by Nevil Shute
He nodded. “I’m sorry about her dog, but it was silly of you and her, to bring it to the hard. Yes, take her back with you. She’s put up a good show, and loading finishes tonight, I think.”
“It was her dog getting killed that put the lid on it,” said Viola, six years later. “Funny, that, wasn’t it? She stood up quite well when your brother got killed and when her father got killed, but when the dog got killed it finished her. I suppose she felt responsible or something.”
“I suppose she did,” I said. “What happened after that?”
“I took her back up to the Wrennery, and when Third Officer Collins saw her she made her report sick,” she said. “There weren’t any naval surgeons left in Mastodon — they were all in Overlord. There was an American Army doctor there, Lease-lend, and he sent her on sick leave.”
“Was she away long?” I asked.
“She never came back,” Viola told me. “She messed about for a couple of months under a navy doctor in Oxford. I went and saw her when I was on leave but she was sort of — well, funny. She was still crying quite a lot, and very nervy. As a matter of fact, there’d have been nothing much for her to do in the navy after the invasion. She went up to a board in London sometime in August and they gave her her discharge, on compassionate grounds, I think, to look after her mother.” Viola paused, and then she said reflectively, “I suppose the truth is that she wasn’t any good to the navy any more.”
6
WHEN I WENT back to Oxford in 1948 I spent much of my time in trying to trace Janet Prentice. I soon discovered that her mother had died in the year 1946 and that Janet had left Oxford. The house in Crick Road had been sold and there had been a sale of furniture; everything seemed to have been converted into ready cash. I managed to trace the agent who had sold the house but he had no address for the girl, though he told me the bank into which he had paid his cheque. I went and saw the bank manager and he confirmed what I had already learned, but the account had been closed and he had no address. The balance had not been a large one, for the house had been mortgaged and large houses in those days had sold badly. He said that he had an idea that Miss Prentice had gone abroad.
When I found May Spikins, then May Cunningham, she remembered the name Mr. Grimston as Professor Prentice’s companion when he had joined the Seaborne Observer Corps, and Viola Dawson confirmed that name shortly afterwards when I mentioned it to her, though she could not recall the name till she was prompted. I went to the headquarters of the Royal Observer Corps in Oxford and I found that Mr. Grimston was still a leading member in the local organization, much looked up to for his maritime war experience. I went to him one afternoon at the chain store grocery that he manages in Cowley, and he made me stay until the store closed and then he took me round to his small house for tea.
He remembered the visit of Janet Prentice to the Royal Bath Hotel, but he was unable to tell me where she went after she left Oxford on her mother’s death; he did not know the family and had only met Janet on that one occasion. He was able to give me a full account of the Professor’s death, however, and what he said was this.
Dr. Prentice had been drafted to a ship called the Elsie Davidson, one of the Davidson line of coastal cargo steamers. She was a vessel of about four thousand tons, chartered for the invasion of Normandy and loaded with motor transport in the London Docks. She sailed in convoy from Southend on June the 5th and reached the coast of Normandy off Courseulles about midday on D-Day, June the 6th. She anchored still in convoy well offshore and remained there for the afternoon and evening, being in no great danger because already the Germans in that sector had retreated well inland.
It had been the original intention that these motor transport ships should unload their cargo on to Rhino Ferries. The vehicles that they carried, with their army crews, were loaded principally with gun ammunition for the tanks and Priests in the front line and were, of course, most urgently required on shore. The Rhino Ferry was a great steel raft a hundred and fifty feet long or more built up of rectangular steel caissons bolted together and powered by two sixty-horsepower petrol engines at the stern. The vehicles were to be lifted bodily down on to the Rhino Ferry by the ship’s derricks and the ferry would then convey them to the beach where it would ground in about two feet of water, that being its very shallow draft. The vehicles would then drive off it by means of a ramp, drive through the shallow water and up the beach to make their way inland to the guns.
The Rhino Ferry, however, proved to be unmanageable in the bad weather of D-Day though it had functioned well in trials; it was swept by the seas and with its low power it could make no headway against the wind. This had been foreseen as a possibility and an alternative means of unloading the motor transport from the merchant ships had been planned. At dawn on D+1 the ships were steamed in to the beach and grounded on the sand an hour after high water, so that when the tide fell and left them high and dry they could lower the trucks down on to the sand beside them with their own derricks, and in this way they unloaded every truck in safety.
It was a bold expedient to beach big steel ships in this way because the ships were needed urgently back in England for the build-up of the army, and if they had been damaged on the beaches the whole venture might have met disaster a week later for lack of supplies. However, the planners knew their job and the ships suffered very little damage; they floated off in the evening and sailed for England to load up again.
The S.S. Elsie Davidson beached with the others of her convoy soon after dawn, and by midday all her motor transport cargo had been unloaded on to the wet sand beside her and had driven away. By that time the Germans were several miles inland so there was no particular danger to the ships upon the beach, though a few snipers left behind in ruined buildings were still giving trouble and had not yet been cleaned up. At intervals, however, a solitary mortar bomb would sail up from some point inland and would land upon the beach and go off, and the army were having a good deal of difficulty in locating this trench mortar.
Nobody in Elsie Davidson had had much sleep since they left London, and when the motor transport had been unloaded and six or seven hours must still elapse before the ship could float, the officers and crew of the ship mostly went to their bunks to get a little badly needed rest before commencing the return passage. There had been no enemy aircraft over during the day, but the captain left the guns manned, the gunners mostly curled up on the deck asleep beside their guns. Dr. Prentice would not have gone below on this the great day of his life, for his duty of aircraft identification kept him on the bridge and in any case the scene unrolled before him on the beach was far too fascinating for him to leave, but the captain had provided him with his deck chair. When all the motor transport had been unloaded and the last soldier had left the ship they went to dinner, and after a quick meal the don sat down behind the canvas dodger in a corner of the bridge and presently he slept, a worn, aging man rejoicing in the part that he was privileged to play in war.
Soon after three o’clock one of the occasional mortar bombs came over, fired at random, and exploded on the bridge of the S.S. Elsie Davidson, only a few feet from the sleeping old man. As luck would have it a steward was bringing him a mug of tea, and this man was killed instantaneously on the ladder leading to the bridge. Dr. Prentice died a few minutes later, probably without regaining consciousness.
The soldiers searched all day to find that mortar, for it was evidently firing from a point well behind our line. Shortly before dark they found two girls who had been sitting on a stile in a hedgerow all day, waving at the soldiers passing down the lane in trucks or tanks and chi-hiking with the few who passed on foot. They were pretty girls and wore tricolour ribbons in their hair and waved little French flags at the passing trucks, but in fact they were German and had the mortar and its ammunition hidden in a bed of stinging nettles just behind the hedge. When everything was quiet and there seemed to be nobody about they would pop one of the projectiles down the spout and get up quickly on the stile a
gain and watch it sail away towards the beach, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. When finally the troops located this trench mortar and arrested the two girls they could hardly move for laughter; it went as a tremendous joke on a grim day.
That is how Professor Prentice came to meet his end. I asked Mr. Grimston when I met him at his house in Cowley if Janet Prentice ever heard the rather grotesque details, and he was inclined to think that she hadn’t. He had heard the facts himself from one of the other aircraft identifiers who had been in another ship which had remained stranded on the beach for some days till they could get her off, and had got the details from the beachmaster’s party. Mr. Grimston had debated whether he should tell Mrs. Prentice the whole story and had decided not to, thinking that it would only distress her needlessly. He was doubtful if anybody else had told them.
As I have said, I never met Janet Prentice again. I wanted to, but in the pressure of war it wasn’t possible. I wrote to her at Mastodon in August 1944 as soon as I had time to turn round after the mass of work that came upon me at the invasion and I suggested a meeting, but I never got an answer to my letter. It may never have reached her, for by that time she was out of the navy and in and out of various institutions, for her nerves were in a bad way. Viola Dawson remembered the name of one of these places, and I went to see the matron of the Mary Somers Home at Henley when I was in England, who remembered the case. Janet Prentice had been there for about two months in the autumn of 1944. The matron remembered her as a listless girl, obsessed with a sense of guilt for something that she fancied she had done in the war, and inclined to be suicidal. They did not regard her as an acute case but one more in need of occupation and psychological help, and as she had a mother to look after the psychologist attempted to direct her mind towards an ideal of service and regeneration through work. It is just possible that my letter was purposely withheld from her, in that home or some other, as being likely to produce a psychological setback.
I knew nothing about this at the time, of course; I only knew I hadn’t had an answer to my letter. By the time that might have troubled me I was back on operations in the RAF and I had closer and more intimate troubles and excitements of my own to occupy my mind.
I dropped a rank to Squadron Leader and got away from Fighter Command in September 1944, and went to Aston Downs to convert on to Typhoons. I can’t say that I liked the new machine with its thick wings and its enormous Sabre engine, but the day of the Spitfire was practically over in Europe. In the last stage of the war the Luftwaffe was better equipped than we were and our fighters and our fighter-bombers were having a rough time in France; the Focke-Wulf TA 152 was a better fighter than anything we had till the Tempest became operational, and in the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter they were streets ahead of us, though this machine was reported to be killing more Germans than English in its first months of operations due to its high landing speed and its unreliable engines. Still, there it was, and if you met one in a Typhoon or a Spitfire it was likely to be curtains unless you had a great numerical advantage.
I went to Belgium at the beginning of November 1944 and took command of my Typhoon squadron on Evère aerodrome just by Brussels. The squadron was armed with eight rockets on each aircraft and was principally employed on shooting up railway trains, bridges, and flak positions; the last duty was murder, for the German flak was accurate and intensive in those days. True, the range of the rocket enabled a breakaway to be made sooner than if the attack had had to be pressed home with cannon, but even so casualties had been very heavy in the squadron in the months since the invasion. In my squadron of fifteen machines casualties had been running at the rate of over two a week for months on end, and only one pilot who had landed in France with the squadron in June now remained, though two others had completed their tour of operations and had been relieved. Three replacement pilots for my squadron crossed to Brussels with me in the Anson.
It was an anxious and a trying time for me at first. Morale in the squadron was not good, and everyone was well aware that their new squadron leader had been off operations for a year — none more than me. In that year fighter-bomber tactics had progressed enormously and I was definitely out of touch; the saving grace was that I knew that myself. I had a frank talk with the group captain the day after I arrived, taking my stand perhaps upon my DFC and bar. I told him that for the first ten days he mustn’t expect a great deal from my squadron and that the fault would be mine; after that he would get good results from us. He bellyached a good deal but he took it, and for a week I played very, very safe. In that week I got the squadron pulled together a bit, and after that we went to town upon our sorties.
Shooting up flak posts, I discovered, is a matter of planning the attack beforehand and good discipline; one can keep down the casualty rate if the right machines start firing in the right direction at the right time. We got our casualty rate down quite a lot and at the same time did our job as well as anybody else. We got more railway trains than Huns. I got one Messerschmitt 109K certain and another probable in my six weeks of operations, but we never mixed it with the German fighters if we could avoid it, for with rockets on we were no match for them and without rockets our main duty was to get home in one piece. We had a fighter cover normally who fought for us.
It all came to an end for me on New Year’s Day, 1945. That was the day when the German fighters made their massive attack upon our aerodromes and did enormous damage to the RAF and to the USAAF. They concentrated everything they had and came over at dawn with about 650 Focke-Wulfs and 450 Messerschmitts in three formations, and within an hour most of the aircraft dispersed on our aerodromes were blazing ruins by the runways.
We had a show on that morning, and we were in the process of scrambling when the Jerries came over. I had just taken off with Red Two beside me and I had my head down in the cockpit at about two hundred feet as I got the undercart up, throttled back, and set the pitch. I looked up, sensing there was something wrong, and saw a burst of tracer flying past me; there was a violent shock as one smacked into the armour at my back. I got my seat down in a hurry and saw a Focke-Wulf pass just underneath me, and another one, and then the air was full of them and our own flak everywhere. My radio went dead, and I saw Red Two go down and crash in flames upon a house.
The air was full of aircraft, all unfriendly, and the cloud base far above. I stuffed my Typhoon down to deck level, breaking to port. On the ground the Fortresses and the Dakotas and the Typhoons and the Spits all seemed to be burning in rows; the Jerries certainly had made a mess of us. I got a Focke-Wulf fairly in my ring sight for a moment and pooped off all my eight rockets at him, more to get rid of them than anything else, and two of them got him on the port wing and broke it off. The wing flew past, mercifully without hitting me, and the rest of the machine went down and rolled along the ground in a flaming ball.
I went on turning, putting all my strength upon the stick, practically blacked out, probably at about three or four hundred feet, but I hadn’t got a hope; there must have been hundreds of them. Somebody got me from the side with a big deflection shot; there was a crash between me and the engine, half the instruments leapt from the panel and crashed into my face, there was a frightful pain in both my feet and a hot waft of burning rubber that told me I was on fire. I shoved the throttle through the wire to emergency full and shot straight upwards for the clouds, and by the mercy of God at that moment there was nobody upon my tail. I jettisoned the hood as I went up and wrenched away the oxygen and radio, and with each hand in turn I managed to draw my damaged legs close up to me in spite of the pain. Then I pulled the stick back and turned her over, waited an instant and pushed it forward and got thrown out cleanly, probably at about two thousand feet. I had enough sense left to pull my parachute and then I think I may have passed out, because I can’t remember anything about the descent or landing. The next thing I remember is sitting on the snow with some chaps of the RAF regiment about me putting tourniquets upon my legs; one of my
feet wasn’t there at all, and the other was a mess. There was a Bofors gun nearby; I was very lucky to have got down so near help for I was bleeding like a pig. Then a doctor came and gave me a shot in the arm and I passed out again.
That is how my service in the RAF came to an end.
A couple of days later I was flown in a Dakota direct from Evère to an aerodrome near Shrewsbury in the west of England, and I spent the next four months in the RAF hospital there. They operated three times because they tried to save the left foot but weren’t able to. I was very depressed in those months, because it’s not funny to lose both your feet when you’re thirty-one years old. You don’t realize that in time you’ll get accustomed to the disability, that in years to come you may have just as much enjoyment out of life as you had before, though in a different way. I was passionately fond of winter sports and skiing as a young man and all that was over for me now, and swimming also, and long walks over the hills. I had black moods when I was in the hospital that lasted for days on end, cursing myself for an idiot that I had ever baled out. I should have had the guts to take it.
Outside the RAF I had a few friends in England, and as the months went on my service friends were all dispersed. I didn’t want to see anybody, anyway. I am ashamed to say that in those months I thought little about Janet Prentice; when I did so it was in cynical reflection that she had not bothered to answer the letter I had written to her. I’m not very proud of those months of self-pity, but that’s what happened.
Presently I was moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital at Clifton just outside Bristol, and I was there till November 1945. We had considerable freedom as patients in that place while we were being fitted with artificial feet and learning to walk on them, for part of the treatment was that we should get used to taking part in normal life. I had, of course, as much money as I liked to ask my father for, for wool was already high and Coombargana was doing well in spite of the rabbits; I was far better off than most of the other chaps. The obvious thing for me to do was to buy a car to get around in, but there were difficulties and frustrations all around that one. No new cars were available and the six-year-old one that I bought gave constant trouble which I wasn’t really fit to cope with, for I couldn’t stand at first on my new feet for more than a few minutes at a time. The petrol allowance I could get, though generous by British standards in those days, was far too small to let me range widely over England and I was allowed no new tires at all. There was little that was healthy, therefore, for me to spend my money on and it mostly went on drink and rather dreary parties with the nurses; I suppose I was already too old to take much pleasure in a wild time with the girls.