The Widow & Her Hero (2 page)

Here was the lure of delayed fulfilment – men and
women both like to play that game even now. An immense
anticipatory excitement grew, calculated to fill banal days
with consecrated light and profane heat. The idea that a
man must go on a quest to earn the company and solace of
his woman is ancient, is literally Homeric, and is a handy
one for nations who are organising their young for war and
bloodshed.

First Leo nominated June of 1943 as a possible wedding
date. By then he believed he would have been into the
Minotaur's cave and slain the beast and been rendered fully
a man. But by April he wrote to me announcing that all
timetables had been changed and he hoped to see me next
by October. He said he knew that that was a long time, and
though his affections and intentions were fixed, he felt he
should offer me the chance of freedom. A beautiful girl like
me must have many suitors, he acknowledged. Of course, I
wrote back. I told him of my willingness to wait. Indeed, I'd
had a nasty experience that Easter, when one of the senior
men at the ministry, flushed and alcoholic, had asked me to
sleep with him. He was nearly my father's age, and that
made me feel sluttish and frightened and ugly and even took
my mind in directions I did not want it to go. It was, that is,
what my granddaughter would call
creepy.
It rendered the
prospect of waiting for Leo and his unspecified heroic
business to be attended to all the more attractive.

By letter from Leo, and other means postwar, I got a
picture of the training he was engaged in during those
months. Cairns in Queensland was one of the ports from
which our troops and the Americans in New Guinea were
supplied. It also had a hillside training camp for the officers
and men of the Independent Reconnaissance Department,
of which Leo was a member. There Leo met and worked
with Free Frenchmen and British and Australian and
Dutch, all pursuing plans to infiltrate various sectors of the
new Japanese empire.

Their chief trainer was a tall English sailor named Rufus
Mortmain, with whose wife, the writer Dotty Mortmain, I
would become friends. The men trained in the thick rainforest
of the Atherton Tableland west of town. Trucked
down to the coast, Leo and the others, faces blackened,
spent nights in the sort of collapsible canoes they called
folboats, navigating from Palm Cove to False Cape or out
to the coral reef and back. Leo's usual companion was a
tidily built young Russian Jew who could speak Mandarin
and Shanghai-nese and whose family had come to Australia
via Harbin in Manchuria and Shanghai. His name was
Jockey Rubinsky, and he was a leading seaman in the
Australian navy. It was thought his languages might be
useful in operations around the equator.

The task of the folboat crews at night was to flit across
the sea without being spotted from shore, and indeed they
never were. The searchlight battery at False Cape, placed to
pick up an enemy entering through the heads of Cairns
harbour, became a special training tool for Charlie
Doucette's men – if caught by a light, Leo and Jockey
would instantaneously paddle the folboat stern onto the
glare, and then they would freeze. It always worked. In
those warm waters between the coast and the Great Barrier
Reef they built up their invisibility, and so their immunity.
On land, by day and night they hiked and stalked
through the bush barefooted, sometimes naked to avoid
giving themselves away by fabric noise, or perhaps wearing
a soft cloth thong around their nether parts. Their faces
were black with commando grease designed for infiltrators
by Helena Rubinstein. They crept into a coastal artillery
battery making no sound, and stood within inches of
sentries whom, in their imaginations, they despatched with
their knives. Then they withdrew without being seen.

If in exercises they had to land on the sandstone jumble
below headlands, they wore no footwear except woollen
socks to enable them to creep over barnacles and oyster
shells. With only starlight to guide them, nineteen-year-old
sailors from Australian country towns learned to assemble
an Owen or Sten gun in ridiculously short times and
without anyone twenty yards away hearing them. And
Charlie Doucette himself the magnetic Irishman loved exercises
of this kind, the way only an irregular regular soldier
could.

Not to cast any doubt on their skill or athleticism, it was
nonetheless true that this style of life suited some men.
There are always men who are happiest with other men,
dreaming of women as a remote mountaintop above the
plain on which their Spartan camp lay. I didn't understand
this, but Dotty Mortmain, wife of the trainer, the naval
lieutenant Rufus Mortmain, believed this and would pass
the certainty on to me. This hiking-running-tumblingpaddling-
infiltrating caste might have been happier and
more certain with yearning than fulfilment, since fulfilment
was demanding in a complicated way. And as I said,
yearning suited the times.

In any case, most of them were babies, and I too a bush
infant.

And of course, the young Australians and occasional
British, Dutch and French, training in the rainforest to turn
darkness into a gift, learning how to breathe and move
invisibly, were not aware of the great struggle of ideology
and imperialism raging between American General Douglas
MacArthur's headquarters, and the British and Australians.

We'll get to that. I became educated. Widowhood was
my education.

One day, during his training, Leo found himself paired for
a race in a folboat, not with Jockey Rubinsky, who had
a tooth abscess, but with a magnetic Ulster Irishman,
an exile from Singapore, Major Charles August Doucette.
Doucette was a compact, muscular, gleaming man. He had
been an intelligence officer in Singapore before its inglorious
fall, and a rare valiant figure from that fiasco. Leo had been
until now assigned to a different proposed raid than the one
Charlie Doucette was slated to lead, but he knew something
of the mythology and rumours surrounding Doucette. He
was a Dubliner of French Huguenot descent. His people had
been architects and soldiers who acquired land cheaply in
the west of Ireland in the nineteenth century from the overmortgaged
Anglo-Irish nobility.

Doucette was a regular soldier of the kind who was
attached to an ancestral regiment. The Doucettes' regiment
was the Royal Ulster Fusiliers, which had been the Royal
Dublin Fusiliers until the Irish Free State was established,
at which time it moved north to garrison Northern Ireland.
He was quite jolly about telling me this one evening at
some eventual party in Melbourne, and letting me know
that ancestors of his had helped the Crown put down a
rebellion in Ireland in the late 1700s.

Mark Lydon, author of
The Sea Otters
and thus virtually
Doucette's biographer, records that Doucette was a
long distance sailor and, before the war began, had spent a
lot of time sailing the South China Sea – mainly for his own
delight, nominally for British Intelligence. He had identified
the beaches up near the Thai border where he believed
the Japanese would land in a future attack on Malaya, and
he also informed British Intelligence that the Japanese
would not slink through the jungles but would roll down
the good north–south roads in trucks and on bicycles,
flanking any line the British might set up. So he had been a
prophet ignored, and General Percival and the others had
lost Malaya and Singapore in precisely the way he claimed
he had warned them they would.

During one of his delightful reconnaissances by small
boat, he met the daughter of a Belgian businessman in
Macau, and married her. In fact, as she told me after the
war ended, he had heard that there was a beautiful Belgian
girl in Macau, and ensured that on his long sweep across
the South China Sea, he took his mess uniform with him in
a duffel bag, to charm the family and to court the girl:
Minette Casselaine. Not a maiden in a tower as it turned
out but a young, sadder and wiser divorcee with a child
named Michael. He courted Minette and married her at his
regimental church in Singapore.

The month before the fall of Singapore, Doucette had
shipped Minette, whom he called Netty, and her son
Michael, out of Singapore and to Australia. By the time
Singapore surrendered, Minette and her son were living in
the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia.

After the fall, Charlie Doucette had got together some
escapees, Singapore civil officials, police, members of the
judiciary, and British officers and men, put them in a
lumpy, 25-ton fishing vessel named
Johannes Babirusa
, and
relayed them to Sumatra to the estuary of the Indragiri
River, which he knew from his peacetime recreation of
sailing. From the point where he landed them they could
reach, by a last hectic road trip, the port of Padang on
the west shore of Sumatra, where Dutch, British and
Australian rescue ships waited to pick up the strays from
the catastrophe. He went back to Singapore to a
rendezvous on the west coast many times after the fall to
rescue groups of officers and officials.

For these exploits alone, Doucette – by the time Leo met
him – was already a legend. Men in the know shook their
heads, laughed and felt better when his name came up. I
record this fact plainly and in sadness. It remains to me in
part to record only the thickening and ongoing strands of
Charlie the Boss Doucette's Homeric status. The legendary
state traps not only the hero himself but exercises a
magnetic pull on other men. Stronger than breath, stronger
than sex, as Dotty Mortmain would say.

Once Doucette could no longer rescue anyone from
Singapore, the gaps in Japanese security having closed,
he escaped from Sumatra on the
Johannes Babirusa
with
sixteen Special Operations men, mainly British. He was
navigator, and steered for India. On the way, he once told
Leo and myself, the
Johannes
had been attacked by a
Japanese aircraft, but although the sails were riddled and
the decking splintered, neither he nor any of the other men
were wounded. Just the same, this strafing seemed to have
affected him in a curious way. He always mentioned it
heatedly. He had been so badly hurt in other ways by the
Japanese dominance of the region that for the sake of
sanity, I think, he put all his grievance into that particular
matter. It was as if it was the chief outrage of his military
career and a final sign of Japanese malice.

The
Babirusa
reached Bombay, to considerable congratulations
from the military in-crowd, and Doucette was sent
to Delhi and attached to Special Operations Executive
there. He wrote to Minette, announced his escape, and
asked her to leave Australia and join him. In the meantime
he went to his late father's friend General Wavell and
proposed to him a raid upon Singapore harbour using a
vessel rather like the
Babirusa
. The head of SOE Delhi
decided now that the Australian Independent Reconnaissance
Department in Melbourne had the best personnel for
such a venture. In it, the raiders could approach Singapore
from Darwin up the long Indonesian archipelago, hiding
amongst islands, looking like a coaster doing normal
Indonesian, Borneo or Singapore business.

Charlie now telegraphed his wife to tell her not to leave
Australia after all – he was coming there. But the telegram
arrived too late. Netty and three-year-old Michael had left
Perth a week earlier on the
Tonkin
, with over a hundred
other passengers. After five days at sea the ship seemed to
have evaporated. Still in Delhi and about to leave for
Australia, Doucette heard that the
Tonkin
had vanished
with his wife and stepson. When I ultimately met Doucette,
I somehow expected him to talk about this giant fact,
directly or indirectly, most of the time. But it was the sort
of thing he tried to keep to himself.

In Melbourne, the head of the Independent Reconnaissance
Department, one Major Doxey, listened to the ideas
of the dazzling newcomer. The chief idea was: get a
Japanese coaster or fishing vessel to Australia, put on
the right operatives, sail it through the Indonesian and
Malay archipelagos and make an assault by canoe with
limpet mines on Japanese shipping in the Singapore roads.
Ambitious Doxey loved this. He had felt cramped by the
new relationship with the Americans, and dependent on
them for submarines to land operational parties. But this
plan didn't need permission or help from the Americans.
And it would show the enemy that they had no safe
harbour.

In any case, now, in 1943, preparing in Cairns for operations
soon to take place, Doucette and Leo had made a
unique folboat pairing. The most significant members of
their families had vanished in the war. They might have
thought it was a fanciful connection. But it was a connection
nonetheless.

I imagine them sitting in pandanus shade on a beach
waiting for the little canvas prows of inferior paddlers to
show themselves on the dazzle of ocean.

In speaking with Leo, Major Doucette was reticent with
the details of his life and let go of them shyly. Doucette
remarked, as they sat on Holloway Beach, their race done,
that the Australian other ranks were funny chaps.

Leo asked him in what way.

They always give you the impression they won't obey an
order, yet they do.

Leo said they just wanted to assert their dignity.

Some of the things they say and do, reflected Major
Doucette, would be the subject of a court martial in Britain.

Leo said it would be a waste of time charging them and
would only make them sullen.

The major said he could do with an Australian officer to
liaise between himself and his Australian operatives. Leo
listened to this fanciful talk and didn't take it too seriously
at first. His mind was given over to the proposed raiding
party on Japanese-occupied Rabaul. I knew nothing of this
constantly postponed plan, but it was the reason our
engagement stretched out. The group of which he was a
member were to be dropped and picked up by submarines,
a prospect which Leo looked at as a pleasing extension of
his experience and a fulfilment of filial duty to his father.