Requiem for a Wren (13 page)

Viola Dawson said, 'I may not be able to get off again if I go in there, sir. The tide's falling pretty fast.' She meant that if she stayed on the sand more than a minute or two the LCP would be stranded and must wait for the next tide to float her off again.

'Go on in,' he said. 'I'll make that right for you. They've got transport there, and there's just a chance a doctor may be able to do something for this chap.'

They went in, and the landing craft grounded some distance from the water's edge. An Army lieutenant in battledress waded out to them and they pulled him in over the bow. Janet said, 'Somebody else take a turn at this. I'm not doing any good.'

The Lieutenant hesitated and then knelt down and took over the attempt at artificial respiration; a couple more men climbed up over the bow. Janet got up, only anxious to get away from the dead man she had been handling. She went aft to the stern, where she came upon the two Marine sergeants naked to the waist, scrambling awkwardly out of their rubber suits.

She said, 'Oh, sorry'. And then she said, 'Have either of you got a cigarette?' She was very glad to be free of the chill deadness of the body on the foredeck, and to be with live young men.

One of the sergeants, the fair-haired boy with the slight

accent, said, 'I've got some here'. He turned over his clothes and searched the pockets of his battledress, and passed up a packet and a box of matches to her as she sat upon the canopy.

She took them from him. Thanks awfully. Go ahead - I won't look.' She lit a cigarette from the packet with fingers that trembled a little, and blew a long cloud, and relaxed.

From the stern below her, where the men were dressing, the fair-haired young man said, 'Dead, isn't he?'

'I should think so' she replied, without looking down at the speaker. 'There wasn't a sign of anything.'

The young man said, 'Well, he was under water the best part of fifty minutes. There's no future in that.'

She sat in the warm sun smoking, looking out over the blue sea of the Solent; on the flat bow of the LCP men in khaki were still labouring over the body of the driver. It was a warm day for March with all the promise of summer, the sort of day when the beach should have been associated with bathers, and small boats, and children making sand-castles and paddling, instead of with waterlogged Sherman tanks, soaked uniforms, and dead men. An LST, the first she had seen, came in by the Needles passage and made its way up towards Southampton; she watched it with interest as it passed. A flight of Spitfires passed overhead on their way to France. Three MLs in line ahead went by, and a couple of motor minesweepers.

The fair-haired sergeant stood up by her in shirt and trousers and helped himself to one of his own cigarettes. He seemed to her a clean, good-looking boy - which, of course, Bill was. He glanced towards the bow. 'Not doing any good, are they?"

'I don't think so.' She hesitated, and looked down at him. 'Was I doing it right? I've never had to do it in earnest before.'

Bill said, 'You were doing it all right. He was under water for the thick end of an hour. Ten minutes - well, you might have got him back. But an hour's different. You did all that anyone could do.'

He looked over to the LCT; she was weighing anchor to get away before the falling tide left her stranded, too. She

still had three tanks on board; apparently the exercise was cancelled. They ought to survey the beach before these practices,' he said. 'It only needs a chap to wade ashore ahead of the tanks, that's all. If he has to swim for it the beach is crook.'

She wondered a little at the word, but each Service at that time had its own slang; to her the Army were all Pongoes. 'Couldn't do that operationally,' the other sergeant said. 'Not with Jerry on the beach.'

The Marine officer came aft to them. 'Well, we're here till six o'clock, the Coxswain says.' Already the LCP was high out of the water on the beach; in another quarter of an hour they would be able to get off her dryshod. He picked up the walkie-talkie and got communication with some station on the other side of the Solent, and told them to telephone a message to Mastodon.

Presently they were able to climb down from the deck of the LCP on to the wet sand. They stood talking with the soldiers about the accident while the tide went down still further till the tank lay half submerged in a long pool of sea water on the beach. 'There's been another LCT there,' said the officer. 'That's where she used her engines, getting off. That's the wash from her propellers did that, scoured away the sand and left that hole...'

Dinner was arranged for the Marines and Wrens by the Army at a gun station on the cliff half a mile away; Janet and Bill walked up together and had dinner in a mess tent after the Bofors crews had finished. 'Where are you stationed?' she inquired. T didn't know about your party.'

'We're at Cliffe Farm,' he said. 'About two miles westwards down the coast from where you picked us up today. I was over at your place the week before last, but I didn't see you.'

She said, 'I was probably down the river.'

They lunched sitting side by side in the mess tent, a heavy, badly served meal of stew and jam roll. After lunch they all strolled down again to the beach. The LCP lay high and dry, far from the sea. An ambulance stood at the cliff top and medical orderlies were loading a stretcher covered with a blanket into it. 'What's your name?" asked the sergeant.

She told him. 'What's yours?'

'Bill Duncan,' he said. He indicated the other sergeant. 'He's Bert Finch.'

She asked, 'Do you live in London?'

'He does, but I don't. I'm Australian. Did you think I was a Londoner?'

She was confused, not wanting to be rude. 'I don't know why I thought that.'

'It's the way I talk,' he said. 'Back at home people would say I hadn't got any Australian accent, but they know it all right here.'

She was intrigued. 'Have you been in England long?'

'I came over just before the war,' he said, 'after I left school. I was at Geelong Grammar.' The Eton of Australia meant nothing to her. 'I was doing a course of agriculture when the war broke out. We've got a farm at home.'

'What made you go into the Marines?' she asked.

'More fun than just the ordinary Army,' he replied. 'More special jobs, like this sort of thing.'

She knew too much about the Service to ask specifically what he did when he wasn't pulling drowned men out of tanks. Instead, she said, 'You volunteered for this?'

He grinned at her. 'I always did like swimming.'

They walked across the beach together to inspect the tank; it lay in the middle of a long pool in the sand with the tops of the tracks just showing. Presently there was a clatter of tank tracks on the cliff and a 'priest' appeared, a Sherman chassis mounting a gun-howitzer. It nosed delicately down a very steep slope to the beach, loaded with men and steel ropes. The soldiers coupled the wires to the towing eyes on the sunk tank; the 'priest' went ahead and towed the Sherman from the pool above high-water mark. It made an attempt to tow the Sherman up the cliff but the incline defeated it; the men uncoupled the wires and the 'priest' struggled up the cliff alone and made off.

Bill stayed with Janet all the afternoon and she was glad to have him; she found him an unassuming young man, easy for her to talk to. She admired him a little, too, for the instant courage that had sent him down into the interior of the flooded tank. He told her that he had never been inside a

tank of any sort before, and it had been rather dark, but he had managed to find his way around all right. She had once been inside a tank, stationary, in broad daylight on dry land, and she knew a little bit about the contortions that you had to make to move about in them. She felt that his effort for the drowned man had been a good show, and she told him so.

They strolled up to the AA site again and got the cooks to give them cups of tea; then they went down and sat smoking and chatting in the LCP while the tide rose around them. Soon after six she floated off, and Viola turned the boat and headed her for the Beaulieu River.

They turned in to the long entrance reach between the sea marshes in the cold dusk of the March night. At Needs Oar Point the truck was waiting for the Marines; as they approached the mud flats Janet said, 'We've got a dance on Saturday. Why don't you two come over?'

That's how it all began.

I SAT there by the fire in my room at Coombargana fingering the photographs, lost in memories. I sat there in the still night thinking how different everything would have been if Bill hadn't been killed. He would have come back to Coombargana directly the war was over, and almost certainly he would have brought Janet Prentice with him. They would have made a good pair to run the property after my parents' time. Bill was never very keen on going to England; I think he only went to Cirencester for his course of agriculture because it was the thing to do, because it is fashionable for young people in my country to reach out for wider experience than they can get at home. He would have been happy to return and make his life at Coombargana, and I think he would have made a better grazier than I.

Janet would have come to Coombargana as its mistress-to-be, not as its house parlourmaid. Presently I would have to violate her privacy further to find out why she had come at all. The answer to that one lay almost certainly within the case upon the table by my side, amongst her private papers that I was reluctant to explore. I could stall a. little longer, sit a little longer by the fire thinking of the girl that I already knew so much about.

It was probably true that I knew more about her than I would ever have learned if she had come to live at Coombargana as Bill's wife, living with him in my parents' old room just along the corridor from mine. If it had turned out that way I might have gone back to England in 1948 to take my degree at Oxford, as in fact I did, but I wouldn't have gone back to look for Janet Prentice. I would never have met or talked with Warrant Officer Finch at Eastney Barracks or with CPO Waters in the Fratton Road, and I would never have met May Cunningham or Viola Dawson.

I knew so much about her, most of it from hearsay, and I

had packed all that knowledge away for good, as I thought, only a few days before, sitting in my bedroom in the St Francis Hotel. I had packed all that knowledge away as in a trunk, and put it in a lumber room out of my life, and now the trunk had burst open before me when I least expected it, spilling all that knowledge and those memories into my life again. The memories, of course, concerned the one day only, the day that we had spent together in the boat before the balloon went up. That day remained etched sharp in my memory; ten years later I still knew exactly how she moved and spoke and thought about things, so that it gave life to all the knowledge I had gleaned about her from these other people.

Bill had got rather English in the five years he had been away from home, I think, or perhaps he had been lonely. At home I don't think he would have made a pet of a mongrel dog like Dev, short for de Valera. Dev was an Irish terrier by courtesy that had strayed into their camp one day, probably about two years old, probably a part of some military or naval unit that had moved away. He had adopted Bill and Bill had adopted him and made a pet of him, and now he was adopting Janet, too. At home Dev might have been a candidate for the rabbit pack; he would certainly never have been allowed inside the house. I doubt if he'd have made the grade for the rabbit pack, though. He wasn't fierce enough; he was one of those bumbling, good-humoured, rather incompetent dogs, good for a lonely man or girl to look after.

They had Dev in the boat with them that day when we went round from Lymington to Keyhaven, sitting up in the bow looking out forward, ears pricked, obviously enjoying his trip. 'I think he's a love child from an unsatisfactory family' Janet said, explaining him to me. 'He's such a fool you can't help liking him.'

When we reached the entrance to the Lymington River she turned the boat to the west and we began to skirt the marshes on the north shore of the Solent. The sea was rough outside, but moving along close inshore we were in calm water. 'We'll keep fairly close in because of your uniform' she said. 'Keep a look-out for snags or stumps or anything

sticking up out of the mud. I'll get in a fearful row if I knock a hole in this boat on a trip like this. It's not as if I were a boat's crew Wren, even.'

Bill and I stood up and watched the water ahead. I asked, 'How did you manage to get hold of a boat at all?'

She grinned. 'I've been here long enough to know the ropes. As a matter of fact, they're not very fussy on Sundays when the boats aren't being used.'

We had great luck with the weather, for it was a warm, sunny day. We skirted along the mud flats for the best part of an hour under the lee of the long spit that terminates in Hurst Castle, and then turned in to the next river to the west of Lymington, which led to Keyhaven. We went up between the mud flats till we came to a tumbledown jetty at the end of a track across a meadow; Janet brought the boat alongside this and we made her fast, and went ashore. We had brought lunch with us from the hotel and three bottles of beer, and on shore we settled down to lunch and talk and smoke, lazing upon the short grass in the sun not far from the boat, looking out over the Solent. It was so seldom in the war that I had had the chance of a day like that.