The Widow and Her Hero

16

You wouldn’t believe, Grace, how calm I am now, here in Outram Road. The way I see things, I’ve got two people to be thankful to. One’s Hidaka and the other’s mad old Filmer. He’s such a character. I’ve got to say it’s just as well we’ve got him here. Hidaka’s brought Filmer some books from the Raffles College Library, and they’re P. G. Wodehouse stories which Filmer reads us at night in all the right Pommy accents and gets us laughing. Could have been an actor, Filmer, and he might be, he says, if he gets out of here. He says he knows some fellows in the Royal Marines that have got connections at the BBC. He also says that he’s related through his mother to one of Bernard Shaw’s Irish brothers. Filmer says they were all drunks, except George Bernard Shaw, who was a vegetarian, but he was just as mad as them without taking to drink. Filmer can do all the accents in Shaw too, this book of plays, Plays for Puritans, Hidaka gave him. The Devil’s Disciple is the best one of the three plays for us, because it’s like our situation, men under sentence, etc. In fact we’ve started calling ourselves the DDs – the Devil’s Disciples. We like the chief character’s gumption. None of us are really keen on Caesar and Cleopatra, but Captain Brassbound’s Conversion has a whole range of accents in it.

They’ve given us a mess room, and during meal times Filmer organises us into parts and goes through our lines with us, and then after lock-up we’ve got Blinkhorn, who has got better quicker than we could have hoped, doing Cockney from one cell and Hugo Danway doing the Yankee Captain Kearney from another, and Filmer doing Lady Cecily from a third, and prompting us, and it’s all great for our spirits. I’m doing a couple of Captain Brassbound’s sidekicks at the moment, but I’m going to take over the role of Brassbound from Jockey in a week or so. Jockey can do an English gentleman’s accent, you wouldn’t believe it. I really take back everything I ever might have said about Filmer. There’s a heavy-lidded guard we call Sleepy. He lets us make a fair bit of noise. It must be okay with his superiors. He looks like a fellow who’s in the army by mistake, shows a lot of patience, but when his temper goes, he’s frightful. We saw him beat a poor Dutchman dreadfully a week back. As the fellow stood outside his cell. He must have smiled or something – Sleepy can do that to you, sadder than a donkey in a cartoon one moment and the angel of death the next. I took a risk one day with him – he was putting Mel and Filmer in the same cell, as usual, and I knew they had something gnawing between them, so I said, No, not him, pointing to Mel. Him. And I pointed to Jockey. And to my surprise he let me nominate who went in with who, so everyone gets variety, a good thing for them and me, and it’s easy for us to pass on messages. Sleepy must know that, but I suppose he knows too we’ve got nowhere to go and no more harm to do. And that added to the play rehearsals – we were able to rehearse each other’s lines very closely – I suppose we’re getting a bit obsessed with it all. I almost got to consider if I want to be an actor instead of a lawyer.

As for Hidaka, he brings us bags of these little Chinese lollies, and they’re delicious – it’s amazing how much like heaven sugar is when you haven’t had any for a long time.

The DDs, the Devil’s Disciples. If we have to face the penalty, old GBS has shown us how it can be done with as much style as possible. We’re determined to have style like Richard Dudgeon, the central figure in the play.

Filmer’s talked to Hidaka about how the prison boss Matsasuta ought to let us do a performance of The Devil’s Disciple, with your dear husband in the starring role of Richard Dudgeon, and Filmer himself playing General Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Jockey Rubinsky playing the clergyman Anderson.

Hidaka said to him, But the play concerns a great defeat for the British.

And Filmer said, like a true Pom, Yes, like Singapore. It can happen in the best of empires.

I think we’ve got Buckley’s chance of the Japs letting us put it on, but rehearsing it is great work, and so is just reading the parts at night, from cell to cell. We get away with it.

There’s another thing I ought to tell you about Filmer, so you don’t blame him for anything. He’s been pretty happy just as theatrical director. He has left the command of the blokes to me. You are Doucette’s successor, he tells me, and, he says, You know how to handle Aussies. It isn’t an art everyone has.

I always assumed he was a fairly toffee-nosed character, but you can’t judge the Poms as easily as that. And I tell you what, I wish he’d been my English teacher at school…

I had thought that Leo’s journal was the last item I would need to adapt to. Yet there was one side of me that quite correctly believed that Leo’s story would only be settled by my own death.

Now my husband Laurie had a stroke which cruelly paralysed his left side and made it difficult for him to speak. The poor fellow was embarrassed by the impact his deadened lips had on his diction. He now lived in a home, quite an elegant one, but in permanent care, where I visited him daily. He was not disgruntled – he had always had a positive frame of mind, and the stroke, instead of souring him, seemed to have confirmed him in his best temperamental habits. Our son took him out for drives and to concerts at the Opera House in a wheelchair. Except he didn’t want too many of his old friends to see him like this.

I visited Laurie every afternoon and read to him, and I thought that was the way his and my life would go, with no surprises but the expected ones of deterioration and sudden, perhaps fatal crisis for both of us. To extend our lives I read long books, like Great Expectations and Quiet Flows the Don, because I’d read somewhere that having a book to finish actually helped keep people alive.

Yet even as the century ended, I got an unexpected call from California, from a heroically aged Jesse Creed, the American who used to hang around the boys and whom Dotty worked for. Doucette had always been contemptuous of him, though I had found him very urbane and sensible. But I was rather surprised to hear he was still alive. He was coming to Sydney with his wife and wanted to see me. I’m ninety-two, he admitted, and I had to get all manner of medical clearance to do this trip. Finding travel insurance was a hell of a business. But it seems my vascular system is that of a forty-year-old. And I have a wife to help me round – she’s barely seventy.

I asked him why he wanted to come back. Well, he said, the claim of memory. And in any case he remembered and thought often about Doucette and Mortmain and Leo – in fact, of all the wars he had since been involved in, he said, he remembered Doucette, such a character, and still felt uneasy about him.

I did not like to hear phrases like that. They possessed all the danger signs. Hidaka had felt uneasy too, and been full of surprises.

Why uneasy? I asked. Dotty doesn’t blame you. She blames Doucette fair and square.

I’d like to come and discuss that with you, Grace, he said.

You’re very welcome to come, I told him. But is there anything more to be said?

I hoped there was not, but I felt the same fear I’d had before Hidaka visited me.

There are a few things, he assured me.

Damn him.

Bring your wife with you, I suggested. Safety in numbers, I thought.

Well maybe, Grace. We’ll see.

I agreed to talk to him, of course, for Leo’s sake. Because I’d be at the retirement home in the afternoon, I asked him to call in the morning at ten. I gave him the address and directions but he told me not to bother with those – he would have a local driver, he said.

The old man who presented himself at my door the following morning was indeed on his own, and wearing slacks and a fawn jacket. Despite his age, he still possessed those ruby-cheeked boyish features rather reminiscent of President Reagan’s face, a particular sort of glow Americans retain through tennis, golf and watchful dieting. I had expected him to bring his wife. When I said so, he told me that she was still jet-lagged and had begged off. She gets jet-lag real bad – always has.

He laughed benignly.

And the poor old thing doesn’t have the stamina she once possessed.

Something told me that was just his story, and he had not wanted her here. We sat a while swapping life histories. He had married twice, been widowed once, had an abundance of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He sometimes got breathless and they’d shipped extra oxygen aboard the plane in case he became short of breath, but he hadn’t needed it – he’d known beforehand he wouldn’t, but you couldn’t convince wives and doctors.

I could see he was not utterly at ease telling me this, and so I was not utterly at ease hearing it. I created detours in the conversation. I asked him when he’d retired from the army. He’d hung on a long time, he said – until the late 1970s. He told me that he’d ended up his military career a major general – a prince of the Pentagon. You know the saying about how behind every great fortune there’s a crime? he asked. The same could be said of high military rank.

After retirement he served on the board of a staff college and took two quarters a year as an adjunct professor teaching politics at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Underlying all we said, I think, was the awareness in both of us that he was the blessed warrior, always marked by himself and others for survival amidst the reckless. That was something I refused to blame him for, but even such a reasonable attitude called up its opposite, a little cloud of possible widowly rancour in the room. We were therefore happy when we found ourselves talking about Dotty. He’d read her half-dozen novels. She was very British, you know, he told me. I don’t think all that post-war British squalor she wrote about is as interesting to Americans. The Brits go for squalor, but we try to ignore it.

I told him a bit shortly I thought squalor was inescapable for war widows, and inevitably influenced Dotty’s novels.

I suppose that’s true, he conceded, with careful grace.

But she had never remarried, which rather surprised him. She was a lusty girl, Jesse Creed said fondly. I imagine you’ve heard I was in a position to know. We had an affair, as the rumours said.

Before or after Rufus vanished? I asked.

Creed said, Both, I’m afraid. I don’t expect you’d approve. To an extent I took advantage of her loneliness. So there, I can’t be franker.

That’s Dotty’s business, I told him sharply. I’ve got other things to live with.

I hoped nonetheless that this was the chief of his old man confessions.

He said, When she had anything to do with other men, it was always really to do with Mortmain anyhow, that crazy monocle-wearing Limey.

Dotty had been moderately successful with her novels, and her poetry was anthologised. She was a bit of a cult feminist writer, and had made her mark in London until emphysema and diabetes in combination had brought her down suddenly in the early 1990s.

What about Mrs Doucette? Creed asked. Do you ever hear?

Indeed, I could fill him in on Minette, and the scandal of the way Minette was forced to live.

Last I contacted her, said Creed, before I could answer, she was living with Doucette’s mother.

I told him that was right. After the war, Minette and Michael were liberated, hungry but unharmed, from their convent-camp in the hills. She had nowhere to go – she did not want to return widowed to Macau, and she did not come to Australia, though I think a new world would have been her redemption. She made perhaps the worst choice, joining Lady Doucette in her family house in Wiltshire. Since her elder brother had died, Constance Doucette had become the chatelaine of the place. I wrote to Minette a number of times and got back plain letters about life in the countryside and walks she took Michael on along a nearby Roman road cut in a hill of chalk. It was Dotty’s letters that told me of the full impotence of Minette’s life. During her years under Lady Doucette’s thumb, Dotty told me once, Minette and her son took their meals in the kitchen like servants, and soon discovered why Doucette had so feared his mother and flourished in the East, away from her oppressive presence. Dotty said a lot of the fight had been taken out of Minette by her imprisonment by the Japanese. Now Minette suffered the indignity of being the poor relative acquired through an ill-advised marriage, though the old dragon did send Michael Doucette to Eton, where his stepfather had gone.

At last a local landowner fell in love with the by-then middle-aged Minette and rescued her from the witch’s castle.

I paused in my recital. Then I decided, Let him hear this, even at third hand, what Dotty told me Minette had experienced. I said, While she was still at the house in Wiltshire though, one day in the kitchen garden, she says Doucette appeared to her and said, I always wanted to give you something better.

Oh dear God, he said, and put his hand to his forehead. He said, A lot of ghosts after that war, weren’t there?

It seems so. Leo had the decency never to trouble me.

We were drinking our tea by now. I steered him to that old standby topic of where else he was going while he was at this end of the earth. The winter sun was on his face and enhanced the sense he exuded of a life well lived, and a mind still active.

Oh, I’ve already been some places, I’ve just visited Melbourne again, he told me. It’s changed, but it’s still Melbourne. I always liked that place. It had a lot of character. And before then, we were up in Cairns. That’s changed too since we were there, but you only have to scratch the surface to see the old town, the houses on stilts. There’s something about that coast that won’t let it be turned into a total Florida. The mountains behind, I suppose.

And this is your last call? I asked.

Yes. I don’t expect ever to see lovely Sydney again. The truth is, Grace, I discouraged my wife from visiting today. I really wanted to see you alone. To talk about Leo and the others. To clear my slate.

I really didn’t like that sentence.

Yes, I said, feeling that peculiar flinch. I appreciate that, Jesse. But there’s my slate, too. What condition will you leave that in?

I’ll try to be careful, he assured me. I know nothing about Leo but what reflects glory on him.

I was pleased to hear it.

He paused. He said, I remember a meeting I had up in Cairns one day with Doucette and Leo and Dotty’s husband. I should tell you I was certainly trying to make a bridge with the guy – Doucette, I mean. Dotty’s husband was fine. And nothing had happened between me and Dotty at that stage. But I wanted to work with Doucette because I could tell he was a special kind of man, and I could see he and his expedition could be an important business and might get lost in the wash-up. With our help it could be something special. That’s what I believed anyhow. But he had a lot of contempt for Americans, that guy. He thought we were fools, an idea easier to argue now than it was then. But even if we were fools, we were the fools that were running the game, and everyone else, even Mountbatten, a fool enough in his own right, had to come to terms with us. Doucette thought I was being sent to clip his wings or spy on him and take his project off him. In fact I was genuinely concerned about him.

Why? I asked.

Because he was a terrier dog. And without our help, he should never have been encouraged to go again, you know. I’m sorry to say that, it must be painful for you. Cornflakes didn’t prove that the thing could be done again. It proved that the thing could be done once.

It seems you were right about that, I told him.

A silence grew and although I understood that the longer it went the more we’d be landed back with the business of cleaning his slate, I could not think of a word to utter.

Suddenly, he said, My superiors, General Willoughby, General MacArthur. They believed Doucette’s attempt to go back to Singapore was an imperial gesture, to set up a British claim for the place after the war. I know that from the standpoint of the present, their attitude might seem hypocrisy, but we Americans were genuinely all in favour of the Malays getting their self-determination, and Churchill and Mountbatten wanted back that which was theirs.

None of that mattered to Leo, I said. He just wanted to smite the Amelechites. He would have gone anywhere.

I know that, he conceded. But I was aware of one big problem I couldn’t tell Doucette about. That was, if he kept Memerang to its timetable, it would coincide with General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines. And the Philippines would take up all our attention. And that’s exactly what happened, Grace.

Creed seemed to have been parched by a few minutes’ conversation and drained his tea to moisten his tongue.

I was still in Melbourne in late October 1944, he said. I hadn’t been moved forward to the Philippines because I was fielding all the interceptions of Japanese radio traffic. You must know by now that early in the war we’d captured Ultra, the Japanese code, and we’d been intercepting all major signals and orders since mid-1942 onwards. These intercepts were absolute gold, Grace. Ultra. The absolute standard. And we needed to be careful how we reacted to the messages we intercepted. We couldn’t react, for example, in a manner that showed we had the code. Because we needed them to go on using it. So we could afford to take actions that looked to the enemy like skilled guesswork or good luck, but we couldn’t take action which indicated foreknowledge. You understand that?

Of course I understand that, I told him, but my jaw was set, like the jaw of an unbreakable instead of a friable woman.

Okay, he said. The recital of this triumph of intelligence now, decades after, seemed to cause him as much melancholy as it did me.

So every day, he continued, as you might imagine, the Ultra intercepts were argued about, and as a mere lieutenant colonel I had an advisory role in that. Some intercepts had to be ignored – we could have swooped in and saved this or that endangered officer, say, but that would have shown foreknowledge. That was the point, the intercepts dealt sometimes with local matters, with the movement of prisoners, say. Then at other times with considerable tactical issues, and then the entire strategic plans of the Japanese.

Look, I said. I’ve read the appropriate spy books. I’m up on my Le Carré. None of this astonishes me, Jesse.

He looked me in the eye and spoke flatly. By way of Ultra intercepts, he told me, I knew by late October that Memerang was in trouble.

I felt that prickling sensation, like the soul breaking out in hives.

You’re saying you knew, Jesse?

There was an intercept from Seventh Area Army in Singapore that more than twenty Caucasian people had been engaged in a defensive stand on a junk in the northern part of the Riau Archipelago. The message said they had dispersed using sampans and canoes, and had infiltrated many islands of the archipelago. Even though the Kempei Tai hoped for cooperation from its network of agents, strict watch was to be maintained. And as we sat round the table in Melbourne, orders came from the Philippines, from General Willoughby’s office, to say nothing to IRD yet.

It meant they could have signalled the submarine to pick them up at once.

You were sleeping with Dotty… and you wouldn’t save Rufus.

The old general covered his eyes with his hands.

I was tempted to call Foxhill, but I was also inhibited… Next day or so we intercepted a Seventh Area Army message that four of Doucette’s people were dead in combat and the others being hunted. Now I know what should have happened in an ideal world – we ought to have made up our mind to release the information to IRD so they could get a signal to the British submarine, that character Moxham, to move into the pick-up island with all speed. But there were risks in warning IRD. So we were coming to a decision. We didn’t have any idea then that Moxham would dawdle criminally round the South China Sea trying to find targets, or that he’d only visit the pick-up island once…

I could guess everything he was going to tell me. That their plight had been known. That they had been written off. Someone as precious and complex as Leo written off by people in temperate, secure Melbourne, just for policy’s sake. I stood up. All the blood had raced to my brain. I could feel the inner pressure against the bone of the skull. The room swayed promisingly. So I’ll die, I thought. I won’t have to listen.

I am sorry, said Jesse Creed.

He stood too. He wanted to hold my shoulders but I backed away.

That’s been a weight on me for years, he said.

He was distressed, sure enough, but now he implied he had transferred the weight. When I could think again, I found that for reasons I couldn’t understand I did not want him to claim too much responsibility in front of me. I wanted to curse him after he’d gone. It was as if the normal denunciations just weren’t adequate for dealing with him.

Well, you said you had a merely advisory role, I told him through my teeth, as if it was my job to comfort him.

No, not exactly, he said, refusing to be silent. I had the power to change decisions. With some danger to Ultra, sure. But of a very low order. I was asked my opinion. I felt I could have persuaded the committee. I believe I could have. But at the moment I should have spoken, I remembered Doucette, and all I felt was annoyance at him for getting himself in this mess. If you’ll excuse me, I thought, let that British bastard stew in his juice. He’d sneered at every gesture of friendship and cooperation I’d made. He’d pushed ahead with his Gilbert and Sullivan, tally-ho trapeze act. To hell with him! To hell with him! Then by the time I’d got over my rancour, I thought, Jesus, you have to raise it again tomorrow. But by then there was another flood of Ultra intercepts which kept me up all the following night, and it would have looked strange for me to revisit yesterday’s business when thousands of men were dying in the Philippines. Basically, I lacked the moral courage to do it. I consider it the great dishonour of my career.

His dishonour. He might boast of that, but he still retained his remarkably robust face, and any torment he felt had not halted him from dressing his old bones in a camelhair jacket and golf shirt and cream slacks and loafers. I felt my newly calm anger working along with my old familiar bewilderment, and a sense of being stung into brutality. Who did he think he was to make this confession to me? But fortunately I now lacked the physical endurance to beat him with fists, just as he lacked the endurance to receive such a beating. I felt affronted though, and this might have been the greater part of my anger, that I was being made party to nothing more than some sort of spiritual book-keeping on Creed’s part. And I felt for him too some of Leo’s anger for the desk soldier, the ones who drew up plans for jungle forays, or supplied the gear of champions.

The thing is, I told him, you weren’t condemning Doucette. You were condemning Leo. Doucette had chosen to throw himself on the first bonfire he found.

He made a concession with his hands. Remember Foxhill? he asked me. In the tartan pants? He was organising a group to go in by sub and fetch the survivors. Well, by that stage we knew it wasn’t much use. They were all dead or captives by Christmas, except two, and we thought they’d probably drowned.

And you were wrong about that too.

Maybe. Anyhow, telling Foxhill to call off Memexit didn’t involve any chance of jeopardising Ultra, and so I let him know.

Jesse Creed spread his hands further. He seemed to be expecting something more from me now. He was lucky that I did not know which viper of a sentence to sting him with first. The great dishonour of my career. How sad for you, that you discovered you were a bastard! It didn’t stop you breathing, progressing, mating, breeding and ageing and finding travel insurance at the age of ninety-two. I certainly didn’t intend to absolve him, and I itched to attack him as I had Hidaka. And then it struck me. As I was ready to curse and whack him, I thought, You poor old bitch! What are you about? Doing what you could, and inadequate to Leo. But they all were inadequate to Leo. Foxhill, Doucette, Rufus. All of them. Eddie Frampton, Captain Moxham, Jesse Creed. At eighty-four, why not just let yourself go in peace? The ghost is satisfied, the ghost has had its explanations, the ghost has departed the scene. Just ease up now, you foolish crone. And be Leo’s widow from this point only in honourable name.

Never mind, I suddenly told him, conceding nothing, dismissing him. I had scorn, too. All the stuff you try to lay at my door, you’ll have to take all that with you when you leave. I’m going to get a bottle of gin. You and I will drink a health to the men you let down. Then you can go off in your car and make of it whatever you want. I’m not here to help you feel easy about 1944. You can go to hell for all I care.

He nodded. That’s a good Australian curse, he said. And I deserve it.

When I brought the gin, he sat because I told him to. With the drink in front of him he looked so much like an aged lost boy. He laughed. I’m not supposed to have this. Ruinous to a guy’s blood pressure.

I think you’ll get through to tomorrow, Jesse. You always have.

He shook his head. He looked eroded now, and I was pleased it had gnawed at him, the same thing that had eaten at me. And at a calm level I acknowledged that after the century I had lived through, I wasn’t nearly as surprised that day as I would have been had he told me in 1945.

Here’s to Leo, I said. He abashed me by beginning to weep. Tears made his handsome, ageing face look more squalid and rheumy. Ah, I thought, good. He should know some indignity.

Don’t think of sending me a Christmas card, I told him.

He said, I don’t think there’ll be any more Christmases.

As if they know they’re feeding important theatricals, since the trial the rations have got better – some fish with our rice. Then one day little Hidaka smuggled in a dozen egg tarts in his valise. Succulent. We were groaning with joy like a pack of old ladies. He said, Steamed buns next time. But they haven’t turned up yet.

Yesterday, a week from the trial, we suddenly got called up by Sleepy and told to get our mattresses and mess tins. We were sweating a bit because we didn’t know whether it was the final walk, but Jockey talked to a Chinese orderly again and found it was routine after all. Naturally enough, we’re hoping to wait the war out. Anyhow, as Sleepy led us to another wing we could hear some poor wretch being beaten somewhere on the lower floor. His screams were bouncing from gallery to gallery. In the end, we found ourselves at a cage, in a corner of the gaol, bars three sides and brick the other. There were bunks in there, some bed rolls too, and so we were all going to be together till the finish, whatever the finish is. And crazy old Filmer looked at the cell and bed rolls and said, Well now, chaps, we can really perform the play.

Leo and the others must have read George Bernard Shaw’s preface to the play, The Devil’s Disciple. It’s GBS at his most tendentious and engaging.

I read The Devil’s Disciple with an appetite for its hidden magic over Leo. I found an unread edition of George Bernard Shaw’s Three Plays For Puritans on our bookshelves, a 1962 Penguin edition. When I opened it, I found the outer rims of the pages browned with time – it was as if the book had lain close to a fire, but it was the dull plod of second after second which had done this. I can see why the other two plays did not closely interest Leo and Filmer and the men. In Caesar and Cleopatra and in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, a melodrama set on the coast of Morocco, there isn’t the same focus as in The Devil’s Disciple – the focus there being provided by Dick Dudgeon’s embrace of execution in the place of another man, the Reverend Anderson, in New Hampshire in 1777.

From my Sunday school days, the phrase Devil’s Disciple still carries with it a whiff of brimstone. In what sense was Dick Dudgeon the Devil’s disciple? (asked the old English mistress in me.) And how did Leo and the others see themselves under that banner too? Sergeant Bantry was a Catholic, and Jockey Rubinsky Jewish. In what sense were they devil’s disciples?

I studied the issue. It wasn’t an abstract matter for me. Even though George Bernard Shaw was playing with ideas in his safe study, or else his summer garden in Surrey, and did not have to face the blade himself, there was cogency for me and for Leo to what he wrote. As an introduction to the play, Shaw writes an essay called ‘On Diabolonian Ethics’, and in it he complains that while he was away from London, a theatrical director interpreted The Devil’s Disciple’s willingness to save the life of Reverend Anderson by dying in his place as motivated by his love for young Mrs Anderson. That was to miss the entire point of the play, said Shaw. A glorious thing, the thing by which the Devil’s Disciples transcended Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, was to die for a man you didn’t know, for a man who had a wife you didn’t know, and whose features were unknown to you.

Shaw wrote:

I’m sure the twenty condemned Malays for whose lives Leo and others of the Cornflakes gang had petitioned the Japanese were never far from the consciousness of Leo and the other Memerangs as they rehearsed the play. I prefer to believe that it was for those men that Leo was ready to die rather than for some flatulent concept of military honour. That he died neither for some bankrupt British officer code nor for the bankrupt code of his gaolers.

I imagine the play under way in their communal cage, with Leo playing his part, and Essie the servant girl asks him why he lets them call him the Devil’s disciple? And Richard replies, ‘Because it’s true. I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear…’

I can imagine Filmer, who had been to Oxford, explaining the meaning if any of the group were theologically timid – that Richard Dudgeon is not really speaking of the Devil, he is speaking of the God of Purposeful Love, a deity unhonoured in the Dudgeon household in the play but honoured by Richard.

It is touching to think that under Filmer’s direction, Leo played the scene in Act II in which he speaks at length with Mrs Anderson, played by Jockey Rubinsky (seriously it seems, and not for the easy laughs that derive from young men playing women). There is something almost consoling about that, the earnestness of two young men who would never touch a woman again, enacting sexual attraction.

I must curse GBS because he taught them how to do it, to be Devil’s Disciples. I must thank him for reinforcing the necessity of the path they were treading, so that they went with a certainty that transcended flags and empires and all that weary dross.

The reward for a good rehearsal is that Filmer reads us a Jeeves story by Wodehouse. You see behind the men’s faces that the more they enjoy that, the more they think: Maybe they’ll let us and the Malays live on too. But no one could say it, of course, because that would be a deadly bad omen.

When we read the whole play in our communal cell, Englishmen and Dutch and Chinese we had never seen applauded from their cells. Because by now Memerang fellows knew each other’s stories, the play was like the new conversation we had with each other. We were grateful. If George Bernard Shaw had walked along the gallery on the third level of Outram Road Gaol and appeared in front of our cage, we would have cheered him to the echo. So would the poor buggers in all the cells.