The Widow and Her Hero

17

Hidaka’s brought a huge bag of Amanetto sweets, which he knows are my favourites. He did not want to stay though and looked evasive. I wonder is something about to happen.

There are possibilities other than the worst. They might even take us over to Changi, to the general military camp.

Just in case though, I put down all the love I can find in this sentence. For you, Grace. It’ll be wonderful if we meet again. It’ll be a wonderful life.

Hidaka’s sworn he’ll get this to you if I can’t.

In a tiny kolek or fishing-boat, two private soldiers, Dignam the Foreign Legionnaire, and Pauling, were still at large in January 1945. They would call at villages but then move on before they could be betrayed. They had travelled 3000 kilometres through enemy territory, and at Ramang Island off Timor were only 220 kilometres from an air force pick-up island, and only 800 from Darwin. By now, however, they needed to rest for days, and a village headman told the Japanese that they were there. They were taken to Dili in Timor where their torture was horrifying, and both, left alone in their cells at last, died of their injuries.

Then, in Singapore, on the morning appointed by the authorities, some four weeks before the war would end, guards came to the large communal cell at Outram Road Prison and tethered the arms of all the Memerang men behind their backs. Sentries went screaming along the galleries telling prisoners, Don’t look. Don’t look! So there is no record of anyone having seen Leo and his men descend to the ground floor. They were dressed only in their shirts and shorts, and their feet were bare. It might be a move to another prison – they could partly quell their fever of expectation with that idea. But they hadn’t been told to bring their mess-kits. They probably all noticed that fact. By the time they were put in a small bus with painted-out windows, Jockey probably knew. Did he tell Leo? Did he bespeak death with total clarity? The orderly says no. But surely he’d tell Leo, they were so close. Japanese documents say they behaved coolly, and with the example of Richard Dudgeon before their minds, it was quite possibly so. As well as that, Jockey Rubinsky’s attitude of not giving malign forces the satisfaction of showing obvious and reasonable fear was no doubt at play amongst all of them.

Not a lifetime of ambitious imagining, dreams, obsession and terror has managed to recreate that journey definitively for me. Hidaka says he heard from the guards that the men sang. Not hymns. They just sang. Studiedly casual songs. There’s a track winding back to an old fashioned shack… or Coming in on a wing and a prayer, a hit of the time – I know Leo liked that. Though we’ve one engine gone/ we can still carry on/ coming in on a wing and a prayer.

The guards got them off their bus, and they stood on waste ground, and since they were not blindfolded they must have been able to see other burial mounds around the place, and certainly would have seen three freshly dug pits. So, their deaths became established in their minds. There was a considerable crowd of Japanese officers and men there, General Okimasa and at least two of the judges. The prison governor of Outram Road told them in English that they were to be beheaded. According to Hidaka, he himself was not there, he had hidden by the cars on the road, but he claimed he saw through the stunted trees that Leo and the others had now been released from their bonds and were smoking cigarettes, and shaking hands. I hope he’s telling the truth.

He probably is, because even Hidaka doesn’t pretend it was nice. He came close to the site, he fled, he came back again. Three at a time, the men were made to kneel, one at either pit. They were offered blindfolds, but some did not take it.

It is all very well for men to strut with swords and invoke Bushido, as it is all very well for mass-murdering generals to invoke chivalry amongst the shrapnel and napalm. But Bushido, like chivalry, required purity of heart and was beyond the reach of most narrow men. The NCOs of Judicial Section might each have owned a sword, but they had debased its meaning and its edge by beating and executing too many prisoners, and following that with too epicene a life, good Singapore food, blunting drafts of liquor. Had they been true warriors of ascetic and muscular leaning, the beheadings would not have been botched. Even Hidaka says it took half an hour, with breaks in between, while the fat judicial sergeants recovered their stability and their breath, and again took up their lean swords in their thick and inefficient hands. When the thing was done, the body of my beloved lay gracelessly and headless in its pit. Having been promised a death fit for heroes he was given a death barely fit for oxen. I know it. After the executions, Korean witnesses told the War Crimes investigators, the NCOs in the squad room at Outram Road teased Judicial Sergeant Abukara about his messy work during the beheadings. Abukara would later suicide, impaling himself on his sword to avoid punishment for his Outram Road brutalities.

But enough. Enough now.

I sit where I like to sit in the mornings, having crossed the minefield of carpet edges and chair legs which is my living room to reach the sunroom and look out my window through the august North Head to the Pacific which connects us to all peoples and all cultures. There is an absolute purity out there that transcends the slogans: King and Country, Banzai, Blood and Fatherland, Semper Fidelis, Who Dares Wins. These are the mere trellises upon which men uncertain about their weakness grow their peculiar and imperfect intentions. Doucette and Rufus and the incompetent NCOs who struck the head from my husband’s body were all in the same game. The truth is, heroism and its codes take you only so far, as it took Eddie Frampton only so far, and then he bit the capsule.

I didn’t want a hero. A person is never married to a hero – the heroic pose is not designed for ultimate domesticity. Ulysses on his return found not a wife to charm but suitors to fight. Nothing is learned, and everything is learned.

And at last Judicial Sergeant Abukara got it right, and Leo was liberated.