by Nevil Shute
It was of course possible, he said, that Miss Prentice had married and was living in the district under her new name, but in view of the nervous breakdown that she had suffered after the war he thought that was unlikely. He was very sorry not to be able to offer more assistance. As a colleague and an old friend of the late Dr. Prentice he was anxious to do everything he could to help his daughter, and he hoped I would not hesitate to call upon him if he could do anything further in the matter.
This letter reached me at the beginning of May 1948, and it was very bad news. This girl who had deserved so well of us was in trouble, for she had had a nervous breakdown after the war. I knew enough about university life to know that the daughter of a don would probably inherit very little money at the death of her parents, and for civil life she probably had little earning power. She had left school before qualifying for a job and in the war she had learned automatic guns, no great qualification for civil life. Without the breakdown she would have got by upon her native wit and with her competence she would have made her way in peacetime; as things were she had apparently become a housekeeper or a companion for some aged relative, living no doubt in circumstances that were far from affluent in England. I felt very strongly that she was a part of Coombargana, that we were responsible for her and should look after her. Coombargana could do better for her than that. She was Bill’s girl, and in trouble.
I thought about it for a day or two, restless and unhappy. The memory of the clear-eyed, competent Leading Wren at Lymington was very vivid in my mind; in love with Bill, she had been a very lovely girl that day and I had thought he was a very lucky man. It was a terrible idea that she might no longer be like that, that trouble and poverty perhaps had aged her, made her different, uncertain of herself where she had been direct and positive. Not many years had passed, however, though much had been crammed in to them. She was only four years older now than she had been when we had met and picnicked in the motorboat. With help and money and kindness she could regain a great part of her youth. Somehow we must let her know that people still cared a great deal about Bill, and so cared for the girl he loved and would have married.
It was difficult, if not impossible, to find her and do anything to help her from Coombargana, but difficulties can be broken through. There was nothing to keep me in Australia because my father could get on perfectly well without me, and if I wanted to go to England I could go. In fact, nothing could be easier or more convenient, because I was still a Rhodes scholar only halfway through his course at Oxford, and Oxford was probably the place where I could find a thread that would lead me to Janet Prentice. Presumably I was still entitled to go back to the House and finish my scholarship and take a degree in Law, and in doing so I felt that I would certainly be able to find Janet Prentice.
I didn’t tell my parents anything about her, possibly because I was ashamed to tell them of the part that I had played, or had not played, in the affair. I was reluctant to tell them anything about her till I had located her and found what she was doing; they couldn’t do anything to help, and it all seemed so private. When finally I found her she might well be married and happily settled in life, and in that case there would be no point in interesting the older generation in her; probably better not to. It would be time enough to tell my parents if I found they could do anything to help her.
I raised the question of going back to Oxford with my father two days after the letter arrived. “I’d like to finish off my scholarship and take a degree, and perhaps get called to the Bar,” I said. “It’s something that I started, Dad, and that I’d rather like to finish. There’s not a great deal here for me to do till you get older, is there?”
He nodded. “You mean, there’s not enough work for two?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I hoped when you came home that you’d get married and have a place of your own,” he said. “Your mother and I both hoped that. But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.”
I smiled. “Too bad. I suppose I’m too restless.” I paused. “I don’t feel like an invalid any longer, like I did when I came home. I want to get out and do something.”
He nodded. “That’s reasonable,” he said. “After all, you’re still a young man. How old are you, Alan? Thirty-two?”
Dad was never very good at figures. “Thirty-four,” I said. “I’d like to get around a bit before settling down for good, and this seems the right time to do it.”
“We shall miss you here,” he remarked, “ — your mother and I. But I think you’re right to want to travel while you’re young. You haven’t seen anything of Europe, really, have you?”
“Only from on top while I was trying to smash it up,” I said. “I had two months in France and Italy when I got out of hospital, but I really wasn’t fit to notice anything much then.”
“You’ll start off by finishing your scholarship?” he asked.
“That’s what I’d like to do.”
It didn’t prove quite so easy as I had supposed. The scholarship was still there waiting for me though it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been. Oxford, however, was still full of post-war undergraduates and there was no place for me in college till October 1949. I exchanged several letters with the secretary to the trust in Oxford and with the Dean of Christ Church to see if I could get digs for the coming year within a short distance of college, but the place was still so crowded that they could not offer me accommodation nearer than North Oxford. For a normal man this might have been no great impediment, but I was still unable to walk much more than a mile without a good long rest and for me this meant that I should be very largely cut off from the life and benefits of the university.
I chafed at the delay, but there seemed to be nothing for it but to wait a year and go to Oxford when I could get in to college. I thought this over for a week and then decided that I wouldn’t wait; I was confident that if I were in Oxford I could find somewhere to live within a stone’s throw of the college even if I had to buy a house to live in, and Janet Prentice might well be in trouble that would brook no delay. My father generously fixed up money for me in England on a basis that was virtually unlimited, and I sailed for England in the Orontes in August 1948.
I got to Oxford about three weeks before term began, and put up at the Randolph, and immediately began my search for somewhere to live. I traded on my disability and my war record shamelessly, but at the lower levels I’m afraid the money helped. By the time term began I was very comfortably installed in rooms in Merton Street conveniently close to college, which may well have been the most expensive lodgings ever to be rented by an undergraduate. However, there I was; I bought a nearly new car dubiously at an inflated price from a young doctor who had got it on a priority licence, and started in to look for Janet Prentice.
I shall pass over the details of my quest quite shortly, because it ended in a complete dead end. I went and had a talk with the Bursar of Wyckham who remembered my letter of course, and was very helpful. He introduced me to the Provost and three other dons who had been friends of Dr. Prentice, but they knew nothing that would help me. Settle seemed the best line of enquiry, and I went up to that little town in Yorkshire just before the Oxford term began, and stayed there for three days. I went and saw the police, the postmaster, the stationmaster, the headmasters of two schools, the vicar, the Roman Catholic priest, the Methodist minister, the Town Clerk, and a chap in the Food Office who issued ration cards. Nobody that I spoke to had ever heard of Janet Prentice, and there seemed to be no young married woman in the town who answered the description in any way.
I went back to Oxford disappointed.
At that time in England everybody had to have a registration card, which was, theoretically at any rate, a means of tracing anyone at any time. As I took up my legal studies once again in Oxford, an elderly, battered undergraduate somewhat out of tune with his surroundings, I started an enquiry into registration cards with the Ministry of Labour. This led me to the Admiralty. I di
scovered then that Leading Wren Prentice had been given a compassionate discharge from the navy in September 1944, for the purpose of looking after her mother, who was recently widowed and in bad health. A civilian registration card had been issued to her on her discharge from the navy, and I got the number.
All this correspondence took time, because a good many letters were involved and no British government department seemed to answer any letter in less than a fortnight in those days. It was near the end of term when I finally got the number of the identity card and wrote to the Ministry of Labour to ask where she was.
They took a month to answer, creating something of a record in this correspondence, and then wrote back and gave me the address of the old Prentice home in Crick Road, Oxford.
I had, of course, been there at a very early stage and made enquiries up and down the road, with no result. It was just before Christmas when I got this letter. I had stayed in Oxford to await it, cancelling a project I had had to go down to the south of France for the vacation, because I could not bear to waste time in my quest. I went to London directly Christmas was over and stayed at the Royal Air Force Club, of which I was an overseas member, and spent a morning in the Ministry of Labour. In the end I found an affable young man who went to a good deal of trouble in the matter, and produced some information which surprised me.
The registration card had been handed in at Harwich on November the 14th, 1946, when Miss Janet Prentice left England for Holland. At that time the regulations stated that if a British subject were to go to live abroad the registration card had to be handed in on leaving the country and a new one taken out when he came back and wanted ration cards again. No new registration card had been issued to Miss Prentice, so presumably she was still abroad.
By this time the trail was growing very cold, but I could not give up until I had done everything within my power to find Bill’s girl. I went to the steamship company and succeeded in discovering from their records that a Miss Prentice had, in fact, crossed as a passenger from Harwich to Rotterdam on that November day two years before, travelling tourist class, but they could provide no clue as to her destination. More to fill in time during the vacation than with any real hope of success I went to Rotterdam and saw the British vice-consul to try to learn if any British subject of that name were living in the district, perhaps with an old lady, perhaps in some town or village with a name that resembled Settle. He had no information for me, but suggested that the British Embassy at The Hague had fuller information covering all Holland, so I went on there. They knew of nobody in Holland that corresponded with my description, but the Third Secretary discovered a small village or hamlet called Settlers about sixty miles north of Pretoria, in the Transvaal, in South Africa. It was a desperately long shot, but the Transvaal is closely linked with Holland and when I got back to Oxford I addressed a letter to the postmaster of Settlers. Too long a shot, because I never got an answer.
So, for the time being, my search for Janet Prentice came to an end. Two years previously she had vanished in to Europe and had left no trace behind her.
7
A MAN WITH my disability has to make new interests and amusements, and while I was in England motor racing became mine. It began, I think, in 1949 when I joined the London Aeroplane Club and took up flying again, more for mental discipline and to show myself I wasn’t afraid to than because I really got much kick out of a Tiger Moth. I set myself to do about fifty hours’ solo flying to rehabilitate my skill; I think I had vaguely in my mind that having once flown I should retain the ability in case we ever wanted to use aeroplanes on our Australian properties.
At the flying club I found a number of enthusiastic motor racing types, young men of all social classes united in a common love of the internal combustion engine, who appeared at the aerodrome on stripped-down motor bikes or ancient racing cars. None of them had much money, most of them spoke with a slight London accent not unlike my own, and all seemed to have cheerful and attractive young women perched athletically on their uncomfortable vehicles. I found their company congenial and their enthusiasms contagious, and I went with them upon a number of excursions to races and hill climbs, and once in a chartered Anson to the Tourist Trophy races in the Isle of Man.
Early in 1950 I got so far involved in this amusement that I bought a little racing car myself, a Cooper, which I raced once or twice without distinction in the miniature class. I found that while I could still fly an aeroplane all right I hadn’t really got the nerve for motor racing. Perhaps I was too old, but with my dummy feet it took a matter of minutes to wriggle in or out of the cramped little single-seater cockpit, so that I was continually troubled by the thought of fire. After a few races I gave up and handed it over to a young friend of mine at the club, John Harwood, content to be the backer and pay the bills, and watch him win races on it. It served its turn well, did that little car, because John developed into a very fine driver and now races for various firms continually, all over Europe.
I took Schools at Oxford in May 1950 and got a second in Law and went in to Mr. A. N. Seligman’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn with a view to getting called to the Bar. There wasn’t a great deal of sense in it, perhaps, because the Bar wasn’t going to be much help to me in running Coombargana, but by that time I was interested in law and legal processes and there was no need for me to go home just yet. I got a flat in Half Moon Street quite handy to my club and settled down to live in London for a time, retaining my associations with the flying club and with my motor racing friends, of course. Petrol was de-rationed shortly after I came down from Oxford, so I got a ten-year-old Bentley and began to explore England.
I had visited the Admiralty soon after my return to England and I had got an account of my brother Bill’s death which was rather scanty, though all the essential facts were there. The Second Sea Lord’s office was helpful in the matter, however, and they suggested that I could get a fuller account from Warrant Officer Albert Finch of the Royal Marines, who had been Bill’s companion on the night when he was killed. Warrant Officer Finch, however, was serving a tour of duty on the China Station and was due home in November 1950. I wrote to Finch and got rather a laboured letter in reply because he evidently wasn’t a very easy writer and had difficulty in telling a story on paper, and I arranged with him that we would meet when he got home to England.
In the years when I was at Oxford I met a good many young Englishwomen, particularly in the motor racing crowd. They were cheerful, sensible girls mostly, but I didn’t get involved with any of them. The best of them had a little of the same quality of forthrightness and community of interests that I had admired so greatly in Bill’s girl and that had made me so glad to have her as a prospective sister-in-law, the indefinable quality of being easy to live with. None of them approached the Leading Wren that Bill had loved, in my opinion; the more I saw of these others, the more they reminded me of Janet Prentice, the more my mind turned back to all the details of that day at Lymington.
It was to be August 1950 before I got any further in my quest for her, however. There was a race meeting on the perimeter track of the old Goodwood aerodrome, and I had entered the Cooper for two events with John Harwood driving it for the first time; he had put in a lot of work upon the car in his mews’ garage in Paddington and had got her in good nick. I sent the Cooper down upon a truck and left London at about five in the morning with a carload of my friends and two other cars with us, a party of fifteen or sixteen of us all told. It was a glorious summer morning and we made quick time down to West Sussex, and got the Cooper unloaded and filled up before nine o’clock. We pushed John off for a few trial circuits so that he could get the feel of her; he took her round easily for two or three laps as we had arranged and then trod on it and did a lap at seventy-eight, timed by my stop watch, which seemed good going for a car of only 500 c.c. He came into the paddock and said he could do better than that, so we pushed her into a corner and went to breakfast.
We had brought a lot of food down i
n baskets and a Primus stove to boil a kettle, and the girls got breakfast for us on the grass beside the cars in the warm sun. There was a girl there I hadn’t met before, Cynthia Something — I forget her surname. Somehow the talk turned to the war, as it so often does; she evidently knew all about me, but I knew nothing about her. She looked about twenty-seven and so had probably seen service of some sort, and I asked her casually, “What did you do in the Great War, Mummy?”
“Mummy yourself,” she retorted. “I was in the navy.”
I had had this once or twice before, but it had never led to anything. “In the Wrens?”
She nodded, her mouth full of cold sausage.
“What category were you in?” I asked.
“Boat’s crew,” she said. “First of all at Brightlingsea and then Portsmouth — in Hornet.”
“When were you at Portsmouth?”