It was very hard going and if she hadn’t already vowed to be brave and to survive this, she might have given up several times on that very first day.
It was the middle of the afternoon when they reached a mission station set in a cleared coconut grove on a high, remote plateau.
A group of very worried missionaries, neatly attired in white, greeted them. ‘We’re waiting for the Japanese,’ they said after the briefest introductions were made. ‘But please, come inside and have a cup of tea.’
A cup of tea sounded like the most wonderful luxury in the world to Georgina. She could have kissed them.
Inside the wooden mission hut, they found three Australian soldiers already drinking tea and eating biscuits. Their eyes boggled when they saw Georgina.
‘What’s a sheila doing here?’ a skinny red-headed fellow with astonishingly bright blue eyes asked.
‘This is Subaltern Lenton of the British Army,’ Harry told them smoothly, as if her presence was perfectly normal. ‘In the scramble yesterday, she was unable to get away.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Georgina could see that these men were absolutely thrown by her presence. Not only was she a woman but an Englishwoman. They were probably bursting with questions, but they offered her tired smiles of sympathy and introduced themselves as ‘Busker’ McMahon, Dave Higgins and Joe Brownlie.
‘We shouldn’t stay here for long,’ Joe Brownlie said. ‘I know the missionaries are worried about Japanese reprisals if they’re caught harbouring Aussie soldiers.’
Harry nodded. ‘That’s fair enough. We won’t hang around.’
One of the missionaries, a tall, balding man of about fifty, appeared in the doorway with a tea tray. He looked distressed, as if he’d overheard Joe. ‘We don’t want to chase you away.’
‘Don’t give it another thought,’ said Harry. ‘We understand your position. You have a responsibility to look after your people. What do you plan to do?’
The missionary’s pale blue eyes were bleak behind his rimless spectacles. ‘We have no choice. We’ll surrender and become prisoners.’
Georgina shivered, thinking of Cora and Teddy. She wondered again where they were now and decided that she had to imagine them safe and well. She would drive herself mad with negative thoughts.
‘That’s a hard call, but it’s yours to make,’ Harry told the missionary. ‘My duty is to avoid capture at all cost.’
Over welcome second cups of tea and biscuits, the soldiers chatted quietly, tiredly – mostly about the best place to head to next. They all seemed to agree that to avoid the Japs they needed to withdraw further beyond the Keravat River.
‘We should stick together,’ Harry said. Georgina realised she was chewing her lip, thinking again about being a hindrance to these men. But she knew that if she offered to stay behind with the missionaries, Harry would be angry. He was committed to getting her out of here. And despite a few wary-eyed glances in her direction, the soldiers seemed very impressed by Harry. Perhaps they would forgive a woman’s presence if it meant being in the company of a commando with jungle training, especially as he carried tinned food and medical supplies.
Unlike Harry, the other soldiers were dressed in short-sleeved shirts and shorts, and their skin was already dotted with red mosquito bites. Only one of them seemed to have a rifle.
‘We need to set a clear goal,’ Harry told them. ‘I vote we head for Wide Bay. It’s a safe anchorage.’
Joe looked surprised. ‘You reckon we can get off the island by boat?’
‘It’s our best bet.’
‘But the Japs are blowing up any vessels they can find,’ warned Busker. ‘Freighters, fishing trawlers, yachts. Anything that bloody floats.’
Harry nodded grimly. ‘We’ll just have to trust that someone from Moresby is organising an evacuation by sea.’
The men looked doubtful, but they were cheered when the missionaries gave them a bunch of bananas and a bag of rice as they bid them goodbye.
‘God bless you and keep you safe.’
‘And you,’ Georgina said as she shook their hands.
One of the women pointed to Georgina’s feet. ‘Oh, my dear, you won’t get far in those shoes. They’ll fall to pieces in no time.’ With that, she hurried away, only to reappear shortly with a pair of sturdy boots. ‘See if these fit. They’re much stronger.’
Georgina thanked her and she felt rather self-conscious with everyone watching her while she took off her muddy shoes and exposed her filthy stockinged feet. As she slipped her feet into the boots, they seemed a little big. She could wriggle her toes rather freely, but then she did up the laces and stood. ‘They’re surprisingly comfortable,’ she said.
Harry was grinning. ‘They’re the cat’s pyjamas.’
When they set off again, Harry scouted ahead. It was soon obvious that keeping to the track was the only real way to make any progress through the jungle. At the first patch of bamboo they stopped so Harry could help the other men cut walking sticks. They quickly realised how useful they were, particularly as they were heading up another mountain.
There was a tension in the other men that Georgina hadn’t sensed in Harry. They kept looking back down the track, as if they expected the enemy to appear at any moment. She shared their tension, of course, but she was glad that the jungle canopy was thick overhead. It gave some sense of security against being spotted or attacked by the enemy aircraft that they could still hear high above them.
When they broke into an open ridge section, she could see deep, heavily timbered valleys below and then beyond them to more towering cloud-covered mountains. No sign of the sea. The terrain was so rugged, this was going to take days. But at least she was coping, so far. Apart from the incessant desire to scratch her red-raw insect-bitten tender parts, she felt she was holding her own.
It was hard, though, knowing that she couldn’t show any sign of her relationship with Harry now. They hadn’t discussed it, but she understood this was how it must be. Harry had taken responsibility for the group and she certainly didn’t want to make any problems for him or cause any fuss, although she did ask for sticking plaster to cover the blisters the new boots caused.
Georgina was ploughing on, head down, watching where to place her feet on the broken, uneven ground when she suddenly bumped into Joe Brownlie, who was the man ahead of her. Then she realised everyone had frozen in their tracks.
Harry was stopped, about twenty yards ahead with one hand raised, signalling a halt, while he gripped his pistol in the other. Silently, carefully, he retraced his steps and when he reached them he spoke in a whisper. ‘Jap sniper up a tree about eighty yards ahead.’
Fear, cold and immobilising, sliced through Georgina, but when Harry looked at her, his eyes seemed to glow with a silent message. Just for her.
Trust me. I love you. Just do what I say.
It was all the reassurance she needed.
He gestured for them to retreat, going carefully and quietly back down the track away from the danger.
At a safer distance, he spoke again, still in a low voice. ‘A few more paces and I would have walked into his line of sight.’
‘How did you spot him?’ Busker whispered.
‘He cut away some of the foliage to improve his line of fire and I saw small branches lying on the track with withered leaves. Didn’t look right.’
‘I want to know how these bastards got ahead of us,’ demanded Dave. ‘It doesn’t seem possible. I’ve been expecting them to come from behind us ever since we started out.’
Harry gave a knowing shake of his head. ‘We’re not in the desert any more and I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. This mob are far better in the jungle than we are.’
‘Well, thank Christ you’ve had jungle training,’ said Dave.
Joe asked, ‘So, what happens now?’
‘I reckon there’ll be more Japs manning a Nambu just a bit further up the track, waiting to ambush any parties coming through. We’l
l leave an obvious note pegged to the middle of this track, warning other stragglers there’s a sniper ahead, and then we’ll loop off upwind onto the high ground. Put some distance between them and us.’
With their note set carefully in place, they moved off.
‘As quiet as you can,’ Harry warned. ‘No slashing at the scrub with your bayonet. No talking. I want to put us on an intersect with the track again, but at least a mile further along.’
Georgina had no idea in what direction they were travelling as they trudged on. For the next two days, the hot, sticky jungle, heavy with the smell of rotting vegetation, was their only shelter. They stumbled up an ever-ascending track, up a steep mountain and then, over equally treacherous terrain, they picked their way down the other side, only to face yet another mountain. In the mornings they packed up quickly and pushed on. At night they slept on wet ground, with hunger pangs gnawing at their bellies and insects biting their faces, arms and legs. Of course, she could no longer sleep snuggled close to Harry, but she was so weary it hardly mattered.
Filthy and mud-smeared, she thought about her parents and was grateful that her mother had no idea where she was. Her father would be horrified too, of course, even though he’d been a soldier in the last war and was proud that she’d joined the army. Apart from his years in the war, he’d embraced a life of privilege and elegant refinement.
Beneath a dripping tree, squashing yet another blood-filled mosquito, Georgina couldn’t help recalling stories of her father’s exclusive London Club, where men went to get away from their wives, to relax, and where the newspapers were reputedly ironed to remove surplus, messy ink and the coins were boiled to clean off any dirt. It all seemed so ridiculous now.
21
Georgina lost count of the days in the jungle.
Her sense of time faded alongside her dwindling energy, as she and the Aussie soldiers trudged on, following slick, muddy tracks, monotonously climbing up more mountains and slithering down the other side, tormented all the way by mosquitoes and leeches, by cut and torn hands and constantly wet clothes, plus the gnawing pangs of hunger.
Always, there were Zeroes zooming overhead. The Jap pilots obviously knew there were escapees in the jungle and they seemed to love taking pot shots, breaking the silence of the bush with the rat-a-tat-tat of their machine guns as they raked haphazardly across the heavily forested hillsides.
The greatest danger came when the soldiers reached the rushing rivers that filled the narrow valleys between the mountain ranges. The Zero pilots soon learned to circle there, waiting to gun down anyone who valiantly tried to cross. To Georgina’s horror, there were bodies caught up in logs at several of the crossings.
Harry made their little group wait till nightfall to cross and they used guide ropes cut from lengths of sturdy vine spliced together.
From time to time the men offered to help Georgina, but she’d made a decision from the outset that she wouldn’t be a hindrance so when someone tried to take her elbow to support her, she felt compelled to pull away.
‘Thanks,’ she would say politely. ‘But I’m all right. I can manage.’
They quickly accepted that she was pulling her own weight, and Harry helped this by reminding them that a subaltern was equivalent to a second lieutenant.
Joe nudged Busker and winked. ‘S’pose we should call her Ma’am.’
They didn’t call her this, but they did end up nicknaming her Duchess because of her accent, which apparently sounded hilariously posh to Aussie ears – especially in the murky depths of a tropical jungle.
A duchess with infected sandfly bites, tropical sores and soggy, rotting boots, Georgina thought ruefully.
She noticed that the men also liked to call Harry ‘Skipper’. It seemed Australian diggers choked on the word ‘Sir’, especially when they were all in danger together and far away from the pomp and ceremony of a parade ground.
They weren’t in the least disrespectful, though. They knew they’d have perished without Harry. It wasn’t just a matter of his jungle training and the fact that he could identify edible plants like kaukau or cassava, they also came to rely on his strength of character and leadership.
Through the really tough times, when their spirits were at rock bottom – when it was tempting to simply lie beside the track and refuse to move – it was Harry who cajoled and bullied them not to give in. Relentlessly, he pushed them on, somehow managing to mix encouragement with the harsh military orders his seniority required.
‘Can’t go one more step, Skipper,’ Joe Brownlie said one night, when they’d been resting before a particularly ghastly river crossing. ‘Leave me here. Please. I’ve had it.’
Harry knew Joe was in a bad way but as he stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, his voice was sympathetic yet firm. ‘You can’t curl up and die, Private. Not until I bloody well give you the order.’
They got Joe across another river that night, but despite the quinine tablets that Harry rationed out for all of them, it soon became clear that Joe was suffering from malaria. Over the next few days, he sank into delirium and the men took it in turns to support or carry him.
Another night and another swift water crossing. Rain drizzled and no light penetrated the jungle. The only sound was the rushing river or an occasional grunt from an exhausted soldier. Everyone was focused on getting Joe safely across – Harry bearing the sick man over his shoulders, the others bringing up the rear – when Busker slipped on a muddy rock and fell.
Georgina, right behind him, let go of the vine rope and managed to grab the big man by his shirt collar, just in time. The water was only knee deep, but the force of the rushing river was fierce, threatening to sweep him from her grip.
Desperately, she braced herself, trying to hang on. Yells from the other men reached her through the darkness. Busker furiously tried to grab onto the slippery rocks, but he couldn’t gain purchase and his rotted shirt began to tear apart in her aching hands.
Oh, help.
Miraculously, she managed to get a hand under his arm but she knew her strength was giving out. As the water rushed and eddied around them, her legs and feet were sore and weary, her back was straining and her arms felt almost pulled from their sockets.
Consumed by deadly weariness, she found herself thinking how easy it would be to simply slip into the water and let the current take her and Busker. It would be just like the summers in Cornwall when she and her friend Rob, the gamekeeper’s son, used to hurl themselves into the brook that crossed their estate and float on their backs, letting the flow take them, drifting downstream.
She might have given in to this temptation if Harry hadn’t suddenly appeared at her side, steadying her and dragging Busker to safety in one powerful movement.
The three of them stood together, feet braced, their clothes now completely saturated, gasping for breath.
‘Have you got him?’ called Dave through the darkness.
‘Yes!’ Georgina’s cry was triumphant, her relief sweet.
Before long, without the need for any words, they continued their cautious crossing over the rocks.
They were all suffering from bone-deep exhaustion, and Georgina knew that none of them could last much longer.
Again Harry rallied them. ‘We’re all going to die someday, but not today. Call yourselves sons of Anzacs? We can’t be more than a few miles from the coast now. So on your feet, soldiers.’
It was only beneath the thickest jungle canopies that they allowed themselves the luxury of a small fire to boil rice or kaukau. Once or twice they celebrated with brewed tea and stale biscuits. Bliss!
They also used boiled water to clean the worst of their cuts and bites and Georgina tore up the last of her half-slip to use as bandages.
These were the good nights.
But to Georgina’s shame, there were times she genuinely wished she’d gone to the mission with Cora and Teddy. Surely a Japanese prison couldn’t be as bad as this endless, muddy nightmare?
Jus
t when she was at her worst, though, she would catch Harry watching her, see his grey eyes, fierce and worried, yet shining with a tenderness that speared straight to her heart.
Just remember I love you. Right?
It was enough to stir new hope in her breast, to believe in the possibility of a future when this war was over.
Days, weeks, it was all a blur.
The little party was on its last legs when they finally found themselves at the coast. One moment they were slogging along a jungle pathway and the next their soggy feet were sinking into soft brown sand and there before them lay a sparkling, palm-fringed bay.
At first, Georgina couldn’t quite believe her eyes. She had to blink several times to make sure it wasn’t a mirage. And then she couldn’t see the bay at all, because her eyes were blinded by tears. Tears of relief. And gratitude.
Harry, as cool as ever, kept them back under the cover of the jungle trees while he studied the sweep of the bay for signs of the enemy.
Busker’s voice broke the silence. ‘Skipper, take a look at this. It’s gotta be from our mob.’
He was pointing to words carved into the side of a large tree trunk.
Circular Quay.
To Georgina’s surprise, the other men grinned.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked.
‘Circular Quay is a ferry terminal on Sydney Harbour,’ Dave explained. ‘I reckon this must be a pick-up point.’
‘Yes, there should be a boat near here,’ Harry agreed. ‘It’s probably holed up in the mangroves, hidden during the day.’ For the first time in ages, his eyes were bright, almost excited, but then his gaze narrowed as he scanned the dense scrub. ‘Could be other Aussies here. We need to take a look around.’
Georgina waited with Joe in the shade and they sat with their backs against the smooth trunks of coconut palms, while the other men, with renewed energy now, set off on a reconnoitre.
They returned with a party of five other Australians they’d found sheltering at the far end of the little bay. Most of the men were sick – they hadn’t had the benefit of Harry’s medical supplies – one of them was suffering particularly with malaria and another was badly wounded.
The Secret Years Page 22
