Description

In the Autumn of 1941 life seemed good for the newly-married Wren Jane Beacon.  The culmination of her efforts to get Wrens accepted as boat crew and seamen after two years battling with naval prejudice, is to be appointed as one of the trainers for the very first boat crew Wrens’ course.  This sees sixty young women trained to crew the Navy’s harbour craft, and the beginning of a revolution which would fundamentally change how the Navy saw its female counterparts.

But these good times did not last.  The war with Germany made itself brutally felt as, in quick succession, her mother and her husband were killed by enemy action.  Carrying out her normal duties as a boat Wren ‘buoy jumping’ to moor a ship, she loses three fingers when her hand is crushed.  When the captain of the ship calls on her in hospital, he insults her as an incompetent and silly girl.  This so incenses Wren Jane that she slaps the captain’s face.  Big mistake: she finds herself being court-martialled for hitting an officer, that most heinous of Naval crimes. Her sentence is to be sent to the Detention Quarters for thirty days.

Emerging from this in a state of mental breakdown fuelled by her deep resentment at the unfairness of it all she finds succour with a Wren who Jane helped to survive in the early days of the Wrens.  Her loving close embraces bring solace and equilibrium to Jane’s troubled soul.  Recovered, she sets sail once more in command of a small stores ship being used as a target in highly risky experimental work with magnetic mines.  Despite the other ship on this work being blown up, Wren Jane and her loyal Wren crew persist and succeed in making the experiments work which earns them recognition in high places.  On passage, returning it to Portsmouth, her little ship is ambushed and sunk by an E-Boat but the Wrens survive.  Once recovered they are sent to take an elderly steam picket boat from Dover to Chatham.  While waiting to sail from Dover they are called on to rescue the crew of a motor gun boat being smashed in a gale on the shore at South Foreland.  By some brilliant seamanship Jane and her crew succeed in saving them all.  The rescued crew prove to be free Norwegians and a strong relationship is struck with King Haakon of Norway, who by chance witnessed the rescue from the White Cliffs.  A new world of action with his Norwegian seamen is opened up offering dangerous but exciting prospects for Wren Jane, getting involved in the ‘Shetland Bus’.

In the background Jane finds that her husband had made a new will before going back to sea, leaving his fortune to her and although it makes little difference to her day-to-day, she finds herself a wealthy woman.  So much crammed into one year.