Requiem for a Wren (11 page)

She hesitated, because at Ford it was against the regulations for Wrens to fly. Then she decided it was better to tell the truth. 'I was in the Fleet Air Arm before coming here' she said. 'They used to take us up sometimes to test the observer's Lewis or Browning by firing it.'

'What did you fire at? Something in the sea?'

'Yes, sir. A bit of wood or seaweed - anything.'

All the officers were studying her. The First Sea Lord asked, 'What are you in civil life?'

She said awkwardly, 'Well, sir - I wasn't anything. I mean, I was at school."

The Captain of Excellent asked, 'What were you best at, at school?'

She hesitated. 'Well, I liked Latin best, I think.' It seemed a pretty crackpot sort of question to her, and it must have been, because one or two of them laughed.

The First Sea Lord asked, 'Did you have any difficulty in learning eye-shooting?'

'No, sir.' She had a natural flair for it. All the rest of her class had been much puzzled by it, and she had spent an hour trying to make May Spikins see what seemed so obvious to her. 'I just did what the Chief taught us.'

That brought in Chief Petty Officer Waters. The Admiral asked him, 'Is this Wren exceptional, Chief?'

He answered stiffly, 'She's better than the general run, sir. I'd say that she's a natural good shot.'

'That's why you put her on to shoot?'

'Yes, sir.'

Somebody else asked, 'What are the Ordnance Wrens like, in general, compared with the ratings?'

He said, 'They're better, sir - no doubt of that. Of course, they're better educated, mostly, than the called-up classes that we're getting in now.'

The First Sea Lord said, 'Well, I congratulate you on this young lady, Chief. It was very good shooting.' The Petty Officer beamed with pleasure, storing up each word in a retentive memory, to retail to me in the end eight years later.

He withdrew with Janet and they left the tower together and went down to the class on the grid. He sent her back in to the ranks, and called the squad to attention. 'Now look here, you Wrens,' he said in measured tones. 'I just been congratulated by the First Sea Lord himself, on account of what Leading Wren Prentice, No 3 in the front rank, just did. Now you see what can be done with eye-shooting if you troubles to learn how to do it. What Leading Wren Prentice did any one of you can do, if you takes the trouble. Otherwise you better change your category and go for a cook. Now, stand easy.'

They all bent towards Janet. 'Did you see the First Sea Lord? What did he say?'

'I saw him,' she told them. 'He asked me what I did before I joined up, and I said I didn't do anything. And then the Captain of Excellent asked what I was best at, at school, and I said, Latin. I think they're all crackers, if you ask me. Mad as March hares. No wonder they can't hit the bloody aeroplane.'

I know she said that, because May Spikins told me all about that day when we talked in her council house up on the new estate at Harlow. May Cunningham she was by that time, with a little boy two years old and a baby of six months; her husband was a clerk in the municipal offices at Enfield and he was away at work when I called to see her, in 1950. War-

rant Officer Finch had told me about her when I went to see him about Bill, and I motored down to see May Spikins because I thought that she might be in touch with Janet Prentice, or at least know what had happened to her. But she knew nothing; they had not met or corresponded since Janet left the Service. She had known Bill slightly as Janet's boyfriend, and when I told her that I was his brother from Australia she loosened up and invited me into the parlour, and made a pot of tea, and we talked for a long time of those far-off weeks and day at Beaulieu, before 'Overlord', before the balloon went up.

I know she said that, because she was a very outspoken girl in those days, and when May Spikins told me that I knew that it was true, because the words were exactly the words that Leading Wren Prentice would have used. It was probably this quality of character and ability to express herself in a masculine way that made the ratings in the invasion fleet afraid of her displeasure; to be ticked off by a Wren who used all the vigour and language of a petty officer was intimidating, and there was a certain feminine ruthlessness about her that made them feel she would not hesitate to implement her threats.

I felt something of the same quality in her when I spent the Sunday with her and Bill, at Lymington, in April 1944. There was a forthrightness about her, a directness of speech and community of experience that was infinitely restful to men strained to the limit in those weeks before the invasion. She was obviously very good for Bill. He didn't have to put on an act for her, She would have laughed and been embarrassed if he had given her flowers, and by then he was too tired and preoccupied with his trips over to the other side to think of giving anything to anybody. It was she who produced the motor boat that day for our run down the river to the Solent. It was a little grey painted Naval boat fifteen or sixteen feet long, a fishing boat that had been taken over by the Navy, I should think. She had it at the quay by the Ship Inn when I got back from Beaulieu aerodrome at about half past ten. The WAAF driver took me to the quay and there was Bill in battledress and gumboots with his dog, and Janet Prentice in rather dirty blue serge

slacks, and gumboots, and a blue jersey, and a greasy duffel coat. I dismissed my car and went down to the boat.

Bill introduced me, and I shook hands with the girl. She looked me up and down smiling. 'Bill's got an oily for you' she said, 'but I don't know about your clothes. I'm afraid this boat's in a bit of a muck.' There was a pad of dirty cotton waste upon the engine casing by her side, and she wiped the thwart with it.

The uniform that I was wearing was my oldest, threadbare with much cleaning and still marked with oil stains that would not come out. 'I'll be right' I said. 'Don't bother about me.'

'I'm afraid you'll get that lovely uniform all dirty' she said. Put on the oily anyway; it may be a bit wet outside, if we go round to Keyhaven.'

'Tide's flooding and there's not much wind' Bill said. 'It won't be bad.'

She turned to crank the engine. I offered to do it for her, but she refused, making me feel that I had done the wrong thing. 'She kicks back if you're not careful' she said. 'One of the ratings broke his arm on her the other day, but she's all right when you know her. I'll do her myself.' She tickled the old carburettor, bent to the handle, and gave the heavy flywheel a vigorous heave over; she was evidently a very powerful girl. The engine began thumping away beneath the box, and she moved to the stern and cast the stern rope off and drew it in, dripping with sea water, and coiled it expertly. Bill cast off from the bow and the girl took the tiller, kicked the lever forward with her foot, and we moved off down the river.

There were no civilian boats or yachts afloat upon the South Coast at that time, but the river was full of landing craft, box-like grey, painted things of steel with ramps to let down at the bow, with diesel engines thumping away inside them to charge batteries as they lay moored bow and stern to the buoys, with soiled white ensigns drooping at the stern, with bored ratings fishing over the side and staring at us as we threaded our way past. I did not know the function or the name of any of these ships, but Janet and Bill knew them all and told me shortly what they were, and what they were

to do, as we chugged past. This, was the LCT Mark 4, the standard tank landing craft, British built and the most common of the lot. This, was the Mark 5, American designed and built and shipped to England on the decks of ships, an unpleasant and relatively unseaworthy little craft that would go in first in the assault, bearing the Sherman tanks that were to swim ashore, and the work tanks, the armoured vehicles RE that were to clear the beach of obstacles so that the landing craft could come in safely, and detonate the mines, and bridge the trenches in the sandhills on the other side. This, was an obsolete mark of LCT converted as a rocket ship to fire a salvo of nine hundred rounds at one push of the button to blast the shore defences. This, bristling with Bofors guns and Oerlikons, was a gunnery support craft, manned and commanded by Marines. This fast powerful open landing craft coming up the river towards us at speed, manned by American sailors in white, upturned caps, and with the name Dirtie Girtie proudly painted on her bow, was an LCVP, an American infantry landing craft so powerful and well designed that ratings with a minimum of training could handle her. All these were known to Janet and Bill, but there were other things afloat upon the Solent that they knew nothing of, great box-like things of concrete bigger than a cross-Channel steamer floating moored or building on the shore, things like a monstrous reel of cotton fifty or sixty feet in diameter floating on the water, flat rafts with grotesque girders sticking up into the air.

Once Janet said in a low tone, 'I wonder what the hell they're going to do with that?' but neither of us answered her. Bill may have known; if so, he kept his mouth shut, as was right. Each of us had our own secrets at that time, our own part in the affair, dominating our minds. I asked once casually, 'Do you get many German aircraft over here, having a look?' It was always possible that something might have slipped in my office, some information that we might have missed, something the locals might know about that we did not.

The girl grinned and said, 'We've not had a Jerry over here for weeks - two months, I should think. I can't think

what he's up to. You'd think that he'd be over every day, photographing all this.'

'You'd think so,' I replied idly. It was all right. The fighter patrols organised from my office were on top of the Germans on the other side of the Channel; nothing had slipped past us. Our combat losses might be averaging three machines a day on these security patrols alone, but nothing had got past us save one Messerschmitt no ten days before, and that one we had got on his way home. The Germans probably knew very little still of what was massing up against them in the Solent.

We reached the end of the river and the West Solent lay before us, blue and shimmering in the April sun. Bill had moved to the stern beside the girl. I turned to say something to them, but they were both looking over to the shore of the Isle of Wight, four miles across the sea. Bill said, 'That Sherman's still on the beach.'

'They're not bothering about it' she said. 'They can't tow it up the cliff.'

I asked, 'What's that?'

They pointed to the beach on the far side of the channel. 'That tank up at the head of the beach, see it? Under the cliff. They were doing practice landings from an LCT on that bit of beach. That Sherman was wading ashore but it went down in a hole.'

The girl turned to me. 'It went right under water' she explained. 'A chap got drowned in it - the driver.'

It was a simple statement of fact, unemotional.

Bill said, 'They could salve it if they took a bit of trouble. They could bring in an LCT and tow it back on board and take it somewhere.'

'It's no good' the girl said. 'Viola heard about it from a Pongo. When it went under, the water got into the engine and wrecked it - blew off all the cylinder heads. It's not worth bothering about. They took the gun off it.'

'When did this happen?' I asked.

'About five weeks ago' said Bill. He grinned at the girl, and said nonchalantly, 'That's how I met Janet.'

I learned a good bit about what had happened on that day

when I met Viola Dawson six years later, and Warrant Officer Finch told me a little more when I was talking to him about Bill. It was in March, perhaps about the twentieth of the month. Janet had been in Mastodon for about nine months. When she went there she had thought that she was going to a base of Coastal Forces to service guns on motor torpedo boats; security had masked the fact that she was destined for the build-up to the invasion of Normandy.

She found that HMS Mastodon was a stone frigate. It was Exbury Hall, about three miles up the Beaulieu River from the Solent. The river runs in to the New Forest through country that is wholly rural. For the first three miles it is a fair-sized tidal river capable of accommodating landing craft up to two hundred feet in length if they don't object to going on the mud now and then, but after Bucklers Hard it becomes very shallow at low water. At the entrance there are leading marks in from the Solent, and a row of disused coastguard cottages, and Lepe House, a timbered mansion overlooking the entrance to the river. From Lepe the river runs up westwards for a mile in a long reach between sea marshes, and then turns northwards inland till it comes to woods on either side that shroud fine houses of the wealthy. One of these was HMS Mastodon, and it came as a surprise to Janet Prentice and May Spikins when the truck deposited them there in June 1943.

They reported to the duty officer and were handed over to a Wren petty officer who took them to their quarters in a hut that was built on a tennis lawn. That evening the two girls wandered round with mixed feelings, bemoaning the fate that had landed them into a place where there was nothing operational going on and which was ten miles from the nearest movie. At the same time, they were forced to realise that the Navy had sent them to one of the most lovely country houses in England. It was a stone-built, fairly modern country house in the grand style, with a flagstaff flying a white ensign on the lawn in front of it. All afternoon the two girls wandered up and down woodland paths between thickets of rhododendrons in bloom, each with a label, with water piped underneath each woodland path projecting in stopcocks here and there for watering the