Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

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.