The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  Mollie had left her job to come and see him, but Mr Turner said, “Well, no; I suppose not.”

  Phil Morgan did not often get a letter from his wife, but his friends wrote to him from time to time. Two days before he left the hospital he came to talk to Captain Turner, troubled. “I do wish people wouldn’t write things like this,” he said. “It’s absolutely all right, of course …” He handed Turner one sheet of a letter:

  … and we had a wizard time. We couldn’t get anywhere to sleep in London because you have to book a room weeks ahead now, so we rang up Joyce and she said we could come and sleep at her flat. She had a chap called Bristow there, a two-striper from 602 Squadron, and he said he had given up looking for a bedroom in London now and he always went and slept with Joyce, in a manner of speaking, of course. We got some sausage and stuff from the NAAFI and cooked supper about one in the morning, and Bristow had a bottle of whiskey and I had one of gin so we were well away. We all felt like death the next day, but it was a good party.

  Captain Turner read this through; the exposed portion of his face was a poker face. “Nothing in that,” he said. “It was kind of friendly of your wife to look after your friends.”

  “I know …” The boy turned to the letter in his hands. “There’s only just the sitting room and the bedroom,” he said at last.

  “Well, that’s all right. Your friends wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t like ’n go and write to you about it.”

  “Oh, it’s not them.” He hesitated. “It’s this chap Bristow.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, he’s got a lot of money, and he can give her things—furs and things I simply haven’t the money to get. He’s awfully kind. But …” He hesitated, and then said, “The poor kid’s had such a packet of losing husbands, she sort of feels she’s got to be safe, whatever happens. If I’d gone for a Burton on my second tour, or any time, I think this chap Bristow would be Number Four.”

  “I see,” said Captain Turner thoughtfully.

  “It’s all perfectly all right, of course,” said Morgan. “It’s only that she’s so attractive people go mad over her. It’s not her fault that happens.”

  “Of course not,” said Turner.

  Two days later Phil Morgan was discharged from hospital.

  “I wish to God I hadn’t lost that parcel,” he said. “I don’t like going up to London with nothing for her. She gets such a lot of presents …”

  In the moonlit garden his wife stirred beside Turner. “Well, that’s nothing,” she said. “actresses and that, they’ve got different standards.”

  “Actress, my foot!” said Mr Turner. “She wasn’t an actress at all, not till they brought in conscription for women and she had to get a job.” He turned to her. “You remember, we went to see ‘Smile Sweetly, Lady’? The chambermaid—she hadn’t got much to do.”

  Mollie nodded. “Irene Morton wore a lovely pyjama suit. You remember them pyjamas? Ever so lovely they were. Silly sort of play, though. We went on and had dinner at Frascati’s. Remember?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner thoughtfully. “Good evening, that one.”

  He glanced at her. “I sort of worried more about Phil Morgan than either of the others,” he said. “He was married to a bitch that didn’t care a sausage for him. But a chap can butt his way through all that sort of trouble.”

  He paused. “It was sort of—there was nothing to him, if you get me,” he said. “There he was, twenty-two years old, and not a thought in his head beyond the perishing aeroplanes. Might have been a kid of ten. Got himself in a bloody mess through marrying a bitch like that, and probably go on getting into mess after mess, unless he got killed in an aeroplane first. But I reckon he was too good for that. He was good at flying; the only thing he was good at. I dunno what would have become of a chap like that. He just knew nothing, absolutely nothing at all.”

  His wife said, “Well, I dunno. People get more sense as they get older and get settled down in jobs. What about the nigger?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner, “he was the last one. I was much better when he got up. There was just the two of us left in the ward then, and the guard on the door just the same.” He paused, and then he said, “Funny thing about that chap,” he said. “He didn’t talk like a nigger at all. He talked just like any other Yank soldier—better than most, maybe.”

  “Pretty simple, I suppose,” she said. “I mean they don’t know much, do they? I don’t suppose you found much to talk about with him.”

  “Well, I dunno,” he said. “We got along all right.”

  She glanced at him, puzzled. “Was he a proper nigger, then?”

  “Oh yes, he was a nigger all right. Sort of milk chocolate colour, he was, with black kinky hair. He’d got some white blood in him, I should think, but not a lot.” He paused. “Quite young, he was—only about twenty.”

  By the time Turner was allowed out of bed, the screen had been taken away from around him and the whole of his face was uncovered. He still had a dressing on the wound, but he was sitting up in bed and taking notice of things. He had spoken once or twice to the Negro before, but their beds were on opposite sides of the room, and that made conversation difficult for Turner with his wounded head and for the Negro with the deep wound in his throat. It was not until Lesurier was up and in a dressing gown that they were able to approach each other sufficiently closely for easy talk.

  Turner said, “How does it feel, now you’re up?”

  The Negro said, “I don’t feel so good right now. Say, if I’d known that cutting your throat gave you septicaemia, I sure would have made a job of it.”

  “Or else not done it at all,” said Turner.

  The Negro paused for a moment in abstraction. “Well,” he said at last, “that would have been another way.” He turned to Turner. “Now I’m up and around, if you want anything, Cap’n, just say.”

  “Righto,” said Turner, and went on reading his paper.

  He could not read continuously at that time, or for very long; it made his eyes ache and he had to stop. The Negro also had a paper and copies of the “Stars and Stripes” and “Yank,” but most of the time he sat in sad, thoughtful abstraction in a wicker chair, or stood in silence looking out of the window at the pleasant, undulating Cornish country scene. In the middle of the afternoon Turner said, “What about a game of draughts? Can you play draughts?”

  The other roused himself. “Surely, Cap’n.” He got up and fetched the board and the cardboard box that held the pieces. “You know,” he said, making conversation, “back home we call this checkers.”

  They set up the board on Turner’s bed, and arranged the pieces.

  “Where’s your home?” asked Turner, also making conversation. “What part of the States do you come from?”

  “Nashville,” said the Negro. “Nashville, in the State of Tennessee.”

  Turner thought for a moment. “That’s over somewhere in the West, isn’t it? Or is that Texas?”

  “No, sir. Tennessee is in the South, between the Lakes and Florida. Not right South like Mississippi or Louisiana, just halfway South.”

  “I see,” said Turner, not much interested. “Been over here long?”

  “Four-and-a-half months.” They began to play.

  “Do you like it over here?”

  “It’s a long way from home, Cap’n,” said the Negro quietly. “You get to feeling sometimes that you’re quite a ways from home, and then you get lonely. But most of us colored boys like England pretty well.”

  Presently Turner asked, “What do you do in Nashville? What do you work at?”

  “I got a job with the Filtair Corporation.”

  “What’s that?”

  The Negro glanced at him, surprised. “Why, that’s quite a business, Cap’n, back in Nashville. They got over five thousand hands working now, with war contracts. Make air cleaners for autos and trucks and tanks, and airplane engines, too.” He paused, and then he said, “My Dad, he’s been with them o
ver twelve years now. That’s a long while to be with one corporation in the States, specially for a colored person.”

  “What does he do there?”

  “Runs the print machine, making the blueprints from the drawings. He’s a draftsman really, makes a darned fine engineering drawing. We lived up in Hartford when I was a lil’ boy, and he worked there as a draftsman. Then we moved back down South because his pa died and Grandma needed looking after. But I guess there’s difficulties in the South you don’t get in Connecticut. Yes, my dad works in the print room.” He said that he had been sent to the James Hollis School for Colored Boys in Nashville.

  The ex-draughtsman had given his son as good an education as a coloured boy could get.

  “Pa wanted me to be a draftsman too, and I did the course at school, and I liked it well enough. But then when I left school I couldn’t get a start nohow. No, sir; not in Nashville!”

  “Why not?”

  The Negro looked at him. “Things is mighty funny in some states,” he said quietly. “In Filtair, colored people don’t do drafting. I guess if I’d gone up to Hartford I’d have got a start all right, but Ma was poorly, and not much money, either. I got taken on as a garage hand at Filtair; it’s all colored in the garage. Then I got to drive a truck for them, and then they put the filters on the Type 83 Bulldozer for desert service, and I got to driving that around sometimes for experimental trials. Then when I got drafted they found I knew how to drive a bulldozer so they put me into a construction unit.” He thought for a minute. “I guess I’d have been in a construction unit anyway,” he said. “They don’t send us on combat service.”

  In the winter of 1942 he had been moved across the Atlantic; he was stationed for a month or two in Northern Ireland with his unit. An airstrip had been needed in the region of Penzance. By March 1943, his construction company, with three others, was working on a hilltop just above the little village of Trenarth, four miles from Penzance, levelling the fields, breaking down walls, demolishing farmhouses, making roads and runways.

  Trenarth is a little place on the railway, at the junction of the main line and the North Coast line. It is a place of about a thousand inhabitants, with a small market square, a church built in the year 1356, and a public house. The construction companies were all Negro except for a few white technicians; the impact of fifteen hundred coloured soldiers on this little place was considerable.

  “I like Trenarth,” he said. “I guess we all do.”

  There were some misunderstandings to be cleared up when they first arrived. A party of white American surveyors from the Eighth Air Force had come first to pick the site and mark it out, and they had told the village about the blacks who would arrive in a few days. They said that the Negro soldiers who were coming were rather primitive, and that the villagers would have to be both careful and tolerant. They said the Negroes could speak little English and did not understand the use of lavatories. When they were hungry, they would bark like a dog, and they had small, rudimentary tails concealed within their trousers, which made it difficult for them to sit down. Having drunk their beer and marked the site and had their fun with perfectly straight faces, the surveyors went away, and left the village in perplexity.

  Old Mr Marston, the gardener at the vicarage, raised the matter in the White Hart one night. “I asked Mr Kendall if it’s true what they were saying about these black soldiers that are coming,” he said. “About them barking when they want their victuals. He says it’s all just a story they were telling us, to get a rise out of us.”

  “Aye, that’s right,” said Mr Frobisher, the landlord of the pub. “They was just pulling our legs. Negroes don’t have tails, not any that I heard of.”

  A mournful little man who worked as a porter at the station said, “Well, I don’t think they was pulling our legs at all. Very nice and straight they spoke to me, they did. That corporal, he said this lot come straight from Africa. Africans, they are—that’s why they can’t speak English. There’s rum things happen in Africa, believe me.”

  The consensus of opinion was that the stories were improbable, but that it would be prudent to maintain a strict reserve when the visitors arrived.

  The story reached the Negro soldiers very quickly. In the March dusk, after their evening meal in the rough camp they were making on the bleak hilltop, a few coloured men walked down into the village. They came in a little party, smiling broadly. As they passed each villager they gave a realistic imitation of a pack of hungry dogs. They thought it was a great joke, and barked at everybody in tones varying from Pekinese to bloodhound. By the time they reached the White Hart, the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers to whom was owed some sort of apology.

  “They were real friendly, right from that first evening,” said Lesurier. “They made us feel like we were regular fellows.”

  It was not only that the villagers were conscious of their own stupidity. At that time there had been a great deal of prominence given in the English newspapers to the assistance America was sending in Lease-Lend, and this assistance was obvious to everybody in Trenarth in the increasing numbers of American tractors, trucks, and jeeps to be seen in the streets. Like others, Bessie Frobisher, the buxom daughter of the landlord, had half believed the stories she had heard about the Negroes, and felt in a dim way that she owed recompense to these black, soft-spoken, well-behaved strangers in the bar. So she got out her electric iron, which had not functioned for a month, and brought it into the bar and put it on the counter, and said, “Can any of you mend an iron?”

  Sergeant Sam Lorimer picked it up in his enormous pink-palmed hands. “Sure, lady,” he said, “I can fix that for you.” He turned it over, examining it. “It don’t get hot no more?” he asked.

  She said, “It doesn’t get hot at all now. It used to be ever so good. It’s a job to get anything mended now, you know.”

  He called across the bar, “Hey, Dave, lend me your screw driver?”

  Lesurier lent his screw driver, and with that and a jack-knife they disembowelled the iron on the counter while the girl watched, picked up the broken thread of filament and made it fast, and re-assembled it. They tried it in a lamp socket and it got hot at once.

  “It’s all okay now,” said Lorimer, “but the filament won’t last so long—it’s kind of rotten. It gets that way as it gets old.”

  “You can get new parts for irons like that,” said one, “I see them that day we was in Belfast.”

  “That’s so,” said Lorimer. “Maybe we could get one in Penzance.” He passed the iron back to Bessie. “Well, there you are, lady. It’s fixed right now, until it goes again.”

  She smiled at him. “It’s ever so kind of you to take the trouble,” she said. She turned to her father. “Dad, this gentleman’s mended my iron, and it works beautifully.”

  She used her normal language without thinking anything about it, but each Negro within hearing caught the word “gentleman” and stiffened for a moment in wonder. They certainly were in a foreign country, a long ways from home.

  Frobisher passed his hand over the iron to feel its warmth, and turned to Lorimer. “Aye, it works all right,” he said. “Will you take something on the house? A glass of beer?”

  The big Negro hung his head, smiling and confused. “Well, that’s real kind of you, mister,” he said.

  Within a few days the boys were fixing everything. They liked fixing things. They fixed the leg of the settee in the saloon bar, and they fixed the gate leading to old Mrs Pocock’s cottage garden. They fixed the Vicar’s Austin Seven, and they fixed the bit of wall by the war memorial, that a truck had knocked down. They fixed the counter flap of Robertson’s grocery shop, and they fixed the wheel of Mr Penlee’s dung cart. When Penlee gave them tea with all his family in the farm kitchen, as some recompense for what they had done to his cart, they were so overwhelmed that they turned up next Sunday in a body and limewashed his cow house.

  They fixed everything tha
t needed fixing in Trenarth in a very few weeks. In a country that had been at war for over four years, with every able-bodied man and woman called up for industry or for the forces, their presence was a real help to the village; the people liked them for it, and for their unfailing courtesy and good humour. They were well paid by English standards and they brought prosperity to Trenarth, which was a factor in their favour, but more important was the willing work they did; England in wartime had plenty of money, if little to spend it on. Some of them were gardeners in civil life, and used to come up shyly and ask if they might work in the garden, asking for nothing but the pleasure of tending flowers. Some of them were farm hands, and wanted to do nothing better in their spare time than to help the land girls clean the muck out of the cow houses. Inevitably they were asked in to a meal as interesting and honoured guests, and equally inevitably they would take the farmer’s daughter or the land girl to the pictures in Penzance.

  They had a grand time in those early days. They used to bring a couple of trucks down from the camp on Saturday afternoons to pick up the girls, and drive off to Penzance to the pictures in a great merry party, thirty or forty black young men and as many white girls, all laughing and jammed together in the great trucks, having a fine time.

  The Vicar, Mr Kendall, held unconventional views on most of the controversial subjects in the world, which no doubt accounted for the fact that at the age of fifty-three he had progressed no further than the living of St Jude’s, Trenarth. He stood with Mr Frobisher one afternoon, watching one of these expeditions as it started off, and said, “We’ll have a few black babies to look after, presently.”

  Mr Frobisher rubbed his chin. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “It’s the girls’ own business if they do. Colour apart, I like these fellows well enough, I must say.”

  The Vicar nodded. “I’d rather have them than some others of our gallant Allies,” he said darkly.

  It was in that halcyon time that Private David Lesurier became acquainted with Miss Grace Trefusis.