Free Requiem for a Wren by Nevil Shute

portrait. My mother has a print of it that stands upon the table in her room, with one of Helen and one of me. I wondered what she would have thought if she had known that her house parlourmaid had a copy of it, too.
    Opposite this one, in the other glazed frame, was a more living picture. It was a snapshot of Bill taken shortly before his death, in the battledress uniform of a sergeant in the Marines, taken in the open air upon the roadway of some camp. Janet Prentice was beside him in the uniform of a Leading Wren; he had his arm around her shoulders and they were laughing together.
    I knew that one existed, though I had never seen it; my mother did not know of it at all. Bill had told me about it when I met him in the spring of 1944. I was at Fighter Command in those days, after two hours of operations, first on Hurricanes and then on Spitfires. It was so long since we had met that when a job cropped up that was to take me to a conference at Beaulieu aerodrome I had shamelessly extended it and snatched an extra twenty-four hours from my office on Sunday in order that I might see Bill before 'Over-
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    lord', before the balloon went up. I flew down in a Spit from Northolt late one Saturday evening and landed in the dusk. Tony Patterson was there and he had laid a car on for me to take me in to Lymington, where I had booked a room at the Roebuck Hotel, and Bill had met me there for dinner.
    In the first exchanges over a couple of drinks before we ate, Bill told me that he knew Beaulieu aerodrome. It was nearly two years since we had met; I had been in Egypt and the Western Desert before my office job, and when I was drafted back to England he had been up at some Commando training place on the west coast of Scotland. So much had happened to us both, so differently had we developed, that it took us a few minutes to establish contact again and to reach the point when we could talk about the matters we both wanted to discuss. The gin helped, of course.
    'What were you doing at the aerodrome?' I asked. 'You don't go arsing about up in the air?'
    He shook' his head. 'There's a flight-sergeant there in charge of the PR unit' he said. I nodded; Beaulieu aerodrome was now a mass of fighters, Thunderbolts and Typhoons in readiness for close support of the invasion landings on the other side, but previously there had been a photographic reconnaissance flight of Lightnings there and the photographers with their equipment for developing and printing were still in one of the buildings. 'He's a good type,' said Bill. 'Nobody's allowed to have a camera down here, of course.' I did not know that, but with the intense security precautions necessary before the invasion it was obviously so. 'He'll take anybody's picture for a dollar and let you have the prints. Good pictures, too. I went up there with Janet this afternoon and he took one of us. I'm going to pick them up on Wednesday.'
    This was getting near the subject we both wanted to discuss. 'Where's Janet now?' I asked. 'Is she here?' I had never met her then, of course.
    He shook his head. 'She only got a three-hour pass. She caught the ferry back to Mastodon from just outside the aerodrome.' He meant the naval truck that plied between Exbury Hall upon the Beaulieu River that was now HMS
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    Mastodon, and Lymington. 'She's got a full day off tomorrow.'
    'Got anything laid on?'
    'She's got a boat' he said. 'When have you got to go back?'
    'Be all right if I get off at dawn on Monday' I replied. 'I've got a natter on with the Americans tomorrow evening - I've got to be up at the aerodrome at six o'clock. And I'll have to slip out to the aerodrome in the morning to ring up the office. That won't take more than half an hour. After that I've got all day, till six o'clock'
    'You could make the call from here'
    I shook my head. 'It's got to be a scrambled line. It won't take long. I've got transport laid on to collect me here at half past eight'
    He looked me up and down, and grinned. 'All