Requiem for a Wren (16 page)

She was taken aback. 'There were no gunners on 702, sir, and the sub wasn't doing anything about it. It seemed the right thing to do, that somebody should man the guns. I think I asked Lieutenant Craigie - I'm not sure.' She hesitated. 'It all happened so quickly.'

'I know.' He paused, and then he said, 'You can stand easy, Prentice. Sit down.' She did so. 'Lieutenant Craigie says that you were acting under his orders. Actually, he had no business to give you any orders at all. You're not a part of his command and you haven't been trained for operations. You understand that?'

She said quietly, 'Yes, sir'.

The naval officer turned to the Flight-Lieutenant, who leaned forward. He was an Intelligence officer from Beaulieu aerodrome. The Army say that at about the time you started firing the machine put its wheels down,' he said. 'Did you see that?'

She hesitated. 'Yes, I think I did.'

"You're not sure?'

'I remember noticing the wheels were down after it passed over and was going towards the shore' she said. 'I think I shot them down.'

'Shot the wheels down?'

'Yes, sir. I know the wheels came down while I was shooting. I'd say that I'd hit the machine once at least before that happened, but I couldn't be quite sure.'

'Did you go on firing after you saw the wheels come down?'

She said, 'Yes, I think I did.'

'Do you know what it means when an enemy aeroplane puts its wheels down?'

She had a vague idea. 'Does it mean that he wants to surrender?'

'That's generally the meaning. In a case like this it's difficult to judge. I'm not blaming you, Miss Prentice. I've just got to establish the facts, whether the Junkers was making a motion for surrender or not.'

She said unhappily, 'A lot of other people were firing at it after the wheels went down, after it passed over us.'

'I know. We don't know for certain that you were responsible for its destruction. The trouble is that we now think that the machine was trying to find an aerodrome and make a peaceful landing.'

She stared at the Intelligence officer. 'How could that be, sir?'

He shrugged his shoulders. 'There were seven men in a machine with seats for four, they were all NCOs, and their paybooks show they were all Poles or Czechs. They may have stolen the Junkers to fly it over here and surrender.'

The Captain said, 'If so, they picked the hottest spot on the South Coast to try and land.'

'Maybe,' the Air Force officer remarked. 'But they wouldn't have known that. They couldn't have been briefed at all for this flight, or they'd never have come over in the way they did. We think that they were probably escaping from the Germans to join our side.' He turned to the Naval captain. 'That's all I wanted to establish for the report, sir, whether the wheels came down before this Wren began

firing, or afterwards. As regards the aircraft, there's no need for anybody to lose sleep over it. I think it possibly was trying to land, but who's to say?'

'No more questions for this young lady?'

'No, sir.'

The Captain turned to Janet. 'Well, I'm not going to take any disciplinary action, Leading Wren Prentice. I don't blame you for acting as you did. But remember this in future. You've not been trained for operations and you don't know operations. You have absolutely no right to fire any gun against the enemy, because in doing so you may make very serious mistakes. Remember that. That's all. You may go now.'

She went back to her hut to change back in to working clothes, dazed and unhappy. Normally she would have seen Bill next day, which was a Sunday; I think that must have been the weekend following our trip to Keyhaven. In the normal course of things neither of them worked on Sundays, and they were in the habit of meeting then and spending most of the day together. But Bill was not available. He had told her that he had a job to do over the weekend, and he would meet her one evening in the following week, as soon as he got back. Piecing together what he had been doing in the weeks before 'Overlord' from information that I could collect about him six years later, I think this must have been the time that he was taken in a submarine to St Malo by night, to paddle ashore in a folboat to make a survey of obstacles upon the beach at Dinard.

Janet had the weekend alone to brood over what she had done. 'She took it badly' May Cunningham told me, years afterwards. 'I mean, after all, it's what any one of us might have done, and nobody knew really what the aeroplane was up to. But she got it fixed firm in her mind that they were on our side, and that she'd killed them. I tried to tell her - we all tried - that the Bofors hit them too -I mean, if she hadn't fired at all they'd have been dead anyway, whoever they were and whatever they were up to. But she couldn't see it like that. She didn't cry or anything. Might have been better if she had. She just carried on, but she got very quiet -hardly talked at all. It's a pity her boyfriend - your brother

- it's a pity he wasn't around so she could talk it over with him.'

Looking through her documents at Coombargana ten years later, I found two letters, each dated April 29th, 1944. I think that date was the same Saturday on which she shot down the Junkers, and so she would have got these letters on the Monday morning after her weekend of troubled thought about the crash. One of them was from her mother and one from her father. The one from her mother read,

~ My darling girl,

~ Daddy went off yesterday with Mr Grimston; they were to report at the headquarters of the Observer Corps in London but they didn't know where they would go after that except that it would be to a place on the South Coast somewhere for a week in training and after that they would be sent to join a ship. It seems very lonely in the house without him, but I have plenty to do of course. I think he is going to write to you when he knows where he is going to be. Poor dear, he was getting terribly disappointed because he volunteered nearly three weeks ago and Mr Grimston heard on Saturday, but then he's two years younger than your father, only sixty-two, and Daddy thought they might have decided that he was too old to go. But then the letter came on Wednesday and he was to go in the same party as Mr Grimston. It is nice they'll be together, isn't it? I try not to think of what may happen. I do wish he was safe in England like you are but, of course, all the fighting will be over by the time the merchant ships get there, he says, and he's afraid they won't have anything to do at all. I am glad they took him in the end, because he did want to go so badly.

~ I must stop now because I have seven pounds of gooseberries from the garden and just enough sugar to make jam.

~ 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 LCTs she serviced; he had gatecrashed 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 ageing men and schoolboys in the light blue RAF battledress of the Observer Corps.

Her father was in the lobby, and he came forwards 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 letter 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 ninety-six per cent 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 practise slinging and stowing a hammock, and practise 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.