I now know what was happening with Charlie Doucette in England at that time. He had fallen in love with an appliance of war, a sort of sub-submarine, a little boat piloted by one man. This vessel could proceed on the surface by battery power, and so required no paddles. It could also submerge, so that only the driver’s head was visible, or it could go underwater entirely, the driver wearing goggles, and with an oxygen supply device clamped between his lips. The record shows it was an Englishman, Major Frampton, who introduced him to it and to a young instructor named Sublieutenant Lower who could do the loop-the-loop with it underwater. Doucette wanted a go at it. If he could handle it, it would be very suitable for his buccaneering plans.
I believe that, when he practised aboard the submersible in the deep, dark water of a reservoir outside London, Doucette dealt easily with the normal human problems of fear of drowning, of underwater claustrophobia in water greyer and dimmer than the greyest, dimmest English sky. Doucette was first of all a creature of water, and I doubt he had too many of the normal phobias. Doucette had to be lived up to by other men who knew normal, pedestrian fears. A man who would know fear, the Englishman Frampton, the inventor of the little submersibles, reacted to Doucette’s enthusiasm for the machine and pleaded to be allowed to come with Doucette and have a role in Doucette’s new enterprise.
On his English journey, Doucette also visited a British mine-laying submarine, and found out that if you built special containers for the submersibles, a number of them could be transported in the compartments generally devoted to mines.
His mother, Lady Doucette, was living with her English relatives in Wiltshire. She had left Dublin for the time being as a protest against de Valera’s insistence that Ireland remain neutral. She came from hard-up English gentry and had married into the Doucettes’ ready cash, giving the Doucettes social cachet while the Doucettes paid the bills. For whatever reason, Doucette had given SOE her address as his ‘care of’ address in Britain. Lady Doucette was a robust woman, but she later told Tom Lydon she sought the normal reassurances from Charles that a mother should. In his book, Lydon sets down, accurately or not, a standard mother–son conversation:
How are your quarters?
Quite comfortable, thanks, Ma.
And you wouldn’t do anything ill-advised?
Of course not, Ma. I intend to come back and take you dancing.
The conversation sounds credible. Though it’s dying out, that understated language is still used by the sort of British gents my second husband, Laurie Burden, had business with. But in Doucette’s day, it was a sort of safety net thrown over the cruelties that young men could inflict, and have inflicted on them.
The evening of his visit to his mother and aunt, Doucette caught the village taxi to the local railway station. He was about to be returned to Australia by a succession of military aircraft. A quarter of an hour after he left, an urgent telegram arrived for him. After some discussion, Lady Doucette and her stepsister called the police to come and collect the telegram and rush it to the station. The train had already left for London by the time they got it there, so they brought it back to Lady Doucette. They must open the telegram, the two women decided, so that its contents could be relayed to a number at SOE in Baker Street, London. The telegram, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, begged to inform that Doucette’s wife and son, Minette and Michael, were alive, and prisoners of the Japanese. They were presently held in Satsuoka internment camp in Japan, and were in moderately good health. The SS Tonkin, on which they had been travelling to join Doucette in India, had been intercepted in the Indian Ocean by the German raider Jaguar. Its commander gave Tonkin’s captain a choice between capture and being blown to pieces. For the sake of his passengers, the captain chose capture. The German put a crew aboard Tonkin and sailed it to the Japanese port of Yokohama. From there, the 130 passengers were taken by train to the upland town of Satsuoka and internment in a convent building.
The personnel at SOE failed to get the news to Doucette before his plane took off from Croydon airfield, but it was waiting for him when he arrived in Malta. Immediately, he sent a message to IRD, and Captain Foxhill passed the welcome news to Mortmain and Leo, who brought it home to Dotty and me.
By now, Dotty had forgiven Rufus for whatever had happened earlier. She and I had become firmer friends still, and on the days we didn’t work, she showed me things to read – Auden, and T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ verses and Mrs Dalloway, Sons and Lovers, and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. I began to write a few tentative verses myself, a sign that Dotty was having a potent influence on me. The other thing about her was that she spoke with great frankness, to the point that would actually be considered impoliteness in my own painfully polite family. In a bush town, a bank manager like my father was considered one of the gentry, and although the children of undistinguished English and Scottish immigrants, my parents did their best to behave in the manner in which they thought the British privileged classes did. With only an occasional etiquette guide, and tips on good behaviour in the weekend papers and the Women’s Weekly for directions, they avoided uttering bruising truths. Dotty didn’t. Thus the morning after Leo and Rufus brought Doucette’s good news home, I found Dotty very depressed and, over tea, she was very quick to tell me why.
This will make Doucette even more unstoppable, she told me. I’m glad the woman and her son have been saved, of course. But Jesse Creed showed me a report about how short the Japanese are of steamships. Doucette will want to blow up the entire Japanese merchant fleet now, and end the war. And he’ll want Rufus and Leo with him. And Rufus will go of course.
I felt a pulse of fear too, and for the first time. Leo was so much part of my world that I had never doubted his survival. To an extent this was a symptom of my innocence. Young captains bearing the DSO and resembling Errol Flynn weren’t in any real danger, were they? Leo had told me he and Rufus were chiefly advising IRD on equipment, and they kept fit because at any stage they might be needed as instructors. Leo had also mentioned that he and Rufus might be sent by sub on a non-attack run to lay a depot here or there in the islands, but would I keep that to myself. I asked him was he comfortable in a submarine, and he said, No reason why not. I mean, they’ve got air down there.
It was partly Dotty’s unconscious demeanour of knowing so much more than I did. If she, a novelist and a poet, had grounds for alarm, then alarm must be the proper mode. I wanted Leo to be like Major Enright, stuck to a desk in Melbourne, going out to Essendon now and then to practise putting wing charges on military aircraft, so that he could in turn instruct commandoes on how it was done.
The simple truth was that I found it easier to believe in my own death than in Leo’s. Earlier in the war he had come through the bombing of Darwin, and through whatever he and Rufus and Doucette had done. And in fact, the main lesson he took from the good news about Doucette was that he might now learn something about his father. From his contacts in Intelligence, he told me, he suspected his father had also been shipped to Japan. But at least I had not got from him any sense that he intended to blow up Japanese fleets as a way of personally liberating his father. His father’s capture was a phenomenon locked up in the giant nature of the war, beyond any individual input.