The Widow & Her Hero Read Free Page A

land on the sandstone jumble
below headlands, they wore no footwear except woollen
socks to enable them to creep over barnacles and oyster
shells. With only starlight to guide them, nineteen-year-old
sailors from Australian country towns learned to assemble
an Owen or Sten gun in ridiculously short times and
without anyone twenty yards away hearing them. And
Charlie Doucette himself the magnetic Irishman loved exercises
of this kind, the way only an irregular regular soldier
could.
    Not to cast any doubt on their skill or athleticism, it was
nonetheless true that this style of life suited some men.
There are always men who are happiest with other men,
dreaming of women as a remote mountaintop above the
plain on which their Spartan camp lay. I didn't understand
this, but Dotty Mortmain, wife of the trainer, the naval
lieutenant Rufus Mortmain, believed this and would pass
the certainty on to me. This hiking-running-tumblingpaddling-
infiltrating caste might have been happier and
more certain with yearning than fulfilment, since fulfilment
was demanding in a complicated way. And as I said,
yearning suited the times.
    In any case, most of them were babies, and I too a bush
infant.
    And of course, the young Australians and occasional
British, Dutch and French, training in the rainforest to turn
darkness into a gift, learning how to breathe and move
invisibly, were not aware of the great struggle of ideology
and imperialism raging between American General Douglas
MacArthur's headquarters, and the British and Australians.
    We'll get to that. I became educated. Widowhood was
my education.
    One day, during his training, Leo found himself paired for
a race in a folboat, not with Jockey Rubinsky, who had
a tooth abscess, but with a magnetic Ulster Irishman,
an exile from Singapore, Major Charles August Doucette.
Doucette was a compact, muscular, gleaming man. He had
been an intelligence officer in Singapore before its inglorious
fall, and a rare valiant figure from that fiasco. Leo had been
until now assigned to a different proposed raid than the one
Charlie Doucette was slated to lead, but he knew something
of the mythology and rumours surrounding Doucette. He
was a Dubliner of French Huguenot descent. His people had
been architects and soldiers who acquired land cheaply in
the west of Ireland in the nineteenth century from the overmortgaged
Anglo-Irish nobility.
    Doucette was a regular soldier of the kind who was
attached to an ancestral regiment. The Doucettes' regiment
was the Royal Ulster Fusiliers, which had been the Royal
Dublin Fusiliers until the Irish Free State was established,
at which time it moved north to garrison Northern Ireland.
He was quite jolly about telling me this one evening at
some eventual party in Melbourne, and letting me know
that ancestors of his had helped the Crown put down a
rebellion in Ireland in the late 1700s.
    Mark Lydon, author of The Sea Otters and thus virtually
Doucette's biographer, records that Doucette was a
long distance sailor and, before the war began, had spent a
lot of time sailing the South China Sea – mainly for his own
delight, nominally for British Intelligence. He had identified
the beaches up near the Thai border where he believed
the Japanese would land in a future attack on Malaya, and
he also informed British Intelligence that the Japanese
would not slink through the jungles but would roll down
the good north–south roads in trucks and on bicycles,
flanking any line the British might set up. So he had been a
prophet ignored, and General Percival and the others had
lost Malaya and Singapore in precisely the way he claimed
he had warned them they would.
    During one of his delightful reconnaissances by small
boat, he met the daughter of a Belgian businessman in
Macau, and married her. In fact, as she told me after the
war ended, he had heard that there was a beautiful Belgian
girl in Macau, and ensured that on his long sweep across
the South China Sea, he took his mess uniform