by Nevil Shute
NEVIL SHUTE
Pied Piper
Nevil Shute Norway was born in 1899 in Ealing, London. He studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. Following his childhood passion, he entered the fledgling aircraft industry as an aeronautical engineer working to develop airships and, later, airplanes. In his spare time he began writing and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926, using the name Nevil Shute to protect his engineering career. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they had two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), A Town Like Alice (1950), and On the Beach (1957).
ALSO BY NEVIL SHUTE
NOVELS
Marazan
The Mysterious Aviator (UK title, So Disdained)
Lonely Road
Kindling (UK title, Ruined City)
Ordeal (UK title, What Happened to the Corbetts)
An Old Captivity
Landfall
Pastoral
Most Secret
The Chequer Board
No Highway
A Town Like Alice
Round the Bend
The Far Country
In the Wet
The Breaking Wave (UK title, Requiem for a Wren)
Beyond the Black Stump
On the Beach
The Rainbow and the Rose
Trustee from the Toolroom
Stephen Morris and Pilotage
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Slide Rule
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Copyright
Chapter One
His name is John Sidney Howard, and he is a member of my club in London. I came in for dinner that night at about eight o’clock, tired after a long day of conferences about my aspect of the war. He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the door mat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow.
He peered down at the mat and poked it with his umbrella. ‘Damned thing caught my toe,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Peters. Getting old, I suppose.’
The man smiled. ‘Several of the gentlemen have caught their foot there recently, sir,’ he said. ‘I was speaking to the Steward about it only the other day.’
The old man said: ‘Well, speak to him again and go on speaking till he has it put right. One of these days you’ll have me falling dead at your feet. You wouldn’t like that to happen—eh?’ He smiled quizzically.
The porter said: ‘No, sir, we shouldn’t like that to happen.’
‘I should think not. Not the sort of thing one wants to see happen in a club. I don’t want to die on a doormat. And I don’t want to die in a lavatory, either. Remember the time that Colonel Macpherson died in the lavatory, Peters?’
‘I do, sir. That was very distressing.’
‘Yes.’ He was silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘Well, I don’t want to die that way, either. See he gets that mat put right. Tell him I said so.’
‘Very good, sir.’
The old man moved away. I had been waiting behind him while all this was going on because the porter had my letters. He gave them to me at the wicket, and I looked them through. ‘Who was that?’ I asked idly.
He said: ‘That was Mr. Howard, sir.’
‘He seemed to be very much concerned about his latter end.’
The porter did not smile. ‘Yes, sir. Many of the gentlemen talk in that way as they get on. Mr. Howard has been a member here for a great many years.’
I said more courteously: ‘Has he? I don’t remember seeing him about.’
The man said: ‘He has been abroad for the last few months, I think, sir. But he seems to have aged a great deal since he came back. Getting rather frail now, I’m afraid.’
I turned away. ‘This bloody war is hard on men of his age,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir. That’s very true.’
I went into the club, slung my gas-mask on to a peg, unbuckled my revolver-belt and hung it up, and crowned the lot with my cap. I strolled over to the tape and studied the latest news. It was neither good nor bad. Our Air Force was still knocking hell out of the Ruhr; Rumania was still desperately bickering with her neighbours. The news was as it had been for three months, since France was overrun.
I went in and had my dinner. Howard was already in the dining-room; apart from us the room was very nearly empty. He had a waiter serving him who was very nearly as old as he was himself, and as he ate his dinner the waiter stood beside his table and chatted to him. I could hardly help overhearing the subject of their conversation. They were talking about cricket, re-living the Test Matches of 1925.
Because I was eating alone I finished before Howard, and went up to pay my bill at the desk. I said to the cashier: ‘That waiter over there—what’s his name?’
‘Jackson, sir?’
‘That’s right. How long has he been here?’
‘Oh, he’s been here a long time. All his life, you might say. Eighteen ninety-five or ninety-six he come here, I believe.’
‘That’s a very long time.’
The man smiled as he gave me my change. ‘It is, sir. But Porson—he’s been here longer than that.’
I went upstairs to the smoking-room and stopped before a table littered with periodicals. With idle interest I turned over a printed list of members. Howard, I saw, had joined the club in 1896. Master and man, then, had been rubbing shoulders all their lives.
I took a couple of illustrated weeklies, and ordered coffee. Then I crossed the room to where the two most comfortable chairs in my club stand side by side, and prepared to spend an hour of idleness before returning to my flat. In a few minutes there was a step beside me and Howard lowered his long body into the other chair. A boy, unasked, brought him coffee and brandy.
Presently he spoke. He said quietly: ‘It really is a most extraordinary thing that you can’t get a decent cup of coffee in this country. Even in a club like this they can’t make coffee.’
I laid down my paper. If the old man wanted to talk to me, I had no great objection. All day I had been working with my eyes in my old-fashioned office, reading reports and writing dockets. It would be good to take off my spectacles for a little time and un-focus my eyes. I was very tired.
I felt in my pocket for my spectacle-case. I said: ‘A chap who deals in coffee once told me that ground coffee won’t keep in our climate. It’s the humidity, or something.’
‘Ground coffee goes off in any climate,’ he said dogmatically. ‘You never get a proper cup of coffee if you buy it like that. You have to buy the beans and grind it just before you make it. But that’s what they won’t do.’
He went on talking about coffee and chicory and things like that for a time. Then, by a natural association, we talked about the brandy. He approved of the club brandy. ‘I used to have an interest in a wine business,’ he said. ‘A great many years ago, in Exeter. But I disposed of it soon after the last war.’
I gathered that he was a member of the Wine Committee of the club. I said: ‘It must be rather interesting to run a business like that.’
‘
Oh, certainly,’ he said with relish. ‘Good wine is a most interesting study—most interesting, I can assure you.’
We were practically the only people in the long, tall room. We spoke quietly as we lay relaxed beside each other in our chairs, with long pauses between sentences. When you are tired there is pleasure in a conversation taken in sips, like old brandy.
I said: ‘I used to go to Exeter a good deal when I was a boy.’
The old man said: ‘I know Exeter very well indeed. I lived there for forty years.’
‘My uncle had a house at Starcross.’ And I told him the name.
He smiled. ‘I used to act for him. We were great friends. But that’s a long time ago now.’
‘Act for him?’
‘My firm used to act for him. I was a partner in a firm of solicitors, Fulljames and Howard.’ And then, reminiscent, he told me a good deal about my uncle and about the family, about his horses and about his tenants. The talk became more and more a monologue; a word or two from me slipped in now and then kept him going. In his quiet voice he built up for me a picture of the days that now are gone for ever, the days that I remember as a boy.
I lay smoking quietly in my chair, with the fatigue soaking out of me. It was a perfect godsend to find somebody who could talk of other things beside the war. The minds of most men revolve round this war or the last war, and there is a nervous urge in them which brings the conversation round to war again. But war seems to have passed by this lean old man. He turned for his interests to milder topics.
Presently, we were talking about fishing. He was an ardent fisherman, and I have fished a little. Most naval officers take a rod and a gun with them in the ship. I had fished on odd afternoons ashore in many parts of the world, usually with the wrong sort of fly and unsuccessfully, but he was an expert. He had fished from end to end of these islands and over a great part of the Continent. In the old days the life of a country solicitor was not an exacting one.
When he spoke of fishing and of France, it put me in mind of an experience of my own. ‘I saw some chaps in France doing a damn funny sort of fly fishing,’ I said. ‘They had a great bamboo pole about twenty-five feet long with the line tied on the end of it—no reel. They used wet flies, and trailed them about in rough water.’
He smiled. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s how they do it. Where did you see them fishing like that?’
‘Near Gex,’ I said. ‘Practically in Switzerland.’
He smiled reflectively. ‘I know that country very well—very well indeed,’ he said. ‘Saint-Claude. Do you know Saint-Claude?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know the Jura. That’s somewhere over by Morez, isn’t it?’
‘Yes—not very far from Morez.’ He was silent for a few moments; we rested together in that quiet room. Presently he said: ‘I wanted to try that wet fly fishing in those streams this summer. It’s not bad fun, you know. You have to know where the fish go for their food. It’s not just a matter of dabbing the flies about anywhere. You’ve got to place them just as carefully as a dry fly.’
‘Strategy,’ I said.
‘That’s the word. The strategy is really just the same.’
There was another of those comfortable pauses. Presently I said: ‘It’ll be some time before we can go fishing out there again.’ So it was I who turned the conversation to the war. It’s diffcult to keep off the subject.
He said: ‘Yes—it’s a very great pity. I had to come away before the water was fit to fish. It’s not much good out there before the very end of May. Before then the water’s all muddy and the rivers are running very full—the thawing snows, you know. Later than that, in August, there’s apt to be very little water to fish in, and it gets too hot. The middle of June is the best time.’
I turned my head. ‘You went out there this year?’ Because the end of May that he had spoken of so casually was the time when the Germans had been pouring into France through Holland and Belgium, when we had been retreating on Dunkirk and when the French were being driven back to Paris and beyond. It didn’t seem to be a terribly good time for an old man to have gone fishing in the middle of France.
He said: ‘I went out there in April. I meant to stay for the whole of the summer, but I had to come away.’
I stared at him, smiling a little. ‘Have any difficulty in getting home?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’
‘You had a car, I suppose?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a car. I don’t drive very well, and I had to give it up some years ago. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be.’
‘When did you leave Jura, then?’ I asked.
He thought for a minute. ‘June the eleventh,’ he said at last. ‘That was the day, I think.’
I wrinkled my brows in perplexity. ‘Were the trains all right?’ Because, in the course of my work, I had heard a good deal about conditions in France during those weeks.
He smiled. ‘They weren’t very good,’ he said reflectively.
‘How did you get along, then?’
He said: ‘I walked a good deal of the way.’
As he spoke, there was a measured crump … crump … crump … crump, as a stick of four fell, possibly a mile away. The very solid building swayed a little, and the floors and windows creaked. We waited, tense and still. Then came the undulating wail of the sirens, and the sharp crack of gunfire from the park. The raid was on again.
‘Damn and blast,’ I said. ‘What do we do now?’
The old man smiled patiently: ‘I’m going to stay where I am.’
There was good sense in that. It’s silly to be a hero to evade discomfort, but there were three very solid floors above us. We talked about it, as one does, studying the ceiling and wondering whether it would support the weight of the roof. Our reflections did not stir us from our chairs.
A young waiter came into the room, carrying a torch and with a tin hat in his hand.
He said: ‘The shelter is in the basement, through the buttery door, sir.’
Howard said: ‘Do we have to go there?’
‘Not unless you wish to.’
I said: ‘Are you going down there, Andrews?’
‘No, sir. I’m on duty, in case of incendiary bombs, and that.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘get on and do whatever you’ve got to do. Then, when you’ve got a minute to spare, bring me a glass of Marsala. But go and do your job first.’
Howard said: ‘I think that’s a very good idea. You can bring me a glass of Marsala, too—between the incendiary bombs. You’ll find me sitting here.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He went away, and we relaxed again. It was about half-past ten. The waiter had turned out all the lights except for the one reading-lamp behind our heads, so that we sat there in a little pool of soft yellow light in the great shadowy room. Outside, the traffic noises, little enough in London at that time, were practically stilled. A few police whistles shrilled in the distance and a car went by at a high speed; then silence closed down upon the long length of Pall Mall, but for some gunfire in the distance.
Howard asked me: ‘How long do you suppose we shall have to sit here?’
‘Till it’s over, I suppose. The last one went on for four hours.’ I paused, and then I said: ‘Will anyone be anxious about you?’
He said, rather quickly: ‘Oh, no. I live alone, you see—in chambers.’
I nodded. ‘My wife knows I’m here. I thought of ringing her up, but it’s not a very good thing to clutter up the lines during a raid.’
‘They ask you not to do that,’ he said.
Presently Andrews brought the Marsala. When he had gone away, Howard lifted up his glass and held it to the light. Then he remarked: ‘Well, there are less comfortable ways of passing a raid.’
I smiled. ‘That’s true enough.’ And then I turned my head. ‘You said you were in France when all this started up. Did you come in for many air raids there?’
He put his gla
ss down, seven-eighths full. ‘Not real raids. There was some bombing and machine-gunning of the roads, but nothing very terrible.’
He spoke so quietly about it that it took a little time for me to realise what he had said. But then I ventured,
‘It was a bit optimistic to go to France for a quiet fishing holiday, in April of this year.’
‘Well, I suppose it was,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘But I wanted to go.’
He said he had been very restless, that he had suffered from an urge, an imperious need to get away and to go and do something different. He was a little hesitant about his reasons for wanting to get away so badly, but then he told me that he hadn’t been able to get a job to do in the war.
They wouldn’t have him in anything, I imagine because he was very nearly seventy years old. When war broke out he tried at once to get into the Special Constabulary; with his knowledge of the Law it seemed to him that police duty would suit him best. The police thought otherwise, having no use for constables of his age. Then he tried to become an Air Raid Warden, and suffered another disappointment. And then he tried all sorts of things.
It’s very difficult for old people, for old men particularly, in a war. They cannot grow accustomed to the fact that there is little they can do to help; they suffer from frustration, and the war eats into them. Howard fell into the habit of ordering his life by the news bulletins upon the wireless. Each day he got up in time to hear the seven o’clock news, had his bath, shaved, and dressed and was down to hear the eight o’clock, and went on so all day till after the midnight news, when he retired to bed. Between the bulletins he worried about the news, and read every paper he could lay his hands upon till it was time to turn the wireless on again.
He lived in the country when the war broke out. He had a house at Market Saffron, not very far from Colchester. He had moved there from Exeter four years previously, after the death of his wife; as a boy he had been brought up in Market Saffron and he still had a few acquaintances in the neighbourhood. He went back there to spend the last years of his life. He bought an old country house, not very large, standing in about three acres of garden and paddock.
His married daughter came back from America and lived with him in 1938, bringing her little boy. She was married to a New York insurance man called Costello, Vice-President of his corporation and very comfortably off. She’d had a spot of bother with him. Howard didn’t know the ins and outs of it and didn’t bother about it much; privately, he was of the opinion that his daughter was to blame for the trouble. He was fond of his son-in-law, Costello. He didn’t understand him in the least, but he liked him very well.