Doucette nodded and frowned. He looked towards Doxey and Foxhill. They both gave confirmatory nods. Doxey said General Durban from SOE London had been out to see General MacArthur, and had got a pledge of cooperation. Creed looked gratified. He seemed to be convinced that Doucette would soon be looking at him with new eyes. Basically, old sport, he said, you’ll be raider-in-chief in the South China Seas. We’ll have you raiding airfields and shipping. Everything you tell me you like!
Even Doucette was impressed and excited, though warily so. He was still distracted, trying to reconcile his mistrust of Creed with the golden idea that had been held out to him. The idea that he could be a pirate chieftain!
When Doxey told Doucette then that first the British wanted to see him in London at SOE headquarters, they had a few things they wanted him to look at, Doucette said, That’s good. I can go and visit Mother.
They put Doucette and Leo up at the Windsor, the flashest of old gold-rush hotels. A pressed uniform with captain’s pips on the shoulder sat on Leo’s bed, so he went to Doucette’s room to report a mistake had been made. It appears not, said Doucette. Doucette had just discovered he was a lieutenant-colonel as well, and Rufus Mortmain was lieutenant commander. Doxey said Mountbatten’s headquarters in India were so impressed that they intended to recommend decorations as well. Doucette said, Makes my rant to the men look pretty silly.
At the time, Leo wrote to me a letter which was an account of that heady afternoon.
I have to say, Leo would write, I feel a bit of the vanity of it all. There’s something intoxicating about getting an extra pip on your shoulder. Stupid, I know. Gives you ideas of military self-importance. I wish you were here, to see how seriously we’re being taken.
In the dusk that afternoon, they were driven by a staff car up the long botanic-gardens-like grounds of Government House to the front door, where a fellow in a frockcoat opened the car door for them, and another with an umbrella led them into the portico and told them he hoped they had not got too wet, sir. They were taken into a great hall lined with portraits of former governors, whose names adorned rivers and mountain ranges in the great State of Victoria and the immensity of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Inside a ballroom, a waiter asked Leo would he like sherry. He didn’t like it, but equally, he didn’t fancy his chances of getting a beer. He saw Foxhill across the room in his tartan pants and started to cross to him, but was all at once taken by the elbow by a young English captain in dress uniform who steered Leo directly to the centre of the room, into the open veldt of the place, away from paintings and ferns and other items of protection. Here in the middle of the floor, where the more important dancing couples would have danced had this been a wedding or a state ball, Doucette was speaking like an equal with three men, two of whom Leo knew from newspaper pictures. One, dressed in a morning suit, was the governor-general, Lord Gowrie, a lean man, popular for having toured the troops in Northern Australia and New Guinea. The other was a very portly fellow, famous General Blamey, former Commissioner of Victoria Police, pudgy and yet somehow commanding, and swaying a little, toe to heel, with a glass of Scotch in his hand.
Some of our boys like the fact he’s a bit boozy, Leo would write, and that he looks such a man’s man. I think he could have been a bit less so. He had interesting, crinkled-up eyes full of roguery, and all up reminded me of a cross between Santa Claus and a pub-owner.
Tall Lord Gowrie extended his hand to Leo and spoke, thus condemning him to further danger. Easy for Lord Gowrie, in his vice-regal serge. And what he said would draw hoots of laughter now, if it didn’t cause widespread incomprehension. He said to Leo, Captain, may I express the admiration of the British Empire.
The admiration of the British Empire!
All the grandiloquence of one age becomes one-liners for a later generation, before becoming utterly incomprehensible to the next.
And General Blamey was muttering his version of the same thing. Bloody fine, said Blamey. Bloody fine.
Lord Gowrie said that his friend, the governor of Victoria, who had so kindly loaned him these digs, possessed some excellent maps in his library. He turned to Doucette and asked him whether he and his young friend Waterhouse could perhaps show him, after the party, their operational movements on an atlas.
General Blamey was pleased with the idea and passed his glass to a waiter for a refill. Leo decided not to judge him for that. He was, after all, one of the fellows who beat Rommel. But then Doucette adopted a solemn air which confused Leo. Doucette said, I was so distressed to hear about Patrick, Leonard.
That’s most kind of you, said Lord Gowrie, and I wish I was a rarity amongst parents who’ve lost sons in the Desert campaigns, but I fear I am not. He knew General Blamey here, by the way.
Yes, said Blamey solemnly. He was a very fine young man, Lord Gowrie’s boy.
Lord Gowrie found even this much reflection on Blamey’s part painful and changed the subject, asking after Doucette’s wife and son. Any word?
No news, Leonard, said Doucette. Thank you for asking.
Lord Gowrie said he didn’t want to offer false comfort. But it takes ages for the Red Cross to get news…
Doucette declared that a kindly thought. In a half-embarrassed voice, Lord Gowrie explained to the other generals that Mrs Doucette and the little boy were missing. They’d been on the Tonkin.
Doucette, perhaps to distract attention, nodded in Leo’s direction. Captain Waterhouse… his father is a POW of the Japanese.
General Blamey looked solemn and said something Leo quoted to me occasionally, sometimes half-joking in boastfulness after sexual athleticism, for like many he thought Blamey ludicrous. Well, he said, they’ve felt the sting of the family, son. They’ve felt the sting.
The British general who had till now been silent, whose red tabs looked so much more vivid than Blamey’s desert-bleached ones, now joined the conversation. He seemed to address Doucette and Leo. He hoped that his own journey from London, specifically to visit General MacArthur, had broken down the American resistance to cooperation and the use of MacArthur’s submarines. MacArthur was very worried that the British and Australians would use their occasional special operations as the basis to claim back the whole region when the war ended. Now according to the Americans, that couldn’t be permitted, because it was imperialism. But, complained this general, it’s not imperialism when he declares he will return to the Philippines
Lord Gowrie murmured, Well, of course, we’d expect Malaya back. I mean, after all, it was taken from us without benefit of international law.
The tall English general turned out to be General Durban, the head of the Special Operations Executive in London. He said that with a bit of American cooperation, he could see the whole of the South-East Asian zone busy as a church fete with airfields and ports blown to pieces by Australians and Free French and wandering Britons like Charlie Doucette.
Later, after everyone had left, Lord Gowrie got one of the Asian atlases from the Government House library, and Lord Gowrie and Charlie Doucette and Leo ended up with it spread on the floor, recounting their dartings back and forth, Subar to Bukum, Pandjang to Pompong.
By the time we were finished, Leo told me, we’d pretty well managed to amaze even ourselves.
How I loved him for choosing a sherry at Melbourne Government House instead of asking for beer. He really was just a boy from the bush, a Grafton boy, despite the fact that he had also lived in the Solomons amongst the colonial administrators and their children. They were the bush gentry in places like that, their civic dignity paper-thin and under threat from marital or alcoholic scandal. Leo was therefore fascinated by real gentry, the members of English or Anglo-Irish clans who produced a governor-general in the family like the king of spades out of the magician’s hat.