The Persimmon Tree (83 page)

You wouldn’t want to wish an intravenous course of quinine via a drip on your worst enemy. It’s a toss-up whether the cure is worse than the malaria. For five days I experienced an almost suicidal headache; I would undergo bouts of shivering interspersed with burning fever; the bed sheets were drenched with sweat and had to be changed several times a day. A constant and maddening ringing occurred in my ears, like the clanging of church bells right next door. I kept on drifting off and the subsequent dreams were snippets of everything: the sudden flight of a butterfly; the severed head of the sailor on the beach; the face of the young Japanese soldier I’d killed with a knife at Bloody Ridge; Gojo Mura’s boot on the Clipper butterfly; the look of surprise on the face of the sniper I’d taken out; my father reading in his study with his horn-rimmed glasses positioned on the end of his nose; Kevin crouched in the cabin of
Madam Butterfly
after the storm at sea. Perhaps most curiously, a Japanese woman beating me as a child and shouting that I was a non-person, an ‘it’. They went on and on, flashes that went past me almost too fast to see, a blink on a silver screen, while others were detailed. All of them were dreadfully stressful, so that I would often come out of these hallucinatory moments — dreams, imaginings, whatever — weeping softly.

Five days passed including Christmas Day. I seem to remember hearing snatches of carols and once imagined a choir had entered the ward and a pretty nurse had kissed me on the forehead, but I couldn’t be sure. On Boxing Day morning I woke to find the nightmare was over. I felt weak but completely rational; the headache and the ringing in my ears had gone. It was like being born again, getting a brand-new start in life. I wondered if I’d been given something to make me feel so good. A nurse seeing me attempt to sit up came over to arrange my pillows and asked me how I was feeling.

‘Great!’ I said. ‘But you look tired, nurse.’

She giggled. ‘Hangover. Our Christmas party after coming off afternoon shift, it lasted most of the night. Matron is going to be pleased you’ve come around. She was worried you wouldn’t be right for when your visitors come.’

‘Visitors? What visitors?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’ She giggled again and despite her hangover she was pretty; nice pretty, like a friend’s sister.

Moments later the matron came in, a little woman with sharp blue eyes, and wearing a smudge of red lipstick. Her greying hair was pulled sharply back into her white, starched triangular veil that looked rather too big for her head, like a huge gull’s wing fluttering on top of her body. ‘Good morning, Lieutenant, you’re only just in time,’ she said in a prim voice.

‘In time for what, matron?’

‘Why, General MacArthur, of course! Nurse Parkes — shirt, tie, jacket, brush and comb. Quickly, we haven’t got all day. I hope you weren’t amongst the nurses partying all night; the wards this morning are a disgrace.’

For a moment I thought I was back hallucinating. ‘General MacArthur?
The
General MacArthur?’ I asked.

‘There’s only one,’ she said, impatiently looking around. ‘Where
is
that silly girl?’ Nurse Parkes arrived with what I took to be one of my white shirts, washed and ironed, a tie and my naval uniform cleaned and pressed. ‘Nurse Parkes, I said
only
the jacket! The patient won’t be needing his trousers,’ Matron snapped. ‘Lieutenant Duncan is not to leave his bed under any circumstances. Wash and dress him from the waist up, change his sheets and bring an extra pillow. We want him sitting to attention. Hurry up, girl! I don’t know what’s happened to you lot this morning. Cap? Cap? Where is our patient’s cap?’

Ten minutes later I was dressed from the waist up, the bottom half hidden under a clean sheet, with my naval cap resting on the bed. The matron had gone walkabout while Nurse Parkes was getting me ready. ‘Bit of an old dragon, what?’ I said as soon as she’d departed.

‘The worst part of it all is that she’s my aunty,’ Nurse Parkes said
sotto voce
,
glancing over her shoulder to make sure the matron hadn’t suddenly appeared behind her.

‘Every family has its crosses to bear,’ I said, comforting her.

‘Oh, God, here they come. What’ll I do?’ Nurse Parkes said fearfully.

‘Hold my hand, I’m scared witless,’ I whispered in a pathetic way. She grinned and took my hand. ‘Look Florence Nightingale-ish,’ I whispered.

‘Stoppit! I’m petrified. You’ll make me laugh,’ she giggled.

In fact, sitting rigidly to attention, I was fairly nervous when the famous general entered the ward, accompanied by the matron who seemed to come to no higher than his waist, Dr Light with grizzly ginger eyebrows and a weary expression, a dozen photographers all wearing hats, and an equal number of army top brass above the rank of major. Their combined footsteps on the polished cement floor made enough noise to wake the dead.

As MacArthur approached he cocked his head towards the whispering aide beside him, nodded, then having been given my rank and name extended his hand, palm upwards, into which the aide, with a practised deftness, placed a medal at the exact moment the general reached my bedside. It was military precision of the highest order.

I sat so rigid that if you’d slammed my torso with an axe handle it wouldn’t have budged. ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant Duncan, well done,’ the general said, and pinned the medal with an expertise that indicated he’d done it a thousand times before. I hadn’t ever thought about it, but I guess being a general and pinning medals is synonymous. General MacArthur saluted me, flashbulbs exploded, whereupon he turned abruptly on his heel and walked towards the doorway, followed by aides, sycophants and the press. His expression hadn’t changed a wink throughout the entire procedure that had taken no more than twenty seconds.

Overwhelmed as I was, I heard myself mutter, ‘That bloke’s got about as much charm as a goanna in a chookhouse.’

Nurse Parkes laughed, withdrawing her hand and shaking her wrist. ‘Lieutenant, I think you’ve broken every bone in my hand.’

‘Nick,’ I protested. ‘We’ve been holding hands in front of a general, we’re practically intimate.’

‘Is that intimate or invalid?’ she asked, rubbing her hand.

I apologised and then added, ‘I’m sure I’m not the first guy to get a medal presented to me by a general when not wearing any trousers, but it felt pretty strange.’

‘Caught with your pants down!’ she laughed.

The box in which the medal resided had been left on my bed, together with the citation that was very short on detail: ‘For valour when facing the enemy’
.
In truth, I wasn’t at all sure why I was being honoured with the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross), the medal they usually gave to coastwatchers. It was the ‘bit of something going to happen in Australia’ Colonel Woon had mentioned. I could only surmise it might have to do with the commendation for the non-eventful capture of Gojo Mura. But two weeks later the quite separate commendation from the marines came through.

I don’t want to belittle the honour, because a lot of brave and good men earned this particular medal the hard way — coastwatchers who had risked their lives almost daily and put in the thankless, grinding years alone in the jungles with sickness and hardship and very little backup. It was just that I felt I didn’t deserve it.

I was about to learn that what I grew to think of as my ‘goanna medal’ had very little, if anything, to do with me. The very next day I was to begin to get an insight into the nature of war and of politics.

The following morning both the
Argus
and the Melbourne
Herald
ran a photo of General MacArthur presenting me with the medal and under it a story of my ‘conspicuous bravery’ while serving as an adviser with the American marines in the Pacific. Both papers, but for a few pars, carried much the same story. They mentioned Bloody Ridge, the Navy Cross, and how later I’d taken out a sniper in the jungle at great personal risk. Added to this was my single-handed capture of a vital and heavily defended radio post set three hundred feet up a cliff face that had been alerting the enemy to the movement of American aircraft in the Pacific.

It was a story, vague in actual details, but at the same time vastly exaggerated, suggesting great courage by a local boy who made good in the field of battle. There was no mention of malaria, and the caption to the picture in the
Argus
of Nurse Parkes and me read ‘Lieutenant Duncan, repatriated to Australia, requires a nurse
constantly at his bedside’
.
That gave the strong impression that I’d been severely wounded. There was also a nice sentimental bit that told how, unable to rise from my bed, I had nevertheless insisted on wearing my naval uniform for the medal ceremony.

Finally, having been honoured by the Americans with the Navy Cross, I was being awarded the DSC by my own people in recognition of the contribution our own brave sons were making in the Pacific War. It ended with a bit about allies working together in the spirit of mutual cooperation, hands across the sea, blah, blah, blah. If not exactly a beat-up, the heavy hand of a government propaganda machinist wasn’t hard to spot and I couldn’t help thinking how many of the really brave bastards at Milne Bay and Kokoda had gone largely unrecognised.

Nurse Parkes was delighted to be in the papers and I must say, despite her hangover, it was a very nice picture of her. Later that day she came over to my bed, very excited, to say that a lady reporter named Esmé Fenton from the
Women’s Weekly
wanted to do a story on her and did I mind?

Over the Christmas period I was informed by a letter from Naval Intelligence that, despite my secondment to the SRD (Services Reconnaissance Department), naval officers would come to the hospital to conduct a formal debriefing covering my time with the 1st Division marines on Guadalcanal. The first session would take place at 1000 hours on the 2nd of January. The debriefing was to begin with an unexpected visit.

After all the brouhaha of the general’s visit, where every visitor entering the ward seemed to come over to congratulate me, I had been moved to an alcove that contained a single bed; it was a space usually reserved for officers above the rank of major. Nurse Parkes henceforth referred to it as ‘Naval Headquarters’. A heavy curtain separated me from the remainder of the ward and a large bay window looked out onto the hospital garden. After the endless coconut palms and the damp, fetid jungle, the well-tended garden was reassuringly normal with its mowed lawn and a box hedge, clipped to within an inch of its life, surrounding a circular bed of roses.

You may imagine my surprise when, at exactly ten in the morning of my debriefing, a nurse parted the curtain to the alcove and announced, ‘You have a visitor, Lieutenant,’ whereupon Commander Rob Rich entered the alcove.

I guess he saw my surprise, followed almost immediately by my acute embarrassment as I proceeded to blush violently — crimson blush against a yellow skin is not a good look. He brought his hand up as if to prevent me from talking. ‘Nick, let me speak first,’ he said, not smiling. I nodded my head, quite incapable of saying anything.

‘May I sit down?’ he asked, indicating the chair beside my bed. I nodded again. I knew I should have been more in possession of my wits, but I simply wasn’t. I mean, what the hell do you do when your superior officer is about to inform you he’s taken your girlfriend for himself and intends to marry her? Especially when you know you really love her.

‘Nick, Marg has told me everything. When she informed me she’d written to you in Guadalcanal, she burst into tears. I know how tough it must seem, how unfair — you copping all the shit in the islands and me back here with a cushy desk job in Intelligence. I respect and honour you and only hope I can prove myself a worthy contender.’

I was beginning to regain a bit of composure. ‘Thank you, sir. It… it came as a bit of a surprise, that’s all,’ I stammered, uttering one of the great understatements of my life. I continued, ‘I had no right to expect —’

Rob Rich cut me short. ‘No, no, Nick, you had every right to assume you and she were together. Marg explained that to me very carefully. As you know, she does things on her own terms.’

‘You too,’ I said, trying to cheer up a bit.

‘You’d better believe it!’ he grinned and extended his hand. For a split second I thought about not accepting it. He may have been my superior officer but, in this instance, I felt I had the right to refuse. But that would mean I was spitting the dummy and I guess I was too proud to let him see me sulking like a child. ‘It’s okay, sir.’ I know I should have gone on to congratulate him, but there are limits. We shook hands.

Commander Rich then got down to business. ‘Nick, Commander Long, in fact all of us, are tremendously pleased at the way you’ve conducted yourself with the Americans, the marines. Not an easy call.’

‘No, sir, that’s not correct. In fact the 1st Marine Division was very generous and my job under Colonel Woon, as Japanese translator in their radio unit, was not dangerous. It’s not as though I’ve been a coastwatcher and doing the hard yakka.’

‘Well, I’m not so sure about that. Mather put in a very good report on your work in the field, as did Colonel Woon, and there was another very complimentary one, at a very high level, from Marine Headquarters concerning your bravery at Bloody Ridge. Congratulations on the Navy Cross — it’s not a medal the Americans hand out gratuitously. Our division has benefited from all this. Recruiting you in Perth is being seen as a masterstroke by the old man.’