The Widow & Her Hero (21 page)

When it was dark, Filmer and I sent the others off over the
hill to fetch their folboats and drag them down to the beach
on the east side of NE1. We were conscious that if the
Japanese had landed there, we would have needed to fight for
them. Leaving, the fellows moved as Rufus had taught them,
flitting like ghosts. We saw a patrol boat circling the island,
but Jockey timed it and it appeared off the eastern beach only
every few hours. I went down to send all but one folboat away.
In the acute dark, we had been able to find only seven of the
vessels, not enough for all. We had been trained how to handle
this. Two of the boats would need to tow a passenger, and we
used the stratagem in each case of a pair of trousers stuffed
with coconut husks, the passenger floating in the Y and
holding on as he was dragged through the water. Jockey and I
were leaving last so we weren't burdened in this way. We went
back to Hammock Hill after the first six boats got off and
waited till the last hour and minute, three forty-five am, for
Kelly and Carlaw to turn up. It was such a little, intimate
island. We had to presume they'd been killed or captured.
Otherwise, we reckoned, they'd easily be able to find their
way back to our hill.

At the last we smashed the Bolton radio we weren't able to
use because the code had been sunk in the junk or was with the
Boss. But we all had walkie-talkies in our boats for contacting
the
Orca
when it turned up. We had packed the folboat so tight
with supplies, there wasn't really room for my legs, so I
paddled kneeling.

Pushing off the beach with Jockey, I felt a real dingo. Lieutenant
Carlaw was apparently an Oxford graduate in Middle
Eastern studies. Kelly was only twenty years, and an athlete,
and a handsome kid, a bright one too. We made a very nice
little beach on the west side of NE3 – Proma – half an hour
before dawn.

By morning, we were on NE3 and had all our folboats
under cover and were making a dump for our gear. We
made a camp on the crest amongst cactus palms and pandanus
and undergrowth netted by creepers. But from it we could see
anyone coming from any direction. We drew breath and we
hoped, and were more tired than we'd ever been from such a
short paddle. Some slept – it was the fight and the sleepless
night that had worn them out.

But I watched everything that was happening on NE1. Soon
the daylight woke everyone and I was joined in that exercise of
watching. I think we felt like people whose house, Serapem,
had been taken over and we didn't approve of what the new
owners were doing.

Then we saw one of the worst things I've ever seen. We saw
Lieutenant Carlaw running down out of the thick cover on the
hill on NE1, sprinting south into scattered palm trees with just a
pistol in his hand. There was no sign of Private Kelly. The first
thing I thought was, I hardly know him well enough. I heard
Jockey groaning, Jesus, Jesus! Poor bastard!

The enemy were all over our hill over there, that's where
Carlaw was running from, down into the clearing, amongst
the papayas and coconut trees, but wide open, a clear target
amongst the volcanic rocks. He was making for the sea. He
could run, that boy, a beautiful runner, and he could probably
swim strongly too, and intended to reach another island. We
saw him weaving. You could hear them firing at him, and by
the rocks on the edge of the sea he turned. We saw him twice
take clear aim and fire, and the Japanese were coming close to
him not only down the ridge from the hill but from the place
where their barges were too. And now he was out of shots, so
he threw his pistol away, and he just stood there and blessed
himself – I hadn't even known he was a Tyke, in fact, because
he was English I believed he wasn't – and a number of shots
lifted him and threw him down the last decline to the sea. And
everyone on our new place NE3 was groaning, Poor bastard,
poor bastard! And then there was a second of mercy, when one
of the Malay fishermen came up and took Carlaw in his arms
and looked down in his eyes, but the Japs ended that with
blows of their rifle butts.

Despite all they'd seen, two of my men vomited.

We watched them make the Malays dig a grave for Carlaw.
We watched them all the time for three days, but on the
morning the sub was due, the barges pulled away, leaving a
section of soldiers and a few Malay Hei-ho, but taking the
Malay fishermen with them. The Englishman Filmer was very
troubled and came to me. He had written the fishermen a
reference, saying they should take it to the British in Singapore
after the war. He was sweating that the Japanese
wouldn't find it. All at once it seemed very difficult to do good
in this world.

Slowly, as we settled in, we became aware of things we'd left
behind in the confusion of the dark. I'd left my camera. It had
pictures in it. Filmer had left his sketchbook journal. Damned
awful not to be able to vent oneself on paper, he told me. I was
getting to forgive him for what happened on the junk and to
think, Maybe it could have happened to anyone.

We watched for the Boss and Rufus, and Lower too. If they
landed on Serapem and saw we'd been jumped there, they
would quite naturally come here. We were getting used to the
idea they might have been caught.

Two of us always rowed over to NE1 every night from then,
landed on the east side, climbed up Hammock Hill to the
lookout tree. We listened and called for the sub every night on
our walkie-talkies, but it did not respond. If it had broken
the surface, our eagerness would have picked it out in the
darkness. At first we hallucinated: there it is! Half a dozen
times an hour. Then we got more critical with ourselves. It
didn't appear the first night. We told ourselves it was coming –
even if late, or even if we'd missed it, for it was to return every
night for a month if necessary. But it didn't come at all. God
knows what happened to it.

On one of our visits to NE1, Jockey and I had found another
intact folboat, and towed it back to our hiding place. We might
all need to row to Australia.

To fill in the days, everyone told stories of their lives.
Sergeant Bantry told us a great one. About an old man up in
the bush near Grafton who was given a farm in Australia in
return for giving testimony against some of the Irish gunmen.
As he got older, he became convinced that the Irish were
coming for him, so he holed up in his outhouse in the back of
the homestead with a rifle and waited for them. He ended up
wounding the dunny man coming with a new can. A silly
enough tale, but we laughed at it and repeated it. You need to
make what you can of that sort of stuff to spin time out when
you're waiting.

Lance-Corporal Dignam, who I barely knew till now, was a
useful member of the group that way. He was a hard, coiled
little man. He had been a merchant seaman from Melbourne
who got stuck in Marseilles, he says, in bad company, and on
an impulse joined the French Foreign Legion. He had served in
Algeria and Syria for six years. Many of his stories dealt with
Arab and French prostitutes, but others with Algerian rebels
and the filigree work of Damascus. I asked him whether
the training for the Foreign Legion had been harder than the
training for Memerang. Much harder, he said. Memerang's
nothing. In his company they'd bury you alive in a pine coffin
for three hours or more before digging you up to see how you'd
dealt with it.

Jockey said that was bulldust, and Dignam said, Maybe it
was only two hours, but it felt like three.

Major Filmer told us about holidays with his two alcoholic
aunts in a house in Scotland, and with an uncle in Dublin who
spent all his time in the mountains of Wicklow looking for
prehistoric graves. There when he was a boy, he met Lawrence
of Arabia, wearing plus-fours, who happened to have studied
archaeology with the uncle.

Stories like that stopped the onset of the horrors. But after
thirty days had passed – and they went quickly in retrospect,
with two of us every night on Serapem, and hope starting with
the dark and failing only with dawn – no submarine had come,
no Doucette had appeared. It must have been sunk. Poor Eddie
Frampton, everyone said.

December 7, I told them we had to start south, no choice to
it. We would be out of rations if we didn't begin paddling for
Bengku Island, eighty miles away, where we knew the Allies
had placed a depot for operatives and downed airmen. On the
journey we lay up for part of one day on a tiny, unpopulated
place, and I noticed the men had begun to suffer with leg ulcers
from the constant salt and the plain rations. But we didn't rest
for long, and paddled throughout the afternoon, the folboats
scattered but all on the same bearing and hard to see on
dazzling water, and then into the night.

So we came to Bengku and found in a clearing the mounded
cache left there by some other members of IRD. We rested for
a day here – I got a shave from Dignam, and we prepared a
sort of farewell feast, to which Hugo Danway, a very handy
spear-fisherman, added the catch he had taken at dusk. The
reason I call it a farewell feast – it was a good luck ceremony
as well – was because I had to split us up into three or four
groups from now on, all travelling south on a different bearing,
to ensure we couldn't all be taken in one gulp. I repeated IRD's
dictum that if captured, each of us should hold out for a day
under interrogation, to give the others time. I heard someone
say, Bugger that, Dig. I'm going to hold out for a month just to
spite the bastards.

We all took to the sea. Now everyone had a folboat to ride
in, and we travelled in groups of two canoes. Making for
Australia. No reason why we shouldn't get there. We tried to
hide by day and travelled by night, in and out amongst the
pagar, the stilts of fish traps. By day we avoided Malay or
Indonesian villages, and sometimes that meant sitting out in
the mangrove swamps through the heat of the day. But a
person just had to endure and promise himself night would
come, and be quiet too. Jockey got a bout of fever, and was a
passenger for two nights, raving away in Yiddish in the rear
compartment. My only worry was that he'd throw himself in
the sea at some stage, and I mightn't notice. I thought, I'll put
him in the forward cockpit tomorrow night.

We knew you'd all be worried about us – I remember I told
you, Grace, to expect me about December 6. It was nearly
Christmas when Jockey and myself, big Chesty Blinkhorn and
Pat Bantry – both of the latter at various stages Rufus's partners
and pretty fretful about what could have happened to Rufus –
were all cooking a meal in the bush in a coconut grove on some
little place marked NE27 on our maps. We had paddled across
the equator some days earlier and it had given us a boost to
think we were now well into the hemisphere of home. And then
Filmer and his crewman stumbled ashore. I wouldn't have been
certain he had such a long paddle in him. And then Mel Duckworth
and his bowman. Four boatloads in the one place at the
one time, because of accidents of current or bad map-reading –
there was no time to hold an inquest to find out why. There were
too many of them in one place. But what a comfort it was to see
them. They looked dark and greasy and like skeletons, and I
was pretty sure I looked no better.

I told half of them at least to disperse to the other side of the
island, and soon after I saw through the dazzle of the sun a
landing barge enter the lagoon through the hole in the reef and
come into our beach, with another standing off the beach. We
were down to a few magazines now, and were concealed in a
piled-up clump of volcanic stones the patient seasonal workers
of this coconut grove had made as a means of leaving the
avenues between trees free. The landing troops looked more
awesome and professional to us than any of the others we'd
met. They came inland at the run, and saw us and began firing
at us. We made a stand with our silenced Stens and our loud
pistols. Chesty Blinkhorn was wounded and cried out to me,
some advice I could not hear. Bantry and Jockey helped a
hobbled Chesty away, and then the rest of us went running too
towards the far side of the island. We would soon discover
there wasn't much hope in that direction. The second barge had
landed there and its troops had already captured Filmer and
Mel Duckworth and, I regret to say, were beating them hard.

We four hid on a small volcanic hill. The Japanese did not
pursue us. Mel's bowman had tried to swim for it, and late that
night his body came washing back up, before the Japanese had
even removed Filmer and Mel and taken them away by launch.
It happened they were taken to a prison on a large island
named Singkep Island, off Sumatra, and the base for the
Japanese who'd attacked us.

Jockey and I, wounded Chesty and Pat Bantry – we all
managed to find our folboats lying in the mangroves on the
southern end of NE27. We took to the water but we were
suddenly out of steam. We made little more than eight miles
before dawn, when we put into the island of Selajar, and we
dragged ourselves ashore. We were sheltering in an abandoned
native hut when we heard the barges land and the shouts of
Japanese officers. I could hear them coming in the undergrowth,
and I had my loaded pistol, but I remembered Lieutenant
Carlaw, and it struck me all at once to ask, What would
any of it mean if I shot them and they shot me? Was that
cowardice? The question didn't even worry me. I didn't even
think of my poison. Poison had never been stressed anyhow. I
have to say – it's no excuse – but I had some of Jockey's fever
by then, so they entered the hut and I stood there stupidly with
my pistol pointed, and a tall NCO came to me and knocked me
down with a rifle butt. There was a bit more beating on the
beach, before we too were put on a barge and came in the
darkness to the stone cells in the old Dutch prison at Dabo. We
were each put in a separate cell, except Chesty, who'd been
taken to hospital. Filmer and Mel were already there. We were
able to yell to each other, cell to cell. It was a comfort. We
rested in the end. There was a ratty thin floor mattress in each
of our cells.

Bantry and Skeeter Moss were soon brought in too, and
each placed in his separate cell. There was a comforting
feeling in that whatever was to happen to us would happen to
all of us.

I've been through those islands on a liner. I've left the
cooled interior of the
QEII
and walked out on the rather
narrow decks, designed more for the Atlantic than Pacific,
and felt the sun like a blow on the neck and the shoulders.
To spend a day in mangrove swamps under that sun would
bring on madness if not fever. I know Indonesian civilisation
is ancient, but it feels out there on deck as if all that is
impossible, as if morality and culture are called off or
driven out of the blood by the ferocity of heat. The joggers
and walkers on the deck greet me, getting their aerobics
over before the full muscle of the sun makes it impossible.
And I flee inside, ashamed at choosing to be a pallid
woman, stricken by that misery my husband Laurie can
sense and wants to assuage and can't understand, since I
was the one who talked him into this voyage. Always
failing the young hero, always missing him, always
enraged.

On one of the islands, Bintan, Leo was tortured and
sodomised with a baton.

We were thrown like fence posts into the bottom of one of their
patrol boats and moved to a gaol on Bintan Island. This was a
worse place, a Kempei Tai compound. It was bad. For a start,
Blinkhorn now had malaria as well as his thigh wound and we
could hear him calling to us and talking about such things as
getting the cows milked and hay-baling, urgent things that he
brought from his life on the family farm. Bantry, a cow-cocky
himself, would sometimes answer him to soothe him down.
Chesty was still raving when I was taken out of my cell to the
interrogation room for questioning, and was sat down on a
chair on that hosed cement floor.