Round the Bend

by Nevil Shute

  She shook her head. “I just don’t know what people pay out here, or what it costs to live.”

  “I don’t pay San Diego wages.”

  “I know it.”

  I sat in silence for a minute. Then I raised my head and smiled at her. “Why did you come here, Miss Shaklin? It’s a pretty dud sort of a place, and rough living for you, I should think.”

  She smiled. “Well,” she said, “it’s kind of different to San Diego.” She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “I suppose Connie told you about Mother dying.” I nodded, and said something or other. “Well, after that there didn’t seem to be much sense in brother and sister living right on opposite sides of the world, and neither of them married, nor likely to be. So as he was stuck fast here and I was sort of loose in San Diego after Mother went, I said I’d come out here for a time anyway, and keep house for him.”

  I wondered if she had found him living as she had expected, but there was no sense in starting a discussion of that sort with this girl. I had troubles of my own to deal with, without digging into hers. I straightened up at the desk. “Okay, Miss Shaklin,” I said. “Now about the wage. I haven’t an idea what a shorthand typist gets here. I don’t suppose there is another one outside the bl—outside the Residency.” I should have to watch the language now, with a girl in the office. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to suggest. The wage of a cashier in the bank here is two hundred and fifty chips a month. That’s supposed to be enough for a married man with a family, living in this town. I know that, because Gujar Singh was one before he came to me. That’s on the Indian standard, but then you’re a single woman. I’ll give you that for a start, two hundred and fifty rupees a month, and see how it works out. If it’s not enough, come and tell me about it. I don’t want to put you to any real hardship, but I don’t pay European wages. I’d be bust in a fortnight if I did.”

  She said, “That sounds fair enough, the same rate as a teller. It’s good enough to make a start on, Mr. Cutter. Maybe I won’t be here long enough to feel the pinch.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll just show you round and then we’ll get started.” I took her in and introduced her to the babu clerk and showed her our one typewriter. She said it looked as if it had come over in the Ark and spent most of the intervening time up in the snow on Mount Ararat. I said I’d get her a new one because I knew that there’d be trouble if I tried to take it from the babu or make them share it; it was a sort of badge of office to him and a sign of social elevation that he wrote letters on a typewriter. There were some new Royals in a shop down in the souk; I’d make Gujar go and buy one for me because he’d get it cheaper. Then I showed her where the ladies’ room was in the airport building about a quarter of a mile away, and then we got settled down to the dictation.

  I heard no more from Major Hereward, but Johnson of the Arabia-Sumatran came out to see me that afternoon. The Tramp was in the hangar and I took him and showed him that, and we climbed all over it and opened the big nose doors to show him how a truck was driven into it. It was absolutely brand new, of course, and everything was clean and shining and polished; he was quite impressed. Then we went over to the office and I sent for cups of coffee from the restaurant; one falls into the Eastern way of doing things.

  He told me what he wanted, and it was as I had supposed. This first flight to Australia was in the nature of a test of a new mode of operating their vast concern. They were thinking in terms of a much freer exchange of staff and equipment between their properties in the Persian Gulf, in Central Burma, in southern Sumatra, and in North Australia. They had in mind a regular service once a fortnight linking up these places if this first flight proved to be a success, and this trial service would continue for at least six months. It might be, after that, that it would need to be stepped up to once a week, or else they might want to run a smaller and more comfortable aircraft for passengers only on alternate weeks with the freight machine.

  We started then and did a little figuring. To run the Carrier or the Tramp from Bahrein to East Alligator River via the other places was going to cost them £4500 for the return trip, so that the fortnightly service was going to cost them about £120,000 a year. It was a fleabite to them apparently, but it was the hell of a lot of money to me.

  I told him that I could handle it for him, and I convinced him with facts and figures that I could. I think he wanted to be convinced, and indeed he said as much. “I’m very glad to hear that you’re happy about the fortnightly service,” he said presently. “I should be sorry, personally, if we had to put the business elsewhere. For one thing, your quotations have always been lower than anybody else’s, and yet you seem to make your business pay.”

  “It’s the hundred per cent Asiatic labour that I use,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s partly that, and partly your own ability. We like the use you make of Asiatics. We think you’re on the right lines, politically. I think you’ll have fewer difficulties in running a service for us through Pakistan, India, Burma, and Southeast Asia than a wholly European concern might have.”

  “I think I will.”

  “And you’re quite happy that this thing won’t overstrain your resources?”

  “It’s about the limit I can do upon my present capital, Mr. Johnson,” I said frankly. “I shall put the new Tramp on the service and use it for nothing else. When you decide to start, I shall get another spare engine and put it in Australia with a couple of engineers; I’ll have to have some staff out at the other end. The utilization of that Tramp will be at the rate of 2100 hours a year. Well, that’s reasonable. We can do that. We may have to send the Carrier occasionally when the Tramp is in for C. of A. or for an engine change, but that should be all right.”

  “Your Carrier’s pretty well occupied, isn’t it?”

  “That’s so,” I replied. “As I say, a contract of this sort would pretty well fill me up. I can handle it all right, but if any more work comes in I’ll have to get another aircraft—somehow or other.”

  He smiled quietly. “We shan’t be difficult about the schedule. We can adjust the dates of the flights by a day or so to help you, if you give us plenty of notice. Only our own people are involved. It’s not as if it was a public service.”

  “That may be a great help,” I replied. “We might want that for an engine change.”

  “Will you have any difficulty in expanding further, if more work comes in?”

  “Not technically,” I replied. “I can get the aircraft and I can get the staff. Every Asiatic ground engineer in the East seems to want to come and work here—I don’t know why. The only difficulty will be finance.”

  “You’ve got a good business,” he said. “I shouldn’t have thought you’d have much trouble with finance.”

  “There’s been the hell of a lot of trouble over the last lot,” I said candidly.

  “Sheikh Abd el Kadir?”

  “That’s right. It seems my name stinks round these parts.”

  He nodded. “I know they aren’t pleased at the Residency.”

  “Do your people object?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I don’t think we object at all. We have to pay the sheikhs these vast sums in royalties for the oil that lies under their deserts, really huge sums of money that they’ve done nothing to earn. If some of that money finds its way back into your business, I don’t think we object at all. It means that part—a small part—of the money we pay out comes back to do a useful job for us. I think we rather like it.”

  He went away quite satisfied, and I went on with my work. I stayed at Bahrein for about ten days before we took off for Australia, and in that time I didn’t fly at all. There was too much to do upon the ground. The growth of staff continually made new organizations necessary in the business; what had been adequate for a staff of two was quite inadequate for a staff of thirty. The stores were a headache now. I had one or two long talks with Connie about that; we were having rather a curious trouble. There was
practically no pilfering from the hangar, most unusual for the East; I could only put that down, uneasily, to the supposition that the staff regarded our hangar as a holy place. Tools and materials, however, were continually getting lost; one day there would suddenly be no quarter drills in store, and next day six or seven would be found in various drawers or other parts of the hangar. It was the same with gasket material and taps and dies and things like that.

  I worked out a new stores system and put it into force with the help of Connie and his sister. Nadezna was a great help. She was quiet and efficient, and she was always there; moreover, she took an interest in the business and, living with her brother as she did, she could learn the ropes without having continually to bother me with questions. Like most girls in an office, she had an aptitude and a liking for routine work and she filled a very necessary place in our business. It was always a burden to me to check invoices, release notes, and all the many documents that every aeroplane must have for every part put into it, but it was no irritation to her to trace out the pedigree of a spare length of flexible petrol pipe and enter it under the proper reference numbers in the aircraft log book. She seemed rather to like that sort of job.

  I commented on that once, and she said, “I like seeing everything all entered up and right, and the job properly done. It makes me feel good.”

  “You’re very like your brother,” I remarked. “That’s what he tells people in the hangar.”

  “I know it.” She paused, and then she said, “Quite a few people round these parts seem to be taking an interest in what Connie says in the hangar.”

  “Didn’t you know about that—when you came here?”

  She shook her head. “He always was a bit that way at home, but nobody ever listened to him. I don’t mean that he got up and preached. He never did that, although there’s plenty of people in California who do. No, he just had ideas. But nobody paid any attention to them, back at home.”

  “We wouldn’t pay any attention to them in England,” I remarked. “But they seem to fit in out here.”

  She sat in silence for a minute. Then she said, “Have you seen the way they treat him in the souk?”

  I shook my head. “How do they?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like he was a prophet or something. Some of them get up and do a sort of a salaam when he walks by.”

  I hadn’t heard that one. “There’s no harm in that.”

  “I know. But one or two of them have started doing it to me. Do they do that when you go walking down the souk?”

  “Only beggars. Do they come and beg off you?”

  She shook her head. “These are well-dressed old men, merchants, you know, sitting in their shops. Not poor people.”

  I laughed, because it seemed best to take it as a joke. “I look too English. Nobody salaams to me unless they want something.”

  “I wish they didn’t do it to me,” she said uneasily. “It makes you wonder what it is that’s going on.”

  I didn’t pursue the subject; it seemed better to let things sort themselves out in their own way. In a sense, I was relieved. The girl and her brother were a mixture of the East and the West, and when first I had heard that she was living in the souk I had been a bit troubled. If respectable old men got up and bowed when she passed it probably meant that she was perfectly safe down there; it seemed to indicate that she was already known and respected. So far as it went that was all to the good, and resolutely I put the matter out of my mind.

  We took off for Australia in the Tramp a few days after that, Gujar Singh and I, with a load of four passengers and about three tons of technical equipment. We left at dawn and put down in the early afternoon at Karachi to refuel; after an hour we got going again and spent the night at Ahmedabad. We refuelled at Calcutta next day and slept at Rangoon, and on the third day we got to Diento after stops at Singapore for fuel and Palembang for customs. On the fourth day we stopped for fuel at Sourabaya and went on down the island chain of Indonesia, and then over the Timor Sea to Australia. We put down on the big aerodrome at Darwin just after dark, and ran our heads straight into a pack of trouble.

  Australia is a white man’s country, and nobody could have presented Gujar Singh as a white man. I found in the first ten minutes that everyone knew that my aircraft were normally flown and maintained by Asiatics, and that a strike of the airline staffs, control officers, and ground engineers throughout Australia was threatened if my aeroplane was handled by the customs or allowed to fly into Australia at all.

  Preoccupied as I had been with all my own affairs, I hadn’t foreseen that one. The row broke in the darkness on the tarmac, and it went on for hours. The customs refused to clear the goods in the aircraft or, at first, to pass the passengers through immigration. Somebody said at one stage that I could have fuel and fly away back to Indonesia with the load and passengers and all. After an hour and a half of argument they allowed the four passengers to go into the town to the hotel, but the machine was placed under a military guard till the morning. At about ten o’clock they said that I could go down to the hotel, but when I asked about Gujar they said flatly that no hotel in Darwin would accept him. I was so angry by that time I said they could take their hotel and treat it unconventionally, and went off to sleep with Gujar in the cabin of the Tramp, having sent a radio message to the Arabia-Sumatran Company at East Alligator River to tell them of my predicament.

  I found Gujar Singh waiting patiently by the Tramp; he had very wisely kept in the background while all this was going on. “Look, Gujar,” I said. “I’m very sorry about this. They’ve got this colour trouble on their minds here, and we’ve got to make the best of it.” I told him what had happened, and then I said, “We’ll sleep in the machine tonight, and see what happens in the morning. It looks as though the idea of running through to the East Alligator River will have to be revised a bit.”

  He smiled gently. “Don’t be upset about it,” he said. “This is nothing new to us.”

  “I am upset,” I answered hotly. “By God I am. I’ve never heard such bloody nonsense in all my life.”

  “My people do things as silly, or sillier than this,” he said. It was just after the British had left India, and Pakistan and India were at each other’s throats and mass deportations of pitiful refugees were taking place from both countries. “All countries are stupid in these things,” he said. “It does not matter.”

  “It’s economic,” I said. “They know that we can undercut their rates because we employ Asiatics. I don’t believe we’ve got a hope of operating in this country.”

  “There are plenty of other countries,” he said philosophically.

  “You’ve said it.” I was still very angry. “They can keep this one.”

  There was no trouble about sleeping in the machine, of course. Darwin is hot all the year round, and we had no need of coverings. In the rear fuselage we had the engine covers and the cockpit covers which I had brought with me in case we had to leave the aircraft parked in monsoon rain, and these great masses of canvas were quite new and clean. We were both well accustomed to this sort of thing, and we made beds of this stuff in the cabin behind the load, and made ourselves comfortable for the night.

  I lay awake for some time, worrying about my business. This regular fortnightly charter for the Arabia-Sumatran was a very big thing to me; a steady contract running at the rate of £120,000 a year was not one that I could afford to let slip through my fingers. At the same time, I had heard enough about Australian reactions to the flight that evening to realize that it would be quite impossible to operate my aircraft in white Australia. My Asiatic pilots and staff were a valuable asset to me all the way from Bahrein to Timor; they smoothed the way politically for the free passage of my aircraft and they made it possible for me to quote low prices for my freights. The last leg of the journey, however, was impossible for me to operate at all.

  Half-waking and half-sleeping, for I was tired with the strain of four days’ hard flying, I wondered if I c
ould operate to the nearest extremity of Indonesia, and make arrangements with an Australian airline for the last leg of the route. Suppose I flew as far as Koepang in Timor, and transhipped the loads there to an Australian machine with an Australian crew, which would fly to Koepang from Darwin, pick up the load, and take it to East Alligator River? To operate like this would put the costs up, but the cost of the service to the oil company would still be far less than if the flight all the way from Bahrein were carried out by a “white” company. And in this way they would keep the political advantage of running an Asiatic service all the way through Asia.

  I drifted into sleep, thinking about this one.

  They allowed Gujar and me to go out of the aerodrome next morning to a small café just outside the gate, but they sent a soldier to stand guard over us while we were eating our breakfast. I asked him to join us at the bacon and eggs and after some hesitation he agreed; he was a good, clean lad, and said a little awkwardly that you had some pretty funny things to do when you were in the army.

  When we got back to the Control office there was a signal there for me from the East Alligator River to say that they were sending over a representative, and at about ten o’clock a Grumman amphibian landed, carrying a Mr. Fletcher as a passenger.

  Mr. Fletcher knew all about us and our way of operating aircraft; indeed he had been at Bahrein when first I went there with the Fox-Moth, and I remembered him when I saw him as a passenger that I had carried once or twice in those early days. Knowing Australia as he now did, he was not in the least surprised that we had run our heads into a brick wall. His first concern was to secure the release of his passengers and freight, but he listened to my proposals to end my service at Timor and make arrangements in the future for the goods and passengers to be brought into Australia on an Australian aircraft. After half an hour’s talk he left in a taxi to go into Darwin for a conference with the Administrator of the Northern Territory, Mr. Walker.