by Nevil Shute
The Land Administration Board answered our letter later on that week and suggested a meeting on the following Tuesday or Wednesday, which suited our air services. I flew down to Brisbane with Joe Harman, picking up his solicitor in Cairns, and we had a conference with the Land Administration Board, which lasted most of one day, settling the Heads of Agreement. Then Harman went back to his station, and Mr. Hope and I stayed on in Brisbane passing the draft of the final agreement backwards and forwards to the Land Administration Board with amendments in red and green and blue and purple ink. On top of this, I was in communication with the solicitors for Mrs. Spears over the option agreement for the final purchase of Midhurst; all this kept me busy in Brisbane for nearly a fortnight. Finally I was able to agree to them both, after an exchange of cables with Lester, and brought them back to Cairns. Joe Harman signed them, and we put them in the post, and my business in Queensland was done.
I went back to Willstown with Joe and stayed another week with them, not because there was any reason why I should do so, but for an old man’s sentiment. I sat on the veranda with Jean, studying her drawing of the layout of the self-service grocery. We discussed whether it could not be combined with the hardware store. We went into Willstown and visited the site for it, and I spent some time with Mr. Carter, the Shire Clerk, discussing with him the position in regard to the leases that she held for land. She showed me the swimming-pool and we talked about the cost of tiling over the rough concrete to make it look better, and I sat for hours in the ice-cream parlour watching those beautiful young women as they pushed their prams from shop to shop.
I asked her once if she would be coming back to England for a holiday. She hesitated, and then said gently, “Not for a bit, Noel. Joe and I want to take a holiday next year, but we’ve been planning to go to America. We thought we’d go to San Francisco and get an old car, and drive down the west coast into Arizona and Texas. I’m sure we’d learn an awful lot that would be useful here if we did that. Their problems must be just the same as ours, and they’ve been at it longer.”
Jean touched me very much one evening by suggesting that I stayed out there and made my home with them. “You’ve nothing to go back to England for, Noel,” she said. “You’ve practically retired now. Why not give up Chancery Lane, give up London, and stay here with us? You know we’d love to have you.”
It was impossible of course; the old have their place and the young have theirs. “That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I wish I could. But I’ve got sons, and grandchildren, you know. Harry will be coming home next year and we’re all hoping that he’ll get a shore appointment. He’s due for a term of duty at the Admiralty, I think.”
She said, “I’m sorry, for our sake. Joe and I talked this over, and we hoped we’d be able to get you to stay with us for a long time. Make your home here with us.”
I said quietly, “That was a very kind thought, Jean, but I must go back.”
They drove me to the aeroplane, of course, to see me off. Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible. I cannot even remember what she said, and it is not important anyway. I can only remember a great thankfulness that the Dakota on that service didn’t carry a stewardess so that nobody could see my face as we circled after taking off to get on course, and I saw the new buildings and bright roofs of that Gulf town for the last time.
It is winter now, and it is nearly three months since I have been able to get out to the office or the club. My daughter-in-law Eve, Martin’s wife, has been organising me; it was she who insisted that I should engage this nurse to sleep in the flat. They wanted me to go into some sort of nursing-home, but I won’t do that.
I have spent the winter writing down this story, I suppose because an old man loves to dwell upon the past and this is my own form of the foible. And having finished it, it seems to me that I have been mixed up in things far greater than I realised at the time. It is no small matter to assist in the birth of a new city, and as I sit here looking out into the London mists I sometimes wonder just what it is that Jean has done; if any of us realise, even yet, the importance of her achievement.
I wrote to her the other day and told her a queer thought that came into my head. Her money came originally from the goldfields of Hall’s Creek in West Australia, where James Macfadden made it in the last years of the last century. I suppose Hall’s Creek is derelict now, and like another Burketown or another Croydon. I think it is fitting that the gold that has been taken from those places should come back to them again in capital to make them prosperous. When I thought of that, it seemed to me that I had done the right thing with her money and that James Macfadden would have approved, although I had run contrary to the strict intentions of his son’s will. After all, it was James who made the money and took it away to England from a place like Willstown. I think he would have liked it when his great-niece took it back again.
I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ON THE PUBLICATION of this book I expect to be accused of falsifying history, especially in regard to the march and death of the homeless women prisoners. I shall be told that nothing of the sort ever happened in Malaya, and this is true. It happened in Sumatra.
After the conquest of Malaya in 1942 the Japanese invaded Sumatra and quickly took the island. A party of about eighty Dutch women and children were collected in the vicinity of Padang. The local Japanese commander was reluctant to assume responsibility for these women and, to solve his problem, marched them out of his area; so began a trek all round Sumatra which lasted for two and a half years. At the end of this vast journey less than thirty of them were still alive.
In 1949 I stayed with Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck at Palembang in Sumatra. Mrs. Geysel had been a member of that party. When she was taken prisoner she was a slight, pretty girl of twenty-one, recently married; she had a baby six months old, and a very robust sense of humour. In the years that followed Mrs. Geysel marched over twelve hundred miles carrying her baby, in circumstances similar to those which I have described. She emerged from this fantastic ordeal undaunted, and with her son fit and well.
I do not think that I have ever before turned to real life for an incident in one of my novels. If I have done so now it is because I have been unable to resist the appeal of this true story, and because I want to pay what tribute is within my power to the most gallant lady I have ever met.
Nevil Shute
Round the Bend (1951)
First published in 1951, Round the Bend was one of the first novels he had written after emigrating to Australia in 1950. In the late 1940’s, Shute had flown himself to Australia alongside a friend and when he returned to Britain he became worried about what he perceived as the decline of his homeland. He decided it was for the best to relocate to Langwarrin, Victoria with his family. An interesting aspect of the novel is the author’s tackling of the issue of the ‘White Australia policy’. This was a series of immigration acts passed at the turn of the twentieth century that essentially only allowed white Europeans to migrate to the country. These overtly racist laws continued to be in place until the early 1970’s, when acts were passed to end the official policy of racial discrimination in immigration law.
Round the Bend is narrated by the protagonist, Tom Cutter, a British man that works overseas in aviation during the Second World War. When he returns to England, he discovers that his wife, who has been unfaithful, has killed herself and he feels shame and responsibility for her death. He cannot
face staying in England, so he flies to Bahrain, where he establishes a freight company. It becomes successful and then he encounters an old friend, Connie Shaklin, who is soon appointed chief engineer of the company. Shaklin is an unusual man, whose interest in spirituality has resulted in him becoming a leading religious figure in some communities. The novel traces his relationship with Cutter and his spiritual and philosophical ideas.
The first edition of the novel
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Shute, close to the time of publication
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
ST. JOHN. 14.2.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
THANKS ARE DUE to Mrs. Flecker for permission to reprint lines from The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker, The Golden Journey to Samarkand, and Hassan; also to Dr. John Masefield, O.M., and The Society of Authors for similar permission in respect of quotations from his works.
1
Some men of noble stock were made, some glory in the murder blade, Some praise a Science or an Art, but I like honourable Trade!
James Elroy Flecker
I CAME INTO aviation the hard way. I was never in the R.A.F., and my parents hadn’t got fifteen hundred pounds to spend on pilot training for me at a flying school. My father was, and is, a crane driver at Southampton docks, and I am one of seven children, five boys and two girls. I went to the council school like all the other kids in our street, and then when I left school dad got me a job in a garage out on the Portsmouth Road. That was in 1929.
I stayed there for about three years and got to know a bit about cars. Then, early in the summer, Sir Alan Cobham came to Southampton with his flying circus, National Aviation Day, he called it. He operated in a big way, because he had about fifteen aeroplanes, Avros and Moths and a glider and an Autogiro, and a Lincock for stunting displays, and a big old Handley Page airliner for mass joy-riding, and a new thing called an Airspeed Ferry. My, that was a grand turnout to watch.
I knew from the first day that to be with that circus was the job for me. He was at Hamble for three days, and I was out at the field each day from early in the morning till dark. The chaps fuelling and cleaning down the aircraft let me help them, coiling down a hose or fetching an oil drum for them to stand on; when there was nothing else that wanted doing I went round the enclosures picking up the waste paper that the crowd had left behind and taking it away to burn in a corner of the field. It was fun just doing that, because of the aeroplanes.
I got the sack from the garage on the second day.
On the evening of their last day, I went to the foreman of the ground crew and asked him for a job. He said I was too young, and they were full up anyway. He said that he was sorry.
I went home all down in the dumps that night. I must say, Dad and Mum were good. They didn’t lay in to me for getting the sack from the garage, although they might well have done. I’d told them airily that I was going to get a job with the circus, and when I went home I suppose they saw by my face I hadn’t got it. They were ever so nice; Ma opened a small tin of salmon for tea to make a bit of a treat for me. The show was going on to Portsmouth, twenty miles away, and when I told them I was going over there next day, all Dad said was, “That’s right. Keep trying.”
I went to Portsmouth on an early bus and I was out at the airport long before the first machines flew in, helping the ground crew to put up the first enclosures round the edges of the aerodrome. The foreman scratched his head when he saw me, but they were always shorthanded so they didn’t turn me off. He must have said something to Sir Alan, though, because while I was holding a post straight for another chap to hammer into the ground, Sir Alan himself came up behind me.
“Who are you?” he asked. “I thought we’d left you behind at Hamble.”
“My name’s Tom Cutter,” I said.
“Well, what are you doing here, Tom?”
“Helping to get this post in, sir,” I said. I was a bit shy at being talked to by a knight.
“Haven’t you got a job?”
“Got the sack day before yesterday,” I said. It sounded bad, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Is that because you spent so much time out here with us?”
“I suppose so,” I said reluctantly.
He snorted. “Well, don’t be such a young fool. Go back and ask to be taken on again. There’s no work for you here. What was the job?”
“I was in a garage, sir. I can’t go back. They took on another boy.”
“Well, we can’t take you on here. We’re full up. I’ve got hundreds of boys writing to me for jobs every day, hundreds and hundreds. I’ve got no jobs to give.”
“Mr. Dixon told me that there wasn’t any job,” I said. “I just thought that if I came over while I’m doing nothing, I could help, picking up the paper and that.”
He stared at me so long in silence that I felt quite awkward. I know now what a good answer that was. “I’m blowed if I know,” he said at last, and turned away. I couldn’t make head or tail of that.
I went on all that morning helping put up the enclosures, and when dinner time came round the foreman said I’d better go and get my dinner in the mess tent with the rest of the men. It was good of him, because being out of work I hadn’t got any money to chuck around. I went and helped park the cars in the car park when they started to come in for the afternoon show, and then I watched the show again. They had stunt displays, and wing walking, and a parachute descent, and a pretty girl flying a glider. They had a public address loudspeaker system rigged up, and the announcer stood up once and said that Sir Alan Cobham had offered to let any pilot of the last war try his hand at flying again. A pilot dressed up as an old tramp came out of the crowd and did a bit of clowning with the announcer, and tripped over his umbrella and fell flat, and got into an Avro back to front and took it off the ground facing the tail, holding his hat on, waving his umbrella, and shouting blue murder, and went into the best bit of crazy flying ever seen in England, bellowing all the time to be told how to land it as he went crabbing down the enclosures three feet up, and the announcer bellowing back to him. My, that was fun! They finished up with a Gretna Green elopement of a couple in a terrible old Model T Ford, with father chasing after them all over the aerodrome in a Moth and bombing them with little paper bags of flour and rolls of toilet paper. I’d seen it all before, but I could have watched that show for ever. I’d go and see it again, even now.
I went and helped unpark the cars and get them away after the show. Sir Alan had been flying the Handley Page himself most of the afternoon, joy-riding, taking up twenty-five passengers at a time. He handed over to another pilot at about five o’clock and came through the car park to his caravan for his tea. He was always in a hurry, but never in too much of a hurry to notice the humblest detail of his big concern, and he checked when he saw me.
“You still here?” he asked.
“I been helping park the cars and that,” I said.
“Oh. Get any tips?”
“Three and six,” I said.
“Fair enough. Want to earn five bob?”
I grinned and nodded.
“I’ll give you five bob if you’d like to do the girl in Gretna Green this evening. Think you can do it?”
“Oh, aye,” I said. “I can do that all right. Thank you, Sir.”
I was young, of course, and I’d got a fresh, pink and white face in those days, so I could make up as a girl quite well. All I had to do was to dress up in the most terrible women’s clothes and drive about on the aerodrome in the old Ford, trying to get out of the way of the Moth. The Ford was driven by a boy about my own age, Connie Shaklin. Connie was short for Constantine; he was a cheerful, yell
ow-skinned young chap with straight black hair who put me in the way of things. He was dressed up as a young farmer in a sort of smock and we did the turn together; we never turned that Ford over, but we came bloody near it sometimes. It was good fun; we wheeled and skidded the thing all over the aerodrome, shrieking and hugging and kissing while the Moth dived on us and bombed us. The show ended, of course, with my skirt getting pulled off and me running off the field in a pair of red flannel knickers, covered in flour and with streamers of toilet paper all over me, while the crowd laughed fit to burst.
I got the five bob and Sir Alan himself said I’d done very well. That was the first money that I ever made in aviation.
I made eight and six that day in all, and when I got home I’d got four and twopence left, clear profit, after paying for my bus fares and my tea. I showed it to Dad and Mum and told them I was going over to the show again.
Next day they let me do the Gretna Green girl in both performances, and gave me ten bob for the two. For the rest of the day I picked up paper and carried things about for the ground engineers; there was always something to work at. Then I helped in the car park again and got some more tips, and when I went back home that night Dad said I was getting my nose in.
The show moved on to Winchester and I followed it there, but after that it was going to Newbury and that was too far for me to go over every day. I asked the foreman about a job again then, and he said he’d speak to Sir Alan for me. Next day was a Saturday and Dad was off in the afternoon, so I got him to come over in case they said I was too young again. Sir Alan saw Dad for a minute and said I was a smart boy, but if I came I’d have to be laid off in the winter. Dad said he thought it was best for me to do what I was keen on, and we’d take our chance about the winter. When we got on to the bus that night to go back home I’d got my job in the air circus, four quid a week, which was more than I’d been getting in the garage.
