by Nevil Shute
Opposite this one, in the other glazed frame, was a more living picture. It was a snapshot of Bill taken shortly before his death, in the battledress uniform of a sergeant in the marines, taken in the open air upon the roadway of some camp. Janet Prentice was beside him in the uniform of a Leading Wren; he had his arm around her shoulders and they were laughing together.
I knew that one existed, though I had never seen it; my mother did not know of it at all. Bill had told me about it when I met him in the spring of 1944. I was at Fighter Command in those days after two tours of operations, first on Hurricanes and then on Spitfires. It was so long since we had met that when a job cropped up that was to take me to a conference at Beaulieu aerodrome I had shamelessly extended it and snatched an extra twenty-four hours from my office on Sunday in order that I might see Bill before Overlord, before the balloon went up. I flew down in a Spit from Northolt late one Saturday evening and landed in the dusk. Tony Patterson was there and he had laid a car on for me to take me in to Lymington, where I had booked a room at the Roebuck Hotel, and Bill had met me there for dinner.
In the first exchanges over a couple of drinks before we ate, Bill told me that he knew Beaulieu aerodrome. It was nearly two years since we had met; I had been in Egypt and the Western Desert before my office job, and when I was drafted back to England he had been up at some Commando training place on the west coast of Scotland. So much had happened to us both, so differently had we developed, that it took us a few minutes to establish contact again and to reach the point when we could talk about the matters we both wanted to discuss. The gin helped, of course.
“What were you doing at the aerodrome?” I asked. “You don’t go arsing about up in the air?”
He shook his head. “There’s a flight sergeant there in charge of the P.R. unit,” he said. I nodded; Beaulieu aerodrome was now a mass of fighters, Thunderbolts and Typhoons, in readiness for close support of the invasion landings on the other side, but previously there had been a photographic reconnaissance flight of Lightnings there and the photographers with their equipment for developing and printing were still in one of the buildings. “He’s a good type,” said Bill. “Nobody’s allowed to have a camera down here, of course.” I did not know that, but with the intense security precautions necessary before the invasion it was obviously so. “He’ll take anybody’s picture for a dollar and let you have the prints. Good pictures, too, I went up there with Janet this afternoon and he took one of us. I’m going to pick them up on Wednesday.”
This was getting near the subject we both wanted to discuss. “Where’s Janet now?” I asked. “Is she here?” I had never met her then, of course.
He shook his head. “She only got a three-hour pass. She caught the ferry back to Mastodon from just outside the aerodrome.” He meant the naval truck that plied between Exbury Hall upon the Beaulieu River that was now H.M.S. Mastodon, and Lymington. “She’s got a full day off tomorrow.”
“Got anything laid on?”
“She’s got a boat,” he said. “When have you got to go back?”
“Be all right if I get off at dawn on Monday,” I replied. “I’ve got a natter on with the Americans tomorrow evening — I’ve got to be up at the aerodrome at six o’clock. And I’ll have to slip out to the aerodrome in the morning to ring up the office. That won’t take more than half an hour. After that I’ve got all day, till six o’clock.”
“You could make the call from here.”
I shook my head. “It’s got to be a scrambled line. It won’t take long. I’ve got transport laid on to collect me here at half past eight.”
He looked me up and down, and grinned. “All these bloody rings and gongs,” he said. “I suppose they give you transport any time you want it.”
I ordered two more gins. “Mum was asking in the last letter if you were ever going to get a commission.”
“Not much,” he said. “I get more fun this way. If I’d been an officer I wouldn’t have met Janet.”
“Don’t you believe it,” I replied. “Most of the officers’ popsies that you see are in the ranks. They don’t give commissions to the best popsies. Reserve them for a higher destiny than being a wing officer.”
“Reserve some of them for a job of work,” he observed.
I glanced at him. “What does she do?”
“O.A.,” he told me. “Ordnance Artificer at Mastodon. Leading Wren. She looks after the guns on the LCT’s and the LCI’s. Force J mostly, in the Beaulieu River.”
I glanced around, for this was careless talk and there might be some security snooper listening to us. But there was no one within hearing. “Services the guns?”
He nodded. “If a ship reports defects in its Oerlikon or twin Lewis she goes on board and checks it over, and if it’s crook she takes it on shore to the armoury and swaps it for another.”
I raised my eyebrows a little. Most of the popsies that had come my way were ornamental young women from the ops room, or in radar.
Bill grinned. “She knows her stuff.”
“Are you engaged to her?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Nothing like that.” He stood fingering his glass upon the bar. “Not till after the balloon’s gone up. Time enough to think about that then.”
I said, “You’d like to be?”
He nodded. “She’s a beaut girl.”
“How would she go down with Dad and Mum?” At Lymington in Hampshire, in the British forces, we were a long way both in distance and in thought from Coombargana in the Western District.
“She’d be all right.”
“Does she know anything about Australia?”
He grinned. “Not a thing. They none of them do. It’s no good trying to explain, either. I told her we were farmers. They understand that.”
I nodded. I had had some of this myself. When I was new to England I tried once or twice to explain to people how we lived, and found that they thought I was shooting a line. I had soon learned to shut up and to identify myself as a farmer’s son — which, of course, was true.
“Got any idea what you’re going to do when this is over?” I asked him.
“When what’s over? Overlord?” He dropped his voice for the last word, as one which ordinary people did not speak aloud.
“No. The war.”
“When’s that going to be?”
“May be this autumn. It probably won’t go another year.”
“Is that what they are saying at your place?”
I nodded. It was difficult for either of us to credit such a thing, after five years. “Think you’ll go back to Cirencester?” Bill had come to England in July 1939, when he was nineteen years old, to go to an agricultural college. He had stayed there, unwilling, for a few months in the period of the phoney war before enlisting in the marines.
He shook his head. “I’d never go back to school now. What about you?”
I had done two years of Law at Oxford, at the House, on my Rhodes scholarship. “I wouldn’t mind going back for a bit, finish off what I started.”
“Go home and see the parents first of all?”
“Oh, I think so. Go home for a month or two, and then come back to finish off at Oxford.”
Bill put his glass down thoughtfully upon the bar. “I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’d like to marry Janet and go back to Coombargana, and stay there looking at the sheep for a long, long time.”
I glanced at him quickly. “Like that, is it?”
“A bit.” He was a frogman at that time, of course. I did not know the full scope of his work then, though I knew that he went repeatedly to the beaches of northern France in the dark night, to go ashore and to survey the tetrahedrons and the Elements C with land mines tied to them with which the Germans were fortifying the landing beaches. I had seen the air photographs that the Lightning pilots had returned with, taken as they flew along through flak at fifty feet, and I knew that one of Bill’s jobs was to go by night in MTB or submarine, to swim ashore or paddle
in a folboat in the darkness under the noses of the Germans at the head of the beach, to examine these things and report on them. It seemed to me that he was starting to feel the strain, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had been through periods of strain myself.
I said, “One of us ought to get back there as soon as possible. Helen says the rabbits are just terrible.” With my father on service in the Northern Territory, Mother was running the station, with Helen nominally helping her but spending most of her time in Melbourne doing something with the Red Cross. Mother was putting up a marvellous show, but with half the men away at the war the property was obviously going downhill.
He glanced at me. “You won’t be going back yourself?”
I shook my head. “You go. Marry the girl and make an honest woman of her” — he grinned— “and go back and help Dad work it up again. If I go back to live at all, it won’t be for years.” I knew what he was thinking; that I was the elder son. “If ever I come back, it’s big enough to split up into two.”
He nodded. “If we don’t do that, somebody’ll do it for us. It’s too much land to hold as one property in these days.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Anyway, you go back and run it, soon as you like. Take Janet with you, and give her a shock.”
He laughed. “She’ll get that all right. A farm here means about a hundred acres.”
“Who is she, Bill?” I asked him curiously. “What’s her background?”
“Good middle class,” he said. “Nothing social, or up-stage. You may know her father. He’s professor or a don or something, at Oxford.”
“Professor Prentice?” Or was it Dr. Prentice? The name was somehow familiar.
“I suppose so. Do you know him?”
I shook my head. “There’s such a lot of them. Do you know what college he’s in?”
“Is there one called Wyckham, or some name like that?”
I nodded. “He’s at Wyckham?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know what he teaches?”
Bill grinned. “Semantics,” he said. “I learned that word.”
“Christ. Do you know what it means?”
“Well, it’s not Jews,” said Bill. “Janet won’t have that. It’s words or something.”
I nodded. I didn’t think there was a chair of Semantics in the university; it was probably a research subject. He might be a professor of modern languages or English literature if, indeed, he was a professor of anything. In any case, it was a decent background for the girl to have; she would be able to hold her own in feminine society in the Western District.
Bill asked, “Do you know him?”
“I don’t think so. What’s he like to look at?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never met the family. I’ll probably get round to doing that when the balloon’s gone up.”
Our lives hinged upon the date for Overlord, still all unknown. It was not very close for there must be great concentrations of troops and landing craft in the last week or two, and they were not there yet. It was not very far away, because the ground was drying hard after the winter rains, and tanks could operate across country now, or would be able to very shortly. Up at Fighter Command we none of us knew the date; from the internal evidence that passed across my desk I guessed it to be about six weeks off. I could not make that known to anybody, even to Bill.
A picture came into my mind of a broad-shouldered, broad-faced man of fifty-five or sixty, a man with a square, rugged face and very bushy eyebrows, iron grey like his hair. I thought that was Dr. Prentice but I was not sure, nor could I remember where I had met him. In any case, it didn’t matter now.
We went up to the dining room for dinner, a poor meal in those days of tight rationing, and we drank watery beer. It was no fault of the hotel that they served us a poor meal, with all their staff called up and put into the Services to cook for us, but when the sweet that was not sweet came to the table I said to Bill, “I hope your Janet can cook.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” he replied. “I don’t think she’s ever had to do it.”
“How old is she?”
“She joined the Wrens straight from school in 1941,” he said. “I suppose she was eighteen and a half then — I think she was. She’d be twenty-one now.” He paused. “Somehow, she seems older than that — the way she goes on with the ratings. They’re scared stiff of her on the LCT’s.”
I smiled. “Scared stiff of her?”
“My word,” he said, “you ought to see her carry on if she goes on board a ship and finds the gun rusty. They’re more frightened of her than they would be of a CPO.”
“She must have quite a reputation.”
He nodded. “She has that. She’s probably the only Leading Wren in the Navy who’s ever been congratulated personally by the First Sea Lord.”
I stirred, and came back to my room in Coombargana, to the present. A wood fire does not burn for very long; I laid the little photograph frame down upon the table and crossed mechanically to the fire, and put on two or three more logs. I did not go back to investigate the suitcase further; there was time enough for that. So many memories of Bill and Janet Prentice . . .
May Spikins, Viola Dawson, and Petty Officer Waters had all told me about Janet Prentice and her life in the Wrens, when I found them one by one in the post-war years, in 1950 and 1951. She had not kept in touch with any of them and they were little help to me in finding her, but they filled out the picture of the girl that I had met with Bill on that fine April Sunday before Overlord, when we had gone down the river in the small grey naval motorboat into the Solent and had picnicked on the sand spit near Hurst Castle.
She was born in Crick Road in North Oxford; I went and found the big old house in 1948 when I went back to finish my Law course. Her old house and most of the neighbouring houses had been cut up into flats and only one old lady in the road remembered the Prentices. She had a sister some years older than herself, who in 1948 was married and probably in Singapore, but I never succeeded in discovering her married name. She had no brothers. She had lived all her early life in the pleasant, easy, academic atmosphere of Oxford. It had all been laburnum and magnolia and almond blossom in her childhood, and talk of the Sitwells and Debussy and Handel. That was her life till 1939, when she took School Certificate and the war began.
“It all came to an end then,” she told Viola Dawson once. “I was going up to Lady Margaret Hall in 1941, but the war put paid to that. I was jolly lucky to get into the Wrens; I wouldn’t have liked it in the army or a factory. If it couldn’t be Oxford, I’m glad it was the Wrens.”
I think that her last year at school was probably spoilt for her by the war. Academic life had died in Oxford as the phoney war was succeeded by the real war. Her father joined the Observer Corps and spent long hours of most nights at a watch point on Boars Hill, a telephone headset strapped across his beret, watching, reporting the movements of aircraft in the skies to the central plotting room fifty miles away. After a night of that a man of sixty has little energy next day for any but routine work, and her father laid aside research and confined himself to his lectures to small groups of undergraduates and large groups of officers from various services who were brushing up their languages.
In that last year of school her home was crowded with evacuees, irritating strangers who were always there when you wanted them away, always talking when you wanted privacy. Her education suffered, for school work in the evenings was unthinkable at the time of the Battle of Britain, and she spent much of her leisure time at a depot that made up and despatched Red Cross parcels. There was no fun in Oxford in those days.
It was a relief when her time came to join the Wrens. She was a big, broad-shouldered girl at eighteen and a half, still awkward with the gaucheness of a puppy. It was a relief and an unpleasantness at the same time; her first few days of readjustment at the Training and Drafting depot were not happy ones. She was to prove herself a good mixer when the
Service had formed her character, but at the time of her entry she had never mixed. She had never shared her bedroom with anybody since childhood days; now she had to sleep on the top bunk of a double decker in a hut with thirty other girls of every social grade. She had to undergo the most intimate medical examinations, the least offensive of which was a close examination of her head and underclothes for lice. She had to learn the language. Going out of the depot gate to visit the local cinema was “going on shore.” She got sternly rebuked by a Wren petty officer on her third day for incautiously referring to the galley as “the kitchen,” and it was weeks before she could remember what time was indicated by four bells in the forenoon watch. She very soon learned, however, that if you put the counterpane on your bunk with the anchor upside down, the ship would sink.
At the end of her fortnight of basic training she had begun to take it easy; the crudities of Service life were gradually ceasing to offend. At that point she had to volunteer for her particular category of work.
She had no ambition to become a cook or a steward; she was good at Virgil, which nobody seemed to want, but ignorant of shorthand, typewriting or bookkeeping. She would have liked to be a boat’s crew Wren but the competition was terrific and she had little knowledge — at that time — of boats. She had a vague, unexpressed sympathy with things mechanical; she liked oiling her bicycle or tinkering with the mowing machine; she could replace the worn flex of a reading lamp. She elected on these qualifications to go to the Fleet Air Arm, and because she had once or twice fired a shotgun and was not afraid of it she became an Ordnance Artificer Wren.
She was sent to an Ordnance depot where she was taught to dismantle, clean, and check a Browning .300 and to load the belts into an aircraft; she mastered that without difficulty and graduated on to the 20 mm. Hispano cannon. Her education was complete then, and with a batch of other Ordnance Wrens she was sent down to Ford near Littlehampton on the south coast of England, where she settled down to ply her trade from December 1941 to June 1943.