We were appalled – that doesn’t begin to speak the truth. We knew we’d made ourselves visible. Ashore, the policemen’s colleagues were probably on the phone to the Japanese naval base at Bintang.
The Boss came out of the wheelhouse. He was the very soul of calm. Rufus Mortmain came up from below, his Sten in his hands. He looked more sad than angry. But the young blokes were really angry, yelling at each other, asking each other who started the calamity. Was it you, Skeeter? Was it you, Chesty? They were eliminating each other loudly like that because they were trying to shame the culprit into confessing. Even Jockey and Blinkhorn and others were saying frankly they’d seen Filmer open fire, and the name, the way they said it dripped with contempt.
I was half ready, I have to say, to turn my gun on the poor fellow myself. And what a mistake that would have been. Because we couldn’t have got on in prison and at the trial without him. I think Filmer was about to confess too. But the Boss suddenly said it didn’t matter who did it, it didn’t change anything, and he forbade them to talk about it and point fingers. It had happened. The measure of all of us would be what we did as a result of it happening. All the rest was academic. More rain came up, and gloomy rain clouds. It would help us get away, but had it come five minutes earlier we would have got past Kaso in the murk.
Of course I already knew the outline of what had happened to them. But I put the pages Hidaka had given me into the desk drawer with the transcript. They would need to be faced, but not yet. After a week, Laurie, aware of the influence they had on my composure and my moods, asked me tentatively whether I wanted him to read them, and he could then tell me whether I needed to bother myself with them or not.
That won’t be necessary, I told him starchily.
Well, he suggested, whatever’s there, you have nothing to reproach yourself with. You’ve been a good widow to Leo.
Please don’t discuss that, I told him unkindly.
It was for his sake that I knew I had to approach the rough diary Leo had written and Hidaka had delivered fifty years late. After three weeks of tension, I went to the drawer and took up the pages. I knew about the attack on the police, but not of the subtleties of that afternoon. The details of their behaviour, like so much else in Leo’s diary pencilled dimly on yellowish-brown squares of harsh paper, were new to me.
Throughout it all, as we know from the trial documents, the wounded policeman Sidek Bin Safar was hanging on to the stern of the launch, bleeding into the water and too terrified to move. It was clear that Doucette reacted to the calamity with the admirable calm and decisiveness of a leader at the peak of his judgement and adaptability. He declared the junk must be sunk with its Silver Bullets, the submersibles, so they were to bring up the folboats for launching and load the rubber raft with their supplies. Using the marspikes designed by Major Enright, Leo and Rufus attached limpet mines on short timers around the inner hull of the junk. Sadly there were not too many fathoms under the junk’s keel, but Eddie Frampton’s elegant machines would at least be torn to fragments. All the effort, all the mastery that went into learning to drive them, was for nothing.
As the men prepared their packs and took to their folboats, Charlie Doucette was back with what he really liked – the pure human mechanics of the folboat, and reliance on his own sturdy little body.
The Boss had two men watching Singapore from an island named Subar, or NC1, which he had used himself to keep watch on the port the year before. They had their folboat with them but would need to be collected, at least that. His, Mortmain’s and one other folboat crew would go and fetch them. Leo was given the secondary job – he had to take a flotilla of eight folboats back to Serapem, NE1, the base where Mel Duckworth waited. And I learned for the first time from Leo’s slabs of toilet paper that Doucette had his reasons to abandon Leo and, if things went wrong, to court death.
Leo wrote:
The Boss was shouting orders from folboat to folboat, and Jockey and I had a complete set of nine mines, and you can imagine how I felt, being told to back away from Singapore. I felt like that fellow Cherry Apsley-Garrard when Scott told him he wasn’t going to the Pole. I knew in my water that once the Boss got to Subar he’d go on into Singapore overnight, or the next night, and mine some ships. The Boss rowed up close in his folboat and said, Get rid of your mines. Because you have to look after them all, Leo. Filmer hasn’t got the skills for it. I’m sending you away because I don’t want you to run the risk of being captured with me. I can’t be taken alive, you see, otherwise they’ll use Minette and the boy to get at me.
I said, Boss, why don’t we all just come back to NE1?
After I’ve collected the team from Subar, he said.
I said, like a kid, You’re coming back though, aren’t you? And he said, Certainly. But jettison your mines too, for speed.
His group rowed off, pulling the inflatable raft behind them. It was packed with ammunition and explosives. Passing us in his folboat, Rufus told me he had the Japanese flag with him, in case they were able to pirate another junk. So, whichever way one looks at it, I was to have the lesser part. Yet it was a comfort to be back at sea in the old folboat with Jockey and my other fifteen blokes around, and I knew how important each one was to people back in Australia.
Leo seemed to sense the Boss had become an angel of self-destruction, he was not an angel of return. In the meantime, Leo’s world was contained in his folboat’s storage places fore and aft – their weapons, their iron rations, their camouflage, the walkie-talkies, malaria tablets. Suicide pills might have been left aboard in some cases. They were not a high priority. Leo and the others, still wearing the camouflage grease they called commando, could not see each other’s faces as dark came on.
We dispersed quickly in that late-afternoon sea. I’d say we were pretty confident at that moment – somehow everything had been resolved, we were pretty much in a state where we’d forgotten the question of whoever had shot first.
When the junk went with two separate explosions, we were a mile distant and nearly out of sight of the Boss and Rufus. We felt the end through the canvas and through the sea itself, our junk going to pieces, and our fine unused SBs, the submersibles. I spent so long trying to fight a sense of drowning and learn to handle the controls of those machines. The helmet over the head was very claustrophobic, the mask, pushing the controls down took some doing at first, with green water everywhere, and you couldn’t be sure what was up and down. I got on top of the things, we all did for the sake of not being drummed out. And they were gone now. We were awed, the paddlers in the folboats around us stopped for a few seconds, to let the successive jolts rock them. I called out then in after-silence, All right, gents. Now we just wait for the sub home. Fremantle’s Esplanade Hotel awaits us!
It’s the sort of thing an officer’s supposed to say – judging by the war pictures I’d seen. And we all took up paddling again.
Michael Casselaine, Doucette’s stepson, would later write to me declaring how proud he was of the fact that after the crisis with the junk, his father and the seven others, including Rufus, stayed around in the centre of the great archipelago south of Singapore. People consoled themselves for losses in various ways, and Michael Casselaine may well be right. He points to three unidentified large wrecks in Singapore Harbour the Japanese did not have time to label on their maps before the war ended. Or more accurately – and, according to Lydon, Hidaka is willing to go along with this hypothesis, the poor fellow would go along with anything for the sake of peace – they did not identify them because they were ashamed they had occurred. Michael Casselaine presumes these wrecks were the work of a last fling by Doucette, and Tom Lydon, with whom I had reconciled, tends to agree.