The Persimmon Tree (7 page)

The Japanese had already reached the islands of Bali and Ambon and landed on Sumatra. The next step was Java, in particular the port city of Batavia with its huge, safe harbour, and Surabaya for its magnificent naval facilities. Suddenly the Dutch in the East Indies, who’d assumed they had ample time to get out, were thrown into a blind panic. The Japanese were moving into the Pacific like an invasion of angry wasps and the Dutch forces and colonial citizens they were protecting had been caught with their proverbial pants down. The Javanese soldiers, many in sympathy with the Japanese, had no stomach for a fight and were deserting in large numbers, hastily discarding their boots, webbing and rifles and escaping into the jungle. Almost every afternoon now there were Jap air raids on the ships in harbour, their oil tanks on fire.

The carefully planned colonial exodus with the wharves piled high with wooden packing cases, many made out of finely worked teak planks intended for later use as wall panelling, was suddenly thrown into hopeless disarray. The white colonials scurried like ants aboard any ship available. Dirty tramp steamers accustomed to carrying bulk cargo were selling deck space at
Queen Mary
cabin prices and the space in the hold that would normally have housed their possessions was given over to accommodating people at an only slightly less exorbitant cost. Left behind on the loading docks were all their neatly packed and sorted crates for the locals to carry off.

The Dutchman and his family had their passage previously booked but instead of occupying two cabins they now shared one with another family of four, in all eight people, one of them being Anna’s stepmother in her wheelchair. Piet Van Heerden was not a happy man and I begged him to let me take them all to Australia in the
Vleermuis
. But he was one of the few passengers to get his packing cases loaded and he was adamant that they were staying put, whatever the inconvenience. I asked again if Anna could come with me and I thought he was going to have an apoplectic stroke on the spot. ‘It is too dangerous!’ he’d yelled — so much for his previous reassurances that my sailing to Australia would be duck soup, nothing to worry about.

Anna and I had said our tearful farewells during the day and then again on the crowded deck. When the ship’s horn sounded and I had to go ashore she was crying and clutching the specimen box containing her butterfly. ‘Nicholas, I love you!’ she shouted almost hysterically above the noise of the passengers.

‘I’ll see you in three weeks, maybe a month, in Broome. Wait for me!’ We kissed one final time, Anna clinging to me. Then she drew away and quickly handed me a square of white cloth. ‘I’m sorry I did not have paper to wrap it, Nicholas. Please look, I have embroidered it myself.’ She smiled through her tears. ‘I have also one the same. You must keep it till when we meet again.’ I unfolded the handkerchief and in the corner she had embroidered the beautiful Clipper, her personal butterfly.

I was completely choked. I had no idea I could love someone as much as I did this lovely creature. ‘I will keep it always,’ I stammered, barely able to hold back my tears. A final urgent blast from the ship’s horn and I had to rush to get to the gangplank in time. As the steamer pulled away from the docks I lost sight of her but found myself foolishly waving the embroidered square, unexpected tears running down my cheeks. Women, I had discovered, were simply marvellous creatures.

Once back at the cutter alone I began to realise I had been a bit of a fool. No, more than a bit. Quite clearly I
was
a fool, a thoroughly frightened fool! It had been foolish to come to Java in the first instance. Foolish to hunt for a Magpie Crow, a rare species of butterfly that only I cared about. I reminded myself again what a stupid name it was for a butterfly! There were butterflies with names such as Dragontail, Jezebel, Peacock, Red Lacewing, and I had become obsessed with a black-and-white butterfly called a Magpie Crow! But I’d met Anna and fallen in love and now, still a fool, but the luckiest fool in the world, I was still a long way from home.

With everything changing as quickly as it had with the Japanese I now realised that the odds were heavily stacked against me. I’d volunteered to undertake an absurd sailing adventure with a battered school atlas as my only chart. I was sailing a 29-foot cutter I knew nothing about, on a voyage across the Indian Ocean in the middle of the monsoon season when the weather could dish up a cyclone that might last a week or more. The Japanese navy was suddenly everywhere and their aircraft owned the skies from Singapore to the Indonesian Archipelago, and God knows how far their dominance extended into the Indian Ocean. If I wasn’t spotted and run down by a Japanese ship or shot out of the water by a Zero I could go down in a storm at sea. It was little wonder that the Dutchman had gone apeshit when I’d suggested, once again, that Anna accompany me.

I spent the following day making minor adjustments and waited until after dark when the land breeze carried me down the harbour and out to sea. From Batavia it is only about fifty nautical miles to Port Nicholas, the highest point on the island, where a left turn takes you into the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. I fondly imagined I would enter the strait just before dawn. With a half-decent wind this wasn’t a big ask for a cutter such as the
Vleermuis.

However, I hadn’t reckoned on the time of the year. In late February there can be calm periods that can often last all day until the next weather comes through. While I made some little progress, the land breeze soon petered out and the yacht was becalmed. My hope was that by dawn I would encounter a wind front, even if only a breeze, anything to get me out of the sun. A storm at sea is the stuff of drama, but with no wind to propel it, a sailing boat becalmed in the tropics is an altogether horrible experience. The yacht lurches from side to side as it wallows in the swell. The deck becomes too hot to stand on and below decks the heat is so suffocating as to be unbearable. What’s more, there is nothing you can do to change the intolerable conditions. At least in a storm, even in a violent one, you’re moving, there is something happening; crisis with the fear it carries is always stimulating. Sitting helpless in the remorseless heat and without movement except for the incessant wallowing can drive a sane sailor crazy.

Dawn came and with it no wind. I was a sitting duck for any Japanese aircraft or ship at sea that happened to spot me.

Not long out to sea from Batavia I had noted that the head blocks controlling the straight top of the sail were sticking and would need to be repaired before I got to the Sunda Strait. With the violent lurching from side to side in the swell there was no way I could make the repairs at sea. I would need to moor somewhere so I could safely climb the mast and grease the blocks. If I didn’t get them working smoothly they could jam completely under load, preventing me from shortening sail in a blow, thus all but deliberately inviting a fatal result in heavy weather.

Mercifully, by late afternoon a light sea breeze sprang up and I used it to get ashore. As far as I could make out going by the battered school atlas, if it was vaguely accurate I was moored slightly east of Bantem Bay.

This was the night of the 28th and, as it happened, my eighteenth birthday. It was the one birthday I had told myself I would
really
celebrate. I’d promised myself I was going to get myself gloriously pissed, absolutely blotto, smashed, blind, motherless, completely stonkered! Finally I was old enough to join the army.

What a joke! Now there was the distinct possibility that I could be celebrating my last birthday on earth while sitting in a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. Even worse, I could be taken prisoner of war by the Japanese before I’d pulled on my first pair of army boots or once again kissed my darling Anna. The thought that she’d never know what had happened to me brought a fearful lump to my throat as I wallowed in self-pity.

I opened a tin of mackerel, mixed it with a handful of rice left over from breakfast and then sat with my legs dangling over the back of the boat, eating the cold concoction and feeling, I admit, lonely, homesick and decidedly sorry for myself. Too weary to go through the rigmarole of boiling water for a cup of tea, I toasted myself with a glass of water, drank half of it and used the remainder to clean my teeth. After dousing myself in citronella mosquito repellent I crawled into my bunk. I managed to sing, decidedly off-key, almost all of the words to ‘Happy Birthday’ and can remember reaching the penultimate line of ‘Happy birthday, dear Nick’
when I must have fallen asleep, to be wakened later by the guns of a naval battle.

With the first salvo in the sea battle waking me I’d come up from below and sat on deck listening to the booming gunfire and watching the flashes of the big guns like distant lightning on the horizon far out to sea. The sea battle came from the direction of the Sunda Strait and my heart sank knowing that I might have left my escape from the Dutch East Indies too late.

The sound of the big guns continued until shortly before daylight, and although greasing the head blocks, making one or two other repairs and mending a small rip in the flax sails wasn’t going to take long, I now couldn’t risk sailing in daylight. I could well sail right into the area where the naval battle had taken place and besides, the air over the strait would be alive with Jap Zeros.

Rather than remain on deck all day, I decided I’d take the first couple of hours of morning sunlight to hunt for butterflies and make the repairs in the afternoon. It couldn’t do any harm and it would take my mind off the problems that undoubtedly lay ahead for me and, as well, remind me of the morning with my darling Anna on our single butterfly excursion, an occasion we’d never managed to repeat.

It was March the 1st and there’s always something hopeful about the first day of a new month. Anna had presented me with a single egg, a real find, and I’d eaten it for breakfast, after which I packed my day knapsack with my binoculars and collector’s field paraphernalia, filled the canvas-covered metal water bottle my father had given me for my fourteenth birthday, slung its strap around my neck and under my right arm so it rested on my hip, grabbed my butterfly net and slid over the side of the boat into the four feet or so of muddy stream and picked my way across a dozen yards of mangrove growth to firmer ground. From there I climbed up the small hill and into the coconut plantation to wait for the sun to rise.

I told myself it was extremely unlikely — I had one chance in God knows how many thousand that I’d happen upon a Magpie Crow. But then again, hope springs eternal. I was on the right island at the correct time of the year, not too long after the pupae had hatched; maybe, perhaps, who knows, it was worth a try, wasn’t it? My luck had changed meeting Anna, so why not with the ever-elusive trophy butterfly?

Now seated and waiting for sunrise when the morning dew would dry on butterfly wings, I saw the Carley float battling its way in on the tide.

The task must have appeared formidable to the men on the float as they reached the final barrier, the last line of coral before attaining the calmer water beyond. Two of the men crawled to the front of the float, each carrying a crude wooden paddle. Gripping the rope that looped around the outside circumference with one hand and lying on their stomachs, they attempted to reach out and push the float clear of the jutting coral heads. This was proving to be a fairly futile business as the float was carried fiercely inwards by an incoming wave, and bumping into a coral head, the men were immediately jerked backwards by the water smashing into the reef where the float spun and skidded every which way until the process was repeated by the next approaching wave.

Some fifty feet ahead of them I could see a clear channel leading all the way into shore and I silently willed them to find it. ‘Left, go left,’ I said stupidly to myself, knowing they had no possible say in the matter. ‘Left!’ I urged again. The float, caught in a sudden contrary current, moved to the right and away from the safety of the channel; then just as suddenly it was picked up broadside by an arching white line of surf to ride the wave back in the direction from which it had come. I winced as I watched the four men clinging to the ropes as they were swept over several outcrops of coral but then, mercifully, the wave broke and the float subsided into the channel where it spun briefly before calming in the waist-deep water. They’d made it through. The men in the water would be badly cut and bruised, but they’d made it. Moments later an incoming wave caught the float and carried it the thirty or so yards onto the beach.

They’d come into shore the hard way; half a mile further down was the lagoon where I had entered the creek the previous night
.
Had they found the same opening, life would have been a lot less tedious for the last part of their perilous voyage. I guess they couldn’t be blamed. Exhausted, they’d come out of a dark night and a frightening experience and it was still not long after dawn. At first light they would have seen land directly ahead and with the incoming tide being sufficient to cover several of the lower parts of the outer reef, and perhaps not understanding the nature of coral construction, they’d thought what looked like clear water was a break in the line and they’d been swept forward to be trapped within the reef.

I watched as the black guys carrying the man I’d seen lying prone on the float stumbled up the beach. Four of them moved him like a sack of potatoes, one each gripping his ankles and the other two holding him by the wrists while his head lolled like a broken doll’s. I guessed he was dead and to their credit they hadn’t thrown him overboard but intended to give him a burial ashore. They carried him, often stumbling in the soft sand and almost falling, up the full length of the beach to place him in the shade of a line of low bushes that grew at the edge of the beach. One of the other men hastened up, kicking sand in little puffs as he ran, at the same time removing his shirt, pulling it over his head. While I couldn’t see with the bush in the way he must have spread it under the foliage before they lowered the dead black sailor onto it. I remember thinking how it was a curiously gentle and touching thing for an exhausted man to do for a mate. After all, if he were dead, why would it matter if he lay directly in the sand? I focused on the naked torso of the man who’d removed his shirt and I saw him reach up to his chest and pull a broad strip of black tarlike substance from his skin. Underneath he was white. Their blackened skin, as I should have realised, was as a result of oil spilled over the surface of the water from the sinking cruiser. Crude oil is thick, almost glutinous, and when it spills from a ship it rides on the top of the water and sticks like tar to the skin. While some of it will strip off as it dries out a little, it requires a strong non-irritant solvent such as kerosene to get the tar out of the pores of the skin.