Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “Don’t matter,” said Mr Turner. “Long as I know he’s all right, that’s all I care about. I never did see him, you know. I was all bandaged up. All I ever did was hear his voice. I wouldn’t know him if I met him, now.”

  “Fancy . . .” said Grace.

  “I’ll tell him about you and Mr Morgan when I see him next,” the Negro said. “I reckon he’ll be mighty glad to hear you’re going on so well. We got kind of worried, him and me, we ought to try and find out what had happened to you. It didn’t seem right when we was both fixed up so nice, we shouldn’t try and find out about you and Mr Morgan. And now, you’re better fixed than either one of us!”

  “The pilot out in Burma,” Mr Turner said, “he’s better off than all the lot of us together.”

  They said goodbye at the door. “Let’s know when you’re down in these parts again,” the Negro said. “That likely to be soon?”

  “Oh, aye,” said Mr Turner. “I get down here once in a while. Next summer, maybe.”

  Grace said: “Be sure and let us know.”

  They got into the little car, and drove off to Penzance. At the wheel, Mollie said: “Why did you say we’d be down here again, Jackie?”

  “Got to say something,” he said heavily. “You didn’t tell her nothing, did you?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t want it.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “No good getting folks upset about things they can’t do nothing about.” He paused, and then came out with his favourite cliché. “All be the same in a hundred years,” he said. “That’s what I say.”

  They drove into Penzance.

  CHAPTER 11

  AFTER HIS HOLIDAY in Cornwall, Mr Turner went downhill rather rapidly. They got back to Watford without incident, but he was tired by the journey, and when his wife suggested he should stay in bed next day he made no protest. He had breakfast in bed— “Like a Lord,” as he put it — and looked at the pictures in the paper, especially Jane, but reading was now difficult for him except for the very large headlines, and he had soon done with the Mirror. His wife brought him up the wireless and he lay listening to that while she cleaned up the house and washed the breakfast things. She went out presently to do her shopping, and on returning to the house about half past eleven found that he had turned the wireless off, and was lying in bed doing nothing at all. As she took her coat off, she said: “Didn’t you want the wireless any longer, then?”

  He said: “I turned it off. Kind of stops one thinking.”

  She sat down on the bed for a minute before going down to start to cook the dinner. “What you been thinking about?”

  He said: “Oh, all sorts of things. Seems like I never had time for any real thinking before, thinking things out, I mean. I been having a grand time. Ought to ha’ got sick like this long ago.”

  “What sort of things, Jackie?”

  “I dunno.” He paused, and then he said: “I keep on being ever so glad them chaps got themselves fixed up all right, all the lot of them. And all having babies, too, right and left, every one of them. All the whole boiling of them. Sort of makes up for you and I not having any, don’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” she said slowly. “I suppose it does.”

  He said: “You aren’t sorry that we never, are you, now?”

  “I dunno,” she said. “Sometimes I kind of wish we had.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t,” he said. “Things being like they are, with you having to work again and that, I’m glad we never. But lying here and thinking, I’m glad them chaps don’t think about it like we do.”

  “They’re not so sensible,” she said thoughtfully.

  He grinned. “That’s right,” he said. “Chaps with a dud napper like I got ought to be sensible about not having kids, but they don’t have to be.”

  She went downstairs to get on with the cooking, and presently she brought him up his lunch in bed while he lay listening to the wireless. And when she came he turned it off, and said: “I been thinking, I’d like to write a letter to Mr Morgan out in Burma, to tell him about Dave Lesurier and Duggie Brent. I know he’d like to hear, ‘n Nay Htohn, she’d like to hear about them, too.” So after lunch Mollie got her pad and he lay dictating a very long letter all about Trenarth and Grace Trefusis and the disease that was catching, and about Jones and Porter, and about Duggie Brent. And tired with the effort of so much dictation, he sank into sleep while Mollie was downstairs typing it, and slept till it was time for tea, and then got up and dressed and had his tea with her downstairs and went out with her to the pictures. That was a prototype for many days that followed, perhaps the happiest of their chequered married life.

  On his good days he used to get up soon after breakfast and walk out with her to help her in her shopping, and come back and write one or two business letters. He shifted the last of his parcels of cheroots during these weeks, and on casting up his accounts came to the conclusion that he had made a profit of about three hundred and forty pounds on them, which more than covered the cost of his trip out to Burma. That pleased him very much.

  They did not lay the little car up for the winter, but kept it in commission for his outings. On his good days, once or twice a week, Mollie drove him to the Barley Mow for an hour before closing time. He no longer had the energy to lead the party, but these short evenings drinking beer and listening to the gossip and the stories in the warmth and light of a crowded bar were a great pleasure to him; he used to talk of them next day with reminiscent pleasure, and make plans for the next outing.

  He did his football pool religiously every week. He could no longer read the small print of the announcements, but Mollie read it all out to him each week and they would make out the coupons and send them in, one for him and one for her. He did not win anything, to her regret, but she won two pounds fifteen shillings one week, and this gave them both a great deal of pleasure.

  On his bad days, when headache forced him to his drugs, he stayed in bed all day, somnolent, sleepy, and thoughtful. About the middle of October he had a fall in the kitchen. He had walked all morning, shopping, with Mollie; on coming into the house the vertigo seized him; he reached for the kitchen dresser and missed it and fell, hitting the back of his head heavily upon the fender. He brought down the soup tureen with him and three plates, and Mollie, hurrying downstairs to the noise, found him lying unconscious on the floor in a litter of smashed china.

  She called Mrs Pocock from next door to help her; together they managed to carry him upstairs and put him to bed. He had come round by the time Dr Worth arrived, two hours later, but after that he did not walk out in the street again.

  Mrs Pocock was devoted to good works. For want of someone to confide in, and for her help in getting Mr Turner up the stairs, Mollie told her the facts of his illness; she relayed them to the vicar. They were not regular churchgoers by any means — indeed, neither of them had very often been inside the place, but the vicar was a kindly and broadminded man, and called one afternoon when Mr Turner was in bed and thinking of getting up for tea to take a run out to the Barley Mow.

  Mollie brought him up to the bedroom. “Here’s Mr Holden come to see you, Jackie,” she said. To the clergyman she said: “It’s ever so kind of you to call.”

  She left them together, and went downstairs to get on with the ironing. Half an hour later she heard the vicar coming out of the bedroom, and went to meet him in the hall to open the front door for him.

  Mr Holden said: “He seems to keep very cheerful, Mrs Turner.”

  “That’s right,” she replied. “Nothing seems to get him down, does it?”

  “No; he seems very composed.” He thought for a minute. “Of course, it’s clear that he has never been what one would call a religious man,” he said, and smiled. She wondered apprehensively what Jackie had been saying to him. “If I can do anything practical to help you, Mrs Turner, let me know. And if you find a little later on that he would like to see me again — that sometimes do
es happen, you know — I will come at once. At any time.”

  She said: “That’s ever so kind of you, Mr Holden. I’m sure he’ll like to know that.”

  He left and she turned off the iron and went up to the bedroom. “I just let Mr Holden out,” she said. “Like to have your tea up here, Jackie, or are you going to get up?”

  “Oh, I’ll get up,” he replied. “I’m feeling all right now. I reckon we can go out, like we said.”

  She asked: “What had Mr Holden got to say?”

  “I dunno — all about having Faith, and that.” He paused. “I asked him straight out what was going to happen to me — where do I go from here? I said. But he don’t know nothing, really. He talked a lot of stuff about Judgment, ‘n Heaven, ‘n Hell, only he didn’t seem to believe in hell himself, not properly. What it all seems to boil down to is, you just got to have Faith that God’ll put you where you belong, but he don’t know where that is or what happens to you there. It don’t seem very satisfactory to me.”

  Theological discussion was a new thing between them. “I wouldn’t bother your head about it too much, Jackie,” she said gently. “Just take it as it comes.”

  He was silent for a minute, deep in thought. “I been thinking about this,” he said at last. “I kind of like the idea them Buddhists have the best — what Mr Morgan and Nay Htohn believe. I don’t want to be judged, not yet. I done a sight o’ mean things in my life, things you probably don’t know nothing about in business and that. You got to these days, or you can’t get by and build up any security at all, with taxes like they are. If I come up to be judged now, ‘n it’s either Heaven or Hell, I know which it would be.”

  “You can’t know that yourself, Jackie,” she said. “That don’t make sense.”

  “Well, I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he replied. “But these Buddhists, what they say is, if you haven’t done so good in this life then you get reborn again a bit lower down, maybe as an Indian sweeper, or lower down still, as a horse or a dog. That gives you another go, like, to have another shot at it ‘n try and do a bit better. And however low you get, they say, you always get reborn, and you can always have another go, and work yourself up again by living a better life. That’s what Nay Htohn said. I’d like to think that it was going to be like that.”

  “Maybe it will be like that, then,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t worry about it, anyway.”

  Mr Turner said: “I don’t. Can’t do anything about it, now, so it’s no good worrying. But I kind of like the Buddhist idea — that’s how I’d like to be.” He grinned up at her. “So if you see a little dog about next year you haven’t seen before, ‘n you call ‘Jackie’, ‘n it comes, just give it a nice bone.”

  “And put a bottle of beer in its bowl, too, I suppose,” she said. She turned, laughing, to the door. “Come on and get up, if you’re getting up today. I’ll go and put the kettle on for tea.”

  Another time, he said: “I been thinking about these coloured people that I got to know about, Nay Htohn and Dave Lesurier. You know, there don’t seem to be nothing different at all between us and them, only the colour of the skin. I thought somehow they ‘ld be different to that. They got some things we haven’t got, too — better manners, sometimes. I reckon we could learn a thing or two from them.”

  His wife said: “You got to remember that those two were different to the general run of coloured people, Jackie. They were educated ones.”

  “That’s so,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe there’s some sense in paying for all this schooling.”

  * * *

  I saw Mr Turner on October 30th in my rooms at Harley Street, by an appointment made for him by his general practitioner, Dr Worth. I saw him at four o’clock in the afternoon upon a day when I had no further appointments, thinking that I might find it necessary to take him to the hospital for another radiological examination.

  My receptionist showed him in. His wife came in with him, one hand lightly guiding his arm; she seemed to be afraid to let him move a step without her. She watched him as he lowered himself into the chair, and then said: “I’ll wait outside, doctor.”

  “No, you can stay if you want to,” I replied. “That is, if Mr Turner doesn’t mind?”

  “Suits me all right,” he said.

  He spoke thickly, with a slurring of the consonants. He still possessed his jaunty air of cheerfulness, but one glance told me that I would have little need of radiological examination for him. Paralysis of the right arm was far advanced. The left eye was fixed and evidently useless to him, and the right one was already much affected. He had lost a great deal of weight, so that his clothes, once tight upon his body, hung upon him loosely. He still had colour in his face, but around his eyes and temples there was a grey tinge to his skin. It did not seem to me that he had very long to go.

  I have been over thirty years in specialist practice. Some men say that they get hardened to these things, but I have never overcome that sadness of compassion that one must feel for a man in his position.

  I offered him a cigarette, and reached over, and lit it for him.

  I said: “Well, Mr Turner, what have you been doing since I saw you last?”

  No Highway (1948)

  No Highway was first published by William Heinemann Ltd in the UK in 1948. Like many of Shute’s novels it was influenced by his engineering career and his work and interest in aircraft construction. In 1931, Shute co-founded a company to build aircraft, called Airspeed Limited, with fellow aeroplane designer, A. H. Tiltman. Lord Grimthorpe and Alan Cobham were two directors of the company and Amy Johnson was one of the initial subscribers for shares. Johnson was a pioneering pilot, who became famous for being the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. She and her husband, pilot Jim Mollison, broke a series of flying records during the 1930’s. However, in January 1941 while flying she faced adverse weather conditions and she died after crashing into the Thames Estuary.

  No Highway concerns the middle-aged scientist, Theodore Honey, who works for the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He has recently become fascinated by the idea of ‘metal fatigue’, which would cause a crystalline fracture in the tailplane. He is using the (fictional) ‘Rutland Reindeer’ plane to test his theory that the failing will occur after the plane has flown over 1400 hours. Worryingly, a ‘Reindeer’ has just crashed in Canada and metal fatigue cannot be ruled out as a cause. Since the aircraft is still being used to transport passengers across the Atlantic, this creates a sense of panic for Honey’s colleague, Dr. Scott. Honey is sent to Canada to investigate, but mid-flight he discovers he is flying in a ‘Reindeer’ that has just surpassed 1400 hours flight time. He must quickly decide what to do and try to prove to others that his theory is correct. The novel was a success and it inspired the 1951 film, No Highway in the Sky, starring James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich and Glynis Johns.

  The first edition of the novel

  CONTENTS

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Poster from the 1951 film adaptation of the book

  . . . Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find

  No highway more, no track, all being blind,

  The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.

  Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea

  And planned the courses of all Stars that be,

  Adventure on, more wonders are in Thee.

  Adventure on, for from the littlest clue

  Has come whatever worth man ever knew;

  The next to lighten all men may be you . . .

  John Masefield

  The three stanzas by John Masefield from The Wanderer are quoted by kind permission of Dr. John Masefield, O.M., and The Society of Authors.

  1

  WHEN I WAS put in charge of the
Structural Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, I was thirty-four years old. That made a few small difficulties at first, because most of my research staff were a good deal older than I was, and most of them considered it a very odd appointment. Moreover, I wasn’t a Farnborough man; I started in a stress office in the aircraft industry and came to Farnborough from Boscombe Down, where I had been technical assistant to the Director of Experimental Flying for three years. I had often been to Farnborough, of course, and I knew some of the staff of my new department slightly; I had always regarded them as rather a queer lot. On closer acquaintance with them, I did not change my views.

  In spite of my appointment from outside I found them quite co-operative, but they were all getting on in years and beginning to think more about their pensions than about promotion. When I got settled in I found that each of them had his own little niche and his own bit of research. Mr. Morrison, for example, was our expert on the three-dimensional concentrations of stress around riveted plate joints and he was toying with a fourth dimension, the effect of time. What he didn’t know about polarised light wasn’t worth knowing. He had been studying this subject for eight and a half years, and he had a whole room full of little plate and plastic models broken upon test. Every two years or so he produced a paper which was published as an R. and M., full of the most complicated mathematics proving to the aeroplane designer what he knew already from his own experience.

  Mr. Fox-Marvin was another of them. I discovered to my amazement when I had been in the department for a week that Fox-Marvin had been working since 1935 on the torsional instability of struts, with Miss Bucklin aiding and abetting him for much of the time. They were no laggards at the paper work, for in that time they had produced typescript totalling well over a million words, if words are a correct measure of reading matter that was mostly mathematical. At the end of all those years they had got the unstabilised, eccentrically loaded strut of varying section just about buttoned up, regardless of the fact that unstabilised struts are very rare today in any aircraft structure.