The Persimmon Tree (82 page)

In a state of some excitement, I wrote, telling her I’d be in Melbourne for Christmas. I was disappointed to be leaving my mates in the radio unit, but the thought of sharing Christmas Day with lovely Marg was more than a little compensation. Now that I was leaving the island, I realised how bloody tired and unwell I felt. I was building up to another bout of malaria and the gut thing caused me to have waves of nausea followed by a longing for a good meal.

A week later, on the 17th of December (I’d been told I was flying out on the 19th), a letter arrived with Marg’s familiar handwriting on the envelope. I tore it open with huge anticipation but also some apprehension — my dread was that she was writing to tell me she was going home to Perth for Christmas. Humans who love their animals passionately don’t always put other people first.

Melbourne

12th December 1942

Darling Nick,

You must know how very dear you are to me. My most earnest hope is that we will remain friends forever. I shall always cherish the time we spent together,
and standing on the platform watching you leave Perth was a moment of infinite sadness I shall never forget.

But there is also the joy I felt that first night we made love and the times we were together. You are a very special and beautiful man, Nick. As I told you that first night, whatever subsequently happened between us was to be on my terms. I am eight years older than you and, at the time, felt that it would be unfair, knowing you had a sweetheart on her way from Java to Australia, not to allow you to take your leave from me graciously when the time came.

I admit, you were such a beautiful young man that I simply couldn’t resist the temptation — the joy of initially having you to myself for one night and thereafter for a short while.

That I allowed myself such a glorious indulgence is one of the nicest things life has ever permitted me to enjoy. There are memories we all store in a special compartment in our hearts and this is one that is securely locked away for safekeeping. Some day, when I am an old woman, I will unlock it and recall the gorgeous young man that, as a young woman, I had the privilege to know and love.

By now you will have guessed the tenor of this letter. It is to tell you that I have met someone else here in Melbourne and we will be spending Christmas together at his family’s cottage on the Mornington Peninsula where we hope to announce our engagement.

By a curious circumstance, or perhaps not so curious, you know him: Commander Rob Rich. He speaks enormously well of you and shares my anxiety about your whereabouts and secondment. Thank God you are coming home.

Rob and I met at
Cerberus
during the course I came over to do and, well, the rest you can guess — thirty-five-year-old bachelor meets twenty-six-year-old spinster…

By the time I’d reached this part of Marg’s letter I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. I guess I was emotionally vulnerable due to the gut thing. No! That’s bullshit! I felt as if my heart had been ripped out and jumped on. I was utterly miserable. I had lost the last of the three anchors in my life, the tide was going out and I had become a boat without a rudder floating out to sea. (What a lousy
metaphor!) I was also, I am ashamed to say, hurt and filled with self-pity and even, for a short while, angry. But deep down I knew I had no right to be any of these things, for Marg had unfailingly played with a straight bat. She’d always been honest with me and had given me more, much more, than ever she’d received from me, a gangling boy with too much testosterone and a longing for the comfort of her beautiful breasts. The heart is a lonely hunter and I had found the joy of a beautiful woman who took my loneliness and turned it into loving.

I was flown out in a B-17 to Luganville and then to Brisbane — a short stop, where I went to the toilet and threw up (green slime). Then we went on to Melbourne where I arrived about eight o’clock at night and found, to my chagrin, that a marine ambulance waited on the tarmac to take me to Heidelberg Military Hospital. I’d left Fraser Island just four months previously, fitter than I’d been in my entire life. No way was some well-meaning bastard going to strap me into a stretcher on my return.

‘We have specific orders, sir,’ the marine NCO medic insisted.

‘Bugger the orders! I’m not lying down on that thing. I’m not dead yet!’ I said, damn near collapsing with a sudden gut spasm.

‘Please, sir?’ he urged.

I turned to the other man. ‘Corporal, help me up to sit in the front. I’m an officer and this
is
also
a specific order.’ It was intended to be a bellow but it came out somehow differently, more as a croak.

The corporal, with a five o’clock shadow, who reminded me a bit of Belgiovani (though a slightly thinner version), and the medic lifted me into the front of the ambulance. I don’t remember a great deal about the trip to hospital. Somewhere close to our destination, or as we arrived, I must have collapsed, hitting my head against the dashboard, which resulted in a black eye the next day.

It’s strange how, when you let things relax because you’re close to relinquishing responsibility for yourself, everything suddenly falls apart. I must have come to fairly quickly, because I still insisted I wouldn’t be strapped down. Wheeled into a hospital emergency department on a stretcher wasn’t quite how I had envisaged my triumphant return to my homeland. I was later told I walked into the hospital carrying my kitbag, shrugging off the help of the two medicos. A bloody stupid thing to do, but I don’t remember a thing.

I knew that what lay ahead was something different; a new turn in my short life. My secondment to the Americans was coming to an end. I was home, wherever that was — initially it had to be a hospital bed in Victoria. While I had always thought of myself as a loner — but had never felt lonely — I was experiencing the most complete sense of being alone, and with it a loneliness such as I had never felt before or since.

Apart from Marg Hamilton, there were two people I thought about every day of my life, Anna and my father, and I knew they might well be dead. I wondered how I could wangle a coastwatcher’s job in New Britain, where at least I’d be able to learn the truth about my father. In both cases, with Anna and the Reverend John Duncan, it was the not knowing that was the worst part. My father had always said ‘Superstition is what keeps humans ignorant’, but Gojo’s boot on the wing of the Clipper butterfly had really shaken me. The symbolism was so strong — the Imperial Japanese boot crushing the wings of Anna, the beautiful butterfly. I tried to tell myself that Gojo Mura was hardly a symbol of Imperial Japan. But you know how it is with an image; it gets stuck in your head and won’t go away.

I’d often fantasise about sailing
Madam Butterfly
to Java after the war and finding Anna and bringing her home with me. She’d be skin and bone but I’d pack the yacht with good things to eat and by the time we got back to Australia Anna would be her old self again. Of course, in my fantasy I didn’t take into account what being crushed under the Imperial Japanese boot might have done to her head.

Now that I had returned to Australia, it all became confusing. That’s the whole point about being in the forces. You don’t have to think about the next step, the next move. It’s ‘Bang!’ and you’re dead or broken. Or you wake up each morning and follow orders and the routine.

I didn’t know quite what I was going to be asked to do, or what my next destination would be. I didn’t mind being the leader, providing there was a purpose, such as the little bloke and me escaping in
Madam Butterfly
from Java. My life had changed so completely that I’d forgotten in just a few months how to be a civilian. In fact, come to think about it, I’d had very little practice at leading a normal existence. As a teenage boy I’d either been institutionalised at boarding school or I’d been in the jungle hunting butterflies. I’d had a short stint of six months working in Moresby with W. R. Carpenter, but that was only to get enough money to go butterfly hunting in Java.

I didn’t really know who Nick Duncan was. When I’d gone to Java it had been a bit of an adventure; the excuse was the search to find the Magpie Crow butterfly, an escapade straight out of
Boys’ Own Annual
. I’d also found Anna and that had been a wonderful bonus. The murder of the men on the beach was the first time I’d been tested and, alas, I’d been found wanting. Maybe that was a turning point? Sailing
Madam Butterfly
across the Indian Ocean with the little bloke in tow had allowed me to bury the incident, and the guilt. The entire time at sea my mind was occupied with the business of getting us back to the safety of Australia. But it had always been there: the feeling that I wasn’t the decent bloke, the intrepid young fellow I pretended to be; that the burial incident on the beach had shown me to be a coward.

Marg Hamilton had led me gently and gloriously into manhood and had urged me not to become a coastwatcher. I might have listened to her pleas, but for my father’s foolish decision to remain behind in New Britain. At the time, that news seemed to open a way to make up for my failure at the beach. I would rescue him and prove to myself that I wasn’t who I hoped I wasn’t.

Then came the secondment to the marines, and Bloody Ridge where I suppose I proved I wasn’t a coward. But, in turn, the fighting revealed a new aspect of my personality: the ability to kill calmly in the heat of battle and, while it was happening, to feel a peculiar exhilaration.

Who the hell are you, Nick Duncan?
This was becoming a recurring question I kept asking myself in hospital. I don’t suppose calm analysis and introspection is a good idea when you’re going through the shakes and sweats brought about by
falciparum
malaria. But there you go. I was feeling like shit, both outside as well as within my heart and my head.

I had been placed in a large malaria ward with twenty other officers, all from the army and air force. I don’t suppose too many navy blokes are exposed to the
anopheles
mosquito. In addition to malaria I was diagnosed with jaundice, which accounted for my constant feeling of nausea, the vomiting, headaches and a whole set of aches and pains. My skin had turned yellow and now the very idea of food was abhorrent.

The doctor, a young lieutenant, was a cheerful bloke named Ross Hayes. Unlike most civilian medicos I’d met in the past, he didn’t adopt a superior ‘I know best’ manner and after we’d been introduced suggested I call him Ross. I responded with ‘Nick’s the name, doctor.’

‘Nick, you’re pretty damned unwell; not just
falciparum
malaria, which, under normal circumstances, would be enough to lay you low, but you also have a hepatic infection of some kind. Frankly, we’re seeing all sorts of bugs in blokes coming in from New Guinea, ones we’ve never encountered before. Tropical medicine is undergoing a fast learning curve. Your symptoms are fairly typical of jaundice. We’ll run some liver tests but if it’s viral, as usual we’ll have to hazard an educated guess and call it jaundice. You are going to feel pretty off-colour with the quinine drip for your malaria, and the only treatment for jaundice is lots of rest and avoidance of fatty foods.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and
absolutely
no alcohol for three months. That, I’m afraid, puts the kybosh on a Christmas beer or two. While I’m at it, you also have a nasty worm infection. We’ve found hookworm and threadworm, but fortunately we can clean them up fairly quickly.’ He pointed at my face. ‘And how did you get the black eye? It’s a beauty!’

‘Dizzy spell coming in from the airport. I must have knocked it.’

He looked amused. ‘Very careless getting a black eye while strapped to a stretcher… Never heard of that particular injury before.’

I laughed, well, sort of laughed, as I was too crook to make a good job of it. ‘I hit it on the dash of the ambulance coming here.’

‘Yes, I heard you weren’t very cooperative at the airport or when you walked into emergency. My boss, Dr Light, your admitting doctor, nearly had a conniption when you pulled your Owen gun from your kitbag and shouted “Anyone who puts me on a stretcher dies!” Fortunately there was no magazine in the weapon and, equally fortuitously, that was the moment you chose to black out.’

‘Oh, God! Can you bring him to the ward so that I can apologise to him?’

‘Don’t worry, he’s a digger from the Great War, served at Gallipoli, then later in France; it won’t go any further. By the way, what’s your unit? It’s not marked on your admitting papers.’

‘I’m just an unattached navy lieutenant at the moment, Ross,’ I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

He laughed suddenly. ‘Bloody stupid of me. I should have realised you were with the funnies. Not too many naval lieutenants arrive here in patched-at-the-knees jungle greens and with the uppers coming away from their boots. I hope you don’t want your uniform or boots returned because they went into the incinerator. A rubber-glove job if ever there was one — never know what could be lurking in the seams.’

‘How long will I be here, Ross?’

‘How long is a piece of string? I can’t give you a time. It will be largely up to you, Nick. You look pretty strong and before the tropics got their claws into your body you must have been very fit, otherwise you would have been here weeks ago. I’m going to hit you with a heavy course of intravenous quinine and you’re going to feel pretty sick for a few days. I’ll try to judge the dose so you’ll be with us on Christmas Day. Thereafter you’ll need to recuperate for a month, perhaps a little more. You’re an officer and with a clearance from me, after two weeks you can technically sign yourself out, as long as you report for morning rounds.’ He paused and smiled ironically. ‘But for that to happen, you’d have to be superman.’