by Nevil Shute
He collected churches, like another boy might collect cigarette cards or matchbox covers. The gem of his collection was at Woking, where he found a mosque to go to. He had a bit of a job getting to that one because the big day at a mosque is on a Friday, but he was a very good apprentice and a hard worker, so the foreman let him go.
Once, I remember, I asked Connie what he really was, Church of England, or Presbyterian, or what. “Blowed if I know,” he said. “I was born in Penang and my father was a Buddhist. But he died four years ago, and then we came to England. I was Church of England at school.”
I stared at him. “Where’s Penang?”
“Just by Malaya,” he told me. “But we don’t live there now. Mother brought us to England when my father died. She was born in Irkutsk, so she’s Greek Orthodox.”
Connie knew an awful lot more than me, of course, and I didn’t want to go on looking stupid, so I let Irkutsk go. The Greek part stayed in my mind, and I remember months afterwards looking at a map of Greece in the Public Library, trying to find Irkutsk where Connie’s mother had been born. But all that came later; at the time I only asked him, “Is your Mum in England now?”
He shook his head. “She’s in California, at a place called San Diego, with my sister. Mother got married again.”
It was quite outside my range, of course; California was somewhere abroad where they made Syrup of Figs. “Oh …” I said vaguely.
I was young, of course, and I was loaded down with new experiences. Until I joined the circus I’d never been more than five miles from my own street in Southampton, and I’d got an awful lot to learn. I must have seemed slow at times, because it wasn’t till that second season was half over that I realized what being an apprentice meant. It meant that I’d got a regular job, that I wasn’t going to be laid off in the winter, like I had before. Connie and I were going to spend the winter at Littlehampton working on the aeroplanes, overhauling them for their certificates of airworthiness so they’d be all ready for the spring.
The circus ran for four years and that was the end; the last season wasn’t so good as the first three had been, and it looked as if the public were getting a bit tired of it. Sir Alan packed it up, and went on with his development work on refuelling aeroplanes in flight. He was very good with us apprentices. He went to a great deal of trouble to find us jobs in other places in the aircraft industry. He got me a fine apprenticeship with Airservice Ltd at Morden aerodrome just south of London, overhauling and repairing aeroplanes in a big way in a grand, modern shop. I owe a great deal to Sir Alan over that.
I had to say good-bye to Connie then. Like me, he wanted to go on and take his ground engineer’s tickets, but neither of us could do that till we were twenty-one years old. He was going out to California to his mother; he told me that there were aircraft factories out there in San Diego and he wanted to get into one of those. I was very sorry to part from Connie, because we’d been together for three and a half years and had a lot of fun; although he knew such a lot more than I did, he was never stuck up about it. Being with him in those early years was very good for me. We said we’d keep in touch by writing, and of course, we never did.
I went to Airservice in the autumn of 1935, and I stayed with them for ten years. It was a good firm to work for, and I got on well. I got my A and C certificates for the maintenance of engines and airframes as soon as I was old enough, in 1936, and I got the B and D certificates for complete overhauls in 1938; by that time I was earning over ten pounds a week, including overtime. I didn’t spend it on girls, and I didn’t spend much of it on beer. I spent it mostly on flying. The firm had a scheme that gave cheap flying instruction to its staff, and I took my first private pilot’s A licence in 1937. By the middle of the war, when pilots were short and regulations lax, I was test flying the Tiger Moths we had rebuilt after a crash as a regular thing. I used to finish the inspection in the shop and then just take it out and fly it. It saved such a lot of time and bother looking for a test pilot.
I stayed a civilian all the war, working at my normal job of repairing crashed aircraft. I was put in charge of a repair section in 1940 and got to foreman’s rank. In 1943 the firm had to strengthen the repair side of their branch in Egypt, and they asked me if I’d go out there for a bit. I was twenty-eight years old, and up till then I’d never been out of England. Of course I said I’d go.
It was on account of that I married Beryl Cousins.
I’ve not said much about girls up till now because, to tell the truth, I never had a lot to do with them till then. I was so stuck into my job and so keen on aeroplanes and flying that girls passed me by, or I passed them by, whichever way you look at it. Till I got my C and D tickets I was working at classes three or four evenings every week; then when I’d got them, and might have had time to look around a bit and have a bit of fun, the war came. That meant that I was working overtime every night till eight o’clock and sometimes later than that, which sort of limits the time that a chap has to look around and pick himself a girl. Maybe when it’s like that he’s apt to pick the first that comes along.
I lodged in a suburban road at Morden and Beryl lived two doors up the road from me, and worked in the stores at Airservice Ltd. She was a sort of clerk there, working on the inwards and the outwards files. She was a slight, pale girl with ash-blonde hair. We used to walk to work together in the mornings. We got to having lunch together and tea if she was working late, all in the works canteen, and Saturdays I’d take her to the pictures, or we’d go dancing at a Palais. After six months of that we came to the conclusion that we were in love, and we’d get married when the work let up a bit. We didn’t realize we both loved something better than each other. I was in love with aeroplanes, and she was in love with love.
I heard about this job one morning, and when they said they wanted me to go out to Egypt they said it would be for two years and I’d have to go in about three weeks’ time. I met Beryl at our usual table for lunch with other people all round us in the works canteen, so I said to her, “Eat up quick. I’ve got something to tell you, but not here.”
We walked out on the grass up the aerodrome hedge when we’d finished; it was September, and a lovely sunny day. I told her all about it as we walked along by the scrap dump of wrecked airframes and engines, and she said, “Oh, Tom! Have you really got to go?”
I hadn’t got to, but I wasn’t going to miss that chance. “They put it to me pretty firm,” I said. “You don’t get much choice, these days.”
She turned to me, and her eyes were full of tears. “I thought we were going to get married about Christmas. That’s what we said.”
I was a bloody fool, of course, but one does these things. I couldn’t bear to see her cry. I took both her hands in mine. “I know,” I said. “What say if we get married now, before I go?”
She said softly, “Oh, Tom! Do you want us to be married?”
I wasn’t really sure I did, but I was twenty-eight and I’d never got that far with any girl before. I said, “Do I want to!” and took her in my arms and kissed her.
After a bit we got to thinking about ways and means. There wasn’t time for doing it the regular way with banns called in church and all that. We should have to do it with a special licence, and I found out pretty soon that Beryl knew all about those. Girls study things of that sort more than men. I wouldn’t be able to set her up in a house in the time we’d got, and she didn’t want to leave her job at Airservice because if she did, and didn’t have a baby, she’d only have got directed into something else since it was wartime. So we fixed that we’d get married as soon as we could and she’d go on working just the same, and living with her people.
We went and saw her Dad and Mum that evening and told them all about it. They were pleased all right, because I was making good money and I think they felt that I was likely to get on. Next day was Friday and I asked for the day off and took Beryl down to Southampton and introduced her to my folks, and ten days after that we got married at a registrar’s office.<
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We got a week at Southsea for our honeymoon; it was a fine September that year so that although there wasn’t much to do we could sit on the front and look at the ships going in and out of Portsmouth harbour, and the Bostons and the Spitfires going out on strikes. I think Beryl was happy, and if I was thinking of the work more than a man ought to do upon his honeymoon, well, it was wartime and the flying schools were waiting for the Tiger Moths I mended, to train pilots. Beryl understood—at least, I think she did.
Looking back upon it now, it must have been a poor sort of a honeymoon. It was wartime in England, and everything was short. There was complete darkness at night, of course, there on the coast, and the cafés and the dance halls and the picture houses were full of men and girls in uniform; a civilian didn’t get much priority. You couldn’t get down to the beach to bathe except in one little place because of the anti-invasion barbed wire and tank obstacles and land mines, and there weren’t any motor coach tours or steamer trips or concert parties on the beach, or anything like that. This was all normal to us because that’s the way things were in England then and we didn’t grieve over what we couldn’t have, but when I think about the sort of honeymoon I could have given her if it had been in peacetime, I feel a bit sore. It might have made a difference.
It was better for me than for Beryl. I had Egypt ahead of me. I was going out to an important job in a warm, spacious country, into all the glamour of a successful war in North Africa. There would be luxury in Cairo, and sunshine on the desert, and the Pyramids, and the Nile, and travel to our various outstations in Africa and Persia and Iraq. For me, this week in Southsea was the last of the drab misery of war in England. Ahead of Beryl was a long, indefinite vista of it, cold and monotonous in the same job, and lonely with me away. We neither of us thought about it like that—or, if I thought of it, I didn’t talk about it. But that’s the way it was.
We didn’t look ahead. I can’t remember that we ever discussed where we were going to live after the war, or anything like that. It didn’t seem to be much good, with things as they were. The war had been going on for four years; for four years we had been directed where to work and we were getting out of the way of thinking about our future for ourselves. This job in Egypt was to be for two years, and after that I should come back to wartime England, so we thought, and it would be the same except that everything would be scarcer and more difficult than ever. We never looked ahead to think about the peace, that I remember.
I was flown to Egypt by B.O.A.C. It wasn’t possible for Beryl to come and see me off because the time and place of departure were secret. The best that she could do was to come down with me to Morden Underground station late one afternoon as I carried my suitcase down from the digs. We walked silent together down the suburban streets; on that last walk we didn’t seem to have anything left to say to each other. Maybe she was only realizing then what the separation was going to mean. She hadn’t got a lot of imagination.
By the entrance to the station we stopped and looked at each other. It was raining a bit, and the red buses starting and stopping at the halt just by us made a great clatter with their Diesels. I put down my suitcase and took her hands. “Well, girl,” I said, “this is it.”
She was pretty down in the mouth. “Write to me a lot, Tom,” she said. “I’ll be ever so lost without you.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “I’ll write as soon as ever I get there, but don’t get worried if you don’t hear for a while. If they’re sending letters round the Cape it might take anything up to six weeks.”
“I won’t be able to sleep till I hear.”
I grinned. “Bet you do. Tuck a bolster in beside you and make belief I’m there, and you’ll sleep all right.”
She smiled, though she was very near to tears. “Now stop it.…”
I took her in my arms. It didn’t matter that there were people all around at the bus stop; you saw this every hour of every day, with people going off on draft. “It’s only for two years, girl,” I said softly. “It’ll soon be gone.”
“It sounds like as if it was for ever,” she said miserably.
There was no sense in prolonging the agony; it was only making things more difficult for her, and we’d said all that there was to say. We kissed, and kissed again, and then I said, “I’ll have to go now, girl. Look after yourself.”
She released me. “You look after yourself. Cheer-oh, Tom.” She was crying now in earnest.
I squeezed her hand clumsily. “Cheer up, girl. It’s not for so long.” And with that I turned and picked the suitcase up and left her, and went and got my ticket. I looked back over the turnstile and she was there waving good-bye to me with tears running down her face, and I waved back to her, and then I had to turn round and go down to the train.
I went in a Liberator, squashed in with about twenty others in the rear fuselage. We took off at about ten o’clock that night from an aerodrome somewhere in the south; we didn’t know what aerodrome it was, nor where we were going to. We flew on for about eight hours, and then in the dawn we landed. We couldn’t see anything out of the aeroplane, and when we got out on to the tarmac we found that we were in a sandy sort of place with palm trees and white houses. They told us it was Tripoli.
We weren’t allowed outside the aerodrome; they gave us breakfast in a tent while the Liberator was refuelled, and we took off again for Cairo. We landed at Almaza in the middle of the day and it was good and hot; I had English clothes on, and I envied the chaps working on the aircraft in just a pair of shorts and no shirt. I got passed through the various formalities, and then I went and reported to the manager of Airservice Ltd on the aerodrome.
That two years was a fine experience for me. I was in charge of airframe repairs and general maintenance. I lived in a small hotel about a mile from the airport and I had my office at the back of the hangar. We operated a large number of aircraft all over the Near East and North East Africa, and I was responsible for keeping them in the air, all except engine overhauls, which were the business of another chap. If a Rapide ran off the runway and bent its undercarriage at Luxor or at Lydda, the responsibility for getting it into the air again was mine. If it was a simple and straightforward repair I would send one of my ground engineers to it by air or truck, but if it was a difficult or complicated job I would go myself and see the work put in hand the way I wanted it. We had an old Hornet two-seater that I used to go in if the journey was anything less than five hundred miles, but there was always a difficulty about finding a pilot who could spare the time, and after a while the firm agreed that I should fly myself about in this thing. It wasn’t worth much if I crashed it, and I didn’t want any flying pay or insurance.
On these repair jobs, flying myself or being flown by a pilot, I travelled very widely in the last two years of the war. I went to Beirut and Baghdad and Aleppo and Nicosia, and down south as far as Khartoum and Addis Ababa. I got to know about Syrian and Iraqui and Egyptian aircraft hands, what they could do and what they couldn’t, what days they had to take off for their religion or their festivals, and why. I tried to learn about all that. It’s no good going round and saying that those boys are just a lot of monkeys, that they aren’t reliable and you can’t use them. You can use them all right if you take the trouble to learn about them, and if you do that you’ll find the work is liable to come out a good deal cheaper, because their wages are much less.
I got some experience in negotiating with officials, too. That was a type of job I’d never done before. Whenever parts for a repair had to be taken into Syria or Lebanon or Iraq there were customs duties to be paid or talked out of; in the usual way I’d get to Aleppo or some place like that and find that the repair parts I’d sent up had got stuck in a bonded warehouse, the Government were asking for a hundred and fifty pounds before they would release them, and the ground engineer had got angry and had insulted the Minister for Air. There was nobody to straighten all that out but me, and I got into the way of taking it easy, going to drink a cup of c
offee with the Minister, saying what a happy little town it was and how my wife would like it if we came to live there, and sending over a big bouquet of flowers for the Minister’s wife. I’d usually get the parts next day without any trouble at all, and nothing to pay. The most I ever had to do was to fix up a joyride for the Minister’s children when the aircraft was flying again.
I used to write to Beryl regularly once a week wherever I was, telling her as much about what I’d been doing as I thought would pass the censor. She used to write to me, but not so often. It was once a week at first, but then it got a bit irregular and sometimes I wouldn’t hear anything for three weeks, and then two letters would come together, written within a couple of days of each other. She never seemed to have much to say, but that was natural because life in England was all just the same. Often most of a letter was about some film she’d seen.
There was one of those long gaps in her letters, nearly a month, about October 1944, when I’d been out in Egypt just a year. Air mail was coming through all right. I got a bit angry, because I’d written regularly myself and I didn’t see why she couldn’t find time to write to me, so I sent her a sharp one. Nothing happened for a bit, and then about ten days later I got a letter from her Dad.
It read:
Dear Tom,
We’ve been having trouble here, I’m sorry to say, and Beryl wants me to write and tell you before she writes herself, and her Ma and I think that’s best too. It’s been very dull for her since you went away, and she went up to the West End some time ago and got in with some Polish officers, very nice and well behaved, she says. She took to going about with one of them, a Captain Wysock, and the long and the short of it is, Tom, she’s going to have a baby in January.
I know this will be a great blow to you, and I can’t tell you how sorry we all are. Captain Wysock has been down to see us and we had a long talk. He was heartbroken about you, but we talked it all out and we thought that it would be best if there was a divorce and he was to marry Beryl; they are very much in love and that is what they want. Beryl will be writing to you in a day or so, but we thought I had better write and tell you first.