Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  It was exciting to be in aviation in those days, because development went at such a pace. Already the new model of passenger transport was in operation, the D.H.18. That was the first aeroplane that de Havilland designed solely as a transport, without using any of the units in production for military aircraft. It was a full gap biplane, which means that the fuselage was so deep as to fill the space between the upper and the lower wings, so that the top wings sprouted from the top of the cabin and the bottom wings from the bottom; in those days this was a novelty in a large aeroplane. To us this was a very big machine; it had one Napier Lion engine of about 450 horsepower; it carried eight passengers and one pilot, and it had the very high stalling speed of about fifty-five miles an hour, which caused a great deal of pessimistic head-wagging among the pilots when it was first introduced. An interesting feature of the machine was that the pilot was seated in an open cockpit behind the cabin looking over the top wing, an arrangement which gave the pilot a fairly good view when flying but a very poor view of obstacles ahead of him upon the ground. The cynical pointed out that since the pilot’s position was the safest in the aircraft, being nearest the tail, it ensured that the designer would get an intelligent account of the accident.

  I did not go to de Havillands for the short Christmas vacation of 1920; my father’s retirement from the Post Office was near and he took his six weeks’ leave that winter at Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. I went out and joined my father and mother there in winter sunshine, the first of a number of visits I have made to that coast since then. Bordighera was a good centre for ageing people in those days, and probably still is for those who can solve the modern currency difficulties; it was quiet and cheap and Italian, a good place for sitting in the sun and sketching, a good centre for pleasant inland walks on hills covered in pine trees and wild thyme and dotted about with walled hill villages and terraced flower gardens. Places like that upon the Continent were full of old English people escaping from the grey chill of an English winter; it is one of the tragedies of modern England that this simple pleasure is denied for economic reasons till the aged are so ill as to be able to get currency upon a doctor’s certificate.

  When I went back to work at de Havillands in the Easter vacation of 1921 the new company had been formed, and the move to Stag Lane aerodrome near Edgware had taken place. Stag Lane had been a training aerodrome in the war, a very minor one run by a civilian flying school, and there were still funny little training single-seaters known as the Caudron Louse lying derelict in corners. The new company was in a tiny way of business, and they were still glad to have my unpaid work, for money was very tight. The buildings consisted of one wooden hangar of perhaps ten thousand square feet floor area which accommodated the woodworking machinery, the machinists and the fitters’ shop, and the aeroplane erection, and three canvas-covered Bessoneau hangars in rather dilapidated condition which housed the aeroplanes. The head office was a little weatherboard building of three rooms, one of which was shared by Captain de Havilland and Mr. Walker, one by Mr. St. Barbe the business manager and Mr. Nixon the secretary, and one by the telephone girl and the typists. The drawing office was an old army hut which in the interval between the end of the war and its occupation by the new company had been a chocolate factory, unsuccessful. In this there were assembled ten or twelve draughtsmen of the old Airco staff, and Mr. King who did all stress and performance calculations, and from whom I was to learn my job.

  In these surroundings the new company began work, and many of the team in those days are still with the company in these days; I sometimes wish I was. It is no small achievement for a man to have assisted to build up a great enterprise like de Havillands from such small beginnings; a man who has done that can look back on his life and feel that it has been well spent. And in those days the beginnings were small indeed. To run the lathes and milling machines — or should those words be singular? — power was needed, and the cost of bringing electric power to the site was probably prohibitive to the infant company, though there was electric light. Perhaps the cost of an electric motor was the difficulty. At any rate, Mr. Hearle and Mr. Mitchell, his foreman engineer, got hold of an old German Benz aero engine from some scrap heap; gas was available on the site, and so they set it up to run on coal gas to drive the machinery, using three of the six cylinders, and that old engine drove the shafting for the machine shop for two or three years.

  It was all like that. Apart from aeroplane construction, the earliest venture of the new company was the de Havilland Air Taxi Service, which used a light bomber of the recent war, the D.H.9, converted to carry the pilot and two passengers. That was a biplane powered by a Siddeley Puma engine. At the conclusion of the war many brand new Puma engines were hit twice with a sledge-hammer and sold for scrap metal, and the infant company acquired a considerable number of these engines for a pound or two and proceeded to cannibalise them and rebuild them into engines for the charter fleet.

  Most of the test flying at that time was still done by Captain de Havilland himself, but presently the company engaged a second pilot. Hatchett had been a sergeant pilot in the war, and he was a skilled woodworker; when he was not flying he worked on the bench. He was a very steady and reliable pilot. I think the next pilot to join the organisation was Alan Cobham, and I remember his arrival very well because he brought an aeroplane with him, by road. He had been joy riding somewhere, and had discovered a complete new D.H.9 on some aerodrome that had escaped the sledge-hammer altogether; perhaps Cobham stood the man a beer. At any rate, he bought it for ninety pounds and towed it behind his car to Stag Lane aerodrome to commence an intricate negotiation with Mr. Hearle with the intent that the company should get a cheap aeroplane and Cobham a job. The deal went through. In those early days Cobham was not rated as the best pilot that the company employed, but he had a fantastic capacity for hard work and organisation; he could work eighteen hours a day month after month, and he was soon to prove it by a series of pioneering flights about the world that brought him a great reputation, and a knighthood. Hubert Broad emerged from the half dozen pilots of the charter service as the best test pilot and he remained the chief test pilot for a number of years. Charles Barnard was the most ribald. I had the characters of all these men in mind for Phillip Stenning, a character in my first published novel, Marazan.

  Another pilot of the charter service was Ortweiler, a very slight, dark-haired, childish looking young man of Jewish extraction, who had been an undergraduate at Cambridge after the war. He had been in the R.F.C. as a fighter pilot and had been shot down over Belgium. In captivity he became an enthusiastic escaper. He was incredibly youthful in appearance, and spoke German fairly well. On his first escape he bought a German schoolboy’s cap; wearing this and telling a tearful story about having been sent home from school to go to his grandmother’s funeral, he travelled as far as the Dutch frontier by train and was only recaptured on a frontier road. He finally escaped to Holland from an island in the Baltic, travelling by train disguised as a commercial traveller and crawling for three days through the marshes at the frontier. He flew with the taxi service for about a year, and was killed in a crash at the aerodrome of Cuatro Vientos, at Madrid. He was a pleasant young man, and we had a lot in common.

  The de Havilland Company was in continuous growth throughout my association with it, but in those earliest days, in the summer of 1921, I doubt if it employed more than a hundred people, counting directors, pilots, design staff, and everybody. In so small an organisation which at the same time covered practically every branch of aviation, I had a magnificent chance to get a knowledge of all sides of the business, and I think I took advantage of it. Mr. King and I worked side by side, the senior performance calculator and the junior assistant, and as the new projects came to life upon our graphs and columns of figures de Havilland and Walker still spent long periods cogitating upon our drawing boards, to my immense benefit.

  The policy of the firm at that time was to make its living by designing and selling
civil aeroplanes rather than military ones. The greater freedom from Air Ministry interference suited the genius of the directors for one thing, but to a great extent this policy arose from de Havilland’s strong antipathy to war and anything to do with it. In the two wars he put the whole of his genius to the design of military aircraft with outstanding success, but this quiet, highly strung man detested war and everything associated with it. I well remember an incident at my board in that early drawing office at Stag Lane. I had been investigating the weights of aeroplanes of increased size to the same overall characteristics at Walker’s command, to try to get an idea whether it would pay to build big. The discussion at my desk ranged beyond technicalities into policy, till Walker said thoughtfully, “Of course, if a machine can carry a thousand pound bomb, it doesn’t follow that a bigger one carrying a two thousand pound bomb will do twice the damage. It might pay to have two of the smaller ones.” De Havilland stood up, said, “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” and walked out of the office.

  In this small, friendly company the office staff had plenty of opportunities for flying with the pilots, and the company encouraged this for general experience, provided that it cost the company no money. I flew first as a passenger with Hatchett in a D.H.9 on a routine test flight. I was still writing bad poetry:

  This wood, this metal to the touch

  Stays solid, even though so much

  Is changed, fantastic …

  Only this liquid element

  That beats and clutches. One would float

  Placidly, like a bottle dropped

  From some swift-flying motor boat.

  Only the sun, the sky, the air

  And mossy pincushions of trees

  Upon the hazy picture there.

  Only the solid wings, and these.

  After that I flew whenever I could get into the air, and I flew with most of the firm’s pilots. De Havilland at that time had a D.H.6, a very slow, safe training biplane of the first war, that he kept for a short time for his personal use, and he took me up in that one day to show me what he meant when he talked at my desk about stability. There was something fresh to be learned every day, and in those days the master was still only a jump or two ahead of the pupil, so that the instruction was virile and stimulating.

  Thinking back over those years, I think that Oxford was less important to me than my vacation work, which perhaps explains why I did no better than third class honours in my Finals. It was difficult to pump up any enthusiasm for the theory of concrete dams or electrical machinery when I was so deeply concerned in aviation. I must have felt, instinctively I think, that in my vacation work I was in on something really big, something that would grow and be important to the world. All through my life I have been subject to these hunches, as I suppose many people are; I have felt inarticulately and for no special reason, ‘This really is something’, or ‘This can’t possibly be right. There must be something wrong with this one, some disaster coming’. Usually I have found that these instinctive feelings have been justified.

  I went down from Oxford in the summer of 1922 and spent a month cruising in the Channel on a chartered six-tonner with two friends. De Havillands had offered me a job as a junior stress and performance calculator at a salary of five pounds a week, but when the autumn came the company was in difficulties and having to economise. They put me off till the New Year. My father retired on pension from the Post Office about that time and intended to spend most of the winter at Bordighera; I joined my parents there in the autumn and spent several months with them, exploring the countryside, learning a little Italian, and probably writing a little. I think I had given up writing poetry by that time, and I had not then started writing unpublishable novels. There is at least one unpublishable short story which dates from that autumn. I suppose most young authors go through the process of development that I went through. First I wrote poetry, probably because a poem is the shortest complete work that is possible, and being entirely emotional it requires little experience of life. Moreover, you don’t have to have a typewriter to write a poem. What I didn’t realise, of course, is that a piece of writing is like a camera; the smaller it is the more carefully it has to be made. In a novel a few awkward passages can get lost in the crowd, but in a short poem every word must play its part and be exactly right, and the temptation to use the wrong word for the sake of rhyme or rhythm is very great.

  Probably the next stage is that the budding author acquires a typewriter. Those who are blessed with a flowing hand may be able to write a short story in longhand though it has to be typed in the end, for no editor will read a manuscript in these days. For myself, I have so cramped and stilted a handwriting that my hand is aching with fatigue after a hundred words, so I wrote nothing longer than that until I got a typewriter and learned to use it, when I found that I could go on as long as my brain would function. I had an old Blick to start with, which was a very elementary form of portable, not easy to use but better than handwriting. I think a good typewriter is as important to an author as brushes and palette to an artist, because when writing on a typewriter it is important to be able to forget the machine. It may not be quite a coincidence that my first publishable novel, Marazan, was the first that I wrote on a brand new typewriter bought out of my earnings as an engineer.

  I started regular work with de Havillands in January 1923. The firm had already grown considerably, and they now had an order for eleven of a new type of transport for the London–Paris route. The D.H.34 was still a single engined biplane powered by one Napier Lion engine, but the trend of development towards the modern aircraft was beginning to appear. Two pilots were seated side by side in an open cockpit behind the engine and in front of the top wing; behind them the full gap fuselage accommodated a cabin for eight passengers and, I think, a toilet. This was a bigger aeroplane even than the D.H. 18; I forget its fully loaded weight but it was probably about 8000 lbs. It stalled at the incredibly high speed of 61 m.p.h., so that its introduction caused something like a strike of the pilots of the operating companies, who held that an aeroplane with so high a landing speed could never be operated safely. Looking back thirty years, there may have been some reason on their side, for the machine had no brakes, wireless of the most elementary nature operating by morse code with a tapping key, no flaps, no blind-flying instruments; in consequence forced landings in fields along the route had to be borne in mind if bad weather should make it impossible to complete a flight. However, the pilots got to like it in the end and the machine served the airlines well for several years, till larger, multi-engined aircraft took its place.

  That spring my parents returned from Italy and took a small country house fifty miles south-west of London, at Liss off the Portsmouth Road. In those days nobody knew much about the depreciation of money or realised that a reduced standard of living had come to stay, and my parents started off with two maids in the house and a gardener three days a week. Money worries pursued them though I was virtually off their hands; they kept the situation under control because my mother all her life had kept accounts religiously, so that they knew exactly where they were. Their retirement, however, was not the carefree time it should have been and after some years they gave up the attempt to live in England in the only manner that appealed to them, and took to wandering, spending their winters abroad and their summers in a variety of hotels at home.

  The motor bicycle had given place to a two-seater car, a Morgan three-wheeler, while I was at Oxford. I got rooms in Stag Lane just outside the de Havilland aerodrome and settled down to work, going down every weekend by road to stay with my parents. In Petersfield I soon discovered No. 1 The Square, an old half-timbered house run as a secondhand bookshop, art gallery, and custom jewellery shop by a crowd of artists led by Harry Roberts, an East End doctor who had a large, rambling estate of woodland in the hills outside the town, near Steep. I made no other friends in the neighbourhood but they were enough.

  In the spring of 1923 I learned to fly. The
company by that time had started a flying school as another branch of its activities, and they were training reserve pilots for the Royal Air Force on Renault Avros, a somewhat unusual version of the well known Avro 504 trainer which was probably dictated by the fact that rotary engines were going out of use and henceforward training had to be upon machines with stationary engines. My flying had to be conducted with the strictest economy, for my parents were selling capital to provide this opportunity for me and flying on the Renault Avro cost five pounds ten an hour, a sum which even in these days of lessened money values would be regarded as prohibitive. Mr. Nixon was adamant in refusing to reduce this figure even for an employee, and I had seen sufficient of the economies forced on the company to feel no great resentment at this very economic charge. Indeed, even at the time when I was arguing for a reduction I felt a sneaking admiration for him in his uncompromising stand; the first objective of the company at that time was to stay in business. They had no elbow room for generosity, though individually they went to untold trouble over employees who were sick. It was a pleasant, friendly company, though tough in business, of necessity.