The Widow and Her Hero

  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 prahu 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 a 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 seaplane 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, 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 raiding parties 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 three folboat crews to creep their 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 now and ask 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 Brindabellas. 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 chaperones and most of us got away, flustered and talkative, by ten pm without what we called damage. The cold stars above the Kurrajong Guest House attracted my gaze but were merely an enigmatic clue to the stars Leo might have been under at that 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, their off-shore waters studded with pagar, fish traps of bamboo, sometimes with a rickety little hut on top. 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 needed later 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 their 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 others 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 in tripping, garrotting and knife- work had always had an imagined enemy as its object.

  The Tamil man saved his own life by detouring to another island. No one ever said whether they were relieved or disappointed. I think they were in a way chosen for their unlikelihood to ask themselves that question. At dusk, their hands bloodless, our boys went swimming off one end of the beach, with Mortmain acting as lookout in the shadows of palms and rocks, 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. Have 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 NC11, 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 earshot 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 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 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 of 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 Dock, with the superstructures of ships rising above its mole. They could see the great containers and superstructures of the Samboe Oil Refinery, and dead ahead the wireless masts on top of the Cathay Building. Doucette drew their attention to the 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.

  For three days 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 lime juice in the wound, and mysterious herbal remedies 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 cafes. 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 of the appointed day, 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 Dock was 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 5000-to-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, the three boats had diverged. In the darkness, Doucette and Bantry could find none of the ships they 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 Doucette 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 the
y 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 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 be there for 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 away patches of rust. 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 a 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. Next were Mortmain and Chesty Blinkhorn, 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 that 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.