by Nevil Shute
He moved to the drawing board and worked there for the best part of an hour. Then in the stillness of the night he moved back to the typewriter. By two in the morning he was writing,
On Plans D, E, F, G, and H, are indicated the apparent sectional geological structures on the five lines of survey indicated on Plan B. With the exception of Plan E, these sections all display the same characteristic of a primary reflecting bed located at depths varying from 2,300 feet to 2,950 feet and a secondary reflecting bed located at depths varying from 3,550 feet to 4,100 feet. On Plan C the sub-surface contours of these two reflecting beds are indicated as deduced from the above sections, the top plan (green) indicating the upper reflecting bed and the lower plan (red) indicating the lower reflecting bed. Scale of Plan C: 1 inch to 2,000 yards.
He stopped typing, and sat for a long time staring at the wall in front of him. Perhaps Mollie had been right about The Frontier. Perhaps in his grandfather’s day this place really had been like the Lunatic. He knew that in the later years of the old man’s life, the only memory of him that Stanton had, his father and his mother had experienced a good deal of trouble with Grandpa and his weakness for strong drink. If it were possible for the old man to get out of the house unperceived he would go wandering off to Skid Row to get drunk in a saloon with other reprobates of his own age, to the shame of Stanton’s parents and the scandal of all Hazel. Perhaps this valley had been like the Lunatic today, once, long ago.
Perhaps, as in the Book of Genesis, there were giants in the earth in those days, when Hazel was created. But were the giants nice people to know?
He roused himself after a while, and went on typing.
On Plan C the bore hole, the datum point, is indicated by the letter O. Attached to this report, Appendix 1, is a copy of the core record and analysis sheets of spoil brought up from this bore at the appropriate depths. It will be noticed that at a depth of 2,560 feet a layer of hard granite rock approximately fifteen feet thick was penetrated, clearly impervious to fluids. Reference to Plan C shows that this anhydrite layer corresponds very closely in depth to the primary reflecting bed revealed by the seismic survey, and is clearly identical with it.
He would never be able to forget Mollie, nor forget the Lunatic that was her home. Too many of his standards had been changed by his time there. Before he went there he could never have seen virtue in the hard-drinking old reprobate who was her father; by the time he left, he could see nothing else. The man who would drop everything to help a neighbour in a difficulty, who would help an inexperienced English boy by taking three thousand starving sheep on to his property for no more payment than a case of rum. The man who loved animals, who could tame even a kangaroo mouse. The kindest hopper in the world. The kindest hopper this side of the black stump.
A tear trickled slowly down his cheek. He brushed it aside, and went on with his work. He turned to the drawing board again and made another sketch, and then back to the typewriter.
Plan I is an over-all plan of the district to a scale of 2 miles to one inch, distances approximate as measured by jeep speedometer. Lines of geological section are shown upon the chain-dotted lines A-A´ and B-B´. The dotted line X-Y indicates the approximate location of the fence between the properties. Surface outcrops of granitic rock corresponding in analysis to the primary anhydrite layer pierced by the bore O at 2,560 feet were observed at the points C, D, E, F, and G shown on Plan I. In all cases these were associated with extensive areas of limestone country beyond the outcrop, corresponding with the waterlogged limestone strata found at the bore between the two anhydrite layers. Barometric altitudes of these anhydrite outcrops are indicated on the plan, referred to the surface level of Bore O as datum zero.
He was growing very tired now, tired enough to sleep in spite of everything, but it was nearly finished.
The water level at Bore O was established on February 22nd, 1955 as — 126 feet. On Plan I surface spot levels below — 150 feet are indicated by the area hatched in brown, PQRST. Within this area bores sunk through the anhydrite rock might be expected to yield an artesian flow.
There was nothing more to say now, and his work was over. He signed his name at the bottom,
Stanton C. Laird,
Staff Geologist,
Topeka Exploration Inc.
Then he collected the sheets of his typescript and pinned them together, folded the many plans to foolscap size, and put the lot into a large Manila envelope. It was nearly four in the morning, and he was exhausted, too exhausted even to grieve.
He slept for about three hours, and then got up. In the next room as he dressed he could hear Mollie moving about. He waited till the sound of steps told him she had got her shoes on, and then he took the envelope and went and tapped on her door.
She came to the door, dressed, but with her hair in disarray. “Morning, Stan,” she said. “I’m afraid you didn’t sleep very well. I heard you typing in the small hours.”
He smiled wearily. “You can’t have slept so well yourself, either.” He paused, and then he said, “You changed your mind, honey?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Stan. I don’t think we could ever make it work.”
He stood in silence for a moment at her door. “Mind if I ask you something, honey? Something real personal?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll answer it if I can.”
“You going back to marry that English boy, David Cope?”
She stood in thought. “I can’t answer that one. I just don’t know. I shouldn’t think he’d ever ask me again.”
“He asked you once, did he?”
She nodded without speaking.
There was a pause, and then he said awkwardly, “You know somethin’? I got a wedding present for you, or a kinda dowry.” He put the envelope into her hands.
“That’s very sweet of you,” she said, wondering. “What is it, Stan?”
He stood for a moment thinking of the low, undulating hills nine thousand miles away, the rocky outcrops on the rose-red earth, the waterless river beds, the thin, parched bush in the valleys, the blazing, cloudless sky. “It’s water,” he said. “Scads and scads of it, under Lucinda Station. Clear, cool water.”
On the Beach (1957)
On the Beach was first published in April 1957 as a four-part series, The Last Days of Earth, in the London periodical, Sunday Graphic. The book format was published later in the same year by William Heinemann and was an extended version of the serialised story. The Sunday Graphic was an English tabloid that was founded in 1915 and ran for forty five years. The title of the novel is both a reference to a Royal Navy term for ‘retired from the Service’ and an allusion to a line in the T. S. Elliot poem, The Hollow Men. On the Beach is one of the author’s best-known works and as such has inspired film and television adaptations over the years, including the 1959 film version starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.
The plot is set a year after a nuclear war, which has destroyed most life on earth, with only parts of the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia, still habitable. However, radiation is spreading quickly and it is only a matter of time until all human life becomes extinct. The novel follows the lives of a handful of characters in Melbourne, who must face their impending demise. Shute explores the different ways that people attempt to emotionally and mentally process their imminent deaths. They range from complete denial, forms of escapism and numbing dread through excessive drinking. The novel was written during the Cold War, at a time when the possibility of a nuclear war seemed likely and Shute clearly articulates not only the idiocy of any such war, but also the complete devastation and human cost of belligerence. The book was well received by critics, earning praise from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and The Times.
The first edition of the novel
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
Poster from the 1959 film adaptation
Melbourne, Victoria, the setting of the novel
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river . . .
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
WILLIAM MORROW AND COMPANY
New York . . . 1957
1
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER PETER Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy woke soon after dawn. He lay drowsily for a while, lulled by the warm comfort of Mary sleeping beside him, watching the first light of the Australian sun upon the cretonne curtains of their room. He knew from the sun’s rays that it was about five o’clock; very soon the light would wake his baby daughter Jennifer in her cot, and then they would have to get up and start doing things. No need to start before that happened; he could lie a little longer.
He woke happy, and it was some time before his conscious senses realized and pinned down the origin of this happiness. It was not Christmas, because that was over. He had illuminated the little fir tree in their garden with a string of coloured lights with a long lead to the plug beside the fireplace in the lounge, a small replica of the great illuminated tree a mile away outside the town hall of Falmouth. They had had a barbecue in the garden on the evening of Christmas Day, with a few friends. Christmas was over, and this — his mind turned over slowly — this must be Thursday the 27th. As he lay in bed the sunburn on his back was still a little sore from their day on the beach yesterday, and from sailing in the race. He would do well to keep his shirt on today. And then, as consciousness came fully to him, he realized that of course he would keep his shirt on today. He had a date at eleven o’clock in the Second Naval Member’s office, in the Navy Department up in Melbourne. It meant a new appointment, his first work for seven months. It could even mean a seagoing job if he were very lucky, and he ached for a ship again.
It meant work, anyway. The thought of it had made him happy when he went to sleep, and his happiness had lasted through the night. He had had no appointment since he had been promoted lieutenant commander in August and in the circumstances of the time he had almost given up hope of ever working again. The Navy Department, however, had maintained him on full pay throughout these months, and he was grateful to them.
The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises. The naval officer reached out and turned the switch of the electric kettle on the tray of tea things and baby food beside the bed, and Mary stirred beside him. She asked the time, and he told her. Then he kissed her, and said, “It’s a lovely morning again.”
She sat up, brushing back her hair. “I got so burned yesterday. I put some calamine stuff on Jennifer last night, but I really don’t think she ought to go down to the beach again today.” Then she, too, recollected. “Oh — Peter, it’s today you’re going up to Melbourne, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “I should stay at home, have a day in the shade.”
“I think I will.”
He got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back Mary was up, too; the baby was sitting on her pot and Mary was drawing a comb through her hair before the glass. He sat down on the edge of the bed in a horizontal beam of sunlight, and made the tea.
She said, “It’s going to be very hot in Melbourne today, Peter. I thought we might go down to the club about four, and you join us there for a swim. I could take the trailer and your bathers.”
They had a small car in the garage, but since the short war had ended a year previously it remained unused. However, Peter Holmes was an ingenious man and good with tools, and he had contrived a tolerable substitute. Both Mary and he had bicycles. He had built a small two-wheeled trailer using the front wheels of two motor bicycles, and he had contrived a trailer hitch both on Mary’s bicycle and his own so that either could pull this thing, which served them as a perambulator and a general goods carrier. Their chief trouble was the long hill up from Falmouth.
He nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. I’ll take my bike and leave it at the station.”
“What train have you got to catch?”
“The nine-five.” He sipped his tea and glanced at his watch. “I’ll go and get the milk as soon as I’ve drunk this.”
He put on a pair of shorts and a singlet and went out. He lived in the ground floor flat of an old house upon the hill above the town that had been divided into apartments; he had the garage and a good part of the garden in his share of the property. There was a verandah, and here he kept the bicycles and the trailer. It would have been logical to park the car under the trees and use the garage, but he could not bring himself to do that. The little Morris was the first car he had ever owned, and he had courted Mary in it. They had been married in 1961 six months before the war, before he sailed in H.M.A.S. Anzac for what they thought would be indefinite separation. The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now, that had flared all round the Northern Hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of explosion on the thirty-seventh day. At the end of the third month he had returned to Williamstown in Anzac on the last of her fuel oil while the statesmen of the Southern Hemisphere gathered in conference at Wellington in New Zealand to compare notes and assess the new conditions, had returned to Falmouth to his Mary and his Morris Minor car. The car had three gallons in the tank; he used that unheeding and another five that he bought at a pump before it dawned upon Australians that all oil came from the Northern Hemisphere.
He pulled the trailer and his bicycle down from the verandah on to the lawn and fitted the trailer hitch; then he mounted and rode off. He had four miles to go to fetch the milk and cream, for the transport shortage now prevented all collections from the farms in his district and they had learned to make their own butter in the Mixmaster. He rode off down the road in the warm morning sunlight, the empty billies rattling in the trailer at his back, happy in the thought of work before him.
There was very little traffic on the road. He passed one vehicle that once had been a car, the engine removed and the windscreen knocked out, drawn by an Angus bullock. He passed two riders upon horses, going carefully upon the gravel verge to the road beside the bitumen surface. He did not want one; they were scarce and delicate creatures that changed hands for a thousand pounds or more, but he had sometimes thought about a bullock for Mary. He could convert the Morris easily enough, though it would break his heart to do so.
He reached the farm in half an hour, and went straight to the milking shed. He knew the farmer well, a slow-speaking, tall, lean man who walked with a limp from the Second World War. He found him in the separator room, where the milk flowed into one churn and the cream into another in a low murmur of sound from the electric motor that drove the machine. “Morning, Mr. Paul,” said the naval officer. “How are you today?”
“Good, Mr. Holmes.” The farmer took the milk billy from him and filled it at the vat. “Everything all right with you?”
“Fine. I’ve got to go up to Melbourne, to the Navy Department. I think they’ve got a job for me at last.”
“Ah,” said the farmer, “that’ll be good. Kind of wearisome, waiting around, I’d say.”
Peter nodded. “It’s going to complicate things a bit if it’s a seagoing job. Mary’ll be coming for the milk, though, twice a week. She’ll bring the money, just the same.”
The farmer said, “You don’t have to worry about the money till you come back, anyway. I’ve got more milk than the pigs will take even now, dry as it is. Put twenty gallons in the creek last night — can’t get it away. Suppose I ought to raise more pigs, but then it doesn’t seem worth while. It’s hard to say what to do. . . .” He stood in silence for a minute, and then he said, “Going to be kind of awkw
ard for the wife, coming over here. What’s she going to do with Jennifer?”
“She’ll probably bring her over with her, in the trailer.”
“Kind of awkward for her, that.” The farmer walked to the alley of the milking shed and stood in the warm sunlight, looking the bicycle and trailer over. “That’s a good trailer,” he said. “As good a little trailer as I ever saw. Made it yourself, didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you get the wheels, if I may ask?”
“They’re motor bike wheels. I got them in Elizabeth Street.”
“Think you could get a pair for me?”
“I could try,” Peter said. “I think there may be some of them about still. They’re better than the little wheels — they tow more easily.” The farmer nodded. “They may be a bit scarce now. People seem to be hanging on to motor bikes.”
“I was saying to the wife,” the farmer remarked slowly, “if I had a little trailer like that I could make it like a chair for her, put it on behind the push bike and take her into Falmouth, shopping. It’s mighty lonely for a woman in a place like this, these days,” he explained. “Not like it was before the war, when she could take the car and get into town in twenty minutes. The bullock cart takes three and a half hours, and three and a half hours back; that’s seven hours for travelling alone. She did try to learn to ride a bike but she’ll never make a go of it, not at her age and another baby on the way. I wouldn’t want her to try. But if I had a little trailer like you’ve got I could take her into Falmouth twice a week, and take the milk and cream along to Mrs. Holmes at the same time.” He paused. “I’d like to be able to do that for the wife,” he remarked. “After all, from what they say on the wireless, there’s not so long to go.”