The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  February 20, 1966

  NOT TO BE SHOWN TO MY FAMILY

  To be sent under CONFIDENTIALITY instead to

  Mrs Minette Doucette, England; Mrs Dotty Mortmain,

  London.

  Dear Ladies,

  This is told you in confidence. A simple rough letter full of the

  blunt sentiments of a man who's dying, and if I offend you with

  that you'll just have to forgive it. I have to let you know straight

  what I can't tell my wife, and beg you in decency not to disturb

  her or visit her.

  I've been questioned by this Mark Lydon fellow, and I always knew it would happen. If I'd stayed on at SOE in Baker Street and not gone gallivanting off to the Indian and Pacific, I could have had an honoured career. Everyone knows the letters SOE these days. Books coming out. Special Operations Executive. The letters are an adequate explanation of a life to those chaps in bars who still ask what you did in those days. And who were you with, old chap? SOE does the trick. Sworn to discretion. They imagine parachute drops and explosions and being bound not to reveal anything.

  Mr Frampton? This author, Lydon, asks me by phone. He's an Aussie, a Fleet Street bugger works for the Observer. Trying to write an account of Doucette's two great missions to Singapore. He has a British publisher. He mentions the name and it's a publisher I recognise.

  I thought I'd better see this writer then, but I've had no peace of mind from that day. Sleepless nights. Isabel saying exasperated, Come to bed, love, and similar, making me tea I put Scotch into.

  I fought my way through a number of meetings with Lydon, but it was all hopeless. Did you ever nearly piss in your pants, I wanted to ask him, like I did when Private Stapler and I landed at Serapem and saw that Jap walk past down Hammock Hill with his little dog? But the reason I write this is because I have no excuse to offer, so I'd better stop offering one.

  Private Stapler wanted to capture the man. He said he'd shoot me. Rather shoot a Pommy than an enemy of the Crown, he said. Pommy poofter! he said. He put the barrel of his Sten against my cheek. We could know everything that happened if you'd let me capture that Nip! he said.

  And what would we do? I asked this berserk colonial boy. With ten hours before dark? What would we do with him after?

  Anyhow, as we Framptons drink tea with this chap the author, Isabel said to him, I hope you appreciate the problem it is for Eddie. He's got enough problems running the factory and serving on the County Council, you know?

  I do appreciate it, said the young man. I saw him nod all right, but could tell he was bloody ruthless. He'd read too much. He'd been into the records and he'd read my report on visiting NE1, and Lieutenant-Commander Moxham's – who's a bloody admiral these days. He'd read Stapler's report too, he told me, which I think should have been destroyed in the interests of decency.

  I wondered, asked this colonial, how Commander Moxham could have so misread the orders . . .? I mean, the orders for picking up Doucette's men on time? As I understand it, he was to bring you to NE1 for the rendezvous every night for a month, starting on October 20 1944?

  Yes, I admitted. But subject to the safety of the submarine.

  The smell of Orca came back to me, and I felt I wanted to be sick in a new sense.

  Well, he didn't get you there till sixteen days after the agreed time.

  I feel you deserve the answer I gave the boy. Moxham got a fixation and insisted on staying out and using his fifteen torpedoes. I told Moxham we had to move along to NE1, Doucette's crowd would be waiting. I didn't like Moxham's stubbornness any more than anyone else. But the simple truth was these sub commanders hated picking up operatives. They didn't get much credit amongst their peers for that.

  As the baby author pointed out, we now know the Memerang operatives I was meant to pick up were on NE1 at the appointed time. And by the time I got there were still hiding on another island by day and paddling across to the Hammock Hill site on NE1 by night. My report showed I visited the Hammock Hill only once and in the day.

  It's true that when I got back to the sub, Moxham said he couldn't land me there again. Water's too shallow in that archipelago, he said. I mean, Orca had been tracked that day by a Japanese anti-submarine plane. They were on to us, you understand. Only a matter of time . . .

  I ask your pardon. I had been, however, eighty days there, on that sub Orca, conducting them up there to Serapem, then back to Fremantle so the Malay crew of the junk could be interviewed by intelligence. Then off again to fetch the party. I had only three days ashore in Western Australia in all that time. By the time we got to NE1, I had no muscle tone left. I was physically done. I could barely stand, scarcely use an oar, and even found walking difficult.

  Lack of muscle tone isn't an excuse. I never got over it, any more than you have. After the war I swore off sophisticated engineering, and became a plain old steelwright who liked putting together big transoms of steel for ordinary purposes. Deliberately went from little cunning devices to big plain structures – to get over what I think was a kind of crack-up, though a fellow couldn't tell anyone that then. I never said so to anyone.

  I should have insisted on going back to Hammock Hill on Serapem the next night, and the night after, and if that hadn't worked, should have insisted we capture the locals and ask them what they knew of my lost brethren. There were still so many of the Memerang boys living and hiding out on NEs and NCs at that stage. Not only did Mark Lydon know that I should have done all that, should have been an enterprising officer like Doucette, who always consulted locals. But he also knew that I knew I should have done it, and that my failure was eating my vitals and that I dreaded all the stuff he had to tell me.

  Right now, Mr Fleet Street is waiting at home for me, Isabel telling him, He'll be here in a moment, something must have come up at the works. I remember when I met her her family didn't use the word the in sentences and she's had to learn. Soomthin coom oop at works, she would have said once. Dear Isabel.

  The Independent Reconnaissance Department was so fussy in some ways, but also incompetent in others, and never asked me for my glass-coated death pill back. I kept it in my kit. I kept it in my office desk as a sort of insurance against anything becoming intolerable – cancer or bankruptcy or such. Bakelite and glass coating to stop accidental usage. I am the last victim of Operation Memerang, and I suppose I can't blame you for thinking I'm its last war criminal. I would be obliged if you and your sisters in loss forgave me my neglect, and I seek that favour from you. I'll soon be walking the shadows with your brave fellows.

  (MAJOR) EDDIE FRAMPTON

  Thirteen

  But of course, time does erode betrayals and further subtleties of loss. You absorb it all, no matter how terrible. I never thought either that Eddie Frampton deserved the death penalty, though I could see the sense of his last act, and I never wrote his widow a condolence letter. I was helped by the fact that I loved my job. By the mid 1980s, I was and had been for two decades head of English at North Sydney Girls' High, teaching bright and receptive girls, and fortunate to be liked and respected by them. I was aging and was spoken of by other teachers as 'an institution'. Though I had accepted that my education as a widow would never cease, I was a happy woman, a reader, a savourer of gardens, with a companionable husband. Laurie and I were frequently visited by our son, Alex, a structural engineer, a man who relished life and had an acute sense of its value. Though he lacked a few of the literary bones which I would like to have given him, his wife was a first-class conversationalist, an athletic, intelligent woman who sometimes reminded me of Dotty. And of course I had those visits from my post-modernist, gender- studies granddaughter Rachel. We sparked off each other.

  I knew from letters from Dotty, now about to retire as a senior editor in a so-called 'hot' publishing firm, that she was as harried as I was by an increasing number of Memerang hobbyists and even serious researchers. The chief of them was still the journalist and author Mark Lydon, whose interviews wit
h Major Frampton had triggered the latter's suicide. Lydon had been shattered for a time by Frampton's swallowing of his death pill, but after a number of psychiatrists assured him that Frampton's suicide had been Frampton's choice and could not have been foreseen, Mark returned to his book, ultimately publishing a fairly flattering version of Memerang entitled The Sea Otters, in which he extolled Doucette and Rufus and Leo and the others and was, no doubt inhibited by the publishers' legal advisers, mildly critical of Frampton and Moxham.

  After The Sea Otters Mark, who could be seen as conscientious to a fault, became a lifelong devotee of Doucette's story, and others joined him or competed with him in businesslike pursuit of new information. In the end they found out everything that could be known, every little squalor, every little move. About the rest they had hypotheses on such subjects as what Leo Waterhouse really felt like in the bus from Outram Road prison to Reformatory Road, what mixture of terror and exhilaration – for everyone mentions the evidence of exhilaration! People spoke during the French Revolution about a shining serenity on the faces of some enemies of the state as they travelled in the tumbrel to the blade. As if the guillotine were such a total cancellation of the world that it solved many of the victim's smaller daily anxieties. They no longer travelled in uncertainty.

  But I couldn't bear to discuss that sort of thing with Lydon or any other outsider. It might just encourage them. As it was, they rushed to tell me new information as if I hungered for it. Between these flurries of research by others I felt content, engrossed in my only grandchild, my son's daughter, a child I felt was very like I had been but thankfully less burdened with painful bush politeness than I was. By now I had seen the sad decline of both my parents, who died with the uncomplaining demeanour of their type, but my world was nonetheless enlivened by Rachel and her capacity from childhood to ambush me with unexpected questions.

  Meanwhile, about 1985, Mark Lydon successfully tracked down the Japanese interpreter Hidaka, who had worked on Leo and others. Hidaka had assumed a false name for some decades, precisely because of what befell his Memerang charges, and Lydon found the man through his disgruntled wife, a former nightclub dancer. Lydon took Hidaka's photograph outside his broken-down steak-house in Yokohama, with a red banner advertising Suntory at the door and a murk beyond the door to match the mysteries behind his edgy smile. For like all of us Hidaka had not even told himself everything! Everyone, from Mark Lydon to poor old Hidaka, the former interpreter for the Japanese in Singapore, with his evasions and boasts about a special relationship with Leo and the others.

  I stayed away that day because I could not bear to see what was done with them.

  That's one of his claims.

  I brought them books. I bought them sweetmeats.

  But you did not save them, nor could you, nor did you at a profound level dissent from what was done to them. So you're no use to me.

  And your superiors also valued you for the way the men trusted you and told you things, and you took that credit too!

  So to what extent was Hidaka a man of sentimental fraternity, and to what extent a cunning operative?

  Every new, well-meaning interviewer and Memerang hobbyist puts the stress-mark between these two possibilities in a different place and then, visiting Hidaka, most of them want to call me up and tell me exactly what they think the formula for Hidaka's supposed generosity to Leo and the others was. As if that's a question on which I would still be working, adjusting still my balance of hatred or gratitude when it comes to Hidaka and the Japanese military code.

  Some of the researchers are starting to be true scholars now, even a doctoral student, a captain in the army. They either examine Hidaka's record or go to Japan to interview him. This raises in me the old fear that something new might emerge which must be borne, something dangerous to the honour of Leo's ghost and something perilous to me. More than the human frame could carry.

  The young doctoral army captain thinks that Hidaka might have been lucky not to be prosecuted by the War Crimes Commission. After all, he did the interpreting for a number of Kempei Tai interrogations. But then, says the captain, dozens of more senior military men were let off too, through lack of personnel to investigate them or because of the war-weariness of the victors. I am a terminally polite old woman, but inwardly I flinch and there's a trace of acid in my response. Thank you, captain, for your fascinating assessment.

  The young captain completed his doctoral thesis, Planning and Operational Shortcomings of Operation Memerang, graciously sent me a copy, and disappeared from my life.

  One enthusiast has told me it rained at 1300 hours as Leo and the others made their way in through the gate of Raffles College to appear before the sitting of the Military Court of the Seventh Area Army. He had also kindly taken a photograph of the college motto above the gate: Auspicium Melioris Aevi, Hope for a Better Age.

  Just a photograph to him, but I am thereby locked into the journey Leo made that day of his trial, and become raddled with the mad wish that I had been there to argue with the judges and offer my head for Leo's. Over decades, Laurie, a man of great generosity of spirit, learned to read my moods, which were profound but not always very visible, and accommodated himself to them in the days after I'd been visited by the enthusiasts, when I felt myself hurtling down in a pocket of free air between two ages and two marriages.

  Anyhow, on the day of Leo's trial, when the accused parties dismounted from their Mitsubishi truck, guards took Leo and Filmer and the others in amidst the dripping shrubberies of the college garden, the leaves already steaming as the afternoon sun failed to decide whether it intended a cool afternoon or not. The prisoners entered a lecture hall with leadlight windows. I imagine sudden, renewed rain on the roof.

  The presiding judge was a Colonel Sakamone of garrison headquarters, but the judge with the greatest experience in the inquisitorial Japanese system, which – as the researchers tell me – is based on the Code Napoleon, was one Major Torosei. A third major filled out the trinity of judges.

  Hidaka the interpreter would later tell Lydon that his own senior officer, Colonel Tomonaga, had declined to serve as judge. He had made it clear to Hidaka he thought the men should simply be put in Changi as POWs. But Colonel Sakamone, a former policeman, disagreed. He was a fanatic, said Hidaka, even though fanaticism was getting less popular with officers as the war went on. Sakamone had said at dinner one night that he believed the war would begin only when the Japanese mainland was invaded, and he was looking forward to that cataclysm. Everything up to now had apparently been mere prelude. The war would be won on ancestral land, he said. Sakamone had taken the job which Hidaka's colonel refused.

  The prosecutor or attorney-judicial, a man the judges had already met with to decide the shape of the trial, was a professional lawyer, Major Minatoya. What did Minatoya think as he prepared his papers? Tokyo burning to ash, the home islands falling, even if the great nuclear secret had a month to go before it would be revealed. Singapore gravid fruit hanging on the empire's tree. Yet at such times of uncertainty men cling to the certainty of routine duty.

  Next to Minatoya the prosecutor sat the young Hidaka, Leo's friend, in his white civilian suit. Hidaka had a slightly spiv-ish reputation amongst the officers for having once worked as a bookkeeper and greeter of foreigners in a Tokyo nightclub before the war, but he was always a meek figure, and the enthusiasts and hobbyists tell me he was not above soliciting women for officers. He was in love with a Tokyo nightclub dancer whom he'd marry after the war.

  The supreme figure of the trial sat in the gallery at the rear of the courtroom, above the double-leafed doorway of the lecture hall. Major-General Okimasa, head of the judicial apparatus for the Seventh Area Army, wanted to see the process through. He must have had a glimmering, given all his robust activities in Saigon and Singapore, that his own future might contain a suicide by blade, or else a scaffold. In Indochina and Malaya he had been a monster for his gods. I would like to think his foreshadowings of fear were un
manning him even then, but I do not believe they did. He certainly seemed to feel a kind of administrative urgency to get this trial settled.

  Each of the prisoners was asked to state, one by one, his birthplace, his unit, rank, name and age. To what extent the not yet identified Stockholm syndrome was at work in Leo and the others, I have no idea. They were human, after all. That growth of solidarity between captor and captive, particularly when exalted by the solemn ritual of a trial and the prospect of a formal execution, probably works even on heroes. Was Leo still looking for, grateful for, signs of humanity even in Sakamone the presiding judge or in Minatoya the prosecutor, or perhaps even from the real presiding presence of the general in the gallery?

  Lydon later told me that the Japanese came to trial only when they felt the case was eminently provable against the accused. Their inquisitorial process was begun that afternoon, and to match the prosecutor, Minatoya, there was no corresponding defence counsel.

  Minatoya, I also knew from briefings by Mark Lydon, had set out to prove the men were both perfidious and heroic – that was always Hidaka's claim, anyhow. The 'stratagem' of which they were guilty was that, except for a few commissioned officers, the party willingly refrained from wearing badges or caps to show their ranks, so that they could not be recognised as fighting members of the armed forces to which they belonged. They had used camouflage dye on exposed skin surfaces. Doucette and Leo and six other members had worn sarongs! A Japanese national flag was flown by them, and a further Japanese flag was painted on the stern of Nanjang.

  On October 10 of the previous year, the party under Lieutenant-Colonel Doucette had launched a sudden and heavy fusillade at a Kaso Island police boat containing five Malay policemen. Four of the crew of the police boat were killed. By December 1944, the time of apprehension of all the accused persons standing before the court, they had confronted Japanese garrisons on a number of islands and killed Captain Matsukata, Lieutenant Hiroshi, along with some fifty-five other army personnel. Thus they had engaged in hostile activities without wearing uniforms, and had also used the vessel as a stratagem of offence and penetration.