The Far Country

by Nevil Shute

  It was a small manuscript book. It began in a hand that was feminine and strange to him, and about half the recipes in the book were written in that hand; thereafter it had been written on by Ethel Trehearn, first in an unformed, almost childish hand, later maturing into the writing that he knew. On the fly-leaf was the inscription,

  For my dear daughter, Ethel, on the happy occasion of her marriage to Geoffrey Trehearn, from her mother. June 16th, 1893.

  It had been a pleasant and a practical thought of the mother to give the bride a personal cookery book as one of her wedding presents; fifty-seven years later Edward Morton smiled a little sympathetically, as he turned the leaves. How unformed the writing of the bride was in the first entry …

  Aunt Hester’s cake (very good).

  Take two pounds of Jersey butter, two pounds best castor sugar, ½ gill of caramel, 2½ lb of flour, 18 eggs, 3 lb of currants, 3 lbs of sultanas, 1½ lbs of mixed peel, ½ lb of blanched sweet almonds, the grated rind of two lemons, a small nutmeg, 1 oz mixed spice, and ½ a pint of brandy.

  He ran his eye down the recipe with the tolerant amusement of a doctor to the final,

  —cover with almond icing and coat with royal and transparent icing. Then pipe the cake with royal icing according to taste.

  What a world to live in, and how ill they must have been! His eye ran back to the ingredients. Two pounds of Jersey butter … eight weeks’ ration for one person. The egg ration for one person for four months…. Currants and sultanas in those quantities; mixed peel, that he had not seen for years. Half a pint of brandy, so plentiful that you could put half a pint into a cake, and think nothing of it.

  He laid the book down on his knee and stared at the stove. Funny the way that things worked out sometimes. This bride had died of starvation, with nothing to eat but currants and sultanas and candied peel in the end. He wondered, had she thought in those days of “Aunt Hester’s cake (very good)”?

  Things had changed, and people no longer lived as they had done in 1893. He had eaten such cakes when he was a young man before the war of 1914, but now he could hardly remember what a cake like that would taste like. Jennifer had never eaten anything like that at all, of course, and so she couldn’t miss it. Funny how the standards of living had changed, at any rate in England.

  He thumbed the book through idly, glancing here and there at a page. Her mother had had little confidence in the memory or interest of her daughter before marriage, for she had written out the simplest recipes in full. “For breakfast, bacon and eggs. For four people, take eight eggs or more if the men will want them and about a pound of streaky bacon cut in rashers …” He could remember breakfasts like that when he was a boy—how long it seemed since he had eaten like that! He turned the pages idly. “Steak and Onions. Take three pounds of steak …”

  He had not eaten a grilled steak and onions for twelve years; perhaps Jennifer at twenty-four had never eaten it at all. People seemed to keep healthy enough on the English rationed food. He was approaching sixty years of age himself and he knew well, perhaps too well, that men of his years think everything was better organised when they were young. It was an old man’s fancy, doubtless, that the young men were more virile in England, and the girls prettier, in 1914 than they were today. People kept healthy enough, but they had not the zest for life that they had had when he was young. Jennifer with her auburn hair looked pale and sallow most of the time, but at twenty-four she should be in her prime.

  He laid the cookery book aside, too precious to destroy; though it might only be of academic interest in England now it was a pity to throw away a little book that had been prized for so many years. He turned over and tore up masses of old letters, only glancing at the signatures in case they were autographs of famous people, and he retained one or two. Then he shook out the contents of a cardboard box that once held envelopes, and out fell dance programmes, dozens and dozens of them.

  It was years since he had seen the little cards, heavily embossed with gilt and coloured lettering, with little pencils attached by a thread of silk. How thick and fine the paper was, how generous! Dance programmes with little pencils attached seemed to have gone out in England, perhaps because of fashion or perhaps because of paper rationing; if they were used, however, cards like that would cost two or three shillings each, with printing, pencils, purchase tax, and everything. Things had been cheaper, easier, and more gracious when Ethel had been young. And how many of the cards there were, how many dances she had been to! There were thirty-five or forty of them; assuming she had kept the programme of every dance that she had ever been to, which seemed unlikely, even so it was a considerable number of formal dances for a young girl to attend. She had been married at twenty-two, younger than Jennifer. He was quite sure that Jennifer had not been to thirty-five or forty formal dances. People didn’t seem to give them so much now as they had in his young days; perhaps it had grown too expensive.

  There were photographs almost by the hundred. He discarded the faded, sepia snapshots, hardly looking at them; there could be nothing worth keeping in those. He paused longer over the professional portraits. One was a very grand affair, hand-tinted by a photographer in Dover Street; it showed a mother and daughter in Court dress, the long trains sweeping from behind each side of the standing pair. He could see the Ethel he had first met as a middle-aged woman in the features of the girl. But what a dress, and what a train! White silk with delicate lines of a pale rose pink, showy and ornate by modern standards, it might be, but very lovely all the same. And what jewellery for a young girl to wear! That necklace, carefully worked up by the tinter, apparently of gold and rubies. Jennifer had never worn a dress or jewellery like that, and yet she came of the same family. He put the photograph aside, thinking that Jennifer might like to see her grandmother as a young woman.

  There was a little bundle of letters tied with ribbon, perhaps love letters. He hesitated for a moment, thinking to throw them away unread; then he undid them and glanced at the signatures. They were all signed “Jane”. He picked one for its embossed letterhead and glanced it through. It was dated March 5th, 1919, and it read,

  “s.s. Mooltan.

  “In the Mediterranean.

  “MY DARLING AUNT,

  “I would have written to post at Gibraltar but I’ve been terribly seasick ever since we left England just like being in a funny story only I didn’t think it funny at all. Jack was only sick one day but I was in my bunk for five days, all through the Bay, in a cabin with five other girls all married to Australians and going out like us, all sick together except one. I felt awfully silly and very glad in a way that Jack and I couldn’t have a cabin together because it would have been horrid for him with me being sick all the time. However, it seems to be over now and I’ve been sitting out on deck in the hot sun for two days and going into the saloon for every meal, and eating like a horse.

  “I wanted to write to you before now to thank you for all you have done for us over the last year. I believe you were the only one of the whole family who didn’t faint at the idea of me marrying an Australian soldier and who really tried to make Jack feel at home and one of us. I’m sorry in a way that I’m leaving England and going out to live so far away, sorry that I shan’t see Father and Mother again for years and years, or perhaps at all. But these last few months haven’t been a very happy time as I suppose you know, and though I’m sorry to be leaving everyone and everything I know, I’m glad at the same time, if you know what I mean. I’m glad to be out of all the complications and unpleasantness and able to start fresh in a new place with Jack.

  “We’re going to have a hard time for the first few years, much harder than if I’d been a good girl and stayed at home and married one of Father’s officers, solid bone from the chin upwards. I might have done that if it hadn’t been for the war, but two years in the W.A.A.C.s make one different. Jack has been promised a job with a firm called Dalgety which means going round the cattle and sheep stations selling machinery and stuff like that t
o the farmers in a place called Gippsland; we shan’t have much money but he’s got a house for us through his uncle in a little market town called Korrumburra somewhere in the depths of the country. I’ll write and give you the address as soon as ever I know it; write to me sometimes, because although I’m glad to be going I expect I shall be lonely sometimes, and longing for letters.

  “I don’t know how to thank you for being so sweet to Jack. It meant an awful lot to him to find one of my family who really liked him for himself—besides me, of course. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to do anything for you like you’ve done for us, like the elephant and the mouse. Only I’d like to call one of our children Ethel if there is a girl. I think I’m in the family way already but I’m not quite sure, so don’t tell anybody yet.

  “Our very, very dearest love to you and Uncle Geoffrey.

  “Your affectionate niece,

  “JANE.”

  Morton was tired now. He had barely sorted one of the three suitcases, but he was too tired to go on that night; the white bed beckoned him in invitation. He folded the letter carefully and put it with the others of the bundle and retied the ribbon. Better to keep that lot, or send them back, perhaps, to Jane Dorman in Australia.

  He had never met Jane Dorman and he knew little of her but that she had made an unfortunate marriage with an Australian soldier after the first war, and had left the country with him, and had never been home since. That was all that he had known about her twelve hours ago; in those hours she had come alive for him, and now she was a real person. She had formed her own life and battled through, and now she had attained a point where she could send five hundred pounds to her old aunt to quell a fear for her that he had never felt. Jane Dorman, twelve thousand miles away, in her enduring affection had sensed that Ethel Trehearn was ill and short of money. Her daughter, who was his wife, and he, living no more than a hundred miles away from the old lady, had had no idea that anything was wrong.

  Jane and Jack Dorman, from her recent letter, had become wealthy people now, far better off than he himself. He could hardly have found five hundred shillings for the old lady without selling something. It wasn’t that he was extravagant, or Mary, either. In these days, in England and in general practice, the money just wasn’t there, and that was all about it.

  He got into bed and turned off the light, but sleep did not come easily. How well Ethel Trehearn had lived when she was a young woman; how incredible it all seemed now! And yet, thinking back over his own youth, perhaps not quite so incredible. The standard of living had slipped imperceptibly in England as year succeeded year, as war succeeded war. His own father had been a doctor before him but in York. He could remember how he lived as a boy in the big house in Clifton now used as part of the municipal offices of York and full of draughtsman. They had kept a coachman and a groom before the days of motor-cars, and a horse for his father’s dog-cart, and a horse for the brougham. There had been a whole-time gardener, and always two servants in the house, and sometimes three. It was unthinkable in his father’s household that there should be any shortage of any food for family or servants; there always seemed to be plenty of money for anything they wanted to do, nor did his father have to work particularly hard. Only the most urgent cases ever called him out on Sunday, and all through the winter one day in each week was sacred to the shooting. It was a good life, that, that Ethel Trehearn had known as a young woman, and his father. It might some day come again in England, but not in his own time.

  He turned restlessly in his bed, unable to sleep. It was easy to say that good times would come again in England, but was it true? In each year of the peace food had got shorter and shorter, more and more expensive, and taxation had risen higher and higher. He was now living on a lower scale than in the war-time years; the decline had gone on steadily, if anything increasing in momentum, and there seemed no end to it. Where would it all end, and what lay ahead of the young people of today in England? What lay ahead of Jennifer?

  He lay uneasily all night, a worried and an anxious man. He got up at dawn and went out for a short walk before breakfast, as was his habit. He met Jennifer at the breakfast table and they talked of the work that lay before them, the undertaker coming at ten o’clock, the search for a second-hand furniture dealer to make an offer for the furniture left in the house, the estate agent to be found who would sell the house itself. These were easy and straightforward matters that had to be attended to before Morton went back to his practice in Leicester; more difficult was the personal matter that he must talk over with his daughter.

  He broached it as they walked through the suburban streets. “I’ve been thinking about you going to Australia, Jenny,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said, for and against. I don’t think we want to decide anything too hastily.”

  She glanced at him in surprise. “You don’t think I ought to go, Daddy?”

  “1 don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to think. There’s this four hundred pounds dumped right into your lap, so to speak, and that’s what she wanted you to do with it. It might not be a bad idea to go out for a few months and see if you like it. There should be plenty of money to pay your passage out and home.”

  “I wouldn’t want to stay out there, Daddy. I couldn’t leave you and Mummy.”

  “We wouldn’t want to lose you, Jenny. But I must say, I get worried sometimes thinking of the way things are going here.”

  The girl was silent. Even in her own memory the stringencies in her parents’ home had increased; her own wage packet bought a good deal less than it had bought two years before. With the optimism of youth she said, “We’ll get an election and a change of Government before long. Then everything will get cheap again, won’t it?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could think so. I don’t think it’s anything to do with Socialism. It’s been going on for thirty years, this has, this getting poorer and poorer. Too many people to feed here in England, out of too few fields. It’s the food-producing countries that’ll be the ones to live in in the future. You can see it now. Look at Jane Dorman!”

  “That’s wool, Daddy. They didn’t make their money out of food. They made it out of wool.”

  “Well, we’ve got to have wool, and we don’t grow enough of our own. I’m dressed in it almost entirely. So are you.”

  Jennifer thought of her winter clothes. “Mostly, in this weather,” she agreed. They walked on for a time in silence. “If I went out to Australia I’d have to get a job,” she said. “I couldn’t just go out and live upon Aunt Jane.”

  He nodded. “You could do that all right. I expect they want secretaries in Victoria.”

  “What’s the capital of Victoria, Daddy? Is it Adelaide?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I think that’s over on the west coast somewhere. I’d have to look at an atlas.”

  Later in the day, when they were having tea in the kitchen of her grandmother’s house before going back to the hotel, Jennifer said, “Of course, I’d like to go out to Australia for the trip. The only thing is, I wouldn’t want to stay there.”

  “You’ve never been out of England, have you, Jenny?”

  “I’ve been to France,” she said. “I’d love to go like that, if one could look on it as just a holiday. Six months or so. But I’d never want to go and live out there.”

  “Why not?”

  She struggled to express herself. “This is our place; this is where we belong. We’re English, not Australian.”

  He thought for a minute. “I suppose that’s right. But that’s not the way the British Empire was created.”

  “You don’t want me to stay out there for good, do you, Daddy?”

  “I want you to do what’s best for you,” he said. “I’m worried, Jenny, and I don’t mind telling you. If this decline goes on, I’m worried over what may happen to you before you die.”

  “That’s what Granny said,” the girl replied uncertainly. “She said that she was worried for me. Everybody seems to
be worrying about me. I can look after myself.”

  Her father smiled. “All the same,” he said, “no harm in going on a six months’ trip out to Australia if it gets dropped into your lap.”

  “It seems such a waste of money.”

  “It’s what she gave it to you for,” he said. “But it’s your money to do what you like with. Think it over.”

  The funeral was on Saturday, and after it was over Jennifer went with her father to St. Pancras to see him off. Then she travelled down by train to Blackheath through the drab suburbs of New Cross and Lewisham. As she went the blazing Australian deserts, the wide cattle stations, the blue seas and coral islands that she had read about in novels danced before her eyes; it seemed incredible that these things could be within her grasp, these places could be hers to go to if she wished. Only the inertia of giving up her job and going, of getting out of her rut, now stood between her and these places.

  She had a duty to perform on the Sunday, the duty of writing to Jane Dorman at this queer address, “Leonora, Merrijig, Victoria” to tell her of the death of Ethel Trehearn, and to tell her about the disposition of her five hundred pounds. She sat down on Sunday morning to write this letter; when she had finished, it was a straight, factual account of what had happened, with the unpleasant fact glossed over that the old lady’s death had been virtually from starvation. She could not bring herself to tell anyone in another country that such things could happen in England. At the end she wrote,

  “As it stands now, I’ve got four hundred of your five hundred pounds, and I’m not too happy about it. She gave it me because she wanted me to go out to Australia and see if I would like to make my life out there, and to visit you. I should like to see you, of course, but as for living in Australia I think it’s very unlikely that I’d like it; I suppose I’m incurably English. If I did come I’d have to get a job, of course; I’m a qualified shorthand typist with four years’ experience since I got my diploma. Do you think I could get a job in Melbourne, or would that be difficult?