The Widow & Her Hero (24 page)

Leo and the others must have read George Bernard Shaw's
preface to the play,
The Devil's Disciple
. It's GBS at his
most tendentious and engaging.

I read
The Devil's Disciple
with an appetite for its
hidden magic over Leo. I found an unread edition of
George Bernard Shaw's
Three Plays For Puritans
on our
bookshelves, a 1962 Penguin edition. When I opened it, I
found the outer rims of the pages browned with time – it
was as if the book had lain close to a fire, but it was the
dull plod of second after second which had done this. I can
see why the other two plays did not closely interest Leo
and Filmer and the men. In
Caesar and Cleopatra
and in
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
, a melodrama set on
the coast of Morocco, there isn't the same focus as in
The Devil's Disciple
– the focus there being provided by
Dick Dudgeon's embrace of execution in the place of
another man, the Reverend Anderson, in New Hampshire
in 1777.

From my Sunday school days, the phrase 'devil's
disciple' still carries with it a whiff of brimstone. In what
sense was Dick Dudgeon the devil's disciple? (asked the old
English mistress in me). And how did Leo and the others
see themselves under that banner too? Sergeant Bantry was
a Catholic, and Jockey Rubinsky Jewish. In what sense
were they devil's disciples?

I studied the issue. It wasn't an abstract matter for me.
Even though George Bernard Shaw was playing with ideas
in his safe study, or else his summer garden in Surrey, and
did not have to face the blade himself, there is cogency for
me and for Leo in what he wrote. As an introduction to the
play, Shaw wrote an essay called
On Diabolonian Ethics
,
and in it he complained that while he was away from
London, a theatrical director interpreted
The Devil's
Disciple
's willingness to save the life of Reverend Anderson
by dying in his place as motivated by his love for young
Mrs Anderson. That was to miss the entire point of the
play, said Shaw. A glorious thing, the thing by which the
Devil's Disciple transcended Sydney Carton in
A Tale of
Two Cities
, was to die for a man you didn't know, for a
man who had a wife you didn't know, and whose features
were unknown to you.

Shaw wrote: 'But then, said the critics, where is the
motive?
Why
did Dick save Anderson? . . . The saving of
life at the risk of the saver's own is not a common thing;
but populations are so vast that even the most uncommon
things are recorded once a week or oftener. Not one of my
critics but has seen a thousand times in his paper how some
policeman or fireman or nursemaid has received a medal,
or the compliments of a magistrate, or perhaps a public
funeral, for risking his or her life for another's. Has he ever
seen it added that the saved was the husband of the woman
the saver loved, or was that woman herself, or was ever
known to the saver as much as by sight? Never. When we
want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither
do we turn? To the murder columns; and there we are
rarely disappointed.'

I'm sure the twenty condemned Malays for whose lives
Leo and others of the Cornflakes gang had petitioned the
Japanese were never far from the consciousness of Leo and
the other Memerangs as they rehearsed the play. I prefer to
believe that it was for those men that Leo was ready to die
rather than for some flatulent concept of military honour.
That he died neither for some bankrupt British officer code
nor for the bankrupt code of his jailors.

I imagine the play under way in their communal cage,
with Leo enacting his part, and Essie the servant girl asks
him why he lets them call him the Devil's disciple? And
Richard replies, 'Because it's true. I was brought up in the
other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was
my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he
was in the right, and that the world cringed to his
conqueror only through fear . . .'

I can imagine Filmer, who had been to Oxford, explaining
the meaning if any of the group were theologically
timid – that Richard Dudgeon is not really speaking of the
Devil, he is speaking of the God of Purposeful Love, a deity
unhonoured in the Dudgeon household in the play but
honoured by Richard.

It is touching to think that under Filmer's direction,
Leo played the scene in Act II in which he speaks at length
with Mrs Anderson, played by Jockey Rubinsky (seriously
it seems, and not for the easy laughs that derive
from young men playing women). There is something
almost consoling about that, the earnestness of two young
men who would never touch a woman again, enacting
sexual attraction.

I must curse GBS because he taught them how to do it,
to be Devil's Disciples. I must thank him for reinforcing the
necessity of the path they were treading, so that they went
with a certainty that transcended flags and empires and all
that weary dross.

The reward for a good rehearsal is that Filmer reads us a
Jeeves story by Wodehouse. You see behind the men's faces that
the more they enjoy that, the more they think: Maybe they'll let
us and the Malays live on too. But no one could say it, of
course, because that would be a deadly bad omen.

When we read the whole play in our communal cell,
Englishmen and Dutch and Chinese we had never seen
applauded from their cells. Because by now Memerang fellows
knew each other's stories, the play was like the new conversation
we had with each other. We were grateful. If George
Bernard Shaw had walked along the gallery on the third level
of Outram Road Gaol and appeared in front of our cage, we
would have cheered him to the echo. So would the poor
buggers in all the cells.

Hidaka's brought a huge bag of Amanetto sweets, which he
knows are my favourites. He did not want to stay though
and looked evasive. I wonder is something about to happen.

There are possibilities other than the worst. They might
even take us over to Changi, to the general military camp.

Just in case though, I put down all the love I can find in this
sentence. For you, Grace. It'll be wonderful if we meet again.
It'll be a wonderful life.

Hidaka's sworn he'll get this to you if I can't.

In a tiny
kolek
or fishing boat, two private soldiers, including
Dignam the Foreign Legionnaire, were still at large in January
1945. They would call at villages but then move on before
they could be betrayed. They had travelled 1900 miles
through enemy territory, and at Ramang Island off Timor
were only 137 miles from an air force pick-up island, and
only five hundred from Darwin. By now, however, they
needed to rest for days, and a village head man told the
Japanese that they were there. They were taken to Dili in
Timor where their torture was horrifying, and both, left alone
in their cells at last, died of their injuries.

Then, in Singapore, on the morning appointed by the
authorities, some four weeks before the war would end,
guards came to the large communal cell at Outram Road
prison and tethered the arms of all the Memerang men
behind their backs. Sentries went screaming along the
galleries telling prisoners, Don't look, Don't look! So there
is no record of anyone having seen Leo and his men
descend to the ground floor. They were dressed only in
their shirts and shorts, and their feet were bare. It might be
a move to another prison – they could partly quell their
fever of expectation with that idea. But they hadn't been
told to bring their mess kits. They probably all noticed that
fact. By the time they were put in a small bus with paintedout
windows, Jockey probably knew. Did he tell Leo? Did
he bespeak death with total clarity? The orderly says no.
But surely he'd tell Leo, they were so close. Japanese documents
say they behaved coolly, and with the example of
Richard Dudgeon before their minds, it was quite possibly
so. As well as that, Jockey Rubinsky's attitude of not giving
malign forces the satisfaction of showing obvious and
reasonable fear was no doubt at play amongst all of them.

Not a lifetime of ambitious imagining, dreams, obsession
and terror has managed to recreate that journey definitively
for me. Hidaka says he heard from the guards that
the men sang. Not hymns. They just sang. Studiedly casual
songs.
There's a track winding back to an old fashioned
shack . . .
or
Coming in on a wing and a prayer
, a hit of the
time – I know Leo liked that.
Though we've one engine
gone/we can still carry on/coming in on a wing and a
prayer.

The guards got them off their bus, and they stood on
waste ground, and since they were not blindfolded they
must have been able to see other burial mounds around the
place, and certainly would have seen three freshly dug pits.
So, their deaths became established in their minds. There
was a considerable crowd of Japanese officers and men
there, General Okimasa and at least two of the judges. The
prison governor of Outram Road told them in English that
they were to be beheaded. According to Hidaka, he himself
was not there, he had hidden by the cars on the road, but
he claimed he saw through the stunted trees that Leo and
the others had now been released from their bonds and
were smoking cigarettes, and shaking hands. I hope he's
telling the truth.

He probably is, because even Hidaka doesn't pretend it
was nice. He came close to the site, he fled, he came back
again. Three at a time, the men were made to kneel, one at
each pit. They were offered blindfolds, but some did not
take it.

It is all very well for men to strut with swords and
invoke Bushido, as it is all very well for mass-murdering
generals to invoke chivalry amongst the shrapnel and
napalm. But Bushido, like chivalry, required purity of heart
and was beyond the reach of most narrow men. The NCOs
of Judicial Section might each have owned a sword, but
they had debased its meaning and its edge by beating and
executing too many prisoners, and following that with too
epicene a life, good Singapore food, blunting drafts of
liquor. Had they been true warriors of ascetic and muscular
leaning, the beheadings would not have been botched. Even
Hidaka says it took half an hour, with breaks in between,
while the fat judicial sergeants recovered their stability and
their breath, and again took up their lean swords in their
thick and inefficient hands. When the thing was done, the
body of my beloved lay gracelessly and headless in its pit.
Having been promised a death fit for heroes he was given
a death barely fit for oxen. I know it. After the executions,
Korean witnesses told the war crimes investigators, the
NCOs in the squad room at Outram Road teased Judicial
Sergeant Abukara about his messy work during the
beheadings. Abukara would later suicide, impaling himself
on his sword to avoid punishment for his Outram Road
brutalities.

But enough. Enough now.

I sit where I like to sit in the mornings, having crossed
the minefield of carpet edges and chair legs which is my
living room to reach the sunroom and look out my window
through the august North Head to the Pacific which
connects us to all peoples and all cultures. There is an
absolute purity out there that transcends the slogans: King
and Country, Banzai, Blood and Fatherland, Semper
Fidelis, Who Dares Wins. These are the mere trellises upon
which men uncertain about their weakness grow their
peculiar and imperfect intentions. Doucette and Rufus and
the incompetent NCOs who struck the head from my
husband's body were all in the same game. The truth is,
heroism and its codes take you only so far, as it took Eddie
Frampton only so far, and then he bit the capsule.

I didn't want a hero. A person is never married to a hero
– the heroic pose is not designed for ultimate domesticity.
Ulysses on his return found not a wife to charm but suitors
to fight. Nothing is learned, and everything is learned.

And at last Abukara gets it right and my eyes fly like rockets
to the sun.

And look there

Tom Keneally is a multi-award-winning author of twenty-
seven works of fiction and ten works of non-fiction. In
1982 he won the Booker Prize for
Schindler's Ark
, which
Steven Spielberg then made into the Academy-Award-
winning film
Schindler's List
. His novels
The Chant of
Jimmie Blacksmith
,
Gossip from the Forest
and
Confederates
were all short-listed for the
Booker Prize
, while
Bring Larks and Heroes
and
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
won the Miles Franklin Award.

Tom is married with two daughters and four grandchildren.