by Nevil Shute
The sight of the warships in the Sound, the land, and the calmer water revived the children a little; they began to look about and take an interest again. Under the old man’s guidance Focquet threaded his way through the warships; off Drake’s Island they came to the wind and lowered the brown sail. Then, under engine only, they made their way to the fish quay.
There were other boats before them at the quay, boats full of an assortment of mixed nationalities, clambering ashore and into England. They lay off for a quarter of an hour before they could get to the steps, while the gulls screamed around them and stolid men in blue jerseys looked down upon them, and holiday girls in summer cotton frocks took photographs of the scene.
At last they were all stumbling up the steps to join the crowd of refugees in the fish market. Howard was still in the clothes of a Breton labourer, unshaven, and very, very tired. The children, hungry and exhausted, clustered round him.
A masterful woman, trim and neat in the uniform of the W.V.S., shepherded them to a bench. “Asseyez vous là,” she said in very bad French, “jusqu’on peut vous attendre.”
Howard collapsed onto the seat and sat there half in coma, utterly exhausted. Once or twice women in uniform came to them and asked them questions, which he answered mechanically. Half an hour later a young girl brought them cups of tea, which they took gratefully.
Refreshed, the old man took more interest in his surroundings. He heard a cultured Englishwoman’s voice.
“There’s that lot over there, Mrs. Dyson. All those children with the two men.”
“What nationality are they?”
“They seem to be a mixed lot. There’s rather an attractive little girl there who speaks German.”
“Poor little thing! She must be Austrian.”
Another voice said, “Some of those children are English.”
There was an exclamation of concern. “I had no idea! But they’re in such a state! Have you seen their poor little heads? My dear, they’re lousy, every one of them.” There was a shocked pause. “That horrible old man — I wonder how he came to be in charge of them.”
The old man closed his eyes, smiling a little. This was the England that he knew and understood. This was peace.
12
THE LAST BOMB had fallen, the last gun had fired; over in the east the fires were dying down. Then came the long notes of the “All Clear” from different quarters of the town.
We got up stiffly from our chairs. I went over to the long window at the far end of the room, pulled back the curtains and threw back the shutters. The glass from the window fell in on the carpet with a crash; the wind blew fresh into our faces with a bitter, acrid smell of burning.
Down in the street below tired men in raincoats, gum boots, and tin hats were tending a small motor pump. There was a noise like a thousand jangling cut glass chandeliers as men in the houses opposite poked the remains of broken windows from the frames, letting the glass fall on the pavements, going methodically from room to room.
A cold, grey light was spreading over London. It was raining a little.
I turned from the window. “Did you get them over to the States?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “They all went together. I sent a wireless telegram to the Cavanaghs offering to send Sheila and Ronnie, and Tenois asked if he might send Rose. I got a woman that I know to go with them, and take them to Coates Harbor.”
“And Anna too?”
He nodded. “Anna went too.” We moved towards the door. “I had a letter this week from her uncle in White Falls. He said that he had sent a cable to his brother in Germany, so that ought to be all right.”
“Your daughter must have had a bit of a shock when they arrived,” I said.
He laughed, “Well, I don’t know. I sent a cable asking if she’d have them, and she said she would. She’ll be all right with them. Costello seems to be reorganizing the whole place for them. He’s building a swimming pool, and a new boathouse for their boats. I think that they’ll be very happy there.”
We went downstairs in the grey dawn and parted in the hall. He went out a few steps ahead of me; I paused to ask the night porter about damage to the club. He said that they had had a fire bomb on the roof, but that young Ernest had kicked it about till it went out. He said there was no gas or water coming to the building, but that the electricity had survived the blitz.
I yawned. “I spent the night up in the smoking room, talking to Mr. Howard,” I said.
The man nodded. “I looked in once or twice and saw you sitting with him,” he said. “I said to the steward, I said — quite a good thing you was with him. He’s got to look a great deal older recently.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid he has.”
“He went away for a long holiday a month or two ago,” the porter said. “But I don’t know as it did him a great deal of good.”
I went out, and the glass crunched tinkling beneath my feet.
THE END
Pastoral (1944)
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
The first edition
Chapter One
THINK NO MORE, lad; laugh, be jolly:
Why should men make haste to die?
Empty heads and tongues a-talking
Make the rough road easy walking,
And the feather pate of folly
Bears the falling sky.
A. E. HOUSMAN
Peter Marshall stirred in the broad light of day, and woke up slowly. The pale sun of February streamed into his narrow room, a gold streak crossing the foot of his bed and lighting on the deal wash-stand. He saw the sunlight through half-opened eyes, then closed them again to ease the dazzle. He could not close his ears. He heard, passing away above his head, the high scream of an ungeared engine in fine pitch, and automatically his mind said: ‘Harvard.’ He listened, tense even in his torpor, till the note dropped as the unseen pilot changed to coarse and throttled back a little; then he relaxed and pressed his head more deeply in the pillow.
It would not have woken him if it had been a Wellington. Wimpies were part and parcel of his life, the very texture of his work. He was awake now, though he lay with his eyes closed. There was a Wimpey running up one engine, somewhere away out in the middle distance of the aerodrome. It would be one of the ones up for forty-hour inspection, or else the one that hadn’t taken off last night. The engine, he decided, sounded lousy.
The noise died down to a tick over, and he heard the birds. There were elm trees opposite the mess, retained for camouflage; these trees were full of rooks. He heard them cawing and disputing. He heard the twittering of sparrows. He heard a cow lowing from the meadow. He heard an AC2 pass beneath his window whistling: ‘Daisy, Daisy . . .’ He opened his eyes again, and there was the pale gold sun streaming across the wash-stand. He turned his head to look at the window and saw a pale blue, cloudless sky, and felt the cold air fresh upon his face. He remembered the Met. report and the belt of high pressure that extended out into the Atlantic.
‘God,’ he muttered drowsily, ‘it’s going to be a bloody fine day.’
He raised his head to look at the wristwatch laid upon the chair beside him; it was seven minutes past ten. He closed his eyes again, calculating. It had been nearly three when he had got to bed, he thought. They had landed back just before two. Taxi-ing to dispersal and handing over to the ground crew took a bit of time. Ten minutes in the truck to Wing Headquarters and twenty minutes over the report. Then the truck again to the mess, and a quarter of an hour, sleepy and silent, over cocoa and buns. It must have been three before he was in bed. That meant he had only had seven hours’ sleep; enough for an old man, maybe, but not for a growing boy. He need not get up yet.
He stretched and turned over in h
is bed, savouring the comfort of it, closing his eyes and striving to regain the warm oblivion from which the Harvard had dragged him. He could not sleep again. He lay for twenty minutes growing gradually wakeful, till he heard the batwoman banging about in the room next to his. He heard the rattle of china as she emptied the basin into her slop-pail.
The partitions were only beaverboard. He shouted: ‘Beatrice! Beatrice — come in here a minute.’
He heard the pail go down with a rattle of the handle, and she put her head around the door. ‘Did you call, Mr Marshall?’
‘I did,’ he said. He turned in bed to look at her. ‘Have you been down for your elevenses?’
‘Not yet. We aren’t supposed to go before half past ten.’
‘It’s half past ten now. Will you bring me up a cup of tea when you come back?’
She giggled. ‘Oh, Mr Marshall! You know I’m not supposed to do that, not at this time of the morning. Mrs Stevens she wouldn’t half let me know about it if she saw me.’
‘She won’t see you.’
‘When are you going to get up, Mr Marshall? I got this room to do before dinner.’
‘I’ll get up when I’ve had my tea.’
She said: ‘I never promised,’ and shut the door. Lying there in bed and asking for tea, she thought, and with the sun streaming in, and all. Even if he had been out late. She had heard the aircraft coming in over her hutment in the camp, in the middle of the night. Them blue pyjamas he had on were ever so nice, and he didn’t half look nice in them. She went downstairs to get his tea.
Marshall sat up in bed. The room, small as it was, held all his personal belongings. He got out of bed and crossed to the corner by the door, and picked up a long green rod-bag. From a top drawer of the chest of drawers he took a little leather bag that held a reel. Carrying these with him, he returned to bed.
He had been introduced to fishing about six or seven months before by Sergeant Phillips, his rear-gunner, who came from York. In peace-time Phillips worked a complicated machine that put the chocolate on to chocolate biscuits, but his heart was in fishing. Every Sunday he would go out and sit on the bank of some slow-flowing stream, frequently the Derwent. He fished for nothing but roach. With his long green-heart roach-pole, his bag of ground bait, and his gentles he would sit all day, watchful, alert, and patient. He had developed into a very good rear-gunner in the Wimpey.
He had taught Marshall to fish for roach. He had succeeded so far as he had fired his captain with enthusiasm for fishing, but his pupil had soon deserted roach for pike. Spinning for pike was more in keeping with the quick energy of the pilot; moreover, you could eat stuffed pike. It was true that Phillips ate the roach, but it was generally conceded that roach were an acquired taste. If you happened to like eating cotton-wool stuffed with mud you liked eating roach.
Gunnar was a roach fisherman, and used to go and sit with Phillips by the slow stream two miles away, the River Fittel, that ran southwards to the Thames through the pleasant farms of Oxfordshire. Gunnar Franck was a Dane from Copenhagen, a sergeant pilot, Marshall’s second pilot and navigator. In 1940 he had been a medical student in his home town; he had reached England from Norway in a fishing-boat in 1941 and had spent six weeks in an internment camp while his credentials were examined. He approved of that, and frequently told the story in the sergeants’ mess. ‘Ver’ careful, ver’ good,’ he would say. ‘Soon as I got on shore at Aberdeen, officer asks me questions. I not speak English ver’ well those days, and pretty soon he think I was a Nazi. I spent six weeks in prison.’ From gaol he had been sent to Ottawa, from Ottawa to Arizona to a flying school. Ten months later he had flown a Hudson back from Montreal to Scotland as a second pilot. He had been a second pilot ever since, though recently he had been re-mustered as a navigator.
Gunnar was a big young man with a red face and curly black hair, good-tempered, methodical, and rather slow. So far as Marshall knew, he had never made a mistake in navigation, and no emergency had ever made him hurry. He never passed a course or distance verbally, but wrote it down and gave it to his captain. He had explained this once to Marshall. ‘No mistakes,’ he had said, beaming good-humouredly. ‘No mistakes this way. Perhaps one day you think I say something when I mean differently, so I think it better that I write it down.’ He always crossed his sevens in the continental style.
These two, Phillips and Gunnar Franck, formed the backbone of the crew; the others came and went in training or dilution of the air crews, but the rear-gunner and the navigator stayed with Marshall. He had reflected once or twice that all of them were fishermen, and had once suggested that a heraldic roach, rampant in or upon a field of gules, should decorate the front fuselage of the current Wimpey. The Wing Commander had taken a poor view of that and Marshall, lying in bed in the pale sunlight, was not altogether sorry that the scheme had come to nothing. A roach was a lousy fish to put upon a Wellington. A pike, a pike with great snapping jaws and very fierce would be altogether different.
Sitting up in bed he assembled his new rod. It was a very little rod, a slender wand of steel more like a rapier than a rod, not more than five feet long. It was beautifully made and finished. The sun glinted on the chromium-plated rings above the wand; the shaped cork grip nestled in the palm of his hand. He fitted the little multiplying reel and flicked tentatively in the air above his bed. A chap could chuck a plug the hell of a way with that.
The WAAF batwoman found him sitting so when she brought in his tea, critically examining his new rod. ‘My,’ she said, ‘what’s that you’ve got?’
‘Fishing-rod,’ he said.
She said again: ‘My . . .’ Them pyjamas were a dream. ‘Well, here’s your tea. Now you get up, ‘n let me do this room.’
‘I’ll get up in a minute.’
She said: ‘Don’t sit there playing with your fishing-rod. I got my work to do.’
She went out, and the pilot sat on in his bed, sipping the large cup of hot, sweet tea that she had brought him. He was in no hurry to get up. He had missed breakfast by the best part of a couple of hours, and it was a full hour and a half before lunch. For decency, he would have to go and look his Wimpey over; he could do that before lunch. He did not want to fly it; for the moment he was sated with flying. What he wanted most of all to do, and what he certainly would do when he had had a meal, was to take his new rod and his new reel and his new plugs, and ride three miles on his bicycle to Coldstone millpool, and see if he could get a pike.
He took the rod to pieces and packed it away again, and presently he got out of bed. He walked over to the window and looked out. He could not see the aerodrome. He looked out over a small valley, pasture and ploughland alternating in chequers, parted by hedges and great bushy trees. It was very still, and quiet, and sunny. Over to the right a little squad of WAAFs were standing in open order in a field doing physical jerks. The girls wore battledress in Air Force blue; the Section Officer who was drilling them wore grey trousers and a grey jumper with a polo neck. She stood facing them. ‘One — two — down — up — swing — stretch — down. Not bad. Let’s try that once again.’ A mile away he heard the village church of Hartley Magna chime the quarters, and then strike eleven.
He rubbed his hand across his face, yawned, stretched, and went to the bathroom.
Half an hour later he was getting on his bicycle to ride around the ring runway to dispersal. He rode slowly with one hand in his pocket, savouring the freshness of the morning. He passed various Wellingtons upon their little concrete bays. One had a gaping, jagged hole at the trailing edge of its starboard extension plane, that had removed a portion of the aileron and put the flap permanently halfway down. He glanced at it casually, without much interest, as he passed. It was a big job. Nobody was doing anything about it yet.
He came to his own Wellington, R for Robert. The ground crew were working on it; the fitters had stripped the port engine of its cowling, and there was somebody in the cockpit. Marshall got off his bicycle and laid it down upon the gra
ss, and strolled over to the port engine.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘How do we go?’
One of the fitters said: ‘You got an oil leak. Filter casting’s cracked. Did you know?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘Pressure was all right. Might have been five pounds down. Is it bad?’
The man went to the engine and wiped the casting with a dirty rag; immediately the new oil showed the crack. ‘You were nearly dry on this side,’ he said. ‘Not more’n two gallons in the tank.’
Marshall looked again. ‘Did something hit that?’ he asked. ‘Or did it just go?’
‘Just went, I should say.’ The man wiped it again. ‘I don’t see any mark.’ He glanced up at the pilot. ‘Is that right, it was Turin?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Much stuff about?’
‘Not much. Seen anything of Sergeant Pilot Franck this morning?’
‘He’s inside, sir.’
There were several people in the fuselage: Gunnar Franck, and the corporal rigger, and one of the men from Vickers. Marshall swung himself in and said: ‘What’s this in aid of?’
Franck turned to him. ‘There is little holes,’ he said. ‘In the bomb doors and the underneath of the rear fuselage, and the tail also. I have thought that it was the rats, maybe.’
Marshall said: ‘Very likely. Couldn’t have been anything else.’ He bent with them to examine the damage, which was no more than superficial, and heard what the technician proposed to do about it. ‘Strong teeth the little muggers have,’ he observed, fingering a buckled duralumin bracing of the geodetic.
Gunnar said: ‘Also, they have strong stomachs. I have found the droppings.’ He opened his hand and showed three tiny, jagged fragments of shell-case.
