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Title: Requiem for a Wren
Alternate title [U.S.]: The Breaking Wave
Author: Shute, Nevil [Norway, Nevil Shute] (1899-1960)
Date of first publication: 1955
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Ballantine Books, January 1985
   [third printing; first Ballantine edition July 1964]
Date first posted: 22 November 2014
Date last updated: 22 November 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1217

This ebook was produced by Alex White, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained.

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.






                           REQUIEM FOR A WREN

                             by Nevil Shute





       _I shall never be friends again with roses;_
          _I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong_
       _Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes,_
          _As a wave of the sea turned back by song._
       _There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire,_
       _Face to face with its own desire;_
       _A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;_
          _I shall hate sweet music my whole life long._

       _The pulse of war and passion of wonder,_
          _The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,_
       _The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,_
          _The music burning at heart like wine,_
       _An armed archangel whose hands raise up_
       _All senses mixed in the spirit's cup_
       _Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder--_
          _These things are over, and no more mine._

                                                A. C. Swinburne.




                                   1


There was a layer of cumulus, about seven-tenths, with tops at about
five thousand feet as we came to Essendon airport; we broke out of it at
two thousand and we were on the circuit downwind, with the aerodrome on
our starboard wing. I sat with my eyes glued to the window looking out
at Melbourne, because this was my home town and I had been away five
years. The hostess touched me on the arm and drew my attention from the
scene, and told me to fasten my safety belt. I had not seen the sign
light up.

"Sorry," I said.

She smiled, and then she said quietly, "Would you like any help down the
gangway, sir?"

I shook my head. "I'll wait till the others are all off. I'm all right
if I take my time."

She nodded and moved on, courteous and efficient. I wondered how she
knew that going downstairs was the tricky part; perhaps that was a
feature of her training, or perhaps the hostesses on the machine from
San Francisco had told her about me at Sydney. I turned back to the
window to watch the approach to the runway and the landing, and I
remained absorbed in the techniques till the machine came to a
standstill at the terminal building and the engines came to rest.

While the other passengers got off I sat at the window trying to see who
was there to meet me. It was likely to be my father. I hadn't given them
much notice for I had only telegraphed the time of my arrival from
Sydney when I landed there the previous evening and it was barely two
o'clock now; moreover they weren't expecting me for another four days
and we live a hundred and twenty miles from the airport. The wing hid a
good part of the enclosure but I saw nobody I knew. I wondered if I
should have to go in to town to the Club and telephone home from there.

I followed the last passenger down the aisle to the door, and thanked
the hostesses as I passed them. I made slow time down the steps but once
on the flat I was all right, of course, and walked over to the
enclosure. Then I caught sight of a face I knew. It was Harry Drew, our
foreman, come to meet me. It was a warm, summery spring day and Harry
was very smart. He is a man about forty years old, with dark, curly hair
and a youthful figure. He was wearing an opulent-looking American shirt
without a jacket on that warm day, a brown shirt buttoned to the neck
and worn without a tie; his brown-green grazier's trousers were clean
and newly creased and held up with a brand-new embossed belt with a
large, shiny buckle. He caught my eye and half raised his hand in
salutation.

I passed through the gate and he came to meet me. "Morning, Harry," I
said. "How are you today?"

"Good, Mr. Duncan," he replied. "We didn't expect you till Friday." He
took the overnight bag from me.

"I came along a bit quicker than I thought I would," I said.

He was clearly puzzled, as they all must have been by my telegram. "Did
you come on a different ship?" he asked. "We thought you'd be flying
from Fremantle, arriving Saturday morning."

"I didn't come that way," I said. "I had to stay in London a bit longer.
I flew all the way, through New York and San Francisco to Sydney."

"Come the other way round?"

"That's right," I said. We passed into the airport building. "How's my
mother, Harry? She's not here, is she?"

"She didn't come," he said. "She gets out most fine days, but sitting in
the chair most of the time, you know. She don't go away much now. Three
months or more since she went down to Melbourne." He paused by the
newspaper stand. "The colonel, he was coming down to meet you, but we
had a bit of trouble."

"What sort of trouble?" I enquired.

"The house parlourmaid," he said. "Seems like she committed suicide or
something. Anyway, she's dead."

I stared at him. "For God's sake! How did that happen?"

"I don't really know," he said. "It only happened this morning, and I
left about half past ten to get down here to meet you. She took tablets
or something, what they give you to make you sleep."

"She did it last night?"

"That's right, Mr. Alan."

"Who found her?"

"She didn't come down to her work. They get down to the kitchen in the
house about six or quarter past and have a cup of tea. When she didn't
come down Annie went up to her room about seven."

"Old Annie found her?"

"That's right. She was dead. The colonel rang through for me to go up to
the house, 'n soon after I got there Dr. Stanley, he arrived. I suppose
the colonel telephoned for him. But there wasn't anything that he could
do; she was dead all right. So then they got on to the police, and just
about then your telegram came from Sydney saying you'd be coming in
today. The colonel, he couldn't leave home with all that going on to
come down here to meet you, so he said to me to take the Jaguar and come
instead."

I stood by the paper stand while the crowd milled around us. It was a
muddle and a mess, and I was deeply sorry for my father and mother. My
father was over seventy and my mother not much less, and neither of them
in the best of health. Too bad that they should have a nuisance of this
nature thrust on them.

"What did she do it for?" I asked. "In trouble with some man?"

He wrinkled his brows. "I wouldn't think so," he said. "Coombargana's a
small place and not so easy to get away from unless you've got a car of
your own, which she hadn't. She couldn't have been going with one of the
lads at Coombargana and have no one know about it. I wouldn't think it
was that."

"How long had she been with us?"

"About a year. Maybe a bit longer. English, she was."

I nodded; she would have been. English or Dutch or German; an Australian
house parlourmaid is rare indeed. "Well, I wish to God she'd picked
another day to do it," I remarked. He grinned, and we went out to where
the motor coaches stand to claim my luggage.

The Jaguar was two years old but it was still fairly new; as they grew
older my parents were staying more and more at home. They had the Buick,
too, which they still used a lot, that they had got through Singapore
before I went away to England. We put my suitcases in the boot and Harry
said, "Will you drive, Mr. Alan?"

I shook my head; I wanted to be able to see the countryside on this, my
first day back in my own country. "You take her. How long did it take
you to get down here?"

"About two hours and a quarter. I was afraid I'd be late."

Our Australian main roads are straight and good and relatively empty,
but even so an average of over fifty was good going. "You've had
dinner?" I asked.

He nodded. "I got some tucker while I was waiting for the plane. Do you
want to go in to the city before going home?"

I shook my head. "Let's get going and find out what the form is about
this trouble at home."

He nodded, and we got into the car and drove out of the airport. He made
for the Western Highway by a short cut through suburban roads I did not
know; there had been much building on the outskirts of the city since I
left. I did not talk to him till we were clear of the houses and making
good time on the highway out to Bacchus Marsh, but then I began to
question him about the property.

"Let's see," he said. "It was after you went away that the colonel sold
the hard land up on Baldy Hill to the Commission, for resumption? Five
thousand two hundred acres he let go, for the soldier settlers. All the
bit on the far side of the road, from the crossroads up to Sinclair's
place." I nodded. "They cut it up into eleven lots, with eleven houses;
there's chaps in seven of them now and four houses still finishing." He
dropped to forty for a moment behind a trailer truck and then
accelerated past it and up to seventy-five again. "I was sorry when the
colonel decided to do that," he said, "but thinking it over, maybe he
was right. What's left is all good land, and we've got enough."

"That leaves us with about thirteen thousand acres?"

"Thirteen thousand three hundred and eighty-seven," he replied.

"What are we running on that now?"

"Thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred and forty Merinos all told," he
said. "That's counting this year's lambs, of course. Six hundred and
eighty-two Herefords."

I nodded, indexing the figures in my memory. This was my business from
now on, and everything that I had known and been in Europe was behind
me. "Finished the shearing?" I enquired.

"Finished last Friday week," he said.

"How did it run out?"

"Good," he said. "We sheared seven hundred and sixteen bales this year."
A bale of wool contains three hundred pounds in weight, and at the
prices that I knew were current it was worth about a hundred and sixty
pounds, taking an average of the grades. Our wool clip must have been
worth a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds or so, and then there would
be the sales of cattle and of lambs on top of that. Take away the costs
of running the property, say thirty or forty thousand pounds, and we
were still left with an income of over a hundred thousand pounds for
tax. It had been like that for several years.

"That's all right," I said. "How many did we shear last year?"

"Six hundred and seventy-eight bales, Mr. Alan," he said. "It's the
improved pastures doing it. We sowed another five hundred acres last
autumn, across the river, from where we make the firebreak by the marsh
up to the main road, Phalaris and Sub Clover."

"Up to where Harrison's place is?"

"That's right, only Harrison's not there now. He got another property
over by Ararat. His place was resumed."

As we went on into the Western District through Bacchus Marsh to
Ballarat he told me all about the property. My father had been ploughing
back much of the profits in to the land and saving the rest for death
duties. He was determined to improve the carrying capacity of the
property by mechanization and re-seeding paddocks and pasture
conservation. Silage was made in a big way for winter feed, a novelty
since I was at home last, and there were now four big diesel tractors on
the place, one of them a crawler. Horses were still used by the boundary
riders but draught horses had vanished from Coombargana, and my father
drove all over the property in a Land Rover instead of riding on a horse
as he had always done when I was young. That suited me, for artificial
feet are something of a handicap upon a horse. There was a great deal
for me to learn about the property before I could unload some of the
work from my parents, and I was quite keen to make a start. First of
all, it would be necessary to clean up this infernal business of the
house parlourmaid, however.

We passed through Bacchus Marsh and up over the Pentland Hills. On that
fine, sunny, warm October day the air was like wine, with all the
glistening glamour and the scents of spring. The view was superb from
the top; I could see right over to Geelong forty miles away, and the
blue curve of the bay as it swung round to Queenscliff and the Heads.
Over to the west, ahead of us, the long blue ridge of the Grampians was
already showing up over the horizon, over a hundred miles away and
twenty miles or so past Coombargana. We dropped down off the hills at
eighty miles an hour on the way to Ballarat, and there were the long
gorse hedges all in bloom that the property owners in that part affect,
mile after mile of them, scenting the countryside in the warm sun as we
drove on into the Western District.

This was my own country, and I was glad to be home. When I had come home
before I had disliked it all, and fretted bad-temperedly till I got away
again. That was in 1946 when I had come out of hospital in England,
stumbling along insecurely on my dummy feet. On board the ship I had
tried to do too much and had fallen a couple of times in the rough
weather of the Bay; after that I had stayed in my cabin most of the
time, angry and frustrated. When I had come home it was all too easy and
too pleasant for me in the Western District. The wartime restlessness
was still on me and the European sense of strife and urgency; I could do
little that was effective at Coombargana with my disability and my
father was still active and well capable of getting along without me. I
stuck it for two years, because it seemed to me that now that Bill was
dead and Helen married I ought to be at home learning to carry on the
property, but it didn't work out well. By 1948 I was safe on my feet and
able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was
slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that
age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to
feel I should go crazy if I didn't get away from it to England again,
where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they
made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a
year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago.

What I didn't realize then was that it wasn't England I was really
fretting for. It was my lost youth.

I came back this time with a quieter mind, my youth behind me and all
packed away. I was thirty-nine, middle-aged and mature, able to realize
and to appreciate that it was not only in England that important things
went on, that there were things of consequence and value going on even
in my own country. Even the job that I had spurned before, the job of
running Coombargana to turn out more meat and wool each year, now seemed
to me to be worth doing, not one that would impress the world or get me
a knighthood, but a job within my powers and worth doing in a gentle,
unsensational way. I owed it to my parents to come home for they were
getting tired and old, and sometimes rather ill, and now that I was home
I was glad that I had come.

We drove into the suburbs of Ballarat and went trickling along like a
twenty-year-old Austin Seven. I turned to Harry by my side. "This bloody
parlourmaid," I said. "You say she was English. Do you know if she had
any relations in Australia?"

"I never heard she had, Mr. Alan," he replied. "Your dad might know."

"Did my parents get her through a registry office?"

He shook his head. "She turned up in Forfar at the Post Office Hotel one
day, by bus from Ballarat, I think it was. Working her way round the
world, with a rucksack on her back--hiking, you might say. She worked in
the hotel with Mrs. Collins for a week or two. Then she come out with
the postman one day for the ride. Your parents had a Polish married
couple but the man was always on the grog, 'n your dad gave them the
sack. Then this girl came along and offered herself for the job, and
your mother took her on."

"How long ago was that?"

"Let's see," he said. "It was wintertime. August, I'd say--August a year
ago."

I thought about it for a minute. "Do you know where she went for her
holiday?"

"I don't think she took one--not while she was working at Coombargana."

"What was her name?"

"Jessie Proctor."

He wove the Jaguar skilfully through the traffic of the town and drove
out down the Avenue of Honour and turned off on to the Skipton road.
"You may find your parents kind of upset," he said presently. "She was
the best help they had in the house since I've been at Coombargana. I
think they liked her, too."

"They did?"

"I think so, Mr. Alan." He paused, and then said awkwardly, "I thought
you ought to know, case you might say anything rough about her, not
knowing."

I nodded. "Thanks for telling me." We drove along in silence while I
thought this over. "If she was happy in the place whatever made her go
and do a thing like that?"

"I dunno, Mr. Alan," he replied. "I dunno what makes girls go and do the
things they do."

I sat silent, thinking all this over. If my mother had grown attached to
this girl it made things so much the worse, and nothing was more likely
if she was a decent girl. My mother was now crippled with arthritis and
could not get about very much, so that she met few people and perhaps
was rather lonely, which was one of the reasons why I had come home. In
a big house like Coombargana that must be run with indoor servants,
unsatisfactory servants can be a continual worry and a nuisance to a
woman in my mother's state of health, and they had had a long succession
of married couples who had come for a few days and departed without
notice because the place was too isolated, or had quarrelled with Annie
our old cook, or had got drunk, or had stolen things. If in the end a
girl had turned up who worked happily at Coombargana and made no trouble
it was very likely that my mother would have grown to depend on her and
might even have treated her more as a companion than as a servant. An
English girl working her way round the world would be a well-informed
person, possibly even well educated. She might have been a great comfort
to my mother.

We passed through Skipton while I sat in silence thinking of these
things and many others and ran on into the undulating pastoral landscape
that was my own place, a county not unlike Wiltshire in England but
without the people, so that you can stand on almost any hilltop and look
all round the horizon and see nothing but the pastures and the sheep,
with no sign of man except perhaps one fence in the far distance. There
are shallow lakes and trout streams, seldom fished because they are too
distant from the city, and most of the homesteads are located beside
permanent water anyway so that anyone who cares for fishing can catch a
trout with fly or worm within a few hundred yards of his own home. A
lonely country for those who are not interested in the land, and bleak
in winter when we usually get quite a lot of snow. In summer, a country
in continual danger from grass fires, so that we spend much time and
energy in planting wide strips of green crops such as rape for
firebreaks. A summer fire that gets out of control in my country can
wipe out all the pasture feed and fifty thousand pounds' worth of sheep
in a couple of days. A country with not much mental stimulus outside the
land, so that those who dislike us and call us the wool barons say that
we all sink to the mental level of the sheep, and get to look like them,
too.

We came to Forfar, which is our village and about six miles from
Coombargana, a little place of one long street straggling on the
highway. Not much seemed to have changed there; there were a couple of
new stores and electricity had reached the place while I had been away.
For the rest it was unaltered; I saw Tom Hicks the garage owner at his
pumps and waved my hand to him, and then we turned off on the gravel
road to my home.

Presently we came in sight of the house, backed by tall pine trees that
shelter it from the west, with the river curling round before it.
Coombargana is my home and I would not willingly live anywhere else, but
architecturally I will admit that the house isn't everybody's cup of
tea. My grandfather, Alan Duncan, built it about 1897. He was born at
Ellon between Peterhead and Aberdeen in 1845, the son of a small farmer.
He came out to Australia when he was twenty years old to make his
fortune in the goldfields of Ballarat, but gold was already big business
by the time he got there, and he soon tired of working for a wage in a
mine. Within a year he had moved further out to farm, and took up land
at Coombargana with the first settlers. By the time he was fifty he was
running sheep on thirty thousand acres, and able to afford what he
called a gentleman's house.

He made a trip home in 1895 to see his relations, and while in Ellon he
went to see the Queen's house at Balmoral; I doubt if he saw the Queen.
He returned to Coombargana with a picture postcard of Balmoral Castle
and set himself to build a house like that, but on a smaller scale.
There was no architect in the countryside to help him and the only
materials that the builder could produce were a peculiarly ugly red
brick, and concrete. The house that evolved was a castle that looked
like no castle has ever looked before, yet inside it was comfortable and
well designed; a good house to live in. It was like that till his death
in 1922; I remember it well as a child. When my father inherited it he
took down eleven little spires that ornamented the battlements and
started to grow creepers over it to tone it down a bit but the possums
used the creepers as a ladder to get in to the roof. My father had the
creepers removed and painted the whole thing cream in colour, which did
away with the hot look in summer anyway. In 1938 my parents spent some
months in England and my mother came back all steamed up about the
modern dcor, and painted all the outside doors and window frames
crimson.

Well, that's Coombargana. It's my home, and I like it.

We crossed the river by the wooden bridge and swung round towards the
house, and passed in to the drive between the great mossy concrete gate
pillars. The place was well cared for, because my parents keep two
gardeners going all the time, the enormous macrocarpa hedges neatly
clipped in rectangular forms, the drive and the gravel sweep up to the
house freshly raked and free from weeds. There are many better houses
than Coombargana in England, but not many so well kept. The beds of
daffodils were bright in the sunlight, masses of them, and behind the
japonica bushes the camellias in bloom made a brave show of colour.

The Jaguar drew up before the door and I thanked Harry and got out. The
red door opened and my father was there on the steps to meet me. I knew,
of course, that he would be older but I had not visualized him in old
age; one always remembers people as they were when last you saw them. My
father was thinner than he had been and his face had a white, pallid hue
I didn't like at all, but he was the same old Dad.

He said, "Hullo, Alan. You're back earlier than we thought."

"I know," I said. "I got hung up in London and had to miss the boat. I
flew through America."

"So that was it!" he said. "We thought you must have flown. How did you
get the dollars to come through America?"

I grinned. "There are ways and means."

He laughed. "Well, come on in and see your mother." Harry was unloading
my two suitcases from the boot. "Stick them just inside the door, Harry,
and I'll get John to take them up presently." He turned to me. "I'm not
allowed to lift anything now."

"I can manage them," I said. "I can take them up, one at a time."

He hesitated. "Would you rather do that?"

I nodded. "I like doing everything I can."

"All right." He said no more about my disability, but told Harry to put
the car away. We went together into the great hall.

"You're looking very well," he said.

I grinned. "Wish I could say the same of you, Dad. You're not looking
too good."

"Ah well," he said, "we none of us get any younger, and this has been
rather a trying day. I expect Harry told you about the trouble here?"

I nodded. "I was very sorry to hear it."

"We'll talk about that later," he said. "Come on and see your mother. I
kept her in bed today." He paused, and then he said, "Did I tell you
that we sleep on the ground floor now?"

I was surprised. "No."

He nodded. "Your mother can't manage the stairs alone. It was either
that or putting in a lift. We turned the billiard room into our bedroom
with the gunroom as my dressing room, and put the billiard table up in
what used to be our bedroom. It's worked out quite well. Matter of fact,
I like it better."

He led the way into the old billiard room. They had redecorated it, and
with the French windows opening on to the lawn it made a sunny, pleasant
room. My mother was sitting up in bed, not very much changed in her
appearance. I went over and kissed her. "Back at last," I said. "You're
looking very well, Mum."

She held me for a moment. "Oh, Alan dear," she said, "it _is_ nice to
have you back. But how did you get here so soon?"

I told her my story about being held up in London and missing the ship,
and complimented her on the arrangement of the room. My father went out
and Mother asked me about Helen, and I spent a few minutes answering all
her questions about my sister in London.

Helen was the youngest of us; she had gone to England in 1946 when she
was twenty-four, avid to get away into a wider world, like many young
Australians. In England she had gone all arty and crafty and had picked
up with a chap called Laurence Hilton who worked for the BBC and put on
plays for the Third Programme. She married him in 1947 and had not been
home since; they had one child, rather an unpleasant little boy. I had
tried to like Laurence and to get alongside him but we had very little
in common. Privately I thought him a phoney and I suspected that he had
seen Helen coming because, of course, she had a good bit of money behind
her. However, she seemed happy with him and had adopted most of his
views, including the one that Australia was a cultural desert that no
decent person would dream of living in. His earning capacity, of course,
was quite inadequate for the life they wished to lead. They have a very
pleasant little house in Cheyne Walk overlooking the river where they
entertain a lot of visitors from ivory towers, and Coombargana pays.

I annoyed Laurence very much one day by referring to my father as a
patron of the arts. I'd probably have annoyed my father too if he'd
known.

I gave my mother a roseate, expurgated account of Helen and Laurence and
their way of life, stressing its importance and the reputation that
Laurence Hilton was building up in the artistic world. My father came in
again then, pushing a tea trolley, for my parents live and eat in the
English way with dinner at eight o'clock in the evening. There was
trouble about the tea, because my father had brought the wrong sort of
cups and had forgotten the tea strainer and the hot water jug, and my
mother sent him off to get them.

"We're all a bit upside down today," she said sadly. "We haven't had to
do this ourselves for so long."

"I know," I said. "Harry told me. I was very sorry to hear about it."

"Yes," my mother said quietly, "it's been a very great blow to us, Alan.
I'm so sorry that it had to happen on the very day that you come home."

"That's all right," I said. "I'm glad in a way it did happen now, if it
had to. Dad doesn't look too fit."

"I think he's just tired today," Mother said. "He had that operation
last year, you remember." I nodded. "The specialist assured us that it
was non-malignant. I think it's just that he's tired and upset."

"I should think so," I said, but I didn't think so at all. "Tell me, has
there got to be an inquest?"

She nodded. "Dr. Bateman, he's the coroner. He's coming out tomorrow
morning, with the police. Dr. Stanley was here again this afternoon. I
think there's got to be a post mortem."

"Why did she do it, Mum?" I asked. "Was she depressed?"

"I don't think so," she said. "She was just as usual, I think. She was a
very reserved girl, Alan. She never talked about herself or her own
affairs, like most women do. It was rather difficult to know what she
thought of anything. She was always just about the same."

"Was she attractive, Mother? Attractive to men?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. She was rather plain. I'm sure it
wasn't anything like that."

It was puzzling; we seemed to have come to a dead end. "Have you got any
idea why she did it?"

My mother said, "I think it was an accident, Alan. I think it must have
been. There was this bottle of sleeping tablets by her bedside, quite a
big bottle, with only two left in it. Dr. Stanley said he thought she
must have taken at least twenty." She paused. "_I_ think she took one,
perhaps, when she went to bed and then had a nightmare or something, and
got up, sort of sleep walking, and took tablet after tablet. I'm _sure_
it was an accident."

It was a possibility. "There were two tablets left in the bottle?"

"Yes."

"If she was going to commit suicide," I said, "she'd have taken the lot.
She'd want to make sure of it. You don't think she had any motive for
wanting to make away with herself, Mother?"

"I'm sure she hadn't, Alan. She seemed just the same as ever."

I thought for a moment. "Did she get any letters yesterday?"

"She never had any."

"Never had any letters?"

My father came back with the tea strainer and the hot water jug and put
them on the trolley. "I was telling Alan about Jessie," she said, and
now there was a suspicion of moisture about her eyes, and a break in her
voice. "He was asking if she got a letter yesterday."

"She never got any mail at all, according to Annie," my father said.
"She never got a letter all the time that she'd been here. I never saw
one addressed to her, and nor did Annie."

"I never did," said my mother.

I stared at them. "That's very unusual, surely. Did she write any?"

"I don't think so," said my father. "I usually take the mail in when I
go, but she never gave me one to take. I don't even know her
handwriting. Annie says she never wrote a letter, and she never got
one."

"Could she write?" I asked. Sometimes a domestic servant can't.

"Oh yes. She was a well-educated girl," my mother said. "Very well
educated. _I_ knew her handwriting. She used to take down messages on
the pad in the hall, when someone telephoned. You've seen them, Richard.
You _do_ know her handwriting."

My father said, "Oh, yes, of course I do. But that's the only place I've
ever seen it."

My mother leaned from her bed and poured out the tea. "Do you know
anything about her relations?" I asked. "You've sent a telegram?"

My father said, "We haven't, Alan. There's not a scrap of anything in
her room to tell us who she was."

My mind, of course, was still concerned with the details of travel.
"There must be something," I said. "Vaccination and inoculation
certificates. She must have had a passport, too."

My father said, "There isn't anything at all, Alan. There's no document
of any sort in her room. There's only her clothes and a few novels.
Practically all of those are from the house, too."

"That's all right," my mother said, and again there was a tremor in her
voice. "I told her she could read any of the books she wanted to, at any
time."

She passed me my tea, and I sat with it in my hand in silence for a
minute. I did not want to say what I was thinking, that here was clear
evidence of suicide, because my mother wanted to believe it was an
accident and maybe it was better that she should. But if the girl before
her death had taken pains to destroy evidence of her identity it meant
that her death was planned beforehand. It must mean that.

I glanced at my father. "So we've got nobody to telegraph to, to tell
them that she's dead? We don't know who she was, or where she came
from?"

"That's right, Alan," said my father. "We don't know who she was, or
where she came from. She came to us from the Post Office Hotel," and he
went on to tell me what I knew already.

My mother said, "Annie says that she had worked in Sydney. She thinks
she came from England several years ago. But I don't think that's right.
She said once that she only landed in Australia a few weeks before she
came to us from the hotel."

"She never told anyone what she'd been doing before she came to Forfar,
to the hotel?" I asked.

My mother shook her head. "She never talked about herself at all."

"She was probably married," I suggested.

My parents stared at me in astonishment; the thought was quite a new one
to them. I said slowly, "An unsatisfactory marriage, here in Australia,
that she wanted to forget about. That would explain why she didn't talk
about her past life. If all her documents were in her married name, it
would explain why she destroyed them. She would have wanted to make a
completely fresh start."

My father said, "Well, that's a new idea entirely." He paused. "It
certainly seems to fit the facts."

I pursued my line of thought. "Proctor is almost certainly her maiden
name. We'll have to try and find the husband, or the police will. I
suppose it's their job. He'll have to be found and told about her death.
They'll have to start looking for a man who married an English girl
called Jessie Proctor, probably in Sydney, probably two or three years
ago, and who probably left him fifteen or sixteen months ago, a little
time before she fetched up in Forfar and came to you. It'll mean a bit
of work for them, but it won't take them very long."

My father sighed with relief. "I think you've got it, Alan," he said.
"It's far the most likely idea so far. And it accounts for everything."
He turned to me. "I don't mind telling you, I've been worried over this.
The inquest is tomorrow, and it's going to make a lot of trouble if we
don't know who she is."

"Don't worry about it, Dad," I said. It seemed to me that he was in no
state to get worked up about anything, and I had come home to unload
him. "I'll go to the inquest."

"I'll have to come with you," he said. "It would certainly be a help if
you came too, Alan. I suppose living here in the country one gets rather
out of touch with the world. It certainly never occurred to me that she
might be a married woman."

My mother said nothing, and it seemed to me that we had talked about
this rather unsavoury business long enough. I began to ask them
questions about the property. Rabbits, it seemed, were now reduced to
manageable proportions thanks to myxomatosis and my father's energy. The
result had been a progressive increase in the stock upon the property,
partly due to pasture improvement but mostly, I think, due to the
reduction of rabbits. Old Jim Plowden who had been a boundary rider when
I went away had fallen from his horse and broken his thigh some years
ago; as he was over sixty my father had put him in charge of the rabbit
pack, a miscellaneous assortment of about thirty mongrel dogs kept in a
kennel and run as a disciplined force in the war against the rabbit.
This war went on continuously with tractor-drawn rippers to destroy the
warrens, with smoke bombs and ferrets, and above all with the rabbit
pack to chase and destroy the vermin as they were flushed from their
burrows. Seven rabbits will eat as much feed as a sheep, and on
Coombargana after the neglect of the war years there must have been a
hundred thousand rabbits, or more.

My father had been experimenting with spreading super-phosphate from the
air on paddocks that were too rough and stony to make spreading it from
trucks a possibility, and this again had increased the carrying capacity
of the land. Two Tiger Moths had done the work efficiently and well, and
he was going to have more paddocks treated in this way in the coming
summer. He had built new shearers' quarters soon after I had left, which
I had never seen, of course, and in the last year he had largely
remodelled the shearing shed and had installed new machinery throughout.
He had built four new weatherboard houses for the station hands to
replace the last of the older, two-roomed shacks of my grandfather's
time, and a couple of years ago he had put up a considerable power
station with a diesel engine of no less than sixty horsepower to provide
electricity not only for our house but for each of the eleven houses on
the property.

My father was only able to give me the bare outline of all these
activities during tea, and my mother, of course, wanted to know all
about my life in London so that we had much to talk about. My mother
seemed much brighter when she had had her tea, and announced her
intention of getting up for dinner, which I thought was a good thing and
better for her than lying in bed thinking about the dead parlourmaid
upstairs. It was arranged that my father would drive me round the
property for a couple of hours in the Land Rover before dinner while my
mother got up and dressed and organized the dinner with Annie our old
cook and Mrs. Plowden, who was usually brought in to help with the
washing up in times of domestic crisis.

We finished tea and put the cups and plates back on the tea trolley,
which my father proceeded to wheel out through the big, galleried
central hall to the pantry. I stayed for a moment with my mother before
going out to carry my suitcases up to my bedroom on the upper floor.

My mother said, "I think you're wrong about Jessie, Alan."

"In what way?" I asked. "Wrong about what?"

"About her being married," said my mother quietly. "I'm sure she
wasn't."

I was silent, because it's a difficult subject for a bachelor to dispute
with a woman of my mother's age. "Did she ever say she wasn't?" I asked
at last.

My mother shook her head. "She never said anything at all about her own
affairs. But I'm quite sure she wasn't married."




                                   2


As old age had crept upon my father and mother they had reduced the
scale of their expenditure upon themselves to quite a small proportion
of their net income. They never had kept racehorses as many of our
neighbours do, and they had outgrown the pleasures of spending money.
They got a book each month through the Book Society and they bought a
few gramophone records when they were in Melbourne, but with increasing
years and infirmity they got more pleasure out of old things than new,
out of old books that they had read fifteen or twenty years before and
turned back to now with pleasure, out of old gramophone records, out of
furniture that they had bought thirty years ago when they took over
Coombargana.

Helen's allowance and my own had absorbed a good slice of their net
income after taxation, which in recent years had fluctuated between
twenty and thirty thousand pounds a year. Much of the rest had been
saved and invested prudently to provide for death duties on an estate
which might well be assessed at a quarter of a million pounds upon my
father's death, but this cash reserve was now adequate for any calls
that were likely to be made on it. In other countries and in other
circles a prosperity such as ours might be accompanied by wild parties
in the city, with a nude girl in a bath of champagne in the middle of
the dinner table and a dozen crashed motor cars next morning. In the
Western District things have never been like that; perhaps an
agricultural prosperity doesn't go that way. Certainly Australian wool
producers, those who survived the hard times of the thirties when wool
was down to a shilling a pound, got such an economic fright as would
keep them in the straight and narrow path for the rest of their lives. I
can vouch for it that at Coombargana and all the other stations that I
know the money made seems to be spent prudently and well.

My father's great interest was in the property, and all his spare money
was now going into improvements. Wherever I looked as we drove round in
the Land Rover there was something new, new stockyards, new spray sheep
dips, new vehicles, new pumps, new generators, new houses, new fences,
new windmills, and new dams. In the hard times before the second war,
when I was a boy at Coombargana, much of this expenditure would have
been classed as rank extravagance, but times had changed and my father
had had the wit to change with them. Labour costs had trebled since the
thirties and the output of the property had doubled, so that any machine
that would save an hour of a man's time was now a good machine.

We went into the long shearing shed, now empty and swept clean, of
course, for the shearing was over and the shed would remain unused till
next year. He showed me how he had rearranged the stands and the tables
and the bins, and the new machinery. He had made a job of it all right;
I could visualize the production line, so to speak, when this place was
going full blast and sheep were passing through at the rate of three
hundred an hour. I was keenly interested in all that he had done for
this was my job from now on, but the dead parlourmaid was still in the
background of my mind.

We rested for a few minutes in the long, cool aisle of the shed, leaning
against a table, looking around. "Mother doesn't seem to think much of
my idea that the girl was married," I said.

"She doesn't?"

I shook my head.

"I'd never thought of her as a married woman, myself," my father
remarked. "She might have been, of course."

"How old was she?"

"Twenty-eight or thirty, I should say. It's difficult to judge."

"Harry said she never took a holiday."

"I don't think she did. I think she went into Ballarat once or twice for
shopping, but apart from that I don't think she left the place the whole
time she was here."

I wrinkled my brows. "What did she do on her days off?"

He thought for a minute. "I think she was interested in the property,"
he said. "She used to go out with Jim Plowden and the rabbit pack. I
think she liked the dogs. She liked shooting, too. I never had much to
do with her outside; she kept her place, you know. The men say that she
was a very fine shot at rabbits, either with a gun or a rifle. They say
she never seemed to miss." He paused. "I've been wondering if she was a
farmer's daughter perhaps, back at home."

I nodded. "You don't know what part of England she came from?"

"I don't," he said. "Annie thinks she came from London, but I don't
think she really knows."

"That doesn't line up with her being a farmer's daughter."

"I know."

We sat silent for a minute. Then I glanced at him, and said, "The
coroner's coming here tomorrow morning, with the police?"

He nodded. "They've got to give a certificate for burial. There'll have
to be an inquest, of course."

"Bit awkward, if we don't know who she was."

He bit his lip. "I know," he said. I glanced at him, and there was an
old man's tremor moving his head, the first time I had seen it. "It
makes us look--well, careless."

"I wouldn't worry about that, Dad," I said. "It's not as if she was a
young girl that you were responsible for. She was a grown woman."

His hands moved to his chin, as if to stop the tremor. "I know," he
replied. "But it looks bad all the same. As if we didn't care."

He turned to me. "It's a very good thing for your mother that you've
come home, Alan. It's going to take her mind off it. Be with her as much
as you can till the funeral is over. Tell her about England--anything."

"She's going to miss her, is she?"

He nodded. "She's going to miss her a great deal. When a woman's getting
on in years and not very well, it's a great comfort to have a girl about
the place who's sensible and responsible. She's a great loss to your
mother, Alan."

I nodded slowly. "Mother was fond of her?"

"I think so. Yes, I think she was," my father said. "The girl kept her
place, but she used to think ahead and do things for your mother before
she thought of asking for them, if you understand what I mean. She was
very thoughtful for your mother in that way."

If she had been thoughtful for my mother it seemed to indicate that she
had liked being at Coombargana; indeed, everything that I had heard
seemed to point that way. She had never even bothered to take the
holidays that were due her. Then why had she taken her own life? I
glanced at my father. "What do you think about this theory of Mother's,
that it was an accident?" I asked. "I didn't want to say too much in
front of Mother. Would you say she was a suicidal type?"

He said, "I simply don't know, Alan. I don't know what a suicidal type
looks like. To me she was just an ordinary, decent girl, not very good
looking. I wouldn't have expected her to commit suicide--I'd have said
she was too level-headed. But who's to say?"

"Do you think it was an accident, Dad?" I asked. "I've never heard of
anyone taking an overdose of sleeping tablets by mistake. I mean, you've
got to eat such a lot, and gulp down such a lot of water. How many does
the doctor say she took?"

"More than twenty."

"Well, surely to God, that couldn't have been a mistake. You can't go on
taking tablet after tablet till you've taken twenty, by mistake. If it
had been one, or even two, it might be possible. But not twenty."

"If it was deliberate," my father said, "she wouldn't have left two
tablets in the bottle, would she? She'd have taken the lot, to make
sure."

There was a pause. "I can't think it was an accident," I said at last.
"I'm sorry, Dad, but I should say it was deliberate."

He stood up, and I was deeply sorry for him, for he looked so old.
"Well, don't tell your mother that," he said. "It's better if she thinks
it was an accident. I'm hoping that we'll get the coroner to see it that
way in the morning. If it _was_ deliberate we'll probably never know the
reason, and there's no sense in stirring up trouble."

We left the shed and got back into the Land Rover and went on with our
tour around the property. In the evening light we came to his trout
hatchery by the river, a series of little pools with water running
through controlled by little sluices from the river, overhung by weeping
willow trees. When I had written to tell them that I would be coming
home next spring my father had had this disused hatchery put in order
and had commenced to breed up about a thousand little fish with which to
re-stock the river against my return; he intended to keep them a few
months longer and then discharge them into the main stream. Next year
the fishing should be very good indeed.

We paused by the pools, in the rippling sound of running water, and he
began to ask me questions about my time in England. I had taken my
degree in Law at Oxford, but I hadn't enjoyed it much. "It was a bit
like Rip van Winkle, Dad," I said. "I was so much older than the others,
and things had changed so. It would have been different if I'd gone back
straight after the war, in 1945 or '46, when there were other service
people up. There was no one there like me in 1948, or hardly anybody,
and nobody at all when I went down in 1950. They were all boys straight
from school on government grants. The people I got along with best were
the young dons." I paused. "I want to get one or two of them out here on
a visit, but it's difficult because they're all so hard up."

He nodded. "That's always a difficulty. But you never can get people to
come out from England on a visit. It's not only the money."

I went on to tell him about my time in chambers, in Lincoln's Inn. "I
don't know that I haven't wasted my time," I said quietly at last. "I
don't know that being called to the Bar is going to help me much in
running Coombargana."

He smiled. "Do you think you'll want to go back and live in England?" he
asked.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think I've got that out of my system. I'd
like to go back again some day for fun, say in about ten years' time,
and see how it's all getting on. But I won't want to live there again. I
don't think so."

"Not like Helen?"

"No."

"What's Laurence really like?" my father asked. He had never met him,
for with their increasing age my mother and father had not felt equal to
leaving Coombargana to travel to England. It was one of my secret
irritations with my sister that she had not thought fit to bring her
husband out to Australia on a visit to let Dad and Mum meet him, though
perhaps it was better so.

"He's all right," I said. "I've not got a lot in common with him, Dad,
and I don't think you would have." My father had served all through the
first war in Gallipoli and France, and had spent three years of the
second war organizing truck transport in the heat and sweat of the
Northern Territory when he was over sixty years of age, while Laurence
had had trouble with his health and had served his war with the BBC.
"There's nothing wrong with him. He's getting very well known as a
dramatic critic--people think a lot of him." I glanced at my father.
"I'm not sure that he's not a bit of a passenger in this world, but he
probably thinks that of us."

"He's making her a good husband, is he? Not a lot of other women, or not
more than a reasonable number?" My father grinned.

I laughed with him. "I don't think there's any trouble of that sort."
There wasn't likely to be, either, because Helen has quite a lot of
character and she kept control of her own money. Laurence wasn't the
type to sacrifice all for love.

"What about you, Alan?" my father asked. "Did you ever think of getting
married?"

I shook my head.

"You ought to think about it," he said. "You're getting on, you know.
Thirty-nine, isn't it?"

I nodded. "It's never happened to come my way."

"You ought to think about it," he repeated. "It's going to be mighty
lonely if you try and carry on this place alone after our time."

"It's not so easy when you're a cripple," I said. "It needs special
qualities in a girl to settle down married to a chap that's got no
feet."

"Well, think it over," he said irresolutely. And then he said, "You
never thought of flying again, I suppose?"

"As a matter of fact, I did," I told him. "Not in Typhoons, of course. I
did quite a lot of flying at the London Aeroplane Club, at Panshanger,
on Tiger Moths and Austers. I didn't tell you in the letters because I
was afraid it might worry Mother."

"Are you going on with it here?"

"I doubt it," I said. "I just wanted to show myself that I wasn't afraid
of it and that I could do it still, even with dummy feet. I did about a
hundred hours in all. But I don't want to carry on with it, unless there
is some object. Which there isn't, now."

He smiled. "What was it like when you got into the machine for the first
time?" he asked with interest. "Were you scared?"

"A bit," I said. "About as much as on my first solo. But of course, one
knew it was dead safe in a pipsqueak thing like that."

We left the pools of the trout hatchery and walked slowly back to the
Land Rover. "Your mother's been concocting an exceptional dinner for you
all day," my father said. "Do you want to change?"

"She'd like it, wouldn't she?" I asked. "What do you usually do?"

"I generally put on a dinner jacket in the winter, when it's dark," my
father said. "In summer when one may want to go out afterwards I usually
change into a suit."

"I've got a dinner jacket in my bag," I said. "The shirt's probably a
bit tatty after travelling round the world. Let's change. Mother'ld like
it."

At the house we found my mother in the drawing room seated before the
log fire, wearing a long black evening dress with a shawl round her
shoulders. We stood warming ourselves, for the evening was turning
chilly, and drinking a pink gin while we chatted about London and about
Helen; then I went up to my room to change. In my bedroom somebody had
lit a fire and left a huge basket of gum tree logs, scenting the air
with the fragrance of the burning eucalypt. Somebody, perhaps old Annie,
had unpacked one suitcase and had laid out my evening clothes upon the
bed.

It struck me as I unpacked my other suitcase in my old, familiar room,
savouring all my old belongings, that I would be the only person
sleeping on the upper floor of the main house that night. My father and
mother who had had the bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom next to mine
now slept on the ground floor and their bedroom was now the billiard
room. On the other side of the corridor to their room was the corner
room that had been Helen's and was now a spare room, and next to that
and separated by the second bathroom was the guest bedroom, empty
tonight, of course. Beside my room there was another bathroom, and
opening from that was Bill's room, very seldom used now. Bill had been
killed in Normandy in the spring of 1944; by the time I got back to
Coombargana my father and mother had taken all Bill's possessions and
pictures out and had refurnished and redecorated the room as a second
guest room, thinking perhaps that too intimate a reminder of Bill and
the war in Europe would have been bad for me. Nothing of Bill remained
there now, but they had forgotten the bathroom. Since 1946 I had never
sat in that bath without glancing at the door into Bill's room with the
thought that it would open and he would come striding in, seventeen or
eighteen years old, with little or no clothes on.

That happened to me again that evening as I bathed before dressing for
dinner. Bill was still a very real person in my life, though nine years
had gone by since I had met him last, at Lymington in Hampshire, and
sixteen years since we had shared that bathroom. One does not easily
forget one's only brother.

As I sat in the bath thinking of these things and enjoying the benison
of hot water after days spent in the aeroplane and in the Sydney hotel,
I felt a little lonely up there on the first floor by myself. I was not
quite alone, of course. Beyond the stairs and the gallery that
overlooked the big central hall of the house lay the servants' wing over
the kitchen quarters, their bedrooms separated from those of the main
house by a swing door. There were four servants' bedrooms there, relic
of the days of more plentiful domestic service, and in one of these
Annie, our old cook, would be sleeping that night. In another, the house
parlourmaid would be sleeping now.

I had not drawn the curtains, and there was still a little light outside
as I dressed before the fire. I stood for a few minutes looking out in
the last of the light before turning to the mirror to tie my tie. Below
me the wide lawns ran down to the river, with the formal flower gardens
upon the right and the screen of oaks, gums, wattles, and pines upon the
left that hid the station buildings. Beyond the river our pastures
stretched over and beyond the rise a couple of miles away, and far on
the horizon the long ridge of the Grampians stood black against the last
of the sunset light. There was contentment here, with no war and no
threat of war, no aircraft, no tanks and no soldiers. This was a place
to which a man might come when he had had the great world and its
alarms, to do a good job in peace. Some day a war might come again and I
would have to leave my peace and go and do my stuff as my father had
before me, but for the moment I was glad to be out of it all and back at
Coombargana as a grazier.

I finished dressing and went down to the drawing room. My father and
mother were both there waiting for me and wanting to know if everything
in my room had been all right. "Fine," I said. "I might have walked out
yesterday instead of five years ago," and I laughed. Actually, in five
years one changes and there were things in that room that I would alter
as soon as I could. There were things there that I now had no need of,
like the stick from my crashed Typhoon, or the compass from the first
M.E. 109 I got, over Wittering. These things had solaced me in 1946, but
that was seven years ago; I did not need them now, and they were better
out of the way.

I had another pink gin with my father, and then dinner was announced.
Mrs. Plowden put her head in at the door. She was untidy as ever with a
wisp of grey hair falling down over her face; her sleeves were rolled to
the elbow and she wore a coarse apron of hessian. She said brightly,
"It's all in, on the table, Mrs. Duncan." My mother thanked her, and she
withdrew.

I saw my mother glance at my father, and caught his glance in return.
Things must have been different in the days of the parlourmaid, and they
had to adjust themselves to new ways and new manners.

We went into the dining room. To me the bare, polished table with the
lace mats and the silver was well laid, but to my mother everything was
in the wrong place and she hobbled about rearranging salt cellars and
wine glasses, moving dishes from the table to the sideboard, till the
arrangement was as she was used to having it. "I'm afraid everything's a
bit higgledy-piggledy tonight, Alan," she said. "We'll get things
organized in a few days."

I said, "It looks all right to me, Mum."

She said quietly, "I suppose the fact of the matter is that we've been
spoiled for the last year or so. I'd almost forgotten what it was to
have to train somebody to do things nicely."

"She was good, was she?"

My mother said, "She was an educated girl, so one only had to show her
how to do a thing once. I think she must have come from a good home,
where they lived nicely."

My father said, "She used to work the radiogram."

"The radiogram?"

My mother said, "Whenever your father and I had a little celebration
here, on my birthday, or when we heard about the wool sale, we used to
have a bottle of champagne with dinner, and music. Your father would put
on a long-playing record in the drawing room, _Oklahoma!_ or _South
Pacific_ or something nice like that, and we'd leave the doors open so
that we had music during dinner. And then we found that Jessie knew how
to change the record, and she knew most of the records that we liked, so
after that we didn't have to bother."

"She got to know our ways," my father said. He turned to my mother.
"Remember when we heard Alan was coming home? She finished handing the
entre and asked if she should put on a record."

My mother nodded. "It will be a very long time before we find another
girl like Jessie."

We seemed to have drifted back on to the difficult subject. I cast about
hurriedly for something fresh to tell my mother that would take her mind
off the dead parlourmaid, but I seemed to have told her most of the
things already. The thought of Bill came into my mind and the new
details I had learned about his death, but I rejected this hurriedly as
a subject that had better wait for another time. My journey home was
something that I had not told her of, that might amuse and interest her
and take her mind off the more sombre topic. "I stayed four or five days
in New York," I said. "It's a stimulating place, but I don't know that
I'd like to work there."

My father played up, sensing the move. "What's it really like?" he
asked. "Is it like you'd think it was from the movies?"

"I suppose it is, physically," I said. "You know more or less what it's
going to look like before you get there. But as regards the people, I've
never yet met an American that was much like the people that you see
upon the movies, and I didn't this time. I suppose there _are_ Americans
like that."

My mother said, "They probably exaggerate their own types, Alan, when
they put them on the stage or on the screen. We do that, too. All
countries do it. You don't often meet people who behave like people on
the stage."

My father carried on the steering of the conversation. "I suppose they
have to make them larger than life on the screen, in all their
characteristics. Did you go to Los Angeles?"

"No," I said. "I spent a few days with a chap in San Francisco." I
carried on talking about the United States, and the topic lasted us all
through dinner. My parents eat little at their age, but what little they
do eat they like to be good, and I think Annie our old cook had made a
special effort though I can only remember the fresh asparagus from the
garden, and the jugged hare. I pleased my mother by appreciating the
dinner, and promised her that I would speak to Annie about it. They had
put a good deal of thought into getting together the dishes that I would
like best. My father opened a particularly good bottle of Burgundy from
somewhere on the Hunter River, and a glass of vintage port from South
Australia served with the dessert was really very like the real thing.

We went through to the drawing room after dinner. My parents had always
gone early to bed; one does so in the country where it is usual to be up
and about the property at seven in the morning to keep the men from
getting slack. Since his operation my father had been ordered to bed at
nine o'clock by his doctor, and with the increasing infirmity of my
mother they had both got into the habit of retiring about that time,
though I think they usually read in bed for an hour or so before sleep.
When I had lived at home before, after the war, I had frequently played
a game of chess with my mother after dinner; I had not played since then
and I had all but forgotten the moves, but now to take her mind off our
troubles I suggested we might have a game to celebrate my return. She
was pleased at the idea though she had played very little in my absence,
so I brought up the inlaid chess table that they had bought in Paris
before the war and that had once stood in some chateau or other in
Touraine, and now stood in somewhat similar surroundings in the Western
District, and found the box that contained the eighteenth-century carved
ivory chessmen, and set them up by my mother's chair before the fire. We
played two games and then it was half past nine and time for them to be
in bed.

I put the things away and helped my mother up out of her chair. "It
seems terribly early to be going to bed on your first evening," she
said. "I feel rather badly about it, Alan, but it's what Dr. Stanley
says we've got to do, especially because your father gets up so early."

My father said, "Help yourself to a whiskey, Alan. And there's the paper
here."

I smiled. "Don't worry about me. I'll probably take to going off early
myself in a few days, and getting up early. It's the best way in the
country."

I walked with my mother as she hobbled slowly to the door and opened it
for her. In the hall as we walked together to her room she said, "It is
good to have you home again, Alan. You don't know how we've been looking
forward to you coming." She paused, and then she said, "It's really
getting too much for your father now. And then this trouble . . ."

"Don't worry about that, Mum," I said. "It'll all be over in a few days
now."

"Yes, I suppose so," she said quietly. She hobbled on a step or two, and
then she said, "She must have been so terribly unhappy, to take her own
life, and I had no idea of it. If she was unhappy, I should have known
about it, and I didn't. I feel that I must be very much to blame, as if
I've failed in some way, or made her unhappy without any idea that I was
doing it. And I just can't imagine what it was I did . . ."

"Don't worry about it, Mother," I repeated. "It's nothing to do with
you. We all think it was an accident."

"Perhaps it was. But I wish I could really think so."

We reached her door. "Good night, Mother," and I kissed her.

She held me for a moment. "Good night, son. I am so very, very glad
you're home."

When my father and mother had gone to bed I went back to the drawing
room and stood for a moment before the fire, deep in thought. This
matter of the parlourmaid was evidently worrying my mother very much
indeed, and the more I thought about it the more inexplicable it seemed.
I could not accept the idea that my mother had made the girl unhappy.
Invalids, of course, are frequently bad tempered and querulous. I had
been away for five years and I felt able to regard my mother
objectively; she had never seemed to me to be bad tempered and she did
not seem so now. Whatever the reasons had been that had made the girl
take her own life, I was quite sure it was not that. Yet it had been
deliberate, or she would not have destroyed her documents and letters. I
wondered what she had done with them.

The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my
head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the
most unlikely trains of thought. Nothing suggested any conceivable
motive for murder in this instance, nor any possibility of it in
Coombargana House.

Annie might know something that she had not told my parents, and it was
time that I saw Annie anyway. Annie had been at Coombargana before I was
born. She came from some village near Peterhead in Scotland, and as a
young girl she had worked in the fishing, gutting and packing herrings
on the quays. I think my grandfather knew her father, old McConchie, as
a boy, or perhaps he met him when he went home in 1895. In any case,
Annie came out with her brother James to work for my grandfather in 1908
or 1910, when she was probably about twenty years of age. James was
still working as a stockman with us when I was a child and Annie was the
kitchen maid, but James left us in 1920 and took up a property near
Mortlake, helped by a bank guarantee from my grandfather. He and Annie,
being Scots, lived frugally and saved every penny that came into their
hands, with the result that in the depression of the thirties when
everyone was going broke and all the properties were coming under the
hammer at a knockdown price, the McConchies were prudently buying land.
Jim McConchie has a property of two thousand acres over by Mortlake now
where he runs Merinos and a stud of Angus cattle; he makes a trip back
home every two or three years to buy stud beasts and last year he paid
three thousand five hundred pounds for an Angus bull at the Royal
Agricultural Show. Annie still works for us in Coombargana House; she
never married and would scorn to live on James, though she is very proud
of his success.

I wondered if Annie was still up. I left the drawing room and went
through the dining room; the light was still on in the kitchen. I opened
the swing door and there she was, standing by the table.

"Evening, Annie," I said. "How are you today?" She was not much changed,
a little smaller perhaps, and the grey hair a little thinner.

"I'm fine," she said. "How have you been keeping? It's good to see you
home again, Mr. Alan."

"I'm very well," I said. "Very glad to be home."

"Aye," she said. "There's no doubt about it, your own place is the best.
How do you find your father and mother, Mr. Alan?"

"Not too good," I said. "It's time I came home. I didn't realize that
they were getting so old."

"Ah well," she said, "we none of us get any younger."

"You haven't changed a lot," I said.

"I keep pretty fair," she said. "I get the rheumatism now and then, but
I keep pretty fair."

"I think this trouble today may have upset my mother," I remarked.

"Aye," she said. "It's a great shock to the lady when a thing like that
happens in the house."

I leaned back against the bright steel sink. "I don't understand why she
did it," I remarked. "Was she unhappy, do you think?"

"I would not say so," she replied. "Very quiet she was, these last two
or three days. But then, she was always quiet."

I cast about for some clue. "Was she sulky?"

She shook her head. "She was not. She was very even tempered, very easy
to get on with, but she never talked about herself. We got on fine,
because maybe I'm a bit that way. I never sought to pry into her
business, nor she into mine."

"Do you know if she was in the habit of taking things to make her
sleep?" I asked. "Was she a girl who took a lot of medicines?"

She shook her head. "There's a bottle of Eno's Fruit Salts on her
washstand, and a tube of Veganin. Then there was the bottle by her
bedside, that the doctor took away."

"You don't know what those sleeping tablets were?"

"I do not, Mr. Alan."

"And there were no letters or papers in her room?"

"Not a scrap. There was nothing written at all, saving one or two books
from the house."

I glanced at her. "That's very extraordinary, because she must have had
some papers. She must have had a passport to come from England. What's
happened to that?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe she got rid of everything when she
decided to make an end to herself."

"You think she did decide to do it, Annie? You don't think it was an
accident?"

"It's not for me to say, Mr. Alan. But if it was an accident there would
be papers or letters of some kind, I would think."

I thought for a minute. "Where could she have burned things?"

"In the coke boiler, out behind," she said. She meant the central
heating boiler. "She could have burned them there."

"Without anybody knowing?"

"Oh, aye. It gets made up in the morning, and at midday, and at night,
but in between times nobody goes there."

I glanced at the slow-burning cooking stove. "Not here?"

She shook her head. "I tend this myself, and I would soon have known if
there was any paper. I would not think that she burned anything here."

I stood in silence for a time, thinking over this conundrum. Then I
looked at her. "Is there really nothing, nothing at all amongst her
things, to tell us who she was? No ornaments, or lockets . . .
anything?"

She shook her head. "Would you like to have a look inside her room, Mr.
Alan?"

I hesitated, reluctant. It seemed an invasion of the dead girl's privacy
to go into her room to try to find out things she evidently preferred to
keep from us. Yet other people had already done so; my father had
certainly been there, and perhaps my mother. The police had been there,
turning over with unaccustomed hands the underclothing and the dresses.
It was doubtful if I could add anything to what had already been done
and I didn't want to go, yet to refuse had something of an element of
cowardice attached to it.

"She's up there, is she?" I asked.

"Aye, she's lying there," she said. "Covered over with the sheet." She
glanced at me, remembering perhaps the little boy that had been running
about Coombargana House when she was a young woman. "There's nothing to
be feared of, Mr. Alan."

"I know," I said. "It's a bad thing to intrude unless you've got some
very good reason. But I think perhaps I ought to have a look."

"I'll come up with you," she said.

She motioned me to go before her, but I told her to lead the way and we
went out to the back lobby and up the bare, scrubbed back stairs to the
servants' bedrooms. There was a short corridor ending in the swing door
to the main house near my own bedroom, and there were two rooms on each
side of this short corridor. I was not very familiar with this part of
the house, though I had been in it as a child.

Annie led the way to the second door on the left. I checked her before
she opened the door. "This is her room?"

She nodded.

"Which room do you sleep in?" I asked.

"In there, Mr. Alan." She indicated the next room on the same side. "The
mistress, she said to use these rooms because they have the better light
and view. The others are a wee bit dark." I nodded; the two rooms they
occupied looked out in the same direction as my own, and shared the same
view over the property towards the Grampians. In the house Bill's room
and the bathroom lay between my own room and that of the dead girl.

I asked, "Did you hear anything unusual last night, Annie?"

She shook her head. "Nothing at all."

She paused for a moment, and then opened the door and switched the light
on, and we went into the bedroom. It was a bare room, with white paint
on the woodwork and cream water paint upon the walls. It was furnished
adequately but simply with a cheap bedroom suite of Australian hardwood,
consisting of a bed, a chest of drawers with a mirror on it, and a
wardrobe. In addition there was a table and a chair. On the bed a sheet
was stretched over the dead girl.

On the table was a small, folding, travelling alarm clock of an American
make, and a bottle of fountain pen ink. With letters and documents in
the forefront of my mind I unscrewed the top of this bottle; the top
came off readily, the bottle was half full. I turned to Annie. "Had she
got a pen?" Instinctively I spoke in a low tone, as if in a church.

"Aye," she said. "I saw a pen in her bag." She opened the left-hand
small drawer of the chest of drawers and took out rather a worn, fairly
large bag of dark blue leather. She opened it, and picked out the pen.
It was a Parker 51, dark blue in colour, in good condition; the ink was
still fresh in the nib. It had been used for writing very recently.

I put it back in the bag and examined the remainder of the contents.
There was a compact, a purse with a little money in it but no papers,
and the usual things that a woman carries round with her, a comb, a
lipstick, three keys on a ring, a clean handkerchief that had evidently
been there for some time. There was nothing to be learned from these. I
glanced at the contents of the drawer, mostly handkerchiefs and
stockings; they conveyed nothing to me. I came back to the purse and
opened it again. "What did she do with her money?" I asked in the same
low tone. "This isn't all she had?"

"She had a savings bank account in the Post Office, Mr. Alan. She'd go
to Forfar once in a while and pay her money in."

"Where's the book for that?" I asked. "Is that here?"

She shook her head. "I would say no. I have not seen it, Mr. Alan, and I
was here when the police made the search."

"Do you know how much she had in the bank?"

She shook her head. "I do not."

There were three books on the chest of drawers, but they told me nothing
except that her tastes were catholic; _The Last Days of Hitler_ was
sandwiched between _Anne of Green Gables_ and _Hocus Pocus_. I looked
for a Bible or a Prayer Book, and found neither. Annie asked, "Do you
want to see the clothes, Mr. Alan?" and put her hand on the first
drawer.

I shrank instinctively from the intrusion. "There's nothing there, is
there? You've turned them over?"

"Aye," she said. "The police, they went through everything very
carefully."

"Leave them be," I said. I turned from the chest of drawers and looked
around the room. Two suitcases lay one on top of the other in a corner.
I moved over and examined them. Both were old and one was in an
unfamiliar style, probably foreign, but both were empty and without
labels. "Is this all the luggage she had?" I asked.

Annie hesitated. "I _think_ it is," she said. "I've been wondering,
perhaps there should have been another. I mind she had to make several
journeys when she came here first, carrying her luggage from the outside
door up to this room. She wouldn't want to carry more than one of these
up the stairs, one at a time. Maybe she went up and down twice only.
It's a while ago since she came, and I was cooking at the time and
didn't notice her particularly."

"You didn't come in here much?"

She shook her head. "I never went into her room, Mr. Alan, nor she into
mine. The mistress, she comes round once in a while and looks in at the
rooms, to see that everything is tidy and kept nice."

I stood looking round the room; there was little more to examine. The
room was fitted with a wash basin with running water, and here the soap
and the toothpaste were of normal brands. The Eno's and the Veganin were
on a shelf nearby, but there were no medicines in evidence, and
practically no cosmetics or lotions, which seemed to me unusual for a
woman's room.

There was nothing to stay for, nothing to be learned. I moved towards
the door. Annie paused by the bed, and said in a low tone, "Would you
want to look at her?" Her hand moved towards the sheet.

I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by that, and we had done
enough intruding. "Leave her be. There wasn't any locket, or anything
under the pillow?"

She shook her head. "Nothing of that, Mr. Alan. We looked carefully,
when the police were here."

I went out into the corridor and she followed me. "Well, thanks, Annie,"
I said. "It'll be a good thing when all this is over, and we can get
back to having things normal."

She nodded. "Aye. It's been upsetting for everybody. Your parents must
be very glad to see you home again."

I nodded. "I'm glad I came in time to help them out with this." I
paused. "Well, good night, Annie. Thank you for showing me."

"Oh, that's nothing," she said. "Good night, Mr. Alan."

I went through the swing door to the main house and my own bedroom. The
fire was low; I threw on two or three logs and went downstairs at my
slow pace, to get a whiskey and to look around the house a little before
going up to bed.

I poured myself a drink and went and stood in front of the dying embers
of the drawing room fire, in the silence of the house. I was still glad
to be home again, glad to be taking up the work that was my proper job,
that I had spurned five years ago, but my pleasure was swamped and
tempered by this matter of the dead parlourmaid, so that I could think
of nothing else. In this comfortable, homely atmosphere there had been a
deep and secret trouble that nobody had known anything about, so deep
that it had led a girl who seemed to have been normal and balanced in
her mind to take her own life. It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a
great city such things happen now and then, where people are too
strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but
in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people
such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded
out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur.
Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.
Nothing like this had ever happened there before, and it was disturbing
that it should have happened now. Was something very wrong in all these
easy, comfortable surroundings, something that nobody suspected,
something that we none of us knew anything about? I felt that I would
very much like to know the answer to that one. In fact, it was my duty
to find out.

I could not put my mind to the affairs of the property; I could think of
nothing but this trouble. What curious impulse had it been that had led
this girl to burn every scrap of evidence of her identity, to burn even
her bank book? Perhaps there was no money in her savings bank, of
course; perhaps she had withdrawn all that she had and used it in some
way. That would have to be checked by the police. By all accounts she
had lived very quietly, spending practically no money. I knew
approximately what wage she would have been getting; in fifteen months
she might have saved two or three hundred pounds. What had happened to
that? Perhaps the savings bank had made a transfer of her balance which
would provide us with a clue. Was it a possibility that some solicitor,
perhaps in Ballarat, might have a will? It was conceivable, though
hardly likely, that she had made a will.

How carefully planned, how deliberate it had all been; how certain she
had been in all the movements leading to her death! Practically nothing
that was personal to her was left behind. The passport--that could go
into the fire; she would not need that again. Letters and papers--they
could go, for she would be reading nothing more after tomorrow.
Photographs and souvenirs; she would not need them now for she would
have emotions no more to be stirred--into the furnace with them. The
bank book--she would have no need of money for the journey she was
setting out on; let it burn. She had cleaned out her life as one might
clean out a house or a bed sitting room before leaving it, and having
done so, she had lain down to die. In any normal person some enormous
emotional upset would have accompanied the sum of all these sacrifices,
and yet apparently there had been nothing of the sort. By all accounts,
if she had planned her death she had gone to it cheerfully, with a quiet
and an easy mind. She had appeared unmoved to my mother and to Annie,
though both had remarked that she seemed rather quieter than usual.

The bizarre thought crossed my mind that if the sleeping tablets hadn't
worked she'd have been in a bit of a spot, having destroyed her passport
and her bank book and everything else. If by some chance she had been
discovered before the drugs that she had taken had proved fatal, if she
had been rushed in to a hospital and her life had been saved, she would
have plumped straight from the sublime to the ridiculous and she might
have had a lot of bureaucratic difficulties in getting hold of her money
and in getting another passport. I smiled cynically and checked the
smile, for after all the girl had been in deep and secret trouble and it
was no laughing matter. But how certain she had been of death!

How could she have been certain of her death? There are ways of
committing suicide that really are certain, but taking sleeping tablets
isn't one of them. When you take sleeping tablets you go to sleep, and
death, if it occurs, occurs several hours later. Even then, only a
doctor experienced in the particular drug and in its effect upon a wide
variety of patients could say with certainty that the dose she took
would really prove lethal at all, or would prove lethal before she was
found in the morning. Nothing I had heard indicated that this girl had
any close or intimate knowledge of medical practice; she might
conceivably have been a nurse at one time, but if so she had never
betrayed the fact to my mother, who was an invalid.

Everything that I had heard indicated that this girl was an educated,
intelligent, and rational person. How could she possibly have been so
sure of death as to get rid of everything by burning in the furnace?
Surely it must have crossed her mind that suicide in the way that she
proposed, though easy and pleasant, was by no means certain. She must
have had some special knowledge of the drug, or she would not have
destroyed her things.

The whiskey may have been responsible though I had not had very much,
because the sentence came in to my mind inverted. She would not have
destroyed her things unless she had some special knowledge of the drug.
She would have hidden them.

She would have hidden them, so that she could regain them if, in fact,
she survived the sleeping tablets. I had assumed after talking to Annie
that she had burned everything in the central heating furnace, but there
was not a scrap of evidence that she had done anything of the sort. With
Annie in my mind, the question of the suitcases came forward again.
Annie had been vaguely puzzled that there were only two suitcases in her
room. Perhaps, in fact, there had been a third. Perhaps she had packed
into that third suitcase all that she valued of her personal possessions
and deposited it somewhere where she could get it if she did survive--in
the baggage room of a railway station, for example.

That wouldn't work, because at Coombargana it would be impossible for
her to get a suitcase off the place in privacy. No bus or other public
transport comes to Coombargana or within five miles of us. She would
have had to take it in to town in one of our cars or trucks. She could
not possibly have taken a suitcase out of the house without someone
noticing and commenting upon it, and no one had suggested anything of
the sort. If she had hidden her belongings in a suitcase it would
probably still be in Coombargana House; she would have had difficulty
even in getting it down the stairs and out into the grounds without
Annie noticing. It was at least a possibility that all the evidence that
we were looking for was in the house with us.

I poured myself another drink, a small one, and sat down in my father's
chair beside the dying fire. I never believe in dashing at things, and
this needed thinking about. Suppose the girl had wanted to hide a
suitcase in the house, where would she put it? It had to be where nobody
would think of looking, somewhere accessible to her, where nobody would
see her as she went to hide it.

That seemed to mean the whole of the top floor. When Annie was in the
kitchen or away the whole top floor of the house was hers to do what she
liked with, for my parents seldom went up there now. Her case could be
in any of the cupboards or closets, in any of the bedrooms. Downstairs
would be far more difficult with Annie and my parents about. It would be
difficult for her to take it out to one of the outbuildings, for the
gardeners were frequently around or else the station hands; she could
not count on being unobserved. But upstairs, on the bedroom floor of
Coombargana House, she could definitely count on being unobserved at
almost any time of day.

If one were to take a look through the top floor of the house, where
would one start? Where would she be most likely to hide a suitcase if
she wanted to do so? There were the two empty servants' bedrooms
opposite her room and Annie's; those, I knew, were used as lumber rooms
or boxrooms now. A suitcase in amongst a pile of our own ancient,
disused cases would lie there for years covered in dust, till in the
future someone clearing out the room to send the contents to some jumble
sale might find this one and puzzle over what was in it, when the very
name of Jessie Proctor had been long forgotten.

The more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that her
belongings might be just across the corridor from her room. It was the
rational and reasonable place for them to be.

I left the drawing room and made my way upstairs through the silent
house. I looked in at my own room and put another log upon the fire,
hesitated, and fetched a small electric torch from the dressing table; I
never travel without one of those. Then I went out into the corridor and
passed through the swing door into the servants' quarters, paused for a
moment opposite the dead girl's room to make quite sure that I was
right, and opened the door on the opposite side of the corridor. My
torch showed me the light switch, and I turned it on.

It was a bedroom, a room with two beds, furnished sparsely as a
servant's room. This must be where they slept the married couple, when
they had one. Except for the furniture it was completely empty; there
were mattresses but no bedclothes on the beds. I opened the wardrobe
door and all the drawers in turn and looked round for a cupboard, which
wasn't there. There was nothing in that room, at any rate.

There was another bedroom, the one opposite Annie's room. I went along
the corridor and opened the door of that one. This was the room I
remembered, the one used as a boxroom. There were beds dismantled and
stacked by the wall, trunks, suitcases, garden furniture, deck and
steamer chairs, beach umbrellas, curtain poles of an antique design, an
old commode, spears, boomerangs, and woomeras, and all the junk that a
country house accumulates throughout the years. I stood in the doorway
looking at all this stuff, wondering where to begin my search.

There was movement in the room behind me, Annie's room, and a light
switched on and showed under the door. I stood cursing and embarrassed
in the door of the boxroom, till Annie came out of her room, dressed in
a faded blue dressing gown, with wisps of thin grey hair hanging to her
shoulders. "It's all right, Annie," I said a little testily. "I was just
taking a look in here."

She said, "Oh--I'm sorry, Mr. Alan. I heard a noise and wondered what it
was." She made a movement to withdraw into her room, and then she paused
and said, "Were you looking for anything in particular?"

I hesitated. "It just crossed my mind that the girl might have had
another suitcase, and that it might be in here."

"I do not think so, Mr. Alan," she replied. "I looked in there this
afternoon."

I stared at her; we had evidently been thinking along the same lines.
"You did?"

"Aye," she said. "After the police went away it came into my mind she
could have packed some of her things away and put them in this room. I
had a good turn-out in here this afternoon."

"You didn't find anything?"

She shook her head.

I glanced around the piles of junk. "Not amongst those suitcases?"

She shook her head. "I opened every one."

"Nothing in that cupboard?"

"Only the candlesticks and lamps we used before the electricity."

"Did you look in those two trunks?"

She nodded. "There's only curtains in that one, and the other's full of
the colonel's uniforms and tropical clothes. I took a good look through
everything, Mr. Alan."

There was nothing, then, for me to do in there. I turned and closed the
door behind me. "Very thoughtful of you, Annie," I said. "It was just an
idea I had."

"Aye," she said. "I was thinking the same thing, that she might have
left some of her stuff in there. I think she must have burned it all,
Mr. Alan."

"Maybe she did," I said. I turned up the corridor. "Well, good night,
Annie. Sorry I disturbed you."

"Good night, Mr. Alan."

I went back through the swing door to my room, disappointed, for I had
expected to find something in the boxroom. It seemed to me to be by far
the best hiding place for a suitcase on the top floor of Coombargana. I
sat down in the long easy chair before the fire in my bedroom and lit a
cigarette, and loosened one of the straps below my left knee which had
been chafing a little. I sat there smoking and wondering about places
where a suitcase could be hidden, and then it seemed to me that possibly
the boxroom wasn't such a good place, after all. It was too obvious.
Both Annie and I had thought of looking there after a very few hours.
Perhaps she had been cleverer than that.

It was conceivable that she had simply put her suitcase in one of the
empty bedrooms, or even in my own room, working on the principle that a
thing that is in practically full view is frequently overlooked. It did
not seem a very likely one, but I got up and took my torch and made a
tour of the top floor of the house, going into all the rooms and opening
all the drawers and cupboards. It did not take me very long and it
yielded nothing.

There was only one other place, and that was in the roof. The possums
used to get in to the roof of Coombargana House to nest when I was a
boy, though the measures that my father had taken seemed to have
defeated them and I don't think we had had them in the house for a
number of years. I had been up into the roof once or twice on possum
hunts twenty-five years ago. It was reached by a trap in the ceiling of
the corridor outside Helen's room, ten or eleven feet above the floor,
inaccessible without a ladder.

Where had I seen a ladder? I had seen one somewhere, very recently, a
ladder of light alloy, painted red. It was a fire ladder. I remembered
it. It hung on hooks along the wall of the servants' corridor above
three fire extinguishers. It was to put out of the window of the
corridor to reach down to the flat roof of the scullery in case fire
isolated people on the top floor of the building.

It was worth having a look up in the roof, and I could probably manage
to get up and down the ladder if I was careful and took my time. I
opened the swing door wide and went in to the servants' quarters, hoping
that Annie wouldn't come out again, and took the ladder down from the
wall, and carried it in to the main house, shutting the swing door
behind me. I set it up in the corridor and poked the trapdoor upwards
with the top end of it; it stood at a convenient angle, firm and
adequate.

It would be very dirty in the roof and I was in my evening clothes.
Moreover, for a man with my disability to get up in to a roof would be
something of a gymnastic feat entailing much use of the arms; I had
developed a good deal of muscular strength in my arms and chest in
compensation over the years. I went back into my room and put on an old
pair of trousers and a pullover, and then, with the torch in my pocket,
I went up in to the roof.

Getting up in to the roof wasn't too difficult, but when I was up there
there were only a few planks laid loosely on the rafters above the
plaster ceiling, with nothing to hold on to if I stood up. I looked
around and there was nothing unusual to be seen; various tanks and water
pipes, and brick chimneys, and electrical conduits. I hesitated to stand
up and walk upon the planks and crawled along on hands and knees away
from the trapdoor and the ladder, till in the end I found what I was
looking for.

It stood upon the rafters behind one of the tanks and in an angle formed
by the brickwork of a chimney, a little shadowed place where it might
have rested for fifty years and never come to light. It was a small
suitcase, fairly new and free from dust or dirt. It had the initials
J.P. embossed on the lid, and it was locked.

There was a bit of rope up there lying on the rafters, perhaps some
relic of our possum hunts, and with this I lowered the case down through
the trapdoor into the corridor. I replaced the trap and eased myself
carefully down the ladder to the floor, and took the case into my room.
I was very dirty, and I washed my hands before doing anything else. Then
I replaced the ladder on the wall of the servants' corridor, and went
back to my room, and put the suitcase on a table by the fire.

I knew where the key was, of course. There had been three keys on a ring
in her bag, but I was reluctant to go back into her room to take them
from her. I had a bunch of keys of my own for my own suitcases and for
the trunks that were on their way to me by sea, and I tried these all in
turn to see if I had one which would unlock her suitcase.

I failed; none of them would fit. There was nothing for it; with a heavy
heart I went back through the swing door, and opened the door into her
room. It seemed a despicable thing that I was doing. The girl had been
in trouble and she was dead, lying there beneath the sheet in the room
with me. She had gone to great pains to maintain some privacy in her
affairs. Now she was dead and could no longer defend herself; I had all
but breached her privacy and now I was robbing her bag, to find out
things about her that she wanted to keep from us.

Standing by the chest of drawers opening her bag I imagined I could feel
the horror and the protest from the girl beneath the sheet upon the bed
behind me. I whispered, "My dear, I'm sorry to be doing this to you,"
and took the keys, and thrust the bag back into the drawer, and got out
of her room and through the swing door and back to my own place as
quickly as I could.

I was in no hurry to open her case, now that I could do so. I was a
little shaken and upset, and not at all sure that I was doing the right
thing. I left the keys lying on the suitcase and went slowly downstairs
to the drawing room. There were still red embers in the grate and warmth
in the room, and I poured myself another whiskey and soda to steady my
nerves. The clock struck eleven while I was doing so.

I stood in front of the fire, glass in hand, recovering my
self-possession. I was intensely reluctant to open that case. To do so
would clearly be to act in opposition to the dead girl's earnest wish,
and one should respect the wishes of the dead. The Law might require me
to do so, but I had the power to tell the Law to go jump in the lake,
for nobody but I knew that the case existed. There was no evidence that
the slightest harm would come to anybody if I took that suitcase now and
thrust it deep into the central heating furnace, and if I did that I
should certainly be carrying out the dead girl's wish.

On the other hand, I was responsible for the happiness and well-being of
everybody in our little community so far as lay within my power. Amongst
our little party there had been enormous, catastrophic grief that had
made this girl take her life. Unless I knew what it was that grief might
come again. It might be something that did not affect Jessie Proctor
alone. It might be something to be rooted out of Coombargana, some evil
that had grown up with the aging of my father and relaxation of the
firmness of control. We might have got a sadist or a pervert of some
kind on the property. If I left this uninvestigated the grief might come
again, upon some other person. Some other person might now be suffering
as this girl perhaps had suffered.

It was my job to open up that case and see if I could find out what the
trouble had been. A brief inspection by the coroner might have to
follow, but after that it could all go into the fire and the sooner the
better. But opened it would have to be.

I went up to my room again presently, with a quiet mind. There was
nothing now to wait for; I shut the door carefully behind me and turned
the key in the lock. Then I went over to the fire side and opened the
case upon the table with one of her keys.

It was full of papers of all sorts, neatly arranged. There were letters
and bank books, and about a dozen quarto manuscript books at the bottom.
I shuffled through the things on top, and her passport caught my eye. I
pulled it out, and stood dumbfounded by the name upon the cover. I
opened it and had a little difficulty in turning the pages, for my
fingers were all thumbs. I stared at the photograph that stared back
from the page at me, the broad, square, kindly face that I remembered so
well, the bushy dark eyebrows.

This wasn't Jessie Proctor. It was Janet Prentice.

Leading Wren Janet Prentice, that I had met with Bill in April 1944, at
Lymington in Hampshire, before the invasion of Normandy.




                                   3


There were little, practical jobs to be done mechanically that saved me
the necessity of thinking for a minute or two. I started to unpack her
papers on to the table and arrange them into little heaps in order that
I might examine them methodically, and very soon I came upon the
photograph frame. It was a little leather thing that opened like a
wallet to stand upon a table, that held two photographs beneath a
cellophane glaze. I stood for a long time with it open in my hand. I
knew one of them; it was the one that Bill had had taken by an
indifferent professional photographer in Portsmouth, when he had been in
training with the Royal Marines at Eastney. It showed him in the uniform
of a private before he had attained a rank, rather a stiff, hack
portrait. My mother has a print of it that stands upon the table in her
room, with one of Helen and one of me. I wondered what she would have
thought if she had known that her house parlourmaid had a copy of it,
too.

Opposite this one, in the other glazed frame, was a more living picture.
It was a snapshot of Bill taken shortly before his death, in the
battledress uniform of a sergeant in the marines, taken in the open air
upon the roadway of some camp. Janet Prentice was beside him in the
uniform of a Leading Wren; he had his arm around her shoulders and they
were laughing together.

I knew that one existed, though I had never seen it; my mother did not
know of it at all. Bill had told me about it when I met him in the
spring of 1944. I was at Fighter Command in those days after two tours
of operations, first on Hurricanes and then on Spitfires. It was so long
since we had met that when a job cropped up that was to take me to a
conference at Beaulieu aerodrome I had shamelessly extended it and
snatched an extra twenty-four hours from my office on Sunday in order
that I might see Bill before Overlord, before the balloon went up. I
flew down in a Spit from Northolt late one Saturday evening and landed
in the dusk. Tony Patterson was there and he had laid a car on for me to
take me in to Lymington, where I had booked a room at the Roebuck Hotel,
and Bill had met me there for dinner.

In the first exchanges over a couple of drinks before we ate, Bill told
me that he knew Beaulieu aerodrome. It was nearly two years since we had
met; I had been in Egypt and the Western Desert before my office job,
and when I was drafted back to England he had been up at some Commando
training place on the west coast of Scotland. So much had happened to us
both, so differently had we developed, that it took us a few minutes to
establish contact again and to reach the point when we could talk about
the matters we both wanted to discuss. The gin helped, of course.

"What were you doing at the aerodrome?" I asked. "You don't go arsing
about up in the air?"

He shook his head. "There's a flight sergeant there in charge of the
P.R. unit," he said. I nodded; Beaulieu aerodrome was now a mass of
fighters, Thunderbolts and Typhoons, in readiness for close support of
the invasion landings on the other side, but previously there had been a
photographic reconnaissance flight of Lightnings there and the
photographers with their equipment for developing and printing were
still in one of the buildings. "He's a good type," said Bill. "Nobody's
allowed to have a camera down here, of course." I did not know that, but
with the intense security precautions necessary before the invasion it
was obviously so. "He'll take anybody's picture for a dollar and let you
have the prints. Good pictures, too, I went up there with Janet this
afternoon and he took one of us. I'm going to pick them up on
Wednesday."

This was getting near the subject we both wanted to discuss. "Where's
Janet now?" I asked. "Is she here?" I had never met her then, of course.

He shook his head. "She only got a three-hour pass. She caught the ferry
back to Mastodon from just outside the aerodrome." He meant the naval
truck that plied between Exbury Hall upon the Beaulieu River that was
now _H.M.S. Mastodon_, and Lymington. "She's got a full day off
tomorrow."

"Got anything laid on?"

"She's got a boat," he said. "When have you got to go back?"

"Be all right if I get off at dawn on Monday," I replied. "I've got a
natter on with the Americans tomorrow evening--I've got to be up at the
aerodrome at six o'clock. And I'll have to slip out to the aerodrome in
the morning to ring up the office. That won't take more than half an
hour. After that I've got all day, till six o'clock."

"You could make the call from here."

I shook my head. "It's got to be a scrambled line. It won't take long.
I've got transport laid on to collect me here at half past eight."

He looked me up and down, and grinned. "All these bloody rings and
gongs," he said. "I suppose they give you transport any time you want
it."

I ordered two more gins. "Mum was asking in the last letter if you were
ever going to get a commission."

"Not much," he said. "I get more fun this way. If I'd been an officer I
wouldn't have met Janet."

"Don't you believe it," I replied. "Most of the officers' popsies that
you see are in the ranks. They don't give commissions to the best
popsies. Reserve them for a higher destiny than being a wing officer."

"Reserve some of them for a job of work," he observed.

I glanced at him. "What does she do?"

"O.A.," he told me. "Ordnance Artificer at _Mastodon_. Leading Wren. She
looks after the guns on the LCT's and the LCI's. Force J mostly, in the
Beaulieu River."

I glanced around, for this was careless talk and there might be some
security snooper listening to us. But there was no one within hearing.
"Services the guns?"

He nodded. "If a ship reports defects in its Oerlikon or twin Lewis she
goes on board and checks it over, and if it's crook she takes it on
shore to the armoury and swaps it for another."

I raised my eyebrows a little. Most of the popsies that had come my way
were ornamental young women from the ops room, or in radar.

Bill grinned. "She knows her stuff."

"Are you engaged to her?"

"No," he said thoughtfully. "Nothing like that." He stood fingering his
glass upon the bar. "Not till after the balloon's gone up. Time enough
to think about that then."

I said, "You'd like to be?"

He nodded. "She's a beaut girl."

"How would she go down with Dad and Mum?" At Lymington in Hampshire, in
the British forces, we were a long way both in distance and in thought
from Coombargana in the Western District.

"She'd be all right."

"Does she know anything about Australia?"

He grinned. "Not a thing. They none of them do. It's no good trying to
explain, either. I told her we were farmers. They understand that."

I nodded. I had had some of this myself. When I was new to England I
tried once or twice to explain to people how we lived, and found that
they thought I was shooting a line. I had soon learned to shut up and to
identify myself as a farmer's son--which, of course, was true.

"Got any idea what you're going to do when this is over?" I asked him.

"When what's over? Overlord?" He dropped his voice for the last word, as
one which ordinary people did not speak aloud.

"No. The war."

"When's that going to be?"

"May be this autumn. It probably won't go another year."

"Is that what they are saying at your place?"

I nodded. It was difficult for either of us to credit such a thing,
after five years. "Think you'll go back to Cirencester?" Bill had come
to England in July 1939, when he was nineteen years old, to go to an
agricultural college. He had stayed there, unwilling, for a few months
in the period of the phoney war before enlisting in the marines.

He shook his head. "I'd never go back to school now. What about you?"

I had done two years of Law at Oxford, at the House, on my Rhodes
scholarship. "I wouldn't mind going back for a bit, finish off what I
started."

"Go home and see the parents first of all?"

"Oh, I think so. Go home for a month or two, and then come back to
finish off at Oxford."

Bill put his glass down thoughtfully upon the bar. "I don't want to do
that," he said. "I'd like to marry Janet and go back to Coombargana, and
stay there looking at the sheep for a long, long time."

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 land mines 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 up-stage. You may know
her father. He's professor or a don or something, at Oxford."

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

"I 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 LCT's."

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 motorboat 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 despatched 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 bookkeeping. 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 an
Ordnance Artificer 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 20 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 worth-while 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 aging and be unable to help her, to see her father turning
into just another poor old man.

In the early summer of 1943 she got an opportunity to change her job.
CPO Waters told me about it when I talked to him in his tobacconist's
shop in Fratton Road, in Portsmouth, in 1951. He remembered Leading Wren
Prentice very well indeed, for she was the subject of one of his best
and most frequently told stories. "It was in 1943, in the summer," he
told me. "Gawd, that was a lark!" He savoured the memory, grinning.
"They wanted Ordnance Wrens to look after the guns on the invasion
fleet, Combined Operations. They sent a chit all round the Ordnance
depots asking for Wren volunteers. These girls, they didn't know what
the job was on account of it being secret; they thought it was to work
on MTB's, but really, it was the tank landing craft and that. Every LCT
Mark 4, she had two Oerlikons, and every LCS--and there were thousands
of them. No wonder they had to rob the other branches of the Service for
Ordnance Wrens! I dunno how many Oerlikons there were in the Normandy
party--thousands and thousands of 'em."

The 20 mm. Oerlikon was not unlike the 20 mm. Hispano that Janet was
used to servicing, so the work would present no difficulty to her. She
felt that she would like to make a change and to see another side of the
navy; it seemed absurd that she had been in the Wrens for nearly two
years and she had never been near a ship. With half a dozen other Wrens
from Ford she volunteered for the new service, and was sent on a short
course to Whale Island to convert to Oerlikons.

Whale Island lies in Portsmouth Harbour and it is the site of _H.M.S.
Excellent_, the naval gunnery training and experimental establishment.
Whale Island is a very serious place, full of ambitious regular naval
officers with black gaiters on their legs and a stern frown on their
foreheads, all intent on advancing themselves in their career by
developing a new system of fire control or improving an old one. Janet
Prentice was ten days at Whale Island and to her delight the curriculum
of her course included two afternoons of firing the Oerlikon at a sleeve
target towed by an aeroplane; this practice was carried out upon the
grid at Eastney firing out over the sea. It was considered necessary
that the girls should be able to test the guns that they had overhauled
with a short burst of fire, and to make the matter interesting for them
they were given a brief, elementary course of eyeshooting at a towed
target, using the simple ring sight.

On the first afternoon of their shoot, when it came to Janet's turn to
fire, the target sleeve mysteriously began to disintegrate into ribbons.
She went on firing for about twenty rounds, and it parted from the
towing wire altogether and fluttered down into the sea. "The rest of 'em
all missed astern," the chief petty officer told me, years later,
leaning across the counter of his little shop. "You get them sometimes
like that--natural good shots, but this was the first time I ever knew
it in a girl. I give her a coconut out of the ready-use locker, there on
the grid. Gunnery officers on ships from West Africa or India, they used
to bring me back a sack or two of coconuts, 'n I'd always have one ready
if that happened. Makes a bit of fun for the class, you see. Makes 'em
take an interest."

Two days later they were taken to the range again for their final shoot.
Their visit coincided with a demonstration to the Naval Staff of a new
sort of towed target designed to replace the sleeve, a little winged
glider that looked just like a real aeroplane and which seemed to tow
much faster than the linen sleeve.

At that time the Naval Staff were divided into two schools of thought
regarding the best method of fire control against low-flying aircraft.
The Director of Naval Ordnance held that all guns should be predictor
controlled. The Director of the Gunnery Division held that all guns
should be radar controlled. This battle was raging at the time more
fiercely than the one against the Germans. The one point that both
agreed upon was that eyeshooting was no use at all for bringing down an
aeroplane.

The Fifth Sea Lord wanted to see a shoot against the winged target, the
First Sea Lord wanted to see if radar was really any good against an
aircraft at close range, and both wanted a day down by the sea. With
their attendant brass they drove down in style from the Admiralty, had
lunch with the captain of _H.M.S. Excellent_, and went out full of good
food and Plymouth gin for their afternoon's entertainment at Eastney.

The range officer at that time was a certain Lt. Cdr. Cartwright, RN,
whose ship had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic by two German
submarines simultaneously while he was busy depth-charging a third. His
subsequent immersion for two hours in the North Atlantic in midwinter
followed by thirty-six hours in an open boat had done him no good. After
his convalescence he had been relegated to shore duties for six months,
to his immense disgust, and had been sent down to take charge of firing
operations on the grid at Eastney.

Commander Cartwright was a general duties officer, a salt horse, whose
profession was commanding a ship; he had little use for gunnery
specialists and their toys. To him a simple weapon was a good weapon and
a complex weapon was a bad one; it was as straightforward as that. His
administration of the range included both the experimental and the
training shoots; in his own mind he gave strong preference to training
and had little patience with experimental work, especially when it
interfered with any of the courses. To him the visit of the Board of
Admiralty that afternoon was a sheer waste of the time of busy people.
It meant that he would have to stop his training shoots when the brass
arrived and he would have a hundred ratings and a dozen Wrens standing
idle for an hour or so, waiting till this damned experimental nonsense
was over.

He let off at his RNVR assistant in hearing of the CPO. "Half of them
won't get a shoot at all unless we stick our heels in," he said
irritably. "Well, I'm not going to have it. I won't pass them out until
each one of them has had a proper shoot. These muggers from the
Admiralty seem to think that training doesn't matter."

When all the admirals and captains came to the grid he was stiffly
correct in his black gaiters, inwardly furious. The towing aircraft
appeared dead on time, and far behind it a small winged object streaked
across the sky. It was the first time that any of the brass had seen it
and nobody knew how large it was or how fast it was going. The technical
officers examined its flight with some concern. The predictor boys spoke
in low tones to the Director of Naval Ordnance protesting that some
knowledge of the size was necessary to their fire control. The radar
boys spoke in low tones to the Director of the Gunnery Division
explaining that the thing was giving an uncommonly poor response upon
the cathode ray screen, and voicing their suspicion that it was made of
wood, which clearly wasn't fair.

The two Directors hesitantly proffered these objections to one or two of
the lesser admirals. The First Sea Lord, overhearing, remarked that they
would listen to the technicians after tea. In the meantime, he was there
to see that thing shot down.

They fired at it for an hour, in ten runs past the grid at varying
angles of approach and altitudes. They fired at it with the quadruple
Vickers, with the multiple pom-pom, with a predictor-controlled twin
Bofors, with a radar-controlled triple Oerlikon, and with a comic thing
that fired a salvo of sixteen rockets all at once. At the end of the
hour the target was still flying merrily about the sky, and half the
officers were laughing cynically and half were speechless with
frustration.

Commander Cartwright was a very angry man. His training classes were
standing idle and laughing at each failure; clearly their morale was
suffering. They would have little confidence after a show like this that
they could hit an aeroplane, if all the experts couldn't. It was
intolerable that they should have to witness an exhibition of this sort
that brought his training effort into ridicule.

His instructor, CPO Waters, who had had ten years of experience upon the
grid, sidled up to him. "I got a Wren down there could hit that thing,"
he said out of the corner of his mouth. "That one what hit the sleeve on
Monday. She's a natural, she is. She could hit that, sir."

The officer's eyes gleamed. "Think she could?"

"I think so, sir. What's it doing? Hundred and eighty knots?"

"About that, I should say."

"She could hit it, sir. Ask if some of the training class can't have a
go, and leave the rest to me."

Commander Cartwright went up to the observation tower, caught the eyes
of the captain of _H.M.S. Excellent_, and saluted smartly. "We have
three courses waiting down on the grid, sir, each for their final day of
eyeshooting. Could we save time in getting out another aircraft by
letting them shoot at this?"

The captain said, "I think that's quite a good idea. It would be
interesting to see the comparison, too." The Director of the Gunnery
Division said, "I don't think you can expect much from that." The First
Sea Lord said, "I have no objection. What time is it now? I must be off
by half past four."

Down on the grid the chief said, "Here you, Leading Wren Prentice. On
the Oerlikon." She stepped forward, bursting with importance, and
slipped her shoulders into the half rings. The chief pulled the strap
behind her shoulders and made it fast for her. "Take it easy," he said
quietly. "Try it first about a hundred and eighty knots, 'n if that
don't work, feel it up towards two hundred, like you been taught. Now
wait till I tell you to fire."

Janet grinned at him. "Okay, Chief."

Up on the observation tower where the high brass were congregated the
Vice-Admiral who was in charge of weapon development looked down to the
Oerlikon. "What's that--a Wren?"

By this side Commander Cartwright said, "It's the eyeshooting class for
Wren Ordnance Artificers, sir. Ladies first."

Down on the grid Janet moved up on the circumferential steps behind her
as she depressed the Oerlikon to the approaching target. A hundred and
eighty knots, fairly near the outer ring but two-thirds in from that
because it was diagonal, flying a little below the centre because of the
range. She had never had the slightest difficulty with this; it all
seemed common sense to her. By her side the old chief said quietly,
"Wait for it. Remember, don't look at the tracer, just keep looking at
the sight, and mind what I told you. Wait for it."

She had it fair and square between the rings at about four o'clock,
exactly as she wanted it. The little target glider grew quickly larger.

"Now--fire!"

She pressed the grip and the gun started shaking rhythmically, and the
noise was great, and the smoke of cordite was all around her. She had
the little glider held fixed in her sight exactly as she wanted it; she
swung her body across and down to keep it there and the gun swung slowly
with her. Deliberately she felt the target back towards the outer ring,
moving it very slowly, anticipating the violent throbbing of the gun,
bracing herself to master this wild thing that she had started with her
grip.

She was exultant. This was really living; it was _fun_!

And suddenly there were two flashes on the little glider, one on the
wing and one on the body. It rolled over on its back and one of the
wings came off and began to flutter down. The chief roared in her ear,
"Cease fire!"

She released her grip and the clamour of the gun stopped, and she stood
watching with the smoke all around her. The glider was plunging
violently and wildly in the air at the end of its mile length of cable,
in fantastically irregular flight. Then the cable suddenly went slack as
the observer in the towing aircraft cut it free, and the target fell in
spinning confusion into the sea with a small splash.

On the grid the class were cheering wildly. The chief released Janet
from the back strap; reaction was upon her and she was trembling as if
she still fired the gun. From the ready-use ammunition locker the chief
produced another coconut; she took it from him, laughing.

Up on the observation tower the Range Officer said drily to his captain,
"There's something to be said for the old methods, after all."

His captain said, "Oh, certainly. But it's exceptional. She's probably a
Senior Wrangler in civil life, and teaches trigonometry."

The higher admirals were perfectly delighted, especially the Fifth Sea
Lord. "There, DNO--and you, DGD. What about it? Beaten by a girl with
five bob's worth of sights upon the gun! I haven't had an afternoon like
this for years!"

Somebody said resentfully, "She's probably a crack shot in civil life,
sir."

The First Sea Lord said, "Well, I should like to know about that. Let's
have her up here for a minute."

An RNVR officer was despatched down to the grid at the double to fetch
CPO Waters and Leading Wren Prentice to the Presence; Janet fumbled with
her coconut and gave it to May Spikins to look after for her, put her
hat on straight, and went with the warrant officer up to the tower. Here
she was passed quickly to Commander Cartwright, by him to the captain of
_H.M.S. Excellent_, and by him to the First Sea Lord. She looked at him
nervously, a red-faced old gentleman with heavy gold braid rings upon
his cuff that seemed to go right up to the elbow, and a fruit salad of
medal ribbons on his chest. She was still trembling from the clamour of
the gun, from reaction, and from fright.

He said kindly, "That was very good shooting, young lady. I congratulate
you. Had you done much shooting before you joined the Service?"

She said, "I had fired a shotgun, sir. Only twice."

"Have you done much shooting since you joined?"

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
eyeshooting?"

"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 into 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 hisself, on
account of what Leading Wren Prentice, No. 3 in the front rank, just
did. Now you see what can be done with eyeshooting 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 upon 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. Viola
Dawson had told me about her, 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 boy friend, 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 days 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 motorboat 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 gum boots with his
dog, and Janet Prentice in rather dirty blue serge slacks, and gum
boots, and a blue jersey, and a greasy duffle 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 carburetor, 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 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
_Dirty Gertie_ 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
to 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
organized 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 110 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 in to 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 _H.M.S. Mastodon_ was a stone frigate. It was Exbury
Hall, about three miles up the Beaulieu River from the Solent. The river
runs into 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 Coast Guard 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
_H.M.S. Mastodon_, and it came as a great 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 in 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 realize 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 specimens. They found streams and pools, with ferns and
water lilies carefully preserved and tended. They found a rock garden
half as large as Trafalgar Square that was a mass of bloom; they found
cedars and smooth, grassy lawns. They found long ranges of greenhouses,
and they learned with awe that the staff of gardeners had been reduced
from fifty to a mere eighteen old men. And finally, wandering entranced
through the carefully tended woods, they found the Beaulieu River
running up between the trees, still tidal. The path ended at a private
pier with a hut and a small dwelling house at the shore end. They walked
out to the end of the pier and stood looking up and down the broad river
at the running water. It was a quiet, sunny evening, very beautiful.
Doves were calling in the woods, and seagulls drifted by upon the tide.
A naval motor cutter manned by two Wrens in jerseys and bell-bottomed
trousers surged up the river from some errand and landed two RNVR
officers at the pier.

"It's not a bit like the Fleet Air Arm," said Janet thoughtfully. "But
it really is a lovely place."

"All right if you never want to see a movie," said May Spikins
practically. "And what about the ships? I thought we'd come to service
Oerlikons, but I haven't seen a sign of one here."

They soon discovered that there were only one or two LCT's in the river
though more were expected before long; the Admiralty had been ahead of
the game in providing Wrens to look after the guns. The Ordnance Officer
was busy with the erection of a new hut down by the pier which was to
serve as their workshop. He was an earnest, competent young RNVR officer
who had been wounded in the raid upon Dieppe a year before; he had a
petty officer that he could use on the construction of the workshop, but
the two Wrens were frankly an embarrassment to him at that time, and he
told them so. "Look, you girls," he said. "I haven't got a job for you,
and I shan't have for the next six weeks. I've fixed things to attach
you to the boat's crews for the time being, so that you can go about
with them and learn the river and the layout of the moorings so that if
you hear that a ship's down at No. 16 buoy you'll know where to find
her. That's a good mike for you, but you'll have plenty to do later on.
If you give any trouble I shall send you back to store and indent for
two more when the work comes along. If you don't behave yourselves
you'll lose a darn good job."

The next months were a sheer joy to Janet. She had hardly realized it,
but her eighteen months with the Fleet Air Arm at Ford had been hard
work; she was more tired than she knew. Here in this lovely place upon
the Beaulieu River there was no war, and at first practically no work;
if she had chosen to do so she could have spent most of that summer
sitting in the sun in the rose gardens reading poetry. Instead, she
followed her directions and attached herself to Leading Wren Viola
Dawson in the naval cutter, with Sheila Cox and Doris Smith, and spent
most of each day with them. When a new tank landing craft or LCS came in
and moored in the river Viola Dawson would take the cutter alongside and
put Janet on board, and leave her there for a couple of hours. She would
report to the petty officer of the ship or to the No. 1 and ask if there
were any gun defects or ordnance stores deficiencies. There usually
were, and she would spend an hour with one or two ratings dismantling
the Oerlikon or recharging the drums, her hands in a wet slough of
coopers' grease. She had a mechanical sense, and rust upon a gun was as
a physical hurt to her. "Just look at that!" she would say severely to
an abashed rating. "If I find it like that again I'll bring the Ordnance
Officer to see your captain. No, I'm not kidding. I will. I've never
seen a gun in such a bloody muck in all my life." To the young captain
of the ship she would say, "I see you've only got stowage for two drums
in the ready-use lockers, sir--all the other Mark 4's seem to have
stowage for six. I'll report on that for you to Mr. Parkes. I think we
might be able to find you four more drums, but the stowage is a dockyard
job. Oh, and I've been over the port gun with Jones--it's getting a bit
rusty." Invariably she would stay for a cup of tea either in the
wardroom with the officers or in the mess deck with the men. Then the
cutter would come alongside for her and she would get back to the pier
and tell her officer that _LCT 2306_ was short of four drums and the
stowage for them, and worry around the naval system till she found
somebody who would do something about it.

Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu
area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the
entrance to the river, was taken over by the navy and became full of
very secretive naval officers; it became known that this was part of a
mysterious naval entity called _Force J._ Near Lepe House and at the
very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength
to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the water
where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let
their ramps down to embark the vehicles or tanks. This place was about
two miles from _Mastodon_. A mile or so along the coast a country house
was occupied by a secret naval party who did strange things with tugs
and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of
cotton floating in the sea; this was Pluto, "Pipe Line Under The Ocean,"
which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply
the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a
thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as
Phoenix, one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till
after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the
artificial harbour Mulberry on the north coast of France.

Inland it was the same. Every wood was littered with dumps of shells and
ammunition in little corrugated-iron shelters, thousands and thousands
of them spaced at regular intervals. There were radar stations upon
Beaulieu Common and Bofors guns at Bucklers Hard; there was radio
everywhere, the slim antennas pointing up from hedges, from haystacks,
and from trucks. Over the whole countryside as winter merged in to
spring there was continuously the roar of aircraft, symbol of modern
military power.

About the middle of March Janet was waiting on the pier one morning for
a boat to take her down the river to an LCS for a routine visit. Sheila
Cox and Doris Smith were there with her, but Viola Dawson, the coxswain,
was still up at the office at _Mastodon_ getting her instructions for
the day's work. The girls sat in a row on the edge of the pier dangling
their legs over the water, talking about Cary Grant and next week's
dance.

Viola Dawson came running down the path through to the pier, most
unusually; the girls got to their feet in surprise. The coxswain panted,
"We're taking the LCP--there's been an accident and it's a beaching job.
Get her started up quick. We've got to pick a party up at Needs Oar
Point."

They were away at full speed down the river in a couple of minutes,
Janet with them to be dropped on her LCS as they passed. As they went
Viola, seated at the wheel and recovering her breath, told them what she
knew. While she had been in the office several small radio transmitters
in the area had burst in to life, and in half a minute everyone
concerned was in action. There had been an accident to a tank upon a
beach near Newtown in the Isle of Wight, and the tank was under water.
Some of the crew were trapped in it, and probably drowned. The party
that they were to pick up at Needs Oar Point was some sort of a salvage
crew of Royal Marines.

There were points of mystery about this story. Doris Smith asked, "How
did a tank get under water?"

"I don't know."

Sheila asked, "What sort of a salvage party is it? There's nothing down
at Needs Oar Point, is there?"

"I don't know that either. The orders were to get down there as quick as
possible and embark this party, and take orders from them."

Needs Oar Point marks a bend in the Beaulieu River a mile from the
entrance, a windy, barren place of flat pastures and sea marshes. When
they got there they saw a naval truck at the end of a track leading to
the river and three young marines waiting for them, a captain and two
sergeants. Their arms were full of strange equipment, waterproof suits
and queer packs holding metal cylinders. The landing was difficult;
Viola ran the sloping prow of the LCP gingerly up over the sea marsh and
the young men scrambled muddily on board over the bow. She backed off
with some difficulty. The officer said, "You know where to go?"

"No, sir."

"You know Newtown? Well, half a mile east of the entrance. Open all the
taps you've got. If we're quick enough there's just a chance we might
get some of them out." He swung round to his sergeants. "Get that
walkie-talkie going and let's know the form."

Viola said, "Can I go alongside the LCS to drop this Wren, sir? She's
Ordnance. She's got a job to do on board it."

"No, go flat out for Newtown. Drop her on your way back." He went aft
past the canopy to his men in the stern behind the engine. Presently he
took the walkie-talkie from the sergeants and began talking and
listening in turn. The two sergeants started to undress. The officer
diverted his attention for a moment. "You girls, keep your eyes
forward," he said.

When after a quarter of an hour they looked aft again the two sergeants
were standing dressed in tight-fitting light rubber suits with rubber
helmets tight around the face, with goggles pushed up on their
foreheads. Janet had heard incautious talk about frogmen but she had
never seen one before, and she had no idea that there were any in her
district. The officer came forward to the wheel where Viola was
steering. "This is the form, coxswain," he said. "An LCT was landing a
Sherman tank upon the beach. You know how they do it? The ship goes in
and grounds with the bow in about four feet of water and lets down her
ramp; the tank goes down the ramp and wades through the water to the
beach. Well, there's a hole in the beach or something, and the tank went
right under. They say its turret is just awash. Everyone got out of it
except the driver, and he's in it still. They've been trying to tow the
tank out with another tank, but it's in gear and they can't shift it.
They've been trying to get down inside to get the driver out, but his
body is across the gear lever and caught up in some way. He's in there
still."

Viola asked, "When did this happen, sir?"

"Ten-fifty."

She glanced at her wrist watch; it was then eleven twenty-five, and they
were still about two miles off, though behind her the engine was roaring
at full throttle and they were doing about fifteen knots. "He'll be
dead, won't he?"

"Not necessarily. Now look, I want you to do this. The tide will be
running to the westward. Go to the tank and land these two chaps on its
turret. Approach it from the lee side, that's from the west, and go
right up to it. Make fast to the turret if you can, but if there's
nothing you can get a rope on to, hold your position with the turret
just under your bow. Got that clear?"

"Aye, aye, sir."

He went aft to his men. Janet came to Viola. "What do you want me to
do?"

The coxswain said, "Give the marines a hand if they want it. I'll need
Sheila and Doris for the boat."

They were close now to the shore. The LCT, relieved of the weight of the
tank, had floated off the beach and backed away, and was now lying a
little way out anchored by the stern. Halfway between the ship and the
sand they saw a small disturbance in the surface of the water which was
the turret of the tank awash, its thin wireless aerial sticking up on
high. There was another tank standing on the beach, and a number of
soldiers, some in battledress and some stripped naked and wet. Viola
turned the LCP and went straight for the tank, and throttled back, and
felt her way to it gently in the last few yards with the turret on her
port hand till the open hatch was right beside her wheel and the bow of
the LCP had grounded on the gun barrel; she held the craft there with a
little engine. It was a delicate and skilful bit of seamanship.

The two frogmen were over the side in an instant, masks and goggles
covering their faces and air bottles on their chests. One of them wormed
his way down through the hatch, twisting his body to right and left to
clear the apparatus on his chest and helped by his comrade, who stayed
waist deep upon the flooded tank peering down into the turret. Presently
he reached right down, head under water, and then the overalled body of
the corporal driver appeared, pulled by the man on top and pushed up
from below by the man inside the tank under the water. The marine
captain in his battledress got over the side on to the tank, and working
waist deep in the water with the top frogman manoeuvred the body of the
driver to the LCP. Janet and Sheila Cox took him as the men passed him
up to them and pulled him up on to the flat foredeck of the landing
craft, and Janet rolled him over on to his face and began the motions
she had learned at school for artificial respiration. He was a young man
with a small moustache, in overalls, his face bluish white in colour,
dead cold to the touch.

The three marines climbed on board again, helped by the other girls. The
one who had gone down inside the tank said, "I put her in neutral, sir."
He seemed to Janet to speak with a slight accent, possibly cockney, but
she paid little attention to that at the time.

They stood dripping on the side deck holding on to the canopy rail,
watching Janet as she worked rhythmically on the body. One of them said
presently, "Dead, isn't he?"

She looked up. "I think he must be. Does anyone know how to do this? Am
I doing it right?"

The officer said, "I think so. Go on as you're doing. Coxswain, take us
in to the beach and we'll get him ashore."

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 living 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 that 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 motor launches 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 enquired. "I 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 in to 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.




                                   4


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; nine 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 lookout 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 was 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.

As we ate she said curiously, "Bill told me you were at Oxford before
the war."

I nodded. "I was at the House."

"Were you really? What were you reading?"

"Law," I said. "You live in Oxford, don't you?"

She nodded. "My father's a don at Wyckham. We live in Crick Road."

"I know Crick Road," I said. "It's a nice part."

"I've lived there all my life," she said. "What made you come to Oxford?
Can't you do Law in Australia?"

"I did a little Law at Melbourne University," I told her. "I'm an old,
old man. I don't know why I came to Oxford, except that I wanted to. I
got a Rhodes scholarship, and it seemed a waste not to use it."

She opened her eyes, for this meant something to her. "You're a Rhodes
scholar?"

"Yes," I said. "It was a bad year for the selectors."

"Did you go into the Air Force when the war broke out?"

"I was in it before, in a way," I said. "I was in the University Air
Squadron."

"Bill said you were in the Battle of Britain."

"I suppose you'd call it that," I said. "I did two operational tours on
fighters, the first at Thorney Island and the second in the Western
Desert. I did a bit of instructing in between. After the second one they
sent me up to Fighter Command."

"Do you like it there?"

I shook my head. "I want to be operational again. My present job comes
to an end when the balloon goes up. I'll put in for an operational
posting then."

She said, "Will they give you a wing?"

I laughed. "A wing commander doesn't get a wing, and I'm only acting,
anyway. I'll have to drop a rank. Lucky if I get a flight to command."

She said in wonder, "It's a bit hard to have to come down in rank. Does
it make a lot of difference in the pay?"

"A bit." I said. "But I've had the office."

"Are you going back to Oxford after the war?"

"I don't know. I think I'd like to go back for a bit and take a degree.
They had a sort of shortened course for Service people after the first
war."

"Wouldn't you find it awfully slow, going back to school, after all
this?"

"I'd like to finish off what I began," I said. "One doesn't like to
leave a loose end hanging out." I glanced at her. "What will you do?"

"I was going to try and go to Lady Margaret Hall," she said. "I don't
know if I'd have got in. I can't see myself getting in there now. I
don't know what I'll do. I haven't thought about it."

Bill laughed. "We'll all get bumped off when the balloon goes up," he
said. "Then it'll be decided for us."

A new sort of landing craft came down the Solent. I forget what it was;
it wouldn't have meant much to me anyway, but it was of great interest
to Janet and to Bill. They began to talk about it, and about other sorts
of ship that were novel to the invasion, and I had leisure to lie
quietly on the grass in the warm sun and study her. I wanted to do that
because it was pretty clear to me that this girl was to be my
sister-in-law. True, they didn't appear to be engaged and she wore no
ring, but from they way she talked to him and the way he looked at her
it was clear that they were very much in love. When the balloon had gone
up and they had more time for personal affairs they would almost
certainly become engaged, and they might marry before the war was over.
I thought of that one and approved the idea. Bill was tired and strained
with the exacting work he had been doing, and a long engagement could
only mean an added strain. I had seen some of that in the RAF and I had
become fanatically opposed to long engagements in wartime. If they were
going to marry, let them marry and have done with it.

When they became engaged or married my mother would want to know what
the girl was like. She could not come twelve thousand miles from
Australia in time of war to meet Bill's girl, nor could she leave the
property even if travel had been possible. She would want my assurance
that this girl would make Bill a good wife, and studying her quietly as
she talked to Bill I felt that I could make my mother happy on that
score. She wasn't a good-looker. Her face was too square and homely, her
shoulders too broad; her short, dark hair had little wave though there
were pretty darkbrown lights in it. I could assure my mother, anyway,
that Bill hadn't fallen for a glamour girl.

I tried to visualize her as the mistress of Coombargana in the future,
to speculate on how she would be able to adapt herself to the Western
District. She had strength of character and a directness of speech that
would make her good with the men; she would be able to control the
station hands all right when Bill was away. She was a good shot with a
gun, which would help her prestige a little. She probably couldn't ride
a horse, but she was young and quite capable of learning to ride. In any
case, that wasn't so important as it used to be in the old days. She was
very practical, which was the important thing, and she was fond of dogs.
She might well become really interested in the cattle and the sheep, and
in the conduct of the work on our big property.

On the social side, she was probably adequate. She would never be much
interested in any social functions, perhaps never dress very well, never
take much pleasure in the organization of charity balls or Red Cross
garden parties. Her interests would probably lie more in the home; she
might become a typical homestead wife. She would always be a pleasant
hostess to visitors to Coombargana but she would never want to give
great entertainments there, unless she changed very much. She was much
more likely to develop an interest in Australia itself, and to want to
travel widely over our vast country. She might want to keep a seagoing
motor yacht or something of that sort, and if so Coombargana could
afford it.

My report on Janet Prentice to my mother would be wholly good. She was
not the sort of girl my mother would have visualized or expected as a
daughter-in-law, but I was confident that she would grow to like her and
to appreciate her very solid virtues. She would make a good mistress of
Coombargana in the future, and a good wife to Bill, and lying there upon
the grass at Keyhaven that day I thought he was a very lucky man.

I listened unashamedly while she talked to Bill, half oblivious of my
presence. The dog, Dev, had laid his head upon her knee as she sat upon
the grass, in sentimental affection, and she was fondling his ears.
"You're very lucky to be able to keep a dog," she said to Bill. "I wish
we could."

"Can't you?"

"I don't know. I don't think anyone has tried. I don't believe the
captain would allow a dog in _Mastodon_. Everyone would want to have one
if he did."

Bill nodded. "We wouldn't be allowed dogs if we weren't in such a lonely
place. I don't know what'll happen to him when we get moved on."

"Are you likely to be shifted soon?"

"I don't think so," he said. "We seem to be able to do everything by
going off on a party from here. We'll get moved on some day, of course."
There was no permanency in the Services. He looked down thoughtfully at
Dev. "I don't know that it's really a good idea letting us have dogs,"
he said thoughtfully. "You get too fond of a dog, and then you're in
trouble when you get moved to a place where you can't have one."

"You can't send him home, of course," she said. "Not to Australia.
Haven't you got any relations in England you could send him to?"

He shook his head. "No one like that."

She said, comforting, "If you're stuck I might be able to get Mummy to
have him."

"Difficult, with the rationing," he replied.

"I know. If Daddy's home I think he might quite like to have him,
though. It's worth trying, if you get in a real jam."

"I thought your father was in Oxford all the time," he remarked.

She turned to him, fresh and animated. "Oh, I forgot--I haven't told
you. There was a letter waiting when I got back on board last night.
Daddy's probably going on the party."

He stared at her. "Not this party?"

"This party," she told him, laughing. "He's gate-crashed it. When the
balloon goes up, Daddy goes too."

"Over to the other side?" he asked incredulously.

"Over to the other side," she said. "At least, he's put in to go. He
doesn't know yet if they'll have him."

"But what's he going as?"

"Aircraft identifier in a merchant ship," she told him. "They're putting
one or two people from the Observer Corps in every merchant ship to stop
the DEMS gunners firing on our own aircraft. They've asked for
volunteers and Daddy's put in for it."

"But how old is he?"

"About sixty-three, I think," she said. "He seems to think that doesn't
matter. I think it's the funniest thing ever."

Bill turned to me. "Have you heard anything about this, Alan?"

As a matter of fact, I knew quite a lot about it, for some of the papers
concerning it had passed across my desk. So many cases of our fighters
being fired upon by friendly ships had occurred that we had stuck our
heels in, and demanded better aircraft identification before we laid on
close support over the beaches by our fighters flying low over a
thousand ships. I rather think that the suggestion to put members of the
Royal Observer Corps in to the merchant ships had come from us. "I did
hear something vaguely," I admitted.

"It's a good show," said Bill. "A good show for a man of sixty-three."

"I think it's the limit," the girl laughed. "Here I've been in the Wrens
three years but no one ever asked me if I'd like to go to the party.
Daddy comes along at the last minute and walks right in."

"Are any Wrens going?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I haven't heard of any. They won't let us do
anything operational, or anything that means living in a ship. We're all
shore based."

I asked her what she did in the navy and she told me answering my
questions with the candour born of competence in her job. "It's quite
good fun, and closer to operations than most of the jobs we get," she
said. "Not so good as being a boat's crew Wren, but better than being a
steward or a cook. It's a bit of a mike at times, but when you get a dud
gun changed in a ship you feel you've done a bit to help."

Bill asked, "Do you get a lot of trouble with the Oerlikons?"

She shook her head. "Not much, and then it's mostly through bad
maintenance. Last week an LCT came in and the captain said his port gun
jammed its breech block solid after twenty rounds and they had to wait
half an hour till it cooled down before they could free it. It did, too.
I cleaned it down and went out to the Needles in the ship and fired it
myself, and it was just like they said. The tolerances were wrong or
something. It was one of the first ones they made in England. They'd put
in several reports about it and nobody believed it wasn't just that
they'd let it get rusty. They've got a new one now."

We went on chatting about Service matters most of the afternoon, sitting
there upon the grass at Keyhaven. I had arranged with the WAAF driver of
the car to pick me up at the hotel in Lymington at six o'clock for I was
dining at the aerodrome that night with a couple of group captains and a
colonel in the USAAF and going through the papers in my brief case with
them after dinner. By four o'clock we had to make a move. We rounded up
Dev from some rabbit holes among the gorse bushes, mud all over his
nose, and got him into the boat, and cast off from the little jetty, and
made our way down to open water and along the mudflats to the Lymington
River and so back to the quay.

I said good-bye to Janet Prentice then, because she had to take the boat
back up the river before meeting Bill again to spend the evening with
him. I shook hands with her in the boat before getting out. "It's been a
grand day," I said. "The best I've had for years. Thanks so much for the
boat, and everything."

"Boats are meant to be used," she laughed. "Especially on Sundays.
Good-bye, sir. Don't go and prang yourself on the way back to London."

"I take that as an insult," I said, laughing. The "sir" to my uniform
hurt a little, but after all, she was Bill's girl, not mine. "Good-bye,
Janet."

She sheered off from the quay and went away up river through the bridge
with Dev still with her in the boat, standing up in the bow and looking
forward. Bill and I watched till she was out of sight, and then turned
up the long hill of the main street to the hotel. "Well," he asked
presently. "What do you think?"

"I think you're bloody lucky," I told him.

"So do I," he said. "It's not in the bag yet, though."

"You've not said anything to her?"

"She knows, all right," he said. "We've fixed to go on leave together
after the balloon goes up, and sort things out then. We've both got too
much on our plates just now to think about the future." He grinned.
"Maybe there won't be a future. If there is, we're going off on leave
together somewhere. That's the way it stands."

"Sounds all right to me," I said.

He glanced at me. "Think there'll be an uproar at home?"

I shook my head. "There'll be no uproar," I told him. "She'll go down
all right."

He nodded. "I think so, too." He hesitated. "You won't say anything
about this in your letters? I haven't said a word about it yet, and I
shan't, not till it's all buttoned up."

"I won't say anything," I told him. "Let me know when you put out a
communiqu, and then I'll write to Mum and say she's okay."

"That's good of you," he said gratefully. "That'ld help a lot. I want
her to start off on the right foot with Mum."

My RAF car was waiting outside the hotel when we got here, with the WAAF
driver sitting in it. I said good-bye to Bill on the pavement. "I don't
know when we'll meet again," I said. "I shan't be able to take another
day off till the balloon's gone up. Some time after that, I should say."

He grinned. "Some time after that I'm coming on leave."

"All right," I laughed. "I won't come and peep through the keyhole."

On that note we ended, and he went off down the hill to meet his Janet
at the boatyard and to spend the evening with her. I stood watching him
till he was out of sight, while my WAAF driver waited for me.

I can see him now.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I think it was only a few days after that that the JU. 188 came over
Beaulieu. Viola Dawson told me a good bit about that when we met in
1950, and May Cunningham, then May Spikins, told me about it, too, when
I had tea with her at Harlow. After that I got in touch with Tom
Ballantyne who had been with me in Fighter Command, and who in 1951 was
a group captain doing a term at the Air Ministry. He was very helpful
and put someone on to dig into the records, and found the accident
report, and showed it to me in his office.

What happened was this. On a Saturday morning at the very end of April
the Ordnance Officer at _Mastodon_ sent Janet down the river with four
Sten guns and four boxes of ammunition for the LCT's. It had been
suggested that after the first landing in Normandy the Germans might
counterattack and re-take a beach while the tank landing craft were
stranded, and it was thought that the ships ought to have some more
adequate weapons on board for close range fighting than revolvers. Sten
guns were in good supply, and these were being issued for the first time
to the officers of the ships.

Each ship was to get one gun and one case of ammunition. The LCT's were
lying in pairs all down the river, moored bow and stern to buoys, and
half their crews had gone off on week-end leave. Viola Dawson took Janet
down the river in the LCP to where the ships were lying near Needs Oar
Point surrounded by the open marshes of the estuary and went alongside
_LCT 968_. The captain came to the rail; he was an RNVR lieutenant
called Craigie. From the boat Janet said, "Good morning, sir. I've got a
Sten gun here for you, and one for each of _538_, _946_, and _702_."

"Morning, Janet," he said. "_702_ is lying alongside us here. Pass up a
couple of them. Wait, I'll get a chap to help you." A rating came down
into the boat and they passed the guns and the heavy ammunition boxes up
into the tank landing craft. Janet swung herself on board after them.
They passed one gun and one box of ammunition across onto the next ship,
whose captain was on leave. A sub-lieutenant met Janet at the rail. She
knew how to deal with hesitant and incompetent-looking young officers.
"I've got to get a signature for these," she said. She pulled a pink
form from a trouser pocket. "Just sign it there. It only means that
you've received them in good condition. Put the number of your ship
there, and the date _there_, sir, and sign it at the bottom, _there_."
The sub took the form from her and went off to the wardroom to find his
pen.

Janet turned to Lieutenant Craigie beside her. "I'm sorry we could only
let you have one, sir."

"Every little helps," he said. "You might let me know if there's a
chance of getting another."

"I will indeed," she said. The sense of impending battle was very heavy
on her; it would be intolerable if any serviceable weapons should remain
in her store when the balloon went up. "We should be getting a lot more
in a few days."

There was a sound of firing from the Isle of Wight, between Newtown and
Yarmouth. Craigie turned to look, and Janet turned with him. There was
an aircraft there, quite low down, flying more or less towards them, at
eleven o'clock in the morning of a bright spring day. And there were
little puffs of smoke in the blue sky all round it.

For a moment they stood staring, unable to believe the evidence of their
eyes. It was many months since the Germans had done anything like that.
Then Craigie shouted, "Enemy aircraft over! Anti-aircraft stations!" and
men came tumbling out on deck.

On the LCT beside them the sub and several ratings came out and looked
with interest at the coming aeroplane; it was not more than a thousand
feet up. Janet, furious at their slowness, said, "That's a German.
Better man those Oerlikons."

The sub looked at her helplessly. "Can't. Both gunners are on leave."

The girl said, "My bloody Christ!" and slipped over the rail on to the
other ship. Behind her Craigie roared, "Okay, Janet--you take the port
gun and I'll take the starboard!" The inner guns of both ships were
practically useless, their field of fire blanked off by the other ship.
"You--Jamieson! Get the R.U. lockers open and pass out the drums! What
the hell are you standing there for--don't you know the drill? And where
are your tin hats?"

At the gun Janet pulled the cocking lever and slipped the heavy drum in
place with quick, experienced hands; she released the securing catch and
put her shoulders in the hoops. Behind her someone strained the strap
across her back. She swung the gun at the approaching aircraft but it
was turning away. It was two thousand yards from her and broadside on
now, a hopeless shot. She stood watching it in disappointment, and
called across to Craigie, "Everything all right on your side, sir?"

He called back to her, "All okay here, but I'm afraid we've lost him."
The aircraft was flying westwards over the middle of the Solent now, a
heavy, black, twin-engined thing; they could see the white cross upon
the fuselage. One or two ships were firing at it at long range, and a
Bofors from a cliff top to the east of Yarmouth, but it was momentarily
out of range of most guns in the district.

She called across, "What sort is it?"

Craigie replied, "A Junkers 188."

"What's he up to?"

"Making a survey, I suppose. Photographing everything he can. He's got a
bloody nerve."

The aircraft began turning towards the north. It went on turning, and
now it was flying more or less towards them from the southwest. From
behind her Craigie called, "I shall be blanked out by Monkey's Island in
a minute. It's all yours, Janet."

The Junkers was not more than a thousand feet up now and coming straight
towards them, a beautiful, copybook example of a sitting shot. She had
it fixed below the centre of her sight exactly as she wanted it; she
swung her body slowly, waiting for it, savouring the moment. It was
impossible that she could miss; she felt too confident. She pressed the
grip and opened fire, and the gun started beating rhythmically, and the
smoke of cordite and burned grease was all around her. She swung her
body down slowly till she was crouching almost on her knees, holding it
exactly as it should be in the sight.

As she fired the wheels came down; she knew that something had happened
but it meant nothing to her. She went on firing and the glass and
perspex nose of the cabin shattered, and three bright stars appeared
inside the cabin quickly in succession. It reared up suddenly and passed
right over the LCT's in a steep climb towards _Mastodon_; she scrambled
round with the gun to get it on a reverse bearing, but now her own ship
blanked her fire. She swung her body to the side to look round the
obstruction and saw it again. A Bofors from the shore opened up on it as
it passed from the river marshes over land. It stalled with full power
on and fell into a dive, and as it fell the Bofors blew its fin off. It
plunged steeply into a field near the marshes and crashed with a great
thud, and a whoof, and a towering pillar of flame, and a huge cloud of
black smoke. Janet stood trembling in the harness of the Oerlikon,
appalled at the sight.

Around her men were clamouring and shouting; she stood bewildered while
they unfastened the back strap for her. It was incredible that this had
happened because of what she did. By her side Craigie cried, "Good show,
Janet! I bet you're the only Wren who's ever done that!" A rating said,
"That's bloody right, sir."

She said stupidly, "Did I do it? Wasn't it anybody else firing?"

"Of course you did. My gun was blanked off by the bridge. You got three
direct hits in the pilot's cockpit. It was marvellous shooting."

"Four hits, sir," said the rating. "She hit it four times. I saw 'um.
Eh, ba goom, I never seen shooting to touch it."

She became concerned about the cleaning of the gun that she had fired,
both gunners being on leave; she told Craigie that she must get down to
work at once and clean the gun. I think psychologists would call that a
defence mechanism or something; her mind turned to the routine job
rather than face the implications of what she had done. The officer
called a gunner from his own ship and set him to work upon the Oerlikon;
she left it reluctantly and went back on board his ship with him. Viola
Dawson and Doris Smith were on deck to congratulate her; for a few
minutes she moved about the deck amongst the men in a welter of praise.
Craigie stood looking over to the fields in front of _Mastodon_ where a
little black smoke was still eddying up. "I'm going on shore to have a
look at it," he said. "Like to come, Janet?"

An awful fascination seized her; she would have to go. She said, "Yes,
please."

He hesitated for a moment. "You know what it's going to look like? Think
you'd better come?"

"I'm all right, sir. I was in the Fleet Air Arm before I got drafted
here. I know what a crash looks like."

He was relieved. "Oh, well then--come along."

They got down into the LCP. The tide was flowing, and Viola nosed the
boat gingerly through a small channel in the marshes to a little disused
jetty; from there they walked across the fields to the crash.

The Junkers had been pulling out of the dive when she hit the ground;
she had not plunged straight in. She had hit first on a little mound
covered in low bushes, and here one of her engines was lying. She had
then cut a swathe through a hedge, across a lane, and through the other
hedge. The wings had been torn from the fuselage here and had taken fire
from the fuel in the tanks; what was left of the aircraft had spread
itself all over the field in scraps of torn Duralumin sheet. It bore no
resemblance to an aeroplane at all.

A number of soldiers were already there; under the directions of an
officer they were gathering up the bodies and laying them in a row under
the hedge. All were dead, all very badly mutilated, and there seemed to
be a great many of them. The subaltern had found two parachute packs
relatively undamaged in the wreckage and he was fumbling with the
unfamiliar fastenings to open them to get the silk out to lay over the
bodies; evidently he had done this job before.

Craigie went up to him. "Do you mind if we have a look? This Wren shot
it down."

"I wish to God she'd done it somewhere else," the young man said
testily. "Look all you like, so far as I'm concerned. It's nothing
whatever to do with me, but one can't just leave them lying in the
field."

Craigie asked, "How many of them were there in it?"

"Seven."

"Seven? I thought the JU 188 had a crew of four."

"So did I. Go and count them, if you like. They must have been jammed in
sitting on each other's knees. We've telephoned the RAF, but I don't
suppose they'll be here for a bit yet."

Craigie hesitated, and then, impelled by morbid curiosity, he walked
over to the hedge to look at the bodies. Janet followed him. The bodies
were poor, battered hulks of things that had once been men; all were
either corporals or sergeants, dressed in the blue uniform of the
Luftwaffe.

Janet had seen a good bit of this sort of thing before, and she was not
particularly upset at the sight though a couple of glances were enough
for her; she turned away. It was difficult for her to associate these
grotesque, battered things with living men. It was sobering to think
that she had killed them, but she had seen her own friends and
acquaintances killed at Ford by Germans in air raids and reduced to
bodies that looked just like that. She would rather that she had not had
to fire the Oerlikon, rather that somebody else had had the job of doing
this and not her, but she felt no particular sense of guilt.

She went back to the LCP with Craigie, and Viola Dawson took them back
to the tank landing craft. Craigie drafted a long signal to be sent by
Aldis lamp to the signal station at Lepe House and then to his
commanding officer, with a copy for the captain of _Mastodon_ since
Janet was involved. Janet went on with her job and finished distributing
her Sten guns and then went back to _Mastodon_ for dinner.

She was working in the Ordnance store after dinner when Third Officer
Collins, her Wren officer, telephoned down to tell her to go back to her
hut and put on her No. 1's and then come to the office; the captain
wanted to see her. Twenty minutes later she was shown in to the
captain's office and stood to attention before his desk. There was an
RAF officer, a flight lieutenant, sitting beside him.

"Leading Wren Prentice," said the RN officer, "I understand that you
shot down a German aeroplane this morning."

"I shot at it and hit it, sir," she said. "Other people hit it too. I
don't know if I was the one to shoot it down."

"Lieutenant Craigie tells me that you hit it first," he said. "Tell me,
why did you fire at it at all? It's not your job to fire at enemy
aircraft. You're not part of an operational unit."

She was taken aback. "There were no gunners on _702_, sir, and the sub
wasn't doing anything about it. It seemed the right thing to do, that
somebody should man the guns. I think I asked Lieutenant Craigie--I'm
not sure." She hesitated. "It all happened so quickly."

"I know." He paused, and then he said, "You can stand easy, Prentice.
Sit down." She did so. "Lieutenant Craigie says that you were acting
under his orders. Actually, he had no business to give you any orders at
all. You're not a part of his command and you haven't been trained for
operations. You understand that?"

She said quietly, "Yes, sir."

The naval officer turned to the flight lieutenant, who leaned forward.
He was an intelligence officer from Beaulieu aerodrome. "The Army say
that at about the time you started firing the machine put its wheels
down," he said. "Did you see that?"

She hesitated. "Yes, I think I did."

"You're not sure?"

"I remember noticing the wheels were down after it passed over and was
going towards the shore," she said. "I think I shot them down."

"Shot the wheels down?"

"Yes, sir. I knew the wheels came down while I was shooting. I'd say
that I'd hit the machine once at least before that happened, but I
couldn't be quite sure."

"Did you go on firing after you saw the wheels come down?"

She said, "Yes, I think I did."

"Do you know what it means when an enemy aeroplane puts its wheels
down?"

She had a vague idea. "Does it mean that he wants to surrender?"

"That's generally the meaning. In a case like this it's difficult to
judge. I'm not blaming you, Miss Prentice. I've just got to establish
the facts, whether the Junkers was making a motion for surrender or
not."

She said unhappily, "A lot of other people were firing at it after the
wheels went down, after it passed over us."

"I know. We don't know for certain that you were responsible for its
destruction. The trouble is that we now think that the machine was
trying to find an aerodrome and make a peaceful landing."

She stared at the intelligence officer. "How could that be, sir?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "There were seven men in a machine with seats
for four, they were all NCO's, and their paybooks show they were all
Poles or Czechs. They may have stolen the Junkers to fly it over here
and surrender."

The captain said, "If so, they picked the hottest spot on the south
coast to try and land."

"Maybe," the air force officer remarked. "But they wouldn't have known
that. They couldn't have been briefed at all for this flight, or they'd
never have come over in the way they did. We think that they were
probably escaping from the Germans to join our side." He turned to the
naval captain. "That's all I wanted to establish for the report, sir,
whether the wheels came down before this Wren began firing, or
afterwards. As regards the aircraft, there's no need for anybody to lose
sleep over it. I think it probably _was_ trying to land, but who's to
say?"

"No more questions for this young lady?"

"No, sir."

The captain turned to Janet. "Well, I'm not going to take any
disciplinary action, Leading Wren Prentice. I don't blame you for acting
as you did. But remember this in future. You've not been trained for
operations and you don't know operations. You have absolutely no right
to fire any gun against the enemy, because in doing so you may make very
serious mistakes. Remember that. That's all. You may go now."

She went back to her hut to change back into working clothes, dazed and
unhappy. Normally she would have seen Bill next day, which was a Sunday;
I think that must have been the week-end following our trip to Keyhaven.
In the normal course of things neither of them worked on Sundays, and
they were in the habit of meeting then and spending most of the day
together. But Bill was not available. He had told her that he had a job
to do over the week-end, and he would meet her one evening in the
following week, as soon as he got back. Piecing together what he had
been doing in the weeks before Overlord from information that I could
collect about him six years later, I think this must have been the time
that he was taken in a submarine to St. Malo by night, to paddle ashore
in a folboat to make a survey of obstacles upon the beach at Dinard.

Janet had the week-end alone to brood over what she had done. "She took
it badly," May Cunningham told me, years afterwards. "I mean, after all,
it's what any one of us might have done, and nobody knew really what the
aeroplane was up to. But she got it fixed firm in her mind that they
were on our side, and that she'd killed them. I tried to tell her--we
all tried--that the Bofors hit them too--I mean, if she hadn't fired at
all they'd have been dead anyway, whoever they were and whatever they
were up to. But she couldn't see it like that. She didn't cry or
anything. Might have been better if she had. She just carried on, but
she got very quiet--hardly talked at all. It's a pity her boy
friend--your brother--it's a pity he wasn't around so she could talk it
over with him."

                 *        *        *        *        *

Looking through her documents at Coombargana nine years later, I found
two letters, each dated April 29th, 1944. I think that date was the same
Saturday on which she shot down the Junkers, and so she would have got
these letters on the Monday morning after her week-end of troubled
thought about the crash. One of them was from her mother and one from
her father. The one from her mother read,

    My darling girl,

    Daddy went off yesterday with Mr. Grimston; they were to report
    at the headquarters of the Observer Corps in London but they
    didn't know where they would go after that except that it would
    be to a place on the south coast somewhere for a week in
    training and after that they would be sent to join a ship. It
    seems very lonely in the house without him, but I have plenty to
    do of course. I think he is going to write to you when he knows
    where he is going to be. Poor dear, he was getting terribly
    disappointed because he volunteered nearly three weeks ago and
    Mr. Grimston heard on Saturday but then he's two years younger
    than your father only sixty-two and Daddy thought they might
    have decided that he was too old to go. But then the letter came
    on Wednesday and he was to go in the same party as Mr. Grimston
    it _is_ nice they'll be together, isn't it? I try not to think
    of what may happen. I do wish he was safe in England like you
    are but of course all the fighting will be over by the time the
    merchant ships get there, he says, and he's afraid they won't
    have anything to do at all. I _am_ glad they took him in the
    end, because he did want to go so badly.

    I must stop now because I have seven pounds of gooseberries from
    the garden and just enough sugar to make jam.

                                                     Your loving,
                                                            Mother.

Sitting in my quiet room at Coombargana, far from all wars and rumours
of wars, I have wondered why she should have kept that letter. There
were not many letters in that case of hers; she did not hoard letters
that were not important to her. I think perhaps she read it very humbly
on that Monday morning; I think it must have made a deep impression on
her. One must remember that her success in shooting down the aeroplane
had brought her no peace of mind; she was deflated, conscious that she
might have made a ghastly mistake. And now this news had come to her;
Daddy had pulled it off. Daddy, who could not read a thing without his
spectacles, whose straggling grey hair did little to conceal his bald
head, the tired old man who through the war had given everything that
was in him to the Royal Observer Corps. Daddy was still as young in
heart as any of the captains of the LCT's she serviced; he had
gate-crashed the party and was to go in Overlord.

I think perhaps that letter made her feel very humble; I think that is
probably the reason why she kept it. The second one was from her father
and I think she kept that for another reason.

    Dear Janet,

    Mother will have written to you by this time to tell you I have
    volunteered for two months' service in the merchant navy as an
    aircraft identifier. We are at the Royal Bath Hotel in
    Bournemouth not very far from you and I shall be here till
    Friday evening. I cannot leave here because we have talks and
    lectures and identification practice from early in the morning
    till six-thirty at night, but could you get over to see me one
    night and have dinner with me in the mess here? I will arrange
    for a car to drive you back to _Mastodon_ after dinner; it can't
    be more than thirty miles. Come if you can possibly get away, my
    dear.

    I am terribly glad to have got this job because I missed the
    last war, you know. I was afraid I would be too old, but there
    are several older than me in this course. The medical officer
    has his surgery on the top floor of a seven-storey building near
    here and there is no lift. If you can get up the stairs to see
    him he passes you as fit.

    After this week I go to some port, to join a ship; there won't
    be any leave. We are so close; do come over if they will let
    you.

                                                             Daddy.

She went over to Bournemouth to see her father one evening that week;
perhaps on the Tuesday or Wednesday. The visit made a deep impression on
her and probably took her mind off her own troubles, for she talked a
lot about what was going on in the Royal Bath Hotel to Viola Dawson and
to May Spikins, and they told me six years later what they could
remember. I found Mr. Grimston when I was in Oxford after the war and
trying to find Janet Prentice. He runs a chain store grocery in Cowley
and he remembered her visit to the hotel to see her father; he had spent
a quarter of an hour or so with them. He told me a good bit about what
went on in the hotel that week. I looked in once when I was travelling
the south coast of England in 1952 and had a meal there, but it was then
a very different place and I found nothing that would put me in mind of
Janet Prentice.

She got to the Royal Bath Hotel at about six o'clock. She found it to be
a large, fashionable place with well-tended gardens overlooking the sea,
situated on a cliff above the broken pier in the middle of the town. The
old ladies and the wealthy residents had disappeared and most of the
furniture had been removed; it was full of swarms of aging men and
schoolboys in the light blue RAF battledress of the Observer Corps.

Her father was in the lobby, and he came forward to meet her with the
enthusiasm of a boy. She kissed him, and stepped back to look at him. He
seemed to have dropped off twenty years since she had seen him last; he
looked hardly more than forty. He wore the blue battledress she knew,
but on his shoulder was a lettered flash SEABORNE, and sewn upon his arm
was a lettered brassard that said simply, RN. He was no longer the
father she had known, the poor old man in Oxford, harassed by overwork.
He was a clear-eyed, confident leader.

She said, "Daddy, you look fine! Are you enjoying it?"

He laughed. "It's pretty hard work. We've only got a week here, and
there's a lot to learn."

She asked in wonder, "Why did they pick this place?"

"It's handy for the invasion. It's our permanent headquarters, this. If
our ship gets sunk we have to get on board one of the landing craft and
find our way back here and report, to get re-equipped and sent off
again. We have to have a base, you see, and it's convenient to have it
on the south coast. Well, this is it."

He was rated, she found, as a petty officer in the Navy. She went rather
shyly and dined with him in his mess, sitting at long tables with a
couple of hundred men; she was the only girl. Most of these men were
over fifty and some of them were very old indeed; she saw one upright,
white-moustached old man that she would have said was seventy-five. She
asked her father about him. "He says he's sixty-three," he told her. "If
you don't walk with a stick they don't ask too many questions."

Beside her at the mess table sat the bald-headed proprietor of a summer
hotel in Scotland. "There was the fower of us, ye understand," he said,
"all in the Obsairver Corps, myself, the cook, the waiter, and the
boots. When this notice came roond I said that I was going, and were
they wi' me? But they couldn't see it, said it was too risky. So I told
the wife, 'Jeannie, my love,' I said, 'I must away to this,' and I
closed down the hotel and sacked all three of them and came down here.
So that's what they got for running out on the Obsairver Corps. Still,
we don't want fellows like that in this pairty."

She had wanted to talk to her father about the Junkers, to unload on to
him some of the trouble she was in. She had debated in her mind whether
there would be a security breach in telling her father what had
happened, and she had privately decided that security could go to hell.
As the evening went on, however, she got less and less opportunity. Her
father was glowing with the glamour of his approach to war; his mind was
set entirely upon aircraft identification. "I got 96% in this morning's
test," he told her with pride. "The only one I got wrong was the ME.
110; it was a dead stern view. I said it was a Mitchell. Only two people
got that one right. I got all the others."

She said, "How splendid! Do you do that all day, Daddy?"

"Oh no. We do seamanship in the morning." There was an RNR lieutenant
commander who had spent his whole life in the merchant navy; he took
them in a class and made them practice slinging and stowing a hammock,
and practice climbing a rope ladder up the side of a house to simulate
the side of a ship. He had a sense of humour and punctuated his lessons
with gruesome stories of bad food and unpleasant heads in merchant
ships, indoctrinating them skilfully into the seamy side of seafaring
amid roars of laughter. He taught them the parts of a ship and the
points of bearing till they could shout, "Enemy aircraft on the
starboard bow!" so that it was heard over half Bournemouth.

Her father's mind was set entirely on these things; he had sloughed off
all the petty cares of home and work, all the responsibilities of normal
life. He had set all that aside and he was going to the war with joy in
his heart, and two hundred other old men with him. In all her naval life
Janet had met no such morale as she found that night in the Royal Bath
Hotel. It was the Dunkirk spirit over again, that turned aside from
every personal affection and from all material ties, and thought only of
the prosecution of the war. That spirit flowered in England for a few
months in the year 1940. It flowered again in the early summer of 1944
in the Royal Bath Hotel.

"I'm trying to get a motor transport ship," her father told her. "They
go over very early, I know. I believe they get there on the evening of
D-Day, or D plus one at the latest."

He listened absently when she told him of her work, for he was absorbed
in his own. They sat in the lounge after dinner on hard wooden chairs,
and a sergeant of the local Home Guard arrived on the lawn outside the
window carrying a Lewis gun. A wide circle of old men formed around him,
seated or kneeling on the grass, as he proceeded to dismantle it and
lecture to them on the gun. Her father said to Janet, "I really ought to
be there, but I don't suppose it matters."

"Would you like to, Daddy? I don't mind. I know the stripped Lewis, of
course, but not the one with all that stovepipe on the barrel. I'll come
with you if you'd like to go and listen. Or wouldn't they like that?"

He said eagerly, "Oh, that won't matter. They all know you're an
Ordnance Wren; if you aren't careful you'll find yourself telling us
about the Oerlikon." So they went together and sat on the grass till
dark, listening to the sergeant as he showed them the Lewis, fingering
the bits of it as they were passed around the circle.

She had not got the heart to spoil his pleasure with her own troubles.
There was nothing he could do to help her, nothing to be gained by
telling him about it now. It would only distress him and spoil the
glamour he was living in. He had put off all personal cares and left
them with his wife in his home at Oxford. Mentally he was stripped now
for the fight; he would not see her mother again till he had done his
stuff and Overlord was over. She could not break in now and load him up
with her troubles. It wouldn't be fair.

"We've got a course in First Aid tomorrow," he told her. "None of these
merchant ships carry doctors; the captain usually knows a bit but he'll
be terribly busy all the time, of course. So they're going to cram some
of that into us. There's such an awful lot to learn, and no time to
learn it . . ."

At ten o'clock her car was at the door, and he came to the steps of the
hotel to see her off. "If you're writing to Mummy, tell her I'm all
right, won't you?" he said. "I've been a bit worried--that I ought not
to have left her. But I simply couldn't miss this one."

She laughed. "Of course not, Daddy. Mummy'll be quite all right. I'll
write to her tomorrow and tell her that you're as fit as a flea and
having the time of your life."

"You know," he said in wonder, "really--I believe I am. It's having to
do with things, I suppose, after spending one's whole life dealing with
ideas. It's having something really solid to bite on. Something definite
to do."

"You won't want to go back to Oxford," she told him.

"Oh yes, I shall," he replied. "Oxford is where the long-term, valuable
work gets done. If I can just have this, I'll be quite happy to go back
to Oxford. If I can take this back with me, and think about it now and
then."

"Look at it, like a pressed flower in a book," she said.

He nodded. "Just like that. Just like a pressed flower in a book."

She kissed him good-bye and got into the car, and was driven off to
Lymington. She had to dismiss the car there because petrol shortages
restricted the radius of hired cars to eight miles, but at Lymington she
picked up the late ferry to _Mastodon_ and got home in the truck. She
was glad that she had not told her father of the Junkers, and said so to
Viola Dawson as they went to bed. I think she must have been looking
forward very much to talking it all over with Bill.

As a matter of fact, I doubt if she did so. I am not quite sure of this,
but I don't think she ever met Bill again. He came back from his Dinard
survey and was at Cliffe Farm for about two days; it is just possible
she might have met him then though it was in the middle of a working
week. Then he went off to join a party setting out from Gosport in an
MTB. He was drowned on the night of May the 5th at Le Tirage in
Normandy, exactly a month before Overlord.




                                   5


It was not until I got back to England in 1948 that I was able to get
any very satisfactory account of what had happened to Bill. I got a
telegram commencing "The Admiralty regrets . . ." three days after his
death, at Fighter Command, for I was Bill's next of kin in England. I
tried, as anybody would, to find out what had happened to him, but
immediately I came up against a blank wall of security. At the Second
Sea Lord's office in Queen Anne's Mansions they told me politely but
quite firmly that no details of his death could be released until the
war was over, and I already knew sufficient of his work to realize that
this was not unreasonable. I don't think the news came as a surprise to
me, for he was strained and tired when we met at Lymington. He should
have been relieved and put on other duties, but in the weeks immediately
preceding Overlord perhaps that wasn't possible.

He was my only brother, and I still miss him a great deal.

When the war ended I was still in hospital, and I left England for
Australia in 1946 before I could get about very much on my own. I had
written guarded and unsatisfactory letters about Bill's death to my
father and mother at Coombargana, because the little that I did know of
his work was classed _Most Secret_ at that time, and the war still had
to be won. I said nothing to them about Janet Prentice in those letters
because I was pretty sure that Bill hadn't told them about her; my
mother didn't know her and could do nothing to help her, and I thought
that letters from my mother in Australia could only embarrass and
distress the girl. When these things happen, I think one must accept the
fact that a clean break is the best way to take it.

I meant to get in touch myself with Janet Prentice directly Overlord was
over and go down to see her, but it was August before I got another day
off from my job and I had been to France three times since the invasion.
I wrote to her then suggesting a meeting but I got no answer to my
letter; I now know that by that time she was out of the Wrens. Soon
after that I got a posting to command my Typhoon squadron, and with that
she slipped into the background of my mind.

In 1951 I met Warrant Officer Finch in Eastney Barracks in Southsea and
he told me what had happened to Bill. His account is obviously right
because he was with Bill in the water at Le Tirage up till a few minutes
before his death. He told me that they usually worked together;
apparently it helps in operations of that sort to know your mate well,
so that when a pair of men team up they may go on together for some
time.

What happened was this. Le Tirage is a little seaside town on the north
coast of Normandy between Le Havre and Cherbourg. It was to be the scene
of one of the landings of the British and Canadian forces in Overlord a
month later, but at that time, the warrant officer told me, security was
so good that neither he nor Bill appreciated the very great importance
of the job they had been sent to do.

A small river runs out in to the sea at Le Tirage, flowing through flat,
marshy land behind the town. This river is furnished with lock gates to
hold the water back when the tide falls and make it navigable by barges
which carry agricultural produce from the inland districts to the sea in
time of peace.

It was an operational requirement that when we invaded Normandy these
lock gates should be captured intact, in order that the lock and the
navigable river might be used to supply our army after landing. A large
number of Thames lighters, shallow-draft steel vessels capable of
carrying a hundred tons of cargo or more, had been fitted hastily with
engines and a steering gear making them capable of crossing to France
under their own power, and these were to be used in the build up of the
army after landing, penetrating inland by the navigable rivers and
canals as the army advanced. This had been foreseen by the Germans. The
French Resistance had informed us that the lock gates at Le Tirage had
been mined with explosive charges under water near the bottom of each
gate, which could be detonated by electricity from a small building
nearby which housed the operating mechanism of the lock gates. At the
first alarm that indicated a landing, the Germans had only to throw a
switch in this small building, the gates would be destroyed, and all the
water would run out of the canal, making it impossible for our lighters
to use it.

Something, therefore, had to be done about these mines on the lock
gates. The gates were about half a mile inland from the sea; for this
half mile the river was a tidal ditch with little water in it at low
tide, though it had twelve feet of water or more when the tides were at
full springs. The problem was studied at the headquarters of Combined
Operations and a number of schemes for capturing the lock gates intact
were discussed. In the course of this study the matter was referred down
to the experts at Cliffe Farm, who put up a proposal that the mines
should be neutralized before the invasion was launched by frogmen
swimming up the half mile of the river from the beach.

To neutralize the mines it was necessary to do a relatively simple
little electrical job on the wiring near the mine itself, and under
water. It would not be sufficient to cut the wires, for circuits of this
sort are tested daily and a cut wire would be instantly detected and
repaired. Instead, an electric gadget no larger than my little finger
had to be wired close up to the mine and in parallel with it; this would
ensure that the electrical resistance would remain unaltered under test
but that the mine would not go off when the exploding current passed.
Such a unit would be very inconspicuous as the mines were under water;
if by any chance it were to be discovered by the Germans before
Overlord, the work that they would have to do would be immediately
obvious to the Resistance, who would report to us. We should then have
to work out some new means of capturing the gates intact.

The work of fitting this little gadget to each mine would take about ten
minutes. Warrant Officer Finch told me that the first suggestion that it
should be done by frogmen came from Bill and himself, after they had
discussed the matter privately together. They were, perhaps, the best
people to advise the Staff upon this matter, for they knew Le Tirage
quite well. They had been there twice in the middle of the night to
examine the beach defences. They did not consider the German sentries at
Le Tirage to be particularly alert, and they were confident that given a
dark, windy night and possibly some sort of military diversion they
could swim past the sentries at the mouth of the little river and up the
half mile to the lock gates, do their job, and get back undetected to
the beach. The gates themselves were unguarded according to the
Resistance, perhaps because they also served as a road bridge and there
was a good deal of traffic over them and also, being half a mile inland,
the Germans were unable to imagine that we could get at them from the
sea.

This plan was considered and discussed at Combined Operations
headquarters, and it was decided to adopt it. If it were successful the
electrical modification to the firing circuits would be good for many
months. It was therefore decided to do the job about a month before
Overlord so that if it were detected by the enemy there would be time to
try some other way of neutralizing the mines. As regards the diversion,
there was a launching site for the V-1 weapon about a mile from Le
Tirage to the south, and it was arranged to stage a night air raid on
this by a few aircraft of Bomber Command at the time when the frogmen
were entering the river, to distract the attention of the German
defenders from the waterfront.

The electrical gadgets to be fitted to the mines were prepared by the
department which specialized in explosive fountain pens and lavatory
seats, and Warrant Officer Finch told me that they spent a couple of
days practicing in attaching them to a similar German mine which was in
our possession. The latter part of this practice was carried out in
darkness under water, working under similar conditions to those under
which the operation must be carried out, with men watching from above to
see if the frogmen could be detected in the work. When they were perfect
in the relatively simple technique that was necessary a date was set for
the operation, when there would be half tide in the entrance channel at
one o'clock in the morning and no moon.

These conditions were fulfilled on May the 5th, and Sergeant Finch and
Bill left Gosport in an MTB at about eight o'clock that evening, with a
folboat on board, a sort of kayak built of waterproof canvas on a wooden
frame that would carry them ashore on to the beach. They reached the
other side at about midnight and lay to about four miles offshore, and
put the folboat in the water. It was arranged that the MTB should lie
there for two hours, till 0215 and she would then stand in towards the
town upon a certain bearing if the frogmen by that time had not
returned, running on her quiet, low-powered engines. If nothing had been
seen of them by 0245 the MTB would have to return to base.

Sergeant Finch and Bill got into the folboat and paddled it ashore,
landing about two hundred yards to the west of the river entrance.
Conditions were not too good for their venture. It was a calm, cloudless
night and the moon had only just set; there was still moonlight in the
sky and visibility was relatively good. They would have preferred a
windy, rainy, overcast night, but they decided to go on and do the job.
They tied the folboat to one of the beach obstacles, adjusted the
cylinders of oxygen upon the harness round their bodies, and entered the
water.

Their plan of action was that Bill was to swim in first past the
sentries at the mouth of the river and proceed up the half-mile entrance
channel. Finch was to follow him five minutes later if all was quiet; if
Bill were detected or if there were any firing Finch was to use his own
discretion whether to go on or to abandon the attempt. Bill was to go on
up to the lock gates and do the job on both mines, and Finch was to stay
in support, resting in the water at a certain point about a hundred
yards from the gates on the east side of the channel. If the job were
not as they expected, or if Bill found himself growing tired before it
was finished, he would come back and consult with Finch.

They had timed their movements accurately, for they only had to wait in
the water for a couple of minutes off the beach till the air raid on the
V-1 launching site commenced. Bill then waded forward till the sand fell
away below him as he reached the river scour; he then dived and swam in
under water, guided for depth by the pressure in his ears and for
direction by occasionally touching the channel side. Both swam through
the entrance to the river in this way and surfaced quietly well inside,
and made their way cautiously up to the lock gates.

Bill came back presently to Finch and paused beside him, whispering in
the darkness. He said that he had done the job all right but he had used
most of his oxygen, for he had been under water for a considerable time.
Finch had plenty of gas left, but they had no means of transferring gas
from one man to the other. By that time the air raid was over, and
everything was quiet again.

They decided that Bill should swim out first and make his way back to
the folboat, postponing the dive under water as late as he dared to get
the maximum distance out from the sentries on his remaining gas. Finch
would follow him a few minutes later since he had more gas and could
stay under water longer if the sentries were aroused. They were to meet
at the folboat if all was quiet and go back to the MTB in that. If an
alarm were raised they were to swim out along the bearing that the MTB
would come in on to get picked up; they had small electric lamps
attached to their suits that they could light for recognition as the
ship drew near.

That was the last that Finch saw of Bill. He went off down the channel
swimming on the surface; Finch followed him about five minutes later. He
did not see Bill dive, but shortly before he reached the point where he
had planned to dive himself firing broke out from the shore, directed at
the point where Bill would probably have had to surface. Finch dived at
once, and swam forward under water.

He swam out of the entrance to the river without difficulty, but when
the channel scour in the sand petered out and was no longer a guide to
him, he lost direction. He thought that he was swimming out to sea, but
when his gas was nearly finished he found himself in shallow water. He
surfaced very cautiously and breathed fresh air, and found that he was
on the beach opposite the town, about two hundred yards to the east of
the entrance, on the opposite side to where the folboat lay. He saw
nothing of Bill, but searchlights were playing on the water at the
entrance and very close to him. He dived again and swam out seawards,
surfaced once more for an instant to check his direction, and swam on
till his gas was all used up.

He surfaced then for good, and found himself a quarter of a mile from
shore. He looked around for Bill and called out once or twice, very
cautiously, but got no answer. He jettisoned his harness, gas cylinders,
mask, and helmet to make swimming easier. He did not dare to go back to
the folboat, for the searchlights were playing all around the entrance
and discovery of the boat seemed certain. He set himself to swim out on
the bearing that the MTB would come in on, and presently he saw her and
lit his lamp for a few moments, till she slowed beside him and men
helped him up a scramble net on to her deck.

About that time a searchlight picked her up, and fire was opened on her
from the shore. She could not stay to look for Bill, and put on her main
engines and made off to sea, in which of course she was quite right.

I think Bill may have been quite close to Finch at one time in the
water. His body was picked up by the Germans ten days later floating in
the water about five miles out from Ouistreham. He had jettisoned his
cylinders and mask, as Finch had done. There was a bullet wound in the
left shoulder, but death was due to drowning.

That is how my only brother came to meet his end. His body, when it was
recovered from the sea, was taken to Caen for examination by the German
intelligence and medical officers, and according to the French it was
buried there. Caen, however, was fought over and very largely destroyed
a month later, and I have never succeeded in discovering his grave. For
a memorial of Bill, who died in the black sea off Normandy a long way
from his home at Coombargana in the Western District, let the record
stand that when the Canadians took Le Tirage in the assault exactly a
month later the lock gates were captured intact and our supply lighters
began to use the river immediately.

When I met Warrant Officer Finch at Eastney years later and he gave me
that account, he also told me that he had written to Janet Prentice to
tell her of Bill's death, and that he had taken the dog Dev to
_Mastodon_. I found his letter with some others that she had thought
important enough to keep, in her case, at Coombargana, and Viola Dawson
told me what had happened to the dog. His letter ran.

                                                         4th LCOCU,
                                                           C/o GPO
    Dear Miss Prentice,

    I don't know if you will remember me but I was with Bill Duncan
    the day the tank was flooded over at Newtown. I'm sorry to say I
    have bad news for you. We had a sort of operation at a place
    abroad and Bill did not come back. I am afraid he bought it.
    That's all I'm allowed to say and I know you will understand
    about that.

    I am very sorry to have to write a letter like this to you but I
    know that poor old Bill would have wanted one of his friends to
    tell you, because I know that you and he were such great
    friends. I am so sorry.

    We don't know what to do about his dog Dev that he called after
    de Valera, could you make a home for him? He said once you had
    said perhaps you could if he got moved away. The captain said to
    shoot him and I will do that and see it all done decent for
    Bill, but before I do that I thought I would ask you if you
    wanted him and if so I will bring him over to you. Please let me
    know.

    I am so sorry to have to write you a letter like this.

                                                 Yours sincerely,
                                                       Albert Finch

Viola Dawson told me that Janet gave her this letter to read half an
hour after she got it; they must have been very close friends. She said
that Janet was dry-eyed and quite composed, though very quiet after she
received it. Viola didn't think she cried at all, and she remembered
that particularly because it worried her a bit. She explained it to
herself, and to me years later, by the reflection that Janet had seen
more of death than most Wrens in the Service, and she no longer had the
feeling, "This can't happen to me." When Viola gave her back the letter
with some words of sympathy, she sat silent turning the letter over and
over in her hands, looking down at it in her lap. Presently she told
Viola very quietly that that was all over and done with, and that she
would never marry anybody now. Viola Dawson would have been a great deal
happier about her if she had cried.

Presently Janet got up and walked over from her hut to the mansion and
asked a wardroom stewardess if she could see Third Officer Collins. Miss
Collins was hardly older than Janet herself, and from much the same
class. When she came out Janet said, "Could I see you privately for a
minute, ma'am?"

"Of course."

She led the way down to the office that she shared with another Wren
officer in what had been the butler's pantry of the mansion; it was
empty at that moment. "What is it, Prentice?" she asked.

Janet handed her the letter. "I've had this about a friend of mine," she
said.

The officer read it quickly through. "Oh, my dear, I am sorry," she
said. "Do you want to go on leave?"

Janet shook her head. "No. I'd rather carry on here. There's nothing to
go on leave for. He was an Australian--I didn't know his people, only
him. What I wanted to see you about, ma'am, was the dog."

Third Officer Collins re-read the last part of the letter. "I see . . ."
This was much more difficult than compassionate leave. "Do you mean you
want to have him here?"

"It wouldn't matter, would it? I could keep him out of the way. There's
lots of places here, in the grounds I mean, where one could keep a dog."

The Wren officer hesitated, hating what she had to say. She braced
herself to add to the burden of the girl before her. "I don't believe
the captain would allow it, Prentice. In fact, I know he wouldn't.
Second Officer Foster asked the captain if she could have her dog with
her here, and he wouldn't let her. He won't have any dogs in the ship.
You see, if you allow it for one you've got to allow it for them all."

"You mean, he's got to be shot?" asked Janet.

"I only mean it isn't possible for you to have him here, my dear.
Couldn't you go on compassionate leave and take him home with you and
leave him with your people?"

"They don't want him," she said dully. "Daddy's away with the seaborne
Observer Corps, and Mummy couldn't cope with him on her own, on top of
all the other things she's got to do. No, he'll have to go. I'll write
and tell Sergeant Finch. Thank you, ma'am."

Third Officer Collins went back to the wardroom, worried and depressed.
Lieutenant Parkes, the ordnance officer, was there reading a copy of
_For Men Only_. She stopped beside his chair.

"I've just been speaking to your Leading Wren Prentice," she said. "Her
boy friend's been killed."

He looked up at her quickly. "The marine sergeant who used to take her
out? I say, I'm sorry about that. How did it happen?"

"They won't tell her. He was in that Combined Ops party--you know." He
nodded. "She's just had a letter from one of his pals."

His mind turned to the work. "Does this mean that she's going off on
leave?"

"No--she doesn't want to do that." Third Officer Collins went on to tell
him about the dog.

Lieutenant Parkes was very angry indeed. "I never heard such bloody
nonsense," he exclaimed. "There's bags of places here where she could
keep a dog. I bet this place was stiff with dogs in peacetime. Why,
there's a great range of kennels behind the stables!"

She said, "The captain wouldn't hear of it when Foster wanted to have
hers here."

He got up from his chair. "He's not going to hear of it now."

He was a cigarette smoker, which meant that he did not use the half
pound of duty free pipe tobacco which he was allowed to draw from naval
stores each month. He had found this useful to him in his duties,
because the construction of his armament workshop and the track that led
to it had brought him into contact with the head gardener more than
once. The house was let to the Admiralty for the duration of the war
upon a purely nominal rent, but a clause in the lease required that the
magnificent gardens should be kept in order and repair by the owners of
the property. Gardens that in peacetime demanded the services of nearly
fifty gardeners to tend the hundred acres that they covered still
required the attentions of fifteen ancient men even in 1944, and the
head gardener was a power in _H.M.S. Mastodon_. Lieutenant Parkes had
realized this very early in his appointment and had kept Mr. McAlister
sweet with an occasional half pound of Navy tobacco. Burning with
indignation, he went straight from the wardroom to the greenhouses.

From there he went to the Wrennery. He stopped a girl going in and said,
"Ask Leading Wren Prentice to come out, will you? I want to see her."

When she came he was shocked at the stony look of suffering upon her
face. He averted his eyes after one glance. "Look," he said, "Third
Officer Collins told me that you want to keep a dog."

She said, "It's no good, sir. The captain won't allow it."

"No," he replied. "He won't. But I've just been talking to Mr.
McAlister, the gardener--you know. He wants a dog to guard the
greenhouses. He says the ratings are getting in at night and pinching
things. I told him I knew of a good watchdog, and I'd put a couple of
ratings on to knock up a kennel. The captain's got nothing to do with
any dog McAlister likes to bring in here to guard his greenhouses,
provided that it's McAlister's dog. I've had a word with McAlister.
He'll say it's his dog."

He glanced at the girl before him, smiling, and was alarmed to see a
tear escape and trickle down her cheek. "Thanks awfully, sir," she
muttered.

He felt that he must cut this very short if she was not to break down in
public. "Get him to McAlister's house," he said. "You know where he
lives? Let Mac bring him in here--don't you bring him in. Mac's
expecting him, and he'll swear blue that it's his dog." He turned away.
"And look--I'm awfully sorry."

When I met Viola Dawson she told me a good bit about the dog, both at
our first meal together at Bruno's restaurant in Earl's Court and later
in the course of our many meetings. "She went crackers over that dog,"
she told me once. "She spent every spare minute that she had with him. I
was very glad to see it, as a matter of fact. I mean it was a sort of
outlet for her after your brother's death. Probably did her good."

Sergeant Finch took Dev to Mr. McAlister's house and left him there; he
did not see Janet, nor did he want to. "I couldn't say anything about
your brother," he told me. "It was all hush, if you understand. It makes
it kind of awkward when you can't say anything, and it's not as if I
knew her very well. I just left his dog with the gardener like she told
me in her letter, and I gave him the packet of letters and the
photograph she asked for out of Bill's kit, to give to her, and then I
beat it."

Within an hour Janet had discovered him in the new kennel by the
greenhouses that the ordnance ratings had knocked up for him, and he
knew her, and bounded forward when he saw her, and licked her face.
Every Wren in the place knew all about him, of course, and in the galley
the cooks set aside a huge plate of scraps for Janet to give him for his
supper, for she was popular and they were sorry for her. It was a very
well fed dog that settled down in his new kennel for a good night's
sleep.

The Commander of _H.M.S. Mastodon_, an elderly officer brought back from
retirement, found him there on the third day and asked about him. The
head gardener launched into a tirade in the broadest Scots complaining
about the wickedness of ratings who stole flowers that should have
graced the wardroom to give to their girl friends, necessitating the
presence of McAlister's own dog to check the depredations. The Commander
escaped after a quarter of an hour of ear-bashing, and Dev became a part
of _H.M.S. Mastodon_.

He never did much watchkeeping, because he slept soundly every night. He
spent most of the day with Janet in the ordnance workshop or around the
pier. Occasionally she would take him in the boat with her to visit an
LCT if she knew he would be welcome but did not do this very often for
fear that she would meet the captain of _Mastodon_ and be asked about
him. On the few week-ends that remained before the balloon went up she
used to take him for a long country walk on Sunday afternoon, and once
Viola went with them, over the moors in the direction of Hythe. "She'd
have been quite happy without me," Viola said, laughing. "The dog was
company enough for her."

The last month saw a great transformation of the countryside round
Beaulieu, with intense activity in every field and copse. Road gangs
were at work with bulldozers and graders ruthlessly straightening and
widening the country lanes that led down to the hard at Lepe, tearing
down the hedges and pushing them aside into the fields, straightening
out corners. Every two or three hundred yards along each lane hard
stands were made, which were parking places for tanks and vehicles.
Temporary airstrips paved with hessian and steel units appeared almost
overnight and crowded thickly one on top of another. The U.S. Air Force
moved in to these with Thunderbolts and B. 25's, and Lymington became
thronged with American soldiers and American trucks. Overhead it was a
common sight to see fifty of their aircraft flying in formation at one
time.

Every wood and spinney in the district became a dump for stores and
ammunition or a parking place for tanks and motor transport. With these
came mobile antiaircraft defence, so that at times it seemed that every
hedge and thicket held a Bofors gun in camouflage. But no German
aircraft ever appeared by day after the JU. 188 that Janet had shot
down; our fighters saw to that. Southampton, where over a thousand
landing craft were congregated, suffered a few light raids at night
which were beaten off with heavy losses; already the Luftwaffe was
growing impotent.

The LCT's came crowding in to the river now; at one time, Viola told me,
there were over seventy of them there. Training and fitting out had been
hurried, and in many cases the maintenance of ships and guns was poor in
the hands of raw, unseasoned crews. The work of the shore staffs grew
very heavy; as the days lengthened with the coming of the summer the
girls found themselves working sixteen or seventeen hours a day, from
dawn till dusk. From time to time the river emptied and the LCT's all
sailed away on training exercises, to load tanks and mobile guns and
trucks and wading bulldozers at one or other of the hards. They would be
gone for two or three days, away down to Slapton sands in Devonshire
perhaps, to assault the peaceful countryside with live shells and rocket
bombs, and go through all the motions of a landing on the beaches they
had devastated. Then they would come back again, more numerous than
ever, crowding in to Beaulieu River and every other river on the south
coast of England with a host of defects and deficiencies to be put
right.

Through May the sun shone and the ground grew harder after winter rains.
The knowledgeable whispered together that the ground was hard enough for
tanks to operate, the more knowledgeable whispered back that it wasn't,
but both agreed that the balloon would go up very soon. Nobody ever
spoke the word invasion, and Overlord was whispered very secretly.

In the last fortnight the work massed up upon the girls to a degree that
they had now no leisure time at all, and the sense of tension was so
great that they had no desire for leisure. On shore the roads were
jammed with tanks and Priests and motor transport; every lane was lined
with them along one side, their crews bivouacking in the vehicles or
underneath them or beside them; there were little cooking fires and
khaki figures everywhere. Each new airstrip was crowded with fighters in
dispersal in the fields beside it, the pilots and the crews living in
tents by the strip. At sea, monstrosities of every sort floated in the
Solent, long raftlike things proceeding very slowly under their own
power, tall spiky things, things like a block of flats afloat upon the
startled sea.

Janet spent most of her time at Lepe Hard, two miles from _Mastodon_,
for the time for major exercises was now over and the ships were all
engaged in loading, unloading, and refuelling practice on the hards. It
was her duty to be there when they were doing that, because when the
balloon went up she would become a part of the Hardmaster's team. Her
job would be to go on board the LCT's when they came back from France to
load up a fresh cargo of tanks or motor transport, to check the
ammunition that had been expended and exchange the empty drums for new,
full ones that she had loaded on shore, and clean the guns for the tired
crews, and make good what deficiencies there might be, all in half an
hour while loading and refuelling took place before the craft backed off
the hard to sail for France again. To get through all the jobs she had
to do in that short time demanded practice and rehearsals, and in those
last few days she went through these rehearsals with every LCT in
Beaulieu River.

"The captains all knew her," Viola told me. "They knew she'd just lost
her boy, and I think they liked her because she went on with her job the
same as ever." Through all her private troubles she had gone on just the
same, the competent Leading Wren explaining once again to raw, forgetful
ratings the meaning of the different colours on the Oerlikon shells and
the order in which they should be loaded in the drums, sitting on the
deck and working with them with her sleeves rolled up and her hands in a
wet mess of grease. "They had confidence in her," Viola said. "I think
they felt that if she didn't fold up when her boy was killed, she
wouldn't fold when the balloon went up."

Viola told me that she asked Janet once about her father. "Is he really
going to the party?"

Janet nodded. "He's finished his training. I got a letter from him
yesterday, posted at Wapping. He's got a ship, but he didn't say what
her name was. I suppose he wouldn't be allowed to."

"Good show. How old did you say he was?"

"Sixty-four. He said in the letter that the sailors are terribly
ignorant about aeroplanes. He said that none of them could tell a
Focke-Wulf 190 from a Thunderbolt even when he pointed out the
differences in the pictures."

"I'm sure I couldn't, either," said Viola.

"Daddy thinks it's just terrible. He telegraphed to Mummy to come up to
London and bring him up his epidiascope and slides, and he rigged it all
up in the ship and started giving lectures to the crew. He says they're
really quite keen on identification now. He makes them identify every
aircraft they see flying over."

"He must be very keen himself."

"It's his whole life," said Janet simply. "He's been like this about the
Observer Corps ever since he joined it at the beginning of the war.
Going with the party to the other side is a sort of a reward to him, for
all the work he's done in the Observer Corps since war began. That's how
he looks at it."

At the end of May Janet was transferred on to the Hardmaster's staff,
which did not mean a move because the hard was only two miles from
_Mastodon_; she was driven down there in a truck each morning and driven
back at night. She moved freely from one base to the other in the boats,
too, but now her main duty was upon the hard and she reported back to
Lepe whenever she was disengaged.

On Saturday June the 3rd all the LCT's were sailed out of the Beaulieu
River and anchored by the stern with their own anchors in the Solent.
That afternoon they began coming in in pairs to the hard to load up
tanks and Priests and motor transport; in the mysterious way in which
these things become known in spite of all security, everybody knew that
this was it. Janet went through her drill of going on board the craft as
they came in and reporting to the No. 1, but she had little to do. The
crews of the LCT's were all set now for battle; the time for worrying
about minor stores deficiencies or rust upon the guns was over. She
could have given them anything they wanted on that day without paper
work or requisitions, but they wanted little from her. All day she
walked from ship to ship upon the cluttered decks in the roar of the
tank engines, dodging the men bowsing down securing tackles, chi-hiking
sometimes with anxious soldiers uttering strained pleasantries. All day
through, the loaded vessels backed away in turn from the hard, and went
out into the Solent to anchor in flotillas.

The cutter came down river in the middle of the afternoon with Viola
Dawson at the helm and Dev standing proudly in the bow. Viola told me
that she had taken to looking after the dog in the daytime since Janet
was at Lepe all day; he was accustomed to boats and gave the boat's crew
Wrens no trouble. Janet crossed an LCT to speak to them as they lay
alongside for a few minutes while some equipment for the Hardmaster was
unloaded. She climbed down into the cutter.

Viola said, "This is it, isn't it?"

Janet nodded. "Everybody seems to think so. It's different, too. Look at
all the stuff they're taking with them." The Priest she indicated was
loaded high with ration boxes and camouflage netting. On its side was
chalked the legend, "Look out Hitler." "This is it, all right."

Doris Smith looked at the massed vehicles moving by inches down to the
hard, at the helmeted soldiers, and voiced all their thoughts. "I wish
one could do something more," she said. "One ought to be able to."

Janet said, "There'll be plenty to do when these start coming back for
another load." She bent and fondled Dev's ears.

She went on all that afternoon and evening visiting the LCT's as they
loaded. Food came to the Hardmaster's hut from time to time, dixies of
tea and thick meat sandwiches and biscuits and jam; as the evening went
on Janet went and foraged for any food that happened to be going at the
moment when she was free. The loading went on till seven o'clock when it
was suspended for a time by the low tide; at dead low water it was
difficult for landing craft to manoeuver in the narrow river on to that
hard. It began again at half past eight and went on uninterrupted as
night fell; floodlights were lit and the landing craft continued to come
in to the hard, load up with tired soldiers and their vehicles, and back
away again.

By midnight Janet was tired out, but there was no respite for men or
Wrens. She had done enough during the day to justify her presence on the
hard; she had replaced two damaged ring sights, supplied about five
hundred rounds of ammunition for the Oerlikons, and a large quantity for
the Sten guns. She had helped the gun crew of a Priest by giving them a
can of grease and a great armful of cotton waste. Much of her day had
been spent in futile walks from ship to ship, trying to locate the
officer she had to report to and finding in the end that nothing was
required.

Loading finished at about two in the morning, when the last LCT of the
first assault backed off the hard and the floodlights were doused
immediately to screen the hard from any German aircraft that might
venture over in the night. There was no transport to _Mastodon_ because
the crowded vehicles upon the roads prevented any traffic backwards from
the hard. Janet and May Spikins wrapped themselves in their duffle coats
and lay down on a pile of camouflage nets, and slept a little. There
Doris Smith found them at five in the morning, and woke them up, and
took them back up river to the pier; they walked wearily to their
quarters and turned in at six in the full light of day.

Janet got out of her bunk at ten o'clock, and Viola got up with her.
Outside the Wrennery the sky was overcast and grey, and the wind was
rising, whipping the tops of the tall elm trees. They stood at the
window in pyjamas, looking at the weather in consternation. Viola said,
"It's going to be a pig of a day." And then she dropped her voice. "They
can't go in this, surely?"

Janet asked in a low tone, "When do they go--when is it? Do you know?"

Viola whispered, "I think it's tomorrow morning. They're supposed to
sail this evening. But half of them will get swamped if they go out in
this. It must be blowing quite hard in the Channel."

They dressed and got some breakfast; then Janet set out in her duffle
coat to walk down to the hard. She got a lift in a small Army truck and
reached the hard at about eleven in the morning. It was a dirty grey day
with a stiff westerly wind; out in the Solent the LCT's were anchored by
the stern in rows, pitching uneasily in a short, breaking sea. One or
two of them had dragged and fouled each other, and were struggling to
free themselves and to turn back against the wind to regain their berth.
She found the Hardmaster and reported to him. "I hope I'm not late,
sir," she said. "You didn't say any time."

"That's all right," he replied. "You might have stayed in bed. It's been
postponed for twenty-four hours. They'd never have got across in this."

She stayed down at the hard for a couple of hours and had her dinner
with the Wrens in Lepe House, but there was nothing for her to do. The
Hardmaster released her for the day then, warning her to stay on call in
_Mastodon_, and she walked back to the great house that was her ship.
Back in her quarters she felt tired and strained; she took off some of
her clothes and lay down in her bunk, and slept uneasily for a time. At
about five o'clock she got up and went and found Dev in his kennel, and
got his supper for him from the galley and sat and watched him eat it;
then she got her clothes brush from her quarters and gave him a grooming
with it, not before time. It was better to do that than to sit about in
tension, thinking of the battle that was coming.

That night when she went to bed there was half a gale blowing, with
squally, driving rain. Few of the Wrens in Janet's hut slept much that
night; all were young, and most of them had boy friends, fiancs, or
even husbands in the LCT's that lay tossing and dragging their anchors
in the black night in the Solent. They lay listening to the wind and to
the rain beating on the window, thinking of their men wet and cold and
in some danger, struggling to keep their loaded, cranky ships afloat
until the weather moderated enough for them to sail across to France to
battle with the Germans on the beaches on the other side.

All night Janet tried to sleep, but sleep eluded her till just before
dawn. She was sick with a great apprehension, with fear of what was
coming. She was seized with the presage of a huge, impending disaster.
She did not worry much about her father; it was clear to her that the
merchant ships would not be brought to the invaded coast until the enemy
had been driven well back inland. She was filled more with a dread that
the whole enterprise would fail and end in a shambles of defeat upon the
beaches. Mixed up with this was a sick memory of the Germans she had
killed in the JU. 188, the smashed bodies that she had seen lying in the
field where she had shot them down, men who were friendly to us, on our
side. A great sense of guilt lay heavily upon her which was to remain
with her, I think, until she died, and over all was the memory of Bill,
my brother, who had loved her, whom she would have married, who had
vanished without trace out of her life having only the bare word that he
was dead. She had killed seven friendly Germans wantonly and so Bill had
been taken from her, because Judgment was inexorable.

She slept a little before dawn, a restless, nightmarish, unhappy sleep.

When the petty officer roused out the hut the sun was breaking through
the clouds; at breakfast it was evident that the wind was falling. Janet
went down to the hard and reported to her officer; he told her that the
indications were that the operation was laid on for the next morning,
June the 6th. He employed her on a variety of minor jobs in the forenoon
and at lunch time he dismissed her for the day; there would be plenty
for her to do when the landing craft came back from France to reload.

In the evening Janet went down river in the cutter with Viola Dawson and
Doris Smith to embark a party of RN officers at Lepe and to take them
across the Solent to Cowes. She had no business to be in the boat upon a
trip like that; it was a joyride for her, but she had become so used to
going up and down the river in the boats by that time that she ranked
practically as one of the boat's crew. The officers were mostly of
commander's rank; she did not know it, but these were the headquarters
naval staff of _Juno_ sector, changing ship. They were serious-faced,
silent men. They crossed to Cowes in the sunset and one of them directed
Viola to an unpretentious steamer called _Hilary_ lying in the roads,
studded all over with radio and radar aerials. _Hilary_ had been the
headquarters ship at the invasion of Sicily and at Salerno, and now she
was to serve the same function at _Juno_ beach of Overlord.

They turned back to Beaulieu as the sun was going down, and now they saw
the whole fleet getting under way. The whole stretch of water between
the Isle of Wight and the mainland was crowded with landing craft and
ships of every sort, and all in turn were getting short their anchors,
weighing, and moving off. In the deep channels were the Infantry Landing
Ships, cross channel steamers and small liners with landing craft
handing on their davits; in the shallows were the LCT's loaded with
vehicles and tanks and men, moving off towards the eastern entrance at
Spithead in great flotillas, shepherded by their ML's. Coming down
Southampton Water was a great fleet of Tank Landing Ships, big American
vessels with a double door that opened in the bow. Overhead the fighters
circled in the evening light, the inner patrol positioned to catch any
German aircraft that penetrated the outer guard of fighters over the
Channel. The evening was thunderous with the roar of engines on the sea
and overhead.

Viola slowed the cutter to half speed and they lingered over the return
to Beaulieu, silent and wondering, conscious that they were looking at a
mass of ships that nobody might ever see again assembled in one place.
Viola told me that she tried to count the ships that were in sight that
evening; she counted over four hundred and then failed to separate the
hulls massed together in the east down by Spithead. Gradually as they
crossed the Solent, weaving in and out between the landing craft, the
western Solent cleared. The craft that had been lying between Lymington
and Beaulieu passed them going to the east, and by the time they reached
the river entrance there were few left to the westward. The girls stood
talking in half whispers as the cutter steamed up river, as if to speak
out loud of what they had just seen would break security and put the men
in peril.

In the Wrennery it was another sleepless night. Aircraft were passing
overhead all night hindering the restless girls from any sleep they
might have got; if drowsiness came through the sheer weariness of
anxiety a wave of bombers from some aerodrome nearby would pass over,
climbing in fine pitch, and they would be wide awake again. They were
too young to have acquired a knowledge or the habit of sedatives, too
much accustomed to a healthy life, too little used to feminine megrims.
Through most of the night one or two of them were out of bed, whispering
together. Towards dawn a little knot of them in pyjamas collected at the
open door, listening in the quiet of the summer night. Far to the south
beyond the Isle of Wight the faint reverberations of explosions came a
hundred miles over the sea; they stood there, tense and cold and rather
sick, listening to the distant echoes of the bombardment.

One of the signal Wrens from Lepe House whispered, "The airborne party
go in about now . . ."

Janet got practically no sleep at all that night. The tension in the
Wrennery was contagious, and for forty-eight hours now she had had
little to do. Before, the work had been continuous and exacting since
she had shot down the Junkers, since Bill had been killed, and had given
her little time for thought; she had slept well every night in an
exhaustion of fatigue. Now in her idleness and tension the sense of
guilt was heavy on her. She had killed seven men who were not Germans,
but Poles and Czechs, trying to escape to fight upon our side. She had
smashed them into the pathetic, sodden, mutilated things she had seen
lying in the field. She had done that in her pride and folly, for she
had seen the wheels come down and had been so exultant in her skill with
the Oerlikon that she had not paused to consider what that meant. God
was a just God, and she must take her punishment. He had taken Bill from
her to Himself as a judgment for what she had done, but was that
punishment enough? Perhaps there was more coming, for she had murdered
seven friendly men and Bill was only one. One life could not atone for
seven. Perhaps she had made some terrible mistake that would kill six
more of her friends. Perhaps a ready-use ammunition locker on the deck
of some craft she had tended would explode and kill six of her friends
through some mistake that she had made, because God was a just God, and
His judgment was inexorable. She racked her brains to think what her
mistake could be.

She lay awake in silent agony all night.

The Wrens were up at dawn next morning clustering around the radio in
their recreation room, listening to the news of the invasion put out by
the BBC. Janet went down to the hard at Lepe after breakfast, but there
was nothing to do there except listen again to a small wireless set,
talk interminably about the position on the various beaches, and wait
for the landing craft to come back for another load. There was little
chance that any of them would return before nightfall; at dinner time
the Hardmaster dismissed his staff till seven o'clock, advising them to
get some sleep.

Janet took three aspirins and lay down in her bunk in the Wrennery, and
pulled a blanket over her, and slept till six. It was the last spell of
heavy, refreshing sleep she was to have for several days.

At half past ten that night the first LCT's came back to Lepe. They came
from Nan beach in _Juno_ sector, near the small town of Courseulles in
Normandy. Janet heard something of their landing from a tired young
rating as they lugged a box of Oerlikon ammunition on board together.
"They got land mines, old shells, anything to make a bang, tied on them
beach obstacles," he said. "Three of ours got it and sank in about two
foot of water on the beach; I don't think anyone got hurt. Time we come
to go in the Jerries was a bit back from the beach; I reckon they're a
mile or two inland by this time. They didn't put up much of a fight, not
in our sector. I did hear it was worse for our chaps at Bernieres and
down that way."

About German aircraft all he had to say was, "One or two come over,
strafing the chaps on the beach. Everybody had a bang at them, but I
never see one come down." He had fired off two and a half drums; while
the LCT was embarking vehicles and refuelling Janet helped him to grease
the rounds and reload the drums. May Spikins was working at the same
jobs on another LCT on the other side of the dolphins that ran down the
middle of the hard; Janet finished her work and crossed to help May out
with hers, and while she did so the first LCT backed off and was
replaced by another empty one. Officers and ratings in these ships kept
watch and watch, taking what rest they could while the flotilla was on
passage.

Reloading, refuelling, and rearming that flotilla took five hours. When
the last ship backed off the hard at half past three in the morning
there was a pause. Janet and May went wearily to the Hardmaster's hut
where there was tea brewing, and bully sandwiches. There was no
indication when the next flotilla would arrive though it was expected
soon; the tanks and motor vehicles were jammed tight down the lane
leading to the hard. The Wrens wrapped themselves in their duffle coats
and lay down on the camouflage nets at the back of the hut, and slept.

They were roused again at about six and came out bleary-eyed in a cold
dawn to see another lot of LCT's from France at anchor in the Solent,
and the first two craft slowly nosing their way in to the hard. The
Wrens gulped down a cup of tea and went to work. At eight o'clock the
Hardmaster called them off for breakfast for half an hour; then they
went on with the job. The last craft of the flotilla backed away at noon
but there was another flotilla already anchored in the Solent waiting to
come in to load; the Wrens swallowed a hasty dinner in the hut, brushed
the hair back from their foreheads with filthy hands, and went to work
again.

That was Wednesday, June the 7th. That afternoon Viola Dawson took the
cutter down the river to Lepe and lay alongside one of the LCT's for a
few minutes, using it as a quay while they unloaded some equipment they
had brought down to the hard. Janet broke off, and went over to the
boat. "Viola, be a darling. You'll be back at _Mastodon_ tonight?"

The coxswain nodded. "As far as I know. Can I bring you down anything?"

"It's not that. Viola, I shan't be able to get up to see Dev till Lord
knows when. Will you see he gets his supper tonight? Look, ask that
Leading Wren in the galley--Rachel Adams--ask her if she'll see he gets
his food for the next few days, while I'm down here. She knows what he
has."

"I'll look after him, old thing. Would you like us to bring him down
here in the boat one day, or don't you want to be bothered with him?"

Janet said, "I couldn't look after him with all this going on--he'd
better stay up at _Mastodon_. But I'd love to see him if you could bring
him down and take him back again."

Viola said, "Okay, I'll do that. Hope it lets up soon, Janet."

"It's going on forever, by the look of it," Janet told her. "I don't
mind. It's the build-up that's important. Commander Craigie says the
Jerries are four miles inland now--that's in _Juno_ sector."

She left the cutter and went aft to the wardroom to find the first
lieutenant of the ship.

All day and night through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the build-up
continued. The flotillas came in to load irregularly and without
previous notice; so long as the flow of tanks and Priests and trucks
kept coming down the road, directed by the army, so long the LCT's would
keep on coming to the hard. The girls ate and slept irregularly in the
Hardmaster's hut, taking food and sleep as they offered, working in a
daze of fatigue. Troubled, the Wren officers from _Mastodon_ offered
relief to the Ordnance Wrens; as there was no one else to do their job
the Ordnance Wrens refused. "I'm quite all right, ma'am--it's nice down
here. I had a lovely sleep last night, and another one this morning."
Working in a daze of exhaustion they went on with their job.

The boat's crew Wrens brought Dev down to the hard each day standing
proudly in the bow of the cutter; he would jump on board the LCT they
came alongside and frolic in and out among the tanks and trucks till he
found Janet; then he would be all over her. She would give him biscuits
and knock off for a few minutes to play with him, fondling his ears;
then Viola would take him back into the boat and Janet would go on,
cheered and refreshed by the short interlude with her dog.

On the morning of Saturday June the 10th Third Officer Collins rode her
bicycle from _Mastodon_ down to the hard, her pretty young face troubled
and upset. She leaned the bike against the hut and went in to the
Hardmaster. "Where's Prentice, sir?"

He pointed at an LCT loading on the hard. "In that one, I think."

"Could you send for her, do you think? I've got to see her, and I'd
rather do it here, not in the ship." She hesitated. "We got a message
from her mother. Her father's been killed."

When Janet came, wondering, to the hut Miss Collins said nervously,
"Prentice, I want a word with you. Come out here." She led the way down
on to the strip of beach below Lepe House. "I'm afraid there's been some
bad news, Prentice," she said. "It's about your father."

Janet said quickly, "Has Daddy bought it?"

"Well--yes, I'm afraid that was what the message was, my dear. Somebody
rang up trying to get hold of you, speaking for your mother."

"He's killed, is he?" Janet asked directly.

"I'm afraid that's what the message said."

Janet walked on in silence for a minute. In the back of her mind she had
been ready for this, because God's judgments were just and she deserved
His punishments. Ever since she had heard that motor transport ships had
been beached upon the coast of Normandy on Wednesday to unload their
trucks with their own derricks on to the sand, she had known that her
father was not far from the German Army. She was too tired to grieve,
too dazed with work and little sleep, too much obsessed with the thought
that she had left her job with the breech out of the port Oerlikon and,
as like as not, without her help the rating wouldn't be able to put it
together again. Daddy had bought it; when she was rested perhaps tears
would come and she would want to go to church. Now it was just a matter
of brushing off Third Officer Collins and getting back on to the LCT to
put that breech back.

She said quietly, "Thank you for telling me, ma'am. It was good of you
to come down." She stopped, turned round, and started to walk back
towards the hard.

The officer said, "I've arranged forty-eight hours' leave for you,
Prentice. I'll just see the Hardmaster; then you can come up to
_Mastodon_ and change, and go off on the 1400 ferry. You can take my
bike and go on ahead, if you like. You'll find your pass and warrant on
my desk; if they're not there, ask Petty Officer Dowling for them."

Janet said, "I don't want to go on leave."

The Wren officer was nonplussed. "They said on the telephone that you're
her only child in England--that's why we put it through. Of course, you
must go, Prentice. You must go home and see your mother."

"I couldn't go till this flap's over," Janet said stubbornly. "Not
unless you can get me a relief."

"Don't you think Spikins can carry on alone, just while you go home for
forty-eight? You're working independently; she can carry on without
you."

Janet said, "It's just a question if she can carry on _with_ me, ma'am."
She quickened her pace towards the hard. "She's just about all in. No,
honestly, I'll be all right. There aren't any reliefs. Is it true that
it's all coming to an end tomorrow?"

"Tuesday, I think," Miss Collins told her. "There's a buzz that there'll
be no more loading here after Tuesday."

Janet said, "Well then, I'll go home on Tuesday."

"You'd better telephone your mother, anyway, Prentice."

Janet hesitated. "I would like to do that," she said. "I must go back on
to that LCT now, ma'am, because I've got the port gun dismantled; the
sear was very dry and sticking down. They'll be casting off any time
now. I must just get on board and see to that. Do you think I might make
the call from here after I've done that?"

"I'm sure you can," the officer said. "I'll go up to Lepe House and see
if I can get a post office line for you. Come up there directly you've
finished on this ship."

A quarter of an hour later Janet, stony-faced, dry-eyed, her hands black
with ingrained grease, was speaking to her mother. "Mummy dear," she
said, "I don't know what to say. I just can't realize it yet. How did
you hear? . . . Oh, how kind of him. I know--well, I'd better not say
that over the telephone. Look, Mummy, who's with you now? . . . Will she
be able to stay over the week-end? Mummy, I want to come home but I just
can't leave here before Tuesday. It's the invasion, Mummy--I haven't
been to bed for four days. We're going on day and night. I think I'll be
able to come home on Tuesday. . . . Oh yes, I'm very well. . . . We
sleep all right but it's in little bits, you know, between the
flotillas. . . . I'll tell you when I come home. I'll try and get some
long leave as soon as this is over, Mummy, but I can't come till
Tuesday. Daddy wouldn't want me to. I'll tell you when we meet. On
Tuesday. Look after yourself, Mummy. I'll be home on Tuesday, probably
rather late. I'll ring you up again tomorrow or on Monday."

She had been speaking from a room on the ground floor that had been the
office of a captain, now vacated because Captain J3 was on the other
side of the Channel. She sat for a moment, weary, after putting down the
telephone. From the window she could see another LCT nosing in to the
hard below, and a long line of loaded trucks and Bren carriers waiting
to embark. Presently she got up stiffly and went out into the corridor.
Third Officer Collins was watching for Janet from the wardroom opposite,
and came out to meet her. "You got through all right?" she asked.

Janet said, "Yes, thank you, ma'am. Thank you for letting me use that
room and make the call from here. Do you think I could possibly speak to
her again tomorrow?"

"Of course, Prentice--I can fix that for you. What time do you want to
call her?"

"I think about teatime would be best. She's always in then."

The officer said, "I'll come down here at about four o'clock and see
that everything's all right for you. You wouldn't like to come back to
_Mastodon_ and rest a bit?"

"I'd rather go on here, if you don't mind. There's another LCT just
coming in."

She went back to her job, her mind in a daze. In the roaring of engines
as the trucks and carriers backed in to the LCT she started working with
the ratings to get the ammunition on board. There was a short pause half
an hour later while that ship backed off the hard and another one came
in to load, sufficient time for her to smoke a cigarette but not to
grieve. Then she went on again. That flotilla was finished by three
o'clock in the afternoon and she went up to the hut and had a couple of
bully sandwiches and a piece of jam tart with two cups of tea for her
dinner; then she lay down to rest till she was needed again. She was too
tired to think clearly, too weary and dazed to cry. She lay in unhappy
suffering for a time, and presently she slept.

The Wrens were called to work upon another flotilla at about eight
o'clock that evening, and they worked till one in the morning. They had
a short sleep then, but another flotilla came in with the first light of
dawn, at half past four, and they went on again. They finished that one
at about nine in the morning and had breakfast; by the time they had
finished eating a fresh pair of LCT's were nosing their way in to the
hard, and a mixed lot of tanks and carriers and Priests was waiting in
the lane to be embarked.

About the middle of the morning the cutter came down river with Dev
standing proudly in the bow; Viola brought her alongside the LCT that
lay at the west side of the hard dolphin. Janet was working on the other
ship, on the east side of the dolphin. Dev, who knew his way around,
jumped on to the LCT and from there to the hard, and began running round
on the hard amongst the tanks and trucks looking for Janet. Presently he
got under a Sherman.

Viola was still down in the cutter, and she never learned exactly how it
happened. She heard a sudden shrill, agonized yelping above the roaring
of the engines and the grinding of the tank tracks on steel decks, and
put her head over the side of the LCT. She saw Janet running from the
ship on the east side. The Sherman moved on backwards to the ramp,
probably quite unconscious of what had happened. On the hard Janet found
a small, concerned group of army NCO's and privates grouped around the
dog, struggling on his forepaws with both hind legs broken, yelping in
agony.

Janet cried, "Oh, Dev, _darling_!" and dropped down on her knees beside
him. He knew her and stopped screaming for a moment, and sniffed her
hand, but he screamed again when she touched him. She raised her eyes
from him in distress and saw a revolver belted at a knee, and looked
higher; it belonged to a young army captain.

"Please," she said. "Please, will you shoot him?"

The young man hesitated. "Who does he belong to?"

"He's mine," she said. "Please shoot him for me."

He glanced around; the hard was paved with concrete, and crowded with
men and tanks and trucks. "I can't do that here," he said. "We'll get a
ricochet. We'll have to move him, I'm afraid." He touched her on the
shoulder and made her get up. "Look, go up to the top of the hard and
try not to listen. I'll look after this for you."

She took one last look at my brother Bill's dog, then turned away and
went up between the tanks and trucks, tears streaming down her face. She
heard the agonized screaming of the dog as the soldiers moved him to the
soft sand of the beach, and then two shots. With those two shots her
service in the Wrens came to an end.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Years later Viola Dawson told me about that day, as we lingered over
coffee in the restaurant in Earl's Court after dinner. "I couldn't wait
then," she said. "I had to take some officers back up the river. I
managed to get down to Lepe again early in the afternoon, and when we'd
moored the cutter I went on the LCT's looking for Janet, but she wasn't
there. I found May Spikins, and asked where Janet was."

"She's not here," she said. "She's gone sort of funny, Viola--crying all
the time. Look, be a dear and find her--she's somewhere about. Take her
back to _Mastodon_ with you. She'll have to report sick."

Viola found Janet sitting at the head of the beach about a couple of
hundred yards from the hard, the tears streaming steadily and quietly
down her face. She had borrowed an entrenching tool from one of the
soldiers and buried the dog there in the soft sand. Viola said, "Come
on, old girl. It's no good sitting here."

Janet sobbed, "I ought to be working but I can't bloody well stop
crying."

"Of course you can't," said Viola. "I'm going to take you back up river
in the cutter to the Wrennery."

"I can't leave here. May Spikins can't do all these ships alone." She
wept again.

"Of course she can," said Viola. "They're not using any ammunition. They
haven't fired a round for the last two days, and you know it. Besides,
there's no more loading here after tonight." She offered her own
handkerchief, rather dirty. "Here, take this. I'll go and see the
Hardmaster and tell him."

She found him on the hard outside the hut. "Leading Wren Prentice seems
to be a bit upset, sir," she said. "Could she have the rest of the day
off? I could take her back up river in the cutter, to the Wrennery."

He nodded. "I'm sorry about her dog, but it was silly of you and her, to
bring it to the hard. Yes, take her back with you. She's put up a good
show, and loading finishes tonight, I think."

"It was her dog getting killed that put the lid on it," said Viola, six
years later. "Funny, that, wasn't it? She stood up quite well when your
brother got killed and when her father got killed, but when the dog got
killed it finished her. I suppose she felt responsible or something."

"I suppose she did," I said. "What happened after that?"

"I took her back up to the Wrennery, and when Third Officer Collins saw
her she made her report sick," she said. "There weren't any naval
surgeons left in _Mastodon_--they were all in Overlord. There was an
American Army doctor there, Lease-lend, and he sent her on sick leave."

"Was she away long?" I asked.

"She never came back," Viola told me. "She messed about for a couple of
months under a navy doctor in Oxford. I went and saw her when I was on
leave but she was sort of--well, funny. She was still crying quite a
lot, and very nervy. As a matter of fact, there'd have been nothing much
for her to do in the navy after the invasion. She went up to a board in
London sometime in August and they gave her her discharge, on
compassionate grounds, I think, to look after her mother." Viola paused,
and then she said reflectively, "I suppose the truth is that she wasn't
any good to the navy any more."




                                   6


When I went back to Oxford in 1948 I spent much of my time in trying to
trace Janet Prentice. I soon discovered that her mother had died in the
year 1946 and that Janet had left Oxford. The house in Crick Road had
been sold and there had been a sale of furniture; everything seemed to
have been converted into ready cash. I managed to trace the agent who
had sold the house but he had no address for the girl, though he told me
the bank into which he had paid his cheque. I went and saw the bank
manager and he confirmed what I had already learned, but the account had
been closed and he had no address. The balance had not been a large one,
for the house had been mortgaged and large houses in those days had sold
badly. He said that he had an idea that Miss Prentice had gone abroad.

When I found May Spikins, then May Cunningham, she remembered the name
Mr. Grimston as Professor Prentice's companion when he had joined the
Seaborne Observer Corps, and Viola Dawson confirmed that name shortly
afterwards when I mentioned it to her, though she could not recall the
name till she was prompted. I went to the headquarters of the Royal
Observer Corps in Oxford and I found that Mr. Grimston was still a
leading member in the local organization, much looked up to for his
maritime war experience. I went to him one afternoon at the chain store
grocery that he manages in Cowley, and he made me stay until the store
closed and then he took me round to his small house for tea.

He remembered the visit of Janet Prentice to the Royal Bath Hotel, but
he was unable to tell me where she went after she left Oxford on her
mother's death; he did not know the family and had only met Janet on
that one occasion. He was able to give me a full account of the
Professor's death, however, and what he said was this.

Dr. Prentice had been drafted to a ship called the _Elsie Davidson_, one
of the Davidson line of coastal cargo steamers. She was a vessel of
about four thousand tons, chartered for the invasion of Normandy and
loaded with motor transport in the London Docks. She sailed in convoy
from Southend on June the 5th and reached the coast of Normandy off
Courseulles about midday on D-Day, June the 6th. She anchored still in
convoy well offshore and remained there for the afternoon and evening,
being in no great danger because already the Germans in that sector had
retreated well inland.

It had been the original intention that these motor transport ships
should unload their cargo on to Rhino Ferries. The vehicles that they
carried, with their army crews, were loaded principally with gun
ammunition for the tanks and Priests in the front line and were, of
course, most urgently required on shore. The Rhino Ferry was a great
steel raft a hundred and fifty feet long or more built up of rectangular
steel caissons bolted together and powered by two sixty-horsepower
petrol engines at the stern. The vehicles were to be lifted bodily down
on to the Rhino Ferry by the ship's derricks and the ferry would then
convey them to the beach where it would ground in about two feet of
water, that being its very shallow draft. The vehicles would then drive
off it by means of a ramp, drive through the shallow water and up the
beach to make their way inland to the guns.

The Rhino Ferry, however, proved to be unmanageable in the bad weather
of D-Day though it had functioned well in trials; it was swept by the
seas and with its low power it could make no headway against the wind.
This had been foreseen as a possibility and an alternative means of
unloading the motor transport from the merchant ships had been planned.
At dawn on D+1 the ships were steamed in to the beach and grounded on
the sand an hour after high water, so that when the tide fell and left
them high and dry they could lower the trucks down on to the sand beside
them with their own derricks, and in this way they unloaded every truck
in safety.

It was a bold expedient to beach big steel ships in this way because the
ships were needed urgently back in England for the build-up of the army,
and if they had been damaged on the beaches the whole venture might have
met disaster a week later for lack of supplies. However, the planners
knew their job and the ships suffered very little damage; they floated
off in the evening and sailed for England to load up again.

The S.S. _Elsie Davidson_ beached with the others of her convoy soon
after dawn, and by midday all her motor transport cargo had been
unloaded on to the wet sand beside her and had driven away. By that time
the Germans were several miles inland so there was no particular danger
to the ships upon the beach, though a few snipers left behind in ruined
buildings were still giving trouble and had not yet been cleaned up. At
intervals, however, a solitary mortar bomb would sail up from some point
inland and would land upon the beach and go off, and the army were
having a good deal of difficulty in locating this trench mortar.

Nobody in _Elsie Davidson_ had had much sleep since they left London,
and when the motor transport had been unloaded and six or seven hours
must still elapse before the ship could float, the officers and crew of
the ship mostly went to their bunks to get a little badly needed rest
before commencing the return passage. There had been no enemy aircraft
over during the day, but the captain left the guns manned, the gunners
mostly curled up on the deck asleep beside their guns. Dr. Prentice
would not have gone below on this the great day of his life, for his
duty of aircraft identification kept him on the bridge and in any case
the scene unrolled before him on the beach was far too fascinating for
him to leave, but the captain had provided him with his deck chair. When
all the motor transport had been unloaded and the last soldier had left
the ship they went to dinner, and after a quick meal the don sat down
behind the canvas dodger in a corner of the bridge and presently he
slept, a worn, aging man rejoicing in the part that he was privileged to
play in war.

Soon after three o'clock one of the occasional mortar bombs came over,
fired at random, and exploded on the bridge of the S.S. _Elsie
Davidson_, only a few feet from the sleeping old man. As luck would have
it a steward was bringing him a mug of tea, and this man was killed
instantaneously on the ladder leading to the bridge. Dr. Prentice died a
few minutes later, probably without regaining consciousness.

The soldiers searched all day to find that mortar, for it was evidently
firing from a point well behind our line. Shortly before dark they found
two girls who had been sitting on a stile in a hedgerow all day, waving
at the soldiers passing down the lane in trucks or tanks and chi-hiking
with the few who passed on foot. They were pretty girls and wore
tricolour ribbons in their hair and waved little French flags at the
passing trucks, but in fact they were German and had the mortar and its
ammunition hidden in a bed of stinging nettles just behind the hedge.
When everything was quiet and there seemed to be nobody about they would
pop one of the projectiles down the spout and get up quickly on the
stile again and watch it sail away towards the beach, looking as if
butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. When finally the troops located
this trench mortar and arrested the two girls they could hardly move for
laughter; it went as a tremendous joke on a grim day.

That is how Professor Prentice came to meet his end. I asked Mr.
Grimston when I met him at his house in Cowley if Janet Prentice ever
heard the rather grotesque details, and he was inclined to think that
she hadn't. He had heard the facts himself from one of the other
aircraft identifiers who had been in another ship which had remained
stranded on the beach for some days till they could get her off, and had
got the details from the beachmaster's party. Mr. Grimston had debated
whether he should tell Mrs. Prentice the whole story and had decided not
to, thinking that it would only distress her needlessly. He was doubtful
if anybody else had told them.

                 *        *        *        *        *

As I have said, I never met Janet Prentice again. I wanted to, but in
the pressure of war it wasn't possible. I wrote to her at _Mastodon_ in
August 1944 as soon as I had time to turn round after the mass of work
that came upon me at the invasion and I suggested a meeting, but I never
got an answer to my letter. It may never have reached her, for by that
time she was out of the navy and in and out of various institutions, for
her nerves were in a bad way. Viola Dawson remembered the name of one of
these places, and I went to see the matron of the Mary Somers Home at
Henley when I was in England, who remembered the case. Janet Prentice
had been there for about two months in the autumn of 1944. The matron
remembered her as a listless girl, obsessed with a sense of guilt for
something that she fancied she had done in the war, and inclined to be
suicidal. They did not regard her as an acute case but one more in need
of occupation and psychological help, and as she had a mother to look
after the psychologist attempted to direct her mind towards an ideal of
service and regeneration through work. It is just possible that my
letter was purposely withheld from her, in that home or some other, as
being likely to produce a psychological setback.

I knew nothing about this at the time, of course; I only knew I hadn't
had an answer to my letter. By the time that might have troubled me I
was back on operations in the RAF and I had closer and more intimate
troubles and excitements of my own to occupy my mind.

I dropped a rank to Squadron Leader and got away from Fighter Command in
September 1944, and went to Aston Downs to convert on to Typhoons. I
can't say that I liked the new machine with its thick wings and its
enormous Sabre engine, but the day of the Spitfire was practically over
in Europe. In the last stage of the war the Luftwaffe was better
equipped than we were and our fighters and our fighter-bombers were
having a rough time in France; the Focke-Wulf TA 152 was a better
fighter than anything we had till the Tempest became operational, and in
the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter they were streets ahead of us, though
this machine was reported to be killing more Germans than English in its
first months of operations due to its high landing speed and its
unreliable engines. Still, there it was, and if you met one in a Typhoon
or a Spitfire it was likely to be curtains unless you had a great
numerical advantage.

I went to Belgium at the beginning of November 1944 and took command of
my Typhoon squadron on Evre aerodrome just by Brussels. The squadron
was armed with eight rockets on each aircraft and was principally
employed on shooting up railway trains, bridges, and flak positions; the
last duty was murder, for the German flak was accurate and intensive in
those days. True, the range of the rocket enabled a breakaway to be made
sooner than if the attack had had to be pressed home with cannon, but
even so casualties had been very heavy in the squadron in the months
since the invasion. In my squadron of fifteen machines casualties had
been running at the rate of over two a week for months on end, and only
one pilot who had landed in France with the squadron in June now
remained, though two others had completed their tour of operations and
had been relieved. Three replacement pilots for my squadron crossed to
Brussels with me in the Anson.

It was an anxious and a trying time for me at first. Morale in the
squadron was not good, and everyone was well aware that their new
squadron leader had been off operations for a year--none more than me.
In that year fighter-bomber tactics had progressed enormously and I was
definitely out of touch; the saving grace was that I knew that myself. I
had a frank talk with the group captain the day after I arrived, taking
my stand perhaps upon my DFC and bar. I told him that for the first ten
days he mustn't expect a great deal from my squadron and that the fault
would be mine; after that he would get good results from us. He
bellyached a good deal but he took it, and for a week I played very,
very safe. In that week I got the squadron pulled together a bit, and
after that we went to town upon our sorties.

Shooting up flak posts, I discovered, is a matter of planning the attack
beforehand and good discipline; one can keep down the casualty rate if
the right machines start firing in the right direction at the right
time. We got our casualty rate down quite a lot and at the same time did
our job as well as anybody else. We got more railway trains than Huns. I
got one Messerschmitt 109K certain and another probable in my six weeks
of operations, but we never mixed it with the German fighters if we
could avoid it, for with rockets on we were no match for them and
without rockets our main duty was to get home in one piece. We had a
fighter cover normally who fought for us.

It all came to an end for me on New Year's Day, 1945. That was the day
when the German fighters made their massive attack upon our aerodromes
and did enormous damage to the RAF and to the USAAF. They concentrated
everything they had and came over at dawn with about 650 Focke-Wulfs and
450 Messerschmitts in three formations, and within an hour most of the
aircraft dispersed on our aerodromes were blazing ruins by the runways.

We had a show on that morning, and we were in the process of scrambling
when the Jerries came over. I had just taken off with Red Two beside me
and I had my head down in the cockpit at about two hundred feet as I got
the undercart up, throttled back, and set the pitch. I looked up,
sensing there was something wrong, and saw a burst of tracer flying past
me; there was a violent shock as one smacked into the armour at my back.
I got my seat down in a hurry and saw a Focke-Wulf pass just underneath
me, and another one, and then the air was full of them and our own flak
everywhere. My radio went dead, and I saw Red Two go down and crash in
flames upon a house.

The air was full of aircraft, all unfriendly, and the cloud base far
above. I stuffed my Typhoon down to deck level, breaking to port. On the
ground the Fortresses and the Dakotas and the Typhoons and the Spits all
seemed to be burning in rows; the Jerries certainly had made a mess of
us. I got a Focke-Wulf fairly in my ring sight for a moment and pooped
off all my eight rockets at him, more to get rid of them than anything
else, and two of them got him on the port wing and broke it off. The
wing flew past, mercifully without hitting me, and the rest of the
machine went down and rolled along the ground in a flaming ball.

I went on turning, putting all my strength upon the stick, practically
blacked out, probably at about three or four hundred feet, but I hadn't
got a hope; there must have been hundreds of them. Somebody got me from
the side with a big deflection shot; there was a crash between me and
the engine, half the instruments leapt from the panel and crashed into
my face, there was a frightful pain in both my feet and a hot waft of
burning rubber that told me I was on fire. I shoved the throttle through
the wire to emergency full and shot straight upwards for the clouds, and
by the mercy of God at that moment there was nobody upon my tail. I
jettisoned the hood as I went up and wrenched away the oxygen and radio,
and with each hand in turn I managed to draw my damaged legs close up to
me in spite of the pain. Then I pulled the stick back and turned her
over, waited an instant and pushed it forward and got thrown out
cleanly, probably at about two thousand feet. I had enough sense left to
pull my parachute and then I think I may have passed out, because I
can't remember anything about the descent or landing. The next thing I
remember is sitting on the snow with some chaps of the RAF regiment
about me putting tourniquets upon my legs; one of my feet wasn't there
at all, and the other was a mess. There was a Bofors gun nearby; I was
very lucky to have got down so near help for I was bleeding like a pig.
Then a doctor came and gave me a shot in the arm and I passed out again.

That is how my service in the RAF came to an end.

                 *        *        *        *        *

A couple of days later I was flown in a Dakota direct from Evre to an
aerodrome near Shrewsbury in the west of England, and I spent the next
four months in the RAF hospital there. They operated three times because
they tried to save the left foot but weren't able to. I was very
depressed in those months, because it's not funny to lose both your feet
when you're thirty-one years old. You don't realize that in time you'll
get accustomed to the disability, that in years to come you may have
just as much enjoyment out of life as you had before, though in a
different way. I was passionately fond of winter sports and skiing as a
young man and all that was over for me now, and swimming also, and long
walks over the hills. I had black moods when I was in the hospital that
lasted for days on end, cursing myself for an idiot that I had ever
baled out. I should have had the guts to take it.

Outside the RAF I had a few friends in England, and as the months went
on my service friends were all dispersed. I didn't want to see anybody,
anyway. I am ashamed to say that in those months I thought little about
Janet Prentice; when I did so it was in cynical reflection that she had
not bothered to answer the letter I had written to her. I'm not very
proud of those months of self-pity, but that's what happened.

Presently I was moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital at Clifton just
outside Bristol, and I was there till November 1945. We had considerable
freedom as patients in that place while we were being fitted with
artificial feet and learning to walk on them, for part of the treatment
was that we should get used to taking part in normal life. I had, of
course, as much money as I liked to ask my father for, for wool was
already high and Coombargana was doing well in spite of the rabbits; I
was far better off than most of the other chaps. The obvious thing for
me to do was to buy a car to get around in, but there were difficulties
and frustrations all around that one. No new cars were available and the
six-year-old one that I bought gave constant trouble which I wasn't
really fit to cope with, for I couldn't stand at first on my new feet
for more than a few minutes at a time. The petrol allowance I could get,
though generous by British standards in those days, was far too small to
let me range widely over England and I was allowed no new tires at all.
There was little that was healthy, therefore, for me to spend my money
on and it mostly went on drink and rather dreary parties with the
nurses; I suppose I was already too old to take much pleasure in a wild
time with the girls.

By the time I left the Orthopaedic Hospital, tottering on my new feet, I
was disenchanted with England, and only anxious to get back to
Coombargana, my own place, where anyway the sun would be shining and
petrol and new tires would be available for me to travel on whatever the
regulations might say; I knew that much about my countrymen. I booked a
passage home by sea for February, not caring to fly, and got enough
black market petrol to drive my car to Newhaven. In France there was
unlimited petrol for anyone who had the money to pay for it and freedom
of movement was restored to me, and by the time that I got south of
Lyons the sun was shining. I spent a pleasant couple of months exploring
the south of France and Italy as far as Rome, and in those months I got
back some of my mental poise again.

The ship did a good bit to dispel it. I returned to London a few days
before sailing for Australia and sold my car, but I was hamstrung
without it. While I had the car I was a free man, able to travel and
enjoy life like other people, but without it on the ship I was a pitiful
cripple. I had a couple of falls in the rough weather of the Bay, one in
the dining room in front of everybody, and everyone was very sorry for
me which made me furious. I spent most of the rest of the voyage in my
cabin, having my meals there, wondering if I was a fool to go back home
to Coombargana and if I could ever ride a horse again. Up till the time
I had left home, of course, the whole of the work about the property was
done on horses.

There was a Queenslander from Rockhampton on board, a chap called
Petersen who had lost a leg at Arnhem; he had been a paratrooper and had
spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. He was in much the
same state physically and mentally as I was, and we used to drink and
talk about the war each night in my cabin or his, and sometimes we would
get a crowd together for a poker game, playing pretty high. I don't
think I went to bed entirely sober any night of the voyage or before two
in the morning; I used to lie in bed till about noon and then get up and
sit around in the cabin trying to read and drinking a good bit, till
evening came and all the women out on deck went in because it was
getting cold, and I could go out for a breather without people staring
at me or being sympathetic. Then would come dinner in the cabin and the
serious business of the day, which was talking about the war and
drinking.

We got to Fremantle at last and there my father met me. He had booked
seats for us on the airline to Adelaide but I didn't want to fly; I had
a scunner against flying at that time which took about two years to
fade. So Dad came round to Adelaide with me in the liner, and I must
say, he was good. He saw that I was drinking pretty hard and set himself
to drink with me, matching Scotch with Scotch; when I talked about my
war he'd start talking about his. We both got shot together each night
on the way round from Adelaide and he won a lot of his own money off me
at poker. He made my homecoming far easier than I had thought it would
be, because when we got back to Coombargana and he laid off the grog
because of Mother it was easy for me to play along with him and go slow
on it too.

Dad had met Harry Drew during the war and had brought him to Coombargana
when they got demobilized and made him foreman; Dad was always a good
picker of men. Mother was already getting disinclined to travel on her
own so Harry brought the old Bentley they had bought before the war to
Adelaide to meet us at the ship, and we drove home in that. I drove it
most of the way and it was a delight to be at the wheel of a decent car.
In a car I could regain my freedom of movement and be equal to anybody
once again.

At Coombargana I found that Dad had come back from the war with some
pretty advanced ideas about the mechanization of the property. Before
the war Coombargana ran almost entirely upon horses in the traditional
style. I don't think we had more than one truck on the station; we had
an old kerosene tractor but I don't remember that it was used much, and
we conserved little fodder. I remember that we used the tractor for
ploughing firebreaks before the war but I don't think we ever ploughed
up a paddock; we grazed entirely on the natural grasses of the district.
All the real work of the property was done with riding and draught
horses; all told we had about eighty horses on the place, to the ten or
eleven we keep now.

Dad, however, had spent much of the war in the Northern Territory in
close contact with the highly mechanized American Army; he had seen a
thousand miles of first-class bitumen road made at an incredible speed
between Alice Springs and Darwin; he had seen vegetable farms to feed
the army created from the bush by modern agricultural machines,
producing the vegetables in a matter of months. He had watched all this
carefully with his mind on Coombargana, sifting out what was likely to
be useful to us from what was not. When I got home in the Australian
autumn of 1946 I found that he had brought a number of disposal vehicles
on to the station, most of which proved useless to us in the end because
they had been designed for other service but which gave us valuable
experience. The Bren carrier lies rotting in a briar thicket now because
it didn't really do anything we wanted and we couldn't get spares for
it, but we learned from it that a tracked vehicle was necessary to us in
the winter and our big diesel crawler is the outcome of that knowledge.
We still use a couple of the four-wheel drive Chevrolet trucks he
bought, but the disposal jeeps have long since given place to Land
Rovers.

I found that Dad was still using his horse to get about the property,
though he had a sneaking affection for a jeep and was starting to drive
where he had ridden formerly. When I got home I made a conscious effort
to take an interest in the station though it all seemed terribly small
and insignificant after the business I had been engaged in for the last
six years. A horse was impossible for me, of course, or at any rate
pretty unsafe, and at an early stage we got a jeep for my personal use
about the property. With his army associations Dad could get to know
what was coming up for sale, and he managed to produce a nearly new jeep
for me that would give no trouble.

It was a pity that it had to be a jeep, although we neither of us
realized that at that time. A man in my condition depends so much upon
his car; it means far more to him than a car would to any normal person.
This jeep was identical in every respect with the many jeeps that I had
driven in the war; it made the same noise, was painted the same colour,
had the same soiled canvas seats; the gear levers came to hand in the
same place, the steering was the same. It made too strong a link with
the war days to be quite healthy; continually it brought back memories
that had better have faded with the different scene and with the passage
of the years. When I had had a drink or two I would be driving in the
darkness round the perimeter track towards our Typhoons at dispersal
with Samuelson and Driver and Jack Carter in the jeep with me, Jack
Carter who was to collide with Driver over the target an hour later and
fall together with him in a flaming mass, and Samuelson who was to pull
out far too low over the train so that the flak got him and he crashed
on the line ahead of the ruined engine, belching smoke and steam and
cinders high into the air. There was the little clip above the
instrument panel that I never learned the use of in which Jack Carter
left his pipe before we went to the machines, in which I found his pipe
when we came back. Once or twice at Coombargana when I was a bit tired I
reached out to take that pipe out of the clip, and it wasn't there.

Helen was living at home when I got back, though she was making plans to
go to England in the spring and straining at the leash to get away. She
was eight years younger than I was and might have been good company for
me if things had been different, but mentally we lived in different
worlds. I think the war made bigger chasms between Australian young men
and women than in England, where girls were called up and had to serve
in the armed forces like the men. In Australia war service for girls was
on an easier basis, and Helen and her friends had had no difficulty in
avoiding it and in pursuing their lives more or less uninterrupted
through the war; indeed the pretext of doing war work in Melbourne had
made it easier for them to leave the country and take a flat in town.
For these girls the war had little reality; no bomb fell within two
thousand miles of them, no death came near them, no military discipline
forced them in to contact with girls of another class; they came out of
the war in much the same state of mind as they went in to it, avid to
get to London and to Paris, to the seats of fashion and of culture that
the silly nuisance of the war had stopped them visiting before.

Most Australian men returning from the war accepted their girls for what
they were, reflecting perhaps that men are different to women, and girls
are like that. I couldn't do it. Perhaps my disability had made me
bitter and critical, but I had spent six years in daily contact with
Englishwomen in the RAF who had shared many of my own experiences, had
been scared stiff when I was scared myself, had known the same
discipline, had grieved for friends when I had grieved, had turned to
cigarettes and grog to hide the grief as I had turned myself. These
Englishwomen spoke the same language that I spoke and thought in the
same way; compared with them Helen and her friends seemed shallow and
trivial to me, people of no account incessantly preoccupied with details
of their clothes and personal adornment, and their unending, foolish
parties.

On her part, Helen found me much changed by the war, and changed for the
worse. I had gone to it a pleasant, affable, and intelligent young man,
a good dancer and skier, popular with her friends. I had come back from
it an unpleasant, soured cripple, contemptuous of her friends and their
way of life, a man with a sharp, bitter tongue, and a fairly heavy
drinker. I think my return put the lid on it for Helen; like most young
Australians she wanted to get out in to a wider world, and by the time I
had been home a month it would have taken a dog collar and a chain to
keep her at Coombargana.

She sailed for England in December 1946; we had a reconciliation when
she went for I had behaved badly to her, and we parted on better terms
than we had been since I came home. After she went I saw no more of her
friends and it was lonely at Coombargana; I did not care for them but in
the words of Barrie they were like a flight of birds, and when they went
it seemed that they had taken away the sun in their pockets. I met very
few young women after that. I was conscientiously trying to learn the
business of the property but I couldn't make it a full-time occupation.
I had been brought up at Coombargana in the wool business and, in fact,
there wasn't a lot left for me to learn; running a station isn't as
difficult as all that. My father was still active and able to make quick
decisions, not yet ready to turn over management to me. We have an
interest in a cattle station in the Northern Territory, a property of
about fifteen hundred square miles about three hundred miles north of
Alice Springs near Tennant Creek and I used to go up there for him once
or twice a year for a few days. I wasn't much good up there because I
wasn't really safe upon a horse and I couldn't walk very far; in the
bush I had to have one of the stockmen with me all the time, because if
I had fallen from my horse I couldn't have caught him again and I could
never have walked out back to the homestead. However, I was able to look
through the books and talk to everyone, and this saved my father a good
deal of travelling.

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 something 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 experiences, 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 duffle 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 in to 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 air mail. 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 in to 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 enquiries he could to find out her address. If he preferred to put
her in to 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 air mail some weeks later. He said that
he had delayed answering my letter till he had been able to make some
enquiries, 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 northwest of Leeds. He had
written to the postmaster of Settle to enquire 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 motorboat. 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. "I'd 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.

"I 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
like 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.

I got to Oxford about three weeks before term began, and put up at the
Randolph, and immediately began my search for somewhere to live. I
traded on my disability and my war record shamelessly, but at the lower
levels I'm afraid the money helped. By the time term began I was very
comfortably installed in rooms in Merton Street conveniently close to
college, which may well have been the most expensive lodgings ever to be
rented by an undergraduate. However, there I was; I bought a nearly new
car dubiously at an inflated price from a young doctor who had got it on
a priority licence, and started in to look for Janet Prentice.

I shall pass over the details of my quest quite shortly, because it
ended in a complete dead end. I went and had a talk with the Bursar of
Wyckham who remembered my letter of course, and was very helpful. He
introduced me to the Provost and three other dons who had been friends
of Dr. Prentice, but they knew nothing that would help me. Settle seemed
the best line of enquiry, and I went up to that little town in Yorkshire
just before the Oxford term began, and stayed there for three days. I
went and saw the police, the postmaster, the stationmaster, the
headmasters of two schools, the vicar, the Roman Catholic priest, the
Methodist minister, the Town Clerk, and a chap in the Food Office who
issued ration cards. Nobody that I spoke to had ever heard of Janet
Prentice, and there seemed to be no young married woman in the town who
answered the description in any way.

I went back to Oxford disappointed.

At that time in England everybody had to have a registration card, which
was, theoretically at any rate, a means of tracing anyone at any time.
As I took up my legal studies once again in Oxford, an elderly, battered
undergraduate somewhat out of tune with his surroundings, I started an
enquiry into registration cards with the Ministry of Labour. This led me
to the Admiralty. I discovered then that Leading Wren Prentice had been
given a compassionate discharge from the navy in September 1944, for the
purpose of looking after her mother, who was recently widowed and in bad
health. A civilian registration card had been issued to her on her
discharge from the navy, and I got the number.

All this correspondence took time, because a good many letters were
involved and no British government department seemed to answer any
letter in less than a fortnight in those days. It was near the end of
term when I finally got the number of the identity card and wrote to the
Ministry of Labour to ask where she was.

They took a month to answer, creating something of a record in this
correspondence, and then wrote back and gave me the address of the old
Prentice home in Crick Road, Oxford.

I had, of course, been there at a very early stage and made enquiries up
and down the road, with no result. It was just before Christmas when I
got this letter. I had stayed in Oxford to await it, cancelling a
project I had had to go down to the south of France for the vacation,
because I could not bear to waste time in my quest. I went to London
directly Christmas was over and stayed at the Royal Air Force Club, of
which I was an overseas member, and spent a morning in the Ministry of
Labour. In the end I found an affable young man who went to a good deal
of trouble in the matter, and produced some information which surprised
me.

The registration card had been handed in at Harwich on November the
14th, 1946, when Miss Janet Prentice left England for Holland. At that
time the regulations stated that if a British subject were to go to live
abroad the registration card had to be handed in on leaving the country
and a new one taken out when he came back and wanted ration cards again.
No new registration card had been issued to Miss Prentice, so presumably
she was still abroad.

By this time the trail was growing very cold, but I could not give up
until I had done everything within my power to find Bill's girl. I went
to the steamship company and succeeded in discovering from their records
that a Miss Prentice had, in fact, crossed as a passenger from Harwich
to Rotterdam on that November day two years before, travelling tourist
class, but they could provide no clue as to her destination. More to
fill in time during the vacation than with any real hope of success I
went to Rotterdam and saw the British vice-consul to try to learn if any
British subject of that name were living in the district, perhaps with
an old lady, perhaps in some town or village with a name that resembled
Settle. He had no information for me, but suggested that the British
Embassy at The Hague had fuller information covering all Holland, so I
went on there. They knew of nobody in Holland that corresponded with my
description, but the Third Secretary discovered a small village or
hamlet called Settlers about sixty miles north of Pretoria, in the
Transvaal, in South Africa. It was a desperately long shot, but the
Transvaal is closely linked with Holland and when I got back to Oxford I
addressed a letter to the postmaster of Settlers. Too long a shot,
because I never got an answer.

So, for the time being, my search for Janet Prentice came to an end. Two
years previously she had vanished in to Europe and had left no trace
behind her.




                                   7


A man with my disability has to make new interests and amusements, and
while I was in England motor racing became mine. It began, I think, in
1949 when I joined the London Aeroplane Club and took up flying again,
more for mental discipline and to show myself I wasn't afraid to than
because I really got much kick out of a Tiger Moth. I set myself to do
about fifty hours' solo flying to rehabilitate my skill; I think I had
vaguely in my mind that having once flown I should retain the ability in
case we ever wanted to use aeroplanes on our Australian properties.

At the flying club I found a number of enthusiastic motor racing types,
young men of all social classes united in a common love of the internal
combustion engine, who appeared at the aerodrome on stripped-down motor
bikes or ancient racing cars. None of them had much money, most of them
spoke with a slight London accent not unlike my own, and all seemed to
have cheerful and attractive young women perched athletically on their
uncomfortable vehicles. I found their company congenial and their
enthusiasms contagious, and I went with them upon a number of excursions
to races and hill climbs, and once in a chartered Anson to the Tourist
Trophy races in the Isle of Man.

Early in 1950 I got so far involved in this amusement that I bought a
little racing car myself, a Cooper, which I raced once or twice without
distinction in the miniature class. I found that while I could still fly
an aeroplane all right I hadn't really got the nerve for motor racing.
Perhaps I was too old, but with my dummy feet it took a matter of
minutes to wriggle in or out of the cramped little single-seater
cockpit, so that I was continually troubled by the thought of fire.
After a few races I gave up and handed it over to a young friend of mine
at the club, John Harwood, content to be the backer and pay the bills,
and watch him win races on it. It served its turn well, did that little
car, because John developed into a very fine driver and now races for
various firms continually, all over Europe.

I took Schools at Oxford in May 1950 and got a second in Law and went in
to Mr. A. N. Seligman's chambers in Lincoln's Inn with a view to getting
called to the Bar. There wasn't a great deal of sense in it, perhaps,
because the Bar wasn't going to be much help to me in running
Coombargana, but by that time I was interested in law and legal
processes and there was no need for me to go home just yet. I got a flat
in Half Moon Street quite handy to my club and settled down to live in
London for a time, retaining my associations with the flying club and
with my motor racing friends, of course. Petrol was de-rationed shortly
after I came down from Oxford, so I got a ten-year-old Bentley and began
to explore England.

I had visited the Admiralty soon after my return to England and I had
got an account of my brother Bill's death which was rather scanty,
though all the essential facts were there. The Second Sea Lord's office
was helpful in the matter, however, and they suggested that I could get
a fuller account from Warrant Officer Albert Finch of the Royal Marines,
who had been Bill's companion on the night when he was killed. Warrant
Officer Finch, however, was serving a tour of duty on the China Station
and was due home in November 1950. I wrote to Finch and got rather a
laboured letter in reply because he evidently wasn't a very easy writer
and had difficulty in telling a story on paper, and I arranged with him
that we would meet when he got home to England.

In the years when I was at Oxford I met a good many young Englishwomen,
particularly in the motor racing crowd. They were cheerful, sensible
girls mostly, but I didn't get involved with any of them. The best of
them had a little of the same quality of forthrightness and community of
interests that I had admired so greatly in Bill's girl and that had made
me so glad to have her as a prospective sister-in-law, the indefinable
quality of being easy to live with. None of them approached the Leading
Wren that Bill had loved, in my opinion; the more I saw of these others,
the more they reminded me of Janet Prentice, the more my mind turned
back to all the details of that day at Lymington.

It was to be August 1950 before I got any further in my quest for her,
however. There was a race meeting on the perimeter track of the old
Goodwood aerodrome, and I had entered the Cooper for two events with
John Harwood driving it for the first time; he had put in a lot of work
upon the car in his mews' garage in Paddington and had got her in good
nick. I sent the Cooper down upon a truck and left London at about five
in the morning with a carload of my friends and two other cars with us,
a party of fifteen or sixteen of us all told. It was a glorious summer
morning and we made quick time down to West Sussex, and got the Cooper
unloaded and filled up before nine o'clock. We pushed John off for a few
trial circuits so that he could get the feel of her; he took her round
easily for two or three laps as we had arranged and then trod on it and
did a lap at seventy-eight, timed by my stop watch, which seemed good
going for a car of only 500 c.c. He came into the paddock and said he
could do better than that, so we pushed her into a corner and went to
breakfast.

We had brought a lot of food down in baskets and a Primus stove to boil
a kettle, and the girls got breakfast for us on the grass beside the
cars in the warm sun. There was a girl there I hadn't met before,
Cynthia Something--I forget her surname. Somehow the talk turned to the
war, as it so often does; she evidently knew all about me, but I knew
nothing about her. She looked about twenty-seven and so had probably
seen service of some sort, and I asked her casually, "What did you do in
the Great War, Mummy?"

"Mummy yourself," she retorted. "I was in the navy."

I had had this once or twice before, but it had never led to anything.
"In the Wrens?"

She nodded, her mouth full of cold sausage.

"What category were you in?" I asked.

"Boat's crew," she said. "First of all at Brightlingsea and then
Portsmouth--in _Hornet_."

"When were you at Portsmouth?"

"1944 and 1945," she said. She took a drink of tea to wash the sausage
down. "I was demobbed from _H.M.S. Hornet_."

I lit a cigarette, for I had finished eating and it was warm and
pleasant sitting on the grass in the sun, listening to the engines
revving up. "Did you ever meet a Leading Wren Prentice?" I enquired.
"Janet Prentice. She was an ordnance artificer, I think, at _H.M.S.
Mastodon_ in the Beaulieu River."

She checked with her cup poised in midair. "You mean, the one who shot
down the German aeroplane?"

I stared at her. "I never heard that."

"There was a Leading Wren Prentice who shot down a German bomber with an
Oerlikon," she said. "At Beaulieu, just before the invasion."

"It's possible," I said. "I never heard that about her, but it could be.
She was engaged to my brother, but he was killed about that time. I've
been trying to get in touch with her, but she seems to have
disappeared."

"It must be the same," she said. "There couldn't have been two Leading
Wrens called Prentice at Beaulieu, at that time."

"Did you know her?" I enquired.

She shook her head. "I never met her. There was a lot of chat about it
in the Service--naturally. It never got into the newspapers, of course.
Security."

I nodded. "I wish to God I could find somebody that knew her and kept in
touch with her," I said. "I believe she's out of England, but she must
have some friends here. I've been trying for two years to find out where
she is."

She chewed thoughtfully for a minute. "She was engaged to your brother?"

"That's right. I met her once, at Lymington, early in 1944, just before
Bill got killed." I paused, and then I said, "She was a fine girl."

"Viola Dawson would be the best person," she said thoughtfully. "Viola
must have known her."

"Who's Viola Dawson?"

"She was another Leading Wren," she said. "She was in boats with me at
Brightlingsea, and then she went to Beaulieu. Viola must have known this
Prentice girl."

"Can I get in touch with Viola Dawson?"

"I know Viola," she said. "She's got a flat in Earl's Court Square.
She's in the telephone book. If you like, I'll give her a ring tonight
and tell her about you, and say you'll be calling her."

"I wish you would," I said. "It's the first time I've been able to find
anybody who might know something about Janet Prentice."

"I'll do that," she said. "I'll tell her who you are."

"What would be a good time to ring her?" I enquired. "Does she work?"

"She works in a film studio," she said. "At Pinewood or some place like
that. She does continuity, whatever that may mean. I should think you'd
get her any evening at about seven o'clock--unless she's out, of
course."

I thanked her, and at seven o'clock next evening I rang up Viola Dawson.
"Miss Dawson," I said. "You won't know me--my name's Alan Duncan. I met
a girl--"

"I know," she broke in. "Cynthia rang me. I've been expecting to hear
from you, Mr. Duncan."

"Good," I said. "What I really wanted to find out from you is if you
know anything about Janet Prentice."

"I knew her quite well in the war," she said.

"You haven't seen her recently?"

"I haven't," she replied. "I'm not sure even where she's living now."

"I don't think she's in England," I said. "I've been trying to find
someone who could put me in touch with her." I paused, and then I said,
"She was engaged to my brother, before he got killed."

"I know," she said. "I remember that happening."

"You do?"

"Oh yes. Janet and I were together at Beaulieu. We were great friends in
those days, but I'm afraid I've lost touch with her now."

"Look, Miss Dawson," I said, "there's a lot I'd like to ask you about
Janet. I never knew much about her, and I'm very anxious to get in to
touch with her if I can. Could we have a meal together, do you think?"

"I'd like to," she said.

"What about tonight? Have you eaten yet?"

She seemed to hesitate. "No--not yet. Yes, I could come tonight, a bit
later on."

"Suppose I call for you in about half an hour?"

"Give me a little longer--I've got some work I want to finish. Come
about eight o'clock and we'll go out somewhere. Somewhere simple; I
shan't have time to change."

"All right. I'll be with you about eight o'clock."

"Top flat," she said. "Right up at the very top, in the attic."

I went round in a taxi an hour later, and climbed the stairs of the old
four-storey terraced house converted into little flats, up to the very
top. It was such a place as any working girl in a good job might live
in, decent but not affluent. I rang the bell, and she opened the door to
me.

If her face hadn't been quite so lean, her jaw quite so definite, she
would have been a very beautiful woman. She had very fair hair and a
beautiful complexion, slightly tanned or sunburned. That she had been a
boat's crew Wren was in the part; I realized directly I saw her, with
the knowledge of her Service that I had, that she would look exactly
right at the wheel of a motorboat. Perhaps her dress may have put that
into my mind, for she wasn't ready for me yet. She was wearing a dark
blue linen overall coat, and she had an artist's brush in her hand.

"Come in, Mr. Duncan," she said. "I'm going to ask you to sit down and
wait a few minutes while I finish off, before the light goes."

The door opened directly into her sitting room, which was half studio;
apparently her interests were artistic. Various canvases were propped up
on chairs or book cases or stacked against the wall, and sketches and
sketch books littered her table. She was working at an oil painting upon
an easel, and she went back to this without more ado, picked up her
palette, and began work again. "Find somewhere to sit down for just a
minute," she said. "That's sherry in the bottle on the tray--help
yourself. I ought to have got this place all tiddley before you arrived,
but it's such a pity to waste the light."

"Don't bother about me," I said. "I'll sit and watch. Cynthia didn't
tell me that you were an artist. She said something about working in the
movies."

"That's what I do," she said. "Continuity and set design. I do this as a
sparetime job, for fun. Give yourself a glass of sherry and give me one.
I won't be very long."

I did as she told me, and took her glass to her before the easel, and
saw the picture she was painting for the first time. The easel stood
beneath a skylight in the roof which gave it a north light, probably why
she lived in that flat. The canvas was a fairly large one, perhaps
twenty-four by twenty. It showed a brightly camouflaged motor torpedo
boat ploughing through a rough sea at reduced speed, under a lowering
sky with a break at the horizon giving a gleaming, horizontal light. The
curved bow of the vessel was lifted dripping from the water in a trough
showing a fair length of her keel; there was vigour in the painting and
life in the pitch and heel of the boat, and in the gleaming, silvery
light.

I gave her her sherry and stood back behind her, looking at the picture.
"That's good, isn't it?" I asked. "I mean, that's what it must look
like."

"I hope so," she said equably. She stood back for a moment, then bent
forward and added a deft, sweeping stroke to one of the grey-green waves
of the foreground, giving it form and texture. "You don't know much
about painting, do you?"

"Not a thing," I said.

"Then there's a pair of us," she remarked. "I've never had a lesson and
I'll never be any good, but I like doing it."

I stared at the painting. "Never had a lesson?"

"Not in painting," she said. There was a pause while she changed
brushes, dabbed on the palette, and added a stroke or two. "At school,
of course--drawing. And then night classes after the war to learn to do
a monochrome wash drawing, for the sets, you know, for the stage
carpenters to work to. I'm not sure that lessons in colour would be much
good, anyway."

"I like that," I said. "I like it very much."

There was another pause while she worked. "Journeyman stuff," she said
at last. "I'll hang it on the wall and look at it till I've outgrown it.
Then I'll sell it, and some stockbroker who was RNVR in the war'll give
me twenty quid for it and love it for the rest of his life."

I glanced around the room, taking in the other pictures. Most of them
seemed to have to do with naval matters, studies of ships and landing
craft, and one or two portraits of naval officers. One recent painting
showed white painted yachts moored in a harbour; this was principally a
study of water reflections.

"Are most of your things naval?" I asked.

"Most of them," she said. "I'm beginning to get it out of my system
now." She worked on in silence for a time, and then she said, "It seemed
so much the normal way of life after the war that one didn't do anything
about it. And then one day I woke up--we all woke up--and had to realize
that it had all been quite unusual; it would never come again. Not for
us, not in our lifetime. We should be too old, or married--out of it.
And then I felt I had to work and work and put it all down on canvas,
everything I'd seen, before I forgot what it was like." She worked on in
silence, and then she said, "It's very hard to realize that it will
never come again. To realize we've had it."

"I know," I said. "I think we all feel that."

She laid the palette down and wiped the brush upon a bit of newspaper.
"You were in the RAF, Cynthia said."

"That's right," I replied.

"I remember Janet telling me about you," she said. "Didn't she pinch one
of the boats and take you out in it, one Sunday?"

"That's right," I said again. "I went out with her and Bill, to a place
called Keyhaven."

She scraped the palette with a palette knife and wiped it with a cloth.
"She said you were the hell of a chap," Viola remarked. "Fighter
Command, three rings, and a chest full of ribbons."

"That was then," I said quietly. "Now I'm a fat cripple walking with two
sticks, living on wool and only interested in Law."

She went on tidying up her things, for the light was failing and her
work was over for the evening. "It comes to all of us," she said. "You
think a thing's going on forever when you're young, and then you wake up
and you find it doesn't, and you've got to find something fresh to do.
New interests."

She finished putting her things away, gave me another sherry, stood for
a minute looking at her painting, and then went through to another room
to wash and get ready to come out to supper. I sat down off my feet and
rested, pleasantly lulled by her sherry, studying her pictures. She had
made a better job of adapting herself to Peace than I had.

She came out presently, pulling on a raincoat over her blouse and skirt.
"There's a little restaurant just round the corner that I go to," she
said. "In the Earl's Court Road. Will that be all right for you?"

"Anywhere you say," I replied.

She turned to a cupboard, opened it, and stooped down on the floor
rummaging among the contents. "There's something here I'd like to show
you," she said. She pulled out a big, floppy sketch book, discarded it
upon the floor beside her, pulled out another and another, and finally
stood with one in her hand. "I think it's in here."

She flipped the pages through and turned the book back, and laid it on
the table before me. It was a vigorous drawing of a Wren firing an
Oerlikon at an aeroplane flying very low towards her. The drawing was in
sepia crayon. The Wren was a broad-shouldered, dark-haired girl,
hatless, leaning back upon the strap that held her in the shoulder
rings, tense, unsmiling, intent upon the sights. I had only met her once
six years before but she was unmistakable to me.

"Janet Prentice," I said.

She nodded. "I did that the same evening, in the Wrennery. I was in the
boat alongside when the thing came over." She paused. "I think that's
pretty well what it looked like."

"Cynthia told me she had shot a Junkers down," I said. "I never heard
the details. I think that must have been after I met her."

"Probably it was," she said. "I think it was after your brother got
killed--no--I'm not sure about that. I can tell you what happened,
though." She paused, and then closed the book. "Let's go out now and
have supper."

She took me to her restaurant and I ordered dinner. They had no very
good wine because it was a cheap little place, but they produced a
bottle of claret, very _ordinaire_ and probably Algerian, the sort of
wine we would pay seven and six a gallon for at home. The wine helped,
no doubt, and I found Viola Dawson easy to talk to, so that when we were
sitting smoking with a cup of coffee I had no difficulty in speaking to
her frankly about Janet Prentice.

"I want you to understand where I stand in this matter," I told her. "I
only met her once, that day when she took Bill and me to Keyhaven in the
boat. I don't think they were engaged, but they were pretty near it."

She nodded. "They were never engaged," she said. "She wanted to be. They
were waiting until after the balloon went up."

"I know," I said. "Bill told me that. He was my only brother, you know.
We were very close."

"He thought a lot of you," she said. "Janet was afraid of meeting you
that day because Bill had told her about you. Three rings, DFC and bar,
Fighter Command and all the rest of it. She wasn't a bit happy when she
went off with the boat that morning. She was afraid she wouldn't make
the grade with you."

I stared at her. "I'd never have thought that . . ." I paused, and then
I said, "She made the grade all right. I told Bill afterwards. You see,
my father and mother came in to it. They'd have wanted to know about her
if Bill had got married in England. I thought she was a fine girl, and
she'd have made Bill a good wife. I told him that I'd write and tell
them so at home."

"She was quite happy when she came back to the Wrennery that night,"
Viola said. "She wasn't worried after that. The only thing is, I think
she was a bit puzzled."

"What about?"

She smiled. "About what she was marrying in to, if she married Bill. She
thought he was a sheep farmer's son. She'd got herself accustomed to the
idea that she might be marrying--well, a little bit beneath the way
she'd been brought up. She didn't worry about that because she was in
love with your brother, but she knew she'd have to make adjustments,
that she might find her new relations a bit raw." She paused. "Your
brother was a sergeant, of course. Then you came along and it turned out
you were a Rhodes scholar, which rocked her a bit, and then it seems you
told her that both you and Bill had been at some school in Australia--I
forget the name. She found out afterwards that it was a sort of Eton in
Australia, and rather expensive. Then she didn't know what to think."

"Bill was telling her the truth," I said. "We _are_ sheep farmers. But
there are little ones and big ones in Australia."

"You're one of the big ones?"

"Yes." I paused for a minute to collect my thoughts. "She was very good
for Bill," I said. "I thought that day that he was feeling the strain a
bit--the work he had to do." She nodded. "She was just the right person
for him, as I saw it. I was grateful to her then," I said. "I'm grateful
to her now."

"They should have given him a rest," she remarked. "The trouble was, of
course, there were so few of them that had the skill to do the job, and
so much to be done before Overlord."

"I know," I said. "They were expendable. The thing that matters now is
this. She made Bill very happy in his last weeks. I should have kept in
touch with her, and I didn't. She should have been a friend of the
family for the remainder of her life, but it's not worked out that way.
I tried to get in touch with her three years ago and I've been trying
ever since. All I've succeeded in discovering has been bad news. Things
haven't been too good for her. That's what's worrying me now."

I went on to tell her why I hadn't kept in touch with Janet Prentice,
about the show at Evre aerodrome, about my time in hospital, about my
self-centred preoccupation with my own affairs before I went back to
Australia. "Not so good," I said quietly at the end. "But that's what
happened."

"I lost touch with her, too," said Viola. "I'm just as bad, I suppose,
because she needed her friends after the war. But--one can't keep up
with everyone." She glanced at me. "You know that she was trying to get
back into the Wrens?"

"No," I said. "I never heard that about her."

She thought for a minute. "I went and saw her just after the invasion,
at Oxford," she said. "I was on leave. She wasn't up to much then--sort
of weepy and very, very nervous. It was just before she got her
discharge from the Wrens and she knew that it was coming. She took it as
if it was a sort of disgrace, I think. The Junkers she'd shot down was
worrying her, too."

"I don't know anything about that Junkers," I said. "What was it that
she did?"

She told me as much as she knew. I called the waiter and ordered a fresh
pot of coffee, and lit another cigarette for her. At last I was learning
something real about Janet Prentice.

"It was all a bit depressing," Viola said at last. "She'd been such a
fine person a few months before, and now she was all to pieces."

I said nothing.

"I saw her again in the summer or autumn of 1946," Viola said. "I can't
remember what month. I saw her mother's death in the _Telegraph_, and I
was driving to Wales or somewhere so I wrote to her and fixed up to have
lunch with her in Oxford on my way through." She paused. "It was just
after the funeral and she was packing up the house and selling
everything. Her one idea was to get back into the Wrens."

"Why was she so keen on that?" I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Why do any of us look back on our war
service with such pleasure, in spite of everything?" she demanded.
"Answer me that. You'd be glad to be back in the RAF in another war, and
you know it. If it happened again, I'd be back in the Wrens like a
shot."

"Did she get back into the Wrens?" I asked.

She shook her head. "They wouldn't have her."

"Why not? She must have had a very good war record."

"I know." There was a pause, and then she said, "They're very, very
careful who they take in. Even in peacetime there are many more girls
trying to get in to the Wrens than they want. They can afford to be
choosy."

"I see," I said.

"I know a girl who stayed on in the Wrens," she told me. "She's a Second
Officer, in the Admiralty. She tells me that they won't have anyone
back, however good, if there's the slightest hint of any nervous trouble
on the record. She says they get a lot of cases like that, and they turn
them all down, just on principle. They want girls with untroubled minds,
who sleep soundly at night."

We sat in silence for a minute. "When you saw her in 1946," I asked
presently, "was she really bad? I mean, I'd like to know."

"She wasn't raving, if that's what you mean," Viola said, a little
sharply.

"I want to try and understand," I told her.

"I know," she replied, more gently. "She was very lonely for one thing,
I think. She was missing her mother, of course, and she didn't seem to
have any relations left in England to speak of. She didn't seem to have
made many friends, either."

"She didn't make friends easily?"

Viola shook her head. "She did in the Service, but that's different.
When you're sleeping thirty in a hut you just can't help making friends.
But in civil life, living at home and looking after her mother--I don't
think she would have done. She was rather shy, you know."

"I'd never have thought that of her," I remarked.

"You only saw her in the navy," Viola said. "It's so totally different,
living with men and working alongside them. You can't do a good job in
the navy and be shy. But it can come back afterwards."

"Was she still nervous?"

She shook her head. "Not in the way she was when I saw her before, the
time I saw her just after the invasions. She'd got herself under
control. I don't think anything was very real to her that had happened
since she left the Wrens, though."

"Was she still worrying about the Junkers?"

Viola nodded. "It was still very much upon her mind--that, and your
brother's death. But what really did worry me was the way she talked
about the dog."

"What dog was that?" I asked.

"Your brother's dog," she said. "He had a dog that he called Dev. I
thought you'd have known."

"I know he had a dog," I said. "A sort of Irish terrier. They had him
with them in the boat that day. What about him?"

"Bert Finch brought him over to her after your brother's death," she
said. I sat in silence while she told me about Dev.

Ten minutes later I said, "It was that that really finished her? When
the dog got killed?"

She nodded. "You see, it wasn't just a dog that she'd got fond of. It
was your brother's dog. She told me in the Wrennery that evening that
she'd let your brother down by not taking more care of his dog. Of
course, I didn't pay much attention to that at the time, because she was
in a sort of a breakdown and going off on leave next day. But after her
mother's death, more than two years later, she told me the same thing. I
tried to tell her it was my fault as much as hers, that I shouldn't have
let him out of the boat on to the hard. But it didn't register with her.
She seemed to have got a sort of horror and disgust with herself that
she hadn't looked after Bill's dog better."

"She never had another dog, after the war?"

Viola shook her head. "Oh no--I shouldn't think so." There was a pause,
and then she said, "Something broke in her when that dog got killed that
took a lot of breaking, and would have taken a lot of building up. And
it never got built up . . ."

She looked at her watch presently, and it was half past ten. "I must
go," she said. "I've got to work tomorrow."

I paid the bill and we left the restaurant. We walked slowly together
the short distance to her flat, and paused for a minute on the pavement
outside before I left her. "There are one or two other people who might
possibly know where she is," she said. "There's a girl called May
Spikins, the other O.A. Wren who worked with her. I think I might be
able to get you her address. You ought to see Bert Finch, too."

"I've been in touch with him," I said. "He's in China, or on his way
home now. I'll be seeing him before Christmas--about Bill."

She nodded. "Of course. I think you might find he knows something about
Janet Prentice. Anyway, I'll find out about May Spikins for you."

I saw a good deal of Viola Dawson after that. She rang me up a few days
later to give me information about May Spikins, who was May Cunningham
by that time, and when I suggested that we might have lunch together she
seemed pleased. She was almost as anxious as I was to find Janet
Prentice, for having been close friends in the war Viola was genuinely
worried to find that they had drifted so far apart that she had lost all
touch with her. On my part, I soon found that Viola knew a great deal
about Janet Prentice that had not come out at our first meeting--not
important things for she had told me all of those, but little touches,
little incidents that happened in their Service life together that
helped me to build up a picture of the Leading Wren that Bill had loved.

I went to see May Spikins in her new house in the new town at Harlow,
and she put me on to Petty Officer Waters in his tobacconist's shop in
the Fratton Road at Portsmouth. Then, about Christmas time, Warrant
Officer Finch came home and I went down in January after he came back
from leave and saw him in his mess in Eastney Barracks. From him I got
the account of Bill's death, and in the Long Vacation of 1951 I went to
France and spent some time endeavouring to find out where Bill had been
buried. As I have said, I failed, but it wasn't very important to know
that in any case.

At each step in this matter Viola and I used to meet to talk things
over, often at a restaurant in Jermyn Street. Presently she began coming
with me to motor race meetings, and twice I visited her film studio and
spent an afternoon upon the set with her, and had lunch with her in the
commissary. She was a very easy person for a man like me to go about
with, for we had the Service background as a link. I found presently
that I was telling her about my life in the RAF, almost unconsciously, a
thing that I had never been able to talk about to anybody, and I woke up
one day to realize uneasily that we were getting very close, that she
knew more about me, probably, than anybody else in the world. It was a
year after we had met for the first time that I woke up to that, and the
realization troubled me. I liked Viola, and I didn't want to hurt her.

It all came to a head next winter, either just before or just after
Christmas. She had been to Switzerland skiing for a fortnight and had
come back with a lot of action photographs, and from these she had been
working up a painting of a chap on a snow slope doing a fast turn. It
was part of her artistic development that she was getting away from
naval subjects now; at the long last, perhaps, the preoccupation with
her Service life was beginning to fade. She had asked me to come round
to her flat to have a look at this picture, and I went with slight
reluctance. At some stage I would have to hurt her, and I didn't want to
do it.

I went one afternoon at a week-end, intending to take her out to a movie
and dinner. The painting she was working on was a good, vigorous action
picture; if anything, I think she was a better draughtsman than painter
and her action drawings were unusually good for a woman. We talked about
the picture for a few minutes, and then she went through to her
kitchenette to make tea, and I dropped down upon the sofa.

She had been rummaging in the cupboard where she kept her old
sketchbooks, and the big, floppy things were all out upon the floor. I
turned them over till I found the one that I thought contained the
sketch of Janet Prentice firing the Oerlikon, and turned the pages. It
was full of pencil sketches of naval craft and naval scenes, with a
number of rough portrait sketches, a sort of commonplace book that she
had kept with her throughout her service in the Wrens. Presently,
turning the pages, I came upon a pencil sketch of Janet Prentice.

It was a head and shoulders portrait, exactly as I had seen her in the
boat at Lymington, as I remembered her. She wore a round Wren cap and a
duffle coat, the hood thrown back upon her shoulders. I sat there
looking at the square, homely face that I remembered so very well,
thinking of that day. Viola came in as I sat motionless with the book
upon my knee. She asked, "What have you got there?" and looked over my
shoulder.

"Portrait of Janet Prentice," I said. "Can I have it?"

"What do you want it for?" she asked. There was a sharpness in her tone,
so that I knew there was trouble coming. It had to come some time, of
course.

"It's very like her," I said quietly. I wanted a picture of her very
badly. "I'd like to have it, if you can spare it."

She did not answer that at once. She crossed to the table and put down
the teapot and the plate of cakes that she was carrying, and stood
silent for a minute, looking into the far corner of the room. Then she
said, "You think you're in love with her, don't you?"

"I don't think anything of the sort," I replied. "She was Bill's girl.
If he'd come through she'd have been my sister-in-law. We ought to have
a picture of her."

"It's absolutely crazy," she said dully. "You only met her once for a
few hours nearly eight years ago."

"It would be absolutely crazy if I was," I retorted. "You're imagining
things." I paused, and then I added weakly, "I'm just trying to find
her."

She turned to me, suddenly furious. "And when you've found her, what
then? Do you think she'll still be the same person as she was eight
years ago? Are you the same person as you were in 1944? For God's sake
be your age, Alan, and stop behaving like a teen-ager."

She was quite right, of course, but I wasn't going to stay and have her
talk to me like that. I got to my feet. "About time I beat it, after
that," I said. I put on my raincoat and picked up my sticks. "I'm sorry,
Viola, if I've done anything to hurt you. I didn't mean to." And I made
for the door.

She stood watching me go, and I half expected the embarrassment that she
would call me back and ask me to stay, and so prolong the inevitable.
But she didn't do it, and I closed the door behind me and made my way
slowly down her stairs for the last time. It's no good looking
backwards; one has to go on. It's no good trying to be happy with the
second best. She had said that I was absolutely crazy, but I had known
that myself for some considerable time.

Two days after that I got a note from Viola; it enclosed the little
pencil sketch of Janet Prentice, cut from her sketch book. It said
simply,

    My dear Alan,

    Here's your sketch, as a peace offering. I've fixed it, but
    you'd better frame it under glass.

    I think you're mad as a March hare, and I don't want to see you
    any more, so please don't ring up or write and thank for this.

                                                        Good luck.
                                                           Viola.

London wasn't much fun after that. I had grown to depend on Viola more
than I quite realized for company, and when it all came to an end I
didn't know what to do with myself. I had my work in Chambers, of
course, and I had the club and motor racing still, but as 1952
progressed I began to take less interest in these things, and to feel
that a time was approaching when I should have had England. Reports from
home weren't too good, either; both my father and my mother were
beginning to fail in health and to find the work of the station a
burden, and a wistfulness was starting to creep into their letters when
they mentioned my plans. I saw Helen from time to time and she was
obviously fixed in London with her Laurence, and I began to feel that I
should be at home. My search for Janet Prentice seemed to have petered
out, and it was only a chance now if I ever heard of her again. In the
uncertain climate of the English spring and summer I began to think with
longing of the warm settled weather of the Western District in summer,
and the drenching sunshine of our property at Tennant Creek.

I had another year of keeping terms and eating dinners to do before I
could be called to the Bar, and there was no urgency for me to go home
till that had been achieved, but I began to make my plans to go home in
the autumn of 1953. I didn't really want to stay in England for another
year, and it may well have been the really big mistake of my life that I
did so. But having set myself to one of the learned professions it
seemed silly to abandon it when it lay within my grasp, and though I was
growing tired of London there was nothing imperative to take me home. I
went to Spain for a month in the summer and to Greece, Rhodes, and
Cyprus for a couple of months in the winter, garnering all the
experience that an Australian likes to take back with him to the
Antipodes when he knows it may be many years before he comes to Europe
again, if ever.

I achieved my ambition and was called formally to the Bar in September
1953. I had booked a passage home by sea to leave England at the
beginning of October, and in the last month I was winding up my affairs
in England and saying good-bye to all my friends. I was troubled about
Viola Dawson, the best friend I had made in London, and uncertain if I
ought to see her to say good-bye to her or whether that would only upset
her and so be an unkindness. But she solved the matter, because ten days
before I sailed she wrote to me. She said,

    Dear Alan,

    I hear I've got to congratulate you on being called. I'm so
    glad. And Cynthia tells me that you're sailing on the 5th. I
    want to see you before you go, and it's about Janet Prentice so
    you'll probably come.

    I shall be dining at Bruno's, the little restaurant I took you
    to the first night we met, next Thursday at eight. Will you come
    and dine with me there? Don't come to the flat.

                                                            Yours,
                                                             Viola.

I was waiting for her in the little restaurant when she came, at a table
by the wall. She was paler than usual, I thought, not looking very well.
She seemed pleased to see me, and I ordered sherry while we discussed
what we would eat. I asked her what she had been doing, and she said,
working.

"No holiday?" I asked, for it was autumn and the weather was still warm.

She shook her head. "There seems to have been such a lot to do."

The waiter took our order and went away, and then she turned to me.
"I've got news for you," she said. "Janet Prentice."

"What about her?" I asked.

"She's living in Seattle, or she was about a year ago."

"Seattle--in America?"

She nodded. "On the west coast somewhere, isn't it?" She smiled faintly.
"It was Seattle she was going to, when she left Oxford, not Settle. The
charwoman got it wrong."

"What on earth's she doing there?"

"Didn't you say that she was going to live with an aunt in Settle?"

"That's what the charwoman said."

"She had an uncle who was on the faculty of Stanford University in the
United States," she reminded me. "Is that in Seattle?"

"I think it's on the west coast somewhere," I said slowly. "I always
thought it was near San Francisco."

"Anyway, she's living in Seattle now," said Viola. "I've got her address
for you." She picked up her bag and opened it, and took out a folded
slip of paper, and passed it to me across the table. "That's what you've
been looking for," she said quietly.

I opened it, and it read: Miss J. E. Prentice, 8312 37th Ave., N.W.,
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. I stared at it for a minute, and then asked,
"How did you get hold of this, Viola?"

"Dorothy Fisher got it for me," she said a little wearily. "The girl I
told you about, who stayed on in the Wrens. Second Officer, in the
Admiralty. Janet's been writing in every few months, ever since the
Korean war started."

"Trying to get back into the Wrens?"

She nodded. "She wrote in when the Korean war broke out and there was
nothing doing, and she wrote in again about six months later. Then about
eighteen months ago she put in an application to rejoin the Wrens
through the Naval Attach in Washington, and that went to the Admiralty,
of course. They were getting a bit fed up with her by that time, so they
wrote her rather a sharp letter, saying that her application was on the
file and would be considered if and when the expansion of the Service
justified the re-engagement of ex-naval ratings in her category. They
haven't heard from her again."

"That was eighteen months ago?" I asked.

"About that. I think their letter to her was dated some time in April."

The waiter came with soup, and I sat silent, thinking rapidly. I could
scrap the passage I had booked by sea back to Australia and fly home
through the States, but I should have to wangle a few dollars. A little
thing like that wasn't going to stop me. Buy a set of diamond cuff links
and sell them in the States, perhaps . . .

The waiter went away, and Viola said, "I suppose you'll write to her."

"I'll do that," I said slowly, "but there won't be time to get an answer
before I go. I'm booked to leave in a few days. I think I'll cancel the
sea passage and go back through the States. I'll be in Seattle in a few
days' time, pretty well as soon as my letter."

"I thought you'd probably do that," she said. "Mad as a March hare."

I didn't know what I could say to that without hurting her more, and so
we sat in silence for a time. The waiter came with the next course and
woke me up from the consideration of the detail of my change in plans,
of airline bookings, visas, vaccination certificates, travellers'
cheques, and all the other impedimenta to air travel. I became aware
that I owed Viola a lot. It must have cost her a great deal to give me
what she had.

"I'm very grateful to you for all this, Viola," I said clumsily. "I
don't think I'd ever have got in touch with her without your help."

"We were good friends in the war," she muttered, looking down at her
plate. "She's had a bad spin since, and I'd like her to be happy."

Instinctively I sheered away from the difficult subject. "Do you think
she'd be happy if she got back into the Wrens?"

She raised her head and stared across the room. "She might. It's
difficult to say. She only knew the Wrens in wartime, and it's very
different now."

"What she wants is a third World War," I said, half laughing.

"Of course." She sat silent for a moment, and then she said, "Until
we're dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of
another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We'll none of us
come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us if we
did. What we do is to put our votes in favour of re-armament and getting
tough with Russia, and hope for the best."

I stared at her. "Is that what you really think?"

She nodded. "You know it as well as I do, if you're honest with
yourself. For our generation, the war years were the best time of our
lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The
best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at
the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when
we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we
think that if a third war came we'd have those happy, carefree years all
over again. I don't suppose we would--some of us might."

"We're getting older every year," I said. "Perhaps more sensible."

She nodded. "That's one good thing. Most of us are gradually
accumulating other interests--homes, and children, and work that we
wouldn't want to leave. It's only a few people now like--well, like
Janet, who've had a bad spin since the war, who are so desperately
anxious now to see another war come--for themselves." She sat in thought
for a moment. "But for our children--I don't know. If I had kids, I'd
want them to have all I had when I was young."

"If you had daughters, you'd want them to be boat's crew Wrens?" I
asked.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I'd want them to have that. I'd want them to have
all I had when I was young." She turned to me. "Your father served in
the first war, didn't he?"

I nodded. "He was at Gallipoli, and afterwards in France. He served in
the last war, too."

"Was he shocked and horrified when you and Bill joined up?" she asked
relentlessly. "Or was he glad you'd done it, for your own sakes?"

I sat in silence. "I see what you mean," I said at last. "I never
thought of it like that."

"When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last
war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world
peace. Not till then."

"Get a nice hydrogen bomb dropping down upon Earl's Court tonight," I
said. "That'ld get rid of a good many of us."

She smiled. "Maybe that's the answer. But honestly, war's always been
too pleasant for the people in it. For most young people it's been more
attractive as a job than civil life. The vast majority of us never got
killed or wounded; we just had a very stimulating and interesting time.
If atom bombs can make life thoroughly unpleasant for the people in the
Services, in all the countries, then maybe we shall have a chance of
peace. If not, we'll have to wait till something else crops up that
will."

"Actually, in the last war, people in the Services in England had a
better time than the ones who stayed at home, working in the factories,"
I said.

"Of course they did," she replied. "That's the trouble. You'll never get
rid of wars while you go on like that."

It was better for us to go on talking so rather than to get back to
Janet Prentice, and we went on putting the world right throughout our
dinner till the coffee came and I lit her cigarette. She drank her
coffee quickly. "I must go back soon," she said. "I've got some work to
do upon a script before tomorrow morning."

I knew that she was making an excuse to cut our meeting short. "This'll
have to be good-bye for the time being," I said awkwardly. "I don't know
when I'll be in England again."

"Not for some years, I suppose," she said.

I nodded. "I ought to have gone home a year ago. My father and mother
are both getting pretty old, and there's the property to be looked
after."

She said, "Maybe that's as well, Alan, for both of us." She ground her
half-smoked cigarette out into the ash tray and said, without looking up
at me, "Are you going to ask her if she'll marry you?"

"I don't know," I protested. "I may be mad as a March hare, but I'm not
as mad as all that. Nine years ago, and only for a few hours then. We'll
both have changed. You said that once yourself."

"You'll marry her," she said, "and you'll be very happy together. And
I'll send you a wedding present, and stand godmother to one of your
kids." She raised her eyes to mine, and they were full of tears. "And
now if you don't mind, Alan, I think I'm going home."

She got up from the table and went quickly to the door of the little
restaurant, and I went with her. In the doorway she turned to me. "Go
back and pay the bill," she said. She put out her hand. "This really is
good-bye this time, Alan."

I took her hand. "I've done you nothing but harm, Viola," I said, "and
you've done me nothing but good. I'm sorry for everything."

She held my hand for an instant. "It wouldn't ever have worked," she
said. "I see that now. You're what you are and she would always be
between us, even if you never see her again. We're grown-up people; we
can part as friends." She let my hand go. "Good luck in Seattle."

"Good-bye, Viola," I said.

She turned away, and I stood in the doorway watching her as she went
down the street, irresolute, half minded to go after her and call her
back. But presently she turned the corner and was lost to sight, and I
went back to pay the bill, sick at heart. Whatever I did with my life
seemed to be wrong and make unhappiness for everyone concerned. I tried
to kid myself it was because I was a cripple, but I knew that wasn't
true. You can't evade the consequences of your own actions quite so
easily as that.

I went back to my flat in Half Moon Street and sat down to write a
letter to Janet Prentice. I slept on it, tore it up, wrote it again,
slept on it next night, and wrote it a third time. When I was satisfied
and posted it by air mail I had cut it to about one half of the original
length. I just reminded her of our meeting in the war and said that
while I was in England I had met Viola Dawson, who happened to have her
address. As I was flying back to Australia in a week or so it would
hardly be out of my way to come to Seattle to see her, and I would give
her a ring as soon as I got in.

It took me a fortnight to re-arrange my passage to Australia by air
through the United States and to comply with all the formalities,
maintaining the old adage--"If you've time to spare, go by air." It was
not until October the 14th that I finally took off from London airport
for New York. I was leaving behind me in England a great deal that I
admired and valued, but as I settled down into the Stratocruiser's seat
I was absurdly and unreasonably happy. Of course I was going home after
an absence of five years, and that probably accounted for a little part
of my elation.

I had one or two friends in New York and I had never been in the United
States before, so I went to a hotel and spent three days there, seeing
my friends and being entertained and seeing the sights. I couldn't spare
more time than that for the greatest city in the world because I had a
date to keep in a smaller one. On the night of the nineteenth I was
sitting in a Constellation on my way across the continent to Seattle; we
got there in the morning and I checked in at a big hotel on 4th Avenue.

I didn't want to rush at this, so I had a bath and went down to a light
lunch in the coffee shop. Then I went back up to my room and looked for
Prentice in the telephone directory. It was there, all right, with the
same address, though the name was Mrs. C. W. Prentice. I stared at it in
thought for a minute. There had been mention of an aunt that she was
going to live with. This would be the widow of her uncle, the one who
had been on the faculty of Stanford University. Widow, because if the
husband had been alive the telephone would have been in his name.

I put the book down presently and sat down on the edge of the bed, and
called the number.

A woman's voice answered, with a marked American accent. I said, "Can I
speak to Miss Prentice?"

"Say, you've got the wrong number," she replied. "Miss Prentice doesn't
live here now."

A sick disappointment came upon me; I had been counting on success this
time. "Can you tell me her number?" I asked. And then, feeling that a
little explanation was required I said, "She's expecting me. I'm on my
way from England to Australia, and I stopped here in Seattle to see
her."

I don't think my explanation impressed the woman very much, because she
said, "She left here more than a year back, brother, after the old lady
died. We bought the house off her. Did she give you this number?"

"No," I said. "I looked it up in the book."

"I'd say you'd got hold of an old book. Did you say she was expecting
you?"

"I wrote to her from England a few days ago to say that I'd be passing
through Seattle, and I'd ring her up," I explained.

"Wait now," she said. "There's a letter came the other day for her from
England. I meant to give it to the mailman, and I clean forgot. Just
stay there while I go get it." I waited till she came back to the phone.
"What did you say your name was?"

"Alan Duncan."

"That's correct," she said. "That's the name written on the back. Your
letter's right here, Mr. Duncan."

I asked, "Didn't she leave a forwarding address with you?"

"A forwarding what?"

I repeated the word.

"Oh, address," she said. "You certainly are English, Mr. Duncan. No, she
didn't leave that with us. A few things came in after she had gone, and
we gave them to the mailman."

I thought quickly. There was just a possibility that the woman might
know more than I could easily get out of her upon the telephone, or
possibly the next door neighbour might know something that would help
me. "It looks as if I've missed her," I said. "I think the best thing I
can do is to come out and collect that letter."

"Sure," she said affably. "I'll be glad to meet you, Mr. Duncan. I never
met an Englishman from England."

I laughed. "You've not met one now. I'm Australian. Would it be all
right if I come out this afternoon?"

"Surely," she said. "Come right out. The name's Pasmanik--Mrs. Molly
Pasmanik."

I drove out in a taxi half an hour later. It was quite a long way out of
town, in a district known as North Beach; the house was a street or two
inland from the sea at Shilshole Bay, a decent suburban neighbourhood.
The taxi driver didn't want to wait, so I paid him off and went into the
open garden to ring the bell of the small, single-storey house.

I spent an hour with Mrs. Pasmanik, who produced a cup of coffee and
some little sweet cakes for me, but I learned very little about Janet
Prentice. She had lived there with her aunt until the aunt had died, but
Mrs. Pasmanik could not tell me how long she had lived there; they had
themselves come to Seattle very recently from New Jersey. She really
knew very little that was of any use to me.

I could not find out from Mrs. Pasmanik that Janet had made friends in
the neighbourhood, and in that district houses seemed to change hands
fairly frequently. The neighbours on the one side had left two months
before my visit, and on the other side had come shortly before Janet had
sold the house, and they knew nothing of her. The aunt had died in May
1952 and the Pasmaniks had bought the house from Janet in June. They had
not seen much of her as the business had been handled by an agent; they
had an idea, however, that she was going down to San Francisco to live
there. There had been one or two legal complexities about the sale of
the house because she was an alien in the United States, inheriting the
estate of the aunt who was a U.S. citizen. They had never had any
address for the forwarding of letters, but had given everything back to
the mailman. She thought the post office would have a forwarding
address. The aunt had been cremated and the urn had been deposited in a
cemetery at Acacia Park.

There was nothing more to be done there. Janet Prentice had been here,
had lived here for some years, but she had gone on. I said good-bye to
Mrs. Pasmanik and walked slowly three or four blocks up the street to
the Sunset Hill bus that would take me back to town. These were the
streets she must know very well, the surroundings that had formed her in
the years that she had spent in this district while I searched for her
in England. Here were the stores where she had done the daily shopping
for her aunt, the A. & P. and the Safeway, far from her home in Oxford,
far from the Beaulieu River and from Oerlikon guns. As I drove in to
town in the bus we crossed a great bridge and I saw masses of fine
yachts and sturdy, workmanlike fishing vessels ranged along the quays
and floats, and I wondered if the ex-Wren had found solace there, some
anodyne related to her former life. Somewhere along that waterfront
there might be somebody who knew her, some fisherman or yachtsman, but
how to set about such an enquiry in a foreign country was an enigma.

I sat in my hotel bedroom that evening brooding over my problem, which
seemed now to be as far from a solution as it had ever been. True, I had
caught up with her in time and I was now no more than fifteen months or
so behind her so that the memories of those who might have known her
would be fresher, but to balance that she had disappeared into a foreign
country, if a friendly one, of a hundred and fifty million people. I had
dinner in the dining room of the hotel, and then I couldn't stand
inaction any longer and went out and walked the streets painfully until
I found the inland water I was looking for, with infinite quays and
wharves packed with small craft. I must have walked for miles that night
beside Lake Union. I walked till the straps chafed raw places on my legs
and hardly felt them, but it was like looking for a needle in a bundle
of hay, of course. Once, crazily, I stopped an old man coming off a
little run-down fishing boat and asked him if he had ever heard of an
English girl who worked on boats, called Janet Prentice.

"Never heard the name," he said. "There's a lot of boats in these parts,
mister, and a lot of girls."

Finally I came out to a busy street and hailed a taxi and went back to
the hotel. I didn't sleep much that night.

There were still a few faint threads to be followed up that might
posibly lead to her. I went and saw the British vice-consul in the
morning; he knew of her existence but thought she had returned to
England. I went to the head post office and saw a young man in the
postmaster's department, who told me that it was against the rules to
give out forwarding addresses and suggested that I should write a letter
to the last known address, whence it would be forwarded if any
forwarding address existed. I hired a car after lunch and went out to
the cemetery and talked to the janitor, who showed me the urn containing
the ashes of the late Mrs. Prentice and told me that the urn had been
endowed in perpetuity at the time of the funeral. I had hoped that
annual charges of some sort would be payable which might lead to an
address, but there was nothing of that sort.

With that I had shot my bolt in Seattle, but there remained one faint
hope of contact in America. I flew down to San Francisco next morning
and got a room in the St. Francis Hotel. That afternoon I got a car and
drove out to the beautiful Leland Stanford University, and called on the
Registrar as a start, who passed me on to the Dean. He remembered Dr.
Robert Prentice, an Englishman who had joined the faculty about the year
1925 and had worked with the Food Research Institute; he had left
Stanford about seven years later to take up an appointment with the
University of Washington at Seattle, where he had died about the year
1940. They had no records that would help to trace his niece. I thanked
them, and went back to the hotel.

That evening I booked a reservation for the flight across the Pacific to
Sydney. I had followed a dream for five years and it had got me nowhere.
Now I must put away the fancies that I had been following and, as Viola
had once remarked, stop behaving like a teen-ager. I was a grown man,
nearly forty, and there was work for me to do at Coombargana, my own
place. I dined that night in a restaurant at Fisherman's Wharf looking
out upon the boats as they rocked on the calm water of the harbour. I
must put away childish things and get down to a real job of work. I was
content to do so, now that it was all over. I knew that I should never
quite forget Janet Prentice, but that evening I felt as though a load
had slipped down to the ground from off my shoulders.




                                   8


It was nearly two o'clock in the morning in my bedroom at Coombargana in
the Western District before I could bring myself to begin upon a
detailed examination of the contents of her attach case. I had been
reluctant to violate her privacy when she was impersonal to me, a
housemaid that had been engaged while I had been away. Now she was very
personal, for she had been Bill's girl. She had come here for some
reason that I did not understand after the death of her mother and her
aunt, and she had looked after my mother and father in my absence more
in the manner of a daughter than a paid servant, all unknown to them,
till finally she had died by her own hand. Why had she done that?

If I had been reluctant to violate her privacy when she was a stranger I
was doubly reluctant now. I laid the contents of her case out on the
table, putting the letters in one pile, the photographs in another, and
the bank books and the cheque book in a third. There remained the
diaries, eleven quarto books of varying design. I had opened one and
shut it again quickly; her writing was small and neat and closely
spaced. Those books, I had no doubt, would tell me all I had to know,
and I didn't want to know it.

There was no need to hurry over this, I told myself. I made the fire up,
took off my dirty trousers and pullover and changed back into my dinner
jacket, sat staring at the fire for a time, wandered about the room.
Twice I roused myself and drew a chair up to the table to begin upon the
job and each time my mind made excuse, and little trivial things
distracted me from the job I hated to begin. I remember that I stood for
a long time at the window looking out over our calm, moonlit paddocks
stretching out beyond the river to the foothills. Already one hard,
painful fact protruded, the first of many that her diaries must contain.
She had made an end to her life on the eve of my return home, presumably
because I was the only person who could recognize her and disclose her
as Bill's girl. I had arrived earlier than I had been expected; if I had
come by sea as they all thought, she would have been buried by the time
that I arrived and her secret would have been safe.

If I had stayed away from Coombargana, if I had gone on as an expatriate
in England as my sister Helen had chosen to do, Janet Prentice might
have lived. In some way that I did not want to understand, I was
responsible for her death.

I came to that conclusion at about two in the morning, and I think it
steadied me. My mother had said earlier in the evening that she had
failed the girl and made her terribly unhappy without knowing it so that
she had taken her own life, and she couldn't understand what she had
done. It now seemed quite unlikely that my mother had anything to do
with it at all. It was my homecoming that had precipitated this thing,
and I must face the facts and take what might be coming to me. If only
for my mother's sake I had to read these diaries.

I sat down at the table, put all the other papers on one side, and
started to examine the eleven quarto books. I glanced at the first page
of each and arranged them in order of date, beginning with the first.

It started in October 1941, when she had joined the Wrens. In that first
volume the entries were daily to begin with and largely consist of
reminders about service routine, leave dates, corresponding ranks in the
army and the RAF to indicate who should be saluted and who not, and
matters of that sort. As the volume went on the entries ceased to be
daily and became rather more descriptive and longer; some power of
writing was developing in her as might have been expected from her
parentage, and the diary began to show signs, which were to become more
marked in the later volumes, that it was assuming the character of an
emotional outlet.

An entry in August 1942 is fairly typical:

    _Saturday._ Went to movies in Littlehampton with Helen and a lot
    of boys in W/T. Community singing in truck on the way home, Roll
    me over. Air raid alarm as soon as we got back about 11.45, went
    down into the shelter. A lot of bombs dropped and one near miss,
    a lot of sand came down from the roof and our ears felt bad.
    Waves of them were coming over and a lot of Bofors firing. All
    clear about two-fifteen and very glad to come up on deck, a
    lovely starry night but a lot of stuff on fire better not say
    what. Shelter No. 16 got a direct hit and some of the boys were
    killed, and Heather Forbes, engine fitter. Alice Murphy was
    buried but dug out and sent to hospital, not very bad. A crash
    by the transport park and three bodies on the ground beside it,
    but they were German. One of the Bofors got it rooty-toot-toot.
    They let us lie in, but I got up for breakfast and Divisions was
    as usual.

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 Lieut. 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 we 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 eyeshooting 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
succeeding 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 two-pennyworth 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 in to 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 LCT's 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 along _968_ and all the gunners were on leave
    and the sub too wet to do a thing, so I manned the port
    Oerlikon. Lieut. 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 realize 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 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 sent 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
    Lieut. 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 in to the Wrennery. It's
    awful when people are so kind as that, but I suppose it does me
    good to let go. I felt better afterwards and went down river
    with some Bofors ammunition for the LCG's. 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.

    _Sunday_ 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, one 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 in to the Wrens.

    The first thing is to keep out of the hands of the bloody
    doctors, of course. I'm never going to see a doctor again in all
    my life, and I'm not going to any more homes. I'm not a looney
    and I never was. They don't understand that some people do
    things that they've got to be punished for. God looks after
    that, and it's fair enough, because if you kill seven people
    wantonly just to show how good you are with an Oerlikon you've
    got to be made to suffer for it. The trouble is that all the
    proper doctors are in the services and the ones left aren't any
    good. If you try to explain about punishment they think you're
    crackers and send you to a looney-bin like Henley.

    Mother not at all good. She gets tired so quickly and she
    doesn't seem to be interested in anything. I took her to the
    pictures yesterday because she liked going with Daddy before the
    war, but she didn't seem able to follow the plot, and a bit
    bored with it all. I wish we hadn't sold the car now, because
    she never gets out at all and if I could take her out in to the
    country now and then I think she'd like it. One couldn't go far
    on the basic ration, but it would be something. But God knows we
    needed the money. If I don't get back into the Wrens soon I'll
    have to take a job because there's not much left of the car
    money and our capital won't last so long if we go selling out to
    live on it. PG's would help, of course, but not those ghastly
    children.

    The war looks like going on for a long time now, at least
    another year. They're bound to call me up again before long. May
    Spikins has been drafted to Brindisi; they're starting up an
    ordnance depot there. With all these ordnance Wrens going out to
    the Med. they must be getting very short of them at home.

There were several entries in a similar tone in the early months of
1945, showing a great sense of frustration, of being out of active
service in the war and fretting over it. Then came the armistice.

    May 9th. The war in Europe seems to be over, though the war
    against Japan is still going on. Fighting has stopped in Europe,
    Hitler is supposed to be dead, and everyone is starting to talk
    about getting demobilized.

    I can't believe it's true. The war against Japan will go on for
    years, and it must be a naval war. They must need ordnance Wrens
    all the more out in the east. Now that the fighting has stopped
    an awful lot of girls will be getting married and leaving the
    service, and I don't suppose they'll be training any more. I
    believe if I wrote in now they might take me back.

    I don't know what to do about Mother. She doesn't seem to pick
    up a bit, and I don't know that she could manage by herself now
    if I went back to the Wrens. I suppose we'll have to go on as we
    are for a bit till things get easier, unless they write and call
    me up again, when of course I'd have to go. They might do that,
    because I've had a long spell at home, nearly a year, and I'm
    perfectly fit now.

    I went and saw the Bank Manager and told him to sell out enough
    of the Associated Cement to give us 200 in the bank. At the
    rate we're going the capital won't last more than five years,
    though it would be better if I got a whole-time job instead of
    this half-time one. The trouble is with Mother in bed so much
    that isn't going to be very easy. I've got a feeling sometimes
    that if the money lasts five years it may be long enough. Poor
    old Ma.

She never got back into the Wrens, of course. She was writing fairly
regularly in the diary again, with an entry every three or four days,
but there was nothing particularly notable about the entries in the
fifteen months that were to elapse before her mother's death. They were
a record of small, daily frustrations and austerities, and of her
rebellion against the circumstances of her life. The coming of peace
meant no joy or release to her; it meant rather a continuation of a
prison sentence. Freedom to her meant life in the navy in time of war.

Her mother died in August 1946 and I pass those entries over, and I turn
on to one of more significance.

    September 7th. Viola Dawson turned up this morning in her little
    car. It was lovely seeing her again, but I hardly recognized her
    in civvies. It's funny how different people look. We went and
    had lunch at the Cadena and talked till about three in the
    afternoon.

    She's got a job with a film company, not acting, but doing
    something with scripts and sets; she's making eight hundred a
    year. Of course, she can draw awfully well, and that helps in
    the set design. She's such a splendid person, I do hope she
    marries someone who's really up to her. I did enjoy seeing her
    again.

    I told her about Mother and selling the house, and about my
    letter to the Admiralty. It's five days since I posted it so I
    ought to be getting an answer any day now. She was a bit
    discouraging about getting back because she says they're cutting
    the navy down so much, but Wrens get paid less than ratings so
    it's obviously economical to use Wrens on ordnance duties when
    they can. If I can't get back I suppose I'll have to take a job
    in a shop or something. I don't believe I'd ever be able to do
    shorthand well enough to make a living as a secretary.

    Viola asked if I ever had another dog, and when I said no, she
    said I ought to have one, and that it wasn't my fault that Dev
    got killed. I told her I still pray for Dev every night, because
    I think dogs need our prayers more than people. We know that God
    looks after people when they die and that Daddy and Mummy and
    Bill are all right, but we don't know that about dogs. Unless
    somebody keeps on praying to God about dogs when they die they
    may get forgotten and just fade out or something. Someday Bill
    and I will get together again but it wouldn't be complete unless
    Dev was there too. I let Bill down so terribly by not looking
    after Dev, but if I keep praying for him it will all come right.

    May Spikins is married to her boy, the one who was a P.O. in
    _Tormentor_, and they live in Harlow. It was nice seeing Viola
    again.

The next entry reads,

    September 16th, 1946. So that's over, and they don't want me
    back in the Wrens. The only person who wants me is Aunt Ellen in
    Seattle. I can't remember her at all, although she says she met
    me on their trip to England in 1932. I've a vague recollection
    of an American woman coming to see Daddy and Mummy once when I
    was at school. Perhaps that was her.

    I think I'll go and stay with her for a bit anyway. It's an
    awfully long way and a very expensive journey; it's rather sweet
    of her to offer to send money for the fare but I've got enough
    for that. I don't suppose I'll like America but it's time I got
    out of my groove here, I suppose, and I don't have to stay there
    longer than a month or two.

    One can go all the way to Seattle by sea, through the Panama
    Canal. Cook's are finding out about passages for me, in case I
    should decide to go when the house has been sold. They seemed to
    think a Dutch ship would be best, as there's a regular line of
    cargo ships that carry a few passengers from Rotterdam to San
    Francisco and Seattle, and it's cheaper to go that way than by
    Cunard to New York and then across America by train. I'd like it
    much better, too, going by sea all the way.

I pass over a few entries, mainly concerned with the sale of the house
in Oxford and the furniture. The diary at this point becomes filled with
rather muddled notes about her finances; she was not very good at
accountancy, but when everything was realized she seems to have
possessed about seventeen hundred pounds, of which she was spending
about a hundred and twenty on her passage to Seattle.

    November 15th. Rotterdam. In a ship again, and it's simply
    grand. The _Winterswijk_ only carries ten passengers, and I've
    got a lovely single cabin right under the bridge, beautifully
    furnished. We're still in dock, but there's the same old smell
    of salt water and oil and cabbage cooking, and the moon on the
    water, all ripply. I brought my duffle coat and my Wren
    bell-bottoms, and I've been leaning on the rail looking at it
    all and taking it all in, hour after hour. We sail about two in
    the morning, so I shan't get much sleep tonight. I don't quite
    see how they're going to get her out of this dock even with a
    tug, because I'm sure there's not room to swing her. I believe
    they'll have to take her out backwards.

    I'm sorry to have left England, and yet in a way I'm glad. It
    will be good to get away and have a change from Oxford. There's
    been so much unhappiness. I'll come back in a year or so because
    I don't think I'd want to live anywhere else, but it's a good
    thing to snap out of it and see new places for a time.

    They've started up a donkey engine on the forecastle, heaving in
    on something. I must go and see.

    November 18th. We're out of the Channel now and heading out in
    to the Atlantic, rather rough. I felt a bit funny at first and
    didn't want breakfast, dinner or tea, and spent most of the
    first day lying on my bunk reading a grand book by Hammond
    Innes. I'm fine now and spend most of the day on deck. When
    Captain Blok saw my duffle coat he asked me where I got it and
    when I told him I was in the Wrens he invited me to go up on the
    bridge any time I liked. So I spend most of each day up there
    now, keeping as much out of the way as I can in case they find
    it a nuisance having me up there and stop it. We go north of the
    Azores and we shan't see anything at all till we pass Puerto
    Rico in about nine days' time, and after that Panama. If only
    there was a gun to be looked after it would be as good as being
    back in the Wrens.

I pass over several more entries in the diary that describe her voyage.
It was obviously very good for her; the entries are balanced and
cheerful. She was keenly interested in everything that related to the
management of the ship, and at one point she listed the names and
addresses of all the officers and stewards, and many of the men. She was
less impressed by the Panama Canal than one would have expected; to her
it was mere inland steaming, rather hot and humid and less interesting
than being at sea. She went on shore at Coln and at Panama, where they
refuelled, but didn't like it much and was glad to get back on board.
The last shipboard entry in her diary reads:

    December 12th. We dock tomorrow at Seattle, and it's cold and
    misty. It was clear this morning and we were quite close in to
    the coast and could see snow-covered mountains a good long way
    inland. Of course, it's winter now and we are pretty far north,
    almost as far north as England in latitude. The Captain says it
    doesn't get very cold in Seattle in the winter because of the
    sea, not like the inland cities of America, but they get a lot
    of fog and mist.

    It's been a lovely month, and I'm sorry to be leaving the ship.
    They make four trips a year between Seattle and Rotterdam and I
    shall try to go back in her, probably in three months' time.
    They're such a good crowd to be with.

    I wonder what Aunt Ellen will be like.

She got on well with Aunt Ellen but found her rather a sick woman with
mysterious internal pains. In fact, she was dying though she took five
years to do it and at the time that Janet went to Seattle they neither
of them thought that there was very much wrong. Her aunt-by-marriage
proved to be about sixty-five years old, in fairly easy circumstances.
There was a seven-year-old Pontiac car that had done little mileage
which Aunt Ellen no longer cared to drive herself, and a Boxer dog, and
a cat.

Janet Prentice lived with her aunt in Seattle till she died, in May
1952. It was the logical thing for her to do, of course, and she seems
to have been fairly contented with a very quiet life in that suburban
district. I think the dog and the cat provided her with the emotional
outlet that she needed, for there are many references to them in the
early pages of the diary. Later on the diary entries become infrequent,
as had happened once before when she had Bill's dog to look after.

Rather curiously, I found no mention in the diaries that she had ever
made contact with fishermen or yachtsmen in Seattle, or had been to sea
in a boat in all the five years that she lived there. From my mother's
account of her life at Coombargana she seems to have developed in to a
very reserved girl, and there is little in the diaries to indicate that
she made any friends of her own at all while she was in Seattle. She
seems to have been content to go on quietly in the daily round of
housekeeping for her aunt. If she couldn't get back into the navy she
had no particular ambition for another form of active life. When
friendships had been forced on her in the close quarters of the Service
she enjoyed them and treasured them, but she was too reserved to make
friends on her own.

An entry in her diary about six weeks after she reached Seattle is of
interest.

    January 29th, 1947. Tacoma is only thirty miles from here and of
    course that's where Dr. Ruttenberg lives. I looked him up in the
    telephone book and he's there all right, Lewis C. Ruttenberg.
    He's got an office in the city and a residence at Fircrest. I
    would like to see him again because he was so awfully nice at
    _Mastodon_, but I couldn't bother him unless I was ill. Today a
    friend of Aunt Ellen's came for lunch, a Mrs. Hobson who lives
    in Tacoma, and I asked her if she knew Dr. Ruttenberg. She
    didn't know him herself but she had heard about him; she says
    he's got a very good reputation as one of the up-and-coming
    young doctors, and that he takes a tremendous amount of trouble
    over his patients. It is nice to know he's here within reach.
    Almost like having a bit of _Mastodon_ here in Seattle.

Apart from that, I do not think that there is anything worth quoting
from the diaries till the Korean war broke out, more than three years
later.

    June 29th, 1950. There's a full-scale war on in Korea now, and
    the Americans are being forced back southwards. Everything is
    just tearing in to action here--troops embarking for the east,
    tanks and guns on the quays, destroyers in Lake Union. Everybody
    says that it's the beginning of the third world war.

    I wish I was in England now. They're bound to want a lot of
    Ordnance Wrens back in to the navy, because they're calling up
    reserves. I've been an awful fool, because the Admiralty don't
    know where I am; they probably still think I'm at Crick Road. I
    wrote airmail at once, of course, and posted it yesterday,
    saying that I could pay my own passage home if they wanted me,
    or else join up in Canada, at Esquimault or somewhere. It will
    be about a fortnight before I hear, even if they reply airmail.
    I should think they'd probably cable, though.

    I think Aunt Ellen would be all right. She's got her family in
    Denver; one of them would have to come over and look after her,
    Janice or Frances. It's not like it was when Mummy was alive. If
    they want me in the Wrens I'll have to go.

Six weeks later she got a letter from the Admiralty, delivered by sea
mail, saying that there was no requirement at the moment for ex-naval
personnel in her category and that she would be notified in due course
if vacancies for re-engagement should arise. It was a disappointment to
her, though I think she must have been getting used to disappointments
by that time. She put in another application to the Admiralty in
December 1950 when the Chinese Communists had intervened in Korea and
were driving the United Nations forces southwards, and the third world
war seemed really to have begun. Again she got the same type of reply.

She would have found it difficult to leave her aunt by that time if the
Wrens had wanted her, however, for Aunt Ellen was a very sick woman.

    February 17th. Aunt Ellen had the operation this morning, and it
    all went off quite well. I saw her for a few minutes in the
    hospital this afternoon and she seemed quite cheerful, but still
    very dopey. I took some chrysanthemums but the sister wouldn't
    let her have them in the room today, but I saw some lovely
    carnations in a flower store and I'll take her some of those
    tomorrow. I saw Dr. Hunsaker for a minute or two in his office
    at the hospital and he says she stood the operation very well
    and thought she'd be home in about a fortnight, but when I asked
    him if it was malignant he sort of dodged the question and said
    that at this stage it was difficult to make an accurate
    prognosis. Doesn't look too good. Billy isn't at all well; he
    wouldn't eat anything yesterday or today. It's rather lonely in
    the house without Aunt Ellen. I went out to the movies last
    night, but it was a stinker.

Billy was the Boxer dog, now getting very old.

The operation did little to relieve Aunt Ellen of her complaint, and
throughout the year 1951 her infirmity increased. Again, trouble and
overwork were massing up on Janet Prentice, for by the end of the year
her aunt's spells of pain were practically continuous and were only kept
in check by drugs and analgesics. The dog Billy was dying, too, and in
September he had to be put away, and from that point onwards a note of
tired despair begins to creep in to the diary.

    November 13th. I persuaded Aunt Ellen to stay in bed again
    today; it's two days since she ate anything solid. Dr. Hunsaker
    came this morning and he's going to see if he can get a nurse to
    come in every day for a couple of hours. I asked him what was
    coming to us and he couldn't hold out much hope, but said she
    might go on for a long time. In the end she'll have to go into
    the hospital.

    I suppose this is what happens at the end of life and it's
    normal and nothing to do with the Junkers. But this is the
    fourth, or if you count the dogs and I think you ought to, it's
    the sixth. There were seven people in the Junkers, so there's
    only one more due. I suppose that will be me.

    I think she misses Billy a great deal, and I do too.

The nurse was living permanently in the house by January, and by the
beginning of March Aunt Ellen was removed to the County Hospital, where
Janet used to go and see her every day.

    April 7th. It's very lonely in the house now. I've been starting
    to pack things up a bit, because I don't think there's a chance
    now that Aunt Ellen will ever come back. Janice is coming from
    Denver to stay for a few days; Aunt Ellen was always very fond
    of her. I'll talk it over with her and decide what's to be done
    with all the things.

    When it's all over I'm going to make a real effort to get back
    into the Wrens. I think I'll write to the naval attach in
    Washington. I believe that's the right thing to do for a British
    subject living in the United States. I simply don't know what
    I'd do if they won't have me back. But the war in Korea is so
    serious now I think they're bound to want more ordnance Wrens.

    May 2nd. Aunt Ellen died today at about five in the morning.
    Janice saw her yesterday but she was so much doped she didn't
    really know anything. Poor old dear. They rang up from the
    hospital to tell us, but we'd been expecting it of course.

    Well, that's over. The house is to be sold and all the clothes
    and stuff. Janice is staying here for another week to help me
    sort it all out. There's a tremendous lot of stuff that we shall
    have to give away or pass on to the garbage man including all
    the drugs and medicines except the ones I've pinched. Janice
    says that she made a new will about two years ago and that the
    house has been left to me, but I wouldn't go on living here. I
    shall post my letter to the naval attach tomorrow.

    May 11th. Janice left today; she's been away from the family too
    long as it is. She asked me to go and stay with them in Denver
    when everything has been cleaned up here, but I left that open.
    I told her that I felt rather bad about the will, getting the
    house, because I'm not really a relation at all, but she said
    they were all agreed about it at the time the will was made and
    they were grateful to me for doing what I had in the last five
    years. So that's that. I put the house in the hands of the agent
    yesterday and some people called Pasmanik came and looked over
    it today; I think it should sell fairly easily. The furniture
    goes to the sale room on Wednesday of next week and I've booked
    a room at the Golden Guest House from Monday. I do hope I hear
    soon if they want me in the Wrens. I don't know what to do if
    they don't.

    May 28th. I got a letter from the Admiralty today, and they
    still don't want me. Not a very nice letter. I suppose that's
    the end of it and in a way I'm glad. It's been so miserable
    sitting here and doing nothing, just watching for each post. I'm
    glad in a way it's over and I know something definite.

    I suppose I'll have to go back to England now, but I don't know
    what I'd do. I'm beginning to think the best thing now might be
    to finish it all here or somewhere in America, where nobody
    really knows me and there won't be any scandal or any trouble
    for anyone. Most women have something to hang on to that makes
    going on worth while--children, or a husband, or relations, but
    I've got nothing like that. If I go on I'll have to start from
    now and build up a new life, almost like being born again, and I
    don't think I want to. I feel too tired to face up to that. It's
    not worth while.

    It would be terribly easy to do, because I've got enough of Aunt
    Ellen's stuff to kill a horse. You'd just go to sleep and never
    wake up. It would make the seventh, and that must finish it. All
    the people that I've loved, Bill most of all, and then Daddy,
    and Dev, and Mummy, and Billy, and Aunt Ellen. I'd make the
    seventh, and all the people in the Junkers would be paid for
    then.

    The only thing is that it seems so cowardly, as if you can't
    face up to things because you haven't got the guts.

Perhaps the drugs that had been provided for Aunt Ellen were not wholly
menacing to her, because the next entry reads, two days later:

    May 30th. I couldn't sleep again last night, just miserably
    tired and depressed, and about midnight I got up and took one of
    Aunt Ellen's things as an experiment, with a glass of water. It
    was a knock-out drop all right because I didn't wake up till
    half past nine--clean out, like a log. I got up feeling fine and
    it was a glorious morning, sunny and bright and fishing boats on
    the blue sea in Shilshole Bay. I was too late for breakfast here
    so walked up to the drug store on West 85th and had a cup of
    coffee. I'd been so miserable the night before and I was feeling
    so good that I thought perhaps all I needed was a tonic. And
    then, rather on the spur of the moment, I rang Dr. Ruttenberg's
    office in Tacoma from the drug store and told his nurse he'd
    treated me before in England during the war, and asked for an
    appointment to see him. She said to come along at two-thirty, so
    I drove over in the Pontiac and had lunch in Tacoma and saw him
    in the afternoon.

    He didn't seem to have changed much in eight years, hair a bit
    thinner, but he looked as young as ever. He remembered me, and
    he really did because when we got talking he mentioned Bill and
    Daddy, and he even remembered Dev's name--pretty good to
    remember the name of a dog all these years when he'd only seen
    me once. I asked how he did it and he said that he'd been very
    much interested in the case because it was the first he'd come
    in contact with, where a woman had been exhausted and worn out
    in service life, and he'd always been sorry that he hadn't been
    able to follow the case up. It was just like it was before at
    _Mastodon_ and I told him everything, about Mummy and Billy and
    Aunt Ellen and how miserably ill I'd been feeling and that I
    wanted a tonic. He started asking me things then, about love
    affairs of which there aren't any, probably that's bad, and I
    was getting too tired to keep up a front any longer and told him
    about the Junkers and the expiation that had to be made, and
    there'd been six already and the last one would be me. I said I
    didn't know when that would happen, but if I didn't get a hefty
    tonic it would happen pretty soon.

    He said of course that there was no future in that and that all
    that was wrong with me was that I'd been spending myself and got
    myself worn out again, like I had in _Mastodon_. He said the
    expiation angle was baloney, that I seemed to have the instincts
    of a nurse in doing things for people, but a nurse didn't talk
    about expiation and go all suicidal after a hard case when her
    patient died. He said he wanted to see me again and made an
    appointment for next Tuesday at the same time, and gave me a
    prescription to get made up at the pharmacy. I did like seeing
    him again; he gives one such confidence. I was with him for
    about an hour.

Before her next appointment the doctor wrote her a letter which
influenced her a great deal. I found the letter itself among her
correspondence, and it reads,

                                                    1206 S. 11th St.
                                                              Tacoma
                                                      June 1st, 1952
    Dear Miss Prentice,

    I have been giving your case a great deal of consideration in
    the last two days and would suggest a line that you may care to
    consider and talk over at our next appointment.

    Medically your case is not a complicated one, and as you are
    aware your trouble is more of a psychological nature. As such it
    may be somewhat beyond my province, but as a friend can I
    suggest that you might think over the following?

    I do not think that you have taken sufficiently in to account
    the family of the young man Bill Duncan whom you would have
    married. If he had lived you would have become a part of that
    family, and you would have owed duties to your new relations by
    marriage. I can readily understand that in the circumstances of
    1944 you did not wish your love affair to become known to
    strangers, but the circumstances of 1952 are very different.

    As I understand the matter your recent bereavement has given you
    a small independence so that you are under no immediate
    necessity to look for paid work. In these circumstances I would
    say you might seek out the Duncan family and satisfy yourself
    that they are well and are in no need of help from you, even if
    this should mean a journey to Australia. From what you have told
    me both now and in the year 1944 these people are farmers. If
    with increasing age the father or the mother of your friend Bill
    should be in any distress it may be that you could assist them,
    and in doing so achieve a purpose and new interest in your life.

    If this suggestion should entail a sea voyage of several weeks
    from this country to Australia I presume that this would be an
    interest and an enjoyment to you. From the medical point of view
    I could advise nothing better for you in your present
    circumstances.

    I look forward to seeing you again on Tuesday next.

                                                      Sincerely,
                                                 Lewis C. Ruttenberg

The next entry in her diary reads:

    June 2nd. I got a letter from Dr. Ruttenberg this morning. It's
    given me an awful lot to think about. When Bill got killed it
    was the end of everything for me. I never thought about it being
    the end of everything for other people, for his mother, for one.
    What Dr. Ruttenberg says is absolutely right, of course. If it
    had happened six months later, after Bill and I were married,
    say if he'd been killed at Arnhem or something like that, then
    I'd have been one of his family. My name would have been Mrs.
    Duncan. I couldn't have slid off then and kissed my hand to them
    and never seen them again. Bill wouldn't have thought a lot of
    me if I'd behaved like that, and I don't suppose I'd have wanted
    to anyway. But that's about what I did. We'd have got married if
    he'd lived a few months longer, after the balloon went up. And
    now I don't know anything about his father and mother, and I
    haven't cared. I've been wrapped up in my own affairs and my own
    grievances, very selfish. I'm so sorry, Bill.

    It's going to be a bit difficult finding out. They may be fit as
    fleas and perfectly all right; after all I suppose they've got
    brother Alan to look after them and the sister, Helen. I can't
    just write and say, well, here I am. You've never heard of me,
    but how are you getting on? I think the doctor's right, as
    usual, I'll have to go to Australia and snoop around, and come
    away if everything's all right. Perhaps if I went there I might
    find brother Alan and have a talk with him. I think he'd
    understand.

    I've been wondering what sort of place a sheep farm in Australia
    can be. I suppose it's very hot and people riding round the
    desert in big hats on horses, and boomerangs, and black people.
    And billabongs whatever they may be, like in the song. I don't
    think I'd be much good in a place like that, but I'd feel now
    that I was letting Bill down if I didn't go and see if I was
    needed there at all.

    Anyway, it'ld mean another month on a ship. I've been down to
    the library looking at an atlas. Honolulu, Fiji, New Zealand,
    Sydney, I should think. It would be a marvellous trip, anyway.

On the next page of the diary she had totted up her financial situation
to the best of her ability. Her aunt's house had sold to the Pasmaniks
for eighteen thousand dollars. Unravelling her somewhat tangled
accountancy and putting together the money from the sale of the house
and her English capital, she seems to have possessed a total of about
eight thousand pounds in English money, a sum which she considered as
indecent riches.

She saw Dr. Ruttenberg again, but there is only a short mention of that
meeting in the diary.

    June 4th. I saw Dr. Ruttenberg again today. He gave me a medical
    check-up, stethoscope and blood pressure and all the rest of it
    and we had a talk about things. I told him I was going to take
    his advice and take a sea trip to Australia and perhaps meet
    brother Alan and find out how Bill's parents were, but I wasn't
    going to barge in if everything was quite all right as it
    probably will be. In that case I should come back to Seattle
    because I'll have to come back here, because it will take the
    lawyers about six months to settle up Aunt Ellen's estate and
    they can be doing that while I'm away. He asked me to come and
    see him when I got back. And then he said that in his experience
    a woman without family duties was generally an unhappy woman
    until she got adjusted to what was an unnatural condition, and
    that was really all that was the matter with me. I suppose he's
    right. He generally is.

    I went to a shipping office this morning. There's a ship called
    _Pacific Victor_ loading bulldozers and earth moving machinery
    for Sydney which is due to sail in about ten days' time. She had
    accommodation for four or five passengers, and they don't think
    she's full up but they're not sure. They've given me a letter of
    introduction to the captain. She's in a dock on the East Side
    somewhere by Lander St. I couldn't go today because of seeing
    Dr. Ruttenberg, but I shall go and find her tomorrow and see if
    she's got a berth.

    June 17th. We sailed from the East Waterways this morning. This
    isn't half such a nice ship as the _Winterswijk_ was, much older
    and dirtier and slower, not so well kept. However, I've got a
    two-berth cabin to myself and it's lovely being at sea again.
    It's two thousand four hundred sea miles to Honolulu and we do
    about ten knots, so it will take about ten days.

There was nothing of any particular interest in the diary until she
disembarked at Sydney. At Suva a young married couple called Anderson
came on board for the passage to Sydney; they were English born but
resident in Australia for many years. From them she learned a good deal
about the country that was useful to her.

    August 2nd. We docked today and I got a taxi and went to the
    Metropole. The Andersons say that anyone can get a job of any
    sort in this country and it certainly looks like it from the
    situations-vacant columns in the paper. They say that lots of
    English girls come out and work here, usually in pairs, flitting
    about from job to job and seeing the country. I believe that's
    the best line. Travelling by bus.

    Sydney is rather like Seattle, a bustling sort of place with
    bits of sea all round. Tomorrow I shall have to find out about
    buses, and probably leave here on Monday. I asked the Andersons
    where the Western District of Victoria was, and they said west
    of a place called Ballarat. I got a map today and found
    Ballarat. It looks as if it would be best to get to it through
    Melbourne.

She had a talk with the chambermaid in the Metropole Hotel and learned
of the acute staff shortage experienced by all hotels in Australia, and
of the considerable wages that were paid. She left Sydney by bus early
in the morning a few days later and reached Albury on the borders of New
South Wales about the middle of the afternoon. She found Albury to be a
prosperous country town, an attractive place with a number of hotels,
good shops full of fine fabrics and Swiss watches, and a general feeling
of well-being about it. She parked her suitcases in the office of the
bus company and strolled out down the street to look for a job. Within
half an hour she was a waitress in Sweeney's Hume Hotel at a wage of
twelve pounds a week, sharing a room with a Dutch girl who had been in
the country for about three months. An hour and a half later she was
serving dinner.

    August 5th. When Mrs. Sweeney asked me what my name was I said,
    Jessie Proctor. It went down all right, and it matches the
    initials on my case. I want to find out about Bill's people but
    if everything's all right I don't want to be bothered, and Alan
    probably told them about me so that they'll know the name.
    Everything's a bit more under control this way.

She stayed in Albury for a fortnight before giving up the job and going
on. It was a good experience for her, for it enabled her to find her
feet in the new country and to learn a little of its ways. The hours
were not long but the work was strenuous; with Anna she was responsible
for thirty-two bedrooms as well as serving all the meals and doing a
good bit in the kitchen.

She went on by bus to Ballarat, staying one night on the way in
Melbourne but not working there. At Ballarat she repeated her experience
in Albury; arriving about midday, by three o'clock in the afternoon she
was a waitress in the Court House Hotel.

    August 25th. It's bitterly cold and wet here, I always thought
    Australia was a hot country. They've got a Shell map of Victoria
    in the office and it shows Coombargana as a little spot on a
    sort of dotted line, near a place called Forfar. It doesn't look
    as if Coombargana is a very big place and Forfar isn't much to
    write home about. I looked up Forfar in a tourist guide and it's
    got one garage and two hotels, the Post Office Hotel and Ryan's
    Commercial. The Post Office Hotel is the best; it's got eight
    bedrooms but Ryan's Commercial doesn't seem to have any bedrooms
    at all.

    I've been keeping my ears open to see if anyone said anything
    about Coombargana, but I haven't heard anything. I think I'll go
    on at the end of the week.

She left two of her three suitcases in the station luggage room at
Ballarat and went out in the bus to Forfar.

    August 30th. Well, here I am, and I've come all this way for
    nothing. Coombargana isn't a village, it's an estate. Apparently
    it's a terrific place, one of these enormous Western District
    stations. Fourteen thousand acres, a big house, and God knows
    how many sheep. The Duncans are one of the big families of the
    neighbourhood. They've got about twenty men working for them all
    in houses on the property. Mrs. Collins always speaks of old Mr.
    Duncan as The Colonel. I suppose that's Bill's father.

    Well, there it is, and now I don't know what to do. That's what
    Bill meant when he said they had a sheep farm. I wonder if he
    was afraid of shooting a line?

    I've got a job here, so I'll have to stay for a week anyway. I
    got off the bus and went into the Post Office Hotel and booked a
    bedroom and had lunch, and after lunch I asked Mrs. Collins if
    she'd got a job for a week or two. I said I was working my way
    round Australia and going on to Adelaide, and I showed her the
    letters I'd got from Albury and Ballarat, saying I was a good
    worker. She said it was the off season so she couldn't pay much,
    but she'd give me six pounds and my keep if I didn't mind
    helping out in the bar. I told her I'd never been a barmaid but
    I was quite willing, only I didn't know the work. So I went down
    to the bar and Mr. Collins showed me how to draw the beer and
    told me how much it was, and I helped him when the evening rush
    started. Two men came in on horses about five o'clock, tough
    looking types. They were from Coombargana, boundary riders,
    whatever they may be. They tied their horses up outside like in
    the movies and came in and had about six beers each, and then
    rode off up the lane opposite the hotel. I asked what
    Coombargana was, and he told me all about it.

    I've been such a fool. I ought to have known that there was
    nothing I could do for them.




                                   9


The diary goes on:

    September 1st. I saw Bill's father today. I was sweeping out the
    bar directly after breakfast and he drove up in a big car and
    got out and came in and asked where Mr. Collins was. I said I'd
    fetch him; he was down the yard feeding his pigs. So I did, and
    when I got back to the bar Mr. Collins introduced me and told
    the Colonel that I was English and working my way round
    Australia. He asked where my home was, and I said London. He
    said he wished more English people would do that.

    He's chairman of the Shire Council, I think, and he was talking
    to Mr. Collins about local matters, something about getting
    electricity to Forfar and financial guarantees. He's about
    seventy, I should say, and he doesn't look a bit well, very
    white. He's got a great look of Alan about him, much more than
    Bill. He drank one small whiskey and water, but refused another.

    Alan and Helen are both in England, and have been for some
    years. Mr. Collins told me that after the Colonel went away. He
    said that Alan was in Oxford, or had been, but he thought he was
    in London now. And then he said that Alan had had a crash,
    flying, towards the end of the war, and had lost both his feet.
    He came back here after the war and was at home here for a year
    or two, but they said the accident had changed him a great deal.
    He didn't make friends or get about much and he was drinking a
    good bit, and after a time he went back to England. That was
    several years ago.

    The daughter, Helen, went to England soon after the war and
    married somebody there, and hasn't been back since. Mr. Collins
    said that there had been a younger son, Bill, but he was killed
    in the war. Coombargana is six miles from here.

    Mrs. Duncan has arthritis and they don't often see her in the
    village now. The family would be sort of local squires or
    something in England, but it's not like that here. When Mr.
    Collins came into the bar to meet the Colonel he said, "Morning,
    Dick," as if he and the Colonel were old friends. The family
    seem to be very much respected in the district, though. Mrs.
    Duncan used to run a Sunday School in Forfar up till about two
    years ago when she had to give it up because she couldn't get
    about so well.

    I can't get used to the idea of Alan hobbling about on
    artificial feet and hitting it up. He was such a terrific person
    in the war, obviously so good at his job and yet so quiet about
    it all.

    September 2nd. There were a couple of foreigners in for dinner,
    Lithuanians or something. After dinner they sat in the bar, the
    man drinking gin and water and the woman drinking beer. He was a
    weedy, poor looking specimen and the woman the fat, broad-faced,
    Russian sort of type. When the bus for Ballarat stopped they
    went away on that, and Mrs. Collins was in the bar and she said,
    "Well, that's a good riddance." I asked who they were, and she
    said they were the married couple from Coombargana. The Colonel
    sacked them because they were always on the grog. She said they
    can't keep any help in the house because it's such an isolated
    place. It's six miles from here, but the nearest picture theatre
    is at Skipton and that's about twenty miles. They've got an old
    cook who's been with them all her life but it's a big house and
    they need more than that, especially now they're getting old.
    The girls from the village used to work there before the war,
    but now they all want to be somewhere near the movies and they
    can get such good wages in the city. Nobody seems to stay at
    Coombargana longer than a month or two. It's not only
    Coombargana, all the other big properties are in the same boat.
    All the money in the world with wool up at its present price,
    but they've got to do their own housework just like everybody
    else.

    September 3rd. Mr. Fox, the postman, was in the bar this
    evening. He came out from England as a boy about forty years
    ago, from Beverley, in Yorkshire. We got talking when he heard
    that I was English, and I told him I was working my way round
    seeing the country. He said I ought to come out with him on his
    round; he starts off with the mail at about ten o'clock each
    morning in an old car and goes to all the outlying properties,
    getting back here about three or four in the afternoon. He takes
    the newspapers, too. He suggested I should go with him tomorrow
    if it was a nice fine day. It seemed too good a chance to miss,
    so I went and asked Mrs. Collins if I could go if I got up early
    and did out the bar and the dining room before breakfast. She
    said I could, so I've set my alarm clock for five thirty.

    September 4th. I've taken a job at Coombargana, as a
    parlourmaid. I did it on the spur of the moment without really
    thinking. I rather wish I hadn't now, but it's done and I go
    there next Friday. It's only for a week or two till they can get
    another married couple.

    I went out with Mr. Fox and we called at every house on the way,
    of course. It's a lovely countryside, rather like Salisbury
    Plain but on a much larger scale and with fewer houses and
    villages. All the houses wooden and rather new looking, except
    the very big properties which are quite different.

    We got to Coombargana about half past eleven. It's just like a
    big English country house with a long drive, stone pillars and
    iron gates permanently open on the road and an avenue of
    flowering trees and pines about half a mile long through the
    paddocks. The house stands by a river in a very beautiful place,
    though the house itself is as ugly as sin. It's a big rambling
    two-storied house built of brick I think, rather like a Scotch
    castle gone wrong. The grounds all round it are lovely and very
    well kept, acres of daffodils in bloom, and japonica, and
    camellias in the sheltered places, enormous great bushes of them
    beside the clipped yew hedges.

    We went to the back door and the old cook came out to meet us
    and took the post. Her name is Annie. She asked us into the
    kitchen for a cup of tea; apparently this is the usual routine.
    Mr. Fox introduced me and said I came from London, and Annie
    asked at once if I had met Mr. Alan there. The locals all seem
    very interested in Alan.

    While we were sitting at the kitchen table over tea Mr. Fox said
    something about the married couple and asked if they had anyone
    else. Annie said the mistress was trying the registry offices
    again but it was very difficult; they could only get the
    riffraff to come out into the country these days. She said that
    for her part she didn't want any more foreigners; she'd rather
    carry on and do the housework herself with what help they could
    get from the wives on the place though it was too much for one
    person. She said the mistress was trying for a Dutch girl, and
    that might be better.

    I liked Annie, and I said I wouldn't mind coming for a week or
    two myself if it would help them, till they got someone
    permanent. I can't imagine what made me say that; it just sort
    of slipped out. Annie was on it like a knife, though. She said
    that if I meant that she'd go and tell the mistress and she'd
    want to see me. I started hedging then; I said I could only stay
    for a week or two because I was going on to Adelaide and I
    didn't want to let down Mrs. Collins at the Post Office Hotel
    and I'd never done parlourmaid work, but if Mrs. Duncan could
    make it right with Mrs. Collins I'd come for a short time.

    She said she thought the mistress was in her room still because
    she stayed in bed till lunch time this cold, wet weather when
    she couldn't get out, but she would go and see. She came back
    and said the mistress was getting up and she would see me in
    half an hour. Mr. Fox had to get on, of course, so we fixed it
    that I'd stay and have lunch in the kitchen with Annie and he'd
    call back for me at about three o'clock on the way back to
    Forfar at the end of his round. He said it would only be two or
    three miles out of his way to do that.

    Annie said I'd better take a walk round the house with her to
    get an idea of the work before I saw the mistress. She took me
    first into the dining room, a big room with a long polished
    table that I think she said was blackwood, all exactly like a
    big English country house, very good furniture. Then the hall
    which is the whole height of the building with a gallery all
    round it on the bedroom floor, and the drawing room, all
    beautifully furnished and with lovely flowers in the bowls. Mr.
    and Mrs. Duncan sleep on the ground floor in what used to be the
    billiard room because Mrs. Duncan can't manage the stairs,
    because of her arthritis. There's a study on the ground floor
    but the Colonel was in it so we didn't go in there. We took a
    quick look at the top floor but it's only guest rooms and Alan's
    room if and when he comes home. Annie sleeps up there over the
    kitchen, and she showed me the room that would be mine, quite
    nice and with the most lovely view out across the lawn to the
    river and the pastures and the hills in the distance. There's a
    great deal in the house to keep polished and dusted, but so few
    people it shouldn't be too bad. They've got an electric floor
    polisher and a Hoover.

    Mrs. Duncan saw me in the hall, sitting in front of the fire.
    She's terribly like Bill. She walks with a stick, very lame. She
    asked me about myself and I told her as little as possible; I
    said I was working my way round seeing the world and when I'd
    seen Australia I was going on to South Africa. She asked if I'd
    worked in hotels. She asked why I wanted to come to such an
    out-of-the-way place, and I said that I wanted to see all of
    Australia and I hadn't been able to see a big station property
    yet. I said I wouldn't be able to stay longer than a week or two
    till they got someone permanent. She said she'd ring up Mrs.
    Collins and see what she thought about it, and let me know after
    dinner. She asked if I had any dark dresses because I was in my
    French blue jumper and grey skirt, and I said I'd got my dark
    blue costume. She said she wouldn't want me to wear light
    clothes in the dining room but she didn't want me to ruin my
    best costume by working in it; she thought she had something
    that would fit me with a bit of alteration. It looks as though
    the servants dress in the old style at Coombargana, like in
    England thirty years ago. I'll probably have to wear a starched
    white apron or something, over a black dress.

    She sent me back to have lunch with Annie in the kitchen and I
    got Annie to show me how to lay the table in the dining room.
    They've got beautiful silver, and it looks so nice upon the
    polished table. It's all got to be cleaned every week. They had
    cutlets for lunch, and new potatoes and green peas, and English
    Stilton cheese afterwards. There was only the Colonel and Mrs.
    Duncan. I asked Annie if they'd like me to serve them with the
    stuff in the entre dishes and she said drily that they hadn't
    had a parlourmaid who did that for years but they'd like it well
    enough. So I did it like that for them; they looked a bit
    surprised but I think they were pleased.

    After dinner Mrs. Duncan came to the kitchen and asked me to
    come out into the hall. She said she'd spoken to Mrs. Collins
    and it was quite all right, and I could leave on Friday. I said
    I'd have to go to Ballarat and get my suitcases and come back to
    them, and she said they'd pick me up in Forfar when the bus came
    in. They're giving me eight pounds a week and my keep. The
    Colonel was there and they both said that they hoped I'd be very
    happy with them. He said that in the afternoons, in my time off,
    I could go anywhere on the property and he'd tell the men to
    show me anything I liked.

    Mr. Fox came, and I went back to the hotel with him in time for
    the evening rush at the bar.

    She's so terribly, terribly like Bill, it's almost unbearable
    sometimes.

    September 8th. I think I must be crazy to have come here, but
    here I am. Colonel Duncan sent the foreman, Harry Drew, in to
    Forfar in a Land Rover to meet me at the bus and I drove out
    with him. His father came out from Gloucester forty years ago,
    but Harry was born here. He invited me to tea at his house on
    Sunday to meet his wife. I said I didn't know what my times off
    would be, but I'd come if I could and I'd let him know tomorrow.

    I took my suitcases up to the room Annie had shown me. I always
    thought the servants in a big country house must have the whale
    of a good time and now I know it. The view from my bedroom is
    just perfect, the room is very clean and comfortable, and
    there's a lovely bathroom just for Annie and me, with a shower.
    There was a dark grey dress laid out on the bed which fitted
    more or less. I put it on because it looked as if it had been
    left there as a sort of hint, rather a broad one, and then I
    went downstairs to start work. They have afternoon tea on a
    wheeled tea trolley and Annie showed me how to get that ready,
    and I wheeled it into the hall and through into the drawing
    room. Mrs. Duncan was there in a chair before the fire and she
    showed me how she likes the tea arranged and made me turn round
    to show her how the dress fitted. It wants taking in a bit at
    the waist and it's a bit long; I told her I'd have a go at it
    tomorrow afternoon. I wonder who had it before me.

    I laid the dining room table then and washed up the tea things,
    and then I came up here to unpack. I've been sitting at the
    table looking out over the river and the paddocks in the evening
    light. A man went by just then on the other side of the river
    riding a horse, at the walk. It's so very, very quiet and
    peaceful here.

    I think I'm beginning to understand more about Bill, after eight
    years. This is what he was brought up in. This house and this
    view made him what he was. No wonder he was different to all the
    other Pongoes. One couldn't help being different, living in a
    beautiful place like this, not as a passenger but doing a real
    job of work upon the land. Because it is a real job of work--it
    must be. Twenty-eight thousand sheep don't just look after
    themselves and cut their own hair and send it to market for you.

    I've got to start thinking of a different Bill, a Bill who was a
    part of Coombargana. I only knew him as a marine sergeant in a
    battledress. That wasn't the real Bill at all; it was Bill in a
    disguise, and I never knew it though I should have done. The
    real Bill was a part of all this loveliness.

When I got to that point in her diary I couldn't go on reading for a
time. I got up from the table and made up the fire, and then I went over
to the window and pulled the curtains aside. It was nearly four in the
morning and the moon was setting; in little more than an hour it would
be beginning to get light. I opened the window and the cool night air
blew in around me; before me lay the paddocks, misty by the river in the
slanting, silvery light. I stood there thinking how right she had been,
how well she had understood. Bill had been a part of all this
loveliness.

Both Bill and I had spent our lives at Coombargana and at school till we
had gone away to England before the war. We had never thought about our
home much, except perhaps to grumble that it was too far away from city
life. We had gone away to very distant places and Bill had not returned;
I had travelled the world and I had come to realize, in faint surprise,
that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty
with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to
accept the fact that the wide, bustling sophisticated world of the
northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways; I
was nearly forty years old, and I was only now realizing that by any
standard of the wider world my own home was most beautiful.

Bill had been fortunate in being born and brought up here, as I had,
though we never knew it. In her diary Janet had written that this house
and this view had made Bill what he was. Perhaps she had got something
there. In the dark night at Le Tirage, within a stone's throw of the
Germans, Bill had gone forward to attach the gadget to the German mines
on the lock gates while Bert Finch stayed in support. Perhaps when he
worked under water at the wires, using up oxygen and so implementing his
death, the British Navy had been cashing in on all that Coombargana had
put in to him throughout his childhood in the Western District.

I closed the window, searched for my pipe and my tobacco, and sat down
to the diary again. After the first entries at Coombargana the diary
became infrequent, as had happened several times before in the years
since the war. I think that means she was contented, with an easy mind;
she seems only to have written in it when she was troubled. An early
entry, however, seems to be important.

    September 13th. There are two photographs of Bill in her
    bedroom, one that I hadn't seen before of him on a horse, I
    think by the stockyard here. He's much younger in that one,
    probably only about fifteen or sixteen. The other is the rather
    stiff studio portrait he had done at Portsmouth that I didn't
    like. I've got such a much better one in my case, but of course
    I daren't put it up in my room here. I haven't heard them say a
    word about Bill and I suppose that's understandable because it's
    eight years ago and everything there was to say must have been
    said. But they talk a lot about Alan.

    Everybody here talks about Alan; he's very much in everybody's
    mind. Annie says something now and then, and Mrs. Drew was
    talking about him when I went to tea on Sunday, and the Colonel
    and Mrs. Duncan say something about him at practically every
    meal that I can't help overhearing. They all hoped that he was
    coming home this spring but he's staying in London for another
    year to get called to the Bar. There's no sign of him getting
    married, but he does a lot of motor racing.

    I think the fact of the matter is that they're all a bit
    anxious. If he doesn't come back to Coombargana the place will
    be sold on the Colonel's death, and that means a tremendous
    upset for everyone connected with it. Annie has been here for
    forty years, and some of the men for over twenty. They've all
    got houses on the place and very good houses they are, too--all
    with electric light from the main generating plant and all with
    septic tanks. Apparently that's much better than conditions
    usually are on these country properties. The Duncans have been
    very good employers. They pay a good bonus after each wool sale
    so that all the man have cars of some sort. I think that's why
    they're all so interested in Alan. They want to see him marry
    somebody and settle down here, and carry on the property.

    October 26th. The weather has been lovely while the Colonel and
    Mrs. Duncan have been in Melbourne, warm sunny days, and not
    much wind. We've had Mrs. Plowden in to help us with the spring
    cleaning, and we've had all the windows open every day, letting
    the warm wind blow through the house. It's been a lot of work
    but we've broken the back of it now. They're coming home
    tomorrow.

    Last night after supper we were sitting in the kitchen and Annie
    started talking about Alan again. She said it was a great
    trouble to his mother that he hadn't married. She said they
    hoped that when he came home after the war he'd have taken to
    one of Helen's friends, but he was very much put out with having
    lost his feet and didn't seem to want to have anything to do
    with girls. They all said it was because he was crippled, but
    Annie herself always thought he'd got a girl in England he was
    thinking of. She said he never rested till he could get away and
    back to England, and she thought when he went that they'd have
    heard he was engaged to somebody in England within six months.
    But it didn't happen. Gossip of the servants' hall, of course.

    I'm terribly sorry for Alan. He sounds rather a lonely person.

    October 28th. They came back yesterday. I thought the Colonel
    was looking better for the change, but Mrs. Duncan not so good.
    Of course, staying in her club and going about shopping in
    Melbourne she can't look after herself, and she told me this
    morning she'd had a great deal of pain while she was away, but
    it had been worth it. I persuaded her to stay in bed all day.
    This evening I asked her if she'd like me to bring the little
    table from the study into her bedroom and lay the Colonel's
    dinner there so that they could have it together. It's got a
    good polish on it and it really looked quite nice with the
    silver and the dinner mats laid out on it just as we do it in
    the dining room. It wasn't much more trouble, either.

    They had a letter from Alan today. He doesn't write often
    enough.

There is no mention in the diary that she was pressing to move on to
Adelaide, or any mention of another married couple. I think that she was
happy in the queer position that she had made for herself at
Coombargana, and content to stay on as a parlourmaid indefinitely. I
think Dr. Ruttenberg in Seattle had probably summed her up correctly;
she felt a great need to be of use to somebody, and this was satisfied
for the time being. A significant entry when she had been at Coombargana
for three months shows her developing relationship with my mother.

    December 11th. The Colonel had to go to Ballarat this afternoon
    to speak at a dinner of the R.S.L.--I think that means the
    Returned Servicemen's League but I'm not quite sure, so Mrs.
    Duncan had dinner by herself. When I took the coffee into the
    drawing room after dinner she was sitting at her desk turning
    over a lot of things she'd taken out of one of the little
    drawers at the side. I put the coffee down beside her on the
    desk and handed the sugar on the salver, and when she'd helped
    herself she picked up a photograph and showed it to me and said,
    "Jessie, that was my other boy, Willy." It was a photograph of
    Bill, of course, standing by the front door with a shotgun and a
    dog probably when he was about eighteen years old. I couldn't
    think of anything to say, and after a minute she told me, "That
    was taken just before he went away to England, just before the
    war. He was killed in 1944, doing something on the coast of
    Normandy just before the invasion." I'd got a grip on myself by
    that time, and I said, "I know, madam. Annie told me. He must
    have been a great loss to you." She didn't say anything for
    quite a time, and then she said, "Yes. Willy wasn't clever like
    Alan. He was more of a home lover. If he'd lived I think that
    he'd have been the one to carry on this place, and Alan would
    have gone into Parliament or else into the Department of
    External Affairs. Willy never wanted to do anything else but
    come back here and manage Coombargana." I couldn't stand it any
    longer, and I said, "Will that be all tonight, madam?" And she
    said, "Yes, thank you, Jessie. Good night." I think I got out of
    the room without giving myself away to her, but I wouldn't be so
    sure about Annie. She doesn't miss much that goes on in
    Coombargana.

Another entry reads,

    January 5th. We had awful fun today. I'm supposed to get one
    full day off a week and one half day, but I've never bothered
    much about them. I felt I wanted a bit of fresh air and a change
    though, and yesterday I asked Harry Drew if I could go out
    rabbitting with them. Old Jim Plowden is the King Rabbitter here
    and he looks after the rabbit pack, about thirty of the most
    ferocious mongrels you ever saw. He keeps going after the
    rabbits steadily all the time, but now they're having a big
    drive to clean them up and they've got half the men on
    rabbitting. I drove out with them in the truck up to the hill
    that they call the Eight Hundred Acre. It's got an awful lot of
    rabbits in it, or it had last week; I don't think it's got many
    now. They've been ripping up the warrens with sort of prongs
    that stick down into the ground behind the tractor and rip down
    about two feet deep, make an awful mess of the ground but make a
    mess of the rabbit holes too. Then they work the tractor
    backwards and forwards to stamp the earth in, and run a great
    big roller with a lot of things sticking out of it, a
    sheep's-foot roller they call it, run that over the lot.

    Where the ground's stony and they can't do that they put in
    ferrets and chase them out and set the dogs on them as they come
    out, or shoot them. All the men were armed to the teeth with
    various sorts of cannon popping off in every direction and
    having a grand time. I asked Harry if I could have a go and he
    looked a bit doubtful and asked if I'd ever fired a shotgun, and
    I said I had, so he lent me his gun. I missed the first two, but
    then I got the hang of it and bowled over four rabbits in four
    shots--running, too. It's only a question of laying off enough
    ahead of them and imagining a ring sight on the gun. The men
    were very impressed and wanted to know where I learned to shoot,
    but of course I didn't tell them. We ran out of rabbits then,
    but on the way home they asked if I'd like a go with a .22 and I
    said I would. I think they wanted to see if the rabbits had been
    just a fluke. So they put up a beer bottle on a stone wall and
    gave me a little rifle and made me try it at about thirty yards.
    I was just below with the first shot but I got it the second
    time. I knew I could do it so I told them to put up three
    bottles in a row and I smashed them in three shots,
    rooty-toot-toot. I said, any time they wanted anything shot,
    just get a Pommie girl from England and she'd shoot it for them
    if they couldn't. They thought that was a scream and laughed
    about it all the way home.

    It was a lovely day. Harry let me clean the rifle when we got
    back to his house, and I had tea with them. He tried again to
    find out where I learned to shoot, but I wasn't having any and
    dodged the question.

After that there are long gaps in the diary of five or six weeks at a
time, and such entries as there are are not significant. She seemed to
have settled in to the routine of washing and cleaning in the house,
making the beds and serving the meals. Because neither of my parents are
very good on stairs at their age she used to go down to the cellar for
my father to fetch up the drinks, and she got to know what wine or
cocktails they required when they had friends in the house, and how to
serve them. I think her relations with my mother were always those of
mistress and maid, but inevitably they became close friends. When the
arthritis was painful she could do things for my mother that no one else
could do and inevitably my mother talked to her freely about family
affairs in the winter months, when few visitors came to the house and
there was no other woman for my mother to talk to.

An entry early in the winter is important:

    May 6th. It's been bitterly cold today with a dark, leaden sky
    and a few flakes of snow. They say it's too early for snow to
    lie, but outside it's as cold as charity. They've got the
    heating going and the house is warm enough, but I got her to
    stay in bed till after lunch. I always thought Australia was a
    warm country, and it was hot enough here in the summer, but it's
    good and bracing now.

    They had great news today, because there was a long letter from
    Alan. He's definitely coming home, and they're so excited over
    it. He's staying in England till September to get called to the
    Bar, but he's booked a passage sailing from England on October
    the 5th, so he'll be home at the beginning of November.

    They're both so happy today, and it was all round Coombargana by
    the evening. I asked the Colonel if he'd like me to get up a
    bottle of champagne for dinner and they had that, and Annie made
    a special effort over dinner for them with caviar to start with
    and mushrooms on toast to end up--there are a lot of mushrooms
    in the paddocks now and we can get a basket any time. They had
    music at dinner for a celebration. Alan's been away five years,
    but from what they say he's definitely coming home for good now,
    to get down to work and manage Coombargana. I'm so glad for
    them.

    I'm glad for Alan, too. I haven't seen his letter, of course,
    but she was talking about him this afternoon when I was helping
    her get up. She says he's quite made up his mind now that his
    place is here and he doesn't want to do any of the other things
    any more, like being a barrister or going in to politics. He
    feels he ought to stay in England till September and finish off
    what he's begun and get called to the Bar, but he feels that
    he's too old to start in practice at the English Bar and he's
    tired of being in England now and wants to come home and settle
    down. I suppose that was all in the letter. She was saying that
    he was so restless after the war and being crippled, but she
    thought he'd got it out of his system. She said she hoped he'd
    find some nice girl and get married.

    It's been a great day for them.

    I'll have to move on somewhere else before Alan gets home. He'd
    be bound to recognize me. I wouldn't want to go much before
    November because I do think they need someone to look after them
    a bit, but when Alan gets home everything will be different;
    he'll be able to do a lot of the things I do for them now. He'll
    organize things for them, and he'll be able to race around and
    get some decent servants in the house, not like that ghastly
    Polish couple that were here before. There won't be any need for
    me when he comes home. I'll aim to get away a week or two before
    he arrives.

    I'll have to go back to Seattle first, I think, to get hold of
    Aunt Ellen's money. That should be settled up by now. After
    that, God knows. I _would_ like to get back in to the Wrens, if
    they'll have me. If the armistice negotiations in Korea break
    down, and it looks as if they will, the war will all flare up
    again and everyone says it will be much worse than before, and
    there may be a full-scale war breaking out between America and
    China, with Russia and England and everyone else joining in. If
    that happened they'd be bound to want all the ordnance Wrens
    they could get hold of.

    It's going to be a bit of a wrench leaving this place.

She was to discover as the months went on that it wasn't going to be so
easy for her to leave Coombargana. She had made herself too much a part
of it.

    May 29th. She's been talking for some time of getting Alan's
    room ready for him, but it seemed a bit early to me. This
    morning she got up directly after breakfast and wanted to go
    upstairs, so I helped her with the stairs and then she made me
    go and get a pencil and paper and the tape measure and she got
    down to things. There are two big rooms there with a bathroom in
    between. Alan's has got bits of aeroplane in it and some of his
    clothes there still in the wardrobes and chest of drawers, all
    put away with mothballs. She told me that the other room was
    Willy's, but she'd refurnished it after the war and now they use
    it as a spare guest room. I took a look in there this afternoon,
    but there's nothing in it now to remind anyone of Bill. The view
    is practically the same as from my room.

    She's really going to town over Alan's room. First of all she
    said it needed new curtains and she made me get the steps and
    measure up the pelmets and the curtains; she said when she was
    in Melbourne she'd seen some Italian material in Georges that
    she thought would do; it cost four pounds ten a yard but it
    would last a long time. She'll need thirty-eight yards for the
    curtains. Then she said the carpet wouldn't do at all; it was
    much too shabby, but it looked perfectly all right to me. There
    are two upholstered armchairs there and she wasn't satisfied
    with those, so we're going to get those downstairs and send them
    in to Ballarat on a truck to have loose covers made, two sets
    for each. She's going to get the material for that in Melbourne,
    to go with the curtains. She wants a new bedspread and new
    shades on all the lamps. She's going to have all the woodwork
    repainted and the bathroom repainted completely.

    She wanted to re-paper Alan's room, but I persuaded her not to.
    There's nothing the matter with the paper and I thought it would
    make the room look so different for him. I said that half the
    fun of coming home was to come back to all the things you knew
    and you remembered, and if she did the wallpaper it would make
    it look like another room and he wouldn't feel at home. She saw
    that in the end, and we agreed that the paint should be as much
    like the old paint as possible so that the appearance of the
    room would be the same, but everything clean and nice. I said
    I'd get a loaf of stale bread and rub down the paper by the
    electric light switch at the door where it's got a bit dirty.
    It's good paper and I'm sure it'll come up all right. She made
    me measure up the carpet, but she'll have a job to get one big
    enough. It wants to be about twenty-five feet by twenty. She
    says that if she can't find anything she likes she can get one
    made specially, in Bombay.

    I totted it all up just for interest; she's going to spend
    nearly eight hundred pounds doing up that room, I should think.
    They don't spend anything on themselves in the normal way; they
    live quite modestly though they spend a good bit on the garden.
    But she's really letting herself go on Alan's room. It's going
    to look awfully nice by the time we've done with it.

I stopped reading and stared round the room. There were the new
curtains, the new shades on all the lamps, the deep new pile of the
Indian carpet beneath my feet, the new loose cover of the chair that I
was sitting in, the slightly different appearance of the wallpaper by
the electric switch, the gleam of the new paint. I had not noticed any
of them.

    June 20th. The Colonel placed an order for a new Land Rover
    today for Alan. Delivery is about two months so it should be
    here about a month before he arrives. They don't use horses much
    now, only the boundary riders who go round every day inspecting
    every fence and every gate and looking to see if any of the
    sheep are straying or if any of them have anything the matter
    with them. The Colonel goes everywhere in his Land Rover and he
    says that Alan must have his own. His feet won't matter a bit
    then.

    I heard them talking about this at dinner, and of course I
    mentioned it to Annie in the kitchen because there didn't seem
    to be anything confidential in the fact that they were getting a
    new motor vehicle upon the property. Everyone will know about it
    tomorrow. Her reaction was typically Annie. She said, "Aye,
    they're getting for him everything the heart of man could
    desire, saving the one thing." I asked, "What's that?" She said,
    "A wife." She's very shrewd.

    July 10th. They came back from Melbourne yesterday. I think the
    prospect of Alan coming home has been very good for her;
    although it's the middle of the winter and pretty cold she was
    quite fit and well and told me that she hadn't had much pain;
    she got up for breakfast this morning, fit as a flea. She told
    me that she had chosen the pattern for Alan's carpet and cabled
    the order; it will take about a month to make and she's told
    them that it's got to get on board a certain P. and O. boat on a
    certain date or she won't have it, so it should be here about a
    month before he gets home. She's got the curtain material and a
    woman is to come here next week from Ballarat and make the
    curtains and the pelmets here, staying till it's done. The
    painters finished last week. She showed me the bedspread and the
    lampshades; they're awfully pretty.

    She told me that when Alan comes home she wants me to look after
    his clothes, like a valet. She's going to get Mrs. Plowden to
    come in every morning to do some of the cleaning I do now
    because she says that they'll be having many more guests in the
    house when Alan comes home and there'll be a good deal more
    work, but she wants me to take over Alan's clothes. She's going
    to show me how to do it and I can practise on the Colonel till
    Alan comes home. The drill is to lay out the clothes that he'll
    be wearing in the evening ready for him on the bed at about six
    o'clock before he goes up to change for dinner; she's going to
    show me how to put the studs into an evening shirt and how she
    wants it done. Then when I go up to turn the bed down I collect
    the clothes that he's been wearing during the day and take them
    away and brush them and put them away in the wardrobe, looking
    out for any spots or dirt or loose buttons and doing something
    about it next day. Nothing's got to go back in the wardrobe till
    it's been brushed and looked over and put right. The same with
    the evening clothes; I collect them and take them away to brush
    when I take him in the morning tea.

    I tried to tell her that I wouldn't be here when Alan comes
    home, but I wasn't ready and I didn't know how to bring the
    subject up. I'll have to tell her soon, but it's going to be
    frightfully difficult. I haven't been able to think of any story
    yet that doesn't mean telling her a whole string of lies, and
    I'd hate to do that. I'm not sure that I'd be very good at it,
    either.

    I don't know what to do. I _would_ like to see Alan again; he
    was such a grand person and he can't have changed so much. I've
    been so happy here, I'll just hate going away. I don't know what
    I'll do if I can't get back into the Wrens. Perhaps I'll be able
    to go back; the peace talks at Korea don't seem to be getting
    anywhere. That would be much the best of all. If a full-scale
    war broke out again I could tell her that I was a Wren on the
    reserve and I'd got to go back into the Service. That wouldn't
    mean telling any lies at all, hardly.

    July 22nd. I've been wondering if somehow I couldn't see Alan
    and have a talk to him before he comes home. If I went to
    Fremantle or something and met him there. He's such a very good
    sort, he'd advise me and tell me what to do, and he might
    somehow be able to put things right for me so that I could come
    back and go on here. The one thing which I couldn't bear is that
    he should come home and walk into the house and say, "Hullo,
    Leading Wren Prentice, what are you doing here? I thought we'd
    finished with you when Bill got killed." He wouldn't say that,
    of course, but that's what it would be like. If I could have a
    quiet talk with him before he gets home I think I could make him
    understand how it all happened, and perhaps we could concoct
    something together that would make it possible for me to go on
    here. After all, there's no reason why his mother and father
    need ever know that I had anything at all to do with Bill. Alan
    would only have to keep his mouth shut, and everything could go
    on here as usual. Only Alan and I know what Bill and I were to
    each other. It wouldn't be much to ask him to keep quiet about
    it. But it's going to take a bit of explaining what I've been
    doing here at all, even to Alan.

    I don't know what to do.

    July 28th. The Korean war is over, and they've signed a truce at
    Panmunjom. There isn't going to be another full-scale war, and I
    suppose I ought to be glad. But this finishes all chance I ever
    had of getting back into the Wrens. They won't be needing any
    more ordnance Wrens now; they'll be needing less.

    I simply can't think what I could do when I leave here; I've got
    nowhere to go, nothing I want to do. I've got to try and think
    of something.

I laid the diary down, glad for an excuse to stop reading it for a time,
and I put another log or two upon the fire. Outside the sky was starting
to show grey.

Viola Dawson had been right about ex-Service people. Janet Prentice, at
any rate, had banked upon another war that would solve all her
difficulties and bring her back into the full, useful life she once had
known. Without it she was lost, because another war had been her main
hope since the end of the last one.

I sat down again and went back to the diaries with mounting reluctance.
It was a violation of her deepest privacy that I should read what she
had written, but I had to know.

    August 17th. It's only about six weeks now till Alan sails, and
    I can't make up my mind what to do. I've been putting it off and
    trying not to think about it, hoping that something would turn
    up.

    I don't think it would be possible to go to Fremantle to meet
    Alan on the ship before he gets here. I believe the Colonel's
    going to fly across and meet him there and fly back here with
    him. That's what he did when Alan came back before, after the
    war, and he's talking of doing it again, but I don't think
    they've decided anything yet. If he did that, of course, it
    would be impossible for me to meet Alan alone before he got
    here. I can't help feeling that's the way to tackle it. I know
    he'd be able to get me out of this mess. But even if the Colonel
    didn't go to Fremantle, I don't see how I could ask her for a
    holiday then. They're all counting on me to be here and they're
    looking forward so much to his homecoming. I don't think I'd
    have the face to ask for a holiday just at that time. It would
    look awfully strange, and if they started to get curious and
    found out that I'd been to Fremantle to meet Alan before he got
    home it would be worst of all.

    Last night I thought I'd better write to Alan and explain
    things, and I tried to write a rough copy of a letter to send
    him. But it's one of those things I don't think you can do in a
    letter. I only met him once, nine years ago, and he probably
    hardly remembers me. I've been thinking of him as the same
    person he was then, but everybody here says that he's changed a
    lot. He's really a total stranger, although he doesn't seem like
    that to me. He'd get a letter from his mother's parlourmaid
    asking if he'd mind deceiving his mother when he comes home so
    that the parlourmaid could keep her job, because the parlourmaid
    had been deceiving her and living here under false pretences for
    the last year.

    I tried all last night to write a letter wrapping up those facts
    and making it sound all right, but I couldn't do it. He's a
    barrister; he'd see through it at once and get suspicious. I
    know if I could see him and talk to him quietly before he gets
    home I could explain how it all happened and make him
    understand, but I don't believe it's possible to do it in a
    letter.

    The curtains and the pelmets in Alan's room are finished. They
    look lovely. The carpet's supposed to be arriving at the end of
    the month. We've got all the furniture piled in the middle of
    the room and I've been waxing and polishing the floor with the
    electric floor polisher. It's some kind of Tasmanian hardwood,
    myrtle I think; it's a sort of golden colour with a bit of pink
    in it. It's starting to look awfully nice for him.

    September 25th. Alan sails from England in about ten days' time.
    I've been drifting, hoping something would turn up, but now I
    can't drift any longer.

    Yesterday morning I was dusting in the hall and when I'd
    finished that I went through to the dining room to do the
    sideboard and the chairs. Mrs. Plowden was in the kitchen
    scrubbing the floor and talking to Annie. They were making a
    fair bit of noise and they didn't know I was there, and the
    swing door was open so that I could hear every word they said.
    They were talking about Alan and a girl called Sylvia Holmes
    whose people have a property near Hamilton, just speculation
    based on the fact that he took her to the races six years ago.
    They're terribly anxious to see him married, and they're always
    gossiping. And then Mrs. Plowden said, "He might do worse than
    look in his own kitchen, to my way of thinking." And Annie said,
    "Aye, that's a fact. It wouldn't be the first time that's
    happened, and it won't be the last." I went back into the hall.
    I'm sure they didn't know that I was there.

    Well, now it's come out into the open, and I think I'm glad.
    It's what's been wrong for a long time, this interest that I've
    been feeling for Alan. That's really what's kept me here in the
    last months although I wouldn't admit it--that, and the
    comfortable living of Coombargana, that I've been reluctant to
    give up. There are some things about oneself that it's not very
    nice to wake up to.

    All this time I've been kidding myself about Alan. I've been
    thinking I could go to Fremantle and talk to him like a big
    brother, and he'd get me out of this jam that I've got in. But
    it's nastier than that. What I've really been up to is that if I
    had a heart-to-heart talk with Alan about Bill and all that I've
    been doing here I could make him fall in love with me, and then
    I wouldn't have to go away from Coombargana. It's time now to be
    honest, and that's what I've been intending. Coombargana means
    ease and gracious living and security and wealth for the
    remainder of my life. I think that that's what I've been
    reaching out for, really. And I've damn nearly got it. If Alan
    married me, everybody here would be quite glad.

    This isn't a fairy story. This isn't King Cophetua and the
    Beggar Maid. This is another story altogether, of the Beggar
    Maid plotting to tell King Cophetua a sob-stuff story so that he
    would fall in love with her and take her out of the kitchen, and
    marry her, so that she'd be Queen and lord it over all the other
    servants, and live in luxury for the remainder of her life.
    There's no happy ending to that one, not even for King Cophetua
    because he'd come to realize quite soon how he'd been trapped.

    Oh, Bill, I can't imagine what I've been doing, how I've got
    myself in such a mess.

    October 10th. Alan sailed about five days ago, and I suppose his
    ship would be somewhere near Gibraltar now, and coming closer
    every minute. It docks at Fremantle on the 30th and they're
    expecting a letter from him to say that he'll be flying home
    from there. There's only about three weeks now to go.

    There's no way out of this one. I'll have to meet him sometime,
    either here or at Fremantle, and now I don't know that it makes
    much difference which. There's something horrible about me. I
    know when I meet him I'll be wanting him to fall in love with
    me, and I've got such good cards to play. But it's all wrong.
    It's horrible and sordid and wrong, because I'm only thinking of
    him in that way because I want to stay at Coombargana.

    I really did love Bill. I loved him very truly, and I still do.
    I didn't know his family had all this money. He was just Bill to
    me. But now I'm playing with the idea of making up to his
    brother, kidding myself that I could fall in love with him. It's
    time I woke up to myself. I had a good look in the glass just
    now, and it's not very flattering. Rather an ugly woman, not so
    young, who had been genuinely in love with one brother planning
    to fall in love conveniently with the other brother who is heir
    to the property. But there's nothing in the mirror to show that
    the trick would come off. I'd probably just be making a complete
    fool of myself, as I have been for the last few months.

    The worst part is that there's just a tiny fragment of sincerity
    which makes the whole thing so insidious. I did like Alan when
    we met nine years ago. I've been looking back through this diary
    and I see that I thought then that he was something rather
    terrific. I still think of him like that, and I'd like to meet
    him again. But that's nothing to do with being in love with him.
    You can't possibly be in love with somebody you only met for one
    day nine years ago when you were head over heels in love with
    his brother.

    There's no way out of this one. I can't meet Alan. There's too
    much intimacy in the explanations that I'd have to make to him
    to tell him why I'm here at all to make it possible to go on
    with him here as master and servant, or even to go on as neutral
    friends. I'd want him to fall in love with me and marry me, I
    know I would. If he did, I think I'd be unhappy for the
    remainder of my life, because I'd know it was all phoney and
    wrong. I'd make him unhappy, too. If he didn't, then there'd be
    shame and confusion all round, and everything here would be
    spoiled, and I'd have to go away. And the mirror says that's
    probably exactly what would happen.

    There's no way out of this one.

    October 17th. I asked for a day off and went for a long walk
    alone all round Coombargana today, getting back about six
    o'clock. It's such a lovely place, and I'm so happy to have seen
    it all. They're shearing now, finishing on Friday, and
    everybody's down at the shearing shed in a mad rush. I hardly
    saw anyone at all, all day.

    I wanted a day's tramp to clear my mind and make quite sure that
    I was doing the right thing, because it's one of those things
    that you can't undo when once you've done it. It's so permanent.
    But now I know I'm right. After a year like this I don't think
    that I'd ever be happy anywhere else but here, and it's not
    possible for me to stay here any longer now. The only thing I
    could do now would be to run away, go to Ballarat on some
    excuse, get on an aeroplane and fly away to England or somewhere
    and start again. I think I'd rather stay here.

    I've got Aunt Ellen's knock-out drops, a whole bottle of them,
    still. They must be good, because the name was always cropping
    up in the Seattle papers; they're what all the film stars turn
    to when they're through. The very highest recommendation. Then
    all the people in the Junkers will be paid for.

    Alan's ship gets in to Fremantle on the Friday, so I think I'll
    do it on the Sunday night. Everything will be over and done with
    by the time he gets home on the Saturday and the excitement of
    his homecoming will put it all out of their minds. It'll be a
    bit of a shock to them, of course. I'm sorry about that because
    they've been so kind to me, but in a day or two Alan will be
    home and everything will be forgotten. Old people get a bit like
    children; their griefs don't last very long.

    October 23rd. I went walking round the garden this afternoon
    looking at things and enjoying them, and in the greenhouse Cyril
    had a lot of azaleas in pots. I picked out a big red one just
    coming in to bloom and took it into the house and asked her if I
    could put it in Alan's room. She said I could, so I put the
    flower pot in a dark blue jar and took it up and put it on his
    table. It's going to look lovely in a few days' time. I hope
    they keep it watered.

There the diary ends. The azalea was still upon my table in full bloom.




                                   10


The fire was practically dead and the dawn was light behind me at the
window. I closed the diaries, and arranged them in a little pile upon
the table. I stood up stiffly and reached out for her attach case to
put the volumes back in it, and as I did so her bank books caught my
eye. I wondered dully what on earth I ought to do about those, for she
had considerable sums of money in Seattle and in England.

When things like this happen there's just nothing to be done about it;
even suffering itself is a mere waste of time. I crossed to the window
and opened one of the casements, and the cold air came streaming in to
the warm room around me like a shower. Before me lay our property, a few
ewes in the ewe paddock moving over the wet grass in the first glints of
the sun, the river running quietly between. This was the view that she
had known and loved, as Bill and I had loved it, all unconsciously. She
could have been mistress of Coombargana twice over, but it didn't work
out that way.

I turned from the window after a long time, and took my sticks, and went
out of my room into the gallery. The house was dead quiet except for the
loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall; nobody was yet astir.
I moved slowly down the stairs, and as I went I wondered a little at the
decency of my home, after all that I had read during the night. Even
into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an
octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some
infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing
people for a long time after it's all over.

I paused in the hall and looked around me, at the flowers that she had
arranged, the chairs and tables she must have dusted, the radiogram that
she had turned on for my mother when they celebrated the news that I was
coming home. I drew a coat on over my dinner jacket and went out on to
the lawn, and walked slowly down towards the river bank. From now
onwards loneliness would sit with me at Coombargana, in my bedroom with
the polished myrtle floor and the scrubbed wallpaper around the electric
light switch, in the dining room that she had served, and with the
rabbit pack. I had been lonely in my home when I had come back from the
war in 1946; I should be doubly so now. I had found Coombargana
difficult to bear in those days, but with Janet Prentice ever in my mind
it would be intolerable now.

I moved along the river bank and sat down on the low stone wall by the
trout hatchery, where I had talked with my father only twelve hours
before. I sat there for a long time thinking of what lay before me. From
there I could see three of the new station houses that my father had
built while I was away, and as I sat there suffering little signs of
life started to appear. A woman came out of one house with a four-gallon
oil drum serving as an ash can, and emptied the ashes on a heap in the
back yard. A man came out of another house in soiled and blue overalls
walked down a path that led behind some trees to the main station
buildings, perhaps to start the diesel. The sun grew stronger, and all
over Coombargana life began to appear.

I did not know the names of half the people on the property, but they
all knew me. The diary that I had been reading made that very clear.
Everybody on the property knew all about me, what my interests were, how
far I could walk, how much I drank, how long I had been away, what I had
been doing in England. All of them were watching anxiously to see what I
would do on this my first day back at Coombargana, trying to read the
oracle to form their judgment from my first actions whether I was going
to carry on the property or sell it, whether they could settle down with
their minds at ease about the future or whether they must condition
themselves to the probability of change. They knew all about me, yet
perhaps they did not know quite all. They did not know that I had been
in love with Janet Prentice.

It would be intolerable now to live at Coombargana. But we had
twenty-one people employed on the place, all with their eyes on me and
looking for a sign. If I gave up now and went off back to England it
would be intolerable again, for Janet Prentice would have had me stay.
Only cowards run away because they are afraid of ghosts.

I sat there by the trout hatchery for an hour or more till I grew very
cold. Then I got up and I walked slowly through the trees towards the
stockyard, thinking of Janet Prentice and of her integrity. I found two
men saddling up in the horse yard. I knew neither of their names, but I
said, "Good morning," to them absently. They stared at me curiously and
then wished me good morning in return, and I moved on wondering a little
at their attitude until I remembered that I was in my dinner jacket
still, with an overcoat thrown loosely over it. I went back to the house
to change.

Annie must have seen me from the kitchen window coming to the house, for
she met me in the hall. "I have a pot of tea just made, Mr. Alan," she
said. "Will I bring you a cup?" And then she said, "Mercy, have you not
been to bed?"

"No," I said. "I didn't go to bed. I found that case."

"You did, sir?"

I nodded, and then looked her in the eyes. "Did you know she was Bill's
girl?"

She was silent for a moment, and then she said, "I did not know that for
certain, Mr. Alan. But I thought perhaps it might be something of that
sort."

I said heavily, "Well, that's who she was." And then I said, "I'd like
that cup of tea, Annie."

"Go on up to your room, Mr. Alan, and get changed," she said. "I'll
bring it to you there."

I went upstairs and turned on the bath water, and started to undress.
She came in a few minutes with a tray of tea and biscuits and put it
down upon the table by the red azalea in the blue pot. She glanced at
the case on the other table before the dead fire, where I had sat all
night, and then she said, "Did you know her, Mr. Alan?"

"I met her once, during the war, just before Bill got killed," I said. I
glanced at her, and then I said, "This is all something pretty private
to the family. I don't want it talked about upon the station."

"I'll watch that, Mr. Alan."

She went away and I went through to the bathroom, took off my feet, and
got into the bath. The benison of the hot water was refreshing, for I
was very cold, and as I sat in the warm comfort gradually I came to my
senses and the power of reasoning put out emotion from my mind.

As always, Bill was very real to me in that bathroom. Never again would
he come striding through the door that led into his room, eighteen years
old and impatient to get under the shower. He had become one of the
ghosts that haunted Coombargana for me, and now he had been joined by
another ghost, standing in her proper place close by his side. They were
friendly ghosts, utterly benevolent, but they were ghosts just the same;
with all their integrity they could not do the job of work they would
have done at Coombargana if they had been left alive. In their mute
presence they appealed to me to do the job for them.

That ghosts have power nobody can deny, for as I sat there in the warm
water they put in to my mind the little restaurant known as Bruno's in
the Earl's Court Road, twelve thousand miles from Coombargana in the
Western District. If you want help you will find it there, they told me
as I sat in the warm water in a stupor of fatigue, and as they stood
beside the bath and told me that, arm linked in arm as they had been
nine years before at Lymington, I knew that what they said was true.
There was one person and one person only who could take my hand as I
walked with the gentle ghosts of Coombargana, who would understand and
comfort me, who would not be afraid.

I got out of the bath and went into my room and dressed for my new fife.
I put on a grey flannel shirt, the brown-green trousers of a grazier, a
woollen pullover and a tweed coat. Then I took the case in my hand and
went down to the hall.

My father came out of his dressing room that once had been the gunroom
to meet me. "Morning, Alan," he said. "You were up very early."

"I know, Dad," I said. "I didn't go to bed at all. I found a case that
this girl left behind, with all her papers in it. I've got a lot I want
to tell you before Mother comes to life."

"We'll go into the study," he suggested.

We went into his study and closed the door. "Before we start on this I
want to put in a call," I told him. I picked up the telephone and waited
while Forfar got Ballarat and Ballarat got an overseas radio telephone
operator in Melbourne. "I want to book a call to England," I said. "It's
a London number, Western 56841, Miss Viola Dawson. I shall want about a
quarter of an hour."

They repeated it and booked the call, and I put down the handset and
turned to my father. "Hold your hat on, Dad," I said. "I'm going back to
England, flying back at once. I don't expect to be there longer than a
week or so, and I'll be coming back here then to live for good."

"For some reason that I haven't fathomed, Alan," he said drily, "with
Miss Viola Dawson, I presume."

I opened the case upon his desk. "I hope so," I replied. "And now I'll
tell you why."






[End of Requiem for a Wren, by Nevil Shute]
