As for the rest I had been stopped in place by the news of Leo’s execution. The truth I was ashamed of was this: I did not want any minor and peripheral information about it all. What could adjust the fact? When I dared look at the idea of execution, I was dazzled and disabled by its vibrant blackness. Leo’s body was irreparably violated. That reality lay in the supposed paths of healing like an unnegotiable boulder. My curiosity was paralysed, and there was something in me that feared new knowledge, even if this state of mind was a disgraceful thing in a widow.
Captain Gabriel visited me twice. The second time, in 1947, was to tell me the execution of Leo and other Memerang men would not be the subject of a war trial, but that various judicial officers, including the president of the court, Sakamone, had killed themselves, and the NCOs who did the work of execution, including the one who made a botch of Leo, Judicial Sergeant Shiro Abukara, were all in prison, Abukara for life, for other acts of cruelty in Outram Road Prison in Singapore. What could a war crimes prosecution do about the mess the war had put us in? All this war crimes work, which Gabriel would end up spending three years on, and his superiors a half-dozen years or more, was to me nothing but the sort of pottering around the edge of a cauldron. Even two years after the war, the shameful truth was that I was happy to let it, them, all go. Since I was terrified that the more I heard, the more likely I was to find out some terrible, indigestible reality, I felt a bad wife.
I had been working as a secretary in the office of a hotel broker named Laurie Burden. The business was one his father had founded, and Laurie Burden had taken it over in early 1946, after he returned from England, where he had flown transport planes. He was a pensive young man, and rarely took a drink. I liked working for him. But I was aware of the entitlements of my widowhood, including the chance of a university education. I wanted to teach – it seemed that children, of whatever age, would totally absorb my time. Without Leo, I wanted a new self-definition. I felt that if I were stupefied and hypnotised in place by events, as had happen for the past two years, he would be posthumously displeased. Besides, I had a horror of being stuck without company on that island of widowhood – that description, War Widow, was so inadequate an explanation for the woman Leo had let me become.
Yet in another sense I suppose I unconsciously cultivated widowhood, writing verse about it, some of which Dotty got published in English literary mags. That poem of mine, ‘To the Beloved Missing in Action’, became a minor classic, much anthologised.
I did my degree and teacher training. Laurie Burden had remained my friend and attended the graduation. It was not until 1952 when I was teaching English to high-school girls at North Sydney that we became lovers, not moving to each other with the certainty which had been the mark of my life with Leo, but more like two wounded creatures trying not to hurt each other. For Laurie, as he ultimately told me, had certain bewilderments too. He had toured Germany with his father in 1935, a busman’s holiday during which they had visited all the leading hotels of Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt. Flying into those cities on transport missions, he had been appalled to find all the splendour reduced to such absolute rubble. Earlier in the war, he had his own brush with heroes when he delivered members of the specially trained leadership groups whose job was to gather Maquis units into powerful garrisons in the countryside. The fortified positions were prematurely taken up and were reduced by the enemy with great slaughter, from which few survivors emerged. Laurie lacked the urge to march through Sydney with his former comrades on Anzac Day because he did not see how it would help or even enlarge the spirits of the doomed fellows he had delivered to France.
I had been at work as a teacher for a few months when a woman named Rhonda Garnish, an angel of great inconvenience, visited me. The dreary and deadly Korean War was still going, nuclear threat pressed down from the sky and challenged our innocence, and the past war, vividly recalled by millions of its victims, was nonetheless on its way to becoming historical, an item of study.
Mrs Rhonda Garnish descended on me from the Northern Rivers Mail train. She had called me from the north coast, near Grafton, and said she needed to see me, and we made arrangements. I met her in Spit Road, Mosman, as she got down from the bus from town. She was a small woman, very pretty, with a plumpness which might take over in later years but which had a long way to go before it smudged her good looks. She managed her port tied up by two leather straps with a wiry strength, and when I shook hands with her, I could tell by the raspiness of her palm that she was a dairy farmer’s daughter.
But she was smart.
Listen, Grace, she told me on the street, holding me by both wrists, don’t let me talk you around. Just because I’m going to Canberra it doesn’t mean you have to. This is the right time for me to go, that’s all.
All right, I told her. We’ll talk about it at home.
Hey, I saw that write-up of your book of poetry in the Herald. Crikey. They thought the world of you. It made me think twice before I wrote you a letter. There’s another woman too, Mrs Danway.
I don’t know her, I protested.
Rhonda said, Her husband was Hugo Danway. He wasn’t on the first one, Cornflakes. And he arrived over in Western Australia just in time to join them on the second trip.
Danway. Yes, I recognised the name.
He was one of the group, I said.
Yes, the Japanese beheaded him too. I’m going to visit her, but don’t let me drag you along. As my husband says, I’m a bossy cow.
I took her home to my little flat – I had not yet married Laurie and the proprieties were observed. I’d made a cake for her, and she ate heartily, and drank her tea strong and black and with three sugars.
You see, what happened, she told me, was I was engaged to Pat Bantry. Did your husband ever mention him?
Yes, I lied.
I had a crush on him since I was thirteen. I’d be getting ready for school and I’d see Pat drive the old Bantry Hupmobile full-pelt down our hill and over the wooden bridge, and all the timbers of the bridge would slam together in protest. I can’t hear that sound to this day without my heart missing a go.
My hands were sweating. What did she want, this young wife from the Northern Rivers, who had a perfectly good husband at home in Aldavilla, and had left him to cook his own meals and patiently keep her bed warm, and all for the sake of ghosts? I had let her into my house for Leo’s sake, for the sake of his honour, for which as a good widow I was supposed to be hungry. Rhonda Garnish went on extolling Pat Bantry as the ultimate cow-cocky and bushman. The corn up on the Clarence River grew eighteen feet tall, she said, but Pat harvested the Bantry crop as well as Rhonda’s father’s. She and her brother had helped him when he offered to rebuild the floodgate on Sawpit Creek, and he brought along a picnic in a sugar bag – he must have looted the Bantrys’ kitchen pantry.
Pat would often go bush, cutting tea tree, and he’d cart it in for Mr Bantry’s distilling plant. Mr Bantry was from Ireland, she told me, and knew all about distilling, but he was a great admirer of tea tree oil, which he called ‘The Australian Panacea’, and sold at agricultural fairs up and down the Northern Rivers.
Bantry seemed the ultimate Australian, even though he’d been born in Ireland and come here as a child. On top of all else, he’d gone cutting sleepers and bridge-bearing timbers with Rhonda’s uncle, who said he was the most cheerful of company in the bush camp, and never swore but had as much wit as most swearers. Furthermore, this bush paragon had broken in a small team of steers and used them to snig a fence strainer, thus becoming an invaluable friend to every farmer on Sawpit Creek. And when the war brought petrol rationing, Pat had easily converted the Hupmobile into a kerosene burner.