The Widow and Her Hero

14

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 into 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 Heiho. 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 Heiho. 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 Bintang.

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 NC1, which he had used himself to keep watch on the port the year before. They had their folboat with them but would need to be collected, at least that. His, Mortmain’s and one other folboat crew would go and fetch them. Leo was given the secondary job – he had to take a flotilla of eight 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 wrote:

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 Japanese flag 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 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 the 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 Tom 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 headmen who did not pass on news of untoward contacts, and bayonet and burn villages. Buja could say to the investigators, after the war, 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 headman 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 Bintang 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.

One Indonesian man was living on CE7A, a coconut grove attendant who worked for the little island’s owner, and his name was Ahmed Dulib. He had with him his wife and one young child. His chief job was to cut down coconuts and extract the oil from them. He had a boiler, whose fire he fed with husks, going continuously. He had already spotted Doucette’s party, four white men, each with Sten gun and pistol, in green and khaki, and a badge – the Rising Sun Australian army badge – on their caps. (He would thus have made a good witness for the defence at the trial, except there would be no defence.) In passing, Doucette asked young Mr Ahmed to cut down some green coconuts for them, and so they enjoyed the milk, and then they had Ahmed split open the fruit, and savoured the meat.

On the afternoon of that same day, while boiling down the coconut oil near their hut, Ahmed and his wife saw two Japanese landing barges approaching their beach. They were Kempei Tai troops, who landed and came running up the beach and into the hinterland towards the hut. The Japanese had a Malay interpreter who found Ahmed and asked him about white men. Had he seen any on this island?

Ahmed, for whatever reason of resistance against the occupiers, or for the sake of a peaceful life, said he had not seen any. Whatever it was, this coconut oil man and island supervisor kept denying any sight of the fugitives, and became stuck with his first denial and had to play it boldly, and did so, poor fellow. A detachment took him back to the landing barge, while the others began searching the little tropic mole. From his encampment below the island’s slight hill, Doucette had also heard the noisy arrival of the landing craft. He organised his party of five around some trees and a clump of coral-like stones on the east side of the island. They saw the Kempei Tai coming and opened fire on them with their silenced weapons. It was as if a silent wind had pushed down the leading soldiers in the Kempei Tai advance. The Japanese were terrified, disoriented.

We are told the initial gun battle lasted two hours, before the Kempei Tai troops retreated to the clearing around Ahmed Dulib’s hut, where they laid down their dead and wounded. At some stage in that two-hour battle, however, Rufus Mortmain had felt the impact of a sniper’s bullet in his chest. By the time the Japanese pulled back amidst the palm trees, Rufus must have felt cold taking over his extremities, and a terrible uncertainty of breath. I find it hard to think of his death without tears, because his vanities were such boyish ones, he lolloped like a large, lithe dog around the bonfire, and now felt the reality of being devoured by flames. An awareness of his own death would obviously have settled on him.

Poor Ahmed Dulib was taken away on the barge by the Kempei Tai, but somehow his young wife, Mrs Dulib, who had been hiding from the Japanese with her baby, came out with her little girl and visited Doucette’s group. She bent over to feed water to the gasping Rufus Mortmain. One of the soldiers in the Memerang group, Private Meggitt, had a severe but less serious shoulder wound. Doucette spoke urgently to the young woman, telling her to take her little girl and get away, for the Japanese would be back in greater force. She seemed to accept what had happened calmly, which I think astonishing and in the truest sense heroic. By which I mean, in part, innocent and short-sighted as well.

If one wanted to be cruel, and I frequently and shamefully did in Doucette’s case, one could say Doucette now chose his own death rather than his duty to Leo and the others, when Leo had chosen him over me. I have to be frank that I’d always had this argument to wage with Leo, except he could not be reached for questioning.

Anyhow, for Doucette, things had gone messy beyond belief, the grand Memerang plan was in tatters, and thus he chose irresponsibly to orphan Leo. In the last hour of light, he and the two men still standing with him gave Rufus a dose of morphine to dope him up for the journey, loaded him and Private Meggitt into a folboat, gave Megitt a paddle to use one-handed and told them to head for NC2, ten kilometres south. Somehow, Meggitt completed the paddle to NC2. What athletes these young men were. But Doucette’s decision was crazy. Rufus was dying anyhow, yet to give him a meaningless ten kilometres start, Doucette threw his own life away.

Or so it seemed to me until Leo’s pencillings made things clearer.

On NC2, Rufus and Meggitt sheltered in rocks over which palm trees cast a shade. They were fouled with blood, but Meggitt administered his last shot of morphine to himself and Rufus, which helped their wounds to stop bleeding. The next day, landing Japanese found them sitting dead but still warm on a jungle rock ledge. Though the Allies would hide the fact from Dotty, though Lydon would not say it until the second edition of his book, glass was in their mouths – they had taken their suicide pills for fear of what they might say under torture.

Still on CE7A, Doucette took a new position and planned his fields of fire for the return of the Japanese. He put a tall young man named Private Appin, a prominent Victorian cricketer with a powerful throwing arm, in a pit to the right, with a large supply of hand grenades. He and Sublieutenant Lower, the submersible instructor, chose perches in ru trees with clear views down the avenues of palms. He planned to lay down enfilading fire with the silenced Stens. Doucette rested then, and waited until the afternoon, when they heard the noise of landing and patrol craft.

The garrison troops on board were commanded by a particular Major Ninasu. He was, Hidaka told Lydon, a tough nut, a veteran of China and all its horrors, some of which he had himself been guilty of.

Major Ninasu’s men penetrated the island in good order, sending scouts ahead, using the available cover to creep forward. There was no suicidal charge. But when the Japanese moved within range, Private Appin began throwing his grenades. In the midst of all the sudden flame and chaos, Doucette and the young naval officer and their silent Stens did lethal work, though in short bursts so that the flashes did not give away their location. Ahmed Dulib, who had been brought back on the barge and stood under guard in his clearing, saw the Japanese wounded coming back, being laid on the beach and attended to by medical orderlies. He would tell the war crimes investigators there were an astounding number early on – sixty of them.

As darkness came on, Ninasu sent forward some experienced scouts to draw fire from Doucette, and thus to discover where the Stens were in the darkness. There was by now too much blood around these groves of coconuts for any soldiers to proceed too calmly, but one of them got to within grenade range and blew Doucette out of his tree, after which the assassin was quickly shot to pieces by Sublieutenant Lower who himself, at the end of firing a long burst, was shot dead. Private Appin was still there somewhere, alive, but there was no triumphant charge to obliterate him, since there was a belief amongst the attackers that they had silenced only a portion of the fire which had done them so much damage.

Some twenty-five kilometres to the east, Leo and his men, who were and would remain ignorant of what befell Doucette and Rufus, had already come ashore at NE1 and met up with Mel Duckworth, the caretaker of that island, dropped earlier by the submarine. Shaped like a wine glass painted by Salvador Dali, the island had a hill, Hammock Hill, not very high at all, from where they kept watch and searched the sea for omens, expecting to see Doucette and the others at any time. It would have seemed astonishing to Leo, and it sometimes seems so to me, that a little bit of chemical could bring the living intentions of Rufus Mortmain to a halt so easily and promptly, or that Doucette’s huge intentions could be reduced to fragments of flesh by any weapon.

I know from Tom Lydon how unlucky Leo and his men on Serapem, NE1, now were. Lydon, in his study of the Japanese war files, discovered that a Japanese pilot flying a light aircraft from North Borneo to Singapore experienced a sudden alarm sound in the cockpit caused by lack of oil pressure. The pilot was carrying a naval officer and the Japanese manager of a bauxite mine in North Borneo, and the pilot told them he would need to make an emergency landing at the airfield on Bintang Island. He brought the plane in safely, and began to inspect it. There seemed to be a hole in the engine casing, which might have been caused by gunfire. The army in Singapore took no risks. They sent out troops to look for enemy agents and infiltrators on the islands to the east of the emergency landing, a task which would bring them ultimately to NE1. They sent a captain and a full company of men.

When the Japanese arrived, they landed on the west of Serapem or NE1, where Malay fishermen had a few huts. As his men unloaded weapons and ammunition from the barges, the captain, Captain Matsukata, another China veteran, issued a severe beating to one of the fishermen, and when that rendered him no extra information, moved inland from the beach.

We were making lunch at the normal place under the hill – mixing up the usual big stew of compo rations. Our life was very ordered – we spent time on watch, and we had dug a lot of supplies into the caches on the lower ground below Hammock Hill. Poor old Mel Duckworth, darling Grace’s cousin, who had been here alone since we went off on the junk, had been so pleased to see us.

I took Mel aside. I asked him what shape his Bolton radio was in. It’s good, he said. I’ve been cleaning the valves.

Let’s signal IRD to get that sub here.

Mel looked wistful. The problem is the Boss has the code page with him. You see, the code’s based on a page from Robbery Under Arms – IRD’s got their page, and the Boss has ours.

I wondered whether the Boss had remembered to fetch it from the Nanjang before it blew to pieces.

We couldn’t transmit in plain. The Japanese would come straight to us.

Well, I decided in my own head, this isn’t a tragedy, Leo. The sub will come. But there was all the more reason to miss the Boss, and daily we expected him. And there are a lot of empty hours when you’re hiding on a tropic island. That lunchtime, I was with the cooking group. Hearing the engines of the landing barges, we killed the fire, left the stew, and all grubbed our way up the little knoll at Hammock Hill. About four of the blokes were still missing – they had been excavating a new supply of rations Mel had hidden in the swamp. I sent Chesty off to fetch them. They came back in ones and twos, whispering, holding their weapons.

I made a line of my fellows below the ridge, and put three men down to the right to enfilade with a silenced Bren, and similarly three down to the left with their Stens. We looked out from amongst the volcanic rocks and foliage on the slope, and we could see the Japanese landing on the wide-open rocky, shingly beach, on the side where the coconut plantation grew wild, and they were exposed to anyone with weapons. A few seemed to have started a casual approach, but without any urgency, and I said to everyone, These jokers aren’t a danger. They’re ambling along. If we just hold fire and lie low.

Because we had pandanus and cactus palm and wild sago, as well as papayas and beetle nut and broad-leaf banana trees to hide behind, we could reposition ourselves better than they could. We watched the troops come walking in an orderly way over the volcanic rocks of the beach and into the coconut groves. They were still highly visible. They looked strange and innocent, spread out that way, as if you shouldn’t take advantage of them. They didn’t expect anything to happen. That was it. They looked like they might slope back to their barges at any stage.

Could we be struck twice by the same curse? It seems we could. The sort of thing that happens amongst recruits, but I suppose fear and excitement made all of us recruits. Someone slipped his safety catch while his finger was on the trigger of his Sten – everyone knows you shouldn’t do that. But the Sten fired silently, with a little hiss. It wouldn’t have mattered had no target been struck. The Japanese might have heard a sound like a few hard pellets of rain, that’s all. Except the bullets killed the captain that was leading, and his batman at his side. The Japanese looked at the two of them, pole-axed, not knowing where this damage came from. The rest of us began to fire and made a pitiful shambles of the advancing men. Then some of them became soldiers and hugged the ground, and others dragged their dead captain and their wounded into shelter. Even we could see that some were shattered, nearly cut in two, and their blood seemed to stain everyone near them. It was shocking what silenced Stens could do.

Another younger officer came up to take the captain’s place. He showed himself to be pretty competent. He kept his troops down and told them to direct fire to the hill, he’d worked out we were there. Full marks to him. He decided to stay low, and we could hear shouted and relayed orders. The afternoon thunderstorm rained on them and us both, clearing away the memory of their dead captain. Out on the beach, we could see the Japanese flogging some Malays into carrying the captain’s body to the barge. They beat the poor natives all the way across the stones, with half an eye on the hill all the time, worried about us, worried about our silent weapons.

I took a roll-call and two of our fellows, I discovered, hadn’t made it back through the jungle to us. They were a young army sergeant, Kelly, and an English fellow I hadn’t got to know so well because he had a quiet nature and seemed to choose chiefly to talk to his fellow Pom, Rufus. His name was Lieutenant Carlaw, and he had been assistant to Lower in teaching us how to ride the SBs. I hoped Kelly and Carlaw would join us on the hill once night fell. Then we could all slip away to one of the other islands, maybe Proma NE3, and we could hide there and creep back over here at night and wait for the rendezvous with the sub. I could see Proma from our position. Across the water it looked good to me – even thicker cover than NE1. But it seemed to lack a beach, at least on this side. Well, we’d just have to presume one existed on the blind-side.

When it was dark, Filmer and I sent the others off over the hill to fetch their folboats and drag them down to the beach on the east side of NE1. We were conscious that if the Japanese had landed there, we would have needed to fight for them. Leaving, the fellows moved as Rufus had taught them, flitting like ghosts. We saw a patrol boat circling the island, but Jockey timed it and it appeared off the eastern beach only every few hours. I went down to send all but one folboat away. In the acute dark, we had been able to find only seven of the vessels, not enough for all. We had been trained how to handle this. Three of the boats would need to tow a passenger, and we used the stratagem in each case of a pair of trousers stuffed with coconut husks, the passenger floating in the Y and holding on as he was dragged through the water. Jockey and I were leaving last so we weren’t burdened in this way. We went back to Hammock Hill after the first six boats got off and waited till the last hour and minute, 3.45 a.m., for Kelly and Carlaw to turn up. It was such a little, intimate island. We had to presume they’d been killed or captured. Otherwise, we reckoned, they’d easily be able to find their way back to our hill.

At the last we smashed the Bolton radio we weren’t able to use because the code had been sunk in the junk or was with the Boss. But we all had walkie-talkies in our boats for contacting the Orca when it turned up. We had packed the folboat so tight with supplies, there wasn’t really room for my legs, so I paddled kneeling.

Pushing off the beach with Jockey, I felt a real dingo. Lieutenant Carlaw was apparently an Oxford graduate in Middle Eastern Studies. Kelly was only twenty years old, and an athlete, and a handsome kid, a bright one too. We made a very nice little beach on the west side of NE3 – Proma – twenty minutes before dawn.