The Widow and Her Hero

1

I knew in general terms that I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero’s wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt or to understate her demands. Although, as much as women now, we suspected men might be childish or make mysterious decisions, it wasn’t our place to say it for fear of damage to the fabric of what we had. The Japanese had barely been turned back and had not abandoned the field of ambition. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.

But with the confidence of near-on nine decades I can talk about doubt now. I would at least ask, what is so precious about the heroic impulse? Why do ordinary lusty boys love it better in the end than lust itself, and better than love? Why did Leo – judging by his actions – love the Boss, Charlie Doucette, in a way that rose above love of any woman, me included?

There’s a documentary on television every second night these days about the end of World War II and the kamikaze pilots, mysteries of self-immolation. The voice-over commentators are bemused by it all, as if self-immolation were alien to us. And that annoys me. Because self-immolation was a respectable fashion with us too then, in the early 1940s. Every boy and girl put their love on the altar of the war, and that’s just the way it was. We didn’t reflect on or criticise the impulse. We never really believed till it happened that it was our marriage which would be picked up and hurled into the fiery pit. We believed excessively in the fatherly wisdom of generals and statesmen. Every picture we saw and every song we sang approved of what was happening, approved of the risks, celebrated the immolations, and saw the hero return grinning and unaltered by the stress of events.

I believe I began to write this for the sake of my somewhat bemused granddaughter Rachel and for her daughters, but it grows to have a vaguer, more general audience than that. It is the manuscript I always fancied I could write. I am not averse to their finding it amongst what I leave behind, and I don’t think anyone else but the girls would be interested. But the act of addressing one includes the vain ambition to address a million. And to address to the unheeding millions what Leo in his innocence and martial mode wrote of it all.

Anyhow, let me get down to the case. Leo Waterhouse was the most beautiful adult boy I have seen in nearly ninety years of life on earth. I first met him when my cousin Melbourne Duckworth brought him home on leave to the New South Wales town of Braidwood in the warm December of 1942. My father came from Melbourne, like his brother, who had labelled his son with that city’s name. My father had moved north of the Murray River for his career’s sake and he was the Braidwood National Bank manager, which counted for a lot in a bush town at the end of a long drought, with an endless succession of dry skies over Australia. A bank manager’s discretion with credit was either cursed or blessed by farmers as the pastures got threadbare, and fissures of erosion afflicted the soil. We girls liked to think our dad was seamlessly blessed and thanked by everyone in town and from the farms about. It might have been so. He did have some sense of social justice.

My cousin Mel told me when Leo Waterhouse, our house guest, was not around that Leo’s father had been a farmer somewhere up on the north coast, but had lost his wife and taken a job in the administration of the Solomon Islands. Leo had grown up partly under the care of an aunt in Grafton, and in Malaita in the Solomons. Leo certainly looked to me as if he had spent his childhood in places which did not inhibit growth. He had already done some law at Sydney University, and that served to add to his wonderful worldiness.

From the kitchen window of the bank residence, I saw my cousin Mel and the tall visitor creep up on each other in the backyard, practising falls, occasionally miming slitting each other’s throats with a swipe of the hand. I saw my cousin Melbourne land, after one encounter like that, in an oleander bush. They were both playful and serious, those tussling young men. Some of my girlfriends who called in from around the town were hopelessly and frantically attracted to them, as women were to beautiful doomed boys then. He looks like Errol Flynn, all the girls said of Leo. I thought more of a young Ronald Colman, the moustache, the tropic-weight uniform, and big secrets he lightly carried. His mother had died when he was ten. When seen as a motherless child, his appeal to the local girls was more intense still.

I continued to watch the two young men too, as Leo Waterhouse our visitor became less and less apologetic, tripping my cousin up spectacularly, cutting his throat more ruthlessly. But they were so discreet for young heroes. Returning to the kitchen for lemonade and tea, they told me nothing about their expertise with explosives or knives or folboats, the latter a term I would learn about only later. But I knew even then they were involved in something more exotic than ordinary soldiering, even though this tumbling and tripping and ritualised throat-slashing was all I saw of what they did as a living.

And do you still want to go back to your law studies after the war? my tall father asked at the meal table. Certainly I do, said Leo, below his new brushy moustache which barely grew.

It was a good summer. I was a wary, reticent girl, too tall and angular to be utterly happy about myself. My reticence was only partly induced by my upbringing as a model child of model parents in a small country town. It was temperamental as well. You will see from the story I tell that I am watchful by nature. Yet without an exchange of many words, within three days Leo and I became totally enchanted by each other. I remember that we conveyed to each other a certainty of the other’s perfection. Yet we were so uncorrupted. Our few, momentary, stealthy physical contacts would occur when my cousin Mel and Leo and I walked my friends, the daughters of the town solicitor, pharmacist, general practitioner, stock and station agent and headmaster, homewards through the dark, browned-out town of Braidwood. Leo and I would lag behind or go ahead on the broad roads, and if we timed it right would find ourselves in the ultra-darkness between houses under a massive dark sky on the back streets of the town. The occasional straying of hands was a mere stoking of the fires. How ridiculous given that the war which changed everything was under way! Yet I valued his gallantry. At one stage outside the Braidwood School of Arts, as Leo reached for a kiss, he held my outer thigh to his and then repented of it.

It all filled me with months’ worth of fantasy at the Kurrajong Guest House in Canberra, where I normally boarded between returns home. Nothing as potentially intimate had ever happened to me before. In its way it seemed vaster than the movements of Japanese hosts in the Pacific, of German arms on the steppes of Russia.

We certainly did not know enough to understand that even in the Independent Reconnaissance Department, that bureau of noblest and most glamorous human endeavours, and amidst the intelligence organisations on which it fed, there were older, ambitious men, who were willing to deny all the brave backyard tumbling of Leo and my cousin if it suited them: older men, soldiers for life, who had administrative gifts and who weren’t going back to the field of war, and who could write off Leo’s and Mel’s valour if it embarrassed them in some way. Who might find it politically inadvisable to defend them even from the enemy. I could not have believed it, and it was probably just as well, since I could not have convinced Leo. And anyhow, that’s the burden of my tale.

Inevitably that Christmas–New Year period in Braidwood, the question came up one lunchtime. I think it was my mother who asked. And your parents, Leo?

She too was considered rather unfashionably tall – nearly five feet ten inches – and had not married until she was twenty-five, then considered a fairly late, spinsterish age. But she had seen what had happened and that her daughter was under an enchantment. Leo gave my mother a more explicit rundown than he had given me.

My poor mother took a drink of milk one day from a diseased cow, he told us. The family had been walking in the Clarence Valley; the farmer had had no malice in offering his milk straight from the cow. But bovine TB had killed her in three short years. My father, said Leo, took up a post in the islands afterwards. He was Superintendent of Agriculture in Malaita in the Solomons, and now I’m afraid he’s a civilian prisoner of war of the Japanese. He’s been moved on somewhere north, because the Americans haven’t found him yet.

That must be very trying, said my mother.

It gives me an interest in the region, said Leo.

In an older man this would sound like irony, but in him it was understated purpose. It’s a shame, Leo told us. He had a hard time in the first war, and now he’s a prisoner…

Leo’s aunt in northern New South Wales had got a Red Cross card two months past which said that he was in good health.

I was not in Braidwood all the time then. My father had not permitted me to join the Land Army or any of the women’s military units. The war represented a great chance to escape stringent fathers, but my father saw enlistment as a prelude to becoming fast, wearing trousers, smoking, drinking, and the unutterable. But having attended a secretarial course and learned to touch-type I was permitted to work in Canberra for the Department of the Navy. If I had not taken my holidays when I did I would not have met Leo, since I normally made the long bus journey home to Braidwood only once a fortnight. When I worked there, the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia boasted a population of barely 10,000, and everyone seemed buffered from the war by the acreages of pasture and the great insulating force of the eternal bush. I’d started work at the age of twenty, and at the time I first saw Leo tumbling with my cousin in the yard at Braidwood, I had risen to the rank of Procurement Officer, Stationery and Office Equipment.

During the week in Canberra, I boarded at the Kurrajong Guest House, a respectable, temperance boarding house whose manageress, a former Braidwood woman, my parents knew. If my parents had understood how much sundry politicians drank at the supposedly temperance Kurrajong, and how dented the respectability was by their desire to smuggle secretaries into their rooms, they might have summoned me permanently home.

A week after New Year, I said goodbye to Leo and went back to work, and Leo and my cousin vanished – to Queensland, as it turned out.

But soon, attentive Captain Leo Waterhouse descended upon the plainness of my life again. One day in early 1943, when he was on his way for some reason to Melbourne (the city, not my cousin), the bomber he was travelling in made an emergency landing at Canberra’s long, grassy airfield.

Let me say that most of what I now know of Leo’s activities in those days comes from his own occasional letters and intermittent diary notes, and from official documents pushed under my nose by Tom Lydon, a man who once wrote a book on the adventures of Charlie Doucette and Rufus Mortmain and Leo (The Sea Otters, Cassell, 1968) and who has never lost interest in these men. What other sources contribute to this tale you will learn as I go along.

But I know now that Leo was on his way to Melbourne to commune with the officers who were department heads of a group called the Independent Reconnaissance Department over a proposed raid on Japanese-held Rabaul in which he was to participate. Thanks to the faulty bomber he appeared in our outer office in Canberra, in his winter-weight uniform and his Sam Brown (a swagger-stick underarm), like a fulfilment of day dreams. According to the serpentine mores of the day, such an apparition at a girl’s workplace was a very serious gesture of interest. He was aware of it, I was aware of it. He was hopeful, it turned out, that the engine problem would require him to stay overnight in Canberra. We’d have dinner, at least that. I did not want to sit at table with him at the Kurrajong, where some of the regular women guests would have interrupted us. I wanted him to appear, be admired, and then we would go elsewhere, into the centre of town, Civic. In that way my female fellow-boarders would be astonished at how lucky I was, the male guests informed that I was not available. As house rules required, he had me back by 10.30, when the doors of the Kurrajong were locked.

In Melbourne, as well as conferring, he did some course on explosives, how to attach them to ships and planes.

When the course finished, he organised a Sydney leave and caught a train to Goulburn and a car to Braidwood to seek my father’s permission to ask me to become his fiancée. I was summoned home from Canberra. On an afternoon walk through the quiet streets, amongst gargling magpies and fluting currawongs, with light slanting through the wayward colonnades of trees, he asked me the huge question. We kissed. As it got suddenly darker he touched my breast and then apologised, making it impossible for me to say, Go on please. And then we went back to my parents’ place, announced the expected news, and slept feverishly in our separate rooms.

On our afternoon walk he had told me that he would be gone for a time, and that out of fairness to me, we should not marry until he was back. At this stage I knew nothing of bunches of initials like SOE or IRD, I had not heard of Boss Doucette. The lack of specifics made it seem all the more grand in scale. Of course he told me he was confident he would be coming back. We would marry then, he suggested. Was that all right?

Here was the lure of delayed fulfilment – men and women both like to play that game even now. An immense anticipatory excitement grew, calculated to fill banal days with consecrated light and profane heat. The idea that a man must go on a quest to earn the company and solace of his woman is ancient, is literally Homeric, and is a handy one for nations who are organising their young for war and bloodshed.

First Leo nominated June of 1943 as a possible wedding date. By then he believed he would have been into the Minotaur’s cave and slain the beast and been rendered fully a man. But by April he wrote to me announcing that all timetables had been changed and he hoped to see me next by October. He said he knew that that was a long time, and though his affections and intentions were fixed, he felt he should offer me the chance of freedom. A beautiful girl like me must have many suitors, he acknowledged. Of course, I wrote back. I told him of my willingness to wait. Indeed, I’d had a nasty experience that Easter, when one of the senior men at the ministry, flushed and alcoholic, had asked me to sleep with him. He was nearly my father’s age, and that made me feel sluttish and frightened and ugly and even took my mind in directions I did not want it to go. It was, that is, what my granddaughter would call creepy. It rendered the prospect of waiting for Leo and his unspecified heroic business to be attended to all the more attractive.

By letter from Leo, and other means post-war, I got a picture of the training he was engaged in during those months. Cairns in Queensland was one of the ports from which our troops and the Americans in New Guinea were supplied. It had also a hillside training camp for the officers and men of the Independent Reconnaissance Department, of which Leo was a member. There Leo met and worked with Free Frenchmen and British and Australian and Dutch, all pursuing plans to infiltrate various sectors of the new Japanese empire.

Their chief trainer was a tall English sailor named Rufus Mortmain, with whose wife, the writer Dotty Mortmain, I would become friends. The men trained in the thick rain forest of the Atherton Tableland west of town. Trucked down to the coast Leo and others, faces blackened, spent nights in the sort of collapsible canoes they called folboats, navigating from Palm Cove to False Cape or out to the coral reef and back. Leo’s usual companion was a tidily built young Russian Jew who could speak Mandarin and Shanghai-nese and whose family had come to Australia via Harbin in Manchuria and Shanghai. His name was Jockey Rubinsky, and he was a leading seaman in the Australian navy. His languages might be useful in operations around the Equator.

The task of the folboat crews at night was to flit across the sea without being spotted from shore, and indeed they never were. The searchlight battery at False Cape, placed to pick up an enemy entering through the heads of Cairns harbour, became a special training tool for Charlie Doucette’s men – if caught by a light, Leo and Jockey would instantaneously paddle the folboat stern onto the glare, and then they would freeze. It always worked. In those warm waters between the coast and the Great Barrier Reef they built up their invisibility and so their immunity.

On land, by day and night they hiked and stalked through the bush barefooted, sometimes naked to avoid giving themselves away by fabric noise, or perhaps wearing a soft cloth thong around their nether parts. Their faces were black with Commando grease designed for infiltrators by Helena Rubinstein. They crept into a coastal artillery battery barefooted, making no sound, and stood within inches of sentries whom, in their imaginations, they despatched with their knives. Then they withdrew without being seen.

If in exercises they had to land on the sandstone jumble below headlands, they wore no footwear except woollen socks to enable them to creep over barnacles and oyster shells. With only starlight to guide them, nineteen-year-old sailors from Australian country towns learned to assemble an Owen or Sten gun in ridiculously short times and without anyone twenty yards away hearing them. And Charlie Doucette himself, the magnetic Anglo-Irishman, loved exercises of this kind, the way only an irregular regular soldier could.

Not to cast any doubt on their skill or athleticism, it was nonetheless true that this style of life suited some men. There are always men who are happiest with other men, dreaming of women as a remote mountaintop above the plain in which their Spartan camp lay. I didn’t understand this, but Dotty Mortmain, wife of the trainer, the naval lieutenant Rufus Mortmain, believed this and would pass the certainty on to me. This hiking-running-tumbling-paddling-infiltrating caste might have been happier and more certain with yearning than fulfilment, since fulfilment was demanding in a complicated way. And as I said, yearning suited the times.

In any case, most of them were babies, and I too a bush infant.

And of course, the young Australians and occasional British, Dutch and French, training in the rain forest to turn darkness into a gift, learning how to breathe and move invisibly, were not aware of the great struggle of ideology and imperialism raging between American general Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, and the British and Australians.

We’ll get to that. I became educated. Widowhood was my education.

One day, during his training, Leo found himself paired for a race in a folboat, not with Jockey Rubinsky, who had a tooth abscess, but with an Irishman, an exile from Singapore, Major Charles August Doucette. Doucette was a compact, muscular, gleaming man. He had been an intelligence officer in Singapore before its inglorious fall, and a rare valiant figure from that fiasco. Leo had been until now assigned to a different proposed raid than the one Charlie Doucette was slated to lead, but he knew something of the mythology and rumours surrounding Doucette. He was a Dubliner of French Huguenot descent. His people had been architects and soldiers who acquired land cheaply in the west of Ireland in the nineteenth century from the over-mortgaged Anglo-Irish nobility.

Doucette was a regular soldier of the kind who was attached to an ancestral regiment. The Doucettes’ regiment was the Royal Ulster Fusiliers, which had been the Royal Dublin Fusiliers until the Irish Free State was established, and had then moved north to garrison Northern Ireland. He was quite jolly about telling me this one evening at some eventual party in Melbourne, and letting me know that ancestors of his had helped the Crown put down a rebellion in Ireland in the late 1700s.

Tom Lydon, author of The Sea Otters and thus virtually Doucette’s biographer, records that Doucette was a long-distance sailor and, before the war began, had spent a lot of time sailing the South China Sea – mainly for his own delight, nominally for British Intelligence. He had identified the beaches up near the Thai border where he believed the Japanese would land in a future attack on Malaya, and he also informed British Intelligence that the Japanese would not slink through the jungles but would roll down the good north–south roads in trucks and on bicycles, flanking any line the British might set up. So he had been a prophet ignored, and General Perceval and the others had lost Malaya and Singapore in precisely the way he claimed he had warned them they would.

During one of his delightful reconnaissances by small boat, Doucette met the daughter of a Belgian businessman in Macau, and married her. In fact, as she told me after the war ended, he had heard that there was a beautiful Belgian girl in Macau, and ensured that on his long sweep across the South China Sea, he took his mess uniform with him in a duffel bag, to charm the family and to court the girl: Minette Casselaine. Not a maiden in a tower as it turned out but a young, sadder and wiser divorcee with a child named Michael. He courted Minette and married her at his regimental church in Singapore.

The month before the fall of Singapore, Doucette had shipped Minette, whom he called Netty, and her son Michael, out of Singapore and to Australia. By the time Singapore surrendered, Minette and her son were living in the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia.

After the fall, Charlie Doucette had got together some escapees, Singapore civil officials, police, judicial, and British officers and men, put them in a lumpy, 25-ton fishing vessel named Johannes Babirusa, and relayed them to Sumatra to the estuary of the Indragiri River, which he knew from his peacetime recreation of sailing. From the point where he landed them they could reach, by a last hectic road trip, the port of Padang on the west shore of Sumatra, where Dutch, British and Australian rescue ships waited to pick-up the strays from the catastrophe. He went back to Singapore to a rendezvous on the west coast many times after the fall to rescue groups of officers and officials.

For these exploits alone, Doucette – by the time Leo met him – was already a legend. Men in the know shook their heads, laughed and felt better when his name came up. I record this fact plainly and in sadness. It remains to me in part to record only the thickening and ongoing strands of Charlie ‘The Boss’ Doucette’s Homeric status. The legendary state traps not only the hero himself but exercises a magnetic pull on other men. Stronger than breath, stronger than sex, as Dotty Mortmain would say.

Once Doucette could no longer rescue anyone from Singapore, the gaps in Japanese security having closed, he escaped from Sumatra on Johannes Babirusa with sixteen Special Operations men, mainly British. He was navigator, and steered for India. On the way, he once told Leo and myself, the Johannes had been attacked by a Japanese aircraft, but although the sails were riddled and the decking splintered, neither he nor any of the other men were wounded. Just the same, this strafing seemed to have affected him in a curious way. He always mentioned it heatedly. He had been so badly hurt in other ways by the Japanese dominance of the region that for the sake of sanity, I think, he put all his grievance into that particular matter. It was as if it was the chief outrage of his military career and a final sign of Japanese malice.

The Babirusa reached Bombay, to considerable congratulation from the military in-crowd, and Doucette was sent to Delhi and attached to Special Operations Executive there. He wrote to Minette, announced his escape, and asked her to leave Australia and join him. In the meantime he went to his late father’s friend General Wavell and proposed to him a raid upon Singapore harbour using a vessel rather like the Babirusa. The head of SOE Delhi decided that the Australian Independent Reconnaissance Department in Melbourne had the best personnel for such a venture. In it, the raiders could approach Singapore from Darwin up the long Indonesian archipelago, hiding amongst islands, looking like a coaster doing normal Indonesian, Borneo or Singapore business.

Charlie now telegraphed his wife to tell her not to leave Australia after all – he was coming there. But the telegram arrived too late. Netty and three-year-old Michael had left Perth a week earlier on the Tonkin, with over a hundred other passengers. After five days at sea the ship seemed to have evaporated. Still in Delhi and about to leave for Australia, Doucette heard that the Tonkin had vanished with his wife and stepson. When I ultimately met Doucette, I somehow expected him to talk about this giant fact, directly or indirectly, most of the time. But it was the sort of thing he tried to keep to himself.

The head of Independent Reconnaissance Department in Melbourne, one Major Doxey, listened to the ideas of the dazzling newcomer. The chief idea was: get a Japanese coaster or fishing vessel to Australia, put on the right operatives, sail it through the Indonesian and Malay archipelagos and make an assault by canoe with limpet mines on Japanese shipping in the Singapore Roads. Ambitious Doxey loved this. He had felt cramped by the new relationship with the Americans, and dependent on them for submarines to land operational parties. But this plan didn’t need permission or help from the Americans. And it would show the enemy that they had no safe harbour.

In any case, now, in 1943, preparing in Cairns for operations soon to take place, Doucette and Leo had made a unique folboat pairing. The most significant members of their families had vanished in the war. They might have thought it was a fanciful connection. But it was a connection nonetheless.

I imagine them sitting in pandanus shade on a beach waiting for the little canvas prows of inferior paddlers to show themselves on the dazzle of ocean. In speaking with Leo, Major Doucette was reticent with the details of his life and let go of them shyly. Doucette remarked, as they sat on Huskisson Beach, their race done, that the Australian other ranks were funny chaps.

Leo asked him in what way.

They always give you the impression they won’t obey an order, yet they do.

Leo said they just wanted to assert their dignity.

Some of the things they say and do, reflected Major Doucette, would be the subject of a court-martial in Britain.

Leo said it would be a waste of time charging them and would only make them sullen.

The major said he could do with an Australian officer to liaise between himself and his Australian operatives. Leo listened to this fanciful talk and didn’t take it too seriously at first. His mind was given over to the proposed raiding party on Japanese-occupied Rabaul. I knew nothing of this constantly postponed plan, but it was the reason our engagement stretched out. The group of which he was a member were to be dropped and picked up by submarines, a prospect which Leo looked at as a pleasing extension of his experience and a fulfilment of filial duty to his father. Much of the Australian autumn and winter he was in training for this Rabaul mission, which would never take place. His dreams of invading Rabaul Harbour by canoe with Jockey Rubinsky and others were ultimately quashed by General MacArthur’s headquarters, who would not supply a submarine for the drop-off and pickup. MacArthur’s office had earlier said that it would all be okay, but then one of the American submarine fleet was destroyed in those same waters. And in any case, a new plan was in force to bypass the large Japanese garrison in Rabaul and to let it wither on the vine. Suddenly Rabaul was not worth risking any more submarines for. The Americans, I discovered later, also found it ideologically offensive, since it seemed to encourage the idea that British imperialism, even in its more modest Australian variety, would take up in New Britain after the war from where it was in 1941.

The news came down to Leo that the operation had been cancelled. As delightful as that would have been for me, had I known, he was of course desolated. The war had been going for so long, and he had the capacity to infiltrate, to observe, to tumble, to extinguish life. But IRD was proving a mêlée of cancelled good intentions and projects which did not work – often because the Americans were singing from a different hymn sheet, and one which in time would be graced with God’s evident blessing.

After Rabaul was cancelled, Leo was ready to join Doucette as a tamer of Australian personnel. He wrote me another letter. He expected still that we would be reunited about October, maybe November at the latest. Would I have lost interest by then in a plain, uncultivated fellow like him? he asked.