Requiem for a Wren (30 page)

Another entry read:

~ Tuesday, September 15th. We always test the guns at the butts before fitting them in aircraft of course, but last night at the dance Lt Atkinson asked if I had ever fired one from the air and when I said I hadn't he said it was a shame and he'd take me up. We aren't supposed to fly but of course lots of the Wrens go up for joyrides when nobody's looking. He got me a flying suit and helmet and saw me properly harnessed in to the back cockpit of the Swordfish and we went up with four drums to be pooped off before coming down. It was awful fun. We went out over the sea somewhere by Bognor, a bit to the east of Selsey, until he saw a packing case floating, and then he came down to about five hundred feet and told me to pull the plug. The first drum was pretty haywire all over the shop but he went on circling round with the Swordfish standing on its ear and told me to keep on trying, and about the middle of the second drum I seemed to get the hang of it and it suddenly came right and I began to shoot it all to bits. He made me try some big deflection shots then flying straight past at about a hundred feet. He said he'd have my bloody hide if I shot his wing tip or his tail off. They weren't a bit easy, but I got one or two hits

towards the end of the last drum. We landed back at Ford after about an hour. It was a lovely morning.

There was nothing of any particular significance in the months she spent at Ford. When she went to Whale Island for her conversion course on to Oerlikons the diary assumed the nature of a technical memorandum book and was filled with details of the lubricants, their Service designations, how they were drawn from store, the colours painted on the shells, and matters of that sort. There must have been official publications available to her containing all this information, and I can only think it made it easier for her to remember if she made notes in this way in her own diary. The only entry of any importance related to her meeting with the First Sea Lord, and that was very short.

~ Thursday, July 1st. Last day of eye-shooting on the grid. They had an experimental shoot first at a towed glider target but they weren't very good. Then the Chief put me on to shoot and I fluked a hit. They sent for me to go up to the tower and there were more admirals there than you could shake a stick at, all brass up to the elbow. They asked a lot of questions that I didn't understand. The Chief gave me another coconut and we ate it in the Wrennery.

She went to Mastodon, and there is not a great deal of interest in the diary in her first nine months or so at Exbury. She was getting out of the habit of daily entries, and now she only wrote in it when something unusual * happened that interested her emotionally. There is a gap of five weeks at one point, filled only with a detailed list of the various types of landing craft and the armament and ammunition stowage upon each.

She wrote a full account of her first meeting with Bill and the incident of the flooded Sherman tank. I have used that earlier in this account and I am not going to repeat what she had written in her diary. She was very much in love with Bill, right from the first. I had to read her diary entries myself but I shall see that nobody else does. In the suc-

ceeding weeks they were almost wholly concerned with Bill, and with what Bill and she had done together. I pass those over, till my own name comes in:

~ ...Tomorrow, brother Alan. I wish we could go on as we are, sergeant and Leading Wren, but of course we've got to meet each other's relations some time if we're going to go on together. When we come back from the Lake District we may have to get married pretty quick! I'll have to take Bill to meet Daddy and Mummy and of course Alan comes in because he's about Bill's only relation on this side of the world. Bill thinks such a lot of Alan that I'm really a bit windy. Still, it's got to be.

~ Sunday evening. Bill was quite right, of course, brother Alan really is something rather terrific. He turned up in a car with a WAAF driver all dolled up with half an inch of stuff on her face, making me look like twopennyworth of sump oil. Three rings, wings, and five medal ribbons including the DFC and bar. He's the sort of person who seems to have been everywhere and done everything, and yet he's quite quiet about it all. You can see the likeness to Bill, but an older and more mature Bill; they're evidently very fond of each other. Bill hadn't told me that Alan was a Rhodes scholar or that he was at the House; I must ask Daddy if he ever met him. They both went to a school they call Gellong Grammar or some name like that, that evidently means a lot to them. I must ask Daddy if he ever heard of it. I suppose it's where the farmers send their sons to school, but I'm getting a bit puzzled. I suppose boys born on farms in England turn into people like Bill and Alan, only one doesn't know that they were born on farms. I really did like brother Alan, and I'm not a bit windy now about Bill's people. They can't be so different to us as I thought.

Very soon after that came the Junkers incident.

~ Saturday, April 29th. I shot a Junkers down today and it was all wrong. Everyone in it was killed, and it seems they

were friendly, Czechs or Poles, trying to get over to our side. Everyone else was firing at it, but I actually got it, I think. I can't sleep and I don't know what to do and Bill's away somewhere.

~ I went down to 968 with Viola this morning to put some Sten guns on the LCTs and while I was on board this thing came over and they started firing at it from the Isle of Wight but didn't hit it. It got quite low down over the Solent, I should think about a thousand feet and started wandering about more or less out of range of all guns. We thought it was taking photographs. 702 was lying alongside 968 and all the gunners were on leave and the sub too wet to do a thing, so I manned the port Oerlikon. Lieutenant Craigie took the starboard gun on 968 but when it turned towards us he got blanked off by the bridge because we were moored bows upstream, so he shouted out to me to take it. It came right at us at less than a thousand feet; one simply couldn't miss, no layoff at all sideways, I just fed it down the rings at six o'clock and hit it three times in the cabin, and then the wheels came down. A Bofors hit it after it passed over us and it crashed in a field at the edge of the marshes. We went and saw the wreckage, it was awful. Seven of them, all sergeants in the Luftwaffe.

~ I got sent for by the Captain after dinner and put on the mat; there was an RAF officer there, Intelligence I think. He said they thought that it was trying to make a peaceful landing and surrender, but they didn't really know for certain. They tried to make me say the wheels came down before I fired, but honestly I don't think they did. They may have put them down when I began firing but I think I shot away some bit of the controls and they just fell down or something. The Captain gave me the hell of a ticking off for firing at all.

~ I don't know what to do. I ought to have known it was too easy, I suppose. A hostile aircraft wouldn't fly straight over a ship at seven hundred feet like that, going slowly, too. I ought to have known better, but everybody else was firing at it when it was in range. I can't get to sleep, and I'm feeling so ill. I'd like to put in for a posting up

North or somewhere, but they'd never let me go before the balloon goes up. I don't know what to do.

The diary remains blank after that for several days, and then comes a long entry describing her visit to the Royal Bath Hotel at Bournemouth where her father was in training for the Seaborne Royal Observer Corps. I have used that information earlier in this account, and only the last sentence or two need be quoted here:

~ ...I meant to tell Daddy about the Junkers but I didn't. He was so full of fun, and having such a glorious time.

There was another gap of several days, and then came an entry about Bill.

~ May 7th. I got a letter from Bert Finch this morning. Bill is dead. He went off with Bert on some job over to the other side, and didn't come back. Bert's not allowed to say what happened, and I don't specially want to know.

~ I can't seem to realise that it's happened. I thought people went all soppy and cried, but I don't seem to feel like that. I've been going on with the work all day because there's such a lot to do and no time to sit and think. It's almost as if it had happened to somebody else.

~ I'm glad I never told Mummy or Daddy about Bill. I couldn't stand anybody being sympathetic. What happened between Bill and me was just ours and nobody else's, and if it's over now it's still ours and nobody else's just the same. I couldn't bear to have anybody else knowing about us.

~ Bill never told any of his people at home about us, only brother Alan of course. I know he didn't because we decided that we wouldn't tell anybody till we were quite sure ourselves, till after the balloon had gone up and we'd been away together and really got to know each other, out of uniform. I wrote and told Bert Finch that Bill's people in Australia didn't know about us, and asked him to look through Bill's gear and send me back any letters he found, and the photograph we had taken together. Bert's a

good sort, and I think Bill would have wanted it like that. When a thing's done, it's done. I couldn't bear to have strangers butting in and being sympathetic from the other side of the world, even Bill's people.

~ The only complication now is Dev. Bert said he was told to shoot him if I couldn't have him, but I couldn't bear that. I went and told Third Officer Collins about it and asked if I could have him here, and she said I couldn't. But then half an hour later Lt Parkes came to the Wrennery and said he'd fixed it for me, and he was to be McAlister's dog. I cried for about ten minutes, in the heads, when I got back into the Wrennery. It's awful when people are so kind as that, but I suppose it does one good to let go. I felt better afterwards and went down river with some Bofors ammunition for the LCGs. I'm so frightfully tired.

There are no more entries in the diary after that until the middle of June. Only a very few weeks remained before the invasion, and in those weeks she was working at high pressure. She had the dog to look after, too, and Viola told me that she spent every minute of her spare time with Bill's dog. Probably in those weeks there was no need for the emotional outlet of a diary, for the dog Dev provided that. Perhaps it is significant that the next diary entry was written on the evening of the day that Dev was killed.

~ Tuesday, June 11th. Dev is dead, and I made a fool of myself and broke down on the hard, in front of everyone. He got under a Sherman because I wasn't looking after him properly. He was in such pain and it wasn't possible to do anything for him, so I got an Army officer to shoot him. Then everyone was sympathetic and that put the lid on it, and when I started crying I couldn't stop.

~ Viola was a brick; she came back with the cutter as soon as she could and got me out of it and back to the Wrennery, and Collins came over and told me to go and see the surgeon and report sick. All the RNVR surgeons have gone off on 'Overlord' and there was an American Army doctor there, a Captain Ruttenberg, quite a young

fair-haired man. I was so glad it was a stranger because there wasn't anything the matter with me but I couldn't get a grip of myself, and I was so ashamed.

~ I think he was frightfully good as a doctor or psychologist or something because he didn't do anything at all. He made me sit down in a chair and got a couple of cups of tea from the wardroom and gave me a cigarette and started talking about himself. He said it was his first visit to Europe and he's only been here for about three weeks; his name is Lewis and he's got a wife called Mary and a little boy of three called Junior and a baby called Susie and they live in a place called Tacoma. He says he runs a 1938 Ford sedan, I think that's a saloon, and they all go camping in the mountains in it with a tent in the summer because he likes trout fishing and his wife likes riding a horse. I dried up after a bit and presently he got me talking about myself and I told him about Bill and the Junkers, and Daddy, and Dev. I must have been in with him for an hour and a half before he got busy with his stethoscope and blood pressure and all the rest of it, and started making notes about my length of service and all that. And then he said that there was nothing wrong with me except I was tired out so he was sending me on a month's leave. He took two solid hours to get around to that. Lewis C. Ruttenberg. He must be very clever because he didn't seem specially concerned about me, but after a bit I just wanted to tell him all about it and I think it did me good to spill it. He says I've got to have ten hours' sleep each night for the next three nights, and he's given me three little yellow capsules to take when I go to bed, on each night. I've never had anything like that before. I hope they don't make you dream like I've been dreaming lately; I couldn't stand ten hours of that.

~ Oh Bill, I'm sorry about Dev. Do please forgive me. It was all my fault.

There was a long gap then of about six months, and the next entry is headed December 16th, 1944:

~ The last of those foul children went away today, thank God. I told the billeting officer a month ago when I came

back from Henley that my mother couldn't cope with them any longer but he didn't do anything and they just stayed on. I went and saw him on Thursday and told him that I'd murder one of them unless he took them away, and I think he saw I meant it, and I did. So they all went away today and the house is our own for a bit, and we've got a nice black mark against us at the Town Hall. Unpatriotic. We'll have to have somebody with three spare rooms, and I said adults - no children and no babies. My God, I'll be glad when I can get back into the Wrens.