Spit and Polish

by Carl Muller

  Layton, obviously prodded by his own conscience, actually indicated that he was prepared to grant a reprieve and a pardon to Gratien and his colleagues. If only these Ceylonese would grovel . . .

  But Gratien would have none of it. He sent Layton a stunning rejoinder: ‘Take your reprieve and your pardon and wipe your backside with it!’

  Gratien’s father and Carlo Gauder’s brother appealed. Execution dates were delayed, pending appeal, but Gratien’s reply to Layton dashed every hope of commuted sentences. Now, he, Gauder and G.B. de Silva would hang.

  They took Gratien to death row at 7.45 a.m. The British authorities kept the families of the condemned men in the dark about the dates of execution. Gratien was taken to the scaffold accompanied by two chaplains, Father Claude Lawrence and Father Brennan. With them was Prison Superintendent, M. Crowe. Provost-Marshal Whitelow supervised while other prison executives looked on and provided the hangman’s service.

  In their cells, other mutineers, Joe Pieris, Kingsley Dias, Anandappa, mumbled a prayer. Gratien went to the noose with a courage that was unfaltering. Deputy Prison Commissioner Jordan said later, ‘Gratien Fernando’s indomitable courage on his way to the gallows was on everybody’s lips for weeks, both among prisoners and staff . . .’

  They asked Gratien if he had anything to say.

  The condemned man’s eyes flashed. ‘Yes,’ he said in a ringing voice, ‘give me a revolver that I might shoot that bastard Gardiner!’

  The hangman pulled the lever of the trap.

  ‘I have been witness to scores of executions but never did experience a disposition of such a nature,’ Jordan said.

  They hanged Gauder on his 21st birthday. His sister Totsy stood outside the Welikade jail, hoping to claim the body, but wartime regulations forbade this. Eventually the three ‘mutineers’ were buried in Colombo’s Kanatte General Cemetery in unmarked graves.

  For many years, journalist Noel Crusz, who is now in Australia, hunted for the court martial records of the Cocos. The quest took him to the Public Records Office in London, then to examine the wartime naval records in Singapore and London. In 1976, Lieutenant Koch, who placed the six-inch guns on Cocos, was thought to have the records, but it was strongly believed that Gardiner, on being relieved of his commission, took the records away with him.

  Cannily enough, it was Gardiner’s aide, de Sylva, who cashed in. In 1983 Noel Crusz did interview him and he kept offering the ‘inside story’ of the mutiny ... for a price. Crusz found that he had nothing really new to say, but de Sylva hinted at being in possession of vital documents which he was prepared to sell.

  When payment was made, all Crusz received were newspaper clippings about life in Cocos. There was nothing even remotely alluding to the so-called mutiny!

  A sad and quite weary aspect of the war. If, as one man told the writer, the British had won the Pacific War, defeated the Japanese, Asia and the Pacific would never have been really free.

  Who knows ... we may have continued to be under the colonial power—and a victorious colonial power would have been pretty hard to stomach!

  45

  Of Northern Patrols and Schoolgirls in the After Steering and Drinking at The Sydney

  Somehow, northern patrols were not so bad. Not when the Seruwa was reported missing by a hysterical signalman on the Elara and the Korawakka had run aground three miles off the Pungudativu causeway near the island of Delft.

  Victor was not happy. The Vijaya was simply pancaking around in a sea that was on its best behaviour. The waves were so insignificant, the swells so like punctured boils that the ship simply seemed to glide on oiled runners. Carloboy would stand at the portside lookout, gaze at the sun setting a blue oilcloth ablaze and feel that there was something unreal about the cruise. It was like moving in a mess of blue-green butter.

  They spent a couple of days tracking down the Seruwa and reporting back to Elara: that all was well. Apparently the gunboat had developed a battery condition that had affected gyro compass and transmitter and other apparatus.

  ‘So you should have taken a star reading!’ Victor bellowed, ‘and what about azimuth?’

  The captain of the Seruwa grinned. ‘What? And not have you come after us? Why do you think I hung around here? I told the middy there’ll be some good whisky and cigarettes when you come.’ Too true, and the wardroom of the Vijaya grew quite mellow while the men watched a 16 mm film, Black Narcissus on the boatdeck. There were a goodly stock of films on board. Mostly Westerns but some real oldies too with such vintage bombshells like Dorothy Lamour, Esther Williams, Lana Turner and Maureen O’Hara.

  The Korawakka was refloated before they dropped anchor off Kankesanturai for ships stores that had been sent for collection. It was no problem commandeering a pontoon raft to haul the stuff to the ship and it gave opportunity to many of the crew to roam the pebble beach and stray inland where they soon sighted and followed a man with his pingo barrels of palmyra toddy which they knew, tapped and drawn so early in the morning, would be as refreshing as the finest lemonade. And so it was. So fresh that a few bees floated in the nectar, having opted to die deliciously.

  They then rounded the Peninsula and dropped anchor off Talaimannar Pier.

  To Carloboy, these patrols were extremely interesting. Hard to imagine they were anywhere near a familiar Lankan coast. The seas were different too and the water would glisten at night with its speckles of phosphorous. The Vijaya had a pattern to follow—Eluvaitivu Point, Kovilam, Kakeraitivu, Trincomalee for fuel and water, Delft Island. The days passed swiftly as the ship beetled on, threaded its grey and determined way among the islands . . . Eluvaitivu, Pungudativu, Kakeraitivu, Kovilam, Palaitivu, Manditivu, Delft, Mannar, Kayts, Velvettiturai, Kankesanturai, Trincomalee ... in and out and round about the scores of islands and anchorages that clustered like barnacles around the peninsula.

  There were many weird happenings too: like the day the Diyakawa hove to, hauling a long string of hapless fishing boats.

  Victor leaned over the side, watching the approaching procession. Within earshot, he yelled, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Caught these buggers off Kayts.’

  ‘So what are you doing?’

  ‘Taking them to Mannar. Bloody kallathonis!’

  ‘Those are fishing boats, you bloody idiot!’

  ‘That’s what they all say. But one boat has twenty bags of parippu (pigeon pea of dhal) and another bugger has six cases of Lactogen!’

  Victor scratched his head. Of course, there was smuggling. The smugglers operated mostly out of Velvettiturai. Men took boatloads of stuff across the Strait to India.

  ‘Can’t stay to chat,’ the captain of the Diyakawa hollered.

  ‘Carry on,’ Victor shouted and grinned. ‘Like a duck pulling a flock of pelicans. By the time he gets to Mannar half those buggers will cut loose and vanish.’

  They did find a flock of illicit immigrants on a tiny white-stone island off Delft. It was pitiful, rounding them up, transferring them to the Vijaya. Their story was just as pitiful. They had given much to a launch operator to bring them to Jaffna. They were twelve—eight men, three women and a child. The launch had put them on the island eight days ago. As they waded waist-deep to the shore the coxswain had yelled to them to hurry.

  ‘You are in Ceylon,’ he had said, ‘don’t stay on the beach!’ and with a hoarse cackle, swung his nose about and sped away.

  The group had panted ashore, the women’s wet clothes heavy on their bodies. This was Ceylon. Here they would drift inland, go somehow to the interior, trudge the back roads. Someone had given them a contact address in Jaffna. Soon, they would be sent to the hills, the tea country. There, among thousands of other Tamil labourers, they would disappear.

  But they had been cruelly dumped on a tiny thumb-nail of land where the bushes were prickly and the stones cut their feet. All they had were small, tightly wrapped bundles holding all they possessed. They had starved. The child, a dark-eyed scrap of a boy wh
o said he was thirteen and was more like nine, was dangerously ill. None of them could talk in their normal voices. Their throats burned with thirst. They had eaten large hermit crabs cooked in brine. They had eaten leaves and yellow wild flowers and the milk of the leaves had burned their tongues.

  All over the patch of sand were the signs of feverish digging. They had clawed desperately into the earth for water. And they had gazed imploringly at the clouds, for they knew that soon there would be the wet days of the north-east monsoon.

  The women had to be carried to the whaler. One of the men purged horribly and another found it difficult to walk. In the sick bay, they were each given a saline drip to combat acute dehydration.

  ‘Why do these buggers keep coming, I don’t know,’ said Lieutenant Jello (who had joined ship at Trincomalee because he wished to be as far away from Colombo as he could for purely personal reasons). Only he knew why, thankfully, until the night a signal put everyone in a tizzy. It was from NHQ and it ordered Jello to Colombo immediately. Deanna, it said, had attempted suicide. Deanna, it said, was very pregnant. Deanna’s father, it said, was buying a box of 12-bore cartridges. Deanna, it also said, was in the General Hospital, and Deanna’s mother was stalking the NHQ with her hair undone and in a kimono with three buttons also undone. Who, asked the signal plaintively, is Deanna, what is she?

  Jello paled and had words with Victor. Victor swore prettily and told Jello to take the train from Trincomalee. Jello expressed a desire to be let off at Delft. There he would spend the rest of his days, an island recluse, he said grandly.

  Victor was unimpressed. ‘Even the wild ponies won’t be safe,’ he snapped. ‘Go to Gemunu, Lieutenant, and that’s an order.’

  With Jello’s departure came better news. Patrols were over.

  On November 9, with a wild wind taking each wave by the scruff, they left Velvettiturai and headed for the open sea. The coast resounded with cheers. Goodbye for now, you blighted islands, heavy with smugglers and skulking kallathonis . . . they were going home . . . no, correction, they were going to the southern port of Galle, for, as Victor twirled his forelock and told his men, the Mayor of Galle had asked the Captain of the Navy to send the Vijaya to his city. It would be such a honour, he had said—a short stay, a chance to let the sleepy people of Galle come to grips with a real warship.

  Victor gazed bleakly at his crew. ‘The mayor has asked us to honour him with a four-day visit. When off port, this ship will be officially open to visitors, so I want you to be in number ten rig and on your best behaviour, is that clear?’

  Open for visitors! The men looked at each other and each knew what the other was thinking.

  ‘Hey, PO, what are the girls like in Galle?’

  ‘Like everywhere else, you idiot. What do you think? They’ve got horizontal slits?’

  Hughes’ grinned. ‘Must find out,’ he said, and Koelmeyer seconded the motion.

  They rounded the Basses just as the first north-easter dropped its calling card, swooping out of the Bay of Bengal with a yo-ho-ho. The monsoon would soon make the northern seas most agitated. There would be depressions in the Bay and the waves would swipe the coast with great rage. The Vijaya took a pounding as it swept round the south-east hump and ran, with a racing sea, until the Tangalla light buoy. Then the wind dropped and the waves gentled. Victor frowned. Calm seas and ships as steady as Gibraltar were not his idea of fun.

  They couldn’t enter Galle harbour either because of their draught. Victor squinted at the palm-girt coast, the rising hump of the old Dutch Fort, the streaks of gold-white beach and the small breakwaters that seemed to enclose a toy harbour for flat-bottomed freighters and sailing vessels. Picturesque enough, he thought. He checked soundings and bellowed, ‘Let go number one anchor!’

  With an incredible clanking, the hooks shot down even as the Vijaya stopped engines. Victor checked the drag, dropped a sheethook and called for tide signals. The Vijaya turned like an uncertain corkscrew, then held as the anchors lodged themselves.

  ‘Four days outside harbour,’ Carloboy said, ‘and they call this an official visit!’

  Lieutenant Wicks smiled. ‘So what were you expecting? A red carpet?’ He then went below. Time to tog up. The Vijaya was no longer a messy little refuge for maniacs, drunks, malingerers and perverts. To the good people of Galle who would soon come a-calling, it would be the proud man-o-war of the Royal Ceylon Navy, with its able, intelligent, good and true men.

  First came the Mayor of Galle, the government agent and an assortment of city fathers who were more like city grandfathers. They were hustled to the wardroom and dosed liberally, then taken around.

  The men squatted moodily on deck. Galle seemed to be full of old and ugly men. But as the afternoon wore on, they perked up. More and more boats kept coming, and they kept shovelling in parties of schoolchildren, convent girls, groups of civilians and bevies of young girls who were convinced that a ship of any sort was the place where they had to simply lose their virginity. All this talk of sailors and girls in every port had to mean something.

  Even the offshore wind seemed to enter into the spirit of things, swirling their skirts up around their waists as they tottered to the gangway with squeals of embarrassment much to the quartermaster’s glee. The wind chuckled and moved on to make more mischief. The girls blushed and looked coyly about them and kept squealing each time the Vijaya heaved on her anchors. It was, to the men, showtime!

  It may be, as the dormouse said, too much of a muchness to undertake a clinical record of all that transpired. The duty watch was asked to show the visitors around and Carloboy found himself shepherding a gaggle of tittering schoolgirls who were senior students of the Sacred Heart Convent. He found them very enlivening company and somehow, too mature for words. Naturally, they wanted to see the bridge and did not seem to mind at all that lots of sailors lolled around the flagdeck to look up their white school uniforms as they climbed.

  The wheelhouse had never been designed to take twenty sweet sixteens. Neither was the tiny signals office that could hold no more than two and that with extreme tolerance. But the signals office had its steel door and piped air and a slab across the bulkhead that served as a table but was more like a long cell bunk.

  By the time the girls had ooh-ed and aah-ed at the masts, the binnacle, the signalling lanterns and quivered excitedly at the Bofors that were being swivelled around for their benefit, Carloboy knew that it was time to cut one out of her herd. The girl in particular was a sweet-faced, big-eyed thing who kept clutching at his hand as he explained the intricacies of navigation. He had enjoyed their obvious interest. They were most interested in signals and he began to feel like Yeoman Louis in the instruction room.

  ‘V/S is visual signalling. Okay, let me explain. You are walking down a road and I see you. But you don’t see me. And you are now some distance away. I want to communicate, so what do I do? I clap. So that’s a signal. But it’s not a visual signal. You don’t see it, but you hear it. That’s a sound signal.’

  Lots of giggles. One asked, ‘So if a boy winks what is it?’

  ‘A visual signal.’

  More giggles.

  ‘And when you hear the clap you turn to see who’s clapping, no?’

  ‘I won’t turn,’ one miss said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If anybody claps I must turn to see who?’

  ‘Never mind her,’ said another, ‘too proud, anney, she is. I will turn to see. And then?’

  ‘Then I put a wave. You can see me waving. So that is a visual signal.’

  ‘Ah! First the clapping, then the waving.’

  ‘Exactly. Sound signal, visual signal.’ His hand squeezed hers. She did not pull away.

  ‘I want to see the wheelhouse again,’ she said.

  The others said no. They had looked out over the bridge and seen much action around the foredeck gun.

  Carloboy ran his thumb on the girl’s wrist. ‘So you go down,’ he told the others, ‘I’ll show her the
wheelhouse and come. And mind your step. Don’t fall.’

  The girls chattered brightly as they dropped away to the boatdeck. Carloboy led his prize to the little signals office. She hung back at first but his hand was round her waist and his fingers kneaded her hip then moved to her stomach. All they had to do was close the steeldoor but it would be dark and cramped and he could sense her unease.

  ‘We’ll go to the quarterdeck,’ he said, ‘what’s your name?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘Ranjini,’ she said.

  His lips touched her forehead. She reached for his face, kissed his cheek awkwardly.

  ‘You like me?’ he asked.

  The colour rose in her face. She nodded. His hands moved over her small breasts. Outside, he heard the clatter of many feet on the gangway. ‘Let’s go down. There are some more people coming.’

  Nobody paid much attention to the stern where the depth charge racks and minesweeping gear stood. The trap to the after steering was open and to that rude compartment they went and Carloboy made sure the hatch was secured. It was smelly in there. There was the big ship’s wheel, piles of cordage and coiled grassline, belaying pins, the overflow from the shipwright’s store and drums of paint. They sat on a nest of new rope and held each other close and, for no reason at all, spoke in whispers. She took off her white uniform, worried at the oil and how it might soil the dress. Her petticoat was flimsy and low-necked and he gently pushed his hand under the elastic band of her knickers, feeling the soft down of her mount.

  ‘Can you lie back on the rope?’ he asked.

  She was holding his cock, running a finger on its head in a small circling motion. ‘Will you put it inside? I’m—I’m afraid.’