Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

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.