The Widow & Her Hero (19 page)

This was the most important and portentous trial he had
ever seen, but he was not required as a translator – a translator
of military rank sat with the judges. He wondered
what his superiors would think when the prisoners who
were brought in winked at him and smiled at his posh suit.
And the prisoners did, one of them, Sergeant Bantry,
unleashing a little sharp, almost inaudible whistle.

As Laurie made unconscious affirmative and comforting
sounds deep in his throat, at Lydon's request Hidaka went
through the order they stood in. It is engraved on my soul,
said Hidaka.

That was a sentiment I believed, and I heard my husband
Laurie also give his accepting growl. At the end of the line,
on the left, No 10, was Jockey Rubinsky, twenty years old.
Big Chesty Blinkhorn beside him, same age. Sergeant Bantry,
the non-swearer. No 5 was Private Appin who survived
Doucette's last stand. No 6 was the young naval rating
Moss, and then a much-beaten and sickly army officer
named Dinny Bilson. Lieutenant Danway stood at No 4 in
the line. At the other end, Nos 3, 2 and 1 from the left, were
Melbourne Duckworth, Leo and Major Filmer. They all
wore Japanese army boots, and their hair was close-cropped.
I try to imagine Leo thus, very thin, with cropped hair.

And General Okimasa was there the whole time, wasn't
he? Lydon asked Hidaka, as if I did not know that.

All the time, Hidaka confirmed. He did not leave for a
minute. So it was . . . the important trial.

Lydon loves all this straight-from-the-horse's-mouth
stuff. The order in which people stood, and so on. Did
Okimasa sit on a rattan chair or an armchair? The reason
Memerang's supposed crime under Japanese military law
was translated by him as 'perfidy', an old-fashioned and
stately word, is that Mr Hidaka had learned his English
from Shakespeare, Tennyson and PG Wodehouse.

But I could see old Hidaka was gasping, even after such
a short time, and so, secretly, was I.

I smiled and said to Lydon, Listen here, Mark, curb your
enthusiasm. I think Mr Hidaka is tired.

Of course, Mark admitted. One thing though. Mr
Hidaka saw them while they were waiting for the verdict.
To paraphrase him, without putting him to the trouble of
telling it all again . . .

As the afternoon-long trial ended, said Lydon, the
accused were taken away by their guards, to wait in halfdarkness
on benches in the garden. Hidaka had not been
stopped from visiting them. Their spirits were high, and
they spoke quite loudly and in lively terms, and Hidaka
had organised cigarettes to be handed round.

Thank you, Mr Hidaka, I said, as earnestly as I could.

But I knew there must have been a secret fever in each
man. They must have muttered to each other reassurances
about some coming invasion of Singapore by the Allies. The
Seventh Area Army had grown soft in its occupation of
Malaya and Singapore, and was on the verge of losing
Saigon. Having condemned them, the court might in any
case simply let them stay in Outram Road Gaol or in Changi.

I would ultimately get more information on what was
said amongst them too. They were pleased none of them
had begged – I would ultimately find that out. Because
Jockey Rubinsky, world traveller, conceived in Harbin,
Manchuria, born in Shanghai, raised in Sydney, came up to
Leo and said, as if naming the central issue, 'We didn't beg.
The bastards didn't hear us beg!'

How do I know that? Well, that resulted from the
Hidaka visit too.

We had drunk our tea and I could see that Hidaka was
as pleased as I was that the visit had got this far without
too much discomfort. Before they left, Lydon said, he
would like to show Hidaka the garden and the view from
it. Laurie jumped up, happy to show him around, and
Lydon and I followed. Hidaka was impressed by our
jacaranda, by the roses, by the nectar-producing grevilleas
which attracted rainbow lorikeets. We were on the gravel
path, looking over Middle Harbour, the acres of blue
water surging in through Sydney Heads. The day was
warm, and it was humid too, though nothing like Singapore.
Hidaka, saying, 'Very beautiful', was suddenly gone,
vanished from my eyeline. I turned to see him lying flat out
on the path, and Laurie and Mark Lydon kneeling to
attend to him. As soon as Lydon saw him stir, he lifted the
little man in his arms and propped him on the seat of
the garden bench.

My husband went and got some iced water, and
Hidaka revived with a rasping dollop of breath, but kept
his eyes down as if he had shamed himself in front of us.
Maybe to his generation a collapse in front of others from
heat or the vagaries of blood pressure was a cause of
disgrace. We got him into the house and laid him on the
sofa. Mark took Hidaka's shoes off. Laurie suggested we
send for our friend the local GP, who even in these days
would make a call to the house if he was needed. Lydon
relayed the offer to the clenched-eyed Hidaka. The old
man shook his bony head. Driven by his frank human
friability, I made him green tea, and he sipped it, then he
joined his hands, opened his eyes, rose to a sitting
position and bowed to me. Then he muttered to Lydon,
and Mark turned to us.

He wants to visit you again, Mark said. And he apologises
one more time. But he has something to give you.

His eyes lowered, the old man declared, It is not a long
visit. I wish to give you something.

Maybe it was another doll. Lydon had brought me one
back, a bland, ageless, child-woman doll in the kimono
style of some region of Honshu. Its smirk was the smirk
of Salome. I had it in a cupboard somewhere. I could not
say I wanted to see Hidaka again. The answer caught in
my throat, so at last my husband, just out of politeness,
said, Of course. When would you like to call in, Mr
Hidaka?

I felt angry at my husband, who couldn't have said
anything else in any case. My widowhood had grown
primal again, and I just wanted Hidaka to go. But it was
organised Lydon would bring him back the following afternoon.
This was done with very little more input from me
than nods and choked assent.

From early the next day I was gripped by dread. It
seemed to me that people required a repeated disinterment
of Doucette's men, Leo not permitted his quiet grave, and I
deprived of a fixed and stable widowhood. I always feared
that if I confessed this to Laurie, he would despise me. Or
if he didn't, he would know too much about me. He knew
repeated reference to Leo hurt me in some way that he was
willing to take account of and honour, but he probably
thought my secret reactions were nobler than the squalid
panic I felt. He never complained of the mystification I
brought to the whole business.

In the afternoon, Laurie dutifully put the china out
again. He visited a patisserie in Mosman and brought
home cakes and petit fours – all just in case anyone had an
appetite. When they rang the bell at three, I watched from
the living room as Laurie opened the door to them. They
both looked strangely hangdog, Mark Lydon as well as
Hidaka, whose head was down like a penitent's. From the
hallway, Lydon said to Laurie, and over Laurie's shoulder
to me, Mr Hidaka does not wish to stay for long. I hope
you haven't gone to any trouble, Laurie.

No, said my husband. No, Mark . . . always a pleasure.

Mr Hidaka wishes to apologise, Lydon explained.

Please, said Laurie. Come into the living room.

It was only with a lot of nudging from Lydon that
Hidaka came into the core of the house. He bowed deeply
to me and I stood up, and before I could invite everyone to
sit again, I saw he had an aged folder in his hands and held
it out to me. I'm very sorry, Mrs Waterhouse, he told me
carefully.

Lydon said, He showed me this last night – I swear it
was the first time I knew it existed.

Still stooped, Hidaka opened the manila folder and held
it two-handed, like a dish he was offering me with the most
sincere apologies of the house. It contained a series of
brown, square slabs of paper connected up at their top left
hand corners with a ring of twine.

Hidaka said, Captain Waterhouse asked me to give.

Mark Lydon explained, It's a journal Captain Waterhouse
wrote in pencil on slabs of toilet paper. You see, if it
was in danger of being discovered, he could just dump it in
the nearest waste bucket or latrine.

Hidaka bowed even lower, like a man inviting punishment.

This is the diary Captain Waterhouse asked me to
give you. I was shamed by it and I did not give it until
now.

He's had it for some years, Lydon told us. I think it's
psychologically understandable . . . Now, he has emphysema
and wants you to have it.

Hidaka closed the folder and pressed it more insistently
on me. I took it. I saw his suppliant shoulders. I began
howling and punching him on both shoulders. His deep
bowing to me was too easy a gesture, and I wanted to show
him that. If he was a man, I thought, like some bigot I
would normally have hated to meet, he would look me in
the eye now. I was punishing him both for having retained
the grubby squares of pages for so long, and for presenting
them to me now, years after I hoped everything had been
settled.

Until stopped by Laurie, I went on beating the neatly
made Japanese man in a raw-boned, tall Caledonian
Australian fury. Arthritic problems which normally inhibited
the proper making of a fist were not an issue now.
Anger made me a harridan. My husband moved in and
clasped me by the elbows. I realised I had no breath, but it
returned as I settled.

Get him out, I ordered Lydon, and don't bother me
again. Get him out. I'm sick of witnesses. I'm sick of new
evidence. Everyone who comes to me is self-interested!

Mark Lydon's face had gone a terrible, abashed red. I
assure you, Grace, I didn't know it would cause you . . .
I have your best interests –

I cut him off. Best interests? Best interests of the
Memerang men? They're all dead. I bet you looked through
the file as soon as he gave it to you.

No, said Mark. No, Grace. I won't say I wasn't tempted.
But it wouldn't have been right.

Just take him back to his hotel! I roared.

Mark and Laurie tended to the old man, whose face was
covered with tears and who needed to be restored with
water. Given Hidaka's weakness he and Lydon went very
briskly, and I felt the deepest shame I could, knowing Leo
would not have approved of my behaviour. As they turned
to leave, Laurie called, I'll be in contact, Mark. Grace is
understandably upset.

He saw Lydon and Hidaka to the door, and muttered
something conciliatory I wouldn't have approved of to
them as they went. Then he came to where I stood shaking
frantically in rage and shame, and he embraced me.

Now I'll have to apologise to Mark and Hidaka, I said.

Laurie kissed my forehead. No, he said, let it slide. They
understand well enough.

It was from these pages written in pencil on Japanese
toilet paper that I ultimately learned that while they waited
in the garden for the sentence, Jockey Rubinsky said to
Leo, The bastards didn't hear us beg!

From the Outram Road prison journal of Captain
Waterhouse

When it happened, it was a bloody calamity. It was the last
afternoon, and we were at a fever pitch and ready to go. Very
ready to go. The Boss had already sent two of the blokes ahead
to watch Singapore from NC1. When we got there, they'd be
able to brief us on the day's shipping news and naval movements.
From the junk Nanjang we could see through the binoculars
a lot of naval shenanigans way out in the Phillip Channel
to the east of Singapore – Rufus reckoned it looked like exercises.
He said we'd better stick close in to shore. The bow waves
of destroyers could just about sink an old junk like this.

There'd just been one of those Sumatras – blinding rain.
But now the sun had come out, and we were between two
hummocky islands. Kaso and Sambu.

The Japanese had this Malay auxiliary police force – we
hadn't heard of them before. They called them the Hei-ho. We
had three hours before dark and this Malay police chief notices
our junk and comes out from shore in his little launch to look
at us. Of all the junks in those oceans. The watch saw him
coming and started yelling, 'Patroller, Patroller!' We thought it
was some bush-week little navy launch. I was on deck under
the shade of our tarpaulin, and I found my Sten gun and got
down under the gunnels. It changes the world, once you take
up arms. The light looks different. Right or wrong, everything
that went before that moment doesn't count. All your memories
get reduced to this pulse in your ears. Doucette was calling
from the wheelhouse, Steady! Steady!

I don't know who started firing. I know it wasn't me. I think
it might have been a certain British officer we took aboard
because he'd been at D-Day and came from the Green Howards
and wanted an adventure. And now of course we joined in the
firing – there were at least five Sten guns and one Bren, all
silenced. We saw a man jump over the side of the launch. It
was raddled with the holes we made. I think there were dead
and wounded on her, but I did not want to look directly at that.

And it turns out they weren't Japanese, they were these
Malay Hei-ho. Pity they didn't have a Japanese officer with
them. Sad for all parties. After all our stealth, on the last afternoon
we'd let ourselves make too much noise. If the firing
hadn't started we could have let them land on us and then
taken them prisoner. That's what we discussed as long ago as
Melbourne. The junk stank of cordite, a smell we'd hoped to
avoid.

We were appalled – that doesn't begin to speak the truth. We
knew we'd made ourselves visible. Ashore, the policemen's
colleagues were probably on the phone to the Japanese naval
base at Bintan.

The Boss came out of the wheelhouse. He was the very soul
of calm. Rufus Mortmain came up from below, his Sten in his
hands. He looked more sad than angry. But the young blokes
were really angry, yelling at each other, asking each other who
started the calamity. Was it you, Skeeter? Was it you, Chesty?
They were eliminating each other loudly like that because they
were trying to shame the culprit into confessing. Even Jockey
and Blinkhorn and others were saying frankly they'd seen
Filmer open fire, and the name, the way they said it, dripped
with contempt.

I was half ready, I have to say, to turn my gun on the poor
fellow myself. And what a mistake that would have been.
Because we couldn't have got on in prison and at the trial
without him. I think Filmer was about to confess too. But the
Boss suddenly said it didn't matter who did it, it didn't change
anything, and he forbade them to talk about it and point
fingers. It had happened. The measure of all of us would be
what we did as a result of it happening. All the rest was
academic. More rain came up, and gloomy rain clouds. It
would help us get away, but had it come five minutes earlier
we would have got past Kaso in the murk.

Of course I already knew the outline of what had happened to
them. But I put the pages Hidaka had given me into the desk
drawer with the transcript. They would need to be faced, but
not yet. After a week, Laurie, aware of the influence they had
on my composure and my moods, asked me tentatively
whether I wanted him to read them, and he could then tell me
whether I needed to bother myself with them or not.

That won't be necessary, I told him starchily.

Well, he suggested, whatever's there, you have nothing
to reproach yourself with. You've been a good widow to
Leo.

Please don't discuss that, I told him unkindly.

It was for his sake that I knew I had to approach the
rough diary Leo had written and Hidaka had delivered fifty
years late. After three weeks of tension, I went to the
drawer and took up the pages. I knew about the attack on
the police, but not of the subtleties of that afternoon. The
details of their behaviour, like so much else in Leo's diary
pencilled dimly on yellowish-brown squares of harsh paper,
were new to me.

Throughout it all, as we know from the trial documents,
the wounded policeman, Sidek Bin Safar, was hanging on
to the stern of the launch, bleeding into the water and too
terrified to move. It was clear that Doucette reacted to the
calamity with the admirable calm and decisiveness of a
leader at the peak of his judgement and adaptability. He
declared the junk must be sunk with its Silver Bullets, the
submersibles, so they were to bring up the folboats for
launching and load the rubber raft with their supplies.
Using the marspikes designed by Major Enright, Leo and
Rufus attached limpet mines on short timers around the
inner hull of the junk. Sadly there were not too many
fathoms under the junk's keel, but Eddie Frampton's
elegant machines would at least be torn to fragments. All
the effort, all the mastery that went into learning to drive
them, was for nothing.

As the men prepared their packs and took to their
folboats, Charlie Doucette was back with what he really
liked – the pure human mechanics of the folboat, and
reliance on his own sturdy little body.

The Boss had two men watching Singapore from an
island named Subar, or NC11, which he used himself to
keep watch on the port the year before. They had their
folboat with them but would need to be collected. His,
Mortmain's and one other folboat crew would go and get
them. Leo was given the secondary job – he had to take a
flotilla of six folboats back to Serapem, NE1, the base
where Mel Duckworth waited. And I learned for the first
time from Leo's slabs of toilet paper that Doucette had his
reasons to abandon Leo and, if things went wrong, to court
death.

Leo writes,
The Boss was shouting orders from folboat to
folboat, and Jockey and I had a complete set of nine mines, and
you can imagine how I felt, being told to back away from
Singapore. I felt like that fellow Cherry Apsley-Garrard when
Scott told him he wasn't going to the Pole. I knew in my water
that once the Boss got to Subar he'd go on into Singapore
overnight, or the next night, and mine some ships. The Boss
rowed up close in his folboat and said, Get rid of your mines.
Because you have to look after them all, Leo. Filmer hasn't got
the skills for it. I'm sending you away because I don't want you
to run the risk of being captured with me. I can't be taken alive,
you see, otherwise they'll use Minette and the boy to get at me.

I said, Boss, why don't we all just come back to NE1?

After I've collected the team from Subar, he said.

I said, like a kid, You're coming back though, aren't you?
And he said, Certainly. But jettison your mines too, for speed.

His group rowed off, pulling the inflatable raft behind them.
It was packed with ammunition and explosives. Passing us in
his folboat, Rufus told me he had the two Japanese flags with
him, in case they were able to pirate another junk. So,
whichever way one looks at it, I was to have the lesser part.
Yet it was a comfort to be back at sea in the old folboat with
Jockey and my other fifteen blokes around, and I knew how
important each one was to people back in Australia.

Leo seemed to sense the Boss had become an angel of
self-destruction, he was not an angel of return. In the
meantime, Leo's world was contained in his folboat's
storage places fore and aft – their weapons, their iron
rations, their camouflage, the walkie-talkies, malaria
tablets. Suicide pills might have been left aboard in some
cases. They were not a high priority. Leo and the others,
still wearing the camouflage grease they called
commando
,
could not see each other's faces as dark came on.

We dispersed quickly in that late-afternoon sea. I'd say we
were pretty confident at that moment – somehow everything
had been resolved, we were pretty much in a state where we'd
forgotten the question of whoever had shot first.

When the junk went with two separate explosions, we
were a mile distant and nearly out of sight of the Boss and
Rufus. We felt the end through the canvas and through the
sea itself, our junk going to pieces, and our fine unused SBs,
the submersibles. I spent so long trying to fight a sense of
drowning and learn to handle the controls of those machines.
The helmet over the head was very claustrophobic, the mask,
pushing the controls down took some doing at first, with green
water everywhere, and you couldn't be sure what was up and
down. I got on top of the things, we all did for the sake of not
being drummed out. And they were gone now. We were awed,
the paddlers in the folboats around us stopped for a few
seconds, to let the successive jolts rock them. I called out then
in the after-silence, All right, gents. Now we just wait for the
sub home. Fremantle's Esplanade Hotel awaits us!

It's the sort of thing an officer's supposed to say – judging by
the war pictures I'd seen. And we all took up paddling again.

Michael Casselaine, Doucette's stepson, would later write
to me declaring how proud he was of the fact that after the
crisis with the junk, his father and seven others, including
Rufus, stayed around in the centre of the great archipelago
south of Singapore. People consoled themselves for losses
in various ways, and Michael Casselaine may well be right.
He points to three unidentified large wrecks in Singapore
Harbour the Japanese did not have time to label on their
maps before the war ended. Or more accurately – and,
according to Lydon, Hidaka is willing to go along with this
hypothesis, the poor fellow would go along with anything
for the sake of peace – they did not identify them because
they were ashamed they had occurred. Michael Casselaine
presumes these wrecks were the work of a last fling by
Doucette, and Mark Lydon, with whom I had reconciled,
tends to agree.

I did not say to Michael, Shouldn't your stepfather have
stayed with the bulk of his troops? Though it might have
changed nothing.

There is a long, low, coconut-groved reef island named
C5 on Memerang maps, though others call it Pangkill. It
was the sort of island that had a village whose chief task
was coconut harvesting for the owner, generally a Malay
nobleman or entrepreneur.

Whatever the Boss and his party had done in the Singapore
roads, they were still towing the rubber boat with all
of its equipment, including limpets, as if they were not
finished with their brave acts, when they got to that island,
Pangkill. Leo and his men were far to the east, and could
now be considered safe by the Boss. There were two
villages on Pangkill Island. Rufus took three men and went
and spoke to the head man of the south-western one, who
accepted their offer of cigarettes, and Doucette similarly
visited the village on the northern end, and had a meal of
fish and rice with the head man there. This head man,
Rajah Buja, was their betrayer, but they couldn't have
known, for he was genial towards them. And I am sure he
was genial, and wished them little personal harm. But they
were complicating his world. The Japanese recruited their
informers throughout the islands with the not-to-be-sneered-at
prize of a sack of rice per month, a few hundred
rupiah for special pieces of information. And beyond that,
many informants were pressed into service more by fear for
their family's safety than by lust for reward. Rajah Buja
knew the Japanese were paranoid about a fifth column,
were willing to torture and hang head men who did not
pass on news of untoward contacts, and bayonet and burn
villages. After the war, Buja could say to the investigators,
and no doubt did, that he was simply trying to save his
people.

Doucette and Mortmain would have presumed innocently
that a natural alliance and nostalgia for the old
British times would have given the head man an automatic
feeling of fraternity and warmth towards them. If imperial
powers have one naive trait, it is a total bewilderment
about why outsiders might resent them. Not all Doucette's
familiarity with and love of Malay culture would have
altered the betrayal. Not that Doucette had any other
choice than to make human contact, show his face. For it
was harder to betray a known face.

After their visits to the villages, they made a camp and
slept overnight there, but their view of the Japanese
anchorages off Bintan was blocked by a mole of a hill on a
neighbouring little island. So Doucette and three of his
party paddled over there to CE7A to keep an eye on any
Japanese movement. Banana trees, lily bushes and tussocks
of tall grass trees grew amongst the coconut palms. It
all made a good hide. Back on Pangkill, C5, Mortmain
remained with his partner. Early the next morning, a Malay
turned up and told Mortmain that Rajah Buja had taken a
motorised fishing boat west to Pandjang Island to report
the presence of the Memerang men to the district police
chief and thus, to the Kempei Tai. Mortmain immediately
paddled across to lush CE7A to warn Doucette.