Requiem for a Wren (9 page)

I glanced at him quickly. 'Like that, is it?'

'A bit.' He was a frogman at that time, of course. I did not know the full scope of his work then, though I knew that he went repeatedly to the beaches of Northern France in the dark night, to go ashore and to survey the tetrahedrons and the Elements C with landmines tied to them with which the Germans were fortifying the landing beaches. I had seen the air photographs that the Lightning pilots had returned with, taken as they flew along through flak at fifty feet, and I knew that one of Bill's jobs was to go by night in MTB or submarine, to swim ashore or paddle in a folboat in the darkness under the noses of the Germans at the head of the beach, to examine these things and report on them. It seemed to me that he was starting to feel the strain, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had been through periods of strain myself.

I said, 'One of us ought to get back there as soon as possible. Helen says the rabbits are just terrible." With my father on service in the Northern Territory Mother was running the station, with Helen nominally helping her but spending most of her time in Melbourne doing something with the Red Cross. Mother was putting up a marvellous show, but with half the men away at the war the property was obviously going downhill.

He glanced at me. 'You won't be going back yourself?'

I shook my head. 'You go. Marry the girl and make an honest woman of her' - he grinned - 'and go back and help Dad work it up again. If I go back to live at all, it won't be for years.' I knew what he was thinking: that I was the elder son. 'If ever I come back, it's big enough to split up into two.'

He nodded. 'If we don't do that, somebody'll do it for us. It's too much land to hold as one property in these days.'

'Maybe' I said. 'Anyway, you go back and run it, soon as you like. Take Janet with you, and give her a shock.'

He laughed. 'She'll get that all right. A farm here means about a hundred acres.'

'Who is she, Bill?' I asked him curiously. 'What's her background?'

'Good middle class,' he said. 'Nothing social, or upstage. You may know her father. He's a professor or a don or something, at Oxford.'

'Professor Prentice?' Or was it Dr Prentice? The name was somehow familiar.

T suppose so. Do you know him?'

I shook my head. 'There's such a lot of them. Do you know what college he's in?'

'Is there one called Wyckham, or some name like that?'

I nodded. 'He's at Wyckham?'

'I think so.'

'Do you know what he teaches?'

Bill grinned. 'Semantics,' he said. 'I learned that word.'

'Christ. Do you know what it means?'

'Well, it's not Jews' said Bill. 'Janet won't have that. It's words or something.'

I nodded. I didn't think there was a chair of semantics in the university; it was probably a research subject. He might be a professor of modern languages or English literature if, indeed, he was a professor of anything. In any case, it was a decent background for the girl to have; she would be able to hold her own in feminine society in the Western District.

Bill asked, 'Do you know him?'

'I don't think so. What's he like to look at?'

'I don't know' he said. 'I've never met the family. I'll probably get round to doing that when the balloon's gone up'

Our lives hinged upon the date for 'Overlord', still all unknown. It was not very close, for there must be great concentrations of troops and landing craft in the last week or two, and they were not there yet. It was not very far away,

because the ground was drying hard after the winter rains, and tanks could operate across country now, or would be able to very shortly. Up at Fighter Command we none of us knew the date; from the internal evidence that passed across my desk I guessed it to be about six weeks off. I could not make that known to anybody, even to Bill.

A picture came into my mind of a broad-shouldered, broad-faced man of fifty-five or sixty, a man with a square, rugged face and very bushy eyebrows, iron grey like his hair. I thought that was Dr Prentice but I was not sure, nor could I remember where I had met him. In any case, it didn't matter now.

We went up to the dining-room for dinner, a poor meal in those days of tight rationing, and we drank watery beer. It was no fault of the hotel that they served us a poor meal, with all their staff called up and put into the Services to cook for us, but when the sweet that was not sweet came to the table I said to Bill, 'I hope your Janet can cook.'

'I shouldn't think so,' he replied. 'I don't think she's ever had to do it.'

'How old is she?'

'She joined the Wrens straight from school in 1941,' he said. 'I suppose she was eighteen and a half then -I think she was. She'd be twenty-one now.' He paused. 'Somehow, she seems older than that - the way she goes on with the ratings. They're scared stiff of her on the LCTs.'

I smiled. 'Scared stiff of her?'

'My word,' he said, 'you ought to see her carry on if she goes on board a ship and finds the gun rusty. They're more frightened of her than they would be of a CPO.'

'She must have quite a reputation.'

He nodded. 'She has that. She's probably the only Leading Wren in the Navy who's ever been congratulated personally by the First Sea Lord.'

I stirred, and came back to my room in Coombargana, to the present. A wood fire does not burn for very long; I laid the little photograph frame down upon the table and crossed mechanically to the fire, and put on two or three more logs. I did not go back to investigate the suitcase further; there

was time enough for that. So many memories of Bill and Janet Prentice ...

May Spikins, Viola Dawson, and Petty Officer Waters had all told me about Janet Prentice and her life in the Wrens, when I found them one by one in the post-war years, in 1950 and 1951. She had not kept in touch with any of them and they were little help to me in finding her, but they filled out the picture of the girl that I had met with Bill on that fine April Sunday before 'Overlord', when we had gone down the river in the small grey naval motor boat into the Solent and had picnicked on the sand spit near Hurst Castle.

She was born in Crick Road in North Oxford; I went and found the big old house in 1948 when I went back to finish my Law course. Her old house and most of the neighbouring houses had been cut up into flats and only one old lady in the road remembered the Prentices. She had a sister some years older than herself, who in 1948 was married and probably in Singapore, but I never succeeded in discovering her married name. She had no brothers. She had lived all her early life in the pleasant, easy, academic atmosphere of Oxford. It had all been laburnum and magnolia and almond blossom in her childhood, and talk of the Sitwells and Debussy and Handel. That was her life till 1939, when she took School Certificate and the war began.

'It all came to an end then' she told Viola Dawson once. 'I was going up to Lady Margaret Hall in 1941, but the war put paid to that. I was jolly lucky to get into the Wrens; I wouldn't have liked it in the Army or a factory. If it couldn't be Oxford, I'm glad it was the Wrens.'

I think that her last year at school was probably spoilt for her by the war. Academic life had died in Oxford as the phoney war was succeeded by the real war. Her father joined the Observer Corps and spent long hours of most nights at a watch point on Boars Hill, a telephone headset strapped across his beret, watching, reporting the movements of aircraft in the skies to the central plotting room fifty miles away. After a night of that a man of sixty has little energy next day for any but routine work, and her father laid aside research and confined himself to his lectures to small groups of undergraduates and large groups of

officers from various Services who were brushing up their languages.

In that last year of school her home was crowded with evacuees, irritating strangers who were always there when you wanted them away, always talking when you wanted privacy. Her education suffered, for school work in the evenings was unthinkable at the time of the Battle of Britain, and she spent much of her leisure time at a depot that made up and dispatched Red Cross parcels. There was no fun in Oxford in those days.

It was a relief when her time came to join the Wrens. She was a big, broad-shouldered girl at eighteen and a half, still awkward with the gaucheness of a puppy. It was a relief and an unpleasantness at the same time; her first few days of readjustment at the Training and Drafting depot were not happy ones. She was to prove herself a good mixer when the Service had formed her character, but at the time of her entry she had never mixed. She had never shared her bedroom with anybody since childhood days; now she had to sleep on the top bunk of a double-decker in a hut with thirty other girls of every social grade. She had to undergo the most intimate medical examinations, the least offensive of which was a close examination of her head and underclothes for lice. She had to learn the language. Going out of the depot gate to visit the local cinema was 'going on shore'. She got sternly rebuked by a Wren petty officer on her third day for incautiously referring to the galley as 'the kitchen', and it was weeks before she could remember what time was indicated by four bells in the forenoon watch. She very soon learned, however, that if you put the counterpane on your bunk with the anchor upside down the ship would sink.

At the end of her fortnight of basic training she had begun to take it easy; the crudities of Service life were gradually ceasing to offend. At that point she had to volunteer for her particular category of work.

She had no ambition to become a cook or a steward; she was good at Virgil, which nobody seemed to want, but ignorant of shorthand, typewriting or book-keeping. She would have liked to be a boat's crew Wren but the competition was terrific and she had little knowledge - at that

time - of boats. She had a vague, unexpressed sympathy with things mechanical; she liked oiling her bicycle or tinkering with the mowing machine; she could replace the worn flex of a reading lamp. She elected on these qualifications to go to the Fleet Air Arm, and because she had once or twice fired a shotgun and was not afraid of it she became a qualified Ordnance Wren.

She was sent to an Ordnance depot where she was taught to dismantle, clean, and check a Browning .300 and to load the belts into an aircraft; she mastered that without difficulty and graduated on to the 2o-mm Hispano cannon. Her education was complete then, and with a batch of other Ordnance Wrens she was sent down to Ford near Littlehampton on the south coast of England, where she settled down to ply her trade from December 1941 to June 1943-

At Ford aerodrome she passed the most formative eighteen months of her life. She went there as a callow, undeveloped schoolgirl, unsure of herself, awkward and hesitant. She left it as a Leading Wren with no great ambition for any higher rank, reliable, efficient, and very well able to look after herself; a mature young woman.

She became a pleasant young woman, too, and a popular one. She never aspired to any film-star type of beauty, but she was an open, cheerful, healthy girl with a well-developed sense of humour. She was better in overalls and bell-bottoms than in a backless evening frock, more usually seen with a smear of grease upon her forehead where she had brushed back a wisp of hair than with anything upon her face from Elizabeth Arden. The pilots of the flight she worked with grew to like her and to have confidence in guns that she had serviced; from time to time they used to take her up in Swordfish or in Barracudas to fire a gun from the rear cockpit. She was quite a good shot with a stripped Lewis. Physically she had always been broad-shouldered and athletic, and lugging loaded drums and belts and canisters of ammunition about all day made her as strong as a horse.

She was all things to all men and spent most of her life being so, because the men outnumbered the girls at Ford by four to one. Every evening there was a dance or Ensa show, or a party to the movies in Littlehampton. She learned to

talk in terms that they could understand to the shy young sub-lieutenant fresh from school or to the uncouth rating fresh from a Liverpool slum; on occasion she could express herself on matters of sex in good old English words that would have shocked her father and puzzled her mother. She learned to suit her language to the company that she was in.

War moulded her and made her what she was. When first she went to Ford the German bombers used to come frequently to bomb the aerodrome, during the night; she spent long, weary nights down in the shelters. She learned quite soon what a dead man looked like, and a dead girl. She learned what a crashed aircraft looks like, and what a frail and messy thing the human body is when taken from the crash. The first time she saw this she wanted to be sick, and then she wanted to cry and was afraid of being laughed at. After the fifth or sixth such incident she wanted to do neither, and was content to do what she could to help in cleaning up the mess.

She got home to Oxford now and then on leave, and gradually she became distressed for her parents. War was hitting them much harder than it was hitting her. She was merry and well fed and confident, serene in the knowledge that she was doing a worthwhile job; she could put on her Number Ones and doll herself up smartly to go home and cut a dash. At home she found her mother tired and worn with the work of cooking and catering for a large household with little or no help at a time of increasing shortages, and harassed by six strange children from the East End of London living in the house. Her father seemed smaller and greyer than she had remembered him; he was no longer the jovial don who took life easily with good conversation and good port in the Senior Common Room. There was no port in Oxford in those days and little time for conversation; her father seemed to be able to talk of nothing but the Observer Corps, its administration, its efficiency, and its discipline. Before she had been a year at Ford Janet came to look forward to her next pass with something close to apprehension; it was pitiful to see her mother ageing and be unable to help her, to see her father turning into just another poor old man.