The Widow & Her Hero (17 page)

But of course, time does erode betrayals and further
subtleties of loss. You absorb it all, no matter how
terrible. I never thought either that Eddie Frampton
deserved the death penalty, though I could see the sense of
his last act, and I never wrote his widow a condolence
letter. I was helped by the fact that I loved my job. By the
mid 1980s, I was and had been for two decades head of
English at North Sydney Girls' High, teaching bright and
receptive girls, and fortunate to be liked and respected by
them. I was aging and was spoken of by other teachers as
'an institution'. Though I had accepted that my education
as a widow would never cease, I was a happy woman, a
reader, a savourer of gardens, with a companionable
husband. Laurie and I were frequently visited by our son,
Alex, a structural engineer, a man who relished life and had
an acute sense of its value. Though he lacked a few of the
literary bones which I would like to have given him, his
wife was a first-class conversationalist, an athletic, intelligent
woman who sometimes reminded me of Dotty. And of
course I had those visits from my post-modernist, gender-
studies granddaughter Rachel. We sparked off each other.

I knew from letters from Dotty, now about to retire as a
senior editor in a so-called 'hot' publishing firm, that she
was as harried as I was by an increasing number of
Memerang hobbyists and even serious researchers. The
chief of them was still the journalist and author Mark
Lydon, whose interviews with Major Frampton had triggered
the latter's suicide. Lydon had been shattered for a
time by Frampton's swallowing of his death pill, but after
a number of psychiatrists assured him that Frampton's
suicide had been Frampton's choice and could not have
been foreseen, Mark returned to his book, ultimately
publishing a fairly flattering version of Memerang entitled
The Sea Otters
, in which he extolled Doucette and Rufus
and Leo and the others and was, no doubt inhibited by the
publishers' legal advisers, mildly critical of Frampton and
Moxham.

After
The Sea Otters
Mark, who could be seen as
conscientious to a fault, became a lifelong devotee of
Doucette's story, and others joined him or competed with
him in businesslike pursuit of new information. In the end
they found out everything that could be known, every
little squalor, every little move. About the rest they had
hypotheses on such subjects as what Leo Waterhouse
really felt like in the bus from Outram Road prison to
Reformatory Road, what mixture of terror and exhilaration
– for everyone mentions the evidence of exhilaration!
People spoke during the French Revolution about a
shining serenity on the faces of some enemies of the state
as they travelled in the tumbrel to the blade. As if the guillotine
were such a total cancellation of the world that it
solved many of the victim's smaller daily anxieties. They
no longer travelled in uncertainty.

But I couldn't bear to discuss that sort of thing with
Lydon or any other outsider. It might just encourage them.
As it was, they rushed to tell me new information as if I
hungered for it. Between these flurries of research by others
I felt content, engrossed in my only grandchild, my son's
daughter, a child I felt was very like I had been but thankfully
less burdened with painful bush politeness than I was.
By now I had seen the sad decline of both my parents, who
died with the uncomplaining demeanour of their type, but
my world was nonetheless enlivened by Rachel and her
capacity from childhood to ambush me with unexpected
questions.

Meanwhile, about 1985, Mark Lydon successfully
tracked down the Japanese interpreter Hidaka, who had
worked on Leo and others. Hidaka had assumed a false
name for some decades, precisely because of what befell his
Memerang charges, and Lydon found the man through his
disgruntled wife, a former nightclub dancer. Lydon took
Hidaka's photograph outside his broken-down steak-house
in Yokohama, with a red banner advertising Suntory at the
door and a murk beyond the door to match the mysteries
behind his edgy smile. For like all of us Hidaka had not
even told himself everything! Everyone, from Mark Lydon
to poor old Hidaka, the former interpreter for the Japanese
in Singapore, with his evasions and boasts about a special
relationship with Leo and the others.

I stayed away that day because I could not bear to see
what was done with them
.

That's one of his claims.

I brought them books. I bought them sweetmeats
.

But you did not save them, nor could you, nor did you
at a profound level dissent from what was done to them. So
you're no use to me.

And your superiors also valued you for the way the men
trusted you and told you things, and you took that credit
too!

So to what extent was Hidaka a man of sentimental
fraternity, and to what extent a cunning operative?

Every new, well-meaning interviewer and Memerang
hobbyist puts the stress-mark between these two possibilities
in a different place and then, visiting Hidaka, most of
them want to call me up and tell me exactly what they
think the formula for Hidaka's supposed generosity to Leo
and the others was. As if
that
's a question on which I would
still be working, adjusting still my balance of hatred or
gratitude when it comes to Hidaka and the Japanese
military code.

Some of the researchers are starting to be true scholars
now, even a doctoral student, a captain in the army. They
either examine Hidaka's record or go to Japan to interview
him. This raises in me the old fear that something new
might emerge which must be borne, something dangerous
to the honour of Leo's ghost and something perilous to me.
More than the human frame could carry.

The young doctoral army captain thinks that Hidaka
might have been lucky not to be prosecuted by the War
Crimes Commission. After all, he did the interpreting for a
number of Kempei Tai interrogations. But then, says the
captain, dozens of more senior military men were let off
too, through lack of personnel to investigate them or
because of the war-weariness of the victors. I am a terminally
polite old woman, but inwardly I flinch and there's a
trace of acid in my response. Thank you, captain, for your
fascinating assessment.

The young captain completed his doctoral thesis,
Planning and Operational Shortcomings of Operation
Memerang
, graciously sent me a copy, and disappeared
from my life.

One enthusiast has told me it rained at 1300 hours as
Leo and the others made their way in through the gate of
Raffles College to appear before the sitting of the Military
Court of the Seventh Area Army. He had also kindly taken
a photograph of the college motto above the gate:
Auspicium
Melioris Aevi
, Hope for a Better Age.

Just a photograph to him, but I am thereby locked into
the journey Leo made that day of his trial, and become
raddled with the mad wish that I had been there to argue
with the judges and offer my head for Leo's. Over decades,
Laurie, a man of great generosity of spirit, learned to read
my moods, which were profound but not always very
visible, and accommodated himself to them in the days
after I'd been visited by the enthusiasts, when I felt myself
hurtling down in a pocket of free air between two ages and
two marriages.

Anyhow, on the day of Leo's trial, when the accused
parties dismounted from their Mitsubishi truck, guards
took Leo and Filmer and the others in amidst the dripping
shrubberies of the college garden, the leaves already
steaming as the afternoon sun failed to decide whether it
intended a cool afternoon or not. The prisoners entered a
lecture hall with leadlight windows. I imagine sudden,
renewed rain on the roof.

The presiding judge was a Colonel Sakamone of
garrison headquarters, but the judge with the greatest experience
in the inquisitorial Japanese system, which – as the
researchers tell me – is based on the Code Napoleon, was
one Major Torosei. A third major filled out the trinity of
judges.

Hidaka the interpreter would later tell Lydon that his
own senior officer, Colonel Tomonaga, had declined to
serve as judge. He had made it clear to Hidaka he thought
the men should simply be put in Changi as POWs. But
Colonel Sakamone, a former policeman, disagreed. He was
a fanatic, said Hidaka, even though fanaticism was getting
less popular with officers as the war went on. Sakamone
had said at dinner one night that he believed the war would
begin only when the Japanese mainland was invaded, and
he was looking forward to that cataclysm. Everything up to
now had apparently been mere prelude. The war would be
won on ancestral land, he said. Sakamone had taken the
job which Hidaka's colonel refused.

The prosecutor or attorney-judicial, a man the judges
had already met with to decide the shape of the trial, was
a professional lawyer, Major Minatoya. What did
Minatoya think as he prepared his papers? Tokyo burning
to ash, the home islands falling, even if the great nuclear
secret had a month to go before it would be revealed.
Singapore gravid fruit hanging on the empire's tree. Yet at
such times of uncertainty men cling to the certainty of
routine duty.

Next to Minatoya the prosecutor sat the young
Hidaka, Leo's friend, in his white civilian suit. Hidaka
had a slightly spiv-ish reputation amongst the officers for
having once worked as a bookkeeper and greeter of
foreigners in a Tokyo nightclub before the war, but he was
always a meek figure, and the enthusiasts and hobbyists
tell me he was not above soliciting women for officers. He
was in love with a Tokyo nightclub dancer whom he'd
marry after the war.

The supreme figure of the trial sat in the gallery at the
rear of the courtroom, above the double-leafed doorway
of the lecture hall. Major-General Okimasa, head of the
judicial apparatus for the Seventh Area Army, wanted to
see the process through. He must have had a glimmering,
given all his robust activities in Saigon and Singapore, that
his own future might contain a suicide by blade, or else a
scaffold. In Indochina and Malaya he had been a monster
for his gods. I would like to think his foreshadowings of
fear were unmanning him even then, but I do not believe
they did. He certainly seemed to feel a kind of administrative
urgency to get this trial settled.

Each of the prisoners was asked to state, one by one, his
birthplace, his unit, rank, name and age. To what extent
the not yet identified Stockholm syndrome was at work in
Leo and the others, I have no idea. They were human, after
all. That growth of solidarity between captor and captive,
particularly when exalted by the solemn ritual of a trial and
the prospect of a formal execution, probably works even
on heroes. Was Leo still looking for, grateful for, signs of
humanity even in Sakamone the presiding judge or in
Minatoya the prosecutor, or perhaps even from the real
presiding presence of the general in the gallery?

Lydon later told me that the Japanese came to trial only
when they felt the case was eminently provable against the
accused. Their inquisitorial process was begun that afternoon,
and to match the prosecutor, Minatoya, there was no
corresponding defence counsel.

Minatoya, I also knew from briefings by Mark Lydon,
had set out to prove the men were both perfidious and
heroic – that was always Hidaka's claim, anyhow. The
'stratagem' of which they were guilty was that, except for
a few commissioned officers, the party willingly refrained
from wearing badges or caps to show their ranks, so that
they could not be recognised as fighting members of the
armed forces to which they belonged. They had used
camouflage dye on exposed skin surfaces. Doucette and
Leo and six other members had worn sarongs! A Japanese
national flag was flown by them, and a further Japanese
flag was painted on the stern of
Nanjang
.

On October 10 of the previous year, the party under
Lieutenant-Colonel Doucette had launched a sudden and
heavy fusillade at a Kaso Island police boat containing five
Malay policemen. Four of the crew of the police boat were
killed. By December 1944, the time of apprehension of all
the accused persons standing before the court, they had
confronted Japanese garrisons on a number of islands and
killed Captain Matsukata, Lieutenant Hiroshi, along with
some fifty-five other army personnel. Thus they had engaged
in hostile activities without wearing uniforms, and had also
used the vessel as a stratagem of offence and penetration.

The second charge was espionage, the accusation that
various of the party had collected intelligence to take back
to Australia, information on the strength of garrisons,
movement of shipping, docking arrangements at Bintan
and Bukum, bauxite mining at Lingga Island, etc, etc.
While waiting for the party to return to NE1, my cousin
Mel Duckworth had made notes on the passage, frequency
of military aircraft, anti-aircraft defences and shipping.
Now they brought these forward and questioned the
Englishman Filmer, the man who had landed on D-Day but
then blundered into Memerang.

The prosecutor held up one Japanese flag, one notebook,
one sketchbook, one camera, seventeen negatives.
Yes, all that property belonged to Memerang, said Filmer.
The flag had been waved, the photographs taken.

In lonely years I would complain savagely to myself
about Filmer. I had thought him a dupe – he reminded me
of the British commander at Singapore, Percival, who was
foxed into surrendering by the Tiger of Malaya, Yamashita,
even though many officers under him wanted to fight on.
The pattern, I believed, was repeated in a modest but
terrible way by Filmer. My thesis had been that Filmer, the
professional officer, blinded by fatuous codes of military
behaviour – or, to invoke it again, the Stockholm syndrome
– failed to attack the charges head on. In a strange way the
fool felt honoured by them. Combine this with the fact that
he was probably the one who opened fire on the Malay
police boat off Kaso, and thus gave their presence away,
and you have the reason why, whenever I've encountered
Major Filmer in dreams, I've torn the flesh from him and
flayed him with bitter Australian insult. Basically, my grievance
against him was that he was the first to accept the
Japanese charges, and he laid down the pattern for the
other men to do the same. Major Minatoya asked him, Did
you commit these crimes?, and Filmer said yes without
qualification. When he was asked how long his group had
plotted their attack, he said he only knew the details of it a
few days before he left Australia, a statement which shows
that compared to Leo he was one of those ring-ins
Doucette had a weakness for, that he was brought along by
Doucette on impulse, or because he pleaded. And yet here
he was talking on behalf of the whole party, and impervious
to the wrongness of that, as only a professional officer
could be. He agreed with Minatoya that rank should
always be worn, so that the enemy could identify officers.
That was an asinine thing to say, as our side had little
training in
their
badges of rank, and I bet their side had
little training in ours.