The Widow & Her Hero Read Free Page B

with him in
a duffel bag, to charm the family and to court the girl:
Minette Casselaine. Not a maiden in a tower as it turned
out but a young, sadder and wiser divorcee with a child
named Michael. He courted Minette and married her at his
regimental church in Singapore.
    The month before the fall of Singapore, Doucette had
shipped Minette, whom he called Netty, and her son
Michael, out of Singapore and to Australia. By the time
Singapore surrendered, Minette and her son were living in
the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia.
    After the fall, Charlie Doucette had got together some
escapees, Singapore civil officials, police, members of the
judiciary, and British officers and men, put them in a
lumpy, 25-ton fishing vessel named Johannes Babirusa , and
relayed them to Sumatra to the estuary of the Indragiri
River, which he knew from his peacetime recreation of
sailing. From the point where he landed them they could
reach, by a last hectic road trip, the port of Padang on
the west shore of Sumatra, where Dutch, British and
Australian rescue ships waited to pick up the strays from
the catastrophe. He went back to Singapore to a
rendezvous on the west coast many times after the fall to
rescue groups of officers and officials.
    For these exploits alone, Doucette – by the time Leo met
him – was already a legend. Men in the know shook their
heads, laughed and felt better when his name came up. I
record this fact plainly and in sadness. It remains to me in
part to record only the thickening and ongoing strands of
Charlie the Boss Doucette's Homeric status. The legendary
state traps not only the hero himself but exercises a
magnetic pull on other men. Stronger than breath, stronger
than sex, as Dotty Mortmain would say.
    Once Doucette could no longer rescue anyone from
Singapore, the gaps in Japanese security having closed,
he escaped from Sumatra on the Johannes Babirusa with
sixteen Special Operations men, mainly British. He was
navigator, and steered for India. On the way, he once told
Leo and myself, the Johannes had been attacked by a
Japanese aircraft, but although the sails were riddled and
the decking splintered, neither he nor any of the other men
were wounded. Just the same, this strafing seemed to have
affected him in a curious way. He always mentioned it
heatedly. He had been so badly hurt in other ways by the
Japanese dominance of the region that for the sake of
sanity, I think, he put all his grievance into that particular
matter. It was as if it was the chief outrage of his military
career and a final sign of Japanese malice.
    The Babirusa reached Bombay, to considerable congratulations
from the military in-crowd, and Doucette was sent
to Delhi and attached to Special Operations Executive
there. He wrote to Minette, announced his escape, and
asked her to leave Australia and join him. In the meantime
he went to his late father's friend General Wavell and
proposed to him a raid upon Singapore harbour using a
vessel rather like the Babirusa . The head of SOE Delhi
decided now that the Australian Independent Reconnaissance
Department in Melbourne had the best personnel for
such a venture. In it, the raiders could approach Singapore
from Darwin up the long Indonesian archipelago, hiding
amongst islands, looking like a coaster doing normal
Indonesian, Borneo or Singapore business.
    Charlie now telegraphed his wife to tell her not to leave
Australia after all – he was coming there. But the telegram
arrived too late. Netty and three-year-old Michael had left
Perth a week earlier on the Tonkin , with over a hundred
other passengers. After five days at sea the ship seemed to
have evaporated. Still in Delhi and about to leave for
Australia, Doucette heard that the Tonkin had vanished
with his wife and stepson. When I ultimately met Doucette,
I somehow expected him to talk about this giant fact,
directly or indirectly, most of the time. But it was the sort
of thing he tried to keep to himself.
    In Melbourne, the head of the