Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  Old Mr Marston, the gardener at the vicarage, raised the matter in the White Hart one night. “I asked Mr Kendall if it’s true what they were saying about these black soldiers that are coming,” he said. “About them barking when they want their victuals. He says it’s all just a story they were telling us, to get a rise out of us.”

  “Aye, that’s right,” said Mr Frobisher, the landlord of the pub. “They was just pulling our legs. Negroes don’t have tails, not any that I heard of.”

  A mournful little man who worked as a porter at the station said: “Well, I don’t think they was pulling our legs at all. Very nice and straight they spoke to me, they did. That corporal, he said this lot come straight from Africa. Africans, they are — that’s why they can’t speak English. There’s rum things happen in Africa, believe me.”

  The general consensus of opinion was that the stories were improbable, but that it would be prudent to maintain a strict reserve when the visitors arrived.

  I do not know how the story reached the Negro soldiers, but it reached them very quickly. In the March dusk, after their evening meal in the rough camp that they were making on the bleak hilltop, a few coloured men walked down into the village. They came in a little party, smiling broadly; as they passed each villager they gave a realistic imitation of a pack of hungry dogs. They thought it was a great joke, and barked at everybody, in varying tones from pekinese to bloodhound. By the time they reached the White Hart the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers, to whom was owed some sort of an apology.

  “They were real friendly, right from that first evening,” said Lesurier. “They made us feel like we were regular fellows.”

  It was not only that the villagers were conscious of their own stupidity. At that time there had been a great deal of prominence given in the English newspapers to the assistance that America was sending in Lease-Lend, and this assistance was obvious to everybody in Trenarth in the increasing numbers of American tractors, trucks, and jeeps to be seen in the streets. Like others, Bessie Frobisher, the buxom daughter of the landlord, had half believed the stories she had heard about the Negroes, and felt in a dim way that she owed recompense to these black, soft-spoken, well-behaved strangers in the bar. So she got out her electric iron which had not functioned for a month, and brought it into the bar and put it on the counter, and said: “Can any of you mend an iron?”

  Sergeant Sam Lorimer picked it up in his enormous pink-palmed hands. “Sure, lady,” he said. “I can fix that for you.” He turned it over in his black hands, examining it. “It don’t get hot no more?”

  She said: “It doesn’t get hot at all now. It used to be ever so good. It’s a job to get anything mended now, you know.”

  He called across the bar: “Hey, Dave, lend me your screwdriver?”

  Lesurier lent his screwdriver, and with that and a jack-knife they disembowelled the iron on the counter while the girl watched, picked up the broken thread of filament and made it fast, and reassembled it. They tried it in a lamp socket and it got hot at once. “It’s all okay now,” said Lorimer, “but the filament won’t last so long — it’s kind of rotten. It gets that way as it gets old.”

  “You can get new elements for irons like that,” said one. “I see them that day we was in Belfast.”

  “That’s so,” said Lorimer. “Maybe we could get one in Penzance.” He passed it back to Bessie. “Well, there you are, lady. It’s fixed right now, until it goes again.”

  She smiled at him. “It’s ever so kind of you to take the trouble,” she said. She turned to her father. “Dad, this gentleman’s mended my iron, and it works beautifully.”

  She used her normal language without thinking anything about it, but each Negro within hearing caught the word ‘gentleman’ and stiffened for a moment in wonder. They certainly were in a foreign country, a long ways from home. Frobisher passed his hand over the iron to feel its warmth, and turned to Lorimer. “Aye, it works all right,” he said. “Will you take something on the house? A glass of beer?”

  The big Negro hung his head, smiling and confused. “Well, that’s real kind of you, mister,” he said.

  Within a few days they were fixing everything. They liked fixing things. They fixed the leg of the settee in the saloon bar, and they fixed the gate leading to old Mrs Pocock’s cottage garden. They fixed the vicar’s Austin Seven, and they fixed the bit of wall that a truck had knocked down by the war memorial. They fixed the counter-flap of Robertson’s grocer’s shop, and they fixed the wheel of Mr Penlee’s dung-cart. When Penlee gave them tea with all his family in the farm kitchen as some recompense for what they had done to his cart, they were so overwhelmed that they turned up next Sunday in a body and limewashed his cow house.

  They fixed everything that needed fixing in Trenarth in a very few weeks. In a country that had been at war for over four years with every able-bodied man and woman called up for industry or for the forces, their presence was a real help to the village; the people liked them for it, and for their unfailing courtesy and good humour. They were well paid by English standards and they brought prosperity to Trenarth which was a factor in their favour, but more important was the willing work they did; England in wartime had plenty of money, if little to spend it on. Some of them were gardeners in civil life and used to come up shyly and ask if they might work in the garden, asking for nothing but the pleasure of tending flowers. Some of them were farm hands, and wanted to do nothing better in their spare time than to help the land girls clean the muck out of the cowhouses. Inevitably they were asked in to a meal as interesting and honoured guests, and equally inevitably would take the farmer’s daughter or the land girl to the pictures in Penzance.

  They had a grand time, in those early days. They used to bring a couple of trucks down from the camp on Saturday afternoons to pick up the girls, and drive off to Penzance to the pictures in a great merry party, thirty or forty black young men and as many white girls all laughing and jammed together in the great trucks, having a fine time.

  The vicar, Mr Kendall, held unconventional views on most of the controversial subjects in the world, which no doubt accounted for the fact that at the age of fifty-three he had progressed no farther than the living of St Jude’s, Trenarth. He stood with Mr Frobisher one afternoon watching one of these expeditions as it started off, and said: “We’ll have a few black babies to look after, presently.”

  Mr Frobisher rubbed his chin. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “It’s the girls’ own business if they do. Colour apart, I like these fellows well enough, I must say.”

  The vicar nodded. “I’d rather have them than some others of our gallant allies,” he said darkly.

  It was in that halcyon time that Private David Lesurier became acquainted with Miss Grace Trefusis.

  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 Player’s, 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 Player’s, 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 US Army Air Corps. Half of the Negroes were moved on to other work in other places; the remainder went on 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 chihiking 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 ATS 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 crying out loud,” said Corporal Oszwiecki, “he says proper sanitation isn’t necessary. Say, you guys want to brush up your ideas if you’re ever going 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 a bit, ‘n get some modern notions. The US Army pulled you through last time, ‘n it’ll pull you through this time. But we aren’t coming 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, peaceful in the ancient village street under the moon.

  At last one said: “Stan got a bit lit up.”

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

  “That’s right,” the first replied. “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 US 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 US 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 reimpose 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 police 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 place 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, specially 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 through on the telephone to Paddington station, and the railway company are 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; the way to him 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 realized 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 shirtsleeves. “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 out a bit, maybe.”

  Mr Frobisher said: “I’ve been thinking while you’v
e 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 licensing justices say different. Not while they behave themselves.”

  The lieutenant realized 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.”