The Widow & Her Hero (5 page)

Approaching Bali they saw Japanese planes flying high,
with intentions to inspect and destroy bigger shipping than
them. From now on they would wear sarongs – all
uniforms were put away, and they covered their bodies
with a brown stain. Leo says the stuff was utterly lacking
in fragrance and grew smelly on the body. The Japanese
flag was raised at the stern – it had been sewn up by
someone's wife in Melbourne. When other small ships were
met in the fringes of the Indonesian archipelagos, most of
the crew concealed themselves in the wheelhouse or below,
or under the awning, while Doucette, himself slight of body
with delicately designed hands, and fluent in Malay,
together with the navigator and swarthy, small-limbed
Mandarin-speaking Seaman Rubinsky were to remain
visible.

There is a photograph of Mortmain, his monocle still in
his eye socket, his body streaky brown, his lantern jaw a
frank tribute to his ancestry, and of Leo, similarly bare-
chested, standing together before the wheelhouse wearing
their sarongs, demonstrating the hopeless innocence and
valour of the idea that all that sea could be covered without
the subterfuge being easily seen through. But they did take
wise precautions. All smoking was forbidden, lest cigarette
butts cast overboard might serve the Japanese navy as a clue
to their infiltration. Toilet paper could not be used – it was
too dangerous a clue as well. At night there was total
blackout. Garbage and the leavings of their mess table were
put in sealed tins which the men cast overboard and then
filled with holes using Sten guns with silencers.

I see them cheering in particular in their sarongs as with
mock ceremony the home-made Japanese flag was let fly
from the stern. They did this without much thought for the
situation international law placed them in now. Deceptive
men ripe for punishment? They did not feel that way.

They lined up with the two volcanoes of Lombok Strait,
and found themselves a little way off course at the western
end of Bali, and then crept along to the strait, where the
waters surged through so strongly against them that they
were held there all night, watching the lights of Japanese
trucks on Bali. Then while vapour still clouded Lombok,
they crept through by daylight. They did not want to hug
any coastline, in case they met Indonesian
prahu
or junks
or patrols, so they made course north towards Borneo and
then turned to port, lined up on nearly an exact north-west
course for Singapore.

They had the cheek now, in these enemy waters, to begin
to feel bored. 'Bored' was their reaction to a sea too broad
and bright, and a sky too enormous, a brazen sun and their
tiny refuge beneath the tarpaulin inadequate. I don't
pretend to understand how this might be called 'boring',
since normal people would have brought an active anxiety
to every second.

In fact the navigator, Lieutenant Yewell, was not bored at
all, and so was out of step with these fellows. One day a
Japanese seaplane appeared above them. The aircraft circled
the
Pengulling
as the navigator stood in his cabin swearing
and preparing badly for death. When the craft flew off on a
tangent, the others had to reassure him that it was not going
off to summon forth patrol boats and other ships of war.
But he was sick over the side, while having enough whimsy
to tell the others he wished he was an alcoholic again, stuck
in some mining camp, safe from everything but the arsenic
and dynamite he managed, and his own hand.

Now they eased up the Riau Strait and in amongst that
bouillabaisse of islands on the approaches to Singapore.
They found there were too many Malay fishermen around
big Pompong Island, which Doucette had thought of using
as a base, but about which he now changed his mind. On
a mid September day in the tropics, with the Boss planning
to turn west to another of his hides from the time he was
rescuing people from Singapore, they found themselves
under the scrutiny of a Japanese observation post on
Galang Island. The navigator was again tormented, but
Doucette decided it was best to keep north beneath the
broad gaze of the marines of Galang. They calmed him in
the end by letting him look through the telescope at the
indolently chatting and smoking Japanese at the post, who
were obviously unimpressed by their passage.

At night, in case, they puttered back to a little pyramid
of jungle named Pandjang Island, and it was here that the
three boat parties were dropped. Leo would tell me of the
disappointment of the reserve canoe group, two Australian
kids, one nineteen, one twenty, ordinary seamen by rank,
rather extraordinary in their way, however. These two were
to wait on the
Pengulling
with the crew. It was the first day
of October. The raiding parties would have the help of the
last month of the south-east trades. On a dark beach, all
but the navigator were ashore at the one time, helping the
three folboat crews to creep their gear and a little depot of
rations amidst the palms behind the beach.

Here Doucette brought Leo to one side.

I want you to do me a favour. I want you to take aside
the reserve boat chaps, and I want you to tell them to
make
the navigator come back. By that I mean by shaming him,
bullying him . . . by whatever means. Do you understand?
All right?

Leo was secretly comforted by this order, and since he
didn't want to ever become a permanent soldier, saw no
problems with telling young men to coerce an officer. And
so he spoke to the two youngsters, and passed on his
message. Can we shoot the bastard? one of them asked
him.

I don't think you'll need to, said Leo. Not unless you can
navigate as well as he can.

On these infants of the Australian navy the reunion
between
Pengulling
and the folboat men depended.

In the dark a question struck Leo that he couldn't let
himself ask. What if, combined with Yewell's reluctance to
come back, the engine simply blew up? It was the dark
hour at which Leo felt he was in great danger, a feeling
from which he would recover, he said, as soon as the
Pengulling
vanished to sea again before dawn to stooge
around Borneo until it was time to meet them again here,
at Pandjang.

I look back to 1943 now and ask who deserved such an
outlay of gifts as these innocent young men intended to
bring to Singapore. While Nav and the others hid and
flitted and felt bored off Borneo.

It was cold in Canberra, and snow fell on the Brindabellas.
The new girls in the typing pool by my small office called
me Miss, which made me feel ancient. On Thursday night
a group of us, office veterans, went to dance at the Allied
Forces canteen with air force men, Australians and Americans,
and landlocked sailors. There were chaperones and
most of us got away, flustered and talkative, by ten pm
without what we called
damage
. The cold stars above the
Kurrajong Guest House attracted my gaze but were merely
an enigmatic clue to the stars Leo might have been under at
that moment.

Doucette knew all the islands between Pandjang and
Singapore, though they seemed more numerous than the
stars of the Milky Way, denser than the Clouds of
Magellan, their off-shore waters studded with
pagar
, fish
traps of bamboo, sometimes with a rickety little hut on top.
Indeed, hardly anyone else on the
Pengulling
knew the
names of the islands, for they all had code numbers –
Pandjang was NW14, but the final island before the run
into the Singapore roads and Keppel Harbour was NC11,
a tiny hill of an island from which they would be able to
observe Singapore before and after the raid. The boys knew
how to paddle around the NWs, NCs and NEs like angels
on pinheads.

They had two days of rest on Pandjang before they set
out for NC11, for they needed to wait for the right moon.
They spent the time moving their food dump further inland
to a pile of rocks under the island's hill in case it would all
be needed later by them or by downed airmen. And so they
hid, and talked very little, and sketched in their diaries and
made observations of shipping.

While their first day there was still not at its hottest, a
Japanese patrol boat hove around the point of Pandjang,
anchored in the blue bay and sent two boats ashore.
Japanese marines landed from them. Mortmain and
Doucette grinned at each other. The joke was: what would
Nav do if he were here? Shit himself, sir, suggested Jockey.
The Japanese marines cooked up some fish and rice for a
brunch ashore and drank from coconuts.

Then they lay down without sentries and slept, while all
the time their patrol boat swung on its anchor, and
Doucette and Mortmain and Leo and Rubinsky and the
others sat by their depot and the day's heat began to strike.
After an hour and a half, a Japanese NCO woke on the
beach, rose, urinated and kicked his companions' legs.
They dragged their dinghies down the beach and rowed
back out to their boat, and so departed.

A more complicated test came the next morning. A
fishing
kolek
appeared, and the Tamil fisherman who
owned it began to head it in for the beach. Here was the
dark side of the Doucette proposition. He sent little Jockey
Rubinsky and a young rating named Skeeter Moss down
into the fringes of the palms, figures who could be mistaken
as fellow natives, to kill him with knives once he was
ashore. They had to, went the reasoning. Their presence
could not be announced by anyone – they intended to
announce it themselves. And yet to think of these two: a
dairy farmer's son, a jeweller's son born in Russia, come all
the way to Pandjang to slaughter the head of a Malay
family! What did Leo think of that? The first damage they
would do was to an innocent! Well, we're used to that
reality from modern wars, but it was an unaccustomed
thing for Leo. His training in tripping, garrotting and knife-
work had always had an imagined enemy as its object.

The Tamil man saved his own life by detouring to
another island. No one ever said whether they were
relieved or disappointed. I think they were in a way chosen
for their unlikelihood to ask themselves that question. At
dusk, their hands bloodless, our boys went swimming off
one end of the beach, with Mortmain acting as lookout in
the shadows of palms and rocks, while the others played
and dived with a sportive sea otter family with whom they
found they shared the water. A day in the life of an infiltrator.
Ashore again, they each put back around their necks a
bakelite container with its cyanide tablet inside. Have I
mentioned that? They had apparently each been issued one
in Cairns in case pain or torture or fear of revealing too
much overtook them.

Tides ran hard through the channels between these
crowds of islands, and going north that night they had a
difficult time against the current and were ten miles short
of the island NC11, when the dawn came up. They put into
a small island between two bigger ones, Bulan (NW7) and
Batan (NW8), both Japanese garrisoned, and dragged their
folboats – no small weight, some 700 pounds with their
mines aboard – in amongst the mangrove roots and lay still
all day, within earshot of a village, eaten by carnivorous
insects, with mud itchy on their bodies under that dreadful
sun, unable to say anything. A person couldn't put up with
that sort of wait, I don't think, unless he was able somehow
to be remarkably at ease with himself inside the very kernel
of the moment, or unless he lacked too much imagination.
They stewed there anyhow.

It's the sort of thing I think of whenever I've been to
Singapore. The sun is a ruthless threat – it comes down
amongst the great steel towers, slapping your face aside. In
the lout-less streets of that ersatz modern city, it is the lout.
Anyhow, one way and another, they all proved themselves
up to that sort of endurance and that stillness. Mortmain
with his optic in his eye, a sort of lantern-jawed giant, the
colour of mahogany but impossible not to identify as a
European. Big jolly Chesty Blinkhorn, who claimed to
have been thrown out of the Goulburn Convent School for
being unruly yet who had the discipline for this particular
classroom in the mangroves. Sergeant Bantry, veteran of
the North African desert and of New Guinea, and
aficionado of
The Imitation of Christ
. Doucette with his
Chapman's
Odyssey
jammed as a talisman in the breast
pocket of his shirt. And Leo, of course, used from his
childhood in the Solomons to this intensity of heat. A
thunderstorm gave them brief comfort during the afternoon.
I think that if Leo could reduce his mind down to
muteness as a means of lasting out the sandflies and the
heat at the apex of the day, then the rain must have come
like a huge act of grace, must have carried with it elements
of motherhood and rescue sufficient to endow him with
confidence.

That night the currents were running their way, and they
could see off to their right as they paddled past the oil
refinery at Samboe, no distance at all from Singapore, and
were suddenly at NC11 three days before they were to
make their foray. Here there was a lot of what they called
heather, but not of the Scottish variety; just enough cover
for them to hide, though they would not be able to move
about by day. At dusk they saw Singapore begin to glitter,
a secure, wide-awake, electrically lit city. Using Doucette's
telescope, Leo was able to read the time on the clock of the
Imperial Insurance Company tower, and to see fabled
Raffles Hotel where, as Doucette said, the Japanese were
drinking Singapore Slings tonight. From NC11 too they
could see and covet the docks of Keppel Harbour, and due
ahead the core of Singapore, the Empire Dock, with the
superstructures of ships rising above its mole. They could
see the great containers and superstructures of the Samboe
Oil Refinery, and dead ahead the wireless masts on top of
the Cathay Building. Doucette drew their attention to the
many native craft coming and going in those seas without
molestation, wearing their Japanese registration numbers
and not having to worry about mines.