auckland, New Zealand, in which the Queen's step-sister was being educated. It had been a great disappointment to her father that he had had no son to succeed him. He was then an old man, and her mother died at the child's birth ; so he called her Fusibala, meaning Bad Banana. The little princess was an attractive child of ten years when I knew her, and bade fair to be as large as her sister.
Queen Salotte came to stay in Auckland while I was there, with her young sons, and visited the school, where she herself had been for a time under the same headmistress. As I attended them round the junior house, it was amusing to see how the Queen became almost a schoolgirl again in the presence of the dignified Englishwoman who had taught her, while the headmistress showed a suitable respect for a reigning sovereign. Each of them held back for the other to go first when entering and leaving the various rooms, and they deferred to each other's opinion'.
Fusibala was popular at school, and there was keen competition for [ha stamps on her letters from Tonga, with the pOrtrait of the Queen. She was very musical, and even when she was a child it was a pleasure to hear her playing the piano, with a firm touch. If she had lived, she might have made a name for herself as a pianist. or singer, but she contracted tuberculosis and ffied when she was aliout seventeen.—Yours truly,
Previous page
