Bolt, Usa, Achara, Red Lead and the other cats settled in Chiang Mai. It was Thailand’s second biggest city but still, in the 1950s, predominantly rural and both he and Usa preferred it to Bangkok. They rented for a few years then bought a two-storey, colonial-style building on the River Ping in the south-east of the city. It had five bedrooms and sizeable back and front gardens. Bolt had a 25-yard pool built in the backyard and swam every day he was in Chiang Mai. He rented medical offices and opened a practice there on the canal near the city’s Thapae Gate, a 2-mile motorbike ride from his home. He had two surgeries, the second one being for veterinary work. He soon gained a strong reputation for handling humans and animals, and no one ever queried his lack of official documentation as a vet. He kept up his interest in psychiatry and tropical diseases, and gained postgraduate status in both in Thailand.
He stayed in contact with people in Melbourne, mainly through his vast medical interests, and visited his former home once every two years, usually at Christmas and into January when it was quiet.
Each member of Bolt’s group of POWs made the pilgrimage, some with wives, to Chiang Mai to see Bolt and Red Lead. They stayed in the roomy mansion. At first, they had been reluctant to return to the country of the slave railway, and the memories of daily misery and inhumanity that went with it. Bolt reminded them that Red Lead, while hale and hearty at age fifteen in 1956, could not have long to live, if the average lifespan for a cat was considered.
‘She is fortunate to have a most sympathetic medical carer close by most of the time,’ Bolt wrote to Grout. ‘He can only do so much to keep her kicking, although I must say, she is the fittest animal or human of her years, age equivalent, I have ever attended or seen. I know she would enjoy very much seeing her “team” again.’
That was enough incentive for Grout, who broke the drought and made the trip at Christmas 1956. Then each year after that Tait, Noel, Farrow and Bright followed.
In 1961 Edgar Burroughs came with his wife, Michelle, and Bolt and Usa visited them in Chicago in 1962.
All the men made a huge fuss of Red Lead, whose gregarious, warm personality masked whether or not she really knew who they were. Whatever her true feelings, she was close to them all when they left her home. All, including Noel, were in tears on parting.
Bolt told Usa, ‘Red Lead represents hope, and love and courage, which they all had to show during those terrible years.’
On 10 October 1965, Red Lead, as usual of her own volition, joined Bolt in the pool for a swim in the early morning. She had her favourite breakfast of fish and pumpkin and went to sleep in a shaded outdoor hammock in the afternoon, as she often did. She did not wake up. It was a shock for Bolt, who had always admired her agility and control over all her faculties right to the end. It was just about the time of her 24th birthday, a very old age for a cat. He cried, but in his sadness reflected on her incredible life.
Bolt buried her in the back garden of their home, where she had lived for most of her life. He had a bronze cross made. He inscribed on the attached plaque:
RED LEAD 1941–1965
MASCOT OF HMAS PERTH
A CAT OF EXCEPTIONAL CHARACTER
He, Achara and Usa, who favoured Red Lead above all the scores of cats she’d ever had, were sad for weeks. He wrote to the Australian Department of the Navy recommending that Red Lead should be remembered in some way. Bolt also wrote to all the men, who replied with heartfelt letters. Noel had the most telling lines of all.
‘I now understand what empathy really means, having studied my condition since the war,’ he said. ‘That small animal gave me an inkling of what real love and emotion are. In my mind, she has not passed on. She lives in my thoughts forever.’
Bolt had the letter copied, framed and hung in the guestroom of his house.
Dan Bolt died of a heart attack in 1982, just after his 77th birthday. He was still running his Chiang Mai medical practices, part-time, until the day before he died. Bolt left a comprehensive private autobiography, which he said was never to be published. In it he confessed to the murder of two Japanese men, one a sailor in the water on a Java beach, and another an army corporal in the POW camp at Three Pagodas Pass, Thailand.
He and Usa were happily married for 32 years. She passed on five years later, aged 68. Their one child, Achara, died in 1996, aged 52, after a motorbike accident, surrounded by her 30 cats. Her breeding business was bought by a Chiang Mai local, who put the feline parade on show daily for cat-loving tourists.
The third ship to be named HMAS Perth has Red Lead’s red paw prints on the companionway leading to the bridge. There is also a painting of Red Lead on the bridge. The wardroom door has a cat flap that reinforces the memory of this remarkable feline. These features on Perth III, the last of eight ANZAC Class frigates, are in honour of Red Lead and to keep alive the memory of the gallant ship, the outstanding Captain Waller, and his courageous crew.