The Breaking Wave

  “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 L.C.T. 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 realise 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 J.3 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 L.C.T. 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 tea time 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 L.C.T. 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 L.C.T. 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 L.C.T.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 L.C.T. 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 L.C.T. 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, agonised 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 L.C.T. 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 N.C.O.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 agonised 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 Earls 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 L.C.T.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. Beisdes, 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 b
ack 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, seven 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.”

  SIX

  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 organisation, much looked up to for his maritime war experience. I went to see 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 to 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 off shore 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 plus 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, ageing 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 old sleeping 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 her.

  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.