The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  Miss Trefusis worked behind the counter in Robertson’s grocery shop, where she spent all day making up little ounce and two-ounce parcels of rationed foods. She was nearly seventeen years old, a pretty, dark, reserved girl who had grown up late and never had much truck with boys. Lesurier, at the age of twenty-two, had played and danced with various mulatto and “high yaller” girls back home in Nashville, but had very seldom spoken to a pure white one. He was shy of Grace, and very much attracted to her at the same time.

  He saw her first at Robertson’s, where he was buying cigarettes. He could buy better cigarettes in the canteen up at the camp, but it pleased him to go into English shops and buy; it gave him a feeling of competence in a foreign land. From that time on he bought all his cigarettes at Robertson’s, in single packets of ten, that necessitated many visits.

  In spite of this assiduity, he did not get on very fast with Grace. With a sixth sense she knew he came to see her. She was shy of him and did not want much to be seen about with a black boy. As he was equally shy of her and never asked for anything except, “Ten Players, please, ma’am,” she had little difficulty in keeping him in his place. But from his many visits, a queer, tenuous little friendship came into being. She grew accustomed to him and his shy “Ten Players, please, ma’am,” and sometimes she smiled at him. She was very young and pretty when she smiled.

  Up on the hilltop the Negroes did their work efficiently and well, accelerating their own departure. In six weeks the strip was paved and usable by airplanes of the U. S. Army Air Corps. Half the Negroes were moved on to other work in other places; the remainder were set to putting up prefabricated huts and ammunition dumps, and making roadways. In their place came the first detachment of the Army Air Corps to take over the new strip.

  For a week all went well. The white American soldiers mixed amicably with the Negroes, using the bar of the White Hart on friendly terms with them and chi-hiking with them in the street. By the end of the week, however, the detachments were of about equal strength, and a stir of uneasiness was agitating the whites.

  Girls were the first and main trouble. Every eligible girl in Trenarth by that time was walking out with a black soldier, for the very good reason that there had been nobody else in the vicinity to walk out with. The white troops found to their concern that every girl was dated up by a Negro. Socially this was no great matter, for there were too few girls in Trenarth to go round in any case and there was a large camp of A.T.S. not far from Penzance willing and anxious to be taken out by the Americans. Amongst the new arrivals, however, there were a small proportion of whites from the “Deep South,” to whom the feminine vagaries of Trenarth were genuinely distressing.

  Corporal Jim Dakers, from Carthage on the Pearl River, in Leake County, Mississippi, gave expression to his feelings in the bar of the White Hart one evening.

  “You’d think these English girls would have more sense of decency than to go walking with a nigger,” he proclaimed. “What kind of a dump is this, anyway? Their folks should give them a good whipping. If they don’t, well I guess there’s other folks that will.”

  His companions said, “Aw, lay off, Jim. You’re not in the South now.”

  He said, “It sure burns me up to see the niggers getting out of hand this way.”

  Behind the bar the English landlord stood mute, faintly hostile.

  There were other irritations, too. Ninety-five per cent of the white Americans of the Army Air Corps were quiet, well-behaved, and tactful, but unfortunately the remainder were more vocal. Corporal Stanislaus Oszwiecki, from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, considered that municipal affairs were run better at home. He returned to the bar from a visit to the urinal, and said:

  “Say, what do you know? They ain’t got no sewer here. Just a kinder soak pit, ’n an earth bucket.” He turned to Mr Frobisher, the landlord. “Say, didn’t nobody ever tell you guys about modern sanitation?”

  The landlord took his pipe out of his mouth, and said slowly, “You’ll find all you want in the towns and cities in this country. It’s not necessary in a place like this.” He spoke quietly and with restraint, because he was sensitive about the lavatory accommodation of the White Hart. As soon as the village got a more adequate water supply, he meant to alter things.

  “For cryin’ out loud!” said Corporal Oszwiecki. “He says proper sanitation ain’t necessary. Say, you guys want to brush up your ideas if you’re ever goin’ to stand up to the Germans. Look what they done to you before we came—” He drew his breath in sharply—“Boy, did you see Plymouth! You British want to get around some ’n get some modern notions. The U. S. Army pulled you through last time, ’n it’ll pull you through this time. But we ain’t comin’ over every twenty years whenever you get into trouble. No, sir!”

  The landlord sucked his pipe and said nothing. A couple of white American privates got up quietly and walked out into the street. It was quiet and peaceful in the ancient village street under the moon.

  At last one said, “Stan got a little lit up.”

  The other said, “I certainly hate hearing that kind of talk. It’s not right, and it don’t do any good, either. And here’s another thing. It don’t do no good speaking about ‘niggers’ in front of colored boys.”

  “That’s right,” said the other. “Back home we never talk about a ‘nigger’ unless we want to start a row. We always call them colored folks, or maybe Negroes.”

  It did no good at all in Trenarth, nor did the growing feeling between the white and Negro soldiers. When Colonel McCulloch of the U. S. Army and of Columbus, Georgia, arrived to take over the command of the new station, he found a tension between whites and blacks, the blacks encouraged by the sympathy and friendship of the British villagers. The South has always provided a considerable proportion of the regular officers of the U. S. Army. Colonel McCulloch was a good officer, determined to pursue the war seriously, making the best of the personnel under his command.

  “Reckon these colored boys got just a mite above themselves before we came,” he said. “We’ll have to put that right.”

  To put it right, he set himself to re-impose the policy of segregation that had always worked well in the Southern states. He sent for a detachment of Military Police experienced in the segregation policy. It was not his fault that these policemen were all white and mostly from the South. He held a meeting with Captain Deane, the Negro officer in charge of the black troops, outranked him and beat him down on every point. Then he sent his secretary, Lieutenant Schultz, to see the landlord of the White Hart. As it was a formal call, Lieutenant Schultz wore his mosquito boots.

  Schultz explained his business. “The Colonel feels that friction may arise if the colored troops use the same places of recreation as the rest,” he said. He was a big, earnest young man. “Back in North Ireland there were quite a few cases of trouble, especially where troops used the same saloons. We had to make arrangements there for separate accommodation, same as we do at home, and the Colonel’s going to do that here.”

  “Aye?” said Mr Frobisher.

  Schultz said, “I’ve been telephoning to Paddington station, and the railroad company is fixing things so that the refreshment room up at the station stays open till ten o’clock, serving drinks the same as you do, starting Thursday. The Colonel says that, as from Thursday next, the Negro troops go to the refreshment room.”

  “Not much of a place for them, that,” said Mr Frobisher slowly.

  “Not for you and me, maybe,” said the lieutenant, “but it’s all right for them. You ought to see the places most of them come from back home.”

  “Aye?” said Mr Frobisher slowly. He was thinking hard.

  Schultz was young and inexperienced; to him the way seemed easy. “Well, from next Thursday you won’t serve any colored soldiers in this place,” he said; “only whites. I guess you’ll probably be glad to see the last of the black boys, won’t you?” The landlord did not answer. “Anyway, you won’t serve them any more.”

 
Mr Frobisher said slowly, “I’ll serve who I like.”

  There was a momentary pause. The lieutenant quickly realised that there was something here that he did not fully understand. He thought for a moment, and then said, “The Colonel sent me down to tell you what we’re going to do, the way we’d get co-operation. We don’t any of us want friction, fights, and such-like, in this place.”

  “There’s been no friction here,” said Mr Frobisher. “We’ve had the coloured boys here six weeks now, and never a cross word, let alone a fight. Why can’t you let things be?”

  “It’s what the Colonel says,” said Schultz, “that they must use the refreshment room from Thursday on.”

  Mr Frobisher took the pipe out of his mouth and drew himself up, dignified in his shirt sleeves. “I’ve been here twenty-seven years,” he said, “and my father before me, and never a question of the licence or a complaint from the police. I say who I serve here, not your colonel. If I say I serve the coloured boys, why then, I serve the coloured boys, and that’s all about it.”

  Schultz was nonplussed. “I can’t go back and tell the Colonel that,” he said. “You want to think this over a little, maybe.”

  Mr Frobisher said, “I’ve been thinking while you’ve been talking. I don’t want to cross your colonel. If you feel there’ll be fights if your white soldiers go on coming here along with the black boys, well, let the white boys go to the refreshment room, and let the black ones keep on coming here. That’s what I say.”

  The lieutenant stared at him, dumbfounded. “Say, Mr Frobisher,” he said, “we couldn’t do that. That’s the worse accommodation of the two!”

  “Well, then,” said the landlord, “let ’em both keep coming here. There won’t be no fights in my house, I can promise you that. Twenty-seven years I’ve held this licence, and I wouldn’t have done that, I can tell you, if I let the men get fighting.”

  “I don’t think the Colonel will agree to that,” said Schultz. “He wants to get things like we have them back at home.”

  “Well, he’s not at home now, and that’s a fact,” said Mr Frobisher. “He’s in Trenarth, and maybe we’ve got different ways to what you have at home. I don’t want to make no difficulties for you people, but if I stopped serving any man here in this country because I didn’t like the colour of his skin I’d soon lose my licence. That I would. I don’t stop serving blacks until the licencing justices say different. Not while they behave themselves.”

  The lieutenant realised that he was up against a very stubborn man. “Well,” he said, “I’ll just have to go back and tell the Colonel what you say. I guess he’d better stop off when he goes through this afternoon and have a word with you.”

  “Aye,” said the landlord affably, “ask him to look in. Maybe I’ll have thought of something by that time, something else we might do.”

  That happened in the morning, and if Colonel McCulloch had been able to look in that afternoon before the views of Mr Parsons got around the neighbourhood, it would have been a great deal better. Unfortunately, he was detained and did not come till the next day.

  Ezekiel Parsons was eighty-six years old. He had been a farm labourer in his day, and had never been further from Trenarth than Penzance. He could not read or write, and he was very deaf. Trenarth was the universe to Mr Parsons; he classed persons from villages ten miles away as foreigners equally with those from foreign countries. His wife was long dead and his family dispersed. He lived in a single attic room on the old-age pension and a small allowance from his children, and sat in a corner of the public bar of the White Hart every day, morning and evening, from opening till closing time. It was his one amusement, to sit there and watch the people. He was the oldest inhabitant, and he had long white side whiskers.

  He was well known to Jerry Bowman, the driver of the brewer’s lorry delivering the casks of beer. That morning Jerry stood the old man to a glass of mild, and asked, “What do you think of all these Americans in Trenarth, Mr Parsons?”

  The ancient piped in his old quavering voice, “I like them very well; oh, very well indeed. We get on nicely with them here. I don’t like these white ones that are coming in now, though. I hope they don’t send us no more o’ them.”

  It was too good not to be repeated; it ran round both whites and blacks that afternoon. It got to Colonel McCulloch as a good story in the evening. He did not think it a good story at all. He thought it was a very bad story indeed, and he thought about it all night.

  Bright and early the next morning he sent for Lieutenant Anderson, chief of his detachment of Military Police. Lieutenant Anderson came from Little Rock, Arkansas, and had served there in the police; he knew a good deal about “niggers.”

  The Colonel said, “Say, Anderson, we’re heading straight for trouble with these goddam niggers. They’ve been here alone too long, and they’ve got the whole darned countryside with them.”

  Lieutenant Anderson said, “I guess that’s right, Colonel. They been here alone too long, and they’ve got uppity.”

  The Colonel said, “That’s right. Mind, we got nothing to complain of yet, beyond the fact that they go walking with these darned English girls, giving them ideas. But I know and you know what’s the end of that. They get swelled heads, and then we’ll have real trouble.”

  “That’s right, Colonel.”

  “Well, now, you got to be strict with them. I don’t mean go hazing them and stirring up trouble; just—strict. We got to get things back the way they should be. Keep them smart, and crack down on them if they’re not dressed right. It won’t hurt any if we make a few examples; if you get anything to go before court-martial, for example, I’ll see they get the limit. I had some of this before, one time, and I know what can happen if you let it slide. You want to be just, and give them the square deal. But when you catch them on the hop, then you got to be plenty tough.”

  Lieutenant Anderson said, “Okay, Colonel. I get it.”

  The Colonel said, “I’m going down right now to sound out this darned saloon keeper, and get that end of it straightened out.”

  He drove down in his Command car to see Mr Frobisher, accompanied by Lieutenant Schultz. He found the landlord in his shirt sleeves polishing the glasses in the bar, for it was out of hours and the bar was empty.

  He said, “Say Mr Frobisher, I understand there’s been a mite of disagreement between you and Lieutenant Schultz here over the use of this place by the colored troops. I just stopped off to tell you why we can’t have that any more, so that you’d see it from our point of view.”

  Mr Frobisher said, “Aye?”

  Colonel McCulloch said, “Yeah. I’ve got to run the war around these parts, and I’ve got to do it with the troops they’ve given me. They’ve given me white troops and colored mixed for my command. I didn’t ask for it that way, but that’s the way it is. Well, when you get a mixed command like that you got to watch out and be mighty careful. Mr Frobisher, or they’ll be fighting and shooting and God knows what.”

  Mr Frobisher said, “Aye?”

  The Colonel said, “You got to be mighty careful with these niggers. Maybe you wouldn’t know about that in this country. You start and treat them like you would whites, before you know it they’ll be thinking they’re as good as white, telling you what to do. Then you get trouble. There’s only one way to deal with this, and that’s the way we do it back home and all through the Army. Separate recreation for the colored and the whites. Keep them apart, and then you don’t get trouble. Give the niggers a place of their own, and keep them in it. That’s the set-up I’m going to have here.”

  Mr Frobisher said, “Aye?”

  “That’s right. From Thursday next the niggers use the refreshment room up at the station. They won’t be coming in here after Wednesday night.”

  Mr Frobisher said, “I was thinking, how would it be if your whites used the parlour of an evening, and let the blacks go on in the public bar as they’ve been doing?”

  He led the way and showed them th
e parlour. It was a small room, rather dingy, with a few texts on the walls. The officers thought nothing of it. “Can’t put the boys in a dump like this,” said Schultz. Mr Frobisher did not like to hear his parlour referred to as a “dump,” but he said nothing.

  “That won’t do,” said the Colonel. “They’d have to use the same passage and the same door. No, from Thursday next the niggers go to the refreshment room.”

  “How are you going to keep them out of here?” asked Mr Frobisher.

  The Colonel said, “I’m hoping we’ll get your co-operation, Mr Frobisher. If not, I’ll have to put this place off limits to the colored troops and put a policeman outside in the street.”

  He went away, leaving Mr Frobisher uneasy and resentful.

  Late that afternoon Sergeant Lorimer, the big Negro who had mended the electric iron for the landlord’s daughter, called for Bessie to take her for a walk. They had fallen into the habit of doing this once or twice a week, after which he would return with her to tea in the parlour of the pub, finishing up the evening in the bar, playing darts.

  Outside the pub they met a military policeman. Lieutenant Anderson had his own ways of putting niggers in their place, and he had been genuinely shocked to see so many walking out with English girls. The M.P. said, “See your pass, Sergeant.”

  He stared at the pass. “Let’s see your dog tag.”

  The Negro expostulated. “Say, what’s that for?”

  “So’s I’ll know this pass is made out for you, ’n not some other nigger,” said the policeman. “Come on, step on it.”

  To get at his identity disc, slung round his neck next to his skin, Lorimer had to undo coat and muffler, disarrange his collar and tie, open his shirt and pull out the disc from beneath his undervest. Then, while Bessie waited for him, he had to dress up again.

  Twenty yards on they met another military policeman. “C’m on, Sergeant—pass and dog tag.” Again Lorimer had to undress on the pavement.

  All up and down the street Negro soldiers walking with English girls were undressing on the pavement while the girls stood giggling or irritated and the Negroes struggled with their clothes in sullen fury. After the fourth encounter, Lorimer and Bessie gave up their walk, thus fulfilling the intention of Lieutenant Anderson, and returned to the pub. The girl told her father all about it over tea.