The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  Fifteen

  By morning, we were on NE3 and had all our folboats under cover and were making a dump for our gear. We made a camp on the crest amongst cactus palms and pandanus and undergrowth netted by creepers. But from it we could see anyone coming from any direction. We drew breath and we hoped, and were more tired than we'd ever been from such a short paddle. Some slept – it was the fight and the sleepless night that had worn them out.

  But I watched everything that was happening on NE1. Soon the daylight woke everyone and I was joined in that exercise of watching. I think we felt like people whose house, Serapem, had been taken over and we didn't approve of what the new owners were doing.

  Then we saw one of the worst things I've ever seen. We saw Lieutenant Carlaw running down out of the thick cover on the hill on NE1, sprinting south into scattered palm trees with just a pistol in his hand. There was no sign of Private Kelly. The first thing I thought was, I hardly know him well enough. I heard Jockey groaning, Jesus, Jesus! Poor bastard!

  The enemy were all over our hill over there, that's where Carlaw was running from, down into the clearing, amongst the papayas and coconut trees, but wide open, a clear target amongst the volcanic rocks. He was making for the sea. He could run, that boy, a beautiful runner, and he could probably swim strongly too, and intended to reach another island. We saw him weaving. You could hear them firing at him, and by the rocks on the edge of the sea he turned. We saw him twice take clear aim and fire, and the Japanese were coming close to him not only down the ridge from the hill but from the place where their barges were too. And now he was out of shots, so he threw his pistol away, and he just stood there and blessed himself – I hadn't even known he was a Tyke, in fact, because he was English I believed he wasn't – and a number of shots lifted him and threw him down the last decline to the sea. And everyone on our new place NE3 was groaning, Poor bastard, poor bastard! And then there was a second of mercy, when one of the Malay fishermen came up and took Carlaw in his arms and looked down in his eyes, but the Japs ended that with blows of their rifle butts.

  Despite all they'd seen, two of my men vomited.

  We watched them make the Malays dig a grave for Carlaw. We watched them all the time for three days, but on the morning the sub was due, the barges pulled away, leaving a section of soldiers and a few Malay Hei-ho, but taking the Malay fishermen with them. The Englishman Filmer was very troubled and came to me. He had written the fishermen a reference, saying they should take it to the British in Singapore after the war. He was sweating that the Japanese wouldn't find it. All at once it seemed very difficult to do good in this world.

  Slowly, as we settled in, we became aware of things we'd left behind in the confusion of the dark. I'd left my camera. It had pictures in it. Filmer had left his sketchbook journal. Damned awful not to be able to vent oneself on paper, he told me. I was getting to forgive him for what happened on the junk and to think, Maybe it could have happened to anyone.

  We watched for the Boss and Rufus, and Lower too. If they landed on Serapem and saw we'd been jumped there, they would quite naturally come here. We were getting used to the idea they might have been caught.

  Two of us always rowed over to NE1 every night from then, landed on the east side, climbed up Hammock Hill to the lookout tree. We listened and called for the sub every night on our walkie-talkies, but it did not respond. If it had broken the surface, our eagerness would have picked it out in the darkness. At first we hallucinated: there it is! Half a dozen times an hour. Then we got more critical with ourselves. It didn't appear the first night. We told ourselves it was coming – even if late, or even if we'd missed it, for it was to return every night for a month if necessary. But it didn't come at all. God knows what happened to it.

  On one of our visits to NE1, Jockey and I had found another intact folboat, and towed it back to our hiding place. We might all need to row to Australia.

  To fill in the days, everyone told stories of their lives. Sergeant Bantry told us a great one. About an old man up in the bush near Grafton who was given a farm in Australia in return for giving testimony against some of the Irish gunmen. As he got older, he became convinced that the Irish were coming for him, so he holed up in his outhouse in the back of the homestead with a rifle and waited for them. He ended up wounding the dunny man coming with a new can. A silly enough tale, but we laughed at it and repeated it. You need to make what you can of that sort of stuff to spin time out when you're waiting.

  Lance-Corporal Dignam, who I barely knew till now, was a useful member of the group that way. He was a hard, coiled little man. He had been a merchant seaman from Melbourne who got stuck in Marseilles, he says, in bad company, and on an impulse joined the French Foreign Legion. He had served in Algeria and Syria for six years. Many of his stories dealt with Arab and French prostitutes, but others with Algerian rebels and the filigree work of Damascus. I asked him whether the training for the Foreign Legion had been harder than the training for Memerang. Much harder, he said. Memerang's nothing. In his company they'd bury you alive in a pine coffin for three hours or more before digging you up to see how you'd dealt with it.

  Jockey said that was bulldust, and Dignam said, Maybe it was only two hours, but it felt like three.

  Major Filmer told us about holidays with his two alcoholic aunts in a house in Scotland, and with an uncle in Dublin who spent all his time in the mountains of Wicklow looking for prehistoric graves. There when he was a boy, he met Lawrence of Arabia, wearing plus-fours, who happened to have studied archaeology with the uncle.

  Stories like that stopped the onset of the horrors. But after thirty days had passed – and they went quickly in retrospect, with two of us every night on Serapem, and hope starting with the dark and failing only with dawn – no submarine had come, no Doucette had appeared. It must have been sunk. Poor Eddie Frampton, everyone said.

  December 7, I told them we had to start south, no choice to it. We would be out of rations if we didn't begin paddling for Bengku Island, eighty miles away, where we knew the Allies had placed a depot for operatives and downed airmen. On the journey we lay up for part of one day on a tiny, unpopulated place, and I noticed the men had begun to suffer with leg ulcers from the constant salt and the plain rations. But we didn't rest for long, and paddled throughout the afternoon, the folboats scattered but all on the same bearing and hard to see on dazzling water, and then into the night.

  So we came to Bengku and found in a clearing the mounded cache left there by some other members of IRD. We rested for a day here – I got a shave from Dignam, and we prepared a sort of farewell feast, to which Hugo Danway, a very handy spear-fisherman, added the catch he had taken at dusk. The reason I call it a farewell feast – it was a good luck ceremony as well – was because I had to split us up into three or four groups from now on, all travelling south on a different bearing, to ensure we couldn't all be taken in one gulp. I repeated IRD's dictum that if captured, each of us should hold out for a day under interrogation, to give the others time. I heard someone say, Bugger that, Dig. I'm going to hold out for a month just to spite the bastards.

  We all took to the sea. Now everyone had a folboat to ride in, and we travelled in groups of two canoes. Making for Australia. No reason why we shouldn't get there. We tried to hide by day and travelled by night, in and out amongst the pagar, the stilts of fish traps. By day we avoided Malay or Indonesian villages, and sometimes that meant sitting out in the mangrove swamps through the heat of the day. But a person just had to endure and promise himself night would come, and be quiet too. Jockey got a bout of fever, and was a passenger for two nights, raving away in Yiddish in the rear compartment. My only worry was that he'd throw himself in the sea at some stage, and I mightn't notice. I thought, I'll put him in the forward cockpit tomorrow night.

  We knew you'd all be worried about us – I remember I told you, Grace, to expect me about December 6. It was nearly Christmas when Jockey and myself, big Chesty Blinkhorn and Pat Bantry – both o
f the latter at various stages Rufus's partners and pretty fretful about what could have happened to Rufus – were all cooking a meal in the bush in a coconut grove on some little place marked NE27 on our maps. We had paddled across the equator some days earlier and it had given us a boost to think we were now well into the hemisphere of home. And then Filmer and his crewman stumbled ashore. I wouldn't have been certain he had such a long paddle in him. And then Mel Duckworth and his bowman. Four boatloads in the one place at the one time, because of accidents of current or bad map-reading – there was no time to hold an inquest to find out why. There were too many of them in one place. But what a comfort it was to see them. They looked dark and greasy and like skeletons, and I was pretty sure I looked no better.

  I told half of them at least to disperse to the other side of the island, and soon after I saw through the dazzle of the sun a landing barge enter the lagoon through the hole in the reef and come into our beach, with another standing off the beach. We were down to a few magazines now, and were concealed in a piled-up clump of volcanic stones the patient seasonal workers of this coconut grove had made as a means of leaving the avenues between trees free. The landing troops looked more awesome and professional to us than any of the others we'd met. They came inland at the run, and saw us and began firing at us. We made a stand with our silenced Stens and our loud pistols. Chesty Blinkhorn was wounded and cried out to me, some advice I could not hear. Bantry and Jockey helped a hobbled Chesty away, and then the rest of us went running too towards the far side of the island. We would soon discover there wasn't much hope in that direction. The second barge had landed there and its troops had already captured Filmer and Mel Duckworth and, I regret to say, were beating them hard.

  We four hid on a small volcanic hill. The Japanese did not pursue us. Mel's bowman had tried to swim for it, and late that night his body came washing back up, before the Japanese had even removed Filmer and Mel and taken them away by launch. It happened they were taken to a prison on a large island named Singkep Island, off Sumatra, and the base for the Japanese who'd attacked us.

  Jockey and I, wounded Chesty and Pat Bantry – we all managed to find our folboats lying in the mangroves on the southern end of NE27. We took to the water but we were suddenly out of steam. We made little more than eight miles before dawn, when we put into the island of Selajar, and we dragged ourselves ashore. We were sheltering in an abandoned native hut when we heard the barges land and the shouts of Japanese officers. I could hear them coming in the undergrowth, and I had my loaded pistol, but I remembered Lieutenant Carlaw, and it struck me all at once to ask, What would any of it mean if I shot them and they shot me? Was that cowardice? The question didn't even worry me. I didn't even think of my poison. Poison had never been stressed anyhow. I have to say – it's no excuse – but I had some of Jockey's fever by then, so they entered the hut and I stood there stupidly with my pistol pointed, and a tall NCO came to me and knocked me down with a rifle butt. There was a bit more beating on the beach, before we too were put on a barge and came in the darkness to the stone cells in the old Dutch prison at Dabo. We were each put in a separate cell, except Chesty, who'd been taken to hospital. Filmer and Mel were already there. We were able to yell to each other, cell to cell. It was a comfort. We rested in the end. There was a ratty thin floor mattress in each of our cells.

  Bantry and Skeeter Moss were soon brought in too, and each placed in his separate cell. There was a comforting feeling in that whatever was to happen to us would happen to all of us.

  I've been through those islands on a liner. I've left the cooled interior of the QEII and walked out on the rather narrow decks, designed more for the Atlantic than Pacific, and felt the sun like a blow on the neck and the shoulders. To spend a day in mangrove swamps under that sun would bring on madness if not fever. I know Indonesian civilisation is ancient, but it feels out there on deck as if all that is impossible, as if morality and culture are called off or driven out of the blood by the ferocity of heat. The joggers and walkers on the deck greet me, getting their aerobics over before the full muscle of the sun makes it impossible. And I flee inside, ashamed at choosing to be a pallid woman, stricken by that misery my husband Laurie can sense and wants to assuage and can't understand, since I was the one who talked him into this voyage. Always failing the young hero, always missing him, always enraged.

  On one of the islands, Bintan, Leo was tortured and sodomised with a baton.

  We were thrown like fence posts into the bottom of one of their patrol boats and moved to a gaol on Bintan Island. This was a worse place, a Kempei Tai compound. It was bad. For a start, Blinkhorn now had malaria as well as his thigh wound and we could hear him calling to us and talking about such things as getting the cows milked and hay-baling, urgent things that he brought from his life on the family farm. Bantry, a cow-cocky himself, would sometimes answer him to soothe him down. Chesty was still raving when I was taken out of my cell to the interrogation room for questioning, and was sat down on a chair on that hosed cement floor.

  I was soon kneeling on a piece of wood, and then somehow I was spread-eagled by the wall. So I must tell you this. Some dreadful thing happened there, with an NCO of the Kempei Tai. I don't mind being beaten, I'm sure we do the same. But this was . . . Yes, this was a violation. I hate to tell you but I have to. They pushed a baton into my body. Damn him to the pit, that's all I can say. And I'm telling you – I don't know why – because it's necessary for you to know that I've lived through that and that I'm still Leo.

  Straight afterwards I felt all the shame was on me, but I've got to a stage now where I know the shame's on the mongrel who did it. Since you're a wise girl, you'd expect something like that might have happened, and you might have thought that it haunted me – well, it does, but it doesn't. It doesn't weigh on me. The Kempei Tai. Bastards.

  The rest was beating and making me kneel on a piece of wood and one awful bloody session when they put a hosepipe down my throat and just pumped water in. I gave them nothing. I certainly didn't mention the SBs. As far as I know all the others gave them nothing. I think we were as surprised as anyone. The sort of pain they put us in just made us angry. Even the drowning torture. That should have got us talking as soon as we got our breath back. The only thing was they already seemed to know a lot about us.

  One day they put Jockey and me and Chesty, who was somehow recovering, pure bush vigour, on a Kempei Tai launch at the wharf at Bintan – we just lay on the deck under the sun, roped together, sweating and done for, no more stories to tell each other, and not fit to hear them if there were. It was Christmas Eve but we didn't know it. The launch set sail and we came into the Singapore docks proper. We landed so close to Kempei Tai headquarters that they walked us there along Tandjung Pagar. I think the first Singapore laugh we had was when we saw that the place had been the Chinese YMCA – it said so over the door. Young Men's Christian Association. We all said it aloud, and we all hooted, and our guards belted us. But it's funny how kind of immune you get to being belted. One of those hitting us was a Malay Hei-ho, another one was Chinese, and the other two were Japanese Kempei Tai soldiers. Having a joke was more important than their authority.

  On the way in through the lobby, I saw Hidaka the first time. I didn't know his name then. I couldn't have told him from the other officers that were around, except that he was wearing a white suit with no insignia.

  When Leo saw Hidaka, the interpreter was on his way to a meeting. He had told Lydon and others, reliably or not, that at that meeting at Water Kempei Tai headquarters it was decided by his superiors that in general torture wasn't going to work. They'd already tried it at Bintan, and they'd tried it on Private Appin, the cricketer, who'd been captured and taken to Surabaya where they beat him senseless, and no doubt subjected him to the repertoire of torture, and they had got nothing from him. I hope such a conference as Hidaka claimed did take place, and that it was now decided to go softer on everyone at the YMCA in Tandjung Pagar.

  Tan
djung Pagar these days – you can't see it for Singapore's thrusting buildings and shopping precincts, and the little Chinese YMCA, with all its screams still unresolved inside it, has been pulled down to make way for something appropriate to the new Singapore. The new architecture, the Capital Building and the Fountains, are more assertive than the memory of Leo's bravery and the bravery of the others.

  After the conference Hidaka alludes to, those first three YMCA prisoners were brought into an interrogation room and paraded for the Water Kempei Tai officers and Hidaka. Hidaka would tell Lydon it was plain how exhausted they were. They'd been running for three months, since October, and they had not shaven and their clothes had turned solid with salt and then picked up the mud of mangrove swamps in which they'd hidden. It was at that stage that a Kempei Tai lieutenant, Sunitono, announced to them that they would have time for a bath and a shave. He also announced that he would not question them until after Christmas, given that he knew Christmas was so important to them.

  We know the bugger was softening us up, but you've got to take what mercies there are. We were happy for the moment but uneasy for the future. We could tell it might be a Kempei stunt. But we had to take what came, punches or privileges. After Christmas, they began questioning us again. We played dumb about other members of the party. But they mixed up their act on us. Sometimes they would offer us one of their cigarettes, but another time they would get in an NCO to punch us again and again. Sometimes they'd just make us kneel on a sharp piece of dowling or bamboo, while the NCO burned us with cigarette ends. And one day they poured the water not only down my throat but pumped it into my rectum. Hidaka would be there. But to be fair to him, he didn't like any of it. Everyone could tell that. Them and us.

  We had a reason not to tell them about the blokes still on the loose. Hugo Danway was out in the Lingga Archipelago, probably trying to capture a junk. The idea of us stalling the Japanese while the others got away was at the forefront of our minds. Long sessions. But it was milder than what happened on Bintan. We kept saying the junk carried folboats and limpets, because they knew that already.