In the mid-1950s, to celebrate the arrival in Auckland of a group of American Navy destroyers on a goodwill visit, a private dinner was held at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron headquarters, below the Supreme Court buildings on Anzac Avenue. On the day, at around five in the afternoon, a car pulled up in front of the building, and Johnny Bull got out.
‘We should be finished by ten, darling. Are you sure you don’t mind picking me up?’
Cecily nodded and blew him a kiss as he shut the door. Johnny turned and walked towards the Yacht Squadron club rooms as she drove away. He signed the book on entering and headed for the bar, acknowledging certain other members in passing. He ordered a whisky and water and waited. Through the door to the dining room he watched staff making last-minute arrangements for the dinner. As he gazed around the establishment, he could not help but notice the memorial on the house bar wall, nor avoid being reminded about those members who had not survived the war, whose names were regularly invoked in solemn toasts.
Johnny’s personal war knew no end. Even now, years later, he needed no prompt to see those men’s faces, and their voices invaded his thinking without warning.
‘Here you are, sir.’
He took the proffered tumbler just as the honoured guests and their hosts entered the house bar. Jack Gifford stepped forward.
‘Here he is. Johnny! Let me introduce you to our guests. Gentlemen, this is Johnny Bull: Lieutenant Commander Johnny Bull, ex-Naval Reserve, and a member of our committee.’
Johnny was introduced to each of the Americans in turn, before coming to the last guest.
‘Nice to meet you, Johnny. Commander Monk Hendrick, USS Buck. Call me Monk.’
The group, about a dozen, were ushered into the dining room and took their assigned places at the table. The atmosphere was warm, his companions were affable, and the conversation became more animated as the evening progressed. The oysters were well received, and while they waited between courses, Monk Hendrick ordered another bourbon.
‘Rocks. Straight up, with a twist.’
Monk liked his liquor hard.
‘So tell me a little about your tour of duty, Monk,’ Johnny said. ‘I understand you’ve been away from home for a while.’
Hendrick described a twenty-month tour patrolling the China Sea as escort to a carrier force. ‘But I started my naval career on a battleship,’ he said.
‘Good heavens. When was that?’
‘1939, but it was only for a year.’
The young American Ensign seated opposite Johnny regarded the Kiwi with scepticism, wondering what the war experience of an ex-New Zealand Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander might have been. As Johnny took a mouthful, the Ensign took the chance to question him.
‘So you saw service? During the war? Whereabouts?’
‘Most of my time was spent in the Solomons,’ Johnny replied.
‘Oh, yeah? Didn’t know you Kiwis fought in the Pacific.’
Johnny wondered if this was a deliberate slight, but thought better of it. ‘Yes. We were. There weren’t many of us. Most New Zealanders were fighting in Europe.’
‘So what did you Kiwis do?’ The Ensign pressed him.
This time, the inflection did seem deliberate, but Johnny indulged his inquisitor. ‘I served in an anti-submarine flotilla working out of Renaud Sound.’
‘Guadalcanal!’ This time it was Monk Hendricks who replied. ‘Hell, we Americans know all about that.’
Jack Gifford joined the conversation from across the table. ‘Johnny commanded the flotilla.’
‘That right?’ Hendrick looked across at his junior officer. ‘I have to say we were a bit late to the party, but I was involved here myself, in the Pacific. In submarines.’
Now Johnny’s interest was pricked. ‘Subs?’
‘Yup. Thirteen years. Helluva job,’ said Monk, shaking his head.
‘I’m sure it was.’ Johnny nodded in agreement.
Wine was refreshed and toasts offered, and when, with a coordinated flourish, the waiters presented dinner, the visitors cooed with appreciation. For a while the conversation was suspended, and the room filled with the sound of cutlery on china and the clinking of glassware.
Monk Hendrick belched, quietly.
‘Beg pardon, gentlemen. Damned good spread, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ He took another mouthful, then asked, ‘So tell me, Johnny: you Kiwis were in the war from the beginning. Where else did you serve?’
Johnny finished his mouthful and swallowed. ‘Malaya. And Singapore.’
‘That right?’ exclaimed Hendrick. ‘Singapore? I found myself there once. That was pretty early in the piece, trying to rescue a bunch of Brits who got themselves marooned on some island.’
The Committee members, who knew of Johnny’s Singapore experience, stopped what they were doing and sat motionless, wondering how he might react. The sudden suspension of activity seized the attention of the visitors, who also stopped eating.
‘What? Did I say something?’
Johnny put down his knife and fork. He paused, then said, ‘We should talk a bit more, Monk. Perhaps you would like to come to dinner, at my house. Would you be free, say Friday?’
★ ★ ★
Monk Hendrick was grateful he had the use of a Navy driver. The Bulls’ home was a long way from the city, and a taxi would have cost a small fortune. This way, he was able to sit back and enjoy the journey, which swept him along the beautiful foreshore of Auckland’s inner harbour, with its volcanoes, inlets and beaches. Eventually they arrived at Karaka Bay.
This too was a special place. The rising sun bathed the site daily, and on the beach in 1840, eminent rangatira from Tamaki had gathered here to sign a local version of the Treaty of Waitangi. Over time, the Bull family had built several dwellings on the land, and several generations had swum contentedly from the beach, and learned to sail on the Gulf waters.
The car pulled up outside a neat weatherboard bungalow, and four people emerged on cue: Johnny in reefer jacket and tie, his wife in a floral frock, and two children.
The two men shook hands.
‘Good evening, Monk. Let me introduce you to my wife, Cecily.’
‘Honoured, Ma’am. You have a beautiful place here.’
Hendrick was in uniform: a gesture of respect towards his host. He saluted Cecily Bull, then swept his cap off and shook her hand. He then shook hands with the two children, a son and daughter around ten and eight years old respectively, who immediately raced off elsewhere.
‘Come in, Commander,’ Cecily said to Hendrick. ‘Please come in and make yourself at home. Give me your cap. Johnny will pour us a drink. I understand you like bourbon.’
Dinner with the family passed agreeably, without any reference to Singapore or the Navy until the pavlova had been almost entirely consumed by Hendrick, and the table cleared. Then the two children left, while Cecily took orders for coffee or tea and Johnny went to the sideboard, where he collected a neat pile of documents that Hendrick had noticed previously and brought them to the table.
Johnny sat down and began to speak. Hendrick listened, as his new friend began to describe the flight of ML310 from Singapore. He was all the more attentive as Johnny described how he and the staff party had evaded the Japanese and run aground, and how he and two of his ratings had succeeded in escaping the island to seek help. Hendrick watched his friend’s demeanour change and become deeply solemn as he described his efforts to engineer a rescue for his crew and the abandoned party, and his enduring disappointment that the rescue had failed and so few had survived.
In the silence that followed, Monk Hendrick absorbed all that he had heard. Cecily Bull had quietly re-entered the room with fresh coffee and had also been listening. She put a comforting hand on her husband’s shoulder and poured him another cup. It was the first time she had ever heard Johnny talk about the subject in any detail. Their daughter Anne, who had settled under the table unnoticed, engaged in some game or other, sat listening to something she was destined never to forget.
★ ★ ★
The next morning, Johnny awoke late. His head was thick after a late night and too many brandies, and it took him a while to collect his thoughts, but in due course he made his way to the telephone, carrying a cup of tea, and sat down.
The phone rang a long time before Len answered it. He recognised Johnny’s voice immediately.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, old son,’ Johnny said. ‘Can you meet me today, at the Churchill, say 3 o’clock?’
★ ★ ★
Len lived with his wife Pat and their young son in Glendowie, which wasn’t very far from Karaka Bay, and the two men and their wives met frequently at the Churchill Club nearby.
Driving to the meeting, Len wondered what Johnny wanted to talk about. He thought about their shared wartime experiences and their lives since. Unlike Johnny, he had not found it so easy to re-enter civilian life. Johnny was seven years his senior and had returned to a wife and child and his old job, more able to pick up his former life from where he had left it, whereas he himself had left New Zealand a boy and returned a man, with little in front of him but opportunity. While he now had a family and a job working with his father-in-law, he was struggling. He had learned much about where he had come from, and who he was, but the question of where he was going with his life had not been easy to answer. On the one hand, he and Pat had begun to talk about moving away from Auckland, beyond the influence of her father, to start a new life elsewhere. But there was another question of direction that he had found not so easy to resolve.
At times like this when his friend Haami came to mind, he was forced to acknowledge how little he had enquired into te ao Māori beyond what Haami had offered. He shared this with no one, and the more he considered it, the less inclined he was to do so. To discuss the matter openly was likely to start an argument, and like his brother Bill before him, Len found that ‘being Pākehā’, as he more obviously was, was a safer space to stand; so that is where he stood, and he felt guilty for it. He felt shame even – whakamā, he remembered – for letting his friend down and not rising to his challenge to stand strong, to be counted.
There was a banging on the roof of the car. Johnny had emerged from the car beside him. The two of them went inside together, bought a beer and sat down in a quiet corner of the Club.
‘Cecily and I entertained last night, a Commander off one of those visiting US ships,’ Johnny said, and began to repeat the story Monk Hendrick had told him the night before. Len sat back in his chair and listened while Johnny told him the story of S-39 and the failed rescue.
Both men sat deep in thought.
Johnny was wondering what Collins had said to him at the time. ‘There’s little hope.’ Or was it, ‘There’s a little hope’? He couldn’t remember any more. What was hope anyway but unfulfilled promise? And he more than most understood that an unfulfilled promise lasts a lifetime.
‘What’s that?’ Len was indicating an envelope that Johnny had placed on the table when he arrived.
‘Sorry.’ Johnny took something from the envelope, unfolded it and shook it open. It was a National Geographic map of South East Asia. He laid it in front of Len.
‘You need to see this.’
The two men stared at the map, taking in the added detail. They stared at the truth, Len in a stupefied silence. The demons that had dogged both men since the war’s end now crowded the table, and truth did nothing to lighten their darkness.
The passages as inscribed on the map by Johnny and Monk Hendrick were not contiguous. The place identified by Hendrick as the island on which it was understood the men were marooned was over 100 nautical miles too far north: nearer Singapore and much closer to Bintan than to Bangka.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.’ Johnny felt his anger rising. His fists tightened. ‘How, in God’s name, could my directions be miscommunicated? Men died!’ He didn’t see the mist in Len’s eyes. ‘All that risk, and for nothing. They went to the wrong bloody place.’
Taking up their glasses wordlessly, the two men wandered outside and into the fresh air and stood staring out over the estuary. Several small boys busied themselves around two small yachts sitting up on the beach, trying to control the sails flapping loosely in the breeze.
‘The more things change,’ Johnny said, ‘the more they stay the same.’
‘You’re right,’ replied Len, eyes closed, listening to the cry of the gulls on the wind.