by Nevil Shute
There were several entries in a similar tone in the early months of 1945, showing a great sense of frustration, of being out of active service in the war and fretting over it. Then came the armistice.
May 9th. The war in Europe seems to be over, though the war against Japan is still going on. Fighting has stopped in Europe, Hitler is supposed to be dead, and everyone is starting to talk about getting demobilized.
I can’t believe it’s true. The war against Japan will go on for years, and it must be a naval war. They must need ordnance Wrens all the more out in the east. Now that the fighting has stopped an awful lot of girls will be getting married and leaving the service, and I don’t suppose they’ll be training any more. I believe if I wrote in now they might take me back.
I don’t know what to do about Mother. She doesn’t seem to pick up a bit, and I don’t know that she could manage by herself now if I went back to the Wrens. I suppose we’ll have to go on as we are for a bit till things get easier, unless they write and call me up again, when of course I’d have to go. They might do that, because I’ve had a long spell at home, nearly a year, and I’m perfectly fit now.
I went and saw the Bank Manager and told him to sell out enough of the Associated Cement to give us £200 in the bank. At the rate we’re going the capital won’t last more than five years, though it would be better if I got a whole-time job instead of this half-time one. The trouble is with Mother in bed so much that isn’t going to be very easy. I’ve got a feeling sometimes that if the money lasts five years it may be long enough. Poor old Ma.
She never got back into the Wrens, of course. She was writing fairly regularly in the diary again, with an entry every three or four days, but there was nothing particularly notable about the entries in the fifteen months that were to elapse before her mother’s death. They were a record of small, daily frustrations and austerities, and of her rebellion against the circumstances of her life. The coming of peace meant no joy or release to her; it meant rather a continuation of a prison sentence. Freedom to her meant life in the navy in time of war.
Her mother died in August 1946 and I pass those entries over, and I turn on to one of more significance.
September 7th. Viola Dawson turned up this morning in her little car. It was lovely seeing her again, but I hardly recognized her in civvies. It’s funny how different people look. We went and had lunch at the Cadena and talked till about three in the afternoon.
She’s got a job with a film company, not acting, but doing something with scripts and sets; she’s making eight hundred a year. Of course, she can draw awfully well, and that helps in the set design. She’s such a splendid person, I do hope she marries someone who’s really up to her. I did enjoy seeing her again.
I told her about Mother and selling the house, and about my letter to the Admiralty. It’s five days since I posted it so I ought to be getting an answer any day now. She was a bit discouraging about getting back because she says they’re cutting the navy down so much, but Wrens get paid less than ratings so it’s obviously economical to use Wrens on ordnance duties when they can. If I can’t get back I suppose I’ll have to take a job in a shop or something. I don’t believe I’d ever be able to do shorthand well enough to make a living as a secretary.
Viola asked if I ever had another dog, and when I said no, she said I ought to have one, and that it wasn’t my fault that Dev got killed. I told her I still pray for Dev every night, because I think dogs need our prayers more than people. We know that God looks after people when they die and that Daddy and Mummy and Bill are all right, but we don’t know that about dogs. Unless somebody keeps on praying to God about dogs when they die they may get forgotten and just fade out or something. Someday Bill and I will get together again but it wouldn’t be complete unless Dev was there too. I let Bill down so terribly by not looking after Dev, but if I keep praying for him it will all come right.
May Spikins is married to her boy, the one who was a P.O. in Tormentor, and they live in Harlow. It was nice seeing Viola again.
The next entry reads,
September 16th, 1946. So that’s over, and they don’t want me back in the Wrens. The only person who wants me is Aunt Ellen in Seattle. I can’t remember her at all, although she says she met me on their trip to England in 1932. I’ve a vague recollection of an American woman coming to see Daddy and Mummy once when I was at school. Perhaps that was her.
I think I’ll go and stay with her for a bit anyway. It’s an awfully long way and a very expensive journey; it’s rather sweet of her to offer to send money for the fare but I’ve got enough for that. I don’t suppose I’ll like America but it’s time I got out of my groove here, I suppose, and I don’t have to stay there longer than a month or two.
One can go all the way to Seattle by sea, through the Panama Canal. Cook’s are finding out about passages for me, in case I should decide to go when the house has been sold. They seemed to think a Dutch ship would be best, as there’s a regular line of cargo ships that carry a few passengers from Rotterdam to San Francisco and Seattle, and it’s cheaper to go that way than by Cunard to New York and then across America by train. I’d like it much better, too, going by sea all the way.
I pass over a few entries, mainly concerned with the sale of the house in Oxford and the furniture. The diary at this point becomes filled with rather muddled notes about her finances; she was not very good at accountancy, but when everything was realized she seems to have possessed about seventeen hundred pounds, of which she was spending about a hundred and twenty on her passage to Seattle.
November 15th. Rotterdam. In a ship again, and it’s simply grand. The Winterswijk only carries ten passengers, and I’ve got a lovely single cabin right under the bridge, beautifully furnished. We’re still in dock, but there’s the same old smell of salt water and oil and cabbage cooking, and the moon on the water, all ripply. I brought my duffle coat and my Wren bell-bottoms, and I’ve been leaning on the rail looking at it all and taking it all in, hour after hour. We sail about two in the morning, so I shan’t get much sleep tonight. I don’t quite see how they’re going to get her out of this dock even with a tug, because I’m sure there’s not room to swing her. I believe they’ll have to take her out backwards.
I’m sorry to have left England, and yet in a way I’m glad. It will be good to get away and have a change from Oxford. There’s been so much unhappiness. I’ll come back in a year or so because I don’t think I’d want to live anywhere else, but it’s a good thing to snap out of it and see new places for a time.
They’ve started up a donkey engine on the forecastle, heaving in on something. I must go and see.
November 18th. We’re out of the Channel now and heading out in to the Atlantic, rather rough. I felt a bit funny at first and didn’t want breakfast, dinner or tea, and spent most of the first day lying on my bunk reading a grand book by Hammond Innes. I’m fine now and spend most of the day on deck. When Captain Blok saw my duffle coat he asked me where I got it and when I told him I was in the Wrens he invited me to go up on the bridge any time I liked. So I spend most of each day up there now, keeping as much out of the way as I can in case they find it a nuisance having me up there and stop it. We go north of the Azores and we shan’t see anything at all till we pass Puerto Rico in about nine days’ time, and after that Panama. If only there was a gun to be looked after it would be as good as being back in the Wrens.
I pass over several more entries in the diary that describe her voyage. It was obviously very good for her; the entries are balanced and cheerful. She was keenly interested in everything that related to the management of the ship, and at one point she listed the names and addresses of all the officers and stewards, and many of the men. She was less impressed by the Panama Canal than one would have expected; to her it was mere inland steaming, rather hot and humid and less interesting than being at sea. She went on shore at Colón and at Panama, where they refuelled, but didn’t like it much and was glad to get back on board. The
last shipboard entry in her diary reads:
December 12th. We dock tomorrow at Seattle, and it’s cold and misty. It was clear this morning and we were quite close in to the coast and could see snow-covered mountains a good long way inland. Of course, it’s winter now and we are pretty far north, almost as far north as England in latitude. The Captain says it doesn’t get very cold in Seattle in the winter because of the sea, not like the inland cities of America, but they get a lot of fog and mist.
It’s been a lovely month, and I’m sorry to be leaving the ship. They make four trips a year between Seattle and Rotterdam and I shall try to go back in her, probably in three months’ time. They’re such a good crowd to be with.
I wonder what Aunt Ellen will be like.
She got on well with Aunt Ellen but found her rather a sick woman with mysterious internal pains. In fact, she was dying though she took five years to do it and at the time that Janet went to Seattle they neither of them thought that there was very much wrong. Her aunt-by-marriage proved to be about sixty-five years old, in fairly easy circumstances. There was a seven-year-old Pontiac car that had done little mileage which Aunt Ellen no longer cared to drive herself, and a Boxer dog, and a cat.
Janet Prentice lived with her aunt in Seattle till she died, in May 1952. It was the logical thing for her to do, of course, and she seems to have been fairly contented with a very quiet life in that suburban district. I think the dog and the cat provided her with the emotional outlet that she needed, for there are many references to them in the early pages of the diary. Later on the diary entries become infrequent, as had happened once before when she had Bill’s dog to look after.
Rather curiously, I found no mention in the diaries that she had ever made contact with fishermen or yachtsmen in Seattle, or had been to sea in a boat in all the five years that she lived there. From my mother’s account of her life at Coombargana she seems to have developed in to a very reserved girl, and there is little in the diaries to indicate that she made any friends of her own at all while she was in Seattle. She seems to have been content to go on quietly in the daily round of housekeeping for her aunt. If she couldn’t get back into the navy she had no particular ambition for another form of active life. When friendships had been forced on her in the close quarters of the Service she enjoyed them and treasured them, but she was too reserved to make friends on her own.
An entry in her diary about six weeks after she reached Seattle is of interest.
January 29th, 1947. Tacoma is only thirty miles from here and of course that’s where Dr. Ruttenberg lives. I looked him up in the telephone book and he’s there all right, Lewis C. Ruttenberg. He’s got an office in the city and a residence at Fircrest. I would like to see him again because he was so awfully nice at Mastodon, but I couldn’t bother him unless I was ill. Today a friend of Aunt Ellen’s came for lunch, a Mrs. Hobson who lives in Tacoma, and I asked her if she knew Dr. Ruttenberg. She didn’t know him herself but she had heard about him; she says he’s got a very good reputation as one of the up-and-coming young doctors, and that he takes a tremendous amount of trouble over his patients. It is nice to know he’s here within reach. Almost like having a bit of Mastodon here in Seattle.
Apart from that, I do not think that there is anything worth quoting from the diaries till the Korean war broke out, more than three years later.
June 29th, 1950. There’s a full-scale war on in Korea now, and the Americans are being forced back southwards. Everything is just tearing in to action here — troops embarking for the east, tanks and guns on the quays, destroyers in Lake Union. Everybody says that it’s the beginning of the third world war.
I wish I was in England now. They’re bound to want a lot of Ordnance Wrens back in to the navy, because they’re calling up reserves. I’ve been an awful fool, because the Admiralty don’t know where I am; they probably still think I’m at Crick Road. I wrote airmail at once, of course, and posted it yesterday, saying that I could pay my own passage home if they wanted me, or else join up in Canada, at Esquimault or somewhere. It will be about a fortnight before I hear, even if they reply airmail. I should think they’d probably cable, though.
I think Aunt Ellen would be all right. She’s got her family in Denver; one of them would have to come over and look after her, Janice or Frances. It’s not like it was when Mummy was alive. If they want me in the Wrens I’ll have to go.
Six weeks later she got a letter from the Admiralty, delivered by sea mail, saying that there was no requirement at the moment for ex-naval personnel in her category and that she would be notified in due course if vacancies for re-engagement should arise. It was a disappointment to her, though I think she must have been getting used to disappointments by that time. She put in another application to the Admiralty in December 1950 when the Chinese Communists had intervened in Korea and were driving the United Nations forces southwards, and the third world war seemed really to have begun. Again she got the same type of reply.
She would have found it difficult to leave her aunt by that time if the Wrens had wanted her, however, for Aunt Ellen was a very sick woman.
February 17th. Aunt Ellen had the operation this morning, and it all went off quite well. I saw her for a few minutes in the hospital this afternoon and she seemed quite cheerful, but still very dopey. I took some chrysanthemums but the sister wouldn’t let her have them in the room today, but I saw some lovely carnations in a flower store and I’ll take her some of those tomorrow. I saw Dr. Hunsaker for a minute or two in his office at the hospital and he says she stood the operation very well and thought she’d be home in about a fortnight, but when I asked him if it was malignant he sort of dodged the question and said that at this stage it was difficult to make an accurate prognosis. Doesn’t look too good. Billy isn’t at all well; he wouldn’t eat anything yesterday or today. It’s rather lonely in the house without Aunt Ellen. I went out to the movies last night, but it was a stinker.
Billy was the Boxer dog, now getting very old.
The operation did little to relieve Aunt Ellen of her complaint, and throughout the year 1951 her infirmity increased. Again, trouble and overwork were massing up on Janet Prentice, for by the end of the year her aunt’s spells of pain were practically continuous and were only kept in check by drugs and analgesics. The dog Billy was dying, too, and in September he had to be put away, and from that point onwards a note of tired despair begins to creep in to the diary.
November 13th. I persuaded Aunt Ellen to stay in bed again today; it’s two days since she ate anything solid. Dr. Hunsaker came this morning and he’s going to see if he can get a nurse to come in every day for a couple of hours. I asked him what was coming to us and he couldn’t hold out much hope, but said she might go on for a long time. In the end she’ll have to go into the hospital.
I suppose this is what happens at the end of life and it’s normal and nothing to do with the Junkers. But this is the fourth, or if you count the dogs and I think you ought to, it’s the sixth. There were seven people in the Junkers, so there’s only one more due. I suppose that will be me.
I think she misses Billy a great deal, and I do too.
The nurse was living permanently in the house by January, and by the beginning of March Aunt Ellen was removed to the County Hospital, where Janet used to go and see her every day.
April 7th. It’s very lonely in the house now. I’ve been starting to pack things up a bit, because I don’t think there’s a chance now that Aunt Ellen will ever come back. Janice is coming from Denver to stay for a few days; Aunt Ellen was always very fond of her. I’ll talk it over with her and decide what’s to be done with all the things.
When it’s all over I’m going to make a real effort to get back into the Wrens. I think I’ll write to the naval attaché in Washington. I believe that’s the right thing to do for a British subject living in the United States. I simply don’t know what I’d do if they won’t have me back. But the war in Korea is so serious now I think they’re bound to
want more ordnance Wrens.
May 2nd. Aunt Ellen died today at about five in the morning. Janice saw her yesterday but she was so much doped she didn’t really know anything. Poor old dear. They rang up from the hospital to tell us, but we’d been expecting it of course.
Well, that’s over. The house is to be sold and all the clothes and stuff. Janice is staying here for another week to help me sort it all out. There’s a tremendous lot of stuff that we shall have to give away or pass on to the garbage man including all the drugs and medicines except the ones I’ve pinched. Janice says that she made a new will about two years ago and that the house has been left to me, but I wouldn’t go on living here. I shall post my letter to the naval attaché tomorrow.
May 11th. Janice left today; she’s been away from the family too long as it is. She asked me to go and stay with them in Denver when everything has been cleaned up here, but I left that open. I told her that I felt rather bad about the will, getting the house, because I’m not really a relation at all, but she said they were all agreed about it at the time the will was made and they were grateful to me for doing what I had in the last five years. So that’s that. I put the house in the hands of the agent yesterday and some people called Pasmanik came and looked over it today; I think it should sell fairly easily. The furniture goes to the sale room on Wednesday of next week and I’ve booked a room at the Golden Guest House from Monday. I do hope I hear soon if they want me in the Wrens. I don’t know what to do if they don’t.
May 28th. I got a letter from the Admiralty today, and they still don’t want me. Not a very nice letter. I suppose that’s the end of it and in a way I’m glad. It’s been so miserable sitting here and doing nothing, just watching for each post. I’m glad in a way it’s over and I know something definite.
I suppose I’ll have to go back to England now, but I don’t know what I’d do. I’m beginning to think the best thing now might be to finish it all here or somewhere in America, where nobody really knows me and there won’t be any scandal or any trouble for anyone. Most women have something to hang on to that makes going on worth while — children, or a husband, or relations, but I’ve got nothing like that. If I go on I’ll have to start from now and build up a new life, almost like being born again, and I don’t think I want to. I feel too tired to face up to that. It’s not worth while.