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 into Europe and had left no trace behind her.
SEVEN
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 into 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 were 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 English women, 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 in to 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
mid air. “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 Earls 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 into 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 sunburnt. That she had been a boat’s crew Wren was in the part; I realised directly I saw her, with the knowledge of her Service that I had, that she would look exactly right at the wheel of a motor boat. 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 bookcases or stacked against the wall, and sketches and sketchbooks 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 spare-time 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 the 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 R.N.V.R. 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 realise 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 realise that it will never come again. To realise 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 R.A.F., 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.”