Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “I think it’s simply lovely,” said the girl from London. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a beautiful place.”

  They turned to the homestead and started on the business of getting themselves and the luggage indoors, and the refrigerator, and the grandfather clock, and began the business of preparing supper. Mario had killed a sheep and butchered it and there was cold roast mutton in the larder; salad and tinned peaches with cream and plum cake completed the impromptu meal, which they ate in the big kitchen that was the central room of the homestead.

  Leonora homestead had several bedrooms, but, with Tim Archer and Mario both living in, Angela Dorman and Jennifer shared a room. Jennifer soon found that Angela was frankly curious about England; the barrage of questions began as soon as they retired.

  “Have you ever seen Westminster Abbey?” Angela asked.

  Jennifer was taken by surprise. “Why — yes.”

  “It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The girl from London had to think a bit. “It’s all right,” she said at last. “I don’t know that I ever noticed it particularly.”

  “It’s where they have the Coronation, isn’t it? Where the King and Queen get crowned?”

  Jennifer wasn’t quite sure if the Coronation took place there or at St. Paul’s; neither of them meant a great deal in her life. “I think it is,” she said, and laughed. “You know, it must sound awfully silly, but I’m not quite sure.”

  “I’m sure it’s Westminster Abbey,” said the Australian girl. “I was reading a book about the Coronation of the King and Queen, in 1937. It had a lot of pictures taken in the Abbey. It must be marvellous to see a thing like that.”

  “I should think it would be,” Jennifer agreed. “I haven’t seen it, of course. I was a kid at school, in Leicester. I remember that we got a whole holiday.”

  “We got a holiday here, of course,” said Angela. “I was only little, but I remember Banbury was all decorated with flags and bunting everywhere.”

  Jennifer tried to visualise the little country town that they had passed through all decorated and rejoicing over an event that happened twelve thousand miles away, and failed. “Really?”

  “Why, of course. And then when the film came to the picture house Daddy and Mummy took me to it. It was the first film I ever saw; I think I was about five. It came back during the war, and I saw it again then. I’ve seen it three times altogether.”

  “I remember it was a good film,” said Jennifer. “I saw it in England.” She reflected as she brushed her hair that Angela Dorman, then a little country schoolgirl at Merrijig, probably knew a good deal more about the Coronation ceremonies and Westminster Abbey than she did.

  “Have you ever seen the King and Queen?” asked Angela.

  Jennifer tried to remember if she had or not; surely she must have seen them some time, other than at the cinema. Surely she must have? In any case, she couldn’t possibly say she hadn’t. Recollection came to her just in time, and saved her from having to tell a lie. “I saw them in the procession when Princess Elizabeth got married,” she said. “I was standing in the Mall; they passed quite close.”

  “How marvellous! The Mall — that’s the avenue between Buckingham Palace and the Admiralty Arch, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” It was incredible how much Angela knew about London.

  “Did you see Princess Elizabeth, too?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “And the Duke of Edinburgh?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen them several times.”

  “Tell me — do they look like their pictures?”

  “Yes, I think so — as much as anyone looks like their picture. They look very good sorts.”

  “It must be wonderful to see them close to, like that,” Angela said. “I suppose you’ve seen everything there is to see in London?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Jennifer. “I lived in London for two years, but I was outside in one of the suburbs, at a place called Blackheath. I worked in an office there. I didn’t see an awful lot of London, really.”

  “I’m going to London next year, if the wool holds up,” said Angela. “I want to get a job in one of the big hospitals. Have you ever seen Winston Churchill?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jennifer. “I’ve seen him on the pictures so many times, one gets muddled up.” She searched for a palliative for her disgrace. “I’ve seen Bob Hope.”

  “Have you really? Have you seen any other film stars?”

  “One or two. I saw Dennis Price once, at a dance.”

  “You are lucky. Have you seen Ingrid Bergman? I think she’s beaut.”

  It went on and on, long after they were both in bed and growing sleepy. To Angela the English girl was a visitor from another planet, a beautiful rose-coloured place where everything that happened was important to the world. “I should think you’ll find it awfully dull in Melbourne, after living in London,” she said once. “Nothing interesting ever happens here.”

  Jennifer could have answered that nothing interesting ever happened in Blackheath, but she forbore to; she had not known Angela for long enough to damp such a guileless enthusiasm for England and everything English. She herself, so far, had found Australia far more interesting than England. She liked the prosperous dignity of Melbourne better than the shabby austerity of London; she was deeply and inarticulately pleased with the good country she had seen that day, with the brilliant birds and the novel beasts that roamed the woods and pastures where there were so few people to disturb them. She could do without the sight and the propinquity of famous or of interesting people in return for these good things, for a time anyway.

  She slept well, and woke with the first light of dawn to the sound of people moving about in the homestead; she looked at her watch and found that it was half-past five. Outside was sunshine and a man’s step in the yard; she rolled sleepily out of bed and sat on the edge. Angela opened an eye and said, “What’s the time?”

  “Half-past five.”

  “We don’t get up till eight. I never do.”

  “People seem to be moving about.”

  “It’s only Mummy. She gets up in the middle of the night all the year round.” Angela rolled over firmly and went to sleep again.

  Jennifer got up and dressed in jumper and slacks, and found Jane Dorman drinking a cup of tea at the table in the kitchen; the fire was already lit in the new stove. She poured Jennifer a cup. “You didn’t have to get up,” she said. “Angela isn’t, is she? I thought not. I often get a bit of cooking done before breakfast, in the hot weather. It’s better than having the stove going in the middle of the day.”

  Jennifer went out presently into the yard in the fresh morning, and found Tim Archer lifting a couple of dogs into the back of the old Chevrolet utility. They were nondescript dogs, one a sort of mongrel collie and the other a blue roan, a kind of dog that Jennifer had never seen before. She asked Tim what it was, and he said it was a “heeler”, but when she pressed him to say if that was a breed or not, he could not tell her. It was a heeler because it went for the heels of the cattle and not their heads, apparently.

  “Do you use them for the sheep as well?” she asked.

  “My word,” he said. “I’m going down to get the mob out of the river paddock ‘n put them down the road. Want to come along?”

  She got into the utility with him, and they started off across-country in it, driving over the short pastures. They went about a mile, passing through three gates, and drove round behind the sheep; here Tim stopped the utility and put the dogs out. He shouted a few orders to the dogs and got one out on one flank and one the other and got the sheep moving, seven or eight hundred of them, in the direction of the gate. They got back into the utility and drove about the paddock for a time rounding up the stragglers with the dogs; then when the mob was compact in one bunch they drove along behind them in the centre, one dog at each side. They went very slowly, at the walking pace of a sheep.

  Jennifer
stretched in the warm sun. “I suppose this is the modern way of herding sheep,” she said. “By motor-car.”

  “Too right,” he said. “It’s a sight quicker and easier than messing about with a horse. The boss, he likes a horse and he’d ride if he was on this job. But to my way of thinking, by the time you’ve caught the horse and saddled up, you could have done the job in a utility.”

  He turned to her. “Don’t they use utilities in the paddocks in England?”

  She was nonplussed. “I don’t think so,” she said. “They don’t have utilities at all. Most of the farms in England are quite small, much smaller than these. It’s all different here.”

  “I know,” he said. “The properties are bigger here, but you’ve got better land. Or else, perhaps you improve it more than we do. How do you like it here, after England?”

  “I like it so far,” she said. “It’s a very, very pretty bit of country, this.”

  He stared at her in surprise. “Prettier than England?”

  “It’s different,” she said. “You’d have to go a long way to find such unspoilt country in England. England might have been like this once.”

  He digested this in silence for a time. Then he said, “Angie doesn’t like it here. She wants to go to England.”

  “I know. She was telling me last night.”

  “Do you think she’ll like it there?”

  “She’ll like it all right,” said Jennifer. “She’s determined to. She’s expecting an awful lot, and she’ll have some disappointments, I should think. But — yes, she’ll like it.”

  They drove on for a time in silence while he digested this unpalatable opinion. The sheep baa-ed and scuffled in front of them, the dogs whimpering on either side. “What I can’t make out,” he said at last, “is why anybody leaves England, if it’s such a bonza place as that. Is it because they don’t get enough to eat?”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” said Jennifer. “England can be difficult at times.” She paused. “I think Angie may find that, when the glamour wears off. I shouldn’t think she’d want to spend her life in England, after living here.”

  “You think she’ll come back here?” he asked quickly.

  She laughed. “I don’t know. She might marry somebody in England and settle down there.”

  “Too right,” he said quietly. “She might do that.”

  It seemed to be a difficult conversation, and Jennifer changed it, and asked him what sort of sheep they were. He told her that they were Corriedales, and described to her the points that made them so. From that they passed to discussing the Hereford cattle in an adjacent paddock, and the difference between those and Shorthorns.

  “I wish I knew more about all this,” she said presently. “About the land, and how to make it grow more grass. That’s important, isn’t it?”

  He said, “Well, stands to reason if you grow more grass you can feed more beasts. There’s a lot to be done in this part of the country to improve the pastures.”

  “Aren’t people doing all they can?”

  “Aw, look,” he protested, “it costs money, you know. Mr. Dorman, he’s ploughing up eighty acres of the river paddocks we’ve just come from this autumn, and sowing it down to clovers and rye-grass. He’ll have to spend three hundred pounds on seed alone, let alone the labour and the tractor and that, and then the paddock will be out of grazing for six months. I’d like to see him doing a lot more than that, but it’s a big thing to close a paddock for six months, with wool the price it is.”

  “I see. You’d get more meat and wool later on, but not this year. You’d get less.”

  “That’s right. And next year the prices might not be so good. The time to close the paddocks for reseeding is when prices are low, and then you generally can’t afford to do it.”

  “It’s terribly important to turn out more meat,” said Jennifer. “I should have thought people would have taken a chance.”

  “It’s just a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence,” he said.

  “It’s a good thing to do as well,” she retorted. “That ought to count for something.”

  He stared at her. “How do you mean?”

  “The food’s so badly needed,” she said. “It’s important to turn out as much as possible, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I dunno.” All his life Tim Archer had lived in communities that had a surfeit of food; it was a condition of his employment on a sheep station in Victoria that he should be entitled to buy as much mutton as he wanted at threepence a pound, and this for a family meant half a sheep a week. It was hard for him to realise what this English girl was getting at. “We don’t need any more food here,” he said. “You mean, because of people at home?”

  She nodded. “It’ld make a difference at home if people could live like you live here. It isn’t till one comes away that one realises how bad things have got in England. If anybody here wants to do something for England they can just set to and grow a bit more food.”

  “I wish you’d tell Angie that,” he said with a faint smile. He could not keep from talking about Angie to this girl; every topic seemed to work round to her in the end. “She’s wanting to do something for England by going home to take a job in a London hospital.”

  “She wants to see England,” Jennifer said. “That’s what she wants to go for. She’d do a better job for England by staying here at home, on Leonora, and driving the tractor to help make more food.”

  “Well, you just tell her that.” He was grinning now.

  “I don’t mind, but it won’t cut any ice. She wants to see England. But it’s true, all the same. If there was a bit more food we mightn’t want so many hospitals.”

  Jennifer spent the morning in housework with Jane; Angela did a little bit about the house and then borrowed her mother’s Morris and disappeared for the day to look up old school friends in the district, and to bring back a few vegetables and stores from Banbury. Jennifer refused an invitation to go with her, preferring on this first day to stay around the homestead and help Jane to get the lunch. It was hot in the kitchen and they let the wood stove out at about ten o’clock, and served a cold saddle of lamb for dinner with a great dish of potatoes cooked upon a Primus, and a cold jam tart.

  They sat out, after washing-up, in deck-chairs on the veranda; Jack and the two men were away in one of the paddocks cutting up a dead tree for firewood. There was a little breeze from off the mountain, cool and refreshing; they sat drowsing and gossiping, looking out over the wide valley in the blazing sunshine.

  Presently Jane said, “Tell me about Aunt Ethel. What did she die of? I didn’t gather that from your letters.”

  It was an awkward question, and one that Jennifer was not prepared to answer directly. Ealing and the suburban house in the dark November rain seemed very far away. “She was an old dear,” she said at last, “but in some ways she was rather stupid. She ran out of money, and she wouldn’t tell anybody about it. You see, her pension came to an end.”

  She explained the matter of the pension to Jane. “She had another old lady living with her,” Jennifer explained, “a Mrs. Harding, widow of an Army officer.”

  “Is that the one she called Aggie, who died?”

  “That’s right,” said Jennifer. “Aggie died last May, and that probably made things difficult because, of course, they shared expenses. My mother wrote and asked her, but she said that she’d be quite all right. Well, she wasn’t all right at all. It was about that time her pension came to an end, but she never told anybody about that. She hadn’t got anything to live on then, so she began selling things. Furniture that she hadn’t any use for — and little bits of jewellery.”

  “My dear ...”

  “We didn’t know a thing about it,” the girl said. “I went and saw her one Sunday only a month before she died, and she gave me a marvellous lunch — roast duck with all the trimmings, and a mince pie made out of some of the dried fruit parcels that you sent her....” It was incredible, sitting here on the veranda in
the warm breeze, that those cartons had come from here. “She had buttered scones for tea, and a great big cake. She never let on for a moment that there was anything wrong. And all the time she was — well, starving. That’s what it amounted to. When she got ill, it came out that she hadn’t eaten anything for days, except a few of your dried fruits.”

  “My dear, I am so very, very sorry.”

  “I know,” the girl said. “She was very proud, and she wouldn’t tell a soul. She needn’t have let things get to such a pitch. If she didn’t want to tell us, she could have got help from the Town Hall. There’s an official called the relieving officer who’s there to deal with cases like that, and help with money. She could have gone to him. But she wouldn’t do that.”

  “She didn’t want to take charity, I suppose.”

  The girl said, “I think that was it. She’d have thought that was an awful thing to do.”

  “I can’t imagine Aunt Ethel ever taking charity. She — she was different.”

  “I don’t think it a very good thing to be different in England,” Jennifer said. “It’s better if you go along like everybody else.”

  They talked about the details of what had happened in Ealing for a time. Presently Jane asked, “Tell me, Jenny — is this sort of thing common now? Do old people, people of Aunt Ethel’s sort — do many of them die in poverty?”

  The girl said cautiously, “I think a good many of them have a pretty bad time. It’s difficult to tell, because one doesn’t hear a lot about them. Old ladies who die quietly and make no fuss don’t get into the newspapers. Granny didn’t have to die like that. She was too proud to let anyone know that she was hard up. She could have died like that anywhere — it wasn’t anything to do with England. It could have happened in Australia.”