The Widow and Her Hero

11

It would turn out that Foxhill had been planning a rescue operation, Memexit. But it had not got support from others in IRD, who secretly believed the entire party were all dead or captured by Christmas.

It was all distressingly vague, and the bereaved hate vagueness, especially if they don’t know whether they’re really the bereaved or not. Dotty and I spent a miserable Christmas together in the flat. My parents had invited me home, the Foxhills had invited us to their table. But we wanted to get it done with in our own company. I relieved my depression by writing the poem ‘To the Beloved Missing in Action’, but I didn’t show it to Dotty, not then.

The New Year was a relief. Whether the war ended or not, it would be the year in which something more definite would emerge. The Germans surrendered as expected, but no surrender was predicted for the Japanese. Dotty went out with Colonel Creed now and then, and I’d learn there was an affair. In a way, I envied her the option.

Dotty and I were both working the morning the fiery end to Japan’s war came. Dotty called me and asked me to a party at Colonel Creed’s office, where – I discovered when I arrived – the gin and Scotch flowed copiously, and everyone kissed and did the Hokey-Cokey, the latest brainless dance craze. Dotty and I were both edgy with hope and dread. We would soon hear of our loves missing in action, but we said nothing about it. That would have been to provoke the savage gods who, for some, hung over the coming of peace.

News did not come quickly. It was the Chinese driver of one of the Japanese judicial officers who told an investigating Australian that he had driven his master to the place where the executions took place, a nondescript field of weeds along Reformatory Road. He also said he had exchanged a brief conversation in Mandarin with one of the condemned men while they were still sitting and standing near the bus which had brought them, and told him to prepare himself for death, and that he should consider telling the others the same. No, said the condemned man – certainly Jockey Rubinsky – I know already and they more or less know. The condemned man was very brave, said the Chinese driver. They all were. When the truth became apparent there was no pleading, though a few of them retched from the smell of blood as they were led blindfolded to the edge of one of the three pits in which the earlier slaughtered lay. A month after the end of the war, the Australians found the rough graves. Six crosses had been put there – it seemed more as stage-dressing and for appeasing effect rather than from true respect.

The bodies were exhumed the next day. Two days later and I knew. Rufus was not among the dead there. Leo and my cousin Mel Duckworth were. But another three days passed before a Malay led the British to where Rufus had perished, it seemed at first of wounds. I, half a week widowed myself, became the consoler then.

We could have kept the flat in Melbourne indefinitely, and we did stick on in that place booby-trapped by memory until October, when Dotty used her influence to get on one of the troop ships returning to Britain after delivering Australian soldiers home. There was a not quite rational sense in which she was abandoning me, and although neither of us raised the idea it would sometimes enter between us and make us awkward. I saw her off on her troopship from Port Melbourne, and then packed up quickly and went to Sydney, since it was to me a city unsullied by events. I was lucky to find a small flat and there, before Christmas, I received a visit from a thin young officer named Captain Gabriel, a survivor of Japanese imprisonment who had now been given the duty of investigating the enemy’s crimes against Leo’s party.

At the time I was trying to be brave for Leo’s sake – Leo’s presence still so strongly abided that I would sometimes forget that I had joined that venerable category known as War Widow.

The first visit Captain Gabriel made was to tell me the Japanese court-martial that condemned Leo and the others was specious, and investigations were afoot into its legality. The general responsible, Okimasa, had suicided, and others involved were under investigation for a number of other crimes as well. And I was nervous of Captain Gabriel, of how news he gave me, and questions he asked, would impose on me revised duties of grief and vengeance when I found it hard enough still to bear the initial grief and anger of discovering Leo had been executed. Gabriel himself remained earnest, dedicated and analytical, seeming more haunted than angry. I was outraged and consoled by one detail in particular. He told me that he had interviewed a man named Hidaka, an interpreter who seemed to have made friends with Leo and the others, and had brought them sweets and tobacco right up to the end. I could see them all sitting around, their jaws swollen with Chinese lollies Hidaka gave them, Amanetto, Yokan, Daifuku. This stood as a substantial item of mercy in opposition to the blades of the Japanese NCO’s swords.

As for the rest I had been stopped in place by the news of Leo’s execution. The truth I was ashamed of was this: I did not want any minor and peripheral information about it all. What could adjust the fact? When I dared look at the idea of execution, I was dazzled and disabled by its vibrant blackness. Leo’s body was irreparably violated. That reality lay in the supposed paths of healing like an unnegotiable boulder. My curiosity was paralysed, and there was something in me that feared new knowledge, even if this state of mind was a disgraceful thing in a widow.

Captain Gabriel visited me twice. The second time, in 1947, was to tell me the execution of Leo and other Memerang men would not be the subject of a war trial, but that various judicial officers, including the president of the court, Sakamone, had killed themselves, and the NCOs who did the work of execution, including the one who made a botch of Leo, Judicial Sergeant Shiro Abukara, were all in prison, Abukara for life, for other acts of cruelty in Outram Road Prison in Singapore. What could a war crimes prosecution do about the mess the war had put us in? All this war crimes work, which Gabriel would end up spending three years on, and his superiors a half-dozen years or more, was to me nothing but the sort of pottering around the edge of a cauldron. Even two years after the war, the shameful truth was that I was happy to let it, them, all go. Since I was terrified that the more I heard, the more likely I was to find out some terrible, indigestible reality, I felt a bad wife.

I had been working as a secretary in the office of a hotel broker named Laurie Burden. The business was one his father had founded, and Laurie Burden had taken it over in early 1946, after he returned from England, where he had flown transport planes. He was a pensive young man, and rarely took a drink. I liked working for him. But I was aware of the entitlements of my widowhood, including the chance of a university education. I wanted to teach – it seemed that children, of whatever age, would totally absorb my time. Without Leo, I wanted a new self-definition. I felt that if I were stupefied and hypnotised in place by events, as had happen for the past two years, he would be posthumously displeased. Besides, I had a horror of being stuck without company on that island of widowhood – that description, War Widow, was so inadequate an explanation for the woman Leo had let me become.

Yet in another sense I suppose I unconsciously cultivated widowhood, writing verse about it, some of which Dotty got published in English literary mags. That poem of mine, ‘To the Beloved Missing in Action’, became a minor classic, much anthologised.

I did my degree and teacher training. Laurie Burden had remained my friend and attended the graduation. It was not until 1952 when I was teaching English to high-school girls at North Sydney that we became lovers, not moving to each other with the certainty which had been the mark of my life with Leo, but more like two wounded creatures trying not to hurt each other. For Laurie, as he ultimately told me, had certain bewilderments too. He had toured Germany with his father in 1935, a busman’s holiday during which they had visited all the leading hotels of Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt. Flying into those cities on transport missions, he had been appalled to find all the splendour reduced to such absolute rubble. Earlier in the war, he had his own brush with heroes when he delivered members of the specially trained leadership groups whose job was to gather Maquis units into powerful garrisons in the countryside. The fortified positions were prematurely taken up and were reduced by the enemy with great slaughter, from which few survivors emerged. Laurie lacked the urge to march through Sydney with his former comrades on Anzac Day because he did not see how it would help or even enlarge the spirits of the doomed fellows he had delivered to France.

I had been at work as a teacher for a few months when a woman named Rhonda Garnish, an angel of great inconvenience, visited me. The dreary and deadly Korean War was still going, nuclear threat pressed down from the sky and challenged our innocence, and the past war, vividly recalled by millions of its victims, was nonetheless on its way to becoming historical, an item of study.

Mrs Rhonda Garnish descended on me from the Northern Rivers Mail train. She had called me from the north coast, near Grafton, and said she needed to see me, and we made arrangements. I met her in Spit Road, Mosman, as she got down from the bus from town. She was a small woman, very pretty, with a plumpness which might take over in later years but which had a long way to go before it smudged her good looks. She managed her port tied up by two leather straps with a wiry strength, and when I shook hands with her, I could tell by the raspiness of her palm that she was a dairy farmer’s daughter.

But she was smart.

Listen, Grace, she told me on the street, holding me by both wrists, don’t let me talk you around. Just because I’m going to Canberra it doesn’t mean you have to. This is the right time for me to go, that’s all.

All right, I told her. We’ll talk about it at home.

Hey, I saw that write-up of your book of poetry in the Herald. Crikey. They thought the world of you. It made me think twice before I wrote you a letter. There’s another woman too, Mrs Danway.

I don’t know her, I protested.

Rhonda said, Her husband was Hugo Danway. He wasn’t on the first one, Cornflakes. And he arrived over in Western Australia just in time to join them on the second trip.

Danway. Yes, I recognised the name.

He was one of the group, I said.

Yes, the Japanese beheaded him too. I’m going to visit her, but don’t let me drag you along. As my husband says, I’m a bossy cow.

I took her home to my little flat – I had not yet married Laurie and the proprieties were observed. I’d made a cake for her, and she ate heartily, and drank her tea strong and black and with three sugars.

You see, what happened, she told me, was I was engaged to Pat Bantry. Did your husband ever mention him?

Yes, I lied.

I had a crush on him since I was thirteen. I’d be getting ready for school and I’d see Pat drive the old Bantry Hupmobile full-pelt down our hill and over the wooden bridge, and all the timbers of the bridge would slam together in protest. I can’t hear that sound to this day without my heart missing a go.

My hands were sweating. What did she want, this young wife from the Northern Rivers, who had a perfectly good husband at home in Aldavilla, and had left him to cook his own meals and patiently keep her bed warm, and all for the sake of ghosts? I had let her into my house for Leo’s sake, for the sake of his honour, for which as a good widow I was supposed to be hungry. Rhonda Garnish went on extolling Pat Bantry as the ultimate cow-cocky and bushman. The corn up on the Clarence River grew eighteen feet tall, she said, but Pat harvested the Bantry crop as well as Rhonda’s father’s. She and her brother had helped him when he offered to rebuild the floodgate on Sawpit Creek, and he brought along a picnic in a sugar bag – he must have looted the Bantrys’ kitchen pantry.

Pat would often go bush, cutting tea tree, and he’d cart it in for Mr Bantry’s distilling plant. Mr Bantry was from Ireland, she told me, and knew all about distilling, but he was a great admirer of tea tree oil, which he called ‘The Australian Panacea’, and sold at agricultural fairs up and down the Northern Rivers.

Bantry seemed the ultimate Australian, even though he’d been born in Ireland and come here as a child. On top of all else, he’d gone cutting sleepers and bridge-bearing timbers with Rhonda’s uncle, who said he was the most cheerful of company in the bush camp, and never swore but had as much wit as most swearers. Furthermore, this bush paragon had broken in a small team of steers and used them to snig a fence strainer, thus becoming an invaluable friend to every farmer on Sawpit Creek. And when the war brought petrol rationing, Pat had easily converted the Hupmobile into a kerosene burner.

These were the polished feats which had enchanted the young Rhonda. Everyone, Rhonda included, had been astonished when Pat volunteered early in the war. There was a story that a recruiting sergeant managed to get abstemious Pat full of bombo in Grafton (Leo’s home town, by the way). It might have been a version Pat wanted spread, since old Mr Bantry was not a lover of the British Empire in itself. When Pat vanished to North Africa, Rhonda hung on news of him. He was a member of the Sixth Divvy, that fabled division. After defeating the Italians, they moved up to Syria and beat the Vichy French, before returning to Libya to face Rommel.

Home on leave in early 1943, like a god descending, he proposed to Rhonda. Her parents didn’t like Catholics but they liked Pat, who was still robustly teetotal and non-swearing. She began taking instruction in the Catholic religion from the local parish priest. She was willing to cross any barrier and bridge any gap to be his mate. He became a weapons instructor at the Kunungra jungle training school, and so was safe from battle, and Rhonda could not overcome her astonishment that, all that time, he had watched and admired her. She was disappointed when he did not want to settle in the instructor’s job. She was aware of and a bit frightened by a restlessness in him. Like the blokes who came back from World War I, her father said. They were the only blokes who could understand themselves.

They intended to get married in January 1945. But of course… her trousseau waited until 1949, when a man named Ron Garnish came back from serving in the army occupying Japan, started a tyre business in town, began by taking her out and then asked for her hand.

She had been married a year or so, and had a miscarriage, very sad, but the doctor up in Grafton reckoned there was no reason she wouldn’t bear healthy children. And then she had opened the door of her little house one morning and Pat Bantry was standing there, looking just a bit dazed. Where’s the reward, Rhonda? he asked her, and then he was gone. She knew he was dead, of course, but she would have known anyhow, because he was talking with great effort over a great distance. She said she knew she should have been embarrassed to say she had seen and heard from the deceased, except that would be to deny the effort she believed Pat had made to speak to her. She told her husband as early as lunchtime that day. We don’t hide things from each other, she said. In any case there were still mothers and wives all over the Clarence River who had confusing visits from the war’s dead sons and husbands. Mrs Bantry was rumoured to have had a visitation from Sergeant Bantry too.

Ron Garnish proved such a tolerant and understanding fellow that he took her seriously. Many husbands wouldn’t have, would have talked about old flames and so on. She assured her husband of her full loyalty to him, but she hoped he would not stop her from seeing the Minister of Defence about a reward for Pat Bantry, who could have been safe in Queensland for the duration if he hadn’t been such a convinced man of action. She didn’t speak to the aging Bantrys, who were still inconsolable about their son. (Indeed, they sounded more or less like me, in terror of more information than could be accommodated.) It was up to her, as Pat’s former fiancée, to put the matter to rest. What if we went as a delegation? she suggested. You and me and Mrs Danway, if she’d be in it? The Minister couldn’t refuse to receive the spokeswomen for three heroes. Especially since one of them had written a famous poem about a lost husband.

I knew, of course, I had to go. I had had so many dreams myself that I was in no position to laugh at the idea of Pat Bantry’s spirit turning up thirsty for merit at Rhonda’s door. She told me one of the support troops, the Beta men who worked on getting the expedition away from Western Australia, had told her after the war that Pat always kept her picture upright on his boot box, and when some of the other men began talking about their adventures with women, he would say, This isn’t for your ears, dear, and turn her picture face down. The more she talked about it, the more I thought it was this tale, as much as the appearance of Bantry’s ghost, which had her by the throat.

She’d gone to the trouble of looking up the train timetable for us, Sydney to Canberra, and the names of Canberra boarding houses. I told her about the Kurrajong, where I used to stay. They knew me there.

How could I refuse to get on a train to Canberra when Leo had walked under his own power onto that murderous weed-bed at Reformatory Road?

We weren’t able to see Mrs Danway until the following Saturday afternoon. Laurie had a vehicle and would have happily taken Rhonda and me across the city to Kogarah, where Mrs Danway lived in a flat. But I did not want that. My affection for him was still not of the kind that looked to acquire debts of kindness, not yet, and as he would say later, even after five years I hadn’t cleared my slate of the war. Indeed, there were a lot of people like me, a whole sub-class of women in the world, invisible except to each other, who were making their dazed way amongst a society obsessed with housing shortages and electricity strikes, with horse-racing and football, and who were being told against their own instincts that the war was over and suddenly remote, and the dead to be referred to only at ceremonial moments.

When these women visited each other, they usually travelled by ferry, bus and train, as did Rhonda and I. They had generally been left short of the means to hire taxis, or buy a car. Mrs Danway met us at Kogarah Station and walked with us back to her little flat. She was a thin woman, older than Rhonda or me by as much as five years. I was a little ashamed I had not sought her out earlier. It seemed now the most obvious thing I should have done. I should have contacted all of them. I told her I was sorry we hadn’t met previously.

Oh, she said, as if it forgave me, Hugo was a late inclusion.

She told us at some stage that afternoon that she had lost Lieutenant Danway’s child after the men disappeared to Western Australia, so that between her and Rhonda there were two lost children. She told us Danway loved the training camp over in the west. Doucette had taken him on rather late in the process, so that he had to endure long training sessions to catch up with the others. She showed us a letter he had written. Rufus had him climbing hills and canoeing by the mile from 8.30 in the morning till two the next afternoon. On that coastline, the tent accommodation was very cold at night, said Lieutenant Danway. But it was the same for everyone, he said, and Doucette had infused everyone with a wonderful sense of unity. Everyone pitched in, officers and men, all equals in Doucette’s eyes, and so all very energetic and in an inventive frame of mind. She raised her eyes as she read that, as if it showed some kind of innocence, which it did. Doucette is a particular kind of Englishman, Danway said. The other Poms aren’t like him at all.

Hugo Danway had been a great canoeist, Mrs Danway said, attributing it to his Islander blood – his mother had been a woman from the Marianas Islands, and his father an Australian missionary. And yet his whole leave time he would spend with her, with Sherry Danway, on the block of land he’d bought by the harbour. He had made drawings of the house he intended to raise there after the war.

We didn’t have to ask. Rhonda and I knew that she had had to sell the land. With it and what he had put in his building account she had bought this little flat, she said. I keep busy, she claimed, and then she raised her stricken eyes. Isn’t it heartbreaking, she asked, when a fellow is so young and full of life and hope and skill, and then the axe? An obscene death for very little purpose.

Those words, very little purpose, hung nakedly in the air. I did not like their presence. Dotty Mortmain had been very angry with Rufus for not reappearing by the New Year of 1945, but she said it was due to his desire to keep Doucette out of trouble by following him into it. That axiom or mantra – or whatever you’d call it – took up a solid residence in my mind too, but applied to Leo instead of Rufus. But the words very little purpose threatened to reopen the issue and to revisit the flimsy story I consoled myself with.

They were brave men, Rhonda insisted.

But what for? asked Sherry Danway. After all? What for?

Rhonda said, Men believe they’re born to be brave, and you see hollow men walking round who’ve never had a chance to try it. Or else they failed. But your husband… braver than MacArthur for a start. Braver than any politician. Braver than that old soak Blamey.

And I thought there was something to that, too. To men of a certain kind, not to all men, but to some men in certain circumstances and under the force of certain ideas, bravery was its own end. That comforted me a little when put up against very little purpose. The purpose was to be brave, the purpose was even to be doomed.

Mrs Danway said, I don’t think I want to go to Canberra. I’m sorry. The truth is, I couldn’t care two bob whether they give my husband a medal or not. It has no effect on me or my memory of my husband. It’s certainly not worth risking going to Canberra to hear his name rolled round the mouth of some shitty old official.

She was very firm about that, and I felt embarrassed that I didn’t know my own mind, that I had been shamed into going with Rhonda. Rhonda gave up and said to me, The train into Central’s due in twenty minutes, Grace. We ought to start out.

In fact, the station was in sight when Sherry Danway came running after us. I’ll go, she called after Rhonda. What time should I meet you at Central?

Rhonda yelled the details as we sprinted for the train. I’ll see you there, she cried, and I asked myself, Who elected you leader? Sherry Danway and I had lost husbands. Rhonda was a wilful, married woman dragging two reluctant widows into a confrontation they didn’t want to have.

The following Tuesday we all met precisely where Rhonda had decided, the country-train indicator board at Central. Rhonda and I had got quite friendly by now. On Sunday, we’d shared a picnic at Bradley’s Point. On Monday, Laurie Burden took us to a five o’clock session of The Third Man at the Regent Cinema. It was a wonderful tale of complexity arising from the war, and was strangely comforting, since it implied we were still stuck in that same territory too, in a land of shadows. I was convinced by then that Rhonda was indeed a splendid woman. I reassured myself she would not let her grief for Pat Bantry trample on my own decisions about grief, or complicate it all for me.

I remember my view of myself in those days with some amusement and with a sense of loss as well. I was at thirty-one considered almost too old to bear a first child. I saw Sherry Danway and myself as already middle-aged, already bowed by history, and as unentitled to girlishness. It was as a coven of senior women that we met by the huge indicator board at Central, and took our reserved seats in a carriage with pictures of the Blue Mountains above the upholstery, and a cut-glass water bottle above our heads, clinking in its brass retainer. We were all nervous and had brought plenty of reading matter of one kind and another. I was reading Evelyn Waugh, his world remote from my experience, and thus a good one to lose myself in.

When we arrived in Canberra, there was no snow on the Brindabellas out to the west, and the town seemed ominously vacant, still mainly populated by eucalyptus foliage, as if everyone who had an answer for us had fled. We caught a taxi to our hotel, and despite enquiries about buses, were forced to take another cab to the Department of Defence in its bark-strewn parkland. Though Parliament was not in session, the minister had agreed to see us here. Mr Philip McBride had been a regular member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Menzies. I had seen his face in the press and on newsreels. His office at the department was a plain big room with a massive desk, for which one or two native cedar trees must have been plundered. The office was heartened with pictures of fighter planes and bombers, an aircraft carrier and a cruiser. The planes in the pictures were at ease with the sky. The ships had the sea where they wanted it.

We three were already seated in there when Mr McBride entered with a young man who carried a number of files. Don’t get up, ladies, said the minister, as he made his way around the desk. We did half stand in honour of his political gravity, but we were not as innocent as we had once been, so did not overdo it.

The minister settled in his chair and the young man sat on a harder one by the corner of the business end of the desk. He began briefing himself on who we were from the notes on his desk.

Rhonda said, Perhaps you remember? We’re the women calling on you about the Memerang men.

Ah yes, ah yes, said Mr McBride. Brave men.

He looked up at us, and caught our eyes. Every one of them, he assured us.

Rhonda explained, I was merely the fiancée of Sergeant Bantry. Mrs Waterhouse and Mrs Danway were married to the officers of those names.

Mr McBride asked, The men were…?

His secretary muttered something. Oh yes, said Mr McBride, dolorously. Terrible, terrible. Members of the enemy were never charged over it, I’ve been told, but I believe that most of the people involved were caught for war crimes of another stripe.

Rhonda sat back to allow Mrs Danway and myself to take up the running. We were both guiltily reluctant, but at last I said, We are all concerned that none of the men have been honoured for that last operation.

Mrs Danway stepped in, anxious to emphasise that she knew it was no substitute for a husbandly presence. Not that it will bring them home, sir. But they did something very adventurous, and it seemed that no one gave them a lot of credit for it.

Mr McBride turned to his secretary. Was it normal for men to be honoured for secret operations? he asked. Were other IRD men honoured?

The young man looked up from his files. Not normally, sir, he told his master. Only in special circumstances.

I said, My husband, Captain Waterhouse, was awarded the DSO for an earlier mission.

The young man rose and whispered further to Mr McBride. The cabinet minister knotted his broad brow as the whispers entered his ear. At last he said, Ah yes, Mrs Waterhouse, that was for Cornflakes.

He shook his head. These names, he said, chuckling a little. But that was exceptional.

Pat Bantry got the Military Medal, Rhonda said. In North Africa. But Singapore was where he gave everything. And yet there is nothing at all for that.

Mr McBride said, I’m sure it was given every consideration at the time. His secretary was passing another file to him which he quickly read. Oh yes, the policy was reinforced in 1943 after the Cornflakes expedition.

But he read further into the file, squinting his eyes up into a frown now and then. You see, he explained, on Cornflakes they all came back. So they were all witnesses to each other’s valour. Sadly, there were no witnesses left after Memerang, and hence no military awards.

He looked up. I know it’s harsh, but it is apparently the rule.

I believe we all became simultaneously annoyed at this pettifogging. Mrs Danway said, But there are enough witnesses now. We know what happened, don’t we? From witnesses. From the records.

I said, Captain Gabriel told me even the enemy thought they were brave.

And they gave more than most people ever did, said Sherry Danway with an edge. More than any general ever gave.

The minister let a painful smile cross over his face, left to right. Well, you’re probably right about that, he admitted. Of course they had cyanide pills… Did you know that? All such operatives were issued with them.

I hadn’t known. Though I’d heard rumours about it, mainly from Dotty, no one had told us that officially. We took a while to absorb it.

I can’t imagine Leo taking a suicide pill, I told McBride. And I don’t think he should have been expected to.

Hugo would never have taken his, said Sherry. It was against his religion.

Would you give them a medal if they all took their suicide pills? asked Rhonda.

No… The minister knew he had made a tasteless mistake and was back-pedalling. No, suicide is contrary to my principles too.

Though I had sustained myself to this point as well as I could, I wanted to the meeting to be over. I wanted it to end in Mr McBride’s reasonable surrender. Now that we’d done our duty, I wanted to him to say, Of course! What an oversight! I’ll take it up immediately and achieve justice for these men.

Then I wanted to gallop down the stairs without the burden of any further knowledge. If you had asked me what I was scared of I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Poor Leo deserved a more valiant wife. But then I thought, What are Dotty or Minette doing? They were fussy women. Though Dotty wrote to me and kept me informed of Minette, she had never mentioned their trying to make a fuss about the men with Whitehall.

So I summed up the feelings of my sisters in grievance. It seems strange to me, I said, that they were decorated for Cornflakes, which didn’t kill them, and not for Memerang, which did.

Well, said McBride, it was considered at that time by a thorough-going military commission, young lady, and there are no grounds on which I could reverse their decision. Anyhow, look how often the story of Doucette’s raiding parties are told in the press. The Memerang people will always be honoured and known to future generations. I really think you’ll have to be content with that.

I doubt very much that Sergeant Bantry is happy to let it go at that, Rhonda told the minister.

McBride smiled at her with a sort of heavily tested tolerance.

We’re sadly in no position to know that, young lady.

I prayed she would not admit to having seen the ghost, which of course would enable him to end the meeting very promptly. He took this moment of confusion to break away from the mid-desk seat and go to lean over his male secretary for yet another muttered conference. The secretary pointed out paragraphs in files he handed to his superior. McBride scanned them before putting them down again on the desk with a Yes, yes.

Through this, Sherry Danway’s eyes remained fixed on his vacated chair. She was pale but – like me – was sticking it out. As the minister returned to his seat, she said suddenly and in a near shout, I think if we tell the newspapers… I think they’ll find it all pretty strange like we do.

This did upset the minister a little. Look, they can’t make any judgement on this matter. At least I am operating on full information. Besides, why now? There is another war raging. Perhaps you should have come forward earlier.

That idea struck us hard – that we’d delayed. In fact, all Sherry Danway and I could do was look at each other, surrendering the advantage to the minister. But Rhonda went on fighting for us. But come on, you have to be fair, Mr McBride, she protested. In those days it was hard for these women to say anything. Memerang were missing. Then every month they learned something new, and it was never good news. They were as scared as billy-oh of what they’d hear next. And in any case, they’re here now.

The minister nodded, conceding all this. Look, he said, I sincerely urge you all to leave this issue where it stands. I could tell you some committee or other would return to it. But that would be a lie. The matter is finally settled. I wish you’d take my word on that. So, for your own sakes…

Our only power, I could sense, was that he was worried we might weep, scream or do some of the other things that made men his age lose their natural colour and close one eye and wince at the messiness of the world. And we could not leave. We didn’t know whether his advice was kindness or a lie. He turned to his secretary.

Would you like to talk about this, Mr Henley?

A man unleashed, Mr Henley was happy to. But McBride had a sudden doubt. He held his hand up. Ladies, why not just accept my word on this and go away from here certain of the bravery of your husbands, your… men.

Rhonda leaned forward to check our faces. She said, We can’t all go away now, Mr McBride. You’ve raised a mystery.

All right, then, he said, and nodded to Henley. Henley told us that the Memerang men had been considered for awards and decorations. But, he said, there was a further problem than lack of witnesses. As part of the operation, the group had been trained to use a new and very valuable submersible craft. This craft was of such revolutionary design that it allowed operatives to approach enemy ships without being seen. During their training the men learned to handle these craft, and it was impressed on them that if intercepted they were to destroy these vessels and say nothing to the enemy about them. When things did go wrong, they destroyed the vessels. But fragments were retrieved by the Japanese from a shallow sea floor, and presented with these fragments, a number of the Memerang personnel were betrayed into giving information… I stress they were probably tricked. Your husband was one, Mrs Waterhouse, and yours another, Mrs Danway. I’m afraid SOE in London, who had ownership of the craft, were very angry about it. And it certainly vitiated any chance of awards and honours.

At this news I felt my consciousness departing and leaned forward in my chair, letting out a great Oh!

McBride said, It doesn’t matter at all. They were still heroes, and no one’s going to bring out the matter of the submersibles publicly. It would need to come out, of course, only if you made public accusations that we were niggardly towards those men. Are you all right, Mrs Waterhouse?

He was rising in his seat. I felt heeled-over, hanging at a disastrous angle, and when I tried to correct that I stumbled off my chair. I certainly could not speak. There was a flurry of people entering the office and bringing water, but that made me angry for some reason, and with normal irritation, I returned to myself.

Does it mean they were tortured? I asked. I meant, tortured about the submersibles.

For the first time the minister showed some unease. He mumbled, I think it was more a matter of deception and feint…

I stood up. I said, I can’t bear it if they were tortured!

My ears were ringing. I knew I was failing Leo, not up to his strength. I have no clear memory from that point until Rhonda and Sherry were taking me down the stairs and assuring various women staff that I was fine now and that we didn’t need tea. It would have been impossible for us to drink in McBride’s shadow. I couldn’t have borne it.

We were fortunate that in the vacant parkland beyond the front door, a cab was discharging a passenger. Rhonda ran and captured it, and we all got in without a word. The only things said during the journey were by Rhonda. I probably shouldn’t have pushed this trip on you, she told us wanly. Neither Sherry Danway nor myself were speaking.

We arrived at the boarding house, and Mrs Danway got out immediately and hurried inside, still without saying anything. Since Rhonda had insisted on paying the first fare, I applied my confused mind to paying this one. Then we caught up with Sherry – she was in the lobby asking the girl for her key. Rhonda took her by the arm and said something about hoping she was not too upset. She did not get an answer. Well-meaningly, she followed Sherry to the stairs. Don’t go up to your room, Sherry. Let’s have a cup of tea and all cheer up. Why should we give a damn about these submersible boats? If it saved any of them from getting beaten up, all the better!

Sherry Danway said, I wish I’d never seen you. You’ll go home to your husband. Nothing’s lost to you. Grace and I go home knowing our husbands are blamed, and the blame will always be there, in some file. I thought I was as lonely as a person could be. But you’ve managed to make it worse. I have a different picture of Hugo I have to live with now.

She covered her eyes with a web of fingers. Poor bloody Danway, she said. Wanting to build his house. Poor helpless big bugger!

I went up to her and held her, and began to feel her inner collapse and the release of tears. It was as if the impact of the original news of execution had occurred all over again. It was exactly as Sherry had said. The minister had given us a new dimension to the version of their deaths we had become accustomed to and managed to live on with. We both doubted we had the strength to absorb new versions.

Rhonda moved to join us in our mourning, but I dissuaded her with a severe look. I felt Sherry Danway’s crazy, unstoppable anger too.

Rhonda’s face filled with colour. You blame me for this? she asked. Do you?

Yes, I admitted. Don’t worry. We can’t help it. But it was never your business!

On the way back to Sydney on the train, we all read and moped. Rhonda knew that whatever she said it could call up a fury in us. I went especially to get a cup of tea with her in the buffet car, and I was able to summon the grace to say to her again, Don’t worry. It’s not your fault.

If I were married to Bantry, she said, I wouldn’t blame him for anything he gave away.

Do you really think we blame our husbands? Of course, we bloody well don’t.

I felt a desire to hurt her badly – even with a blow. But it had to be suppressed. I warned her though. You’re in no position to understand it or be impatient with us.

She sighed and looked out the window. She was a good woman, slow to take offence.

I realise I shouldn’t have come, she said, only partly in chagrin.