Requiem for a Wren (24 page)

I used to go to Melbourne fairly frequently from Coombargana and stay at the Club on some pretext such as visiting the Show or a machinery exhibition, or to buy some-

thing that we needed for the property that could have been bought just as well by correspondence. I could not fill my time, however, and presently for lack of any other occupation I got out my Law textbooks and began to read up what I had been studying at Oxford before the war, and that I had half forgotten. As the quiet months went on at Coombargana I gradually became accustomed to my disability and learned what I could do and what was dangerous for me, and as I grew safer on my feet I think perhaps I grew a little better in my temper.

It's rather lonely in the Western District, because to see any of your friends you've got to get into your car and drive a good long way. Few girls came my way, understandably perhaps, and I had too little in common with the ones that did to seek their company. As time went on I found my thoughts turning more and more to England. I had been irritated with England when I came away and only anxious to get out of it and back to Coombargana; now that I was home it seemed to me that I was something of a misfit in the Western District, and that after six years of war in England I was more in tune with their austerity than with the ease and the prosperity of my home. England was a place of strain and relative hardship, but it was a place where real, vital things were happening, where people thought about things as I thought.

If Bill had lived and had come home with Janet Prentice it would have been different, for then there would have been three of us, a little island of three people who had shared the same experience, but now I was alone. As the months went on I became uneasy about Janet Prentice. I had written to her and I had received no answer, but I began to feel that I couldn't leave it there. So far as I knew she was the only girl that Bill had ever been in love with. She had been very good for him at a time when he was tired and strained and not far from his death, and for that Coombargana owed her a good deal. I could not keep from thinking of the grey-eyed, homely, competent girl in jersey, bell-bottoms, and duffel coat in the grey-painted fishing boat, whom Bill had loved. I felt I should have made a greater effort to keep in touch with her; she should have been a friend of the family, because she

had deserved well of us. I had not told my mother or my father anything about her, but now it seemed to me that they should know about her.

I didn't say anything to them, because the girl might be married to someone else and happily settled, but in October 1947 I wrote her a letter. It was a chatty sort of letter that began with an apology for not getting into touch with her more energetically after Bill's death, and telling her about my crash and disability, and my life since then. I asked her to forgive the long gap in our friendship and said that we should keep in touch, and I asked what she was doing in these post-war years.

I had a little difficulty in addressing this letter. I knew she lived in Crick Road, Oxford, but I didn't know the number, so for safety I put my own address upon the envelope and sent it off by airmail. Three months later it came back to me by sea mail in an official envelope; pencilled across it were the words, GONE AWAY - ADDRESS UNKNOWN.

I was a bit troubled when that letter came back. I opened it and read what I had written three months previously. It seemed to me all right, so I added a few words at the bottom and sent it off again, addressed to Miss Janet Prentice, c/o Dr Prentice, Wyckham College, Oxford. Again I put my own address on the back of the envelope.

It came back to me again, by sea mail, after about two months. A short covering note came with it, from the Bursar of Wyckham. He said that I was evidently unaware that Dr Prentice had been killed on war service in the year 1944. After the death of her mother the year before last Miss Janet Prentice had left Oxford, and he had been unable to find out her present address. In the circumstances he had no option but to send back my letter.

All this took a considerable time, and it was March when this letter came back to me again. It worried me more than I cared to admit. While I had been sunk in my abyss of self-pity, Bill's girl had had a packet of bad luck. Not only had she lost Bill, but her father had been killed on service in the same year. She had told us that he was going on the party as an aircraft identifier in a merchant ship; had he been killed then? I thought he must have been, but in that case she had

lost Bill and her father within a month of each other. In a very few weeks she had lost both men who were important in her life, a shattering blow to any girl, even to so level-headed and competent a girl as Janet Prentice. Now came the news that she had lost her mother two years later, and that she had gone away, and lost touch with her father's old friends and associates at Oxford.

I had little sleep for some nights after getting this letter. Bill had loved her, and at Coombargana we should have stood behind her in her trouble, and we hadn't, because I had been lazy and self-centred. I didn't know quite what we could have done to help her, but we should have tried. We had one thing at any rate that might conceivably, somehow, have been used to make her troubles easier for her, and that was money. She didn't know it, but if she had married Bill she would have married into a fairly wealthy family. I knew that my father and mother, if they were to hear of her existence and were to hear what she had meant to Bill, would feel exactly as I felt; that she was virtually one of us, a daughter of the house.

I wrote a pretty candid letter back to the Bursar of Wyckham, for I had nothing to lose by putting my cards on the table. I thanked him for returning my letter, and told him that Miss Prentice had been engaged to my brother in the Royal Marines, who had been killed in 1944, apparently shortly before the death of her father. I told him something about myself in explanation why I had lost touch with her, and said that we were really most anxious to make contact with her. I asked him to make what inquiries he could to find out her address. If he preferred to put her into touch with us instead, would he give her my address and pass a message to her asking her to write to me.

I got a letter back from him by airmail some weeks later. He said that he had delayed answering my letter till he had been able to make some inquiries, but he was sorry to say that he had had very little luck. The Prentices apparently had no relations living in Oxford. Dr Prentice, he thought, was born in London and had become a don at Wyckham about thirty years ago. He had a brother who had been upon

the faculty at Stanford University in the United States, but this brother was thought to have died some years ago. Another daughter, a sister of Miss Janet Prentice, was thought to be married and in Singapore but he had been unable to discover her married name. He had, however, been in touch with a charwoman called Mrs Blundell who had worked two mornings a week for Mrs Prentice up to the time of her death, in October 1946, and Mrs Blundell said that Janet Prentice had then told her that she was going to live with an aunt in Settle. Settle was a small town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, about forty miles north-west of Leeds. He had written to the postmaster of Settle to inquire if there was any such person living in the district, but had received the reply that nothing was known about any Miss Janet Prentice in that district.

It was of course possible, he said, that Miss Prentice had married and was living in the district under her new name, but in view of the nervous breakdown that she had suffered after the war he thought that was unlikely. He was very sorry not to be able to offer more assistance. As a colleague and an old friend of the late Dr Prentice he was anxious to do everything he could to help his daughter, and he hoped I would not hesitate to call upon him if he could do anything further in the matter.

This letter reached me at the beginning of May 1948, and it was very bad news. This girl who had deserved so well of us was in trouble, for she had had a nervous breakdown after the war. I knew enough about university life to know that the daughter of a don would probably inherit very little money at the death of her parents, and for civil life she probably had little earning power. She had left school before qualifying for a job and in the war she had learned automatic guns, no great qualification for civil life. Without the breakdown she would have got by upon her native wit, and with her competence she would have made her way in peacetime; as things were she had apparently become a housekeeper or a companion for some aged relative, living no doubt in circumstances that were far from affluent in England. I felt very strongly that she was a part of Coombargana, that we were responsible for her and should

look after her. Coombargana could do better for her than that. She was Bill's girl, and in trouble.

I thought about it for a day or two, restless and unhappy. The memory of the clear-eyed, competent Leading Wren at Lymington was very vivid in my mind; in love with Bill, she had been a very lovely girl that day and I had thought he was a very lucky man. It was a terrible idea that she might no longer be like that, that trouble and poverty perhaps had aged her, made her different, uncertain of herself where she had been direct and positive. Not many years had passed, however, though much had been crammed in to them. She was only four years older now than she had been when we had met and picnicked in the motor boat. With help and money and kindness she could regain a great part of her youth. Somehow we must let her know that people still cared a great deal about Bill, and so cared for the girl he loved and would have married.

It was difficult, if not impossible, to find her and do anything to help her from Coombargana, but difficulties can be broken through. There was nothing to keep me in Australia because my father could get on perfectly well without me, and if I wanted to go to England I could go. In fact, nothing could be easier or more convenient, because I was still a Rhodes scholar only halfway through his course at Oxford, and Oxford was probably the place where I could find a thread that would lead me to Janet Prentice. Presumably I was still entitled to go back to the House and finish my scholarship and take a degree in Law, and in doing so I felt that I would certainly be able to find Janet Prentice.

I didn't tell my parents anything about her, possibly because I was ashamed to tell them of the part that I had played, or had not played, in the affair. I was reluctant to tell them anything about her till I had located her and found what she was doing; they couldn't do anything to help, and it all seemed so private. When finally I found her she might well be married and happily settled in life, and in that case there would be no point in interesting the older generation in her; probably better not to. It would be time enough to tell my parents if I found they could do anything to help her.

I raised the question of going back to Oxford with my father two days after the letter arrived. Td like to finish off my scholarship and take a degree, and perhaps get called to the Bar' I said. 'It's something that I started, Dad, and that I'd rather like to finish. There's not a great deal here for me to do till you get older, is there?'

He nodded. 'You mean, there's not enough work for two?'

'That's right' I said.

T hoped when you came home that you'd get married and have a place of your own,' he said. 'Your mother and I both hoped that. But it doesn't seem to be working out that way.'

I smiled. 'Too bad. I suppose I'm too restless.' I paused. 'I don't feel an invalid any longer, like I did when I came home. I want to get out and do something.'

He nodded. 'That's reasonable,' he said. 'After all, you're still a young man. How old are you, Alan? Thirty-two?'

Dad was never very good at figures. 'Thirty-four,' I said. I'd like to get around a bit before settling down for good, and this seems the right time to do it.'

'We shall miss you here,' he remarked, '-your mother and I. But I think you're right to want to travel while you're young. You haven't seen anything of Europe, really, have you?'

'Only from on top while I was trying to smash it up,' I said. 'I had two months in France and Italy when I got out of hospital, but I really wasn't fit to notice anything much then.'

'You'll start off by finishing your scholarship?' he asked.

'That's what I'd like to do.'

It didn't prove quite so easy as I had supposed. The scholarship was still there waiting for me though it wouldn't have mattered if it hadn't been. Oxford, however, was still full of post-war undergraduates and there was no place for me in college till October 1949. I exchanged several letters with the Secretary to the Trust in Oxford and with the Dean of Christ Church to see if I could get digs for the coming year within a short distance of college, but the place was still so crowded that they could not offer me accommodation

nearer than North Oxford. For a normal man this might have been no great impediment, but I was still unable to walk much more than a mile without a good long rest and for me this meant that I should be very largely cut off from the life and benefits of the university.

I chafed at the delay, but there seemed to be nothing for it but to wait a year and go to Oxford when I could get in to college. I thought this over for a week and then decided that I wouldn't wait; I was confident that if I were in Oxford I could find somewhere to live within a stone's throw of the college even if I had to buy a house to live in, and Janet Prentice might well be in trouble that would brook no delay. My father generously fixed up money for me in England on a basis that was virtually unlimited, and I sailed for England in the
Orontes
in August 1948.