Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

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.