The Persimmon Tree (70 page)

As the train chuffed through the night I realised that Kevin and I had been still out to sea, within the range of Japanese warships and aircraft, when Anna had written the letter. Now, anything could be happening to her. One thing was certain: there was likely to be no news, or very little reliable information, out of the island for the duration of the war.

I removed Anna’s embroidered handkerchief from my wallet, and when everyone had gone to sleep, I spread it across my knee. Searching for the raised stitching of the embroidered butterfly with the tips of my finger, I placed my hand over it and recited Psalm 23 aloud, though softly. This was the psalm my father had rejected in favour of the Irish blessing when writing his letter. Every schoolboy knows the words off by heart:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

There I was in the middle of the night, crossing the continent with five other blokes who were sound asleep, reciting the psalm as if by so doing I would keep Anna safe. Even though my father was an Anglican missionary I didn’t consider myself particularly religious. But there are occasions when we reach for the comfort of words, and God has created some of the very best. I guess, if He was listening, He may have thought me a bit of a hypocrite. I’d just come from the arms of one woman I loved and here I was asking Him to protect another I also loved. It was what my father might call spiritual bigamy. I was unable to separate the two kinds of loving, and now both of the loved ones were lost to me. I would, of course, write to Marg, but she might as well have been in Timbuktu for all the hope I had of seeing her in the immediate future. I realised with a shock that, if I ended up in the islands, I might never see her again, or at least not until the war was over, whenever that was. Who knows? I might be dead by that time, although I didn’t think I would be. Like most blokes of eighteen, I thought of myself as bullet-proof.

The crossing took three days and nights: first main stop was Kalgoorlie, then across the Nullarbor Plain to Port Pirie, Adelaide and finally Melbourne. The ever practical and thoughtful Marg had sourced two Japanese books for me, explaining that they had been taken from an old Japanese couple who had been interned when the war broke out. ‘I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t allow them to take a book or two with them,’ she said at the time. Then she added, ‘Intelligence makes some weird decisions. How a couple well into their seventies, having lived in Broome for fifty years, could be considered dangerous enemy aliens beats me.’

‘Broome? They probably came over for the pearl diving and stayed on,’ I interjected.

‘Maybe. Anyway, I found these in the restricted departmental library and, in the name of Naval Intelligence, confiscated them. I thought it might be a good idea to brush up on your Japanese while on the train. I’ve covered them in brown paper and I suggest you don’t let any of the passengers see you reading a Japanese book or they’re likely to report you to the conductor.’ She laughed. ‘You don’t want some boofhead police sergeant escorting you off the train at Port Augusta.’

They don’t refer to it as the ‘outback’ for nothing. There’s not a great deal other than saltbush to look at from your compartment window. The two volumes were both classical Japanese tales:
The Story of Genji
,
which I hadn’t read,
and
The Forty-seven Ronin
,
a tale of honour and great heroism that I’d read as a young boy
.
My father had urged me to read the first one as a child, but I’d somehow avoided doing so. Inscribed on the flyleaf of both books, rather poignantly, were the names Shimuzi Masa and Shimuzi Korin and the date, 1892. Now the books proved to be a great deal more interesting than the scenery as we crossed the seemingly endless Nullarbor.

We came into Spencer Street Station early on the fourth morning and I said goodbye to my fellow passengers; not a bad mob, although they’d carried on a bit, teasing me about the final kiss on the platform. By the time we’d reached Melbourne, the thirty or so seconds it had taken to kiss Marg goodbye had extended in their imaginations to at least an hour of ardent groping that stopped just short of having sex in public. The last words to me from the air force bloke were, ‘Be faithful, Nick. You don’t come across a good sort like that every day, mate!’ This brought the house down — well, the compartment anyway.

So Nick Duncan, the passionate platform lover, found himself alone in a strange city that was just beginning the workday. My written instructions were that, upon arrival, I was to report to the Naval Recruitment Office in Olderfleet Buildings, 475 Collins Street at 9 a.m. sharp and present the recruitment officer with a sealed envelope that was enclosed herewith. I asked a bloke carrying a briefcase where the office was and he said it was five minutes’ walk and pointed up the tram tracks outside the station. I had at least an hour and a half to kill, even if I allowed fifteen minutes to find the recruitment office, so I checked into the railway café and blew some of the travel allowance I’d been given on ‘the works’: fried eggs, sausage, bacon, tomato and three pieces of toast with a pot of tea that held two cups. I still had time on my hands, so I walked through the city and went and stood on the bridge over the Yarra River, watching the schoolboys sculling on the lazy brown river. Melbourne seemed like a nice place with a park practically in the centre of the city, just across from the station and the railway yards, and stretching beside the river.

I found the recruitment office without difficulty. The ground-floor reception area, more like a small hall, was beginning to fill with young blokes, recruits like me who’d been waiting for the doors to open. We were instructed to queue behind either of two desks, at each of which a female petty officer in uniform sat. Both were quite attractive, and I chose the queue with the prettier of the two, a redhead. Someone in the crowd gave a wolf whistle and, seemingly from nowhere, this big bloke in the naval uniform of a chief petty officer appeared and in a voice that rose above the noise in the crowded hall shouted, ‘There’ll be none of that! You’re in the navy now!’ The whole hall went dead silent. Then he added, ‘Snotties are entitled to admire silently and that’s all, gentlemen!’ which caused a roar of laughter. My turn came soon enough and I handed the envelope to the pretty redhead. She opened it, read it briefly, then raised the telephone, dialled, waited a moment, then responded to the voice on the other end, ‘Sir, I have Nicholas Duncan, the recruit recommended by the DNI in Fremantle.’ She listened for a few moments, then placed the receiver back on the cradle. ‘You are to go to the second floor,’ she pointed. ‘Take the lift. Ask for Commander Rich.’ She smiled, then handed me the original letter and wrote my name and the date on a small card that read ‘Access permitted’
.
She stamped it, then signed her initials under the date. ‘Hand this to the commander when you get there, Mr Duncan.’

‘Nick, Miss,’ I replied, thanking her. ‘Your name is… ?’

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘Cheeky! Definitely officer material,’ she grinned, sending me off with a backward wave of her hand.

Yet another important lesson learned. I was simply being polite and now had been inadvertently instructed in yet another of the techniques of approaching a woman. With my sort of loner background, I was taking a bloody long time (despite, thanks to Marg, not being a virgin any longer) to learn how to flirt. The bloke who’d whistled when we’d come in probably knew all the techniques for picking up a sheila while I hadn’t a clue.

To my surprise, Commander Rich stood as I entered his office and walked around the side of his desk to shake my hand. ‘Rob Rich, nice to meet you, Nick.’ He pointed to one of two easy chairs. ‘Please, have a seat.’

‘Good morning, sir,’ I said, somewhat nervously sitting where he indicated. I’d been expecting to be shunted along with all the other recruits and treated like the mishmash we were, and so all this upstairs stuff came as a total surprise.

‘Welcome. I will be your commanding officer on HMAS
Cerberus
. I’m just up for the day and thought we might have a chat.’

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ I replied. Something was definitely weird. You didn’t have to be Einstein to know that a raw recruit to any of the armed forces doesn’t get sent into the office of the commander for a friendly powwow. Feeling decidedly awkward, I handed him the letter. He reached over and took it, then placed it on his lap without glancing at it.

‘You come to us rather highly recommended, Duncan,’ he said.

‘Sir?’ He could see I was confused and had no idea what he was referring to. ‘You mean Lieutenant Commander Rigby?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Amongst others. I refer to a note from the Archbishop of Perth.’

I could feel myself blushing furiously. ‘Sir, please ignore it. He’s my godfather!’ I begged.

He seemed to be amused. ‘Also a two-liner from God Himself.’

I sensed I was in some sort of trouble. ‘God, sir?’

‘Commander Long — but take no notice of the “commander” tag; in Naval Intelligence he packs a bigger punch than any admiral afloat. I also have a transcript from Lieutenant Commander Rigby telling of your exploits prior to landing in Fremantle. Very impressive. You’re the first eighteen-year-old snotty I’ve come across to have his life marked “Top Secret”.’

Now I knew I was definitely in trouble. First the Archbishop’s letter, then a note from Commander Rupert Basil Michael Long (as Marg always referred to him). His notes were obviously as clipped and precise as his speech.

I was conscious that Commander Rob Rich was, in a manner of speaking, my new headmaster and I sensed I was about to cop a real serve. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said lamely, looking him directly in the eye. Surely he must see that I had nothing to do with anything coming out of Perth and Fremantle? If someone was pulling strings, then it wasn’t my fault and was in fact the very last thing I would have wanted or expected.

‘Right then, let’s get on with it. You are not yet officially a snotty so we will consider this conversation off the record. However, there are one or two things I feel I need to straighten out before you join the navy.’

‘Yes, sir — thank you.’ I was suddenly twelve again and standing up at prep in front of my school boarding house, having arrived late in the first term to boarding school. Grimy Ferret, our housemaster, was asking me questions, a distinctly acerbic tone to his voice. My naïve answers were meeting with howls of orchestrated laughter from the other pupils. Only unlike Grimy Ferret, this guy, Rich, wasn’t milking the interview for cheap laughs.

‘Commander Long has spoken to you about joining Intelligence.’ It was a statement, not a question, and so I remained silent. ‘You speak Japanese.’ Another statement. ‘What did Commander Long say to you, Nick?’ A question.

Marg had warned me not to speak to anyone about the coastwatcher thing. I thought she meant not to talk to any member of the public, so I replied, ‘He spoke about my joining the coastwatchers, listening to Japanese radio messages, ship to shore, then sending back information by radio code about the movements of the enemy.’

‘We’ll stop right there. You are already in possession of top-secret information.’ He jabbed his forefinger at me. ‘You will never, I repeat
never
, say that again! Not a single syllable. Do you understand? What else did he say to you?’ he barked, jabbing his finger once again in the direction of my chest.

I found it difficult not to smile. ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, sir. Who is Commander Long?’

He leaned back and grinned. ‘Well done, Nick. Just remember codebreaking is the most important component of Intelligence and must never be jeopardised,
never
. If you decide to go in the direction indicated, you will have to become accustomed to leading a double life, a veiled life, even with those closest to you.’

This time I had to smile inwardly. One of those closest to me was on the opposite side of Australia some two thousand miles away. A second, if he was alive, was probably a prisoner of the Japanese in New Britain. The third, if she was alive, was probably in an internment camp in Java. It wasn’t as if I’d be spilling the beans in a casual chat with a neighbour across the garden fence. ‘I fully understand, sir,’ I said.

‘Right then, let me fill you in on the next twelve weeks. You’ll be one of two hundred recruits at HMAS
Cerberus.
When you graduate the rest of your class will be sent to the UK for further training, choosing their future careers from several specialist naval training options that are available. Because all the others will be discussing their choices, you’ll have to pretend to make some sort of decision yourself, perhaps wireless, eh? When the time comes and you’re not on the boat going to the UK they’ll assume you’ve failed the course.’ He looked up. ‘So don’t appear to be over-bright during the next twelve weeks. Not a bad idea to start leading a double life right away, eh?’