Requiem for a Wren (25 page)

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 inquiry, 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 inquiry into registration cards with the Ministry of Labour. This led me to the Admiralty. I discovered 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 inquiries 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 that surprised me.

The registration card had been handed in at Harwich on November 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 into Europe and had left no trace behind her.

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 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 were 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 English women, 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 stopwatch, which seemed good going for a car of only 500 cc. He came in to 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 in 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?'

'1944 and 1945' she said. She took a drink of tea to wash the sausage down. 'I was demobbed from HMS Hornet.'

I lit a cigarette, for I had finished eating and it was warm and pleasant sitting on the grass in the sun, listening to the engines revving up. 'Did you ever meet a Leading Wren Prentice?' I inquired. 'Janet Prentice. She was an Ordnance artificer, I think, at HMS Mastodon in the Beaulieu River.'

She checked with her cup poised in mid-air. 'You mean, the one who shot down the German aeroplane?'

I stared at her. 'I never heard that.'

There was a Leading Wren Prentice who shot down a German bomber with an Oerlikon,' she said. 'At Beaulieu, just before the invasion.'

'It's possible' I said. 'I never heard that about her, but it could be. She was engaged to my brother, but he was killed about that time. I've been trying to get in touch with her, but she seems to have disappeared.'

'It must be the same' she said. There couldn't have been two Leading Wrens called Prentice at Beaulieu, at that time.'

'Did you know her?' I inquired.

She shook her head. 'I never met her. There was a lot of chat about it in the Service - naturally. It never got into the newspapers, of course. Security.'

I nodded. 'I wish to God I could find somebody that knew her and kept in touch with her' I said. 'I believe she's out of England, but she must have some friends here. I've been trying for two years to find out where she is.'

She chewed thoughtfully for a minute. 'She was engaged to your brother?'

That's right. I met her once, at Lymington, early in 1944, just before Bill got killed." I paused, and then I said, 'She was a fine girl.'

'Viola Dawson would be the best person' she said thoughtfully. 'Viola must have known her.'

'Who's Viola Dawson?'

'She was another Leading Wren' she said. 'She was in boats with me at Brightlingsea, and then she went to Beaulieu. Viola must have known this Prentice girl.'

'Can I get in touch with Viola Dawson?'

'I know Viola' she said. 'She's got a flat in Earls Court Square. She's in the telephone book. If you like, I'll give her a ring tonight and tell her about you, and say you'll be calling her.'

'I wish you would,' I said. 'It's the first time I've been able to find anybody who might know something about Janet Prentice.'