by Nevil Shute
“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 in to 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 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 mail-man. 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 goodbye 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 possibly 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, when 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.
EIGHT
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 attaché 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 th
e eve of my return home, presumably because I was the only person who could recognise 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 consisted of reminders about Service routine, leave dates, corresponding ranks in the Army and the R.A.F. 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 to 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 he saw a packing case floating, and then he came down to about five hundred feet and told me to pull the plug. The first drum was pretty haywire all over the shop but he went on circling round with the Swordfish standing on its ear and told me to keep on trying, and about the middle of the second drum I seemed to get the hang of it and it suddenly came right and I began to shoot it all to bits. He made me try some big deflection shots then flying straight past at about a hundred feet. He said he’d have my bloody hide if I shot his wing tip or his tail off. They weren’t a bit easy, but I got one or two hits towards the end of the last drum. We landed back at Ford after about an hour. It was a lovely morning.
There was nothing of any particular significance in the months she spent at Ford. When she went to Whale Island for her conversion course on to Oerlikons the diary assumed the nature of a technical memorandum book and was filled with details of the lubricants, their Service designations, how they were drawn from store, the colours painted on the shells, and matters of that sort. There must have been official publications available to her containing all this information, and I can only think it made it easier for her to remember if she made notes in this way in her own diary. The only entry of any importance related to her meeting with the First Sea Lord, and that was very short.
Thursday July 1st. Last day of 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 W.A.A.F. driver all dolled up with half an inch of stuff on her face, making me look like twopenny-worth of sump oil. Three rings, wings, and five medal ribbons including the D.F.C. and bar. He’s the sort of person who seems to have been everywhere and done everything, and yet he’s quite quiet about it all. You can see the likeness to Bill, but an older and more mature Bill; they’re evidently very fond of each other. Bill hadn’t told me that Alan was a Rhodes scholar or that he was at the House; I must ask Daddy if he ever met him. They both went to a school they call Gellong Grammar or some name like that, that evidently means a lot to them. I must ask Daddy if he ever heard of it. I suppose it’s where the farmers send their sons to school, but I’m getting a bit puzzled. I suppose boys born on farms in England turn into people like Bill and Alan, only one doesn’t know that they were born on farms. I really did like brother Alan, and I’m not a bit windy now about Bill’s people. They can’t be so different to us as I thought.
Very soon after that came the Junkers incident.
Saturday April 29th. I shot a Junkers down today and it was all wrong. Everyone in it was killed, and it seems they were friendly, Czechs or Poles, trying to get over to our side. Everyone else was firing at it, but I actually got it, I think. I can’t sleep and I don’t know what to do and Bill’s away somewhere.
I went down to 968 with Viola this morning to put some Sten guns on the L.C.T.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 f
eet and started wandering about more or less out of range of all guns. We thought it was taking photographs. 702 was lying alongside 968 and all the gunners were on leave and the sub too wet to do a thing, so I manned the port Oerlikon. 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 R.A.F. 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.
