The Widow & Her Hero (22 page)

I was soon kneeling on a piece of wood, and then somehow
I was spread-eagled by the wall. So I must tell you this. Some
dreadful thing happened there, with an NCO of the Kempei
Tai. I don't mind being beaten, I'm sure we do the same. But
this was . . . Yes, this was a violation. I hate to tell you but I
have to. They pushed a baton into my body. Damn him to the
pit, that's all I can say. And I'm telling you – I don't know why
– because it's necessary for you to know that I've lived through
that and that I'm still Leo.

Straight afterwards I felt all the shame was on me, but I've
got to a stage now where I know the shame's on the mongrel
who did it. Since you're a wise girl, you'd expect something
like that might have happened, and you might have thought
that it haunted me – well, it does, but it doesn't. It doesn't
weigh on me. The Kempei Tai. Bastards.

The rest was beating and making me kneel on a piece of
wood and one awful bloody session when they put a hosepipe
down my throat and just pumped water in. I gave them
nothing. I certainly didn't mention the SBs. As far as I know
all the others gave them nothing. I think we were as surprised
as anyone. The sort of pain they put us in just made us angry.
Even the drowning torture. That should have got us talking as
soon as we got our breath back. The only thing was they
already seemed to know a lot about us.

One day they put Jockey and me and Chesty, who was
somehow recovering, pure bush vigour, on a Kempei Tai
launch at the wharf at Bintan – we just lay on the deck under
the sun, roped together, sweating and done for, no more stories
to tell each other, and not fit to hear them if there were. It was
Christmas Eve but we didn't know it. The launch set sail and
we came into the Singapore docks proper. We landed so close
to Kempei Tai headquarters that they walked us there along
Tandjung Pagar. I think the first Singapore laugh we had was
when we saw that the place had been the Chinese YMCA – it
said so over the door. Young Men's Christian Association. We
all said it aloud, and we all hooted, and our guards belted us.
But it's funny how kind of immune you get to being belted.
One of those hitting us was a Malay Hei-ho, another one
was Chinese, and the other two were Japanese Kempei
Tai soldiers. Having a joke was more important than their
authority.

On the way in through the lobby, I saw Hidaka the first
time. I didn't know his name then. I couldn't have told him
from the other officers that were around, except that he was
wearing a white suit with no insignia.

When Leo saw Hidaka, the interpreter was on his way to a
meeting. He had told Lydon and others, reliably or not,
that at that meeting at Water Kempei Tai headquarters it
was decided by his superiors that in general torture wasn't
going to work. They'd already tried it at Bintan, and they'd
tried it on Private Appin, the cricketer, who'd been
captured and taken to Surabaya where they beat him senseless,
and no doubt subjected him to the repertoire of
torture, and they had got nothing from him. I hope such a
conference as Hidaka claimed did take place, and that it
was
now decided to go softer on everyone at the YMCA in
Tandjung Pagar.

Tandjung Pagar these days – you can't see it for Singapore's
thrusting buildings and shopping precincts, and the
little Chinese YMCA, with all its screams still unresolved
inside it, has been pulled down to make way for something
appropriate to the new Singapore. The new architecture,
the Capital Building and the Fountains, are more assertive
than the memory of Leo's bravery and the bravery of the
others.

After the conference Hidaka alludes to, those first three
YMCA prisoners were brought into an interrogation room
and paraded for the Water Kempei Tai officers and Hidaka.
Hidaka would tell Lydon it was plain how exhausted they
were. They'd been running for three months, since October,
and they had not shaven and their clothes had turned solid
with salt and then picked up the mud of mangrove swamps
in which they'd hidden. It was at that stage that a Kempei
Tai lieutenant, Sunitono, announced to them that they
would have time for a bath and a shave. He also announced
that he would not question them until after Christmas,
given that he knew Christmas was so important to them.

We know the bugger was softening us up, but you've got to take
what mercies there are. We were happy for the moment but
uneasy for the future. We could tell it might be a Kempei stunt.
But we had to take what came, punches or privileges.
After Christmas, they began questioning us again. We
played dumb about other members of the party. But they mixed
up their act on us. Sometimes they would offer us one of their
cigarettes, but another time they would get in an NCO to
punch us again and again. Sometimes they'd just make us
kneel on a sharp piece of dowling or bamboo, while the NCO
burned us with cigarette ends. And one day they poured the
water not only down my throat but pumped it into my rectum.
Hidaka would be there. But to be fair to him, he didn't like any
of it. Everyone could tell that. Them and us.

We had a reason not to tell them about the blokes still on the
loose. Hugo Danway was out in the Lingga Archipelago,
probably trying to capture a junk. The idea of us stalling the
Japanese while the others got away was at the forefront of our
minds. Long sessions. But it was milder than what happened
on Bintan. We kept saying the junk carried folboats and
limpets, because they knew that already.

I remember old Mr McBride, the Minister of Defence who
more than forty years ago gave us a miserable day in
Canberra. I refuse to quote directly what Leo says in case
this little memoir addressed to no one but my granddaughter
should by evil chance, however remote, become public
and the McBrides of this earth seize on it. Hidaka and Lieutenant
Sunitono knew the prisoners were hiding something,
for there were references in both Filmer's captured journal,
and in Rufus's, to something named SBs.

This is the story Hidaka told Lydon. It had been noticed
that Jockey tried to talk in Mandarin to one of the Chinese
orderlies. The orderly was authorised by Lieutenant
Sunitono to pass on the details of the deaths of Doucette
and Rufus – Sunitono guessed it would put Leo and the
others in a depressed and less guarded state of mind.

Jockey's been talking to this Chinese orderly who takes us back
to our cells. He told Jockey the Boss was killed by grenades
and is buried on one of the islands.

The Chinese guard wouldn't risk telling us if it's not so, and
a pall is over us. I'm certain the Boss let himself be killed so
there'd be no retaliation against his wife and stepson. We knew
something must have happened to him and Rufus, but to get
the final news . . .

So the next day, Sunitono told Hidaka to ask Leo, What
about these SBs? It was shallow where you sank the junk.
And so our divers have found the wreckage of them.
They're no secret anymore, Captain Waterhouse.

That's the lie Leo fell for. And if he fell for it gratefully,
who would not gratefully fall for it? But it meant that fat
sleek men who never knew danger would forever refuse
him posthumous honour.

The next day, as a further grace note, Hidaka told Leo
and the others that there were twenty Malays under death
sentence for the Cornflakes explosion. Leo spoke to the
other veterans of Cornflakes, and they offered to make a
joint confession to Hidaka, to which they appended an
appeal for the release of the Malays.

Hugo Danway and a sickly, shrunken officer named
Dinny Bilson also turned up at the YMCA now. Bilson was
sadly depleted and had only a few tufts of his fair hair left.
They had tried to capture a Chinese
prahu
but the crew had
sold them to the Japanese. They reported that Private
Appin, who had hurled grenades for Doucette, had been
captured too, but was very ill when they saw him in the
gaol at Surabaya.

There were two left, including Dignam, the old Foreign
Legion veteran, out there heading south-east for Australia.

There had been one small success for Memerang. A particular
Japanese naval officer who had failed to have any success
interrogating Hugo and the others sat down in a Surabaya
restaurant and blew his brains out. But they would never
know that.

So Memerang were interrogated and, when the naval
prosecution considered its evidence was complete, they
were moved to Outram Road Gaol, a huge old British
prison which would not have been out of place architecturally
in the Home Counties of Britain. And they were
tried, and condemned, and came back to Outram Road,
which they called the Grand Hotel because there the
torture was at least random, not structured.

You wouldn't believe, Grace, how calm I am now, here in
Outram Road. The way I see things, I've got two people to
be thankful to. One's Hidaka and the other's mad old Filmer.
He's such a character. I've got to say it's just as well we've got
him here. Hidaka's brought Filmer some books from the Raffles
College Library, and they're PG Wodehouse stories which
Filmer reads us at night in all the right Pommy accents and
gets us laughing. Could have been an actor, Filmer, and he
might be, he says, if he gets out of here. He says he knows some
fellows in the Royal Marines that have got connections at the
BBC. He also says that he's related through his mother to one
of Bernard Shaw's Irish brothers. Filmer says they were all
drunks, except George Bernard Shaw, who was a vegetarian,
but he was just as mad as them without taking to drink. Filmer
can do all the accents in Shaw too, this book of plays,
Plays for
Puritans,
Hidaka gave him.
The Devil's Disciple
is the best
one of the three plays for us, because it's like our situation, men
under sentence, etc. In fact we've started calling ourselves the
DD's – the Devil's Disciples. We like the chief character's
gumption. None of us are really keen on
Caesar and Cleopatra,
but
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
has a whole range
of accents in it.

They've given us a mess room, and during meal times Filmer
organises us into parts and goes through our lines with us, and
then after lock-up we've got Blinkhorn, who has got better
quicker than we could have hoped, doing Cockney from one cell
and Hugo Danway doing the Yankee Captain Kearney from
another, and Filmer doing Lady Cecily from a third, and
prompting us, and it's all great for our spirits. I'm doing a couple
of Captain Brassbound's sidekicks at the moment, but I'm going
to take over the role of Brassbound from Jockey in a week or so.
Jockey can do an English gentleman's accent, you wouldn't
believe it. I really take back everything I ever might have said
about Filmer.

There's a heavy-lidded guard we call Sleepy. He lets us make
a fair bit of noise. It must be okay with his superiors. He looks
like a fellow who's in the army by mistake, shows a lot of
patience, but when his temper goes, he's frightful. We saw him
beat a poor Dutchman dreadfully a week back. As the fellow
stood outside his cell. He must have smiled or something –
Sleepy can do that to you, sadder than a donkey in a cartoon
one moment and the angel of death the next. I took a risk one
day with him – he was putting Mel and Filmer in the same
cell, as usual, and I knew they had something gnawing
between them, so I said, No, not him, pointing to Mel. Him.
And I pointed to Jockey. And to my surprise he let me nominate
who went in with who, so everyone gets variety, a good thing
for them and me, and it's easy for us to pass on messages.
Sleepy must know that, but I suppose he knows too we've got
nowhere to go and no more harm to do. And that added to the
play rehearsals – we were able to rehearse each other's lines
very closely – I suppose we're getting a bit obsessed with it all.
I almost got to consider I want to be an actor instead of a
lawyer.

As for Hidaka, he brings us bags of these little Chinese
lollies, and they're delicious – it's amazing how much like
heaven sugar is when you haven't had any for a long time.

The DD's, the Devil's Disciples. If we have to face the
penalty, old GBS has shown us how it can be done with as
much style as possible. We're determined to have style like
Richard Dudgeon, the central figure in the play.

Filmer's talked to Hidaka about how the prison boss
Matsasuta ought to let us do a performance of The Devil's
Disciple, with your dear husband in the starring role of
Richard Dudgeon, and Filmer himself playing General Gentleman
Johnny Burgoyne, and Jockey Rubinsky playing the
clergyman Anderson.

Hidaka said to him, But the play concerns a great defeat for
the British.

And Filmer said, like a true Pom, Yes, like Singapore. It can
happen in the best of empires.

I think we've got Buckley's of the Japs letting us put it on,
but rehearsing it is great work, and so is just reading the parts
at night, from cell to cell. We get away with it!

There's another thing I ought to tell you about Filmer, so you
don't blame him for anything. He's been pretty happy just as
theatrical director. He has left the command of the blokes to
me. You are Doucette's successor, he tells me, and, he says, You
know how to handle Aussies. It isn't an art everyone has.

I always assumed he was a fairly toffee-nosed character, but
you can't judge the Poms as easily as that. And I tell you what,
I wish he'd been my English teacher at school . . .

I had thought that Leo's journal was the last item I would
need to adapt to. Yet there was one side of me that quite
correctly believed that Leo's story would only be settled by
my own death.

Now my husband Laurie had a stroke which cruelly
paralysed his left side and made it difficult for him to
speak. The poor fellow was embarrassed by the impact his
deadened lips had on his diction. He now lived in a home,
quite an elegant one, but in permanent care, where I
visited him daily. He was not disgruntled – he has always
had a positive frame of mind, and the stroke, instead of
souring him, seemed to have confirmed him in his best
temperamental habits. Our son took him out for drives
and to concerts at the Opera House in a wheelchair.
Except he didn't want too many of his old friends to see
him like this.

I visited Laurie every afternoon and read to him, and I
thought that was the way his and my life would go, with
no surprises but the expected ones of deterioration and
sudden, perhaps fatal crisis for both of us. To extend our
lives I read long books, like
Great Expectations
and
Quiet
Flows the Don
, because I'd read somewhere that having a
book to finish actually helped keep people alive.

Yet even as the century ended, I got an unexpected call
from California, from a heroically aged Jesse Creed, the
American who used to hang around the boys and whom
Dotty worked for. Doucette had always been contemptuous
of him, though I had found him very urbane and
sensible. But I was rather surprised to hear he was still
alive. He was coming to Sydney with his wife and wanted
to see me. I'm ninety-two years, he admitted, and I had to
get all manner of medical clearance to do this trip. Finding
travel insurance was a hell of a business. But it seems my
vascular system is that of a forty-year-old. And I have a
wife to help me round – she's barely seventy.

I asked him why he wanted to come back. Well, he said,
the claim of memory. And in any case he remembered and
thought often about Doucette and Mortmain and Leo – in
fact, of all the wars he had since been involved in, he said,
he remembered Doucette, such a character, and still felt
uneasy about him.

I did not like to hear phrases like that. They possessed all
the danger signs. Hidaka had felt uneasy too, and been full
of surprises.

Why uneasy? I asked. Dotty doesn't blame you. She
blames Doucette fair and square.

I'd like to come and discuss that with you, Grace, he said.

You're very welcome to come, I told him. But is there
anything more to be said?

I hoped there was not, but I felt the same fear I'd had
before Hidaka visited me.

There are a few things, he assured me.

Damn him.

Bring your wife with you, I suggested. Safety in
numbers, I thought.

Well maybe, Grace. We'll see.

I agreed to talk to him, of course, for Leo's sake. Because
I visited the retirement home in the afternoons, I asked him
to call in one morning at ten. I gave him the address and
directions but he told me not to bother with those – he
would have a local driver, he said.

The old man who presented himself at my door ten days
later was indeed on his own, and wearing slacks and a
fawn jacket. Despite his age, he still possessed those ruby-
cheeked boyish features rather reminiscent of President
Reagan's face, a particular sort of glow Americans retain
through tennis, golf and watchful dieting. I had expected
him to bring his wife. When I said so, he told me that she
was still jet-lagged and had begged off. She gets jet lag real
bad – always has.

He laughed benignly.

And the poor old thing doesn't have the stamina she
once possessed.

Something told me that was just his story, and he had
not wanted her here. We sat a while swapping life histories.
He had married twice, been widowed once, had an abundance
of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He sometimes got breathless and they'd shipped extra
oxygen aboard the plane in case he became short of breath,
but he hadn't needed it – he'd known beforehand he
wouldn't, but you couldn't convince wives and doctors.

I could see he was not utterly at ease telling me this, and
so I was not utterly at ease hearing it. I created detours in the
conversation. I asked him when he'd retired from the army.
He'd hung on a long time, he said – until the late 1970s. He
told me that he'd ended up his military career a majorgeneral
– a prince of the Pentagon. You know the saying
about how behind every great fortune there's a crime? he
asked. The same could be said of high military rank.

After retirement he served on the board of a staff college
and took two quarters a year as an adjunct professor
teaching politics at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.

Underlying all we said, I think, was the awareness in
both of us that he was the blessed warrior, always marked
by himself and others for survival amidst the reckless. That
was something I refused to blame him for, but even such a
reasonable attitude called up its opposite, a little cloud of
possible widowly rancour in the room. We were therefore
happy when we found ourselves talking about Dotty. He'd
read her half-dozen novels. She was very British, you know,
he told me. I don't think all that postwar British squalor
she wrote about is as interesting to Americans. The Brits go
for squalor, but we try to ignore it.

I told him a bit shortly I thought squalor was inescapable
for war widows, and inevitably influenced Dotty's novels.

I suppose that's true, he conceded, with careful grace.

But she had never remarried, which rather surprised
him. She was a lusty girl, Jesse Creed said fondly. I imagine
you've heard I was in a position to know. We had an affair,
as the rumours said.

Before or after Rufus vanished? I asked.

Creed said, Both, I'm afraid. I don't expect you'd
approve. To an extent I took advantage of her loneliness.
So there, I can't be franker.

That's Dotty's business, I told him sharply. I've got other
things to live with.

I hoped nonetheless that this was the chief of his old man
confessions.

He said, When she had anything to do with other men,
it was always really to do with Mortmain anyhow, that
crazy monocle-wearing Limey.

Dotty also seemed to have remade her life. I got letters
from her. About 1948 she had published a brilliant novel
on East End women. It had been made into an angry little
film everyone considered a classic. She was poetry editor of
two magazines, and a literary figure, and she was tossing
up whether to join a new publishing company as senior
editor.

Dotty had been moderately successful with her novels,
and her poetry was anthologised. She was a bit of a cult
feminist writer, and had made her mark in London until
emphysema and diabetes in combination had brought her
down suddenly in the early 1990s.

What about Mrs Doucette? Creed asked. Do you ever
hear?

Indeed, I could fill him in on Minette, and the scandal of
the way Minette was forced to live.

Last I contacted her, said Creed, before I could answer,
she was living with Doucette's mother, Lady Doucette.

I told him that was right. After the war, Minette and
Michael were liberated, hungry but unharmed, from their
convent-camp in the hills. She had nowhere to go – she did
not want to return widowed to Macau, and she did not
come to Australia, though I think a new world would have
been her redemption. She made perhaps the worst choice,
joining Lady Doucette in her family house in Wiltshire.
Since her elder brother had died, Lady Doucette had
become the chatelaine of the place. I wrote to Minette a
number of times and got back plain letters about life in the
countryside and walks she took Michael on along a nearby
Roman road cut in a hill of chalk. It was Dotty's letters that
told me of the full impotence of Minette's life. During her
years under Lady Doucette's thumb, Dotty told me once,
Minette and her son took their meals in the kitchen like
servants, and soon discovered why Doucette had so feared
his mother and flourished in the East, away from her
oppressive presence. Dotty said a lot of the fight had been
taken out of Minette by her imprisonment by the Japanese.
Now Minette suffered the indignity of being the poor
relative acquired through an ill-advised marriage, though
the old dragon did send Michael Doucette to Eton, where
his stepfather had gone.

A local landowner fell in love with the by-then middle-
aged Minette and rescued her from the witch's castle.

I paused in my recital. Then I decided, Let him hear
this, even at third hand, what Dotty told me Minette had
experienced. I told him, While she was still at the house
in Wiltshire, one day in the kitchen garden, Doucette
appeared to her and said, I always wanted to give you
something better.

Oh dear God, Creed murmured, and put his hand to his
forehead. He said, A lot of ghosts after that war, weren't
there?