by Nevil Shute
Your loving,
Mother.
Sitting in my quiet room at Coombargana, far from all wars and rumours of wars, I have wondered why she should have kept that letter. There were not many letters in that case of hers; she did not hoard letters that were not important to her. I think perhaps she read it very humbly on that Monday morning; I think it must have made a deep impression on her. One must remember that her success in shooting down the aeroplane had brought her no peace of mind; she was deflated, conscious that she might have made a ghastly mistake. And now this news had come to her; Daddy had pulled it off. Daddy, who could not read a thing without his spectacles, whose straggling grey hair did little to conceal his bald head, the tired old man who through the war had given everything that was in him to the Royal Observer Corps. Daddy was still as young in heart as any of the captains of the LCT’s she serviced; he had gate-crashed the party and was to go in Overlord.
I think perhaps that letter made her feel very humble; I think that is probably the reason why she kept it. The second one was from her father and I think she kept that for another reason.
Dear Janet,
Mother will have written to you by this time to tell you I have volunteered for two months’ service in the merchant navy as an aircraft identifier. We are at the Royal Bath Hotel in Bournemouth not very far from you and I shall be here till Friday evening. I cannot leave here because we have talks and lectures and identification practice from early in the morning till six-thirty at night, but could you get over to see me one night and have dinner with me in the mess here? I will arrange for a car to drive you back to Mastodon after dinner; it can’t be more than thirty miles. Come if you can possibly get away, my dear.
I am terribly glad to have got this job because I missed the last war, you know. I was afraid I would be too old, but there are several older than me in this course. The medical officer has his surgery on the top floor of a seven-storey building near here and there is no lift. If you can get up the stairs to see him he passes you as fit.
After this week I go to some port, to join a ship; there won’t be any leave. We are so close; do come over if they will let you.
Daddy.
She went over to Bournemouth to see her father one evening that week; perhaps on the Tuesday or Wednesday. The visit made a deep impression on her and probably took her mind off her own troubles, for she talked a lot about what was going on in the Royal Bath Hotel to Viola Dawson and to May Spikins, and they told me six years later what they could remember. I found Mr. Grimston when I was in Oxford after the war and trying to find Janet Prentice. He runs a chain store grocery in Cowley and he remembered her visit to the hotel to see her father; he had spent a quarter of an hour or so with them. He told me a good bit about what went on in the hotel that week. I looked in once when I was travelling the south coast of England in 1952 and had a meal there, but it was then a very different place and I found nothing that would put me in mind of Janet Prentice.
She got to the Royal Bath Hotel at about six o’clock. She found it to be a large, fashionable place with well-tended gardens overlooking the sea, situated on a cliff above the broken pier in the middle of the town. The old ladies and the wealthy residents had disappeared and most of the furniture had been removed; it was full of swarms of aging men and schoolboys in the light blue RAF battledress of the Observer Corps.
Her father was in the lobby, and he came forward to meet her with the enthusiasm of a boy. She kissed him, and stepped back to look at him. He seemed to have dropped off twenty years since she had seen him last; he looked hardly more than forty. He wore the blue battledress she knew, but on his shoulder was a lettered flash SEABORNE, and sewn upon his arm was a lettered brassard that said simply, RN. He was no longer the father she had known, the poor old man in Oxford, harassed by overwork. He was a clear-eyed, confident leader.
She said, “Daddy, you look fine! Are you enjoying it?”
He laughed. “It’s pretty hard work. We’ve only got a week here, and there’s a lot to learn.”
She asked in wonder, “Why did they pick this place?”
“It’s handy for the invasion. It’s our permanent headquarters, this. If our ship gets sunk we have to get on board one of the landing craft and find our way back here and report, to get re-equipped and sent off again. We have to have a base, you see, and it’s convenient to have it on the south coast. Well, this is it.”
He was rated, she found, as a petty officer in the Navy. She went rather shyly and dined with him in his mess, sitting at long tables with a couple of hundred men; she was the only girl. Most of these men were over fifty and some of them were very old indeed; she saw one upright, white-moustached old man that she would have said was seventy-five. She asked her father about him. “He says he’s sixty-three,” he told her. “If you don’t walk with a stick they don’t ask too many questions.”
Beside her at the mess table sat the bald-headed proprietor of a summer hotel in Scotland. “There was the fower of us, ye understand,” he said, “all in the Obsairver Corps, myself, the cook, the waiter, and the boots. When this notice came roond I said that I was going, and were they wi’ me? But they couldn’t see it, said it was too risky. So I told the wife, ‘Jeannie, my love,’ I said, ‘I must away to this,’ and I closed down the hotel and sacked all three of them and came down here. So that’s what they got for running out on the Obsairver Corps. Still, we don’t want fellows like that in this pairty.”
She had wanted to talk to her father about the Junkers, to unload on to him some of the trouble she was in. She had debated in her mind whether there would be a security breach in telling her father what had happened, and she had privately decided that security could go to hell. As the evening went on, however, she got less and less opportunity. Her father was glowing with the glamour of his approach to war; his mind was set entirely upon aircraft identification. “I got 96% in this morning’s test,” he told her with pride. “The only one I got wrong was the ME. 110; it was a dead stern view. I said it was a Mitchell. Only two people got that one right. I got all the others.”
She said, “How splendid! Do you do that all day, Daddy?”
“Oh no. We do seamanship in the morning.” There was an RNR lieutenant commander who had spent his whole life in the merchant navy; he took them in a class and made them practice slinging and stowing a hammock, and practice climbing a rope ladder up the side of a house to simulate the side of a ship. He had a sense of humour and punctuated his lessons with gruesome stories of bad food and unpleasant heads in merchant ships, indoctrinating them skilfully into the seamy side of seafaring amid roars of laughter. He taught them the parts of a ship and the points of bearing till they could shout, “Enemy aircraft on the starboard bow!” so that it was heard over half Bournemouth.
Her father’s mind was set entirely on these things; he had sloughed off all the petty cares of home and work, all the responsibilities of normal life. He had set all that aside and he was going to the war with joy in his heart, and two hundred other old men with him. In all her naval life Janet had met no such morale as she found that night in the Royal Bath Hotel. It was the Dunkirk spirit over again, that turned aside from every personal affection and from all material ties, and thought only of the prosecution of the war. That spirit flowered in England for a few months in the year 1940. It flowered again in the early summer of 1944 in the Royal Bath Hotel.
“I’m trying to get a motor transport ship,” her father told her. “They go over very early, I know. I believe they get there on the evening of D-Day, or D plus one at the latest.”
He listened absently when she told him of her work, for he was absorbed in his own. They sat in the lounge after dinner on hard wooden chairs, and a sergeant of the local Home Guard arrived on the lawn outside the window carrying a Lewis gun. A wide circle of old men formed around him, seated or kneeling on the grass, as he proceeded to dismantle it and lecture to them on the gun. Her father said to Janet, “I really ought to be the
re, but I don’t suppose it matters.”
“Would you like to, Daddy? I don’t mind. I know the stripped Lewis, of course, but not the one with all that stovepipe on the barrel. I’ll come with you if you’d like to go and listen. Or wouldn’t they like that?”
He said eagerly, “Oh, that won’t matter. They all know you’re an Ordnance Wren; if you aren’t careful you’ll find yourself telling us about the Oerlikon.” So they went together and sat on the grass till dark, listening to the sergeant as he showed them the Lewis, fingering the bits of it as they were passed around the circle.
She had not got the heart to spoil his pleasure with her own troubles. There was nothing he could do to help her, nothing to be gained by telling him about it now. It would only distress him and spoil the glamour he was living in. He had put off all personal cares and left them with his wife in his home at Oxford. Mentally he was stripped now for the fight; he would not see her mother again till he had done his stuff and Overlord was over. She could not break in now and load him up with her troubles. It wouldn’t be fair.
“We’ve got a course in First Aid tomorrow,” he told her. “None of these merchant ships carry doctors; the captain usually knows a bit but he’ll be terribly busy all the time, of course. So they’re going to cram some of that into us. There’s such an awful lot to learn, and no time to learn it . . .”
At ten o’clock her car was at the door, and he came to the steps of the hotel to see her off. “If you’re writing to Mummy, tell her I’m all right, won’t you?” he said. “I’ve been a bit worried — that I ought not to have left her. But I simply couldn’t miss this one.”
She laughed. “Of course not, Daddy. Mummy’ll be quite all right. I’ll write to her tomorrow and tell her that you’re as fit as a flea and having the time of your life.”
“You know,” he said in wonder, “really — I believe I am. It’s having to do with things, I suppose, after spending one’s whole life dealing with ideas. It’s having something really solid to bite on. Something definite to do.”
“You won’t want to go back to Oxford,” she told him.
“Oh yes, I shall,” he replied. “Oxford is where the long-term, valuable work gets done. If I can just have this, I’ll be quite happy to go back to Oxford. If I can take this back with me, and think about it now and then.”
“Look at it, like a pressed flower in a book,” she said.
He nodded. “Just like that. Just like a pressed flower in a book.”
She kissed him good-bye and got into the car, and was driven off to Lymington. She had to dismiss the car there because petrol shortages restricted the radius of hired cars to eight miles, but at Lymington she picked up the late ferry to Mastodon and got home in the truck. She was glad that she had not told her father of the Junkers, and said so to Viola Dawson as they went to bed. I think she must have been looking forward very much to talking it all over with Bill.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if she did so. I am not quite sure of this, but I don’t think she ever met Bill again. He came back from his Dinard survey and was at Cliffe Farm for about two days; it is just possible she might have met him then though it was in the middle of a working week. Then he went off to join a party setting out from Gosport in an MTB. He was drowned on the night of May the 5th at Le Tirage in Normandy, exactly a month before Overlord.
5
IT WAS NOT until I got back to England in 1948 that I was able to get any very satisfactory account of what had happened to Bill. I got a telegram commencing “The Admiralty regrets . . .” three days after his death, at Fighter Command, for I was Bill’s next of kin in England. I tried, as anybody would, to find out what had happened to him, but immediately I came up against a blank wall of security. At the Second Sea Lord’s office in Queen Anne’s Mansions they told me politely but quite firmly that no details of his death could be released until the war was over, and I already knew sufficient of his work to realize that this was not unreasonable. I don’t think the news came as a surprise to me, for he was strained and tired when we met at Lymington. He should have been relieved and put on other duties, but in the weeks immediately preceding Overlord perhaps that wasn’t possible.
He was my only brother, and I still miss him a great deal.
When the war ended I was still in hospital, and I left England for Australia in 1946 before I could get about very much on my own. I had written guarded and unsatisfactory letters about Bill’s death to my father and mother at Coombargana, because the little that I did know of his work was classed Most Secret at that time, and the war still had to be won. I said nothing to them about Janet Prentice in those letters because I was pretty sure that Bill hadn’t told them about her; my mother didn’t know her and could do nothing to help her, and I thought that letters from my mother in Australia could only embarrass and distress the girl. When these things happen, I think one must accept the fact that a clean break is the best way to take it.
I meant to get in touch myself with Janet Prentice directly Overlord was over and go down to see her, but it was August before I got another day off from my job and I had been to France three times since the invasion. I wrote to her then suggesting a meeting but I got no answer to my letter; I now know that by that time she was out of the Wrens. Soon after that I got a posting to command my Typhoon squadron, and with that she slipped into the background of my mind.
In 1951 I met Warrant Officer Finch in Eastney Barracks in Southsea and he told me what had happened to Bill. His account is obviously right because he was with Bill in the water at Le Tirage up till a few minutes before his death. He told me that they usually worked together; apparently it helps in operations of that sort to know your mate well, so that when a pair of men team up they may go on together for some time.
What happened was this. Le Tirage is a little seaside town on the north coast of Normandy between Le Havre and Cherbourg. It was to be the scene of one of the landings of the British and Canadian forces in Overlord a month later, but at that time, the warrant officer told me, security was so good that neither he nor Bill appreciated the very great importance of the job they had been sent to do.
A small river runs out in to the sea at Le Tirage, flowing through flat, marshy land behind the town. This river is furnished with lock gates to hold the water back when the tide falls and make it navigable by barges which carry agricultural produce from the inland districts to the sea in time of peace.
It was an operational requirement that when we invaded Normandy these lock gates should be captured intact, in order that the lock and the navigable river might be used to supply our army after landing. A large number of Thames lighters, shallow-draft steel vessels capable of carrying a hundred tons of cargo or more, had been fitted hastily with engines and a steering gear making them capable of crossing to France under their own power, and these were to be used in the build up of the army after landing, penetrating inland by the navigable rivers and canals as the army advanced. This had been foreseen by the Germans. The French Resistance had informed us that the lock gates at Le Tirage had been mined with explosive charges under water near the bottom of each gate, which could be detonated by electricity from a small building nearby which housed the operating mechanism of the lock gates. At the first alarm that indicated a landing, the Germans had only to throw a switch in this small building, the gates would be destroyed, and all the water would run out of the canal, making it impossible for our lighters to use it.
Something, therefore, had to be done about these mines on the lock gates. The gates were about half a mile inland from the sea; for this half mile the river was a tidal ditch with little water in it at low tide, though it had twelve feet of water or more when the tides were at full springs. The problem was studied at the headquarters of Combined Operations and a number of schemes for capturing the lock gates intact were discussed. In the course of this study the matter was referred down to the experts at Cliffe Farm, who put up a proposal that the mines should be neutralized before the i
nvasion was launched by frogmen swimming up the half mile of the river from the beach.
To neutralize the mines it was necessary to do a relatively simple little electrical job on the wiring near the mine itself, and under water. It would not be sufficient to cut the wires, for circuits of this sort are tested daily and a cut wire would be instantly detected and repaired. Instead, an electric gadget no larger than my little finger had to be wired close up to the mine and in parallel with it; this would ensure that the electrical resistance would remain unaltered under test but that the mine would not go off when the exploding current passed. Such a unit would be very inconspicuous as the mines were under water; if by any chance it were to be discovered by the Germans before Overlord, the work that they would have to do would be immediately obvious to the Resistance, who would report to us. We should then have to work out some new means of capturing the gates intact.
The work of fitting this little gadget to each mine would take about ten minutes. Warrant Officer Finch told me that the first suggestion that it should be done by frogmen came from Bill and himself, after they had discussed the matter privately together. They were, perhaps, the best people to advise the Staff upon this matter, for they knew Le Tirage quite well. They had been there twice in the middle of the night to examine the beach defences. They did not consider the German sentries at Le Tirage to be particularly alert, and they were confident that given a dark, windy night and possibly some sort of military diversion they could swim past the sentries at the mouth of the little river and up the half mile to the lock gates, do their job, and get back undetected to the beach. The gates themselves were unguarded according to the Resistance, perhaps because they also served as a road bridge and there was a good deal of traffic over them and also, being half a mile inland, the Germans were unable to imagine that we could get at them from the sea.