The Widow and Her Hero

3

How was the sex? asked my granddaughter Rachel, one time when she was a student in the late ’80s.

She meant in my life with Leo. She was always talking about and marvelling at my tales of Braidwood at the turn of the 1940s, the codes, the social restrictions, but she was also a clever girl and aware that she too was subject to codes, and that restrictions on people are a moveable feast. She was amused by the fact that in my day women had a duty to appear indifferent to sex and to treat it as a necessary evil, and that in hers women have a duty to be sexually fulfilled and satisfied.

So, How was the sex? she asks me.

It was very satisfactory, I told her, delighted to be prim.

Oh, she said amused, satisfactory. Very well.

In many ways I have never in my life been able to talk to anyone as freely as I have talked to this girl. This was a conversation I could not have had with Laurie Burden, my second husband. It’s still the way.

Rachel’s a museum curator in Brisbane now (now being the early days of the twenty-first century), with three children and a husband, but when we meet even after a year’s separation, often at my son’s place at Christmas time, we simply begin again with the same level of mutual confidence.

Very satisfactory. That’s what I said. One weekend in that winter of 1943, when the wedding awaited some ordeal of arms I could only vaguely imagine, my mother came to my room and gave me a book in a brown paper cover. Her face was red, but obviously she felt she must perform this duty.

She said, Men think they are worldly, but often they’re not. They think they understand women, but no! Sometimes the wife has to educate them. Treated in the right spirit, that book will help you a lot.

It was a surprisingly weighty book. I found it as abashing to accept as she did to pass it to me. I started nonetheless to open the front cover.

No, my mother said. Wait till I’m gone.

I waited till ten seconds after she closed the door. The opened title-page read Sex Without Fear by one Samuel Aaron Lewin. It possessed the weight of a medical tome and was published in America, where – I presumed – life was racier. This book was revolutionary, I would later discover, in that it placed an onus of pleasure, and of educating husbands, on wives. It proposed that men were sexually primitive and that the wife must teach her spouse to seduce her, and that the husband be led to have in the forefront of his mind his wife’s delight. And it illustrated widely and clinically and without pornographic relish how that delight could be achieved, and counselled women to discuss these matters with their husbands, and not to be constrained by any artificial fear that their husbands would think them ‘pre-violated’. Where had my mother acquired this exceptional book? Did all the women of Braidwood possess a copy? I was thrilled and repelled by that idea. Obviously she must have got it on a visit to Sydney. She probably needed to have a medical prescription to buy it. Had my parents resorted to such hearty stimulations as the book recommended? I decided not to contemplate that.

I read the book on icy nights in Canberra with the acuity of an athlete absorbing the rules of a new, higher sport and getting ready for the contest. In the spirit of preparing the way for my lover, I engaged in solitary explorations, though they seemed a dim pre-echo of what might happen to me, once Leo’s test of war had earned the nuptials.

This was, I know now, the beginning of the golden time for Doucette and Mortmain and for Leo. And a study of dour government records is nonetheless full of hints of their mutual creativity and confidence in each other’s company. With the new engine aboard the Pengulling, Operation Cornflakes was a goer, a starter in the great planetary power stakes. The attack on Townsville had been a mere mock play. Now they were to be in the great theatre, and would become legendary even to themselves, blessed men. Alfred Tennyson provided the text for Doucette’s life with lines he could recite at parties.

That might have been the trouble. The men were living according to Tennyson, whereas Dotty, and soon I, were determined to live in the age of Auden and T. S. Eliot.

Pengulling would bring Doucette and Leo through seas of all colours, of abrasive tropic blue, through blinding golden sunsets and the bruisings of storm, to their work of noble note.

Despite all the planning, Doucette had to grab for a few extra people at the end – the only cook he could find was a malaria-prone veteran of fighting in New Guinea earlier in the year. It was appropriate to every odyssey that there be such flawed men. The navigator was flawed too – a wanderer and barely repentant alcoholic, already in his early forties, though gifted at his job. After an unhappy spate in the navy during World War I, he had spent the Depression in Queensland and New South Wales digging for opals along the New South Wales–Queensland border, or descending upon nineteenth-century gold-rush sites to rework the tailings and mullock with arsenic. For his brief World War I experience as a sailor in the Australian navy, upon re-enlisting for this new war he had been commissioned. The Independent Reconnaissance Department had chosen him, yet he had been through none of the training rigours of his young fellow crewmen. His name was Lieutenant Yewell, his nickname was Nav. I have seen his photograph and it’s a complex one. His face leathered by remote suns and in which the struggles with his demons were plainly written. Doucette tended to take a very positive attitude towards such men, an attitude that was good for them, and made them behave better than perhaps they were. He made heroes out of quality men like Mortmain and Leo, and a passable fellow out of the unredeemed Yewell assigned to the Pengulling purely because he knew tropic waters.

A jungle warfare specialist named Sergeant Pat Bantry, a hulking New South Wales farmer, was also brought on board and would be favoured, despite his bulk, by becoming Doucette’s forward hand for his folboat.

Pengulling cast off. Everything went cheerfully as it easily penetrated the dangerous coral reefs of the Torres Straits, and reached westwards through the Arafura and the Timor Seas, sighting peaceful Melville Island north of Darwin. Down the shoal coast of Western Australia they came to the American base at Exmouth Gulf, Potshot. All the way they practised on their silenced weaponry and by day kept their large Caucasian jaws and shoulders and hands under the awning. As for the routine, some men could sleep on the deck, unless there was bad weather and they could then sleep in the wheelhouse. The hold contained three officers’ bunks and a sophisticated radio run by batteries. The head, used by all ranks without distinction, was on deck in the stern. The galley and various cupboards were also there, and there were water tanks and a gravity tank to the engine which was used as a mess table. A tarpaulin covered much of the deck, and I know it was decided that only those who could pass as Asians would be in the open – Doucette, the boy terrier of an Irishman; Rubinsky, the olive-skinned Jewish rating from the Australian navy, and Nav himself.

At sea by night they had taken off and dumped some of the Pengulling’s bullet-resistant cladding, and were thankful for the good weather to that point, for they saw that the armour’s two tons had reduced the freeboard to a mere ten inches, and that would not be enough in stormy sea. Now they rode higher but would splinter to matchwood under any attack.

The American rear-admiral at Potshot was very kind to them and, convinced that their destination was the Japanese naval base at Surabaya in Java, he told Doucette solemnly that everyone believed the hopeless little vessel was bound for Fremantle. In any case, Pengulling was repainted here with camouflage grey.

There was a load of gear awaiting them, flown from Melbourne by IRD. New British-built folboats, spare parts for the engine, anti-glare glasses, binoculars, etc. Leo would later tell me that he was a bit amazed when Doucette declared he was going to drop inland a little way and see some of his relatives who had a cattle station east of Exmouth, and a transport plane flying to Perth agreed to drop him there. Some first cousin of his from Ireland had settled there.

Mortmain looked over the new British folboats with Leo and said that the stitching of the canvas was appalling, a real wartime economy job. We used to laugh at Japanese manufacture, Mortmain told Leo. But he and Leo and their partners went for a warm-up paddle of twenty miles or so, and suddenly the stitching meant nothing. For Leo, excitement and daring would prevail over any deficiencies of thread.

How often did these men mention their women, I wonder. Mortmain his – as I would discover – wily, angular wife, or Leo his fiancée? I never thought about it at the time, I presumed we were talked about, boasted of, envisaged constantly. The older I get the more I doubt it. It was simply that they were engaged in an all-absorbing task.

Doucette returned from his cousin’s cattle station, and he and his men took to their little fishing boat again and sailed north out of Exmouth Gulf. The forward hold was full of armaments and other gear, and there were flaps in the superstructure to enable men to take up battle stations in an emergency. The horns of a submarine supply and maintenance ship USS Wagram sent this little grey sliver of a vessel on its way. It made half a mile before the engine instantly overheated and choked. Some mysterious components named the centrifugal pump and the coupling key of the intermediate propeller shaft had broken. The Americans had Pengulling towed to Wagram’s side, and the engine and most of the drive shaft were hauled aboard and worked on. The Americans replaced the centrifugal pump.

When they left Potshot, thinking that they were going to Fremantle, the American mechanics earnestly told Doucette to nurse the engine along.

And now our voyagers were away on an afternoon tide again, the opinion being that the new pump would last them a long time. Interestingly, as they headed north-east along the desert coast, once the course and rudder were set, Doucette read a little brown book, Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Chapman. The kid leather cover was a scuffed brown, and he had won it as a prize at Eton. Tea and beer had both been spilt on it. The men watched him as if he were trolling for some code to their present situation.

Certainly, a great storm worthy of The Odyssey hit them that September night. The decks were awash with fluorescent foam, and the Pengulling was a mere tub before waves which Leo said were big as blocks of flats, and came up behind, and lifted the little boat high above a nauseating trench of water, dropped it in, awaited its emergence, and began the process again. All night, the water across the deck was waist-deep. Mortmain chopped a hole in the hull to allow the volume of deck water to escape. Above or below, sleep was not possible. Most of the muscular ratings and soldiers were sick, and lay on their sides helpless, humiliated so soon. Leo too was sick, but in a practical way, stepping outside the wheelhouse, retching, coming in again with a clear mind for the next little while.

It was when the storm abated and the sky grew brilliant again the next afternoon, and the men returned to being hungry, that Doucette told them what he and Leo and Rufus and a few others already knew: where they were going. Leo’s partner Rubinsky, for example, had not known until then. He and the others were astonished and enlarged by the news.

Singapore. Three boat crews and one in reserve. Nine limpets per folboat, as at Townsville, but live ones now. After the exhilaration, for the meat of the long journey, there were only three books on board – the novel The Sheik, an erotic story tame by the standards of today, that little leather copy of the Chapman edition of Ulysses, and a black-covered devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, which belonged to Sergeant Pat Bantry, and which only Bantry had any interest in. Most social life took place on the after-deck behind the wheelhouse, which was adequately covered by the tarpaulin to enable gatherings including those men whose big hands and feet and large features deprived them of any chance of resembling an Indonesian or a Malay. Mortmain told stories of life on teak plantations in Burma and Malaya. The malice and whimsy of elephants figured a lot in them. Able Seaman Jockey Rubinsky told stories about his Russian father and uncles in Bondi Junction, a location where Hitler was unlikely to disrupt their energies. Meanwhile, the man keeping watch stood on the gravity tank within the canopied area and stuck his head through a hole in the awning roof.

For a time off the north coast of Australia, Pengulling had aircraft cover. But even this early the navigation officer was surly and wanted a drink. He snapped at Jockey’s tales. He did not get the point, or didn’t have the mental space to, and expressed a hatred of Jews which Leo said wouldn’t have been out of place in a Nazi. A distance grew between him and the other travellers, not because he badmouthed Jews but because he was not far behind in badmouthing everyone and wanting whisky.

At this stage, going to the fair, Doucette did not permit too much conversation. He had already told them he hated regular soldiering and been expansive on his un-regimental sailing adventures in the South China Seas. But now he used all the regular military tricks, filling the hours with the business of dismantling and reassembling weapons, of watches and drills. If that wasn’t enough, his occasional lectures on the Punic Wars were very successful. Having heard that fantastic word Singapore, they did not worry any more about propeller shafts or seas. It was as if the augustness of the target itself, and the supreme dangers it stood for, would keep them safe from lesser issues like drive shafts and rogue waves.

Approaching Bali they saw Japanese planes flying high, with intentions to inspect and destroy bigger shipping than them. From now on they would wear sarongs – all uniforms were put away, and they covered their bodies with brown stain. Leo says the stuff was utterly lacking in fragrance and grew smelly on the body. The Japanese flag was raised at the stern – it had been sewn up by someone’s wife in Melbourne. When other small ships were met in the fringes of the Indonesian archipelagos, most of the crew concealed themselves in the wheelhouse or below, or under the awning, while Doucette, himself slight of body with delicately designed hands, and fluent in Malay, together with the navigator and swarthy, small-limbed Mandarin-speaking Seaman Rubinsky were to remain visible.

There is a photograph of Mortmain, his monocle still in his eye socket, his body streaky brown, his lantern jaw a frank tribute to his ancestry, and of Leo, similarly bare-chested, standing together before the wheelhouse wearing their sarongs, demonstrating the hopeless innocence and valour of the idea that all that sea could be covered without the subterfuge being easily seen through. But they did take wise precautions. All smoking was forbidden, lest cigarette butts cast overboard might serve the Japanese navy as a clue to their infiltration. Toilet paper could not be used – it was too dangerous a clue as well. At night there was total blackout. Garbage and the leavings of their mess table were put in sealed tins which the men cast overboard and then filled with holes using Sten guns with silencers.

I see them cheering in particular in their sarongs as with mock ceremony the home-made Japanese flag was let fly from the stern. They did this without much thought for the situation international law placed them in now. Deceptive men ripe for punishment? They did not feel that way.

They lined up with the two volcanoes of Lombok Strait, and found themselves a little way off course at the western end of Bali, and then crept along to the strait, where the waters surged through so strongly against them that they were held there all night, watching the lights of Japanese trucks on Bali. Then while vapour still clouded Lombok, they crept through by daylight. They did not want to hug any coastline, in case they met Indonesian prahus or junks or patrols, so they made course north towards Borneo and then turned to port, lined up on nearly an exact north-west course for Singapore.

They had the cheek now, in these enemy waters, to begin to feel bored. ‘Bored’ was their reaction to a sea too broad and bright, and the sky too enormous, a brazen sun and their tiny refuge beneath the tarpaulin inadequate. I don’t pretend to understand how this might be called ‘boring’, since normal people would have brought an active anxiety to every second. In fact the navigator, Lieutenant Yewell, was not bored at all, and so was out of step with these fellows. One day a Japanese sea plane appeared above them. The aircraft circled the Pengulling as the navigator stood in his cabin swearing and preparing badly for death. When the craft flew off on a tangent, the others had to reassure him that it was not going off to summon forth patrol boats and other ships of war. But he was sick over the side, while having enough whimsy to tell the others he wished he was an alcoholic again, stuck in some mining camp, safe from everything but the arsenic and dynamite he managed, and his own hand.

Now they eased up the Riau Strait and in amongst that bouillabaisse of islands on the approaches to Singapore. They found there were too many Malay fishermen around big Pompong Island, which Doucette had thought of using as a base for his planned attack on Singapore harbour, but about which he now changed his mind. On a mid-September day in the tropics, with the Boss planning to turn west to another of his hides from the time he was rescuing people from Singapore, they found themselves under the scrutiny of a Japanese observation post on Galang Island. The navigator was again tormented, but Doucette decided it was best to keep north beneath the broad gaze of the marines of Galang. They calmed him in the end by letting him look through the telescope at the indolently chatting and smoking Japanese at the post, who were obviously unimpressed by their passage.

At night, in case, they puttered back to a little pyramid of jungle named Pandjang Island, and it was here that the three boat parties were dropped. Leo would tell me of the disappointment of the reserve canoe group, two Australian kids, one nineteen, one twenty, ordinary seamen by rank, rather extraordinary in their way however. These two were to wait on the Pengulling with the crew. It was the first day of October. The parties chosen would have the help of the last month of the south-east trades. On a dark beach, all but the navigator were ashore at the one time, helping the six raiders to creep their raiding gear and a little depot of rations amidst the palms behind the beach.

Here Doucette brought Leo to one side.

I want you to do me a favour. I want you to take aside the reserve boat chaps, and I want you to tell them to make the navigator come back. By that I mean by shaming him, bullying him… by whatever means. Do you understand? All right?

Leo was secretly comforted by this order, and since he didn’t want to ever become a permanent soldier, saw no problems with telling young men to coerce an officer. And so he spoke to the two youngsters, and passed on his message. Can we shoot the bastard? one of them asked him.

I don’t think you’ll need to, said Leo. Not unless you can navigate as well as he can.

On these infants of the Australian navy the reunion between Pengulling and the folboat men depended.

In the dark a question struck Leo that he couldn’t let himself ask. What if, combined with Yewell’s reluctance to come back, the engine simply blew up? It was the dark hour at which Leo felt he was in great danger, a feeling from which he would recover, he said, as soon as the Pengulling vanished to sea again before dawn to stooge around Borneo until it was time to meet them again here, at Pandjang.

I look back to 1943 and ask now who deserved such an outlay of gifts as these innocent young men intended to bring to Singapore. While Nav and the others hid and flitted and felt bored off Borneo.

It was cold in Canberra, and snow fell on the Brindabillas. The new girls in the typing pool by my small office called me Miss, which made me feel ancient. On Thursday night a group of us, office-veterans, went to dance at the Allied Forces canteen with air force men, Australians and Americans, and landlocked sailors. There were chaperons and most of us got away, flustered and talkative, by ten p.m. without what we called damage. The cold stars above the Kurrajong Guest House attracted my stare but were merely an enigmatic clue to the stars Leo might be under at the moment.

Doucette knew all the islands between Pandjang and Singapore, though they seemed more numerous than the stars of the Milky Way, denser than the Clouds of Magellan, and their offshore waters studded with pagars, little fishing shacks on stilts. Indeed, hardly anyone else on the Pengulling knew the names of the islands, for they all had code numbers – Pandjang was NW14, but the final island before the run into the Singapore roads and Keppel Harbour was NC11, a tiny hill of an island from which they would be able to observe Singapore before and after the raid. The boys knew how to paddle around the NWs, NCs and NEs like angels on pinheads.

They had two days of rest on Pandjang before they set out for NC11, for they needed to wait for the right moon. They spent the time moving their food dump further inland to a pile of rocks under the island’s hill in case it would all be later needed by them or by downed airmen. And so they hid, and talked very little, and sketched in their diaries and made observations of shipping.

While the first day there was still not at its hottest, a Japanese patrol boat hove around the point of Pandjang, anchored in the blue bay and sent two boats ashore. Japanese marines landed from them. Mortmain and Doucette grinned at each other. The joke was what would Nav do if he were here? Shit himself, sir, suggested Jockey. The Japanese marines cooked up some fish and rice for a brunch ashore and drank from coconuts.

Then they lay down without sentries and slept, while all the time their patrol boat swung on its anchor, and Doucette and Mortmain and Leo and Rubinsky and the rest sat by their depot and the day’s heat began to strike. After an hour and a half, a Japanese NCO woke on the beach, rose, urinated and kicked his companions’ legs. They dragged their dinghies down the beach and rowed back out to their boat, and so departed.

A more complicated test came the next morning. A fishing kolek appeared, and the Tamil fisherman who owned it began to head it in for the beach. Here was the dark side of the Doucette proposition. He sent little Jockey Rubinsky and a young rating named Skeeter Moss down into the fringes of the palms, figures who could be mistaken as fellow natives, to kill him with knives once he was ashore. They had to, went the reasoning. Their presence could not be announced by anyone – they intended to announce it themselves. And yet to think of these two: a dairy farmer’s son, a jeweller’s son born in Russia, come all the way to Pandjang to slaughter the head of a Malay family! What did Leo think of that? The first damage they would do was to an innocent! Well, we’re used to that reality from modern wars, but it was an unaccustomed thing for Leo. His training and tripping, garrotting and knifework had always had an imagined enemy as its object.

The Tamil man saved his life by detouring to another island. No one ever said though whether they were relieved or disappointed. I think they were in a way chosen for their unlikelihood to ask themselves that question. Then at dusk, their hands bloodless, our boys went swimming off one end of the beach, with Mortmain in the shadows of palms and rocks, acting as lookout, while the others played and dived with a sportive sea otter family with whom they found they shared the water. A day in the life of an infiltrator. Ashore again, they each put back around their necks a bakelite container with its cyanide tablet inside. Had I mentioned that? They had apparently each been issued one in Cairns in case pain or torture or fear of revealing too much overtook them.

Tides ran hard through the channels between these crowds of islands, and going north that night they had a difficult time against the current and were ten miles short of the island (little NC11, their last stop before Singapore) when the dawn came up. They put into a small island between two bigger ones, Bulan (NW7) and Batan (NW8), both Japanese garrisoned, and dragged their folboats – no small weight, some 700 pounds with their mines aboard – in amongst the mangrove roots and lay still all day, within sound of a village, eaten by carnivorous insects, with mud itchy on their bodies under that dreadful sun, unable to say anything. A person couldn’t put up with that sort of wait, I don’t think, unless he was able somehow to be remarkably at ease with himself inside the very kernel of the moment, or unless he lacked too much imagination. They stewed there anyhow. It’s the sort of thing I think of whenever I’ve been to Singapore. The sun is a ruthless threat – it comes down amongst the great steel towers, slapping your face aside. In the lout-less streets of that ersatz modern city, it is the lout. Anyhow, one way and another, they all proved themselves up to that sort of endurance and that stillness. Mortmain with his optic in his eye, a sort of lantern-jawed giant, the colour of mahogany but impossible not to identify as a European. Big jolly Chesty Blinkhorn, who claimed to have been thrown out of the Goulburn Convent School for being unruly yet who had the discipline for this particular classroom in the mangroves. Sergeant Bantry, veteran of the North African desert and of New Guinea, and aficionado of The Imitation of Christ. Doucette with his Chapman’s Odyssey jammed as a talisman in the breast pocket of his shirt. And Leo, of course, used from his childhood in the Solomons to this intensity of heat. A thunderstorm gave them brief comfort during the afternoon. I think that if Leo could reduce his mind down to muteness as a means of lasting out the sandflies and the heat at the apex of the day, then the rain must have come like a huge act of grace, must have carried with it, I think, elements of motherhood and rescue sufficient to endow him with confidence.

That night the currents were running their way, and they could see off to their right as they paddled past the oil refinery at Samboe, no distance at all from Singapore, and were suddenly at the little island, NC11, three days before they were to make their foray. Here there was a lot of what they called heather, but not of the Scottish variety; just enough cover for them to hide, though they would not be able to move about by day. At dusk they saw Singapore begin to glitter, a secure, wide-awake, electrically-lit city. Using Doucette’s telescope, Leo was able to read the time on the clock at the Imperial Insurance Company tower, and to see fabled Raffles Hotel, where, as Doucette said, the Japanese were drinking Singapore slings tonight. From NC11 too they could see and covet the docks of Keppel Harbour, and due ahead the core of Singapore, the Empire Docks with the superstructures of ships rising above its mole. They could see the great containers and superstructures of Samboe Oil Refinery, and dead ahead the wireless masts on top of the Cathay Building. Doucette drew their attention to the number of many native craft coming and going in those seas, without molestation, wearing their Japanese registration numbers and not having to worry about mines.

There and in the roads were many freighters and tankers, all lit up. They began in the last of the day to select their targets, always allowing that what they chose now might have moved on in three nights’ time. We need the Australian Waterside Workers, said Chesty Blinkhorn proudly, to bung on a strike. Then the bastards’d still all be there in a month.

They lay in undergrowth in the enervating tropic sun which failed to enervate them. As with any tribe, stories were always part of the day. Leo’s stories of growing up in the Solomons, barefoot, shirtless, a South Pacific motherless urchin, with a casual Melanesian nanny who allowed him the same latitude given native children. Based on tales he told me his stories dealt too with natives who trod on stingrays in the shallows and suffered an immediate, agonising cone-like excision of flesh. There were excruciating native remedies involving juice in the wound, and mysterious herbal dosages to prevent paralysis, and sometimes death. Mortmain as ever never moved far from his old repertoire of casually scatological tales of monkeys in tea plantations in Malaya who fell for plantation women, and the standbys of elephants with diarrhoea in the teak plantations of Burma. Rubinsky spoke of the Jewish quarter in Shanghai – everyone called it Little Vienna for its cafés. There were synagogues and rabbis too, and an occasional scandal when a Jewish trader’s daughter fell for a Chinese man, and a little half-Chinese Jew was born and accepted into the family of Judah. So far from home, so endangered, all the men of Cornflakes recited their favourites.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Doucette told each team what they were to do, and the bearing they were to take, and the targets they were to approach, and Mortmain and Leo recited it all back. I have no doubt at all that the mere recital of these details filled the men with certainty. They let the dark settle and slipped their folboats into the open at last. Mortmain and Chesty headed due north, right through the unguarded boom gate and into Keppel Harbour, into the very mouth of the port. The Empire Docks themselves were so heavily lit that they were forced to stay in the outer harbour, choosing first a 6000-ton heavily laden cargo vessel, Moji Maru, which they surmised was carrying rubber. After placing three mines along its length, they sidled up to the 6000-ton vessel Tatsula Maru – it still had its English pre-war lettering under its Japanese title. A 5–6000-ton vessel, unladen, was their next. Fixing the limpets, the contact, the fuses, three by three per ship, they were able to time themselves by the chimes at St Andrew’s Cathedral clearly heard across the water every quarter of an hour. They were done in less than an hour and a half and slipped away south for Pandjang, as ordered by Doucette, and were greatly favoured by the tide.

In the Singapore roads, Doucette and Bantry, and Leo and Jockey had diverged. In the darkness, Doucette could find none of the ships he had been watching and selecting over past days. All shipping at Examination Anchorage was gone or impossible to see out here in the fast-flowing Phillip Channel. But he found a fine big tanker, the Tiensin Maru, 11,000 tons, and placed all nine mines by the engine room and along the stern and the propeller shaft. He wanted it to explode in all compartments, to create a Singapore sensation by being dramatically and visibly blown apart.

Leo and Rubinsky went right into the Bukum Island docks, a few miles south-west of Singapore, and as in Townsville months before, heard sentries and welders yelling jocularly to each other. It was ten o’clock, so Leo and Jockey had the time to examine the entire length of the wharf. They mined the dark side of the bows of a 6000-ton freighter, Subuk Maru, and then exhausted by stress and effort, Leo wrapped an arm around the ship’s anchor chain for a while and he and Jockey rested, within earshot of the sentries’ banter and the sizzle of oxy torches. They ate chocolate in the dark, surveying the wharf area, of which Leo made sketches and notes as they tarried, invisible in the shadow of the enemy’s bows.

The tide changed at eleven o’clock, and they let it take them to their next ship, a modern freighter, the Hoshi. A curious thing happened to Leo and Rubinsky while they were working on their second ship. A light went on in a porthole above them and a face appeared, a Japanese face, seeking the cooler night air in his sweltering sleeping quarters. He looked right at Leo and Rubinsky but did not see their stained faces or did not notice their breath. Mortmain had taught them a technique for breathing so shallowly that an animal three yards away would not hear them.

He was a very ordinary merchant seaman, a little bald, certainly no warrior. But he had chosen his ship, and so he had to await its destruction.

They could see their next target anchored in the stream, and it was well-laden and of a good size, but when they slid under the dark side of its stern, and Jockey held fast and Leo tried to affix the first magnetic mine under the water, the ship’s hull proved too rusty to take it. Leo did something extraordinary then, either out of determination or the obduracy of stress and excitement and frozen intent. He drew his commando knife, reached below the water and began scratching patches of rust away. The next time he tried the mine held, and so he had to repeat the scratching twice more, as Jockey played out the connecting detonation wire. Did any merchant seaman taking his rest in the targeted ship hear the sound? Was he too tired or accustomed to the noises of a crowded port to report it?

The third limpet having stuck, a whistle on Bukum signalled change of shift. It was one o’clock in the morning. They could get away now before the tide turned against them. Through helpful currents Leo and Rubinsky were in fact the first back to NC11, and next Mortmain and Chesty Blink-horn, who had suffered a harder time with currents. Then Doucette and Bantry came in, happy but complaining only half-jokingly of the impact of a collision they had had with Mortmain in the dark the night before, and the fact it had affected their steering and timing. Doucette was inspecting the problem by feel in the last dark hour of night when they heard the first mines go up, and then as they stood and stared during a short two and a half hours, they heard periodic explosions all over the Singapore roads, and sirens of patrol vessels and sub-hunters. In a sharp-edged early light they saw Doucette’s tanker explode beyond all possible ambition in flame and smoke as deep-dyed and effusive as that of a volcano. Doucette wept and smiled and wept, and no one blamed him. The rusty third ship marked out by Leo and Rubinsky off Bukum, already a scene of frantic alarm, seemed by full day spontaneously to erupt as if by its own volition. Leo could see its bows and stern both standing clear of the water, but only for seconds it seemed, before it accepted the force of Leo’s and Jockey’s daring and disappeared. It was a matter of awe now. Chesty Blinkhorn, muscular but very young and his world until recently restricted to a country town, said, Poor bastards, as if he had not expected till now the scope of his commando ambition, and how much mayhem it could cause. And as repetitive explosions and repetitive alarms enlivened and stunned their morning, they drank their water and ate their rations and felt like the gods and demons they had become. They hadn’t only stolen fire, they had planted it on others.

For them, exhilaration overrode all other impulses. Each detonation enlarged their legend. Doucette was keeping count by means of his telescope. With their rods and fuses and magnetic make-fasts they had sunk at least 40,000 tons of shipping and God knew what in the enemy’s cargo. Leo felt that he had nudged open his father’s prison gate, that the walls were closer to falling. And he intended to give the walls a further nudge if asked to do so. They laughed and wept on the cloud-feathery peak of NC11 as explosions tore the sky. Nothing would ever be as wonderful a riposte as this, nothing would ever be as stylish. They had intended to steal the enemy’s sense of safety, but were astonished now they had done so.

They did not fall asleep until late afternoon, and behind their closed eyes the wonderful explosions recurred. With his head down, Doucette had murmured, Did you fellows notice how easy it is for native junks and prahus to come and go? They slept on groundsheets on their inured backs, and when they woke the awe at what they had done recurred to them and authorised all their future plans.

That night they took three separate courses back to the meeting place at Pandjang Island. They were next to invisible on a normal sea. They knew and believed that. With daylight, Leo and Jockey simply turned to a convenient island shore, hid their folboat, and found the boon of a Chinese graveyard, where they were able to hide and rest, having been assured by IRD that the Malays kept away from Chinese graveyards. They needed a deeper sleep than they were able to get amongst the dead that day, but they were still stimulated. The tale of what they had done fuelled them overnight, and the repetitiveness of their single blade stroke induced in them a sort of euphoric meditation. In the darkness they skirted pagars lit by kerosene lanterns and heard fishermen within or from the shore, and they were as unseen as their deeds entitled them to be. A Sumatra came rushing out of the west and blinded them with rain and jolted them about on waves, but did not much delay them in the end. Before the next dawn, at two in the morning, they got to Pandjang and the bay where they had swum with the otters. The others all turned up within the hour, the Boss still complaining of the damage Rufus Mortmain had done to his steering.

They took turns to watch for Pengulling. In last light they spotted it far out to sea, heading south as if towards home. Nav had come back, and they had somehow missed him, and he them. Pengulling looked like a vessel on which there was no dissent now, as it moved definitely Australia-wards.

That night the monsoon started. They sat up under ground-sheets and discussed their situation. Maybe they should paddle south to Pompong Island and live there off the cache of supplies till the monsoon ended, and then when the native prahus set off westwards on the trade wind, they would capture one and sail it to India, like Doucette had earlier. A little disappointing they wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but they’d be home in the end. And they were not depressed, said Leo, except that he knew the marriage would be postponed further. He confessed later that he nonetheless had a sense I would tolerate such a thing.

They began to build a hut. An old man and his grandson rowed in in a native kolek and this time Doucette went down and negotiated with the old Malay for food – a risk, but it had to be taken now. They completed their rough thatch shelter, and then finished some of their tinned rations with the fish the old man gave them for dinner, and lay down very tired and ready for a sleep, with Rufus Mortmain on watch.

And then at eight o’clock there was a sudden frail density of blackness on the water. Pengulling was back. The young men had made the nerve-wrecked Nav return yet again. Doucette and his five abandoned their hut and paddled out. The reunion – well, it can be imagined. Nav the outsider, a bucket of worms, said Leo, talking endlessly. When Leo and the others briefed them, a form of intoxication possessed the men of Pengulling. They had all voted to come back, they told Doucette, except for Nav who had been incapable of electoral activity. Yet he still got the navigation and steering right, and so there was a kind of admirable quality to him also.

Everyone agreed, around dinner tables afterwards, that the trip back had been – yes, boring. The professional warrior Doucette claimed that these were the necessary longueurs a professional soldier had to face, and that they should be grasped for the sake of contemplation. (As if he were not himself the soul of impatience.) The blazing blue nothing at the centre of each second, he asserted, had to be seized.

Meanwhile, as his sailors spoke of boredom, Doucette knew that Ulysses did not get home without passing through Scylla and Charybdis, Scylla being the six-headed monster which guarded its cave by lashing forth and devouring mariners by the half-dozen; and Charybdis being the maelstrom. Doucette knew that in surviving Charybdis, Ulysses lost a swathe of ship-mates. Doucette’s Scylla and Charybdis were that narrow hole in the gate, Lombok Strait. Nav was anxious about it for days before, in a continuous frenetic state, barking at the men but fussy about the duties of navigation which would get him safely back between the two monstrous shores, Bali to the one side, Lombok to the other.

During the afternoon of the approach to the strait, Nav was in a flighty condition, repeatedly talking to himself, said Leo, mumbling coordinates. In darkness he was calmer and worked better, and he hoped to be through by dawn. Chesty Blinkhorn, who was on lookout with his head through the awning atop the wheelhouse, reported the phosporescence of the bows of another ship coming up on them from astern and overtaking them with ease at a distance of a mile. It looked like a Japanese minesweeper or a patrol boat, but seventy-five yards long, he reported. Blacked out, it had the muteness of a blind monster, but its flag could be seen. In the wheelhouse Nav recited to himself a continuous stream of prayers and curses. Mortmain, naked but for a monocle, packed explosives around the radio, enough to break the back of the Pengulling if they were set off. Bantry put his rosary beads around his neck, Leo noticed, and lifted a silenced Sten gun to one of the flaps in the after-awning. Everyone of them resigned himself to bloody, explosive death. Mortmain and Leo, observing the other vessel through glasses, could see the lookouts on the Japanese vessel. On somebody’s order, the Japanese ship kept pace with the Pengulling, slowing down to a crawl to do so.

What were Leo’s true thoughts at this moment, if he knew them in the first place? He would have told me in the end, of course, if we had been married long enough, or it would have emerged in some illness or scream. Five minutes passed of the most intense anguish. The minesweeper or whatever it was kept level pace with the creeping two-knot Pengulling. The Japanese vessel possessed two cannon, one on its fore deck and the other on the apron in front of the bridge. Leo did not know their calibre, but it was obvious to him that either could obliterate them. So they lived for five minutes with the bitter certainty of what was to befall them, a certainty which only the young and irrationally hopeful could sustain.

But for no reason then, the big vessel peeled away westwards, in the direction of Surabaya. It could normally be surmised, as the men hugged and clapped each other’s backs, that the Japanese watch officer, who must have had authority over the helm, had decided that so late at night, and so close to the end of his watch, he did not wish to initiate the rigmarole of searching a fishing vessel for little result. He had been sloppy, he had wanted his bunk, and his discretion and sloppiness had saved them.

I wish I could have heard that laughter. I wish I could plug into it at will. Rosary beads and suicide pills hanging not yet required from their necks. The rest of us are cut out of its echoes, however. It was one of those moments you had to be present at to understand how succulent it was. Another item for the legend, and another chain. The lucky Boss Doucette. Even Japanese naval officers-of-the-watch succumbed to the spell inherent in his blessed plans.

On a permissive riptide, Pengulling swept through the Lombok Strait. And after what had happened to them, they did not mind the tides which then, beyond the strait, ran up contrary to delay them. For after a further day they pulled down their Japanese flag and the flag of the Singapore port administration. They were in range of Australian coastal bombers. Nav suffered a burst of manic delight, and ordered the wireless operator to send a message to a friend of his, an American at Potshot, with the news that Lombok Strait was lightly patrolled.

The others could hear Doucette chastising Nav in the wheelhouse and, later in the day, Doucette made a speech over the evening meal, eaten under awnings on the tanks amidships, which Leo recorded in his occasionally kept diary. It would seem, said Doucette, from a rash radio message recently sent, that some of the party expected to be welcomed back with parades, and to have our expedition written up in the weekend newspapers and made a newsreel of. I’ll tell you now, said Doucette, that will not happen. The Pengulling will be used again, and then there may be further raids on Singapore and other places using the methods we used. If you think your exploits are going to be spoken of in pubs, and that decorations will come plentiful and fast, then I suggest you should avoid any further association with this type of operation. In the meantime, you have the satisfaction of the secret knowledge of what you did.

Nav sulked, but so did some of the younger men who thought their motivations had been questioned. Five days later, they made it into Exmouth Gulf and its desolate but well-supplied shore station USS Potshot. This was a desert shore richly endowed with the plenty of American logistics, but lacking in any extensive population and any atmosphere of triumphant return. Ulysses might have said, I resisted Circe and fought the Cyclops, and all the rest – Scylla and Charybdis, and the rudeness of the sirens – for this banal docking? Mooring there with sealed lips was not an exhilarating experience. Mortmain was left in charge, and Doucette and Leo were flown by bomber over the huge vacant earth to Melbourne for a debriefing. However secretly, they would be permitted to speak to select officers.