Campbell's Kingdom
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Hammond Innes
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Part One: Come Lucky
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: The Kingdom
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Three: The Dam
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
The History of Vintage
Copyright
About the Author
Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller, The Doppelganger, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four-book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience – his 1940s novels The Blue Ice and The White South were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while The Lonely Skier came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller The Wreck of the Mary Deare. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the Mary Deare, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.
Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10 June 1998.
ALSO BY HAMMOND INNES
Air Bridge
Atlantic Fury
Attack Alarm
Dead and Alive
Delta Connection
Golden Soak
High Stand
Isvik
Killer Mine
Levkas Man
Maddon’s Rock
Medusa
North Star
Solomons Seal
Target Antarctica
The Angry Mountain
The Big Footprints
The Black Tide
The Blue Ice
The Doomed Oasis
The Land God Gave to Cain
The Last Voyage
The Lonely Skier
The Strange Land
The Strode Venturer
The Trojan Horse
The White South
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
Wreckers Must Breathe
To Friends in Canada
I was three months getting the background material for this book and from the cities to the ranchlands and up into the high Rockies I received nothing but kindness and much help.
Of the companies that were so willing to give me every facility I would like to thank, in particular, Trans-Canada Airlines and Canadian Pacific for making it possible for me to travel at will regardless of currency difficulties and Imperial Oil for giving me the freedom of the big new oilfields of Alberta and going to endless trouble in taking me round their rigs and introducing me to the whole process of drilling.
Two friends I would like to mention by name. One was Bruce Bohane, a ranch hand, who for three weeks was my guide and mentor as we rode trail in the Rockies. The other was Bob Douglas, leader of a Government survey party, who made me welcome at his camp near the United States border and gave me a hard week of it among the peaks of the Rockies.
For the rest I would like to say this: If in this story I have managed to pass on something of the atmosphere of energy and friendliness of this great new country it is very largely due to the people I met there.
Campbell’s Kingdom
Hammond Innes
With an Introduction by
Andy McNab
Introduction
In the acknowledgements to Campbell’s Kingdom, Hammond Innes thanks ‘friends in Canada’ for helping him in the ‘three months’ he spent researching the book: time he spent trail riding in the Rockies, touring and learning about oil rigs, even taking drilling instruction. These comprehensive background checks were typical of the way Innes approached his writing. His sense of adventure was instinctive – he said that he wrote ‘by the seat of [his] pants’, never knowing where the plot would take him – but the plot was always based on personal experience or careful research undertaken before he put pen to paper. This authenticity shines through in his writing, making the icy cold of a Canadian winter or the stinging lash of waves during a storm at sea come alive for his readers; and making the suspenseful thrills of his novels all the more enjoyable.
Perhaps Innes learned this attention to detail from his stint working as a journalist at the Financial Times, soon after leaving school. But even at that age, he wanted to be a novelist, and he wrote his first book before he was seventeen. When he needed money to get married in 1936, he signed a four-book deal and wrote The Doppelganger, which was published the following year. Several more books followed, but he still had a lot to learn as a novelist and these early books didn’t gain too much attention.
The war barely interrupted Innes’s writing career; in fact it gave him more exciting material to base his plots on. He served in the Royal Artillery, and managed to write Attack Alarm while on night watch, drawing on his surroundings to create a fast-paced story set in an aerodrome during the Battle of Britain. He witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 1944 and recreated the dramatic scenes of destruction for The Angry Mountain several years later. He turned his experiences of tough wartime ski-training in the Italian Dolomites into the first-rate thriller The Lonely Skier in 1947.
That novel, the tale of the hunt for Nazi gold hidden among Italy’s snowy peaks, was one of the first of Innes’s stories to be filmed. It was adapted for screen in 1949, renamed Snowbound, and from that moment on scriptwriters often looked to his novels as a consistent source of gripping plotlines and appealing heroes. When the time came for Campbell’s Kingdom to be filmed, it was none other than Dirk Bogarde who played Bruce with perfect enunciation as the tragic hero.
Meanwhile, Innes’s productive novel-writing clearly did not harm his abilities as a soldier, and he rose to the rank of major before the end of the war.
His major successes came in the 1950s, when he devoted himself to writing, and adventuring, full-time. He was drawn to ancient civilisations, remote islands and perilous situations where men pitted themselves against the elements. He continued to be inspired by first-hand experience gathered on his travels. Fascinated by the Berlin airlift, he begged a space aboard an RAF flight to blockaded Berlin in order to write Air Bridge (1951). He experienced dangerous and back-breaking work as a crew member of a Norwegian whaling ship in order to understand the hardship endured by the men and the gruesome realities of their trade, before writing The Blue Ice (1948) and The White South (1949). Sailing was a lifelong obsession, and his best books are set at sea – the most famous being The Wreck of the Mary Deare, published in 1956. This was Innes’s first major best-seller and it was turned into a Hollywood film, starring Charlton Heston and a weather-beaten Gary Cooper, just three years after publication. Innes used his earnings to buy a new yacht, which he named the Mary Deare.
By this point Innes had a large and loyal fan base of readers who relied on him for action-packed stories flavoure
d with plenty of suspense, drama, rollercoaster plotlines and that trademark authenticity. I think his books were particular popular because of their leading men. These were usually seemingly unremarkable characters, accustomed to a quiet life, who found themselves in impossible situations. Many people could identify with or aspire to the sense of honour and determination these unlikely heroes show when fighting their corner. Bruce Wetheral is a quintessential Innes hero. At the start of the book he is a pale, quiet and nondescript insurance man, with nobody to care for, and nobody (beyond his landlady) caring for him. But within just a few pages we learn this lonely man has a mysterious past, an improbable inheritance, a death sentence hanging over him and an unsuspected fire in his belly. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hopelessness of his case, Bruce decides to travel to the wilds of Canada and prove to everyone that his crazy grand-father was right: there is oil in the Rocky Mountains.
In order to clear his grandfather’s name, Bruce must stand up to bullying from Trevedian and Fergus. The villains of Campbell’s Kingdom display a vice that Innes clearly despised: greed. Money is the cause of the town’s ruin and the bitterness of its inhabitants; it causes Fergus and Trevedian to kill an old man ‘through his hopes’, and risk the lives of a hundred more by using faulty material to build their dam. In this story, as in The Wreck of the Mary Deare, the shadowy dealings of big business, motivated by the pursuit of fortune, ruin reputations, fortunes, even the land itself.
Innes’s writing is never better than when he is describing the power of nature, whether it is waves that pitch and hurl huge freighters, the terrifying rumble of an avalanche or the crushing might of Antarctic icebergs. And as he seemed to have a healthy disregard for wealth, he put the earnings from his book sales towards something better: conservation – preserving the landscapes he loved. During his time spent in the Rockies researching Campbell’s Kingdom, Innes developed a passion for forestry. From this time onwards he bought up acres of land, in Britain and Australia as well as Canada, where he planted dense new woodland. Some suggested this was perhaps in compensation for the many trees felled in order to satisfy demand for his best-selling books! After his experiences of whaling Innes funded development of a more humane method of killing the whales, and The Black Tide was his way of drawing attention to the devastating effects of oil spills on maritime environments. He was also committed to passing on his love of sailing and the sea. The best expression of this was his contribution to the Association of Sail Training Organisations, a charity which promotes adventure at sea for young people, often from disadvantaged backgrounds. Innes both served on the board of ASTO, and made it his chief beneficiary in his will – proceeds from the book you’re holding go towards this charity.
It is clear that the innate decency that characterised Innes’s fictional heroes was very much alive in the author himself. Time and again in his novels, this stubborn sense of right is shown to be the best defence against greed, and the best way of surviving nature’s ferocity. I think it is this hopefulness, and belief in the values of civilisation, that really marks Innes out and makes him more than merely a writer of ‘good yarns’. However, to under-appreciate his skills as a storyteller, first and foremost, would be to do him a disservice. He created brilliant plots that twist and turn and ratchet up the tension; stories bursting with energy and thrills. His books have given immense pleasure to many thousands of readers, and, with this new edition of Campbell’s Kingdom, many more to come.
Andy McNab, 2013
Part One
Come Lucky
1
I HESITATED AS I crossed the road and paused to gaze up at the familiar face of Number Thirty-two. There was a coping stone missing from the roof and one of the dirt-blackened panes of the fanlight was cracked. A light on in one of the upper rooms gave it a lop-sided look. For years I had been coming home from the office to this rather drab old Georgian-fronted house on the edge of Mecklenburgh Square, yet now I seemed to be looking at it for the first time. I had to remind myself that those windows on the first floor just to the right of the front door were my windows, that behind them were all my clothes and papers and books, all the things that made up my home.
But there was no reality about it now. It was as though I were living in a dream. I suppose I was still dazed by the news.
I wondered what they’d say at the office—or should I go on as though nothing had happened? I thought of all the years I’d been leaving this house at eight thirty-five in the morning and returning to it shortly after six at night; lonely, wasted years. Men who had served with me during the war were now in good executive positions. But for me the Army had been the big chance. Once out of it I had drifted without the drive of an objective, without the competitive urge of a close-knit masculine world. I stared with sudden loathing at the lifeless façade of Thirty-two as though it symbolised all those wasted years.
A car hooted and I shook myself, conscious of the dreadful feeling of weariness that possessed my body; conscious, too, of a sudden urgency. I needed to make some sense out of my life, and I needed to do it quickly. As I crossed to the pavement, automatically getting out my keys, I suddenly decided I wasn’t going to tell the office anything. I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I’d just say I was taking a holiday and quietly disappear.
I went in and closed the door. Footsteps sounded in the darkness of the unlighted hall.
‘Is that you, Mr Wetheral?’
It was my landlady, a large, cheerful and very loquacious Scots lady who with their Lords of the Admiralty managed to support a drunken husband who had never done a stroke of work since his leg was blown off in the First World War.
‘Yes, Mrs Baird.’
‘Ye’re home early. Did they give ye the afternoon off?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Och now, fancy that. Would it be some Sassenach holiday or was there nobody wishing to insure themselves against all those things, like arson and accident and annuity that you were talking aboot the other day?’
I smiled to myself, wondering what she would say if I told her the truth. As I started up the stairs she stopped me. ‘There’s two letters for you in your room—bills by the look of them. And I put some flowers there seeing that ye’d no been verra well lately.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Baird.’
‘Och, I nearly forgot. There was a gentleman to see you. He ha’na been gone more than ten minutes. He said it was very important, so I told him to come back again at six. He said that was fine for he’d to go to the Law Courts aboot anither matter.’
‘The Law Courts?’ I stopped and stared down at her. ‘Did he look like a lawyer?’
‘Aye, he did that. He’d a black hat and a brief case and a rolled umbrella. Ye’ve no got yersel’ into any trouble, Mr Wetheral, have ye noo?’
‘Of course not,’ I answered, puzzled. ‘You’re sure he was a lawyer?’
‘Aye, he was a lawyer all right. Shall I bring him straight up when he comes? I told him you’d be back at six. If ye’re no in any trouble, perhaps it’s some good news—one o’ your relatives dead maybe?’
‘I’m making my will,’ I said and laughed as I went on up to my rooms.
The last red flicker of the sunset showed through the trees of the square. I switched on the light. The trees stood out in bare silhouette against the lurid sky. But across the street it was already getting dark. My reflection stared back at me from the long french windows leading to the balcony—a ghostly transfer of myself against the brick façade of the houses.
I pulled the curtains quickly and turned back into the room. I suddenly felt desperately alone, more alone than I had felt in all my life.
For a while I paced back and forth, wondering what the devil a lawyer could want with me. Then I turned abruptly and went through into the bedroom. God! I was tired. I took off my coat and lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. And as I lay there sweating with fear and nervous exhaustion my life passed before my mind’s eye, mocking me with its
emptiness. Thirty-six years, and what had I done with them—what had I achieved?
I must have dropped off to sleep for I woke with a start to hear Mrs Baird’s voice calling me from the sitting-room. ‘Here’s the lawyer man to see ye again, Mr Wetheral.’
I got up, feeling dazed and chilled, and went through into the other room. He was a lawyer all right; no mistaking the neat blue suit, the white collar, the dry, dusty air of authority. ‘Mr Wetheral?’ His hand was white and soft and the skin of his long, sad face looked as though it had been starched and ironed.
‘What do you want?’ The rudeness of my tone was unintentional.
‘My name is Fothergill,’ he replied carefully. ‘Of Anstey, Fothergill and Anstey, solicitors of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Before I state my business it will be necessary for me to ask you a few personal questions. A matter of identity, that is all. May I sit down?’
‘Of course,’ I murmured. ‘A cigarette?’
‘I don’t smoke, thank you.’
I lit one and saw that my hand was shaking. I had had too many professional interviews in the last few days.
He waited until I was settled in an easy chair and then he said, ‘Your christian names please, Mr Wetheral.’
‘Bruce Campbell.’
‘Date of birth?’
‘July 20th, 1916.’
‘Parents alive?’
‘No. Both dead.’
‘Your father’s christian names please.’
‘Look,’ I said, a trifle irritably. ‘Where’s all this leading to?’
‘Please,’ he murmured. ‘Just bear with me a moment longer.’ His voice was dry and disinterested. ‘Your father’s christian names?’
‘John Henry.’
‘An engineer?’
I nodded. ‘He died on the Somme the year I was born.’
‘What were your mother’s names?’
‘Eleanor Rebecca.’
‘And her maiden name?’
‘Campbell.’