Mr Frampton? this author, Lydon, asks me on the phone. He’s an Aussie, a Fleet Street bugger works for the Observer. Trying to write an account of Doucette’s two great missions to Singapore. He has a British publisher. He mentions the name and it’s a publisher I recognise.
I thought I’d better see this writer then, but I’ve had no peace of mind from that day. Sleepless nights. Isabel saying exasperated, Come to bed, love and similar, making me tea I put Scotch into.
I fought my way through a number of meetings with Lydon, but it was all hopeless, I knew. Did you nearly piss in your pants, I wanted to ask him, like I did when Private Stapler the Aussie and I landed at Serapem and saw that Jap walk past down Hammock Hill with his little dog? But that’s no defence. The reason I write this is because I have no excuse to offer, so I’d better stop offering one.
Private Stapler wanted to capture the man that day we visited the rendezvous island. He even said he’d shoot me if I didn’t do it. Rather shoot a Pommy than a Jap, he said. Pommy poofter! he said. He put the barrel of his Sten against my cheek. We could know everything that happened if you’d let me capture that Nip! he said.
And what would we do? I asked this berserk colonial boy. With ten hours to go before dark? What would we do with him after?
Anyhow, as we Framptons drink tea with this chap the author, Isabel said to him, I hope you appreciate Eddie’s got enough problems running the factory and serving on the County Council.
I do appreciate it, said the young man. I saw him nod all right, but could tell he was bloody ruthless. He’d read too much. He’d been into the records and he’d read my report on visiting NE1, and Lieutenant Commander Moxham’s – who’s a bloody admiral these days. He’d read Stapler’s report too, he told me, which I think should have been destroyed in 1945 in the interests of decency.
I wondered, asked this colonial, how Commander Moxham could have so misread the orders…? I mean, the orders for picking up Doucette’s men on time? As I understand it, he was to bring you to NE1 for the rendezvous every night for a month, starting on October 20th, 1944?
Yes, I admitted. But subject to the safety of the submarine.
The smell of Orca came back to me, and I felt I wanted to be sick in a new sense.
Well, he didn’t get you there till sixteen days after the agreed time.
I feel you women deserve the answer I gave the boy. Moxham got a fixation and insisted on staying out and using his fifteen torpedoes. I told Moxham we had to move along to NE1, Doucette’s crowd would be waiting. I didn’t like Moxham’s stubbornness any more than anyone else. But the simple truth was these submarine commanders hated picking up operatives. They didn’t get much credit amongst their peers for that.
As the baby author pointed out, we now know the Memerang operatives I was meant to pick-up were visiting NE1 within the appointed period. And by the time I got there they were still hiding on another island by day and paddling across to the Hammock Hill site on NE1 by night. My report showed I visited the Hill only once, and in the daytime.
It’s true that when I got back to the sub, Moxham said he couldn’t land me there again. Water’s too shallow in that archipelago, he said. I mean, Orca had been tracked that day by a Japanese anti-submarine plane. They were on to us, you understand. Only a matter of time…
I ask your pardon. I can give excuses. I had been, however, eighty days there, on that sub Orca, conducting them up there to Serapem, then back to Fremantle so the Malay crew of the junk could be interviewed by intelligence. Then off again to fetch them, the party. I had only three days ashore in Western Australia in all that time. By the time we got to NE1, I had no muscle tone left. I was physically done. I could barely stand, scarcely use an oar, and even found walking difficult.
But lack of muscle tone isn’t an excuse. I’ve never got over it, any more than you have. After the war I swore off sophisticated engineering, and became a plain old steelwright who liked putting together big transoms of steel for ordinary purposes. Deliberately went from little cunning devices to big plain structures – to get over what I think was a kind of crack-up, though a fellow couldn’t tell anyone that then.
You are right if you think I should have insisted on going back to the Hammock Hill on Serapem the next night, and the night after, and if that hadn’t worked, should have insisted we capture the locals and ask them what they knew of my lost brethren. There were still so many of the Memerang boys living and hiding out on NEs and NCs at that stage. Not only did Tom Lydon know that I should have done all that, should have been an enterprising officer like Doucette, who always consulted locals. But he also knew that I knew I should have done it, and that my failure was eating my vitals and that I dreaded all the stuff he had to tell me.
Right now, Mr Fleet Street is waiting at home for me, Isabel telling him, He’ll be here in a moment, something must have come up at the works. I remember when I met her her family didn’t use the word the in sentences and she’s had to learn. Soomthin coom oop at works, she would have said once. Dear Isabel.
The Independent Reconnaissance Department was so fussy in some ways, but also incompetent in others, and never asked me for my glass-coated death pill back. I kept it in my kit. I kept it in my office desk as a sort of insurance against anything becoming intolerable – cancer or bankruptcy or such. Bakelite and glass coating to stop accidental usage.
I am the last victim of Operation Memerang, and I suppose I can’t blame you for thinking I’m its last war criminal.
I would be obliged if you and your sisters in loss forgave me my neglect, and I seek that favour from you.
I’ll soon be walking the shadows with your brave fellows.
13
But of course, time does erode betrayals and further subtleties of loss. You absorb it all, no matter how terrible. I never thought either that Eddie Frampton deserved the death penalty, though I could see the sense of his last act, and I never wrote his widow a condolence letter. I was helped by the fact that I loved my job. By the mid-1980s, I was and had been for two decades head of English at North Sydney Girls’ High, teaching bright and receptive girls, and fortunate to be liked and respected by them. I was ageing and was spoken of by other teachers as ‘an institution’. Though I had accepted that my education as a widow would never cease, I was a happy woman, a reader, a savourer of gardens, with a companionable husband. Laurie and I were frequently visited by our son, Alex, a structural engineer, a man who relished life and had an acute sense of its value. Though he lacked a few of the literary bones which I would like to have given him, his wife was a first-class conversationalist, an athletic, intelligent woman who sometimes reminded me of Dotty. And of course I had those visits from my post-modernist, gender-studies granddaughter Rachel. We sparked off each other.
I knew from letters from Dotty, now about to retire as a senior editor in a so-called ‘hot’ publishing firm, that she was as harried as I was by an increasing number of Memerang hobbyists and even serious researchers. The chief of them was still the journalist and author Tom Lydon, whose interviews with Major Frampton had triggered the latter’s suicide. Lydon had been shattered for a time by Frampton’s swallowing of his death pill, but after a number of psychiatrists assured him that Frampton’s suicide had been Frampton’s choice and could not have been foreseen, Tom returned to his book, ultimately publishing a fairly flattering version of Memerang entitled The Sea Otters, in which he extolled Doucette and Rufus and Leo and the others and was, perhaps inhibited by his own sensibility, mildly critical of Frampton and Moxham.