The Widow & Her Hero (4 page)

As we all emerged, the merchant captains walking down
the docks to their sundry ships, the captain of the
Warradgerry stopped to talk to us. He invited us to attend
drinks in the wardroom that evening. Doucette said we
would be honoured to. The captain explained why he and the
local naval commander were so friendly to us. He'd been
telling the Scot for a long time that a complete boom needed
to be laid inside the harbour. But the old harbourmaster,
who'd held the job since the 1920s, argued some of the native
captains coming in from the islands would get themselves
caught up in it. The captain said the harbourmaster thought
it was still 1935. He saluted and so we saluted back like real
gents.

For the sun was shining on their faces, and rewarding
them, or making promises they could imagine were castiron.
Leo's account continues exultant, and shows that
even a mock-martial triumph can endow the heroes with
the better lines, and a sense of divine assurance; exactly
what I would have wanted him to have.

There was no time to go back to the officers' club before drinks
hour aboard the
Warradgerry.
We decided we would fill in the
time by going to the Townsville Hotel and having tea on their
verandah, and begging a piece of their stationery so that the
Boss could write a list of the ships we had marked. He was
doing this while Mortmain and I drank our black tea, exactly
right for a warm place like Townsville, bringing out a sort of
cleansing sweat. Then we saw the high-ranked American who
had been in the harbourmaster's office was standing over us,
very thin and tall. His shadow fell over the Boss's page, and he
looked up. The American asked us if it would be an intrusion
if he joined us.

Certainly not, said the Boss, but in that icy British way
which actually means I'd prefer you went away. Doucette did
not rise to salute this more senior soldier, and so neither did
we. Strange, since the Brits were so crazy on rituals, but then
we'd all got out of the habit of it during our training.

So the American took a seat. I looked at his uniform –
it was great tailoring. The Boss introduced us. This was
Lieutenant-Colonel Jesse Creed, he told us. Creed wore the
insignia of the American intelligence corps.

The tall man smiled.

I was wondering if I could have a confidential word, Creed
asked Doucette. The Boss said certainly, and then Creed
looked significantly at Mortmain and myself, suggesting we
should leave. I was already standing up to go. But the Boss
said, These gentlemen can stay.

Creed agreed, making the best of it he could. He asked the
Boss about the spare engine for the Japanese fishing boat,
Pengulling. I hear it's turned up, he said.

Being installed as we speak, said the Boss.

That was the first I'd heard of it, but I really hoped it was
true. It was time.

Creed shook his head and grinned. You English, you do
things all your own way, he said.

I'm actually an Irishman, said the Boss. But he only said it
for the sake of argument since he was one of those Irishmen
who considered himself British.

You'd have a hard time proving that in New York, Creed told
him.

I am, begorrah, said the Boss, without a smile. I'm Irish as
Shackleton. Irish as that ponce Oscar Wilde, Irish as Dean
Swift or Sheridan or Oliver Goldsmith.

Creed said, All right then. Since your cranky old boat's
getting its temporary repair . . . the question arises. Was this
morning to improve the safety of dear old Townsville, the
delightful place destiny has placed us? Or was it a dress
rehearsal?

It was an expression of brio, sir, said Doucette, but still
without any emphasis in his voice.

Loosen up a bit, for God's sake, Creed said. Last time I read
about it, we were allies.

So I could tell you everything, and you would say, That's
absolutely splendid and we Yanks can help. But when the time
came, you wouldn't be available. As happened with young
Waterhouse here. Suddenly, no sub for his jaunt. That's what
happens with you chaps all the time.

Creed was angry and his face flushed for a moment. He
said, We did lose a sub off New Britain. That's eighty men who
drowned, whose lungs choked with water. But a person would
think we did it just to thwart IRD and cause you offence,
Major Doucette.

The Boss murmured, If that's the impression I gave, then I
apologise. But I think there's a policy on your side to keep us
permanently training for ops which get cancelled. And it's just
not good enough.

And he didn't give an inch.

Creed lowered his voice. There's a rumour around that
you're going up to Java, to Surabaya, say, in that cranky old
bathtub of yours.

That was indeed the rumour. The Boss might have spread it
deliberately, though he told me it would be better if there were
no rumour at all.

The American said, God forbid you got into trouble, but I
could make sure your distress calls were acted on. I must be
crazy talking to you like this, on a hotel balcony. I'll approach
you more formally and, Major, I'll expect a private meeting
and a polite answer.

Perhaps you should talk to Major Doxey at IRD, the Boss
said, suddenly stricken with a fake air of helpfulness. And he
smiled now, like a boy. He did have a boy's wiry build and
lolly-legs, and seemed maybe fifteen years younger than he
was when he did that grin.

Creed was pretty exasperated, standing and addressing us
from that position while making a patting-down gesture that
said we should remain where we were. It's like this, Doucette. I
used to paddle boats when I was a kid. Life seems pretty simple
when you're surrounded by water and it's kind of level with you.
But then I'd come in at the end of the pier and moor the canoe
and come ashore, and I'd be amongst complicated stuff then –
my parents, my sister, and whether she was dumping this boy
or encouraging the other, and all the financial secrets and even
other secrets of my parents. That's your situation, Doucette.
You're just paddling away, but there's a complicated big house
somewhere, where your IRD and the whole Mountbatten SOE
group and Central Intelligence Bureau all live. And you despise
and don't understand the big house at all, Major Doucette. You
don't know our secrets and you don't want to give any ground.

I should say not, said Doucette. All the more reason to stick
to what I do best.

It's all the more reason to have a well-wisher in there, in
that big house, to look after you.

I thought to myself that an argument like that might win the
day for the American colonel, but Doucette stayed neutral to
the point of contempt. Thank you, sir, he said.

You guys are more mysterious than the Japanese.

I felt a bit embarrassed for Creed as he walked away
amongst the good afternoon-tea-ing women of Townsville who
wiped their necks, and the chest regions above where their
dresses started, with sweaty handkerchiefs. The truth was that
to me Creed seemed a pretty generous ally. But the Boss must
have had his reasons for rebuffing him.

We were saluted aboard the
Warradgerry
in the late afternoon
and escorted to the wardroom by a midshipman. As we
entered, applause broke out amongst the naval officers present
– it was as if the captain had told his crew that that was the
appropriate response.

When the congratulations were over, we were taken to a bar
where a white-coated steward poured us drinks. I had the
national diet – a glass of Dinner Ale. And the worldly Boss and
Rufus ordered gin. I found myself drinking a beer with a young
officer, and well forgotten in a corner of the room. Then the
captain clapped his hands and gave a jovial introduction to
Doucette.

We had some visitors last night, he said, and everyone
laughed.

Major Doucette has kindly agreed to read out a list of fifteen
ships to which dummy mines were attached last night.

Doucette came forward in that slightly distracted way
which I think was a bit of an act.

The fifteen ships were the SS
Akabar
, the SS
Warrnambool
,
the SS
Katoomba, Port Lincoln, Grafton
and
Eskimo,
the
frigate
Geelong,
the frigates
Mildura
and
Portland,
the
minesweepers
Echidna
and
Waratah
, the Liberty ships
Carolton
and
Duchesse,
the coastal steamers
Murray
and
Downley
and, said Doucette, HMAS
Warradgerry.
Until that
second of seeing the captain's stunned face, I thought he
already knew his ship had been marked. But it was obvious
that he didn't.

Doucette said, I'm afraid it's my young friend over there in
the corner, Lieutenant Waterhouse, who placed your mines
very deeply. As you see, he's got awfully long arms.

The captain laughed, but there was a barking sound to it.
He called for two officers to go on deck and look for magnetic
appendages which might not have been visible in the first
panic that morning, and had passed scrutiny since. The young
man I was talking with gave me a small punch on the arm and
asked, You did us? Bugger me! You really did us!

The captain told me that it looked like he must be indebted
to me for blowing his ship up, and soon the two officers were
back having launched the ship's boat and located the limpets
and left seamen working at detaching them from the
destroyer's side.

When it was announced we were leaving, we were cheered
out of the wardroom. And I suppose, as Rufus said, we had a
story which could make us warm on cold nights and cool on
hot nights. We had a tale which we could use to revive
ourselves and other men.

On the pier, which was conspicuously darker than it had
been the night before, the Boss said that
Pengulling,
the
fishing boat, was nearly ready. Are you still willing to sail? he
asked me.

Mortmain was smoking. He closed the eye behind the
monocle. Can paddle, he said of me. Strong lad. Good humour.
Rough manners. Why not?

But I was always coming, I insisted.

And they laughed. I thought to myself, Creed's right. You
can never exactly tell what the Poms are getting at.

How was the sex? asked my granddaughter Rachel,
one time when she was a student in the late eighties.

She meant in my life with Leo. She was always talking
about and marvelling at my tales of Braidwood at the turn
of the 1940s, the codes, the social restrictions, but she was
also a clever girl and aware that she too was subject to
codes, and that restrictions on people are a moveable feast.
She was amused by the fact that in my day women had a
duty to appear indifferent to sex and to treat it as a necessary
evil, and that in hers women have a duty to be
sexually fulfilled and satisfied.

So, how was the sex? she asked me.

It was very satisfactory, I told her, delighted to be prim.

Oh, she said, amused. Satisfactory. Very well.

In many ways I have never in my life been able to talk to
anyone as freely as I have talked to this girl. This was a
conversation I could not have had with Laurie Burden, my
second husband. It's still the way.

Rachel's a museum curator in Brisbane now (
now
being
the early days of the twenty-first century), with three
children and a husband, but when we meet even after a
year's separation, often at my son's place at Christmas
time, we simply begin again with the same level of mutual
confidence.

Very
satisfactory. That's what I said. One weekend in
that winter of 1943, when the wedding awaited some
ordeal of arms I could only vaguely imagine, my mother
came to my room and gave me a book in a brown paper
cover. Her face was red, but obviously she felt she must
perform this duty.

She said, Men think they are worldly, but often they're
not. They think they understand women, but no! Sometimes
the wife has to educate them. Treated in the right
spirit, that book will help you a lot.

It was a surprisingly weighty book. I found it as
abashing to accept as she did to pass it to me. I started
nonetheless to open the front cover.

No, my mother said. Wait till I'm gone.

I waited till ten seconds after she closed the door. The
opened titlepage read
Sex Without Fear
by one Samuel
Aaron Lewin. It possessed the heaviness of a medical tome
and was published in America, where – I presumed – life
was racier. This book was revolutionary, I would later
discover, in that it placed an onus of pleasure, and of
educating husbands, on wives. It proposed that men were
sexually primitive and that the wife must teach her spouse
to seduce her, and that the husband be led to have in the
forefront of his mind his wife's delight. And it illustrated
widely and clinically and without pornographic relish how
that delight could be achieved, and counselled women to
discuss these matters with their husbands, and not to be
constrained by any artificial fear that their husbands would
think them 'pre-violated'.

Where had my mother acquired this exceptional book?
Did all the women of Braidwood possess a copy? I was
thrilled and repelled by that idea. Obviously she must have
got it on a visit to Sydney. She probably needed to have a
medical prescription to buy it. Had my parents resorted
to such hearty stimulations as the book recommended? I
decided not to contemplate that.

I read the book on icy nights in Canberra with the acuity
of an athlete absorbing the rules of a new, higher sport and
getting ready for the contest. In the spirit of preparing the
way for my lover, I engaged in solitary explorations,
though they seemed a dim pre-echo of what might happen
to me, once Leo's test of war had earned the nuptials.

This was, I know now, the beginning of the golden time
for Doucette and Mortmain and for Leo. Dour government
records are nonetheless full of hints of their mutual creativity
and confidence in each other's company. Now that the
new engine was aboard the
Pengulling
, Operation Cornflakes
was a go-er, a starter in the great planetary power
stakes. The attack on Townsville had been a mere mock
play. Now they were to be in the great theatre, and would
become legendary even to themselves, blessed men. Alfred
Tennyson provided the text for Doucette's life with lines he
could recite at parties.

. . . but somewhere ere the end
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.

That might have been the trouble. The men were living
according to Tennyson, whereas Dotty, and soon I, were
determined to live in the age of Auden and TS Eliot.

Pengulling would bring Doucette and Leo through seas
of all colours, of abrasive tropic blue, through blinding
golden sunsets and the bruisings of storm, to their
work of
noble note
.

Despite all the planning, Doucette had to grab for a few
extra people at the end – the only cook he could find was
a malaria-prone veteran of the fighting in New Guinea
earlier in the year. It was appropriate to every odyssey that
there be such flawed men. The navigator was flawed too –
a wanderer and barely repentant alcoholic, already in his
early forties, though gifted at his job. After an unhappy
spate in the navy during World War I, he had spent the
Depression in Queensland and New South Wales digging
for opals along the New South Wales–Queensland border,
or descending upon nineteenth century gold rush sites to
rework the tailings and mullock with arsenic. For his brief
World War I experience as a sailor in the Australian navy,
upon re-enlisting for this new war he had been commissioned.
The Independent Reconnaissance Department had
chosen him, yet he had been through none of the training
rigours of his young fellow crewmen. His name was Lieutenant
Yewell, his nickname was Nav. I have seen his
photograph and his face is a complex one, leathered by
remote suns and in which the struggle with his demons
was plainly written. Doucette tended to take a very positive
attitude towards such men, an attitude that was good for
them, and made them behave better than perhaps they
were. He made heroes out of quality men like Mortmain
and Leo, and a passable fellow out of the unredeemed
Yewell, who'd been assigned to the
Pengulling
purely
because he knew tropic waters.

Pengulling
cast off. Everything went cheerfully as it
easily penetrated the dangerous coral reefs of the Torres
Strait, and reached westwards through the Arafura and
the Timor Seas, sighting peaceful Melville Island north of
Darwin. Down the shoal coast of Western Australia they
came to the American base at Exmouth Gulf, Potshot. All
the way they practised on their silenced weaponry and by
day kept their large Caucasian jaws and shoulders and
hands under the awning. As for the routine, some men
could sleep on the deck, unless there was bad weather and
they could then sleep in the wheelhouse. The hold
contained three officers' bunks and a sophisticated radio
run by batteries. The head, the lavatory, used by all ranks
without distinction, was on deck in the stern. The galley
and various cupboards were also there, and there were
water tanks and a gravity tank to the engine which was
used as a mess table. A tarpaulin covered much of the
deck, and I know it was decided that only those who
could pass as Asians would be in the open – Doucette, the
boy terrier of an Irishman; Rubinsky, the olive-skinned
Jewish rating from the Australian navy; and Nav himself.

At sea by night they had taken off and dumped some
of the
Pengulling
's bullet-resistant cladding, and were
thankful for the good weather to that point, for they saw
that the armour's two tons had reduced the freeboard to a
mere ten inches, and that would not have been enough in
stormy seas. Now they rode higher but would splinter to
matchwood under any attack.

The American rear admiral at Potshot was very kind to
them, and was convinced that their destination was the
Japanese naval base at Surabaya in Java, though he told
Doucette solemnly that everyone believed the hopeless little
vessel was bound for Fremantle. In any case,
Pengulling
was repainted here with camouflage grey.

There was a load of gear awaiting them, flown from
Melbourne by IRD. New British-built folboats, spare parts
for the engine, anti-glare glasses, binoculars, etc. Leo
would later tell me that he was a bit amazed when
Doucette declared he was going to drop inland a little way
and see some of his relatives who had a cattle station east
of Exmouth – some first cousin from Ireland had settled
there – and a transport plane flying to Perth agreed to take
him.

Mortmain looked over the new British folboats with Leo
and said that the stitching of the canvas was appalling, a
real wartime economy job. We used to laugh at Japanese
manufacture, Mortmain told Leo. But he and Leo and their
partners went for a warm-up paddle of twenty miles or so,
and suddenly the stitching meant nothing. For Leo, excitement
and daring would prevail over any deficiencies of
thread.

How often did these men mention their women, I
wonder. Mortmain his – as I would discover – wily wife, or
Leo his fiancée? I never thought about it at the time,
I presumed we were talked about, boasted of, envisaged
constantly. The older I get the more I doubt it. It was
simply that they were engaged in an all-absorbing task.

Doucette returned from his cousin's cattle station, and
he and his men took to their little fishing boat again and
sailed north out of Exmouth Gulf. The forward hold was
full of armaments and other gear, and there were flaps in
the superstructure to enable men to take up battle stations
in an emergency. The horns of a submarine supply and
maintenance ship, USS
Wagram
, sent this little grey sliver
of a vessel on its way. It made half a mile before the engine
instantly overheated and choked. Some mysterious components
named the centrifugal pump and the coupling key of
the intermediate propeller shaft had broken. The Americans
had
Pengulling
towed to
Wagram
's side, and
the engine and most of the drive shaft were hauled aboard
and worked on. The Americans replaced the centrifugal
pump.

When they left Potshot, it was thought by the Americans
that they were going to Fremantle, and that the repairs
were meant for a journey down the Western Australian
coast. The mechanics earnestly told Doucette to nurse the
engine along.

And now our voyagers were away on an afternoon tide
again, the opinion being that the new pump would last
them a long time. Interestingly, once the course and rudder
were set and they were heading north-east along the desert
coast, Doucette read snatches from a little brown book,
Homer's Odyssey
, translated by Chapman. The men
listened as if for a code. He had won the book as a prize at
Eton, and the kid leather cover was a scuffed brown. Tea
and beer had both been spilt on it. Did he see himself as
Ulysses 'detained by the goddess Calypso'?

A great storm hit them that September night. The decks
were awash with fluorescent foam, and the
Pengulling
was
a mere tub before waves which Leo said were big as blocks
of flats, and came up behind, and lifted the little boat high
above a nauseating trench of water, dropped it in, awaited
its emergence, and began the process again. All night, the
water across the deck was waist-deep. Mortmain chopped
a hole in the hull to allow the volume of deck water to
escape. Above or below, sleep was not possible. Most of the
muscular ratings and soldiers were sick, and lay on their
sides helpless, humiliated so soon. Leo too was sick, but in
a practical way, stepping outside the wheelhouse, retching,
coming in again with a clear mind for the next little while.

It was when the storm abated and the sky grew brilliant
again the next afternoon, and the men returned to being
hungry, that Doucette told
them
what he and Leo and
Rufus and a few others already knew: where they were
going. Leo's partner Rubinsky, for example, had not
known until now. He and the others were astonished and
enlarged by the news.

Singapore. Three boat crews and one in reserve. Nine
limpets per folboat, as at Townsville, but live ones this
time. After the exhilaration, for the meat of the long
journey, there were only three books on board – the novel
The Sheik
, an erotic story tame by the standards of today,
that little leather copy of the Chapman edition of
Odyssey
,
and a black-covered devotional book,
The Imitation of
Christ
, by Thomas á Kempis, which belonged to Sergeant
Pat Bantry, and which only Bantry had any interest in.
Most social life took place on the after-deck behind the
wheelhouse, which was adequately covered by the tarpaulin
to enable gatherings including those men whose big
hands and feet and large features deprived them of any
chance of resembling an Indonesian or a Malay. Mortmain
told stories of life on teak plantations in Burma and
Malaya. The malice and whimsy of elephants figured a lot
in them. Able Seaman Jockey Rubinsky told stories about
his Russian father and uncles in Bondi Junction, a location
where Hitler was unlikely to disrupt their energies. Meanwhile,
the man keeping watch stood on the gravity tank
within the canopied area and stuck his head through a hole
in the awning roof.

For a time off the north coast of Australia,
Pengulling
had aircraft cover. But even this early the navigation officer
was surly and wanted a drink. He snapped at Jockey's
tales. He did not get the point, or didn't have the mental
space to, and expressed a hatred of Jews which Leo said
wouldn't have been out of place in a Nazi. A distance grew
between him and the other travellers, not because he
badmouthed Jews but because he was not far behind in
badmouthing everyone and wanting whisky.

At this stage, going to the fair, Doucette did not permit
too much conversation. He had already told them he hated
regular soldiering and been expansive on his unregimental
sailing adventures in the South China Sea. But now he used
all the regular military tricks, filling the hours with the
business of dismantling and reassembling weapons, and of
watches and drills. If that wasn't enough, his occasional
lectures on the Punic Wars were very successful. Having
heard that fantastic word
Singapore
, they did not worry
anymore about propeller shafts or seas. It was as if the
augustness of the target itself, and the supreme dangers it
stood for, would keep them safe from lesser issues like drive
shafts and rogue waves.