Requiem for a Wren (22 page)

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 5th and reached the coast of Normandy off Courseulles about midday on D-day, June 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 I 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 SS 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 beside 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 SS 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.

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 Down 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 that last stage of the war the Luftwaffe was better equipped than we were and our fighters and our fighter bombers were having a rough tune 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 Evere 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 it 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 positions, 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 under-cart 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 right 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