The Widow & Her Hero (18 page)

Did Leo resent him giving it all away like this, or was he
resigned, or was he stuck by now in some grotesque officer
code of honour too? Had all the Bushido nonsense got to
both of them, so that they were competing for honour with
the Japanese? I don't want to mock that, since they were
willing to die for it. But men become dupes for codes of
honour which any sensible woman could see through in a
second. Yes, said Filmer, they had a Japanese flag on the
junk and were thus sailing under false colours. But no, they
had not themselves painted the Japanese flag on the stern
of the junk. It had already been put there by the Malay
owner. At least five silenced automatic weapons on the
junk opened up on the patrol boat at Kaso, he admitted.
He didn't mention it was almost certainly he who first
pulled the trigger. He began shooting because others did, he
said. As the police vessel approached, everyone thought it
was Japanese, he said, not Malay police, and they yelled,
Patroller, patroller! They did not know it was an unarmed
vessel. No, no British or Australian flag was hoisted on
the junk before they opened fire. There was barely time.
Doucette did not directly order them to open fire.

The affidavit of the surviving Malay policeman from the
patrol boat was read to Filmer. Poor fellow, a local mixed
up between two powers, seeing his fellows on the launch
cut to pieces, and then himself diving, bleeding copiously,
into the water. But it strikes me that, abstracting from race,
Leo and all the other Australians had a lot in common with
that Malay cop. Like the policeman on the patrol boat who
was a servant of the Japanese, they were also caught up in
other people's imperial dream, doing for Churchill what
Churchill never did for us, with all his talk of Australians
being of bad stock and bound to cave in to the Japanese
anyhow.

Leo was the next brought forward before the court, and
he accepted the charges just as Filmer had. He offered the
information that Doucette had worn his badge of rank
while on the junk but he himself had not. He had shot at
the patrol boat, and had also resisted the landing by the
army at Serapem, but he was not sure if he had killed any
Japanese soldier. He admitted he had sketched and
photographed islands and shipping, and made notes. That
is all that's in the record – no pleading, no mention of a
young wife and of her hopes and rights and expectations.
In that regard, I suppose, he had nothing exceptional to
plead. He had worn commando grease to colour his face
and had stopped wearing a beret after they all got on the
junk.

In turn, each of the other men admitted the same, in
their peculiar and grievous honour.

The afternoon showers stopped, Hidaka told Lydon,
and the sun came out with its afternoon intensity, and then
yielded to shadows from the foliage of the Raffles College
garden. The cocktail hour. All the accused were asked to
stand. Each one was asked did he have anything to say in
his defence. The judge urged each of them to point out
anything in their evidence which was to their advantage.
None of them said anything. The silence of honour locked
the tongues of Leo, Hugo Danway, Jockey Rubinsky,
Chesty Blinkhorn, Sergeant Bantry, the naval rating Skeeter
Moss, Mel Duckworth, Major Filmer. Each of the accused
was asked if he had any objection to the statement of any
other member of the party. One by one they said they
didn't. You can imagine a robust fellow like Chesty
Blinkhorn thinking, Wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction.
Each was asked if he wanted to alter any part of his
statement to the Suijo Kempei Tai or the prosecuting
attorney, and they all said no. Thus, bridges burned, they
all turned their inner eye to the sword's edge.

Hidaka, in his white suit, hung his head. Prosecutor
Minatoya then went into his fancy arguments as the air
thickened around the heads of the accused. The Haig
Convention 1907 required that all ships other than
warships, entering an attack, must affix to themselves a
true representation of their nationality. Hostilities
conducted under false or no colours were a crime under
international law. The junk flew a Japanese flag, and hence
no British flag was flown, and commando dye and sarongs
were deliberately used to make the junk look civilian. They
should also have worn badges of rank or unit to identify
them as belligerents. The fact that they were wearing
Australian jungle fabric, very much like that which the
Japanese used, was no adequate warning that they would
attack the patrol boat.

Minatoya then argued with less legal validity that
military personnel lose their right to be treated as prisoners
of war if they disguise themselves. The green military shirts
most of the men wore were not enough. Then, tying
himself in a knot, he further claimed that international law
in any case gave way to the law of the capturing country,
and so whether under international convention or Japanese
occupation law, the men were doomed. The occupation
law involved, he said, was the Martial Law of Japanese
Southern Expeditionary Force, Section 2, Clause 1, Paragraph
1 (iv).

Minatoya made mention of the poison they carried, the
capsules which would come as a surprise to us women
when we first heard of them from Mr McBride on our visit
to Canberra. Their possession of such poison demonstrated
that they could countenance death with composure (a
supreme virtue in his eyes), just like the sailors involved in
the Japanese midget submarine attack on the
Chicago
in Sydney Harbour three years past. The Australians had
treated those heroes with full honours, and now it was the
chance of the Japanese to treat Australian heroes with
equivalent honour.

Have you ever heard such utter horse-feathers? the aging
Dotty had asked me in a letter. With one sentence he says
they've violated international law, and with the next he
deifies the poor sods. For Lydon had sent her the transcript
too, including the peroration of Minatoya's address to the
court. It went this way, or was later doctored to go this
way: These men struck out from their native home,
Australia, with the most ineffable patriotism blazing in
their souls, and with the expectations of all the people of
their country upon their shoulders. They battled most
sublimely to attack and evade. The last moments of such
lives as theirs must be sublime and appropriate to their past
history. For heroes are extremely jealous of their popular
regard, the way their memory will stand amongst their
people. This is a feeling the Japanese people know and
respect. And so we must glorify the last moments of these
heroes as they expect and as they deserve, and by doing so,
the names of these men will be invoked for all eternity, in
Australia and in Britain, as those of truest heroes.

This
Let's give 'em the send-off they deserve
argument
included the rider
Even if it kills them
. As Dotty said, utter
horse-feathers. And before sentencing, as sudden darkness
closed the day, that fool Filmer thanked Minatoya for
saying his bravery was likely to be remembered in Britain
and Australia. He did at least make the point that at the
time they captured the junk, flew the flag and attacked the
patrol vessel, he had not believed he and his fellow soldiers
were engaged in any unfair or illegal combat. At the time
he and the others had not realised, he confessed, that these
were such grave crimes. Now he was willing to face the
punishment that was due.

Some of the hobbyists and researchers think Hidaka was
later given the job not only of translating the trial into
English but of prettifying it as well – if any of it could be
called pretty. That his job was to make it all seem less a
show trial, something decided before Leo and the others
even entered the court. Some researchers have told me too
that the Memerang men were tried and liquidated entirely
for the sake of the Oriental value of
face
, and that they
were to die not for their efforts in Memerang but for the
earlier success of Cornflakes. After that previous raid, it
turns out that the Japanese brought into Singapore from
Saigon a special investigative unit of the Kempei Tai, the
Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, to investigate the
blowing up of the port's tonnage.

The Kempei Tai were convinced that the ships destroyed in
Singapore by Doucette's Cornflakes in 1943 had been
targeted not by raiders but by local saboteurs working with
some influential civilian prisoners of war at Changi, whom
they accused of being in communication with the Allies by
radio. They arrested former executives of British oil companies,
wealthy Chinese they suspected of belonging to sabotage
cells, and humbler Chinese – a woman who ran a soup stall
at Keppel Docks. Many of the people arrested were killed.
The arrests also extended to Malays, twenty of whom were
still in prison that afternoon Leo's trial began. They were
under sentence of death for their nonexistent roles in the
sabotage really created by Cornflakes. As Mark Lydon says
in his book, 'Hidaka would early let Leo Waterhouse's group
know that other men were under the death sentence for a
supposed part in Cornflakes, and that seems to have influenced
the way the Memerang men behaved at their trial.'
Now the Kempei Tai
knew
who the culprits were, since they
had captured Rufus's diary, and they thus found out that all
the questioning and torture, water treatment, beatings and
electrodes on the genitals of last year's local captives had
produced false confessions and unjust executions.

On the question of face, General Okimasa and Court
President Sakamone and the Kempei Tai officers asked
themselves with a fractured but potent logic: how could the
twenty Malays, men in their prime, fathers of families, a
humorist here, a balladist there, a sketcher here, a teller of
profane jokes there, be under death sentence, and the ten
Memerang men not? But it meant, as the hobbyists and
researchers have frequently assured me, that for some
periods of time during their capture, the limitations of
torture having been proven the year before, Leo and the
others had it easier than the locals, Chinese, Malay and
Britons, who had been arrested.

So I had assimilated all that, and stowed it away within
me the way people do. The rivers of our blood flow and
flow, and grind down into smoothness into a sort of habitable
geology, what is too sharp to be known. I knew the
details of the trial from the late 1960s on. I had the English
language transcript provided to me by Lydon, and from
then until the present it lay in my desk drawer at home,
where I would frequently encounter it and flinch, a duty of
pain I felt I owed it. I was familiar with the names of
Okimasa, Sakamone the fanatic, Minatoya the prosecutor,
and above all with that of Hidaka.

The severest test occurred in the early 1990s, when
Hidaka, reconciled to having been discovered, was brought
to Australia by the now middle-aged Mark Lydon and
by an Australian film producer who wanted to have his
technical advice for a proposed film. Lydon called us and
said Hidaka would very much like to pay his respects to
me. I shouldn't have gone along with it – what could the
meeting mean and how could I balance his part in the trial
and execution, and his undoubted kindnesses into one
feasible greeting and one safe little discourse? But then how
could I ignore the half-century of transformation, which
made us fortunate participants in the business of our
region, which made Japan 'our major trading partner'.
After discussing it with Laurie, I suggested to Mark Lydon
he bring Hidaka to our place for afternoon tea.

I was still full of that terror which had lasted nearly fifty
years. Every time I approached Leo's death I was repelled
by the temperature of the event itself and saw refracted
through its heat a new version to which I had somehow to
adjust. I remembered Doucette's guilt about his inadequate
rejoicing at news of Minette's survival, which was paralleled
by my sense that I had never adequately mourned.
Now that Mark Lydon was bringing Hidaka to my house,
the whole file was open again, nothing was settled, I might
hear anything. The fear that there were limitless versions of
the thing to absorb was, despite what I thought of as my
good sense, acute and like a form of madness. Combined
with that, I suspected that a good, brave wife would have
sought Hidaka out years since, would have been frantic to
meet him earlier.

Laurie was wonderful at such times. He had not yet
suffered his stroke, and he attended to everything, meeting
the guests at the door, making the tea. As Hidaka came into
the living room, nodding, bowing to Laurie, not yet daring
to smile, he proved to be a lean old man of average height
whose mouth was beginning to slacken with age. He
seemed to have a respiratory disease, and I noticed his
fingers were nicotine stained and his nails blue-ish from
lack of oxygen. I could tell at once that he and I were both
playing this for Lydon, Hidaka playing along with Mark
who had set up his air ticket from Tokyo to Sydney. At a
moment like this one, I was sure, Hidaka was asking
himself whether he should have taken the trip, despite the
honour he received in the Australian tabloids under the
film-company generated headlines such as 'JAPANESE
TRANSLATOR BEFRIENDED DOOMED AUSSIES'.

Under Laurie's understated stage management, we sat
down to drink tea, and began to talk about Hidaka's flight
and whether he was able to rest properly here. And yet in
no time the matter of the trial came up as if by its own
force. I don't even remember the sequence of sentences, but
there it was, amongst us. Like a slaughtered beast on the
carpet, it demanded comment, and I could see Mark Lydon
sitting forward, eager to assess what Hidaka and I would
say in each other's company.

My superiors order me to dress immaculately, the old
man told us, with his chronic wheeze.