The Persimmon Tree (68 page)

It was a few minutes before midnight when an exhausted Anna arrived at Ratih’s
kampong
restaurant. The patrons had left and she could hear the clatter as the servants washed up the last of the dishes, pots and woks. Ratih could hardly believe her eyes when she saw her. ‘Anna, it is you!’ she cried, then ran towards her, holding her tight as Anna collapsed weeping into her arms.

History tells us that the 14th of August in 1945 was the day the Japanese forces officially surrendered in Tokyo. In Java, a day ahead on the International Date Line, the capitulation occurred on the 15th. By midday the local Japanese in Tjilatjap had laid down their arms, opened the gates of the internment camp, those of the Nest of the Swallows and the soldiers’ brothel, and allowed the prisoners to walk free. The Japanese troops were ordered to return to their barracks to await the arrival of the Allies.

The war was over. Anna had survived.

The murder of Colonel Takahashi was never officially recognised. Allied records copied from the Japanese enquiry into his death simply stated that he died alone in the officers’ bordello, the Nest of the Swallows, on the 15th of August 1945. The report noted that he had taken heroin before stabbing himself under the sternum, a method familiar to the
kempeitai
.

It was presumed that, upon hearing the Emperor’s surrender broadcast from Tokyo, he had committed suicide. The weapon used — ‘in all probability the short sword worn by Japanese officers with the
katana
’ — was never found and was likely to have been stolen. The Japanese record noted that his suicide was an honourable death and in the tradition of a defeated hero.

A typewritten note from a British officer was appended to the short transcript. It noted that Colonel Takahashi had been promoted from the
kempeitai
and that, had he not taken his life, there was more than sufficient evidence to prosecute him for war crimes. The officer had added, in his own handwriting under the typewritten sheet, ‘A thoroughly
nasty piece of work!’

‘
Remember, if you are moving in the jungle

then you are vulnerable.

The soldier who stays still gets the kill.
’

Sergeant Major Wainwright

Weapons Instructor, Fraser Island, 1942

‘
We’ve had the traditional sailor’s farewell, Nick.

Now I want the traditional woman’s farewell.

I want to stand tearfully alone on a railway platform

with a hiss of steam bursting from the engine’s wheels,

waving the dearest man in my life goodbye,

a small lace handkerchief crumpled in my trembling hand.
’

Chief Petty Officer Marg Hamilton

On the way to Perth from Fremantle, 1942

I CONFESS I WAS
shattered when I heard the news that the
Witvogel
had not arrived in either Darwin or Broome. The thought that it may have been sunk by the Japanese, that Anna could be dead, left me depressed and terribly sad. To add to this I received a letter from my father. It had been handed to one of the refugees who was leaving New Britain, with the request that on arrival in Cairns the letter be sent to my godfather, the Archbishop of Perth.

My dear Nick,

My sincerest hope is that you will receive this letter. If ever there was a more inopportune time to go butterfly hunting in Java, then I can’t imagine when that might be. But then you were always a strong-minded child. With the great bastion of Singapore bound to hold the Japanese forces, the speed of their advance that caught us all napping in Malaya will soon be halted. Thank God for good old British foresight and initiative.

With every tramp steamer docking in Rabaul I pray that you will be on board. Now that the Japanese invasion of both islands is thought to be a matter of days away, I pray instead that you take ship to Australia. My worst fear is that you are trapped in Java and taken prisoner. What a fearful mess we find ourselves in.

I am sending this letter via Mr Gunnar Petersen, a passenger (or is it refugee?) on the last boat to leave New Britain. Gunnar is a deacon in the Rabaul congregation and a thoroughly decent chap who, I am confident, will make every endeavour to get this letter to Henry in Perth. ‘If I have to walk all the way myself, Vicar!’ he assured me.

I was, of course, offered passage on the same boat, and my hope is that you will understand why I could not avail myself of the opportunity to escape the island. I am a missionary, not simply for the good times but also for the bad. I have a native flock I feel sure are going to need me in the days and months to come. There are also a number of whites of assorted nationality who are unable to escape, and who will need my spiritual guidance. My hope is that I will not be found wanting.

With a fluency in their language and knowledge of the Japanese mindset, I believe I will be in a position to bring about some amelioration. After all, is this not God’s true calling — to bring comfort and restore faith and hope in those around us?

If you receive this letter that will mean you are safe and the Lord God will have answered my ardent prayers for your safe return. These are uncertain times and, with God’s will, we will soon be together once again — father and son, priest and sailor, bibliophile and butterfly collector.

I realise that I have not always been the father you may have hoped for. With the premature death of your mother you lacked the maternal care every child is entitled to receive, and I know I should have done better. Yet you have grown to be a splendid man. If I haven’t told you as often as I should, I am immensely proud of you. As for my shortcomings as a parent — and I am aware they have been many — I hope and pray that you will forgive me.

I should, perhaps, end with Psalm 23, but choose not to: too much valley, shadow and death and, I fear, very little green pasture is ahead for mankind.

Although, as far as I know, there is not a scintilla of Irish in our family, I prefer to leave you with this simple and traditional secular blessing:

May the road rise to meet you

May the wind always be at your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face

The rains fall soft upon your fields

And until we meet again

May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

Your loving father,

John Duncan

After reading my father’s letter so soon after the news about Anna, I confess I crept away to a quiet corner of the Archbishop’s spacious grounds and found a garden seat where I blubbed like a small child. Why is it that we so often reveal our true feelings when the time has passed? I had never once told my father that I loved him and now, possibly too late, I realised how very much I did.

His notion that he could somehow lighten the load of his parishioners by negotiating with the Japanese was naïve but predictable. He didn’t have a skerrick of commonsense, and never got it into his Anglican clergyman’s head that a good intellect, a dollop of tolerance and a soupçon of God thrown in for good measure isn’t the solution to every human problem. Faith, hope and charity — that summed up his attitude perfectly.

I spent the larger part of my so-called ‘holiday’ (before embarking on the train trip to Melbourne and going on to the HMAS
Cerberus
) lying on the bed feeling sorry for myself. I had found a fleapit to replace Mrs Beswick’s establishment with its ‘All stations alert — spies are everywhere’ and ‘One cold shower a day’ features.

Two of the three people I cared about most were either dead or imprisoned by the Japanese. Marg Hamilton, of course, was the third. If we ever met again a fourth would be Kevin Judge, telling whoever expects him to face up to the enemy:
I want ya ter unnerstan, I ain’t no fuckin’ hero!

Three of these four I now cherished as friends, two as lovers. I hadn’t known any of them that long, but when you’re a loner you pick your associates very carefully, yet more by luck than good judgment these people had come into my life and I cared about them very much. Perhaps it was because I was finally growing up that I recognised their importance to me. Now two of them might well be dead, and a third would be getting on with his life in the US Navy or back in Chicago. That left only Marg Hamilton, who so wonderfully ended my impatient virginity by guiding me across the post-pubescent threshold into manhood.

Added to my depression was my guilt that I knew I loved both Anna Van Heerden and Marg Hamilton. Can a man love two women simultaneously? I mean love, like in romance? Marg had invited me into her bed. That was, and still is, one of the truly wonderful events — with bugles blaring — in my life. As importantly, while I didn’t recognise it at the time, she gave me the comfort of a woman, the warmth, the closeness, and other outwardly female characteristics I had not experienced as a child. By this I don’t mean she was a surrogate mother — nothing of the sort. She belonged to a gender I had instinctively longed to love and, now that I’d been taught to do so, in return she had shown me how to receive love. Does that make any sense?

Anna, on the other hand, made me laugh and want to dance and do somersaults and handstands ahead of her on a green lawn, and feel the sheer joy of being young. She was a lovely mystery to be explored. A butterfly only just emerged from the chrysalis who was testing her beautiful wings in the dewy sunlight.

During my week and a half of being a thorough pain in the arse, Marg took to fetching and feeding me in the evenings and enduring my moods. Then two days before I was due to leave on the three-day journey by train to Melbourne, she’d finally had a gutful of my pathetic self-pity.

‘Nick, there is no point in grieving for what
may
have happened. Until you are certain, until the telegram arrives, get on with your life. Even then, you’ll mourn them for the remainder of your life, but after the initial tears and heartache we all have to get on with it. We have to find a way to cope.’ She paused. ‘As I and many others have been required to do.’

See what I mean? That same sentence said by a man would carry an unspoken but underlying criticism:
C’mon, ferchrissakes, Nick. Time to get on with it; be a man, will ya!
With Marg, it was loving and kind, wise and understanding and correct. And all of it was delivered without the underlying verbal sock in the jaw. It shocked me out of my self-pity.

‘Marg, I apologise. You’re perfectly right. I’m afraid I’ve been a miserable little shit. Thanks for looking after me and straightening me out, helping me get on top of it all.’

‘Well, I rather like the idea of your getting on top of it,’ she laughed. ‘Tomorrow night at 6.30 it’s sausages, onions and a volcano of mash with gravy, followed by trifle and custard and then…’ She paused. ‘I thought the traditional sailor’s farewell.’

‘Sailor’s farewell?’ I asked stupidly, momentarily thinking it was something to eat, then seeing her mischievous grin. ‘Oh!’ I said, blushing.

‘When a sailor goes to sea a prudent woman leaves him with a memory to come home to.’ She grinned. ‘So her sailor-boy won’t forget her.’

At eighteen, unlike girls, I guess guys are a bit ‘um and
ah’,
resorting more to glottal sounds than to sentence construction. ‘Gee, ah, er, ummph, I’m not really, ah, going to sea, but er, ah, that’s wonderful, Marg,’ is a rough approximation of my highly sophisticated reply.

‘But you
are
going to sea, Nick. All naval establishments ashore are treated as ships, and when you leave the front gate it is called “going ashore”. I feel duty-bound to maintain a tradition that has probably existed since Francis Drake left England to circumnavigate the globe or to fight the Spanish Armada.’

I guess it was still on Marg’s terms. I lacked the wit or the experience or whatever it takes to coax a woman into bed, hers or my own. Not that I had one to coax her into. My bed was an iron army cot on an upstairs verandah that had been converted into fibro cubicles just large enough to contain a narrow bed and a suitcase. I was in no position to conduct the niceties of romance, even if I knew how to do so — which I didn’t.

I wasn’t expecting Marg’s invitation and counted myself dead fortunate that I was being invited to sleep with a beautiful, generous and loving woman. My greatest concern was whether I brought my own frangers this time, or whether Marg (as she had previously done) would equip me with standard naval issue.

I wasn’t even certain where one bought French letters. At school, the conventional wisdom was that they were obtained from the barber’s shop or the chemist. I wasn’t too keen on the chemist shop; they always seemed to have young girls behind the counter who wore a knowing smirk when you asked to see the chemist. Anyway, in my experience chemists are, generally speaking, a scrubbed-up and antiseptic-looking lot who mix potions in back rooms and take themselves fairly seriously:
Take one twice a day after meals; if they cause constipation come back and see me, Mr Duncan
. How can you front up to a bloke like that and say ‘I’d like a packet of contraceptives, please, sir’, particularly when you don’t even know how much they’ll cost?

Both chemists in Rabaul were Anglicans and on Sundays they’d arrive at church with their families in big, shiny cars, one a Dodge and the other a Studebaker. They were sort of one notch above the rest of us, except for the doctor and the magistrate and, of course, my dad the vicar. Those four professions, and maybe the headmaster of the local high school, made up the local royalty — oh yes, and the district commissioner, but he was a Catholic. The rest of us were the hoi polloi.

I didn’t need a haircut because I’d had one (as a result of Marg’s suggestion) when Kevin and I had come ashore. The barber had asked me where I’d been when he saw my hair was practically down to my shoulders. The little bloke had always had a crew cut, but I didn’t want to look like a Yank so I’d just had the usual schoolboy short back and sides. Now it looked as if I’d have to get a haircut when I didn’t really need one, just so I could casually bring up the subject of French letters.

The following morning I walked into a barber’s shop near the wharf, and waited until it was empty. ‘Good morning,’ I greeted the barber, who looked Italian or maybe Greek — probably Greek, since the Italians had all been rounded up and put in internment camps, even if they’d lived here for fifty years.

‘Good morning, sir,’ he’d replied, not looking at me, flapping the hair of the previous customer from the barber’s cloth to the floor. ‘Very good for ze tomato and beans. You want a haircut?’

‘Er, yes,’ I replied.

He was a little bloke, tummy sticking out, verandah over the toolshed. He looked like he needed a haircut himself and sported a black moustache, waxed and curled up at the ends like a photograph of a German sergeant in the First World War. He turned and looked at me for the first time. ‘Why you want haircut?’ He jabbed his podgy forefinger at me. ‘I cutta your hair two weeks ago! Why you come back? You don’t like?’

It was the same barber who’d cut my hair after Kevin and I had come ashore. There’d been so much happening that day and with the excitement of finally making it to Australia, I hadn’t noticed the outside of the shop or really taken much notice of the barber. ‘No, it’s fine, thank you. I just, er…’

‘You wanna franger? Five bob packet three. You wanna fancy? Tickle pussy?’ He bent his arm at the elbow and gripped his left hand with the right, with three fat fingers protruding from the left. He wiggled them. I think this was meant to portray my erection when it was fitted with the fancy condom, the tickle fingers sticking out of the top driving Marg mad with desire. ‘Very good, the best! She gonna like
very
,
very
much. Seven an’ six, two packet only fourteen shilling, one bob discount. You want, yes?’