Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  It was the Italian compounds that would come in time to take on more of the character of work camps for former combatants, for whom there existed no available shipping home. By the summer that would take 1943 into the New Year, Italy had not only surrendered but had itself declared war on Germany, and the fervor of the camicie nere, the devoted Fascisti inside the Italian compounds, had shrunk. There were still, nonetheless, residual knots of devout Fascists in both Italian compounds who held out hope that their leader and his German allies, in concert, would endure in the north of the Italian peninsula. But they were outnumbered by the hundreds who did not believe anymore—or who had never believed—and hoped, if it had not already happened to them, eventually to be allotted to farms up and down the inland of New South Wales.

  The camp commandant wouldn’t have minded if the growing Italian appetite for getting along as amiably as they could with the garrison authorities would wash across Main Road and Kelly’s Lane and sedate the prisoners of Compound C, which remained the most unpredictable and surly in the camp, potentially a place of serious conspiracy, hard to interpret. For that reason it was hemmed in on its outer side by a considerable outlay of wire—three tall fences on the outer skin, and cruel coils of wire on top of the middle of the three fences. The other, inner perimeters of the compound, which ran alongside Main Road and Kelly’s Lane, were straight and double-lined with wire. Here, through gates in Main Road, idiosyncratic Compound C was entered, and from when it was first peopled, members of the garrison entered it with caution and tentatively. For Compound C contained those who were the enemy in the profoundest sense, and would have been the enemy even on cultural grounds, let alone because of their invasions.

  Major Bernard Suttor was its commander. He was above all a writer for radio, but also, which seemed to count more with his officers, the Gawell garrison battalion’s sole published novelist. This meant little to him, and he counted his radio work higher, but he knew that the names of radio writers failed to register with the public. And admittedly his novel, A Blue Mountains Affair, had got him his real job in radio. Radio was his cup of tea, and paid superbly by contrast with literature, which he had been happy to abandon to the talented and deluded and impoverished. He had never finished another book, but he’d written millions of words for radio, and he considered that his sole boast.

  Early in the war Suttor had served in his hometown’s part-time militia and had attended their annual camps, but he was considered too old at forty-four years to accompany the young who were being sent off to save the known world in New Guinea. At the time of his appointment to manage the Japanese captives in Gawell in late 1942, the proposed camp was still being built and was as yet a single wired-off compound. Suttor had merely a handful of Japanese captives to administer. There was plenty of time for him to go on writing his most successful serial, The Mortons of Gundabah, the tale of a sturdy family in a town of Suttor’s invention.

  The air of seemingly unexplained hostility that emanated from Major Suttor towards the Englishman Colonel Ewan Abercare, his superior and the camp commander, derived—the colonel himself guessed—from his attempt, mild in his own eyes, to suspend Major Suttor’s association with commercial radio for the duration of that gentleman’s duties at Gawell prison camp. At their first meeting at what the military called Lines of Communication Headquarters, Abercare had made the suggestion, or more exactly taken it as a given, that Suttor would now relinquish his scriptwriting, as famous as the programs he wrote might be.

  At once Suttor identified Abercare as an adversary. This was partly Suttor’s temperament and partly the solace the damn radio thing gave him. Vacuous as his serial might be, it was not too much to say it was the light of his days and was even his religion. Determined to defeat Abercare on the issue, Suttor enlisted to his side the management of the radio network he wrote for, who then approached the great journalist Keith Murdoch, placed at the apex of the Department of Information, who said he believed Major Suttor’s serial essential to national morale, subject to review. The judgment gave Suttor glee. Though one side of Suttor’s nature shied from unnecessary conflict, another—as he knew in his moments of self-perception—made up its mind about people very quickly. Not only had Abercare slighted his serial, but he was also the sort of aging and lusterless military man Suttor hoped to avoid becoming. So he had decided to treat Abercare forever with little more than a polite distance.

  The officers’ mess was a poor imitation of what Abercare had known in India, yet he understood he was working with rough material and must be tolerant for the sake of peace. The mess was simply a barrack room featuring two long tables, and generally there was only a scatter of officers along both. The cook could do a passable but overcooked roast, and steak and chops likewise. He put a tang of curry powder in the stew at Abercare’s insistence. His cooking seemed a reflection of the few Department of the Army photographs adorning the comfortless timber walls. At one end was an inadequate fireplace, at the other a bar manned by an orderly and a shell casing which, when occasionally rung, meant an officer, perhaps for his own birthday or to celebrate the birth of a child, was—again an Australianism—“shouting” drinks for everyone in the mess. Most officers drank beer with their meals.

  There was not much mess solidarity. Some of the officers had rented houses in town, and dined—or as they said—“ate their tea” there, or else at hotels, or at the houses of friends. Abercare indulged himself occasionally in that regard, accepting an invitation from Dr. Garner, a respected physician. Abercare had met him when the doctor was called to the camp to consult on illnesses or injuries amongst the garrison troops or prisoners. Then, occasionally dignitaries from town, the mayor, clergymen, lawyers, or doctors, were invited for formal evenings, where officers’ attendance was compulsory. The visitors did not wear dinner suits nor did the officers don more than full uniform jackets and pressed trousers.

  But Abercare felt it was his duty as commandant, despite Suttor’s subtly hostile manner, to keep this overcasual mess alive. There, one night when Suttor had drunk whisky, he answered with enthusiasm some questions raised by an older lieutenant, who declared himself a great barracker for the Mortons and their mythical town. This man was a pallid supporter, though, typical of garrison personnel: he had been a corporal in the earlier war and would soon be retired with a failing heart.

  Abercare was present at the time of the lieutenant’s praise, eating dinner and obviously listening. Suttor confessed that he knew the Mortons so well now that it took him only about four hours to write a week’s worth of scripts—five fifteen-minute episodes. As for his near-forgotten mystery novel, which was also praised, Suttor reiterated his earlier perceptions about literature: only those with inherited wealth and no need to work could be novelists. Whereas radio was steady—although at times you flinched to hear some of the creaky lines you’d been guilty of.

  Then Suttor said, with a particular edge to his voice, “Besides, Colonel Abercare wouldn’t like me writing novels on the job.”

  Why drag me in? Abercare wondered at the time. “If you want to write a novel, Major, I suggest you do so. I mean, if a chap can get by on six hours of sleep, as many chaps can, there’s nothing to stop you spending an hour or two here or there on a new novel. How many hours of a day does a novelist need to write?”

  “How long is a piece of string, sir?” Suttor asked in belittling politeness, and deniable malice. “It varies from person to person. I can generally write a thousand words an hour if I find that much time. But finding the time beforehand to come up with the material, and making it good—that’s the rub.”

  There was, Abercare thought, emanating from Suttor the old antipathy between regular soldiers and citizen warriors. In no country was it so reflex as in this one. In Britain the regular officer was an object of respect. In this rougher bush version of Britain, the bearing and very habits of military gesture, and forms of addressing other men and officers, were options for mockery. The regular had to prove himself
to the citizens, and amongst the rest—to the clerks, and the writers of radio serials.

  At headquarters in Sydney, the chief-of-staff of the garrison forces and the lines of communication throughout the region had told Abercare that Suttor’s son, David, had been taken prisoner when Singapore fell. (Suttor had never himself told Abercare.) This, headquarters believed, given their assessment of Suttor, made him more suited to the special balance and tact required for the management of a proposed compound dedicated to “Japanese Other Ranks.” Suttor, in their view, would have an investment in being moderate towards an enemy who held the destinies of more than twenty-five thousand Australian souls, including his own son’s, in the palm of an unpredictable hand.

  There was a further thing Abercare believed Suttor irrationally resented about him. Suttor’s file showed that he had married an actress, and when Abercare had made a remark on that—to him—exotic reality, Suttor had become surly to an extent that Abercare had made inquiries of headquarters. Suttor’s wife, Eva, was in a sanatorium in Jervis Bay, he was told. Abercare would have liked the chance to utter a few words of fraternal commiseration to Suttor—for he was in no position to feel smug about wives—but he knew that would be misinterpreted.

  Apart from his hostility, Suttor was an efficient and dispassionate officer, who seemed to Abercare to have less rancor for the dozens, and then the hundreds, of Oriental prisoners eventually arriving at Gawell than he had for his commanding officer.

  • • •

  At another dinner in the mess, Abercare attempted to mend his fences with Suttor.

  “I got a copy of your book from Gawell Shire Library recently,” he informed Suttor. It was the case, though he had not enjoyed it much.

  “I am amazed they still have it, sir. It’s older than Herodotus.”

  “But an interesting premise, I think. A modern murder involving a grievance that began with two convicts in colonial times. First class altogether!”

  It had been a melodrama—both the modern, overblown characters and the historic ones, the tempestuous daughters of the first settlers bringing livestock over the mountain road, past the blazing eyes of Britain’s worst transported felons. But Abercare did not wish to point out literary faults, on which—God knows—he was no expert.

  “Oh, if only the reading public had agreed with you!” said Suttor, and then began a critique of his own book. “A gentleman convict falls in love with the commandant’s daughter and there is a child. On one level, doomed love, and on the other the descendant of the illegitimate child killing the descendant of the convict. Tra-la-la! You’d think people would gobble it up, wouldn’t you? Maybe they would have if the publisher had ever let them know the book was there.”

  “But . . . I was interested . . . Penal times are a natural interest of yours?”

  “I think I might have made a good gentleman convict myself.” There was almost warmth in the answer.

  “Well, there’s a certain irony, don’t you think?” Abercare ventured. “That you should have this interest and are now earning your own living from guarding prisoners in the twentieth century. May I ask you, as an ignorant Englishman, were there many escapes from the early penal settlements?”

  Suttor said, “It was generally impossible for people to get away. That was the attraction of Australia to the imperial authorities.”

  “Ah,” said Abercare. “May I say, a fortiori Gawell?”

  Suttor would not concede the point. “But you can’t depend on the fact that prisoners know a place is unescapable. Some Irish convicts got away into the bush in the belief that China was just beyond the Hawkesbury River. Passions and delusions enter the equation too.”

  Abercare said, “In any case, the Italians don’t seem to want to get away. Not passionately, anyhow. And they’re supposed to be masters when it comes to passion.”

  Suttor was determined not to succumb to Abercare’s rosy view. He said, “I concluded from reading the Historical Records of New South Wales that no one can predict what might seem to be rational to a prisoner. To be a prisoner is like having passed through a mirror.”

  “Nonetheless,” Abercare persisted, not—he hoped—without good humor, “perhaps the Italians can be depended on to have motives we can understand. Even the devout Fascists. They seem to put all their energy into persuading their padre to let them sing the Fascist anthems at Mass. They give us the utterly reasonable impression they still want to be leading a tolerable life by the war’s end—even if that’s not for another ten years. And at risk of the virtue of the ladies of Gawell Shire.” He was referring to the use of Italian prisoners as farm laborers and hoped for a laugh from Suttor. But Suttor had made up his mind, and it didn’t come.

  “The Italians,” he conceded, “are a different story. But they tell us damn all about the crowd I’m in charge of.”

  “Yes,” agreed Abercare. “But we’ll keep the lid on them, won’t we? Kindness, distraction, containment.” And a conspiratorial light blazed keenly and melodramatically in his eyes.

  What an ass! Suttor thought.

  But Abercare was not a fool, merely an Englishman trying too hard with colonials. He said, “In spite of their contempt, they must know their cause is lost.”

  Suttor hurried to rebuff this, just for the sake of it. “Do you really think they believe the newspapers we send inside to them?”

  “Perhaps not. But remember, when we first came here, they looked to the skies, expecting to see their own aircraft. They imagined their carriers off the coast. Well . . . simply from my own observation, they don’t look at the sky in that way anymore.”

  Suttor snorted. “But that hasn’t made the buggers more tractable.”

  Abercare knew he would not be permitted to win.

  He said, “I suppose we’d have to be one of them to know what their convictions are now. As distinct from playing a role. Excuse me, Suttor.”

  And he went, according to the spirit of his normal duties as senior officer, to visit the other table, where someone happened to be telling a story about Yanks and Kings Cross harlots.

  4

  The pilot sergeants such as Tengan who arrived early at Gawell were small in number, like any aristocracy. As well as Tengan, in its early days the camp held four members of a reconnaissance plane’s crew who were found floating near Timor and had passed themselves off at first as merchant seamen; also two fighter pilots who had been found at sea near the Solomons. Amongst them Tengan behaved in his lordly manner because he felt he had most to hide and, publicly, most to expiate, given that humiliating number of his, 42001—the year he had been taken prisoner, and the fact he was the first to have been captured.

  The men who could best resist the arrogance of the fliers were the other two members of the compound’s council—the triumvirate, as Colonel Abercare called them—elected by the compound population. They were older men, accustomed to composure, and they called themselves Aoki and Goda. As senior sergeants in the infantry, they had both learned to be taciturn. Aoki was tall and bowlegged and rather stooping—perhaps congenitally, perhaps from two unextracted bullets in his upper leg. Anyone watching him would not necessarily have guessed their influence on his gait, attributing it perhaps to arthritis. He was aware of his wound, however, and of the limits it put on the time he could stand in comfort and his capacity to move promptly. Aoki’s careful movement helped to endow him with what the young thought of as an air of sagacity. He had joined the army for a span of three years after a bad farming season in 1930—he foresaw it as a brief and financially necessary interlude in his marriage and career. He expected to be stationed somewhere from which he could visit home. But then came the invasion of Manchukuo (which the world at large knew as Manchuria) and he was designated a permanent soldier.

  Aoki believed the lanky Goda, a China veteran like himself, to be a man of excellent counsel. Goda was about the same age as Aoki, somewhere in his midthirties, maybe even forty. Goda, like most of the inmates, avoided talking about his family.
But Aoki got the sense somehow that his comrade was something of a patriarch, with an indefinable number of children. Goda had let slip that he’d had a job as an insurance clerk once, but he admitted little other than that. He had never gone to the trouble most of the others did of explaining how they had been taken by the enemy; how it had been beyond their power to resist, or had occurred when they were not conscious it was happening. No explanation from the insurance assessor. Generally he had a reserve most men did not broach. In peacetime he would have cast a calm, judicious eye over building collapse and flood and fire. Goda was like a rudder, Aoki felt, between the polarities of Tengan and himself, between Tengan’s positive hunger for ultimate elimination and his own more regretful acceptance of it as a mere duty. Goda did not seem frightened of Tengan’s handsome young ferocity. There was something, however minor an impulse, in Aoki that sought Tengan’s approval. It seemed unlikely there was anything like that in Goda.

  Aoki’s capture had occurred when his ship had exploded nearly two years earlier, and he was hurled on a high trajectory into the Bismarck Sea. No steel fragments had entered him, and he’d landed in the sea with as much vigor left as he’d had before the blast. He saw the enemy’s planes machine-gunning lifeboats, and clumps of men in the water, and expected the same himself. But no. He was pulled aboard an untouched lifeboat, which drifted with thirteen men through the night and up past a reef onto the shelving beach of an island.