by Nevil Shute
Viola Dawson came running down the path through to the pier, most unusually; the girls got to their feet in surprise. The coxswain panted, “We’re taking the LCP — there’s been an accident and it’s a beaching job. Get her started up quick. We’ve got to pick a party up at Needs Oar Point.”
They were away at full speed down the river in a couple of minutes, Janet with them to be dropped on her LCS as they passed. As they went Viola, seated at the wheel and recovering her breath, told them what she knew. While she had been in the office several small radio transmitters in the area had burst in to life, and in half a minute everyone concerned was in action. There had been an accident to a tank upon a beach near Newtown in the Isle of Wight, and the tank was under water. Some of the crew were trapped in it, and probably drowned. The party that they were to pick up at Needs Oar Point was some sort of a salvage crew of Royal Marines.
There were points of mystery about this story. Doris Smith asked, “How did a tank get under water?”
“I don’t know.”
Sheila asked, “What sort of a salvage party is it? There’s nothing down at Needs Oar Point, is there?”
“I don’t know that either. The orders were to get down there as quick as possible and embark this party, and take orders from them.”
Needs Oar Point marks a bend in the Beaulieu River a mile from the entrance, a windy, barren place of flat pastures and sea marshes. When they got there they saw a naval truck at the end of a track leading to the river and three young marines waiting for them, a captain and two sergeants. Their arms were full of strange equipment, waterproof suits and queer packs holding metal cylinders. The landing was difficult; Viola ran the sloping prow of the LCP gingerly up over the sea marsh and the young men scrambled muddily on board over the bow. She backed off with some difficulty. The officer said, “You know where to go?”
“No, sir.”
“You know Newtown? Well, half a mile east of the entrance. Open all the taps you’ve got. If we’re quick enough there’s just a chance we might get some of them out.” He swung round to his sergeants. “Get that walkie-talkie going and let’s know the form.”
Viola said, “Can I go alongside the LCS to drop this Wren, sir? She’s Ordnance. She’s got a job to do on board it.”
“No, go flat out for Newtown. Drop her on your way back.” He went aft past the canopy to his men in the stern behind the engine. Presently he took the walkie-talkie from the sergeants and began talking and listening in turn. The two sergeants started to undress. The officer diverted his attention for a moment. “You girls, keep your eyes forward,” he said.
When after a quarter of an hour they looked aft again the two sergeants were standing dressed in tight-fitting light rubber suits with rubber helmets tight around the face, with goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Janet had heard incautious talk about frogmen but she had never seen one before, and she had no idea that there were any in her district. The officer came forward to the wheel where Viola was steering. “This is the form, coxswain,” he said. “An LCT was landing a Sherman tank upon the beach. You know how they do it? The ship goes in and grounds with the bow in about four feet of water and lets down her ramp; the tank goes down the ramp and wades through the water to the beach. Well, there’s a hole in the beach or something, and the tank went right under. They say its turret is just awash. Everyone got out of it except the driver, and he’s in it still. They’ve been trying to tow the tank out with another tank, but it’s in gear and they can’t shift it. They’ve been trying to get down inside to get the driver out, but his body is across the gear lever and caught up in some way. He’s in there still.”
Viola asked, “When did this happen, sir?”
“Ten-fifty.”
She glanced at her wrist watch; it was then eleven twenty-five, and they were still about two miles off, though behind her the engine was roaring at full throttle and they were doing about fifteen knots. “He’ll be dead, won’t he?”
“Not necessarily. Now look, I want you to do this. The tide will be running to the westward. Go to the tank and land these two chaps on its turret. Approach it from the lee side, that’s from the west, and go right up to it. Make fast to the turret if you can, but if there’s nothing you can get a rope on to, hold your position with the turret just under your bow. Got that clear?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
He went aft to his men. Janet came to Viola. “What do you want me to do?”
The coxswain said, “Give the marines a hand if they want it. I’ll need Sheila and Doris for the boat.”
They were close now to the shore. The LCT, relieved of the weight of the tank, had floated off the beach and backed away, and was now lying a little way out anchored by the stern. Halfway between the ship and the sand they saw a small disturbance in the surface of the water which was the turret of the tank awash, its thin wireless aerial sticking up on high. There was another tank standing on the beach, and a number of soldiers, some in battledress and some stripped naked and wet. Viola turned the LCP and went straight for the tank, and throttled back, and felt her way to it gently in the last few yards with the turret on her port hand till the open hatch was right beside her wheel and the bow of the LCP had grounded on the gun barrel; she held the craft there with a little engine. It was a delicate and skilful bit of seamanship.
The two frogmen were over the side in an instant, masks and goggles covering their faces and air bottles on their chests. One of them wormed his way down through the hatch, twisting his body to right and left to clear the apparatus on his chest and helped by his comrade, who stayed waist deep upon the flooded tank peering down into the turret. Presently he reached right down, head under water, and then the overalled body of the corporal driver appeared, pulled by the man on top and pushed up from below by the man inside the tank under the water. The marine captain in his battledress got over the side on to the tank, and working waist deep in the water with the top frogman manoeuvred the body of the driver to the LCP. Janet and Sheila Cox took him as the men passed him up to them and pulled him up on to the flat foredeck of the landing craft, and Janet rolled him over on to his face and began the motions she had learned at school for artificial respiration. He was a young man with a small moustache, in overalls, his face bluish white in colour, dead cold to the touch.
The three marines climbed on board again, helped by the other girls. The one who had gone down inside the tank said, “I put her in neutral, sir.” He seemed to Janet to speak with a slight accent, possibly cockney, but she paid little attention to that at the time.
They stood dripping on the side deck holding on to the canopy rail, watching Janet as she worked rhythmically on the body. One of them said presently, “Dead, isn’t he?”
She looked up. “I think he must be. Does anyone know how to do this? Am I doing it right?”
The officer said, “I think so. Go on as you’re doing. Coxswain, take us in to the beach and we’ll get him ashore.”
Viola Dawson said, “I may not be able to get off again if I go in there, sir. The tide’s falling pretty fast.” She meant that if she stayed on the sand more than a minute or two the LCP would be stranded and must wait for the next tide to float her off again.
“Go on in,” he said. “I’ll make that right for you. They’ve got transport there, and there’s just a chance a doctor may be able to do something for this chap.”
They went in, and the landing craft grounded some distance from the water’s edge. An army lieutenant in battledress waded out to them and they pulled him in over the bow. Janet said, “Somebody else take a turn at this. I’m not doing any good.”
The lieutenant hesitated and then knelt down and took over the attempt at artificial respiration; a couple more men climbed up over the bow. Janet got up, only anxious to get away from the dead man she had been handling. She went aft to the stern where she came upon the two marine sergeants naked to the waist, scrambling awkwardly out of their rubber suits.
She said,
“Oh, sorry.” And then she said, “Have either of you got a cigarette?” She was very glad to be free of the chill deadness of the body on the foredeck, and to be with living young men.
One of the sergeants, the fair-haired boy with the slight accent, said, “I’ve got some here.” He turned over his clothes and searched the pockets of his battledress, and passed up a packet and a box of matches to her as she sat upon the canopy.
She took them from him. “Thanks awfully. Go ahead — I won’t look.” She lit a cigarette from the packet with fingers that trembled a little, and blew a long cloud, and relaxed.
From the stern below her, where the men were dressing, the fair-haired young man said, “Dead, isn’t he?”
“I should think so,” she replied, without looking down at the speaker. “There wasn’t a sign of anything.”
The young man said, “Well, he was under water the best part of fifty minutes. There’s no future in that.”
She sat in the warm sun smoking, looking out over the blue sea of the Solent; on the flat bow of the LCP men in khaki were still labouring over the body of the driver. It was a warm day for March with all the promise of summer, the sort of day when the beach should have been associated with bathers, and small boats, and children making sand castles and paddling, instead of with waterlogged Sherman tanks, soaked uniforms, and dead men. An LST, the first that she had seen, came in by the Needles passage and made its way up towards Southampton; she watched it with interest as it passed. A flight of Spitfires passed overhead on their way to France. Three motor launches in line ahead went by, and a couple of motor minesweepers.
The fair-haired sergeant stood up by her in shirt and trousers and helped himself to one of his own cigarettes. He seemed to her a clean, good-looking boy — which, of course, Bill was. He glanced towards the bow. “Not doing any good, are they?”
“I don’t think so.” She hesitated and looked down at him. “Was I doing it right? I’ve never had to do it in earnest before.”
Bill said, “You were doing it all right. He was under water for the thick end of an hour. Ten minutes — well, you might have got him back. But an hour’s different. You did all that anyone could do.”
He looked over to the LCT; she was weighing anchor to get away before the falling tide left her stranded, too. She still had three tanks on board; apparently the exercise was cancelled. “They ought to survey the beach before these practices,” he said. “It only needs a chap to wade ashore ahead of the tanks, that’s all. If he has to swim for it the beach is crook.”
She wondered a little at the word, but each Service at that time had its own slang; to her the army were all Pongoes. “Couldn’t do that operationally,” the other sergeant said. “Not with Jerry on the beach.”
The marine officer came aft to them. “Well, we’re here till six o’clock, the coxswain says.” Already the LCP was high out of the water on the beach; in another quarter of an hour they would be able to get off her dryshod. He picked up the walkie-talkie and got communication with some station on the other side of the Solent, and told them to telephone a message to Mastodon.
Presently they were able to climb down from the deck of the LCP on to the wet sand. They stood talking with the soldiers about the accident while the tide went down still further, till the tank lay half submerged in a long pool of sea water on the beach. “There’s been another LCT there,” said the officer. “That’s where she used her engines, getting off. That’s the wash from her propellers did that, scoured away the sand and left that hole . . .”
Dinner was arranged for the marines and Wrens by the Army at a gun station on the cliff half a mile away; Janet and Bill walked up together and had dinner in a mess tent after the Bofors crews had finished. “Where are you stationed?” she enquired. “I didn’t know about your party.”
“We’re at Cliffe Farm,” he said. “About two miles westwards down the coast from where you picked us up today. I was over at your place the week before last, but I didn’t see you.”
She said, “I was probably down the river.”
They lunched sitting side by side in the mess tent, a heavy, badly served meal of stew and jam roll. After lunch they all strolled down again to the beach. The LCP lay high and dry, far from the sea. An ambulance stood at the cliff top and medical orderlies were loading a stretcher covered with a blanket into it. “What’s your name?” asked the sergeant.
She told him. “What’s yours?”
“Bill Duncan,” he said. He indicated the other sergeant. “He’s Bert Finch.”
She asked, “Do you live in London?”
“He does, but I don’t. I’m Australian. Did you think I was a Londoner?”
She was confused, not wanting to be rude. “I don’t know why I thought that.”
“It’s the way I talk,” he said. “Back at home people would say I hadn’t got any Australian accent, but they know it all right, here.”
She was intrigued. “Have you been in England long?”
“I came over just before the war,” he said, “after I left school. I was at Geelong Grammar.” The Eton of Australia meant nothing to her. “I was doing a course of agriculture when the war broke out. We’ve got a farm at home.”
“What made you go in to the marines?” she asked.
“More fun than just the ordinary army,” he replied. “More special jobs, like this sort of thing.”
She knew too much about the Service to ask specifically what he did when he wasn’t pulling drowned men out of tanks. Instead, she said, “You volunteered for this?”
He grinned at her. “I always did like swimming.”
They walked across the beach together to inspect the tank; it lay in the middle of a long pool in the sand with the tops of the tracks just showing. Presently there was a clatter of tank tracks on the cliff and a Priest appeared, a Sherman chassis mounting a gun-howitzer. It nosed delicately down a very steep slope to the beach, loaded with men and steel ropes. The soldiers coupled the wires to the towing eyes on the sunk tank, the Priest went ahead and towed the Sherman from the pool above high water mark. It made an attempt to tow the Sherman up the cliff but the incline defeated it; the men uncoupled the wires and the Priest struggled up the cliff alone and made off.
Bill stayed with Janet all the afternoon and she was glad to have him; she found him an unassuming young man, easy for her to talk to. She admired him a little, too, for the instant courage that had sent him down into the interior of the flooded tank. He told her that he had never been inside a tank of any sort before, and it had been rather dark, but he had managed to find his way around all right. She had once been inside a tank, stationary, in broad daylight on dry land, and she knew a little bit about the contortions that you had to make to move about in them. She felt that his effort for the drowned man had been a good show, and she told him so.
They strolled up to the AA site again and got the cooks to give them cups of tea; then they went down and sat smoking and chatting in the LCP while the tide rose around them. Soon after six she floated off, and Viola turned the boat and headed her for the Beaulieu River.
They turned in to the long entrance reach between the sea marshes in the cold dusk of the March night. At Needs Oar Point the truck was waiting for the marines; as they approached the mud flats Janet said, “We’ve got a dance on Saturday. Why don’t you two come over?”
That’s how it all began.
4
I SAT THERE by the fire in my room at Coombargana fingering the photographs, lost in memories. I sat there in the still night thinking how different everything would have been if Bill hadn’t been killed. He would have come back to Coombargana directly the war was over, and almost certainly he would have brought Janet Prentice with him. They would have made a good pair to run the property after my parents’ time. Bill was never very keen on going to England; I think he only went to Cirencester for his course of agriculture because it was the thing to do, because it is fashionable for young people in my country to re
ach out for wider experience than they can get at home. He would have been happy to return and make his life at Coombargana, and I think he would have made a better grazier than I.
Janet would have come to Coombargana as its mistress-to-be, not as its house parlourmaid. Presently I would have to violate her privacy further to find out why she had come at all. The answer to that one lay almost certainly within the case upon the table by my side, amongst her private papers that I was reluctant to explore. I could stall a little longer, sit a little longer by the fire thinking of the girl that I already knew so much about.
It was probably true that I knew more about her than I would ever have learned if she had come to live at Coombargana as Bill’s wife, living with him in my parents’ old room just along the corridor from mine. If it had turned out that way I might have gone back to England in 1948 to take my degree at Oxford, as in fact I did, but I wouldn’t have gone back to look for Janet Prentice. I would never have met or talked with Warrant Officer Finch at Eastney Barracks or with CPO Waters in the Fratton Road, and I would never have met May Cunningham or Viola Dawson.
I knew so much about her, most of it from hearsay, and I had packed all that knowledge away for good, as I thought, only a few days before, sitting in my bedroom in the St. Francis Hotel. I had packed all that knowledge away as in a trunk, and put it in a lumber room out of my life, and now the trunk had burst open before me when I least expected it, spilling all that knowledge and those memories into my life again. The memories, of course, concerned the one day only, the day that we had spent together in the boat before the balloon went up. That day remained etched sharp in my memory; nine years later I still knew exactly how she moved and spoke and thought about things, so that it gave life to all the knowledge I had gleaned about her from these other people.