Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

There’d just been one of those sumatras – blinding rain. But now the sun had come out, and we were between two hummocky islands. Kaso and Sambu.

The Japanese had this Malay auxiliary police force – we hadn’t heard of them before. They called them the Heiho. We had three hours before dark and this Malay police chief notices our junk and comes out from shore in his little launch to look at us. Of all the junks in those oceans. The watch saw him coming and started yelling, ‘Patroller, Patroller!’ We thought it was some bush-week little navy launch. I was on deck under the shade of our tarpaulin, and I found my Sten gun and got down under the gunnels. It changes the world, once you take up arms. The light looks different. Right or wrong, everything that went before that moment doesn’t count. All your memories get reduced to this pulse in your ears. Doucette was calling from the wheelhouse, Steady! Steady!

I don’t know who started firing. I know it wasn’t me. I think it might have been a certain British officer we took aboard because he’d been at D-Day and came from the Green Howards and wanted an adventure. And now of course we joined in the firing – there were at least five Sten guns and one Bren, all silenced. We saw a man jump over the side of the launch. It was raddled with the holes we made. I think there were dead and wounded on her, but I did not want to look directly at that.

And it turns out they weren’t Japanese, they were these Malay Heiho. Pity they didn’t have a Japanese officer with them. Sad for all parties. After all our stealth, on the last afternoon we’d let ourselves make too much noise. If the firing hadn’t started we could have let them land on us and then taken them prisoner. That’s what we discussed as long ago as Melbourne. The junk stank of cordite, a smell we’d hoped to avoid.

We were appalled – that doesn’t begin to speak the truth. We knew we’d made ourselves visible. Ashore, the policemen’s colleagues were probably on the phone to the Japanese naval base at Bintang.

The Boss came out of the wheelhouse. He was the very soul of calm. Rufus Mortmain came up from below, his Sten in his hands. He looked more sad than angry. But the young blokes were really angry, yelling at each other, asking each other who started the calamity. Was it you, Skeeter? Was it you, Chesty? They were eliminating each other loudly like that because they were trying to shame the culprit into confessing. Even Jockey and Blinkhorn and others were saying frankly they’d seen Filmer open fire, and the name, the way they said it dripped with contempt.

I was half ready, I have to say, to turn my gun on the poor fellow myself. And what a mistake that would have been. Because we couldn’t have got on in prison and at the trial without him. I think Filmer was about to confess too. But the Boss suddenly said it didn’t matter who did it, it didn’t change anything, and he forbade them to talk about it and point fingers. It had happened. The measure of all of us would be what we did as a result of it happening. All the rest was academic. More rain came up, and gloomy rain clouds. It would help us get away, but had it come five minutes earlier we would have got past Kaso in the murk.

Of course I already knew the outline of what had happened to them. But I put the pages Hidaka had given me into the desk drawer with the transcript. They would need to be faced, but not yet. After a week, Laurie, aware of the influence they had on my composure and my moods, asked me tentatively whether I wanted him to read them, and he could then tell me whether I needed to bother myself with them or not.

That won’t be necessary, I told him starchily.

Well, he suggested, whatever’s there, you have nothing to reproach yourself with. You’ve been a good widow to Leo.

Please don’t discuss that, I told him unkindly.

It was for his sake that I knew I had to approach the rough diary Leo had written and Hidaka had delivered fifty years late. After three weeks of tension, I went to the drawer and took up the pages. I knew about the attack on the police, but not of the subtleties of that afternoon. The details of their behaviour, like so much else in Leo’s diary pencilled dimly on yellowish-brown squares of harsh paper, were new to me.

Throughout it all, as we know from the trial documents, the wounded policeman Sidek Bin Safar was hanging on to the stern of the launch, bleeding into the water and too terrified to move. It was clear that Doucette reacted to the calamity with the admirable calm and decisiveness of a leader at the peak of his judgement and adaptability. He declared the junk must be sunk with its Silver Bullets, the submersibles, so they were to bring up the folboats for launching and load the rubber raft with their supplies. Using the marspikes designed by Major Enright, Leo and Rufus attached limpet mines on short timers around the inner hull of the junk. Sadly there were not too many fathoms under the junk’s keel, but Eddie Frampton’s elegant machines would at least be torn to fragments. All the effort, all the mastery that went into learning to drive them, was for nothing.

As the men prepared their packs and took to their folboats, Charlie Doucette was back with what he really liked – the pure human mechanics of the folboat, and reliance on his own sturdy little body.

The Boss had two men watching Singapore from an island named Subar, or NC1, which he had used himself to keep watch on the port the year before. They had their folboat with them but would need to be collected, at least that. His, Mortmain’s and one other folboat crew would go and fetch them. Leo was given the secondary job – he had to take a flotilla of eight folboats back to Serapem, NE1, the base where Mel Duckworth waited. And I learned for the first time from Leo’s slabs of toilet paper that Doucette had his reasons to abandon Leo and, if things went wrong, to court death.

Leo wrote:

The Boss was shouting orders from folboat to folboat, and Jockey and I had a complete set of nine mines, and you can imagine how I felt, being told to back away from Singapore. I felt like that fellow Cherry Apsley-Garrard when Scott told him he wasn’t going to the Pole. I knew in my water that once the Boss got to Subar he’d go on into Singapore overnight, or the next night, and mine some ships. The Boss rowed up close in his folboat and said, Get rid of your mines. Because you have to look after them all, Leo. Filmer hasn’t got the skills for it. I’m sending you away because I don’t want you to run the risk of being captured with me. I can’t be taken alive, you see, otherwise they’ll use Minette and the boy to get at me.

I said, Boss, why don’t we all just come back to NE1?

After I’ve collected the team from Subar, he said.

I said, like a kid, You’re coming back though, aren’t you? And he said, Certainly. But jettison your mines too, for speed.

His group rowed off, pulling the inflatable raft behind them. It was packed with ammunition and explosives. Passing us in his folboat, Rufus told me he had the Japanese flag with him, in case they were able to pirate another junk. So, whichever way one looks at it, I was to have the lesser part. Yet it was a comfort to be back at sea in the old folboat with Jockey and my other fifteen blokes around, and I knew how important each one was to people back in Australia.

Leo seemed to sense the Boss had become an angel of self-destruction, he was not an angel of return. In the meantime, Leo’s world was contained in his folboat’s storage places fore and aft – their weapons, their iron rations, their camouflage, the walkie-talkies, malaria tablets. Suicide pills might have been left aboard in some cases. They were not a high priority. Leo and the others, still wearing the camouflage grease they called commando , could not see each other’s faces as dark came on.