The Widow & Her Hero Read Free

it seem all the
more grand in scale. Of course he told me he was confident
he would be coming back. We would marry then, he
suggested. Was that all right?
    Here was the lure of delayed fulfilment – men and
women both like to play that game even now. An immense
anticipatory excitement grew, calculated to fill banal days
with consecrated light and profane heat. The idea that a
man must go on a quest to earn the company and solace of
his woman is ancient, is literally Homeric, and is a handy
one for nations who are organising their young for war and
bloodshed.
    First Leo nominated June of 1943 as a possible wedding
date. By then he believed he would have been into the
Minotaur's cave and slain the beast and been rendered fully
a man. But by April he wrote to me announcing that all
timetables had been changed and he hoped to see me next
by October. He said he knew that that was a long time, and
though his affections and intentions were fixed, he felt he
should offer me the chance of freedom. A beautiful girl like
me must have many suitors, he acknowledged. Of course, I
wrote back. I told him of my willingness to wait. Indeed, I'd
had a nasty experience that Easter, when one of the senior
men at the ministry, flushed and alcoholic, had asked me to
sleep with him. He was nearly my father's age, and that
made me feel sluttish and frightened and ugly and even took
my mind in directions I did not want it to go. It was, that is,
what my granddaughter would call creepy. It rendered the
prospect of waiting for Leo and his unspecified heroic
business to be attended to all the more attractive.
    By letter from Leo, and other means postwar, I got a
picture of the training he was engaged in during those
months. Cairns in Queensland was one of the ports from
which our troops and the Americans in New Guinea were
supplied. It also had a hillside training camp for the officers
and men of the Independent Reconnaissance Department,
of which Leo was a member. There Leo met and worked
with Free Frenchmen and British and Australian and
Dutch, all pursuing plans to infiltrate various sectors of the
new Japanese empire.
    Their chief trainer was a tall English sailor named Rufus
Mortmain, with whose wife, the writer Dotty Mortmain, I
would become friends. The men trained in the thick rainforest
of the Atherton Tableland west of town. Trucked
down to the coast, Leo and the others, faces blackened,
spent nights in the sort of collapsible canoes they called
folboats, navigating from Palm Cove to False Cape or out
to the coral reef and back. Leo's usual companion was a
tidily built young Russian Jew who could speak Mandarin
and Shanghai-nese and whose family had come to Australia
via Harbin in Manchuria and Shanghai. His name was
Jockey Rubinsky, and he was a leading seaman in the
Australian navy. It was thought his languages might be
useful in operations around the equator.
    The task of the folboat crews at night was to flit across
the sea without being spotted from shore, and indeed they
never were. The searchlight battery at False Cape, placed to
pick up an enemy entering through the heads of Cairns
harbour, became a special training tool for Charlie
Doucette's men – if caught by a light, Leo and Jockey
would instantaneously paddle the folboat stern onto the
glare, and then they would freeze. It always worked. In
those warm waters between the coast and the Great Barrier
Reef they built up their invisibility, and so their immunity.
On land, by day and night they hiked and stalked
through the bush barefooted, sometimes naked to avoid
giving themselves away by fabric noise, or perhaps wearing
a soft cloth thong around their nether parts. Their faces
were black with commando grease designed for infiltrators
by Helena Rubinstein. They crept into a coastal artillery
battery making no sound, and stood within inches of
sentries whom, in their imaginations, they despatched with
their knives. Then they withdrew without being seen.
    If in exercises they had to