Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (36 page)

Joan Marshall had married Charles Cruickshanks of the Royal Navy Reserve just after Christmas, 1941 and as he was on active service she lived with her family for the duration of the war. The Marshalls had moved into a semi-detached house in Kenton Road in the newly built suburb of Kenton in 1930. Kenton had been developed to take advantage of the tube expansion into Metroland with the intention of attracting middle-income commuters just like Charles Marshall, now the director of his own company. The Marshalls’ house, ‘Kenilworth’, was typical of the period; bay-fronted with an Ideal boiler for hot water, a Radiation gas cooker, three bedrooms, a bathroom and separate toilet. For thousands of families, houses like ‘Kenilworth’ were an achievable dream of modern comfort and convenience – all for an affordable £800.

In early 1943, like thousands of other young women, Doreen had followed her older sister into the Women’s Royal Naval Service (‘Join the WRNS – and free a man for the fleet!’). Joan had worked at the admiralty decoding messages. Only seventeen, Doreen started two weeks’ intensive training at the WRNS training depot in Mill Hill. All ‘on shore’ naval bases or ‘stone frigates’ were named after Royal Navy vessels and though it may have sounded grand, intimidating even, ‘HMS Pembroke III’ was, in reality, a disused cancer hospital. As a probationer, Doreen had been put through both medical and written tests in order to establish a suitable division for her experience and aptitude. In her first weeks, she was taught about the backbone of the service: discipline, routine and tradition. The Royal Navy was dominated by traditions and rules evolved over many centuries. These traditions, of course, had been evolved by and for the exclusively male intake who made up the ‘Senior Service’. Women had briefly been able to join the service in 1917 but this initiative had been disbanded two years later. A further attempt to create a Women’s Royal Naval Reserve had been mooted in the mid-1930s but after due consideration by the Special Sub-Committee of Imperial Defence, it was ‘deemed not desirable’.
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It had taken the darkening events in Europe in the late 1930s for the admiralty to accept that the need for a Women’s Naval Reserve was pressing. Effectively, Doreen had joined a new and innovative organization of women that would have an impact not just on each Wren individually, but on a generation of young women who felt that being part of the WRNS in some way emancipated them from pre-war strictures and conventions.

The WRNS exposed young women like Doreen and Joan Marshall to a way of life a world away from their suburban backgrounds. They had to learn a completely different vocabulary relating their new, unfamiliar world to naval lore; a room was a ‘cabin’, the dining room was the ‘mess’ and the floor the ‘deck’. All work was divided into ‘watches’ with ‘divisions’ held in the Assembly Hall and Holy Communion in a small chapel every day.
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Crucially Wrens were forced to engage with other classes of women that they had never had the opportunity to meet before. For the first time in her sheltered middle-class upbringing, Doreen came face to face with women from a range of different backgrounds. For Doreen, her time in the WRNS was defining – the job, like the war, having spanned her adult life. She spent her career in the WRNS serving at various sites around the London area, mostly at accounting bases like HMS Pembroke III and HMS Westcliff. Much of her work was clerical, covering everything from submarines to post-hostilities planning and by 1946 she was working in Whitehall with senior figures in the admiralty at HMS President I.

Both Joan and Doreen’s duties with the WRNS were very much office-based jobs with little chance of action. Ironically, the nearest they came to danger was at home in Kenton. At 8.10 a.m. on 28 June 1944, the peace of a typical English summer morning had been devastated by a violent explosion that engulfed the entire neighbourhood.

Without any warning there was a colossal compression and explosion immediately followed by all kinds of crashes, bangs, screams, sounds of breaking glass and God knows what else.

The neighbourhood had been targeted by a V1 bomb – the deadly ‘doodlebug’. Seconds after the blast, Newton Myers, a twelve-year-old schoolboy who lived at 5 Kenton Gardens, emerged from his family’s Anderson raid shelter in the garden to witness a world in chaos:

I clambered out of bed and through the door of the shelter, out through the back room door into what was left of our hall. There was dust everywhere . . . and there were other yells, shouts and screams coming from other places. At this moment my father appeared staggering down the stairs which were still relatively intact. His face was a mask of blood and he was shouting ‘this is the end, this is the end’ over and over again. As we met at the bottom of the stairs he picked me up and rushed out into the front garden with me in his arms. Then he put me down and I rushed back into the house. I went into what was left of the front room. The mantelpiece had come away from the wall and was lying horizontal across the sofa. The bay window was halfway out into the garden. When I looked out and to the right all I could see were what appeared to be the roofs of our neighbours’ houses. The only problem was that they were at ground level with no houses underneath them. Dust was everywhere, there were still screams and moans coming from the buried, dying and injured . . . Before long the rescue teams arrived and started the grisly task of recovering the bodies. I was unlucky enough to see one of my friends’ sisters on a stretcher under a blanket being carried past me towards the ambulance. As the stretcher-bearer passed me, a doctor pulled back the blanket, I had the unpleasant sight of someone who had been completely flattened. Not a pretty sight . . . This whole incident had a disastrous effect on my nerves. Up until now I had borne the bombing with typical British phlegm. However now I begged my father to take me out of London. I was panic stricken and absolutely terrified.
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Thirteen people were killed in the attack. The most severe damage was suffered by Kenton Gardens, but the whole area was reduced to rubble. Though their house was hit, Charles and Grace Marshall and their daughters were relieved to have escaped with their lives, Grace having often despaired during air raid warnings as Joan always refused to use the Anderson shelter in the garden. Significantly, though, Doreen did not escape the incident completely unscathed. From that morning onwards, a shock of grey began to appear in the dark curls of her hair, just above her right temple. This was very distinctive in such a young woman – a continuous reminder to her and everyone she met of the unspoken but continuing effects of the Blitz.

With ‘Kenilworth’ uninhabitable, the Marshalls moved four miles further to the northwest and rented a half-timbered, semi-detached house in Woodhall Drive, Pinner. The house had been built in the early 1930s, very much in the stockbroker Tudor style beloved by John Betjeman. In a conservation area today, it remains a hymn to Metroland – parquet floors and Bakelite door handles, manicured lawns, sculpted privet hedges and quiet avenues surrounding a village green; all the elements of comfortable pre-war middle-class life.

Living the first months of peace in the suburban comfort of Pinner, the Marshalls were well aware that they were very lucky to have survived the war with the family intact. A photograph taken in the garden at Woodhall Drive shows a happy, relaxed family group, the horrors of the war behind them – no inkling of the terrible tragedy ahead.

On Friday morning of 28 June, Charles Marshall drove Doreen to Waterloo Station and saw her off on the 9.30 train to Bournemouth.
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Given the huge holiday crowds mixing with recently demobbed servicemen swarming around the station, Doreen and her father may not have even noticed Faulkner’s, the busy hairdressing shop on the station concourse. The Waterloo branch was ably managed by a Mr William Heath but that day he was not at work, having pressing family issues to deal with at home.

Settling into her first-class carriage, Doreen checked her luggage, which consisted of two suitcases and her black suede clutch-style handbag. In the bag she kept a small pigskin notecase, four or five pounds in cash, her driver’s licence, about sixty clothing coupons and the return half of her railway ticket. She also carried with her a key for the house in Woodhall Drive, keys to the suitcases, a lipstick, a comb and a couple of family photographs. She powdered her face with a blue and gold enamel powder compact, oblong in shape containing rouge, powder and a space for cigarettes. Though there was a crack across the mirror of the compact, Doreen kept it as she’d been given it by her sister Joan.
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She also carried a small silver penknife in her bag, with a matching fountain pen. She had won them as a schoolgirl at an ice-skating competition at Wembley. The pen was inscribed with her name.
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Arriving at Bournemouth Station, Doreen took a taxi to the Norfolk Hotel on Richmond Hill. The hotel, one of the oldest in Bournemouth, was the only one not to have been requisitioned during the war years, so preserved a rather select reputation. The building still operates as an hotel today, opposite the Art Deco offices of the
Bournemouth Echo
, which had been built in 1932. Doreen was booked into Room 94 by the receptionist, Elsie Jones. She confirmed that she would be staying for ten days, as her letter had indicated. She signed the registration form and was shown to her room.
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That evening Doreen telephoned her father to say that she had had a comfortable journey and had arrived safely. She also had a chat on the phone with her sister and mentioned that she had talked to another guest at the hotel, an American antique dealer by the name of George Wisecarver.
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Doreen phoned home again on Sunday and told her father that she was all right, but feeling a bit lonely, so she was looking through some books in her room.
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Talking to her sister on the telephone, she mentioned that Mr Wisecarver had invited her on a trip to Exeter, but she didn’t want to go. She rang home again on Tuesday 2 July and spoke to her mother. She also sent letters to her father and sister which arrived in Pinner on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, but in these letters – her last – she didn’t refer to anybody she had met since she arrived in Bournemouth. She did write that ‘unless I speak to somebody shortly I shall scream’.

For a young woman alone, there was plenty of entertainment for Doreen to occupy herself with at the local cinemas that week. The Electric in Bournemouth was showing the new Gene Tierney picture,
Leave Her to Heaven. The Blue Dahlia
at the Odeon starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake and the Astoria at Boscombe was showing Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer in
The Rake’s Progress.
But it was too hot to sit in a dark cinema during the day, as the weather that week was glorious.

Summer came into its own yesterday [2 July] with a heatwave which, though ideal for holidaymakers, left some office workers somewhat prostrate. Sea bathers increased in number at lunchtime by Bournemouth folk going down for a preprandial dip – for some, their first bathe of the summer. The temperature rose between 3 and 4 p.m. to 80 degrees, the highest recorded so far this year.
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On the morning of Wednesday 3 July, Doreen took a walk on the promenade, packed with families at the height of the holiday season. But having been in Bournemouth for nearly a week on her own, she was now feeling isolated, bored and lonely. In her mind she had already decided that she would return home early. She would take the train back to Waterloo tomorrow. Wednesday would be her last day in Bournemouth.

That morning, whilst stopping to watch a Punch and Judy show on the promenade, Doreen was delighted to meet an engaging young man – tall, tanned, blond and handsome with startlingly blue eyes made even more remarkable by the backdrop of the sea and the cloudless blue sky above the beach. She felt at ease with him and after several days of feeling rather sorry for herself, she was glad of his company. He introduced himself as Group Captain Rupert Brook – but she must call him ‘Bobbie’ or ‘Bob’. He was extremely charming, a real gentleman. He recalled his meeting with Doreen some days later.

I was on the promenade on Westcliff when I saw two young ladies walking along the front. One was a casual acquaintance I had met at a dance at the Pavilion during the latter part of the preceding week. (Her Christian name was Peggy but I was unaware of her surname.) Although I was not formally introduced to the other young lady I gathered her name was ‘Doo’ or something similar. The girl Peggy left after half an hour and I walked along the promenade with the other girl I now know to be Miss Marshall. I invited her to have tea in the afternoon and she accepted.
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Despite later attempts by the Bournemouth police to trace ‘Peggy’, she was never found. In all probability she never existed and is one of several phantom figures that Brook conjured in his various statements. Doreen had been very open with her family that she was lonely in Bournemouth and mentioned all of the few acquaintances she had made, so it seems unlikely that she wouldn’t mention befriending another young woman if she had, indeed, met one. Brook may have been attempting to suggest that his first meeting with Doreen was more socially correct – an introduction through a mutual acquaintance than the rather casual pick-up that it was. The name ‘Peggy’ may have been inspired by his recent acquaintanceship with Peggy Waring who had only returned to London on the preceding Saturday. It seems much more plausible – and more consistent with his usual behaviour – that he noticed Doreen was alone and introduced himself. She might have stood out particularly to him because of the distinctive shock of grey hair above her right temple.