The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  Creed was pretty exasperated, standing and addressing us from that position while making a patting-down gesture that said we should remain where we were. It's like this, Doucette. I used to paddle boats when I was a kid. Life seems pretty simple when you're surrounded by water and it's kind of level with you. But then I'd come in at the end of the pier and moor the canoe and come ashore, and I'd be amongst complicated stuff then – my parents, my sister, and whether she was dumping this boy or encouraging the other, and all the financial secrets and even other secrets of my parents. That's your situation, Doucette. You're just paddling away, but there's a complicated big house somewhere, where your IRD and the whole Mountbatten SOE group and Central Intelligence Bureau all live. And you despise and don't understand the big house at all, Major Doucette. You don't know our secrets and you don't want to give any ground.

  I should say not, said Doucette. All the more reason to stick to what I do best.

  It's all the more reason to have a well-wisher in there, in that big house, to look after you.

  I thought to myself that an argument like that might win the day for the American colonel, but Doucette stayed neutral to the point of contempt. Thank you, sir, he said.

  You guys are more mysterious than the Japanese.

  I felt a bit embarrassed for Creed as he walked away amongst the good afternoon-tea-ing women of Townsville who wiped their necks, and the chest regions above where their dresses started, with sweaty handkerchiefs. The truth was that to me Creed seemed a pretty generous ally. But the Boss must have had his reasons for rebuffing him.

  We were saluted aboard the Warradgerry in the late afternoon and escorted to the wardroom by a midshipman. As we entered, applause broke out amongst the naval officers present – it was as if the captain had told his crew that that was the appropriate response.

  When the congratulations were over, we were taken to a bar where a white-coated steward poured us drinks. I had the national diet – a glass of Dinner Ale. And the worldly Boss and Rufus ordered gin. I found myself drinking a beer with a young officer, and well forgotten in a corner of the room. Then the captain clapped his hands and gave a jovial introduction to Doucette.

  We had some visitors last night, he said, and everyone laughed.

  Major Doucette has kindly agreed to read out a list of fifteen ships to which dummy mines were attached last night.

  Doucette came forward in that slightly distracted way which I think was a bit of an act.

  The fifteen ships were the SS Akabar, the SS Warrnambool, the SS Katoomba, Port Lincoln, Grafton and Eskimo, the frigate Geelong, the frigates Mildura and Portland, the minesweepers Echidna and Waratah, the Liberty ships Carolton and Duchesse, the coastal steamers Murray and Downley and, said Doucette, HMAS Warradgerry. Until that second of seeing the captain's stunned face, I thought he already knew his ship had been marked. But it was obvious that he didn't.

  Doucette said, I'm afraid it's my young friend over there in the corner, Lieutenant Waterhouse, who placed your mines very deeply. As you see, he's got awfully long arms.

  The captain laughed, but there was a barking sound to it. He called for two officers to go on deck and look for magnetic appendages which might not have been visible in the first panic that morning, and had passed scrutiny since. The young man I was talking with gave me a small punch on the arm and asked, You did us? Bugger me! You really did us!

  The captain told me that it looked like he must be indebted to me for blowing his ship up, and soon the two officers were back having launched the ship's boat and located the limpets and left seamen working at detaching them from the destroyer's side.

  When it was announced we were leaving, we were cheered out of the wardroom. And I suppose, as Rufus said, we had a story which could make us warm on cold nights and cool on hot nights. We had a tale which we could use to revive ourselves and other men.

  On the pier, which was conspicuously darker than it had been the night before, the Boss said that Pengulling, the fishing boat, was nearly ready. Are you still willing to sail? he asked me.

  Mortmain was smoking. He closed the eye behind the monocle. Can paddle, he said of me. Strong lad. Good humour. Rough manners. Why not?

  But I was always coming, I insisted.

  And they laughed. I thought to myself, Creed's right. You can never exactly tell what the Poms are getting at.

  Three

  How was the sex? asked my granddaughter Rachel, one time when she was a student in the late eighties.

  She meant in my life with Leo. She was always talking about and marvelling at my tales of Braidwood at the turn of the 1940s, the codes, the social restrictions, but she was also a clever girl and aware that she too was subject to codes, and that restrictions on people are a moveable feast. She was amused by the fact that in my day women had a duty to appear indifferent to sex and to treat it as a necessary evil, and that in hers women have a duty to be sexually fulfilled and satisfied.

  So, how was the sex? she asked me.

  It was very satisfactory, I told her, delighted to be prim.

  Oh, she said, amused. Satisfactory. Very well.

  In many ways I have never in my life been able to talk to anyone as freely as I have talked to this girl. This was a conversation I could not have had with Laurie Burden, my second husband. It's still the way.

  Rachel's a museum curator in Brisbane now (now being the early days of the twenty-first century), with three children and a husband, but when we meet even after a year's separation, often at my son's place at Christmas time, we simply begin again with the same level of mutual confidence.

  Very satisfactory. That's what I said. One weekend in that winter of 1943, when the wedding awaited some ordeal of arms I could only vaguely imagine, my mother came to my room and gave me a book in a brown paper cover. Her face was red, but obviously she felt she must perform this duty.

  She said, Men think they are worldly, but often they're not. They think they understand women, but no! Sometimes the wife has to educate them. Treated in the right spirit, that book will help you a lot.

  It was a surprisingly weighty book. I found it as abashing to accept as she did to pass it to me. I started nonetheless to open the front cover.

  No, my mother said. Wait till I'm gone.

  I waited till ten seconds after she closed the door. The opened titlepage read Sex Without Fear by one Samuel Aaron Lewin. It possessed the heaviness of a medical tome and was published in America, where – I presumed – life was racier. This book was revolutionary, I would later discover, in that it placed an onus of pleasure, and of educating husbands, on wives. It proposed that men were sexually primitive and that the wife must teach her spouse to seduce her, and that the husband be led to have in the forefront of his mind his wife's delight. And it illustrated widely and clinically and without pornographic relish how that delight could be achieved, and counselled women to discuss these matters with their husbands, and not to be constrained by any artificial fear that their husbands would think them 'pre-violated'.

  Where had my mother acquired this exceptional book? Did all the women of Braidwood possess a copy? I was thrilled and repelled by that idea. Obviously she must have got it on a visit to Sydney. She probably needed to have a medical prescription to buy it. Had my parents resorted to such hearty stimulations as the book recommended? I decided not to contemplate that.

  I read the book on icy nights in Canberra with the acuity of an athlete absorbing the rules of a new, higher sport and getting ready for the contest. In the spirit of preparing the way for my lover, I engaged in solitary explorations, though they seemed a dim pre-echo of what might happen to me, once Leo's test of war had earned the nuptials.

  This was, I know now, the beginning of the golden time for Doucette and Mortmain and for Leo. Dour government records are nonetheless full of hints of their mutual creativity and confidence in each other's company. Now that the new engine was aboard the Pengulling, Operation Cornflakes was a go-er, a starter in the gr
eat planetary power stakes. The attack on Townsville had been a mere mock play. Now they were to be in the great theatre, and would become legendary even to themselves, blessed men. Alfred Tennyson provided the text for Doucette's life with lines he could recite at parties.

  . . . but somewhere ere the end

  Some work of noble note, may yet be done.

  That might have been the trouble. The men were living according to Tennyson, whereas Dotty, and soon I, were determined to live in the age of Auden and TS Eliot.

  Pengulling would bring Doucette and Leo through seas of all colours, of abrasive tropic blue, through blinding golden sunsets and the bruisings of storm, to their work of noble note.

  Despite all the planning, Doucette had to grab for a few extra people at the end – the only cook he could find was a malaria-prone veteran of the fighting in New Guinea earlier in the year. It was appropriate to every odyssey that there be such flawed men. The navigator was flawed too – a wanderer and barely repentant alcoholic, already in his early forties, though gifted at his job. After an unhappy spate in the navy during World War I, he had spent the Depression in Queensland and New South Wales digging for opals along the New South Wales–Queensland border, or descending upon nineteenth century gold rush sites to rework the tailings and mullock with arsenic. For his brief World War I experience as a sailor in the Australian navy, upon re-enlisting for this new war he had been commissioned. The Independent Reconnaissance Department had chosen him, yet he had been through none of the training rigours of his young fellow crewmen. His name was Lieutenant Yewell, his nickname was Nav. I have seen his photograph and his face is a complex one, leathered by remote suns and in which the struggle with his demons was plainly written. Doucette tended to take a very positive attitude towards such men, an attitude that was good for them, and made them behave better than perhaps they were. He made heroes out of quality men like Mortmain and Leo, and a passable fellow out of the unredeemed Yewell, who'd been assigned to the Pengulling purely because he knew tropic waters.

  Pengulling cast off. Everything went cheerfully as it easily penetrated the dangerous coral reefs of the Torres Strait, and reached westwards through the Arafura and the Timor Seas, sighting peaceful Melville Island north of Darwin. Down the shoal coast of Western Australia they came to the American base at Exmouth Gulf, Potshot. All the way they practised on their silenced weaponry and by day kept their large Caucasian jaws and shoulders and hands under the awning. As for the routine, some men could sleep on the deck, unless there was bad weather and they could then sleep in the wheelhouse. The hold contained three officers' bunks and a sophisticated radio run by batteries. The head, the lavatory, used by all ranks without distinction, was on deck in the stern. The galley and various cupboards were also there, and there were water tanks and a gravity tank to the engine which was used as a mess table. A tarpaulin covered much of the deck, and I know it was decided that only those who could pass as Asians would be in the open – Doucette, the boy terrier of an Irishman; Rubinsky, the olive-skinned Jewish rating from the Australian navy; and Nav himself.

  At sea by night they had taken off and dumped some of the Pengulling's bullet-resistant cladding, and were thankful for the good weather to that point, for they saw that the armour's two tons had reduced the freeboard to a mere ten inches, and that would not have been enough in stormy seas. Now they rode higher but would splinter to matchwood under any attack.

  The American rear admiral at Potshot was very kind to them, and was convinced that their destination was the Japanese naval base at Surabaya in Java, though he told Doucette solemnly that everyone believed the hopeless little vessel was bound for Fremantle. In any case, Pengulling was repainted here with camouflage grey.

  There was a load of gear awaiting them, flown from Melbourne by IRD. New British-built folboats, spare parts for the engine, anti-glare glasses, binoculars, etc. Leo would later tell me that he was a bit amazed when Doucette declared he was going to drop inland a little way and see some of his relatives who had a cattle station east of Exmouth – some first cousin from Ireland had settled there – and a transport plane flying to Perth agreed to take him.

  Mortmain looked over the new British folboats with Leo and said that the stitching of the canvas was appalling, a real wartime economy job. We used to laugh at Japanese manufacture, Mortmain told Leo. But he and Leo and their partners went for a warm-up paddle of twenty miles or so, and suddenly the stitching meant nothing. For Leo, excitement and daring would prevail over any deficiencies of thread.

  How often did these men mention their women, I wonder. Mortmain his – as I would discover – wily wife, or Leo his fiancée? I never thought about it at the time, I presumed we were talked about, boasted of, envisaged constantly. The older I get the more I doubt it. It was simply that they were engaged in an all-absorbing task.

  Doucette returned from his cousin's cattle station, and he and his men took to their little fishing boat again and sailed north out of Exmouth Gulf. The forward hold was full of armaments and other gear, and there were flaps in the superstructure to enable men to take up battle stations in an emergency. The horns of a submarine supply and maintenance ship, USS Wagram, sent this little grey sliver of a vessel on its way. It made half a mile before the engine instantly overheated and choked. Some mysterious components named the centrifugal pump and the coupling key of the intermediate propeller shaft had broken. The Americans had Pengulling towed to Wagram's side, and the engine and most of the drive shaft were hauled aboard and worked on. The Americans replaced the centrifugal pump.

  When they left Potshot, it was thought by the Americans that they were going to Fremantle, and that the repairs were meant for a journey down the Western Australian coast. The mechanics earnestly told Doucette to nurse the engine along.

  And now our voyagers were away on an afternoon tide again, the opinion being that the new pump would last them a long time. Interestingly, once the course and rudder were set and they were heading north-east along the desert coast, Doucette read snatches from a little brown book, Homer's Odyssey, translated by Chapman. The men listened as if for a code. He had won the book as a prize at Eton, and the kid leather cover was a scuffed brown. Tea and beer had both been spilt on it. Did he see himself as Ulysses 'detained by the goddess Calypso'?

  A great storm hit them that September night. The decks were awash with fluorescent foam, and the Pengulling was a mere tub before waves which Leo said were big as blocks of flats, and came up behind, and lifted the little boat high above a nauseating trench of water, dropped it in, awaited its emergence, and began the process again. All night, the water across the deck was waist-deep. Mortmain chopped a hole in the hull to allow the volume of deck water to escape. Above or below, sleep was not possible. Most of the muscular ratings and soldiers were sick, and lay on their sides helpless, humiliated so soon. Leo too was sick, but in a practical way, stepping outside the wheelhouse, retching, coming in again with a clear mind for the next little while.

  It was when the storm abated and the sky grew brilliant again the next afternoon, and the men returned to being hungry, that Doucette told them what he and Leo and Rufus and a few others already knew: where they were going. Leo's partner Rubinsky, for example, had not known until now. He and the others were astonished and enlarged by the news.

  Singapore. Three boat crews and one in reserve. Nine limpets per folboat, as at Townsville, but live ones this time. After the exhilaration, for the meat of the long journey, there were only three books on board – the novel The Sheik, an erotic story tame by the standards of today, that little leather copy of the Chapman edition of Odyssey, and a black-covered devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis, which belonged to Sergeant Pat Bantry, and which only Bantry had any interest in. Most social life took place on the after-deck behind the wheelhouse, which was adequately covered by the tarpaulin to enable gatherings including those men whose big hands and feet and large features deprived them of any chance of resembling
an Indonesian or a Malay. Mortmain told stories of life on teak plantations in Burma and Malaya. The malice and whimsy of elephants figured a lot in them. Able Seaman Jockey Rubinsky told stories about his Russian father and uncles in Bondi Junction, a location where Hitler was unlikely to disrupt their energies. Meanwhile, the man keeping watch stood on the gravity tank within the canopied area and stuck his head through a hole in the awning roof.

  For a time off the north coast of Australia, Pengulling had aircraft cover. But even this early the navigation officer was surly and wanted a drink. He snapped at Jockey's tales. He did not get the point, or didn't have the mental space to, and expressed a hatred of Jews which Leo said wouldn't have been out of place in a Nazi. A distance grew between him and the other travellers, not because he badmouthed Jews but because he was not far behind in badmouthing everyone and wanting whisky.

  At this stage, going to the fair, Doucette did not permit too much conversation. He had already told them he hated regular soldiering and been expansive on his unregimental sailing adventures in the South China Sea. But now he used all the regular military tricks, filling the hours with the business of dismantling and reassembling weapons, and of watches and drills. If that wasn't enough, his occasional lectures on the Punic Wars were very successful. Having heard that fantastic word Singapore, they did not worry anymore about propeller shafts or seas. It was as if the augustness of the target itself, and the supreme dangers it stood for, would keep them safe from lesser issues like drive shafts and rogue waves.

  Approaching Bali they saw Japanese planes flying high, with intentions to inspect and destroy bigger shipping than them. From now on they would wear sarongs – all uniforms were put away, and they covered their bodies with a brown stain. Leo says the stuff was utterly lacking in fragrance and grew smelly on the body. The Japanese flag was raised at the stern – it had been sewn up by someone's wife in Melbourne. When other small ships were met in the fringes of the Indonesian archipelagos, most of the crew concealed themselves in the wheelhouse or below, or under the awning, while Doucette, himself slight of body with delicately designed hands, and fluent in Malay, together with the navigator and swarthy, small-limbed Mandarin-speaking Seaman Rubinsky were to remain visible.