The Widow & Her Hero

• Praise for
  
• By the Same Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Author's Note
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• About the Author
  

Voted as one of
Bulletin
magazine's Best Books of 2007

'
The Widow and Her Hero
reveals a writer who has lost none of
the skill and talent he has been demonstrating for decades . . . [it]
is distinguished by its memorable portrait of two women: the quiet
and thoughtful Grace and the fiery Dotty. They, offspring of
Goethe's Eternal Feminine, raise Keneally's new novel to an
admirable height of achievement . . . accomplished and highly
readable book.'

Andrew Riemer, chief book reviewer,
Sydney Morning Herald

'Prolific author Tom Keneally's new novel gives a fresh perspective
of World War II through the eyes of one left behind . . . an inspiring
story.'
Brisbane News

'. . . one of Australia's most versatile and interesting literary
figures.'
Courier Mail

B
Y THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

The Place at Whitton
The Fear
Bring Larks and Heroes
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
The Survivor
A Dutiful Daughter
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Blood Red, Sister Rose
Gossip from the Forest
Season in Purgatory
A Victim of the Aurora
Passenger
Confederates
The Cut-rate Kingdom
Schindler's Ark
A Family Madness
The Playmaker
Towards Asmara
By the Line
Flying Hero Class
Woman of the Inner Sea
Jacko
A River Town
Bettany's Book
An Angel in Australia
The Tyrant's Novel

Non-fiction

Outback
The Place Where Souls are Born
Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish
Memoirs from a Young Republic
Homebush Boy: A Memoir
The Great Shame
American Scoundrel
Lincoln
The Commonwealth of Thieves

For Children

Ned Kelly and the City of Bees
Roos in Shoes

The Widow and Her Hero

To the Coverdales – Alex, Rory, Craig, Margaret.
With the author's love.

Original Print Edition

THE WIDOW AND HER HERO
A DOUBLEDAY BOOK

First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2007
by Doubleday

Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Co. (Pty) Ltd, 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording orotherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Keneally, Thomas, 1935–.
The widow and her hero.

ISBN: 9781864711028

I. Title.

A823.3

Transworld Publishers,
a division of Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, Netley, South Australia

Incidents which occur in this tale bear a debt to two real
wartime operations against Singapore, named Jaywick and
Rimau. But, though the real issues of Operation Rimau and
the beheading of its operatives provide a spark for this tale,
this narrative is not meant to be a
roman à clef
of those
times and characters.

The characters here presented, their motives and their
inner souls, are, therefore, not meant to reflect the actions,
motives and inner life of any person who lived or died.
There was, for example, no World War body named IRD
(though similar organisations did exist). Nor were any
battalions of the Royal Ulster Fusiliers part of Singapore's
garrison. And so on.

Just the same, for their depiction of secret operations
from Australia at that time, I have a great debt to the
following dedicated authors and sources:

Ronald McKie,
The Heroes
, Sydney 1989;

Lynette Ramsay Silver,
The Krait: The Fishing Boat That
Went to War
, from the research of Major Tom Hall,
Sydney 1992;

Lynette Ramsay Silver,
The Heroes of Rimau
, from the
research of Major Tom Hall, Singapore 2001;

Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin,
Kill the Tiger, The
Truth About Operation Rimau
, Sydney 2002;

The Transcript of the Trial of the Rimau men, Australian

Archives, Victoria.

Other correspondence, including interrogation of the
Japanese interpreter Furuta, and Special Reconnaissance
Force documents and reports, can be found in the
Australian Archives, Canberra.

Leo, as I dream of him. His last consciousness is written
not on toilet paper supplied by Hidaka but on the yellow
ether there, in Reformatory Road. He knows something
enormous has fallen on his neck, but mercifully not much
more, no focus, no subtle thought. So I'm assured. The
subtlety is bleeding out of him. Perhaps he thinks of it as a
bludgeon, a mallet, something ponderous. He had been
expecting something more exact than that.

Had he remembered the hymn from our wedding? He
chose it himself, you see. It was one he sang at idle seconds:
oh Lord of all Being throned afar, thy glory flames from
star to star, and so on.

So where are we? Pitiably undistinguished ground to
which I have been once since, on a trip to Singapore, and
hope never to see again. It is dead earth baked solid that
has never been built on, perhaps for fear of spirits, I don't
know. Near Reformatory Road. Scattered over with the
tube-shaped weeds they call Dutchman's pipe. They eat
insects, those weeds. I remember mites and flies stuck half
digested in their mucus. Plants which grew all over this
ground and came not from the hand of the God of mercy.

They picked this and that man up after unsuccessful
blows. I know that. Those clumsy, effete swordsmen. They
who postured about being knights of the blade! They had,
engraven on the haft of the sword, a quotation-cum-prayer
invoking the divine wind. No such wind honoured this. Yet
at least one of the Outram Road samurais had done well,
because Pat Bantry's head had rolled near Hidaka that day,
and Hidaka claimed he could see some light still there.

Captain, said Pat Bantry's severed head, since the heads
of the saints and martyrs certainly talk when sundered, and
since the heads of priests and noble folk still spoke after
decapitation in the French Revolution. Then, Mother of
mine! he said.

Judicial Sergeant Abukara, however, was not a knight
but a butcher. But at last he extinguished Leo Waterhouse.
All confusion ceased. The cloud of unknowing came down
for my beautiful captain, Leo. It was a lost mother's kiss.

As Leo quoted from
The Devil's Disciple: All I can tell you is that
when it came to the point whether I could take my head out of the
noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it.

Lovely words make it just about OK, Leo wrote.

Iknew in general terms that I was marrying a hero. The
burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero's wife in times
supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to
swallow doubt or to understate her demands. Although,
as much as women now, we suspected men might be
childish or make mysterious decisions, it wasn't our place
to say it for fear of damage to the fabric of what we had.
The Japanese had barely been turned back and had not
abandoned the field of ambition. It was heresy and unlucky
to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.

But with the confidence of near-on nine decades I can talk
about doubt now. I would as least ask, what is so precious
about the heroic impulse? Why do ordinary lusty boys love it
better in the end than lust itself, and better than love? Why did
Leo – judging by his actions – love the Boss, Charlie Doucette,
in a way that rose above love of any woman, me included?

There's a documentary on television every second night
these days about the end of World War II and the kamikaze
pilots, avatars of self-immolation. The voice-over commentators
are bemused by it all, as if self-immolation were alien
to us. And that annoys me. Because self-immolation was a
respectable fashion with us too then, in the early 1940s.
Every man and woman put their love on the altar of the war,
and that's just the way it was. We didn't reflect on or criticise
the impulse. We never really believed till it happened
that it was our marriage which would be picked up and
hurled into the fiery pit. We believed excessively in the
fatherly wisdom of generals and statesmen. Every picture
we saw and every song we sang approved of what was
happening, approved of the risks, celebrated the immolations,
and saw the hero return grinning and unaltered by the
stress of events.

I believed I began to write this for the sake of my granddaughter
Rachel, and for her daughters, but it grows to
have a vaguer, more general audience than that. It is the
manuscript I always fancied I could write. I am not averse
to their finding it amongst what I leave behind, and I don't
think anyone else but the girls would be interested. But the
act of addressing one includes the vain ambition to address
a million. And to address to the unheeding millions what
Leo in his innocence and martial mode wrote of it all.

Anyhow, let me get down to the case. Leo Waterhouse
was the most beautiful adult boy I have seen in nearly
ninety years of life on earth. I first met him when my cousin
Melbourne Duckworth brought him home on leave to the
New South Wales town of Braidwood in the warm
December of 1942. My father came from Melbourne, like
his brother, who had labelled his son with the city's name.
My father had moved north of the Murray River for his
career's sake and he was the Braidwood National Bank
manager, which counted for a lot in a bush town at the end
of a long drought, an endless succession of dry skies over
eastern Australia. A bank manager's discretion with credit
was either cursed or blessed by farmers as the pastures
became threadbare, and fissures of erosion afflicted the
soil. We girls liked to think our dad was seamlessly blessed
and thanked by everyone in town and from the farms
about. It might have been so. He did have some sense of
social justice.

When Leo Waterhouse, our house guest, was not
around, my cousin Mel told me that Leo's father had been
a farmer somewhere up on the North Coast, but had lost
his wife and taken a job in the administration of the
Solomon Islands. Leo had grown up partly under the care
of an aunt in Grafton, and in Malaita. He certainly looked
to me as if he had spent his childhood in places which did
not inhibit growth. He had already done some law at
Sydney University.

From the kitchen window of the bank manager's residence,
I saw my cousin Mel and the tall visitor creep up on
each other in the backyard, practising falls, occasionally
miming slitting each other's throats with a swipe of the
hand. I saw Mel land, after one encounter like that, in an
oleander bush. They were both playful and serious, those
tussling young men. Some of my girlfriends who called in
from around the town were hopelessly and frantically
attracted to them, as women were to beautiful doomed
boys then. He looks like Errol Flynn, all the girls said of
Leo. I thought he was more of a young Ronald Colman, the
moustache, the tropic-weight uniform, and the big secrets
he carried lightly. His mother had died when he was ten.
When seen as a motherless child, his appeal was more
intense still.

I continued to watch the two young men too, as Leo
Waterhouse became less and less apologetic, tripping my
cousin up spectacularly, cutting his throat more ruthlessly.
But they were so discreet for young heroes. Returning to
the kitchen for lemonade and tea, they told me nothing
about their expertise with explosives or knives or folboats,
a term I would learn about only later. But I knew then they
were involved in something more exotic than ordinary
soldiering, even though this tumbling and tripping and ritu-
alised throat-slashing was all I saw of what they did for a
living.

And do you still want to go back to your law studies
after the war? my tall father asked at the meal table.
Certainly I do, said Leo, below his new brushy moustache.

It was a good summer. I was a wary, reticent girl, too tall
and angular to be utterly happy about myself. My reticence
was only partly induced by my upbringing as a model child
of model parents in a small country town. It was temperamental
as well. You will see from the story I tell that I am
watchful by nature. Yet without an exchange of many
words, within three days Leo and I became totally
enchanted by each other. I remember that we conveyed to
each other a certainty of the other's perfection. Yet we were
so uncorrupted.

Our few, momentary, stealthy physical contacts would
occur when my cousin Mel and Leo and I walked my
friends, the daughters of the town solicitor, pharmacist,
general practitioner, stock and station agent and headmaster,
homewards through the dark, browned-out town
of Braidwood. Leo and I would lag behind or go ahead on
the broad roads, and if we timed it right would find
ourselves in the ultra-darkness between houses under a
massive sky on the back streets of the town. The occasional
straying of hands was a mere stoking of the fires. How
ridiculous given that the war which changed everything
was under way. Yet I valued his gallantry. At one stage
outside the Braidwood School of Arts, as Leo reached for a
kiss, he held my outer thigh to his inner and then repented
of it. It all filled me with months' worth of fantasy at the
Kurrajong boarding house in Canberra, where I normally
boarded between returns home. Nothing as potentially
intimate had ever happened to me before. In its way it
seemed vaster than the movements of Japanese hosts in the
Pacific, of German arms on the steppes of Russia.

We certainly did not know enough to understand that
even in the Independent Reconnaissance Department, that
bureau of noblest and most glamorous human endeavours,
and amidst the intelligence organisations on which it fed,
there were ambitious men who were willing to deny all that
brave backyard tumbling of Leo and my cousin if it suited
them: older men, soldiers for life, who had administrative
gifts and who weren't going back to the field of war, and
who could write off Leo's and Mel's valour if it embarrassed
them in some way. Who might find it politically
inadvisable to defend them even from the enemy. I could
not have believed it, and it was probably just as well, since
I could not have convinced Leo. And anyhow, that's the
burden of my tale.

Inevitably during that Christmas–New Year period in
Braidwood, the question came up one lunchtime. I think it
was my mother who asked. And your parents, Leo?

She too was considered rather unfashionably tall –
nearly five feet ten inches – and had not married until she
was twenty-five, then considered a fairly late, spinsterish
age. But she had seen what had happened and that her
daughter was under an enchantment. Leo gave my mother
a more explicit rundown than he had given me.

My poor mother took a drink of milk one day from a
diseased cow, he told us. The family had been walking in
the Clarence Valley; the farmer had had no malice in
offering his milk straight from the cow. But bovine TB had
killed her in three short years. My father, said Leo, took
up a post in the islands afterwards. He was Superintendent
of Agriculture in Malaita in the Solomons, and now I'm
afraid he's a civilian prisoner of war of the Japanese. He's
been moved on somewhere north, because the Americans
haven't found him yet.

That must be very trying, said my mother.

It gives me an interest in the region, said Leo.

In an older man this would have sounded like irony, but
in him it was understated purpose. It's very sad, Leo told
us. He had a hard time in the first war, and now he's a
prisoner . . .

Leo's aunt in northern New South Wales had got a Red
Cross card two months past which said that he was in good
health.

I was not in Braidwood all the time then. My father had
not permitted me to join the Land Army or any of the
women's military units. The war represented a great chance
to escape stringent fathers, but my father saw enlistment as
a prelude to becoming fast, wearing trousers, smoking,
drinking, and the unutterable. But having attended a secretarial
course and learned to touch-type I was permitted to
work in Canberra for the Department of the Navy. If I had
not taken my holidays when I did I would not have met
Leo, since I normally made the long bus journey home to
Braidwood only once a fortnight. When I worked there,
the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia boasted a
population of barely ten thousand, and everyone seemed
buffered from the war by the acreages of pasture and the
great insulating force of the eternal bush. I'd started work
a few years earlier at the age of twenty, and at the time I
first saw Leo tumbling with my cousin in the yard at Braidwood,
I had risen to the rank of Procurement Officer,
Stationery and Office Equipment.

During the week in Canberra, I boarded at the Kurrajong
Guest House, a respectable, temperance boarding
house whose manageress, a former Braidwood woman, my
parents knew. If my parents had understood how much
sundry politicians drank at the supposedly temperance
Kurrajong, and how dented its respectability was by their
desire to smuggle secretaries into their rooms, they might
have summoned me home permanently.

A week after New Year, I said goodbye to Leo and went
back to work, and Leo and my cousin vanished – to
Queensland, as it turned out.

But soon, attentive Lieutenant Leo Waterhouse descended
upon the plainness of my life again. One day in early 1943,
when for some reason he was on his way to Melbourne (the
city, not my cousin), the bomber he was travelling in made
an emergency landing at Canberra's long, grassy airfield.

Let me say that most of what I now know of Leo's activities
in those days comes from his own occasional letters
and intermittent diary notes, and from official documents
pushed under my nose by Mark Lydon, a man who once
wrote a book on the adventures of Charlie Doucette and
Rufus Mortmain and Leo (
The Sea Otters
, Cassell, 1968)
and who has never lost interest in these men. What other
sources contributed to this tale you will learn as I go along.

But I know now that Leo was on his way to Melbourne
to commune with the officers who were department heads of
a group called the Independent Reconnaissance Department
over a proposed raid on Japanese-held Rabaul in which he
was to participate. Thanks to the faulty bomber he appeared
in our outer office in Canberra, in his winter-weight uniform
and his Sam Browne (a swagger-stick underarm), like a fulfilment
of daydreams. According to the serpentine mores of the
day, such an apparition at a girl's workplace was a very
serious gesture of interest. He was aware of it, I was aware
of it. He was hopeful, it turned out, that the engine problem
would require him to stay overnight in Canberra. We'd have
dinner, at least that. I did not want to sit at table with him at
the Kurrajong, where some of the regular women guests
would have interrupted us. I wanted him to appear, be
admired, and then we would go elsewhere, into the centre of
town, Civic. In that way my female fellow boarders would
be astonished at how lucky I was, the male guests informed
that I was not available. As house rules required, he had me
back by ten thirty, when the doors of the Kurrajong were
locked.

In Melbourne, as well as conferring, he did some course
on explosives, how to attach them to ships and planes.
When it was over, he organised a Sydney leave and got a
train to Goulburn and a car to Braidwood to seek my
father's permission to ask me to become his fiancée. I was
summoned home from Canberra. On an afternoon walk
through the quiet streets, amongst gargling magpies and
fluting currawongs, with light slanting through the wayward
colonnades of trees, he asked me the huge question.
We kissed. As it got suddenly darker he touched my breast
and then apologised, making it impossible for me to say,
Go on please. And then we went back to my parents' place,
announced the expected news, and slept feverishly in our
separate rooms.

On our afternoon walk he had told me that he would be
gone for a time, and that out of fairness to me, we should
not marry until he was back. At this stage I knew nothing
of bunches of initials like SOE or IRD, I had not heard of
Boss Doucette. The lack of specifics made 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?