‘Sure. I ain’t no Christopher Columbus, buddy, but I can try. Nobody never said the Judge ain’t willin’ to try.’ He grinned. ‘I try everythin’ once, dat’s the main reason I mess up my life, man!’
I made him put on an oilskin — fortunately there were two on board — led him up the companionway into the cockpit, unlashed the tiller and checked the compass. Madam Butterfly was holding true south. ‘Here, get the feel,’ I said, handing him the tiller. ‘It’s not hard and needs very little input. Gentle, just a gentle touch.’
‘Like k-ressin’ a tit,’ Kevin replied.
‘Yeah, something like that,’ I laughed, although I had never touched a bare female breast. I pointed to the compass card. ‘See, we’re going due south — all you have to do is hold the course. If anything happens just lash the tiller in place and come and fetch me.’
‘Anything? What you mean, anything?’ he asked anxiously.
I pointed to the sails. ‘See, they’re full. If they begin to flap and you feel the boat trying to change direction, going a bit jiggery-poo, you know, sloppy in the water,’ I said, using the friendly sounding nonsense word to put him at ease, ‘then come and call me, wake me up. If you see a ship it will probably be Japanese, so call me quick smart, but don’t shout. If these squalls persist we could get lucky; the visibility is way down. If we can maintain five or six knots, by tonight we ought to be about sixty miles off Java, but that’s far from safe. As the mouse we’re only a twitch or so beyond the sleeping cat’s paws. Let’s hope to Christ the weather holds and it keeps pissing down. Japs can’t see any better than we can in this murky weather.’
I was trying to make him feel complicit, a part of our escape. In these relatively easy sailing conditions, with the steady breeze, holding a true course ought not to be too difficult. I sat with him for a further twenty minutes, holding his hand on the tiller, guiding him, getting him to acquire the feel as well as the habit of checking the compass every once in a while. I showed him how to sit on the waterproof cushion and ease his back against the rear of the cockpit. ‘Just take it easy. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll make you some hot grub before I turn in, but if you can give me four hours’ shut-eye, I’ll love you like a brother, Kevin,’ I told him.
‘Sails flapping and boat doing jiggery-poo, then I call you?’ he repeated anxiously.
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. Just then a wave broke over the bow, sending spray over the cockpit, drenching us and filling the cockpit up to our ankles.
‘Fuck! Jiggery-poo!’ Kevin yelled in a sudden panic.
‘No jiggery-poo!’ I laughed, beginning to regret my use of the word. ‘That’s normal — you’ll get a wave like that every once in a while in this weather.’
I returned to the cabin and made the usual, rice and fish, the dreaded mackerel, flavoured with a bit of Indonesian ketjap manis, the sweet soy sauce I’d been introduced to by Anna and taken a liking to while on the island. I made a thermos of sweet black coffee for Kevin and took it up to him along with the meal. ‘Chow time — get this down your laughing gear, mate,’ I said, handing the bowl to him. He wolfed it down.
‘Nice gravy.’
‘It’s soy sauce.’
‘Chink stuff? You sure? I don’t eat Chink! Dey lousy, sneaky, treacherous — watch out for dem.’
I pointed to his empty bowl. ‘Yeah, I can see you hated it. We’re on fish and rice for the duration of the voyage; we’ll try you on a bit of curry powder next time.’
‘That Chink?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘No, Indian.’
‘From India?’
‘Well, yeah, originally.’
‘They got slit eyes?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll try it,’ he said, ending the ridiculous conversation that nevertheless served to confirm yet another aspect of the K. Judge character. I wondered how he felt about Negroes, but decided not to probe any further. ‘Righto, I’m off — see if you can give me a few hours’ kip. There’s four cups of coffee in there,’ I said, pointing at the thermos flask. ‘No more than one an hour; when the last cup’s poured wait an hour, then call me.’
‘Aye, aye, skipper,’ he said, touching the bandage on his head in a mock salute.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Lissen, sonny boy, where I come from, giving a sucker an even break is considered a crime against humanity!’
Kevin Judge
CHAPTER THREE
‘Nevah you mind, sailor. Put yoh money away now.Take offa yoh pants. Dis one foh Uncle Sam!’
Kevin’s dream
‘JIGGERY-POO! JIGGERY-POO!’ I awakened with a start to find Kevin shaking my shoulder. I could immediately feel that the boat wasn’t sailing correctly and was annoyed at myself for not having sensed this in my sleep and wakened. I guess we hadn’t been at sea sufficiently long yet for the instinct to kick in and alert me when Madam Butterfly wasn’t sailing true. I glanced at my watch to see that I’d been asleep six hours.
As I jumped from the bunk I touched Kevin briefly on the shoulder, ‘Good work, Kevin.’ I could hear the sails flapping. ‘Wind change, still raining?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘They tell me rich folks, they do this cockamamie shit for fun?’
I grinned. ‘You obviously enjoyed it?’
‘I done better things… Like attemptin’ suicide.’
‘You haven’t been seasick, that’s a sure sign that God meant you to go to sea.’
‘Den He shoulda made me a fuckin’ duck!’
I climbed into my oilskins and went on deck, laughing, grateful to the little bloke for the extra sleep. The sun, invisible behind the low cloud, shone dimly and the rain had turned to a soft drizzle. Visibility thankfully remained low.
I adjusted the sails and set a new course to sou’-sou’-east, around 160 degrees. This I hoped would take me east of Christmas Island. After leaving the archipelago, Christmas was the only island before Darwin on the Australian mainland and seemed to me a logical place for the Japs to build an airstrip.
In fact, I’d decided to give Darwin a miss, for while it was much the closer landing point, it also meant hugging the Dutch East Indies archipelago, already occupied by the enemy. ‘Go south, young man,’ I said to myself. Broome was tempting. I’d told Anna I’d meet her there but I now decided it was too close to the archipelago. That left the West Australian coast. But if I hit it too far north it was pretty well the equivalent of landing on the moon. Allowing for leeway I reckoned I could get to Shark Bay or a bit further south to Geraldton. Given half decent weather, Fremantle was only three days’ sailing from there. Anna would have arrived in Broome long before me and I’d get a message to her if we made it to Fremantle. The big advantage of taking the longest route meant sailing on a broad reach all the way, which is the most efficient method when sailing a small boat.
If it all sounds fairly cut and dried, we had covered about 120 miles in twenty-four hours, but still had around 1200 miles to go! That is, if we didn’t encounter a storm and get blown off course or an enemy plane didn’t use us for strafing or bombing practice. The course I had in mind would be adding another few days to the voyage, but I reckoned that was a damn sight better than spending the rest of the war as prisoners of the Japanese. That is, if they bothered to take us prisoners. With the little bloke being wounded they were just as likely to shoot us on the spot. Before leaving Batavia the news had come in that the Jap navy was sinking merchant shipping carrying evacuees and then strafing the survivors in the water or simply leaving them to drown. My enormous concern was, of course, for Anna. What if the Witvogel went down? I couldn’t bear to entertain the thought. Civilian prisoners were no use to the Japs, whose supply lines were already stretched. They were taking the easy way out with civilian survivors and ignoring the Geneva Convention, which they refused to sign.
Hopefully a warship wasn’t going to stop or change cou
rse to apprehend a yacht the size of Madam Butterfly and in this respect we’d be safe enough once we got beyond the range of the smaller patrol boats guarding the coastline. Aircraft might see us, but even on a clear day we would be a very small target in a very large ocean and unlucky to be spotted. I told myself I’d be happy for the weather pattern to remain as it was; poor visibility from the air, the overcast conditions, frequent squalls and a good blow provide much better sailing conditions than a blazing sun, cloudless sky and little or no wind.
My first aim was to get about 400 miles clear of Java. We’d achieved this on the evening of the fourth day. Having the little bloke on board meant I could get some regular sleep. I took the night watch and while he manned the tiller for a few hours during the day I’d sleep. But I was discovering that having a comparative stranger aboard has its disadvantages. There is little or no privacy on a small yacht and I am by nature a bit of a loner; more precisely, since my childhood in Japan I had learned how to keep my own company. When I look back, it probably all began then, where I spoke Japanese but wasn’t Japanese. I understood and lived within their culture, ate their food, played with Japanese kids, learned Japanese manners and mannerisms, yet went home each night to an English hearth and a cup of Ovaltine at bedtime. I now realise that throughout my early childhood I would have been considered an alien, a gaijin, and secretly been despised by the Japanese people.
This early pattern consolidated somewhat when my father took up his ministry in New Guinea and I was sent to boarding school at the Church of England Boys’ Grammar School (‘Churchie’) in Brisbane. We’d arrived in Rabaul from Japan in April and it was the second term when I started boarding, so the other new chums had already been there a term. Here too I was forced to keep to myself. I was treated as an outcast and branded a surrogate Jap.
I recall on the second evening there, the housemaster, Mr Grimes, at the beginning of evening prep made me stand up and introduce myself in front of the whole house. ‘Righto, lad, let’s begin with your name. Say it loud and clear so everyone hears,’ he announced. He had a habit of jiggling with both hands in his trouser pockets so that the area about his fly flapped like a ferret attempting to escape. Hence his nickname, ‘Grimy Ferret’.
I stood and announced, ‘Nicholas Duncan, sir.’
‘And where are you from, Duncan?’
‘New Guinea, sir, but before that Japan, sir.’
‘Japan!’
‘Yes, sir, I was born there, sir. We left last year.’
‘Ah, that accounts for your peculiar accent,’ he remarked, smiling and jiggling. This got the first laugh of the night.
I had never thought my accent was different to anyone else’s, even though this must have been obvious. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, not knowing how else to answer him.
‘Japan and New Guinea; Rabaul is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And your parents?’
‘My father, sir… he’s an Anglican missionary, my mother, she died in Japan, sir.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, not sounding in the least sorry and immediately asking the next question.
‘And in New Guinea, what does a young boy do?’
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘Hobbies, model aeroplanes, that sort of thing?’
‘No, sir, I am a lepidopterist.’
This brought the second snigger from the boys, although plainly they didn’t know the word. ‘A what?’ the housemaster exclaimed, the jiggling ceasing for a moment.
‘A butterfly collector, sir.’
Grimy Ferret removed his hands from his pockets and turned to face the other boys. He bowed low, one arm across his stomach, the other sweeping forward in a theatrical gesture. ‘Gentlemen, I give you our resident butterfly collector!’ Grimes had been unable to resist the cheap laugh and he was duly rewarded with a great guffawing from the rest of the house. In one stroke my fate was sealed forever.
Without the training in games that comes naturally as a part of the outdoor environment enjoyed by Australian children, I lacked any ball skills, which added to my banishment from the company of the other boys. A big kid who didn’t play sport and spoke a different kind of English was a natural target and I was subjected to a fair bit of derision and persecution. I didn’t play cricket and, at first, lacked even the skills to be a prop forward in the lowest rugby team. In addition to all this, I suffered the disadvantage of having a reasonable apportionment of brains, having read more books by the age of eleven than my class combined and possibly the entire school. Finally, and perhaps not surprisingly for a lonely child, I was a butterfly collector, with a hobby and an obsession that attracted nothing but scorn among my peers. Swot, poofter, sissy, yellow-belly, slit-eye, dickhead, Jap! I’d been on the receiving end of every epithet in the schoolboy vocabulary except ‘coward’.
I wasn’t afraid to fight, but I hadn’t ever learned to scrap, which is almost a birthright among Australian kids. I usually took a beating but accepted this with a fair amount of stoicism, accepting that I was learning to exist in a new culture and had to learn its many peculiar ways. In fact, later in life, it was a source of constant bewilderment to me that the Japanese children with whom I’d spent my early childhood and who had seldom quarrelled and never fought, had grown into adults capable of the most unmitigated cruelty, whereas adult Australians, taken overall, are a fairly peaceable and friendly bunch.
All in all, the earlier part of my Australian experience, until I’d mastered the colloquial language and could use my wit and have my wits about me, was a pretty bruising and lonely one. I felt unwanted, alienated and confused by being constantly reminded of my shortcomings. It’s funny how sometimes the smallest hurts stick like a burr to your memory. I recall how on one occasion the gym instructor at school derisively remarked in front of the other boys, ‘Duncan, you’re a big, clumsy, useless bugger! You don’t belong here. So why don’t you just piss off and go and read a bloody book!’ I laugh about it now, but at the time his derision hurt like hell. If I’m being entirely truthful it still sometimes stabs at my memory.
However, towards the end of my school career I’d mastered the game of rugby sufficiently to play in the front row for the seconds, a position where size and strength was thought to be the primary requirement. The rugby master once advised me, ‘Duncan, we don’t need your brains in the scrum, just your size, grunt and aggression.’ I also played in the water polo team, again perhaps because of my bulk, and I daresay the size of the ball made it easier to catch.
I became the company commander of the school cadets without being in the slightest interested in becoming a leader of men. ‘Tally-ho’, ‘Gung-ho’ or ‘Righto, let’s go’, the three ‘o’ injunctions used to spur action in others, were not for the likes of me. I put this elevation in military pursuits down to butterfly collecting. At cadet camp during jungle exercises, my platoon consistently ended up capturing the enemy while never losing a man. I also earned a bit of a reputation in the military classroom for organisation and tactics and what the regular army captain who conducted it called ‘original tactical thinking’, which earned me (along with the jungle stuff) a recommendation to the school from the permanent army that I be made a cadet officer.
All of which, in combination, entitled me, in senior schoolboy terms, to be finally accepted as a respected brain, head of the school debating team, a prefect, the guy who usually won at cards and to whom you went to settle an argument or to verify a fact. I had learned the peculiar ways of my new culture well enough to survive more or less unnoticed within it. However, aloneness, as opposed to loneliness, becomes an acquired habit and, in the end, a cherished one. I had learned from my school experience in Brisbane to create a niche for myself. Add to this a melancholic widower father, an academic turned Anglican missionary, a silent man who had very little to say to me that could be construed as parental guidance and who usually answer
ed my questions by handing me a book from his vast and cherished library.
We invent our own ways to survive and mine was hardly earth-shattering in its ambition. I can now see that it all pointed to the need to create a place in my life where I felt safe: somewhere I could be someone and do something, without having to necessarily compete — hence the butterfly collecting, sailing, books and finally acquiring the ability to be alone without being lonely. I was known to have a stubborn streak and, moreover, my determination wasn’t always seen as meaningful and was often enough interpreted as foolhardy in a young boy.
For example, to the consternation of my father’s expatriate parishioners, during the school holidays in New Guinea I would spend several days seemingly alone deep in the jungle. The children of missionaries are always thought to be a bit peculiar, but my proclivity for collecting butterflies as a teenager and to undertake dangerous excursions into the unknown to do so, became a constant source of local gossip, most of it aimed at my poor hapless father’s ineptitude as a parent. In truth, I was generally in the company of native village children, who taught me the ways of their vast and beautiful playground where I soon came to feel completely at home.
I guess you could say another example of my stubbornness, if it were to be seen through the eyes of others, would be my unreasonable and ill-considered search for the Magpie Crow. It would be possible to argue that it is a butterfly commonly found in Singapore and Malaya, and while both these countries were now occupied by the Japanese, I could as easily have acquired a specimen before this happened from a local collector. Any local collector would have happily mailed me a Magpie Crow in exchange for any number of rare New Guinea butterfly varieties not available to them.
But there you go. As I saw it, I had one great advantage — I was free to make my own mistakes and to accept the consequences. I was seventeen, I’d worked for a year at W.R. Carpenter as a clerk, a job that required neither brains nor initiative but allowed me to save sufficient funds to embark on my quest for the Magpie Crow in the time I had off before joining up to do my duty for King and country. Sailing Madam Butterfly alone to Australia across the Indian Ocean was just another so-called foolish decision and look what happened — I’d met Anna and fallen head over heels in love. Being headstrong is not always the disaster it is so often made out to be. Now, with the little bloke on board, things were suddenly different. I was no longer a free agent responsible only for myself and, furthermore, I was no longer alone.
The Persimmon Tree Page 10