by Nevil Shute
Thinking back over my life, I know of two or three times when I’ve been just perfectly, radiantly happy. That was one of them.
I went all over England, Scotland, and Wales with the show that summer, from Falmouth to Inverness, from Kings Lynn to Swansea. I did labouring work and Gretna Green, and helped with the aeroplanes whenever I got a chance. That was mostly when some passenger had been sick on the floor. From that I got to washing off the dirty oil with a bucket of paraffin and cleaning down generally, and by the time the season ended I’d picked up quite a bit of knowledge about those particular aeroplanes, just by keeping my ears open and working on them whenever I got the chance.
I got laid off when the show packed up for the winter, but Mr. Dixon said that I could come along next year if I wanted, and if I turned up or wrote in the first week of April there’d be a job for me. Sir Alan himself came round on the last evening and shook hands with us all and thanked us, and when he came to me he asked what I was going to do.
I said, “I’ll get a job of some sort for the winter and come back again next year, if that’s all right.”
“Mr. Dixon tells me that you want to be a ground engineer,” he said.
“That’s right, sir,” I replied. “I was going to go to evening classes in the winter.”
“Fine,” he said. “If you do that, bring along some kind of a report with you next spring. If it’s a good one, I’ll see you get a bit more to do with the aeroplanes.”
I went back home, and I got a job with a coal merchant, going round with the driver of one of those chariot coal carts drawn by a horse, delivering coal at the houses. It was all right as a job because it didn’t tire your mind, and I got off sharp at five every evening with plenty of time to clean up and have tea and go out to my classes at the Southampton Polytechnic.
I did mathematics and mechanics and engineering workshop that winter, and it kept me pretty busy. On top of that I read two technical books about aeroplanes that I got out of the library, and understood about a quarter of them. When the spring came round I got a good report, and I took it along with me in April when I went to Littlehampton to join up with the circus again. I showed it to Mr. Dixon and he showed it to Sir Alan, and he sent for me and asked me if I’d like to be an apprentice with the ground engineers. That meant I’d be working on the aeroplanes all the time. My, I was pleased, and so were Dad and Mum when I wrote home. I liked humping the coal all right, but it wasn’t half as much fun as working on an aeroplane.
Being an apprentice didn’t mean that I did anything very difficult upon the aeroplanes. I still had the job of cleaning out the cabins and washing off the oil from fuselages and wings, but there were also sparking plugs to be cleaned and filters to be checked, and as time went on I got to working with the ground engineers more and more. I still did the Gretna Green girl with Connie twice each day although I had begun to shave, and this brings me to Connie.
When I joined the show the first year, it never struck me that there was anything unusual about Connie. After all, the whole show was a bit unusual from start to finish, and Connie was a part of it; the fact that he looked strange was just another one among a mass of new, strange things. He looked a bit foreign. He was about my age, but taller and rather thin. He had straight black hair and a yellowish tinge to his skin; in spite of that he had firm, well cut features. He was a good-looking, striking chap. He was a darned good friend to me, right from the first.
Once one of the pilots, irritated over something that Connie had or hadn’t done, said, “Where’s that bloody Chink?” It was a surprise to me at the time, but when he said that I thought of the Chinese laundry at the corner of our street at home, and I could see what he meant. Connie was much taller than either of the two men in the laundry and he’d got a leaner look about his face, but he did look a bit Chinese, when you came to think of it. Still, that didn’t mean a thing to me; Connie was just like any other boy except that he knew a good bit more than most of my other friends.
He was an apprentice like me, but he’d started a bit higher on the ladder; he’d been to a good school. Sir Alan had had some trouble at Penang on his first pioneering flight out to Australia, and Connie’s father had helped him, I think; that’s how Connie came to be an apprentice in the air circus. Connie and I became very close friends, perhaps because our backgrounds were so different. Our Gretna Green turn brought us very close together in more senses than one; we were always thinking up new gags for it, most of which Sir Alan stopped us doing after the first time because he said they were too rude.
Again, that second summer we went all over the British Isles, staying a day in each place and giving two shows each day. There was never a whole day off; in an air circus like that you take your week-ends in the winter. We were improvising all the time to keep the aircraft in the air; we had plenty of tools and good materials to work with, but all the work had to be done out in the open field. It was a grand training for an engineer, because in each emergency you had to work out quick what was the best way to tackle it with the facilities at your disposal. I’ve changed an engine many a time in the lee of a haystack, by lashing up a sheerlegs of scaffold poles over the nose of the machine and borrowing the farmer’s tractor to pull the wire rope, like a crane.
It’s not quite true to say that we had no time off, however. We often stayed at the same place over the week-end. We had the afternoon and evening shows on Sunday as usual, but there was never very much to do on Sunday morning. Connie sometimes used to go to church, but Connie was unusual; I can’t remember that anybody else did.
I knew more about church than most boys in our street, because until my voice broke I was a choir boy at St. John’s. I never talked about it on the circus because it sounds a bit sissy to say you’ve been a choir boy, but I was. I wouldn’t have been, but for Mum. She said that if I’d got a good voice it was my duty to use it, and she made me go. I never got anything for it but the outing to the Isle of Wight each summer, and when my voice broke I got out of it. If I’d been working in Southampton Mum would have made me join up as a tenor when my voice steadied down, but the air circus got me out of that, of course. It wasn’t worth doing just for the winter months.
The thing that interested me in Connie’s church-going was that he just went to any old church there was. He went to the nearest, whether it was Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or Roman Catholic. He went to a synagogue one time, at Wolverhampton. If it was raining or if we’d had too much beer on Saturday night he wouldn’t go at all, but if it was a nice fine morning and nothing particular to do, he’d ask somebody where the nearest church was and go to it.
I asked him once if it was all right, just going into any church like that. He grinned and said, “Blowed if I know. I’ve never been chucked out.”
“I’d be scared of doing the wrong thing,” I remarked. “However do you know what to do in a synagogue?”
“Just sit at the back and watch what other people do,” he said. “If they start doing anything comic, like going up to the altar or anything like that, I just sit still and watch.”
“Don’t they mind you doing that?”
“I don’t think so. A Roman Catholic priest came up one time as I was going out and asked me who I was. I told him I was just looking, like in a shop. He didn’t mind a bit.”
He collected churches, like another boy might collect cigarette cards or matchbox covers. The gem of his collection was at Woking, where he found a mosque to go to. He had a bit of a job getting to that one because the big day at a mosque is on a Friday, but he was a very good apprentice and a hard worker, so the foreman let him go.
Once, I remember, I asked Connie what he really was, Church of England, or Presbyterian, or what. “Blowed if I know,” he said. “I was born in Penang and my father was a Buddhist. But he died four years ago, and then we came to England. I was Church of England at school.”
I stared at him. “Where’s Penang?”
“Just by Malaya,” he told me. �
��But we don’t live there now. Mother brought us to England when my father died. She was born in Irkutsk, so she’s Greek Orthodox.”
Connie knew an awful lot more than me, of course, and I didn’t want to go on looking stupid, so I let Irkutsk go. The Greek part stayed in my mind, and I remember months afterwards looking at a map of Greece in the Public Library, trying to find Irkutsk where Connie’s mother had been born. But all that came later; at the time I only asked him, “Is your mum in England now?”
He shook his head. “She’s in California, at a place called San Diego, with my sister. Mother got married again.”
It was quite outside my range, of course: California was somewhere abroad where they made Syrup of Figs. “Oh ...” I said vaguely.
I was young, of course, and I was loaded down with new experiences. Until I joined the circus I’d never been more than five miles from my own street in Southampton, and I’d got an awful lot to learn. I must have seemed slow at times, because it wasn’t till that second season was half over that I realised what being an apprentice meant. It meant that I’d got a regular job, that I wasn’t going to be laid off in the winter, like I had before. Connie and I were going to spend the winter at Littlehampton working on the aeroplanes, overhauling them for their certificates of airworthiness so they’d be all ready for the spring.
The circus ran for four years and that was the end; the last season wasn’t so good as the first three had been, and it looked as if the public were getting a bit tired of it. Sir Alan packed it up, and went on with his development work on refuelling aeroplanes in flight. He was very good with us apprentices. He went to a great deal of trouble to find us jobs in other places in the aircraft industry. He got me a fine apprenticeship with Airservice Ltd. at Morden aerodrome, just south of London, overhauling and repairing aeroplanes in a big way in a grand, modern shop. I owe a great deal to Sir Alan over that.
I had to say good-bye to Connie then. Like me, he wanted to go on and take his ground engineer’s tickets, but neither of us could do that till we were twenty-one years old. He was going out to California to his mother; he told me that there were aircraft factories out there in San Diego and he wanted to get into one of those. I was very sorry to part from Connie, because we’d been together for three and a half years and had a lot of fun; although he knew such a lot more than I did, he was never stuck up about it. Being with him in those early years was very good for me. We said we’d keep in touch by writing, and of course we never did.
I went to Airservice in the autumn of 1935, and I stayed with them for ten years. It was a good firm to work for, and I got on well. I got my A and C certificates for the maintenance of engines and airframes as soon as I was old enough, in 1936, and I got the B and D certificates for complete overhauls in 1938; by that time I was earning over ten pounds a week, including overtime. I didn’t spend it on girls, and I didn’t spend much of it on beer. I spent it mostly on flying. The firm had a scheme that gave cheap flying instruction to its staff, and I took my first private pilot’s “A” licence in 1937. By the middle of the war, when pilots were short and regulations lax, I was test flying the Tiger Moths we had rebuilt after a crash as a regular thing. I used to finish the inspection in the shop and then just take it out and fly it. It saved such a lot of time and bother looking for a test pilot.
I stayed a civilian all the war, working at my normal job of repairing crashed aircraft. I was put in charge of a repair section in 1940 and got to foreman’s rank. In 1943 the firm had to strengthen the repair side of their branch in Egypt, and they asked me if I’d go out there for a bit. I was twenty-eight years old, and up till then I’d never been out of England. Of course I said I’d go.
It was on account of that I married Beryl Cousins.
I’ve not said much about girls up till now because, to tell the truth, I never had a lot to do with them till then. I was so stuck into my job and so keen on aeroplanes and flying that girls passed me by, or I passed them by, whichever way you look at it. Till I got my B and D tickets I was working at classes three or four evenings every week; then when I’d got them, and might have had time to look around a bit and have a bit of fun, the war came. That meant that I was working overtime every night till eight o’clock and sometimes later than that, which sort of limits the time that a chap has to look around and pick himself a girl. Maybe when it’s like that he’s apt to pick the first that comes along.
I lodged in a suburban road at Morden and Beryl lived two doors up the road from me, and worked in the stores at Airservice Ltd. She was a sort of clerk there, working on the inwards and the outwards files. She was a slight, pale girl with ash-blonde hair. We used to walk to work together in the mornings. We got to having lunch together and tea if she was working late, all in the works canteen, and Saturdays I’d take her to the pictures, or we’d go dancing at a Palais. After six months of that we came to the conclusion that we were in love, and we’d get married when the work let up a bit. We didn’t realise we both loved something better than each other. I was in love with aeroplanes, and she was in love with love.
I heard about this job one morning, and when they said they wanted me to go out to Egypt they said it would be for two years and I’d have to go in about three weeks’ time. I met Beryl at our usual table for lunch with other people all round us in the works canteen, so I said to her, “Eat up quick. I’ve got something to tell you, but not here.”
We walked out on the grass up the aerodrome hedge when we’d finished; it was September, and a lovely sunny day. I told her all about it as we walked along by the scrap dump of wrecked airframes and engines, and she said, “Oh Tom! Have you really got to go?”
I hadn’t got to, but I wasn’t going to miss that chance. “They put it to me pretty firm,” I said. “You don’t get much choice, these days.”
She turned to me, and her eyes were full of tears. “I thought we were going to get married about Christmas. That’s what we said.”
I was a bloody fool, of course, but one does these things. I couldn’t bear to see her cry. I took both her hands in mine. “I know,” I said. “What say if we get married now, before I go?”
She said softly, “Oh Tom! Do you want us to be married?”
I wasn’t really sure I did, but I was twenty-eight and I’d never got that far with any girl before. I said, “Do I want to!” and took her in my arms and kissed her.
After a bit we got to thinking about ways and means. There wasn’t time for doing it the regular way with banns called in church and all that. We should have to do it with a special licence, and I found out pretty soon that Beryl knew all about those. Girls study things of that sort more than men. I wouldn’t be able to set her up in a house in the time we’d got, and she didn’t want to leave her job at Airservice because if she did, and didn’t have a baby, she’d only have got directed into something else since it was wartime. So we fixed that we’d get married as soon as we could and she’d go on working just the same, and living with her people.
We went and saw her dad and mum that evening and told them all about it. They were pleased all right, because I was making good money and I think they felt that I was likely to get on. Next day was Friday, and I asked for the day off and took Beryl down to Southampton and introduced her to my folks, and ten days after that we got married at a registrar’s office.
We got a week at Southsea for our honeymoon; it was a fine September that year so that although there wasn’t much to do we could sit on the front and look at the ships going in and out of Portsmouth harbour, and the Bostons and the Spitfires going out on strikes. I think Beryl was happy, and if I was thinking of the work more than a man ought to do upon his honeymoon, well, it was wartime and the flying schools were waiting for the Tiger Moths I mended, to train pilots. Beryl understood — at least, I think she did.
Looking back upon it now, it must have been a poor sort of a honeymoon. It was wartime in England, and everything was short. There was complete darkness at night, of course, there
on the coast, and the cafes and the dance halls and the picture houses were full of men and girls in uniform; a civilian didn’t get much priority. You couldn’t get down to the beach to bathe except in one little place because of the anti-invasion barbed wire and tank obstacles and land mines, and there weren’t any motor coach tours or steamer trips or concert parties on the beach, or anything like that. This was all normal to us because that’s the way things were in England then, and we didn’t grieve over what we couldn’t have, but when I think about the sort of honeymoon I could have given her if it had been in peacetime, I feel a bit sore. It might have made a difference.
It was better for me than for Beryl. I had Egypt ahead of me. I was going out to an important job in a warm, spacious country, into all the glamour of a successful war in North Africa. There would be luxury in Cairo, and sunshine on the desert, and the Pyramids, and the Nile, and travel to our various outstations in Africa and Persia and Iraq. For me, this week in Southsea was the last of the drab misery of war in England. Ahead of Beryl was a long, indefinite vista of it, cold and monotonous in the same job, and lonely with me away. We neither of us thought about it like that — or, if I thought of it, I didn’t talk about it. But that’s the way it was.
We didn’t look ahead. I can’t remember that we ever discussed where we were going to live after the war, or anything like that. It didn’t seem to be much good, with things as they were. The war had been going on for four years; for four years we had been directed where to work and we were getting out of the way of thinking about our future for ourselves. This job in Egypt was to be for two years, and after that I should come back to wartime England, so we thought, and it would be the same except that everything would be scarcer and more difficult than ever. We never looked ahead to think about the peace, that I remember.
