The Breaking Wave

  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 L.C.T.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 C.P.O.”

  “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 motor boat 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 book-keeping. 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 shot-gun and was not afraid of it she became a Qualified Ordnance 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 fro
ck, 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 ageing 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. C.P.O. 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 M.T.B.s, but really it was the tank landing craft and that. Every L.C.T. Mark 4, she had two Oerlikons, and every L.C.S.—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 eye-shooting 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, R.N., 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 hav
e 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 R.N.V.R. assistant in hearing of the C.P.O. “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 preferred 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.