by Nevil Shute
On Monday she got a cable at her boarding-house. It read,
“Deeply grieved Aunt Ethel but so glad you were with her of course keep money and do come out here and visit us plenty of jobs Melbourne about ten pounds weekly writing air mail.
“Jane Dorman.”
She stared at this in amazement that she could have got an answer to the letter she had written only a week before; it made Australia seem very near. Frequently when she wrote on Sunday to her parents in Leicester and missed the evening post she did not get an answer till Thursday; true, Jane Dorman had cabled, but even so ... Jennifer felt as if Jane Dorman lived in the next county, and Australia no longer seemed to be upon the far side of the world.
It wouldn’t do any harm to find out about it, anyway. She made a few discreet enquiries and took Tuesday afternoon off on a pretext that she had to help her father clear up Ethel Trehearn’s estate, which was totally untrue. She went up to London and visited the P. and O. office and the Orient Line next door, and Australia House, and Victoria House. She returned with a great mass of literature to study, fascinating windows opening upon a strange new world.
On the Thursday she wrote to the Orient Line and put her name down for a tourist-class passage to Australia five months ahead, the earliest date that she could get a berth. She sent ten pounds deposit, on the assurance of the company that this would be returnable if she changed her mind and didn’t go. She wouldn’t really go, of course, but it was nice to know she could go if she wanted to....
On the Friday she got a bulky air-mail letter from Jane Dorman in Australia, twelve days after she had written. Enclosed with it were four pages of advertisements in newspapers of situations vacant in Melbourne for secretaries and ‘typistes’, at salaries that made her blink. Jane Dorman wrote six pages, ending,
“As regards the money, do keep it as I said in the cable. Aunt Ethel was terribly kind to us a long time ago when we first got married, and I am only so deeply grieved that I didn’t realise before that she was in need of help, because now we’ve got so much with the wool sales as they are. Of course, we all know that it can’t go on, but the debt upon the land and stock is all paid off now so everything is ours, and even if wool fell to half its present price or less we should still be all right, and safe for the remainder of our lives.
“I need hardly say how much we should like to see you out here with us. We live in a country district a hundred and fifty miles from Melbourne. I don’t suppose you’d want to live the sort of life we do, because it’s very quiet here, rather like living in the depths of the Welsh mountains, perhaps, or in Cumberland. There’s not a great deal for young people here unless they’re keen on the land, and my children are all living now in the cities, Ethel and Jane in Sydney and Jack in Newcastle, about a hundred miles north of Sydney. I expect if you came here you’d want to work in Melbourne, and I am sending you some pages from the Age and the Argus to show you the sort of jobs available. Everybody is just crying out for secretaries, it seems, and you’d have no trouble at all in getting work.
“I do hope that you will decide to come, and that before you take up work you will come and stay with us for as long as you like, or as long as you can stand the country. I do so want to hear about Aunt Ethel from somebody who knew her. I had not met her for over thirty years, of course, but we wrote to each other every two or three months. I can’t really think of her as old, even now.
“Do come and see us out here, even if it’s only for the trip.
“Yours affectionately,
“Jane Dorman.”
Jennifer had no very close friends in Blackheath, but she sometimes went to the pictures with a girl called Shirley Hyman who lived in the room below her. Shirley worked in the City and was engaged to a young man in a solicitor’s office; she was with him every week-end but seldom saw him in the week. That Friday evening she was washing her hair for his benefit next day, and Jennifer went down to see her, papers in hand.
She said, “Shirley. Have you ever thought of going to Australia?”
Miss Hyman, sitting on the floor before the gas stove drying her hair, said, “For the Lord’s sake. Whatever made you ask that?”
“I’ve got a relation there,” said Jennifer. “She wants me to go out and stay.”
“What part of Australia?”
“She’s outside Melbourne,” Jennifer said. “I’d get a job in Melbourne if I went.”
“Perth’s the only place I know about.”
“Have you been there?”
Miss Hyman shook her head. “Dick’s always going on about it,” she said. “He wants us to go there when we’re married. He thinks he knows a chap out there who’ll take him on, as soon as he’s got his articles.”
“Are you keen on it?”
“I don’t quite know,” the girl said. “It’s an awful long way away. When I’m with Dick it all seems reasonable. There’s not much future here and if we’re going, well, it’s better to go before we start a family. But... it’s an awful long way.”
“I’ve been finding out about it,” Jennifer said. “I got a letter back from my relation in twelve days. It doesn’t seem so far now as it did before.”
“Is that all it took?”
“That’s right.” She squatted down before the stove with Shirley and produced her papers and pamphlets. “There’s ever so many jobs, according to these advertisements.”
They turned over the brightly-coloured emigration pamphlets she had gleaned in Australia House. “Dick’s got that one — and that,” said Shirley. “It looks all right in these things, doesn’t it? But then they wouldn’t tell you the bad parts, like half the houses in Brisbane having no sewage system.”
“Is that right?” asked Jennifer with interest.
“So somebody was telling Dick. He says it’s all right in Perth, but I don’t believe it is.”
“What do people do?” asked Jennifer. “Go out in the woods or something?”
They laughed together. “They’ve cut down all the woods,” said Shirley. “I was reading somewhere about Australia becoming a dust bowl because they’ve cut down all the woods.”
“I don’t think that can be right,” said Jennifer. “They’ve got some woods left, or they couldn’t have taken these pictures.” They bent together over the pictures in the pamphlet about Tasmania, showing wooded mountain ranges stretching as far as the eye could see.
“They probably kept those just to make these pictures to show mutts like us,” said Shirley sceptically. “It’s probably all desert and black people round behind the camera.”
They laughed, and sat in silence for a time.
“What do you really think about it?” Jennifer asked at last. “Do you think it’s a good thing to do?”
The girl sat playing with her hair-brush on the floor beside the stove, thoughtful and serious. “Dick expects to be successful,” she said presently, “and I think he will. He’d have more opportunity out there, with new things starting all the time as more people get into the country.” She raised her head, and looked at Jennifer. “And, anyway, what’s the good of being successful in England? They only take it all away from you, with tax and supertax. The way he looks at it, if we stay in England he’d do best in some Government office and get a pension at the end. He wants to be on his own, though.”
There was a pause. “I don’t know what to think,” Shirley said at last. “I’d never thought of leaving England, up until the last couple of months. It seems a horrid thing to do, as if one ought to stay and help to get things right. Dick says there’s too many of us in the country. I don’t know. If somebody’s got to get out, I wish it wasn’t me.”
“Do you think it would feel strange?” asked Jennifer. “Would people like you in Australia?”
“I don’t know. There’s such a lot of English people there already, I think one would find friends. People who hadn’t been out there so long themselves. I think it’ld be like going to live in Scotland for a job. They talk with a funny
accent, some of them, you know.”
“I don’t think it could be as bad as the Scotch accent,” Jennifer said. “I went to Edinburgh once, and I couldn’t understand what some of the people were saying — porters and cab drivers, you know. I don’t believe Australians are as difficult as that.”
“You’re all right, of course,” said Shirley. “You could come back if you didn’t like it. You could save the cost of the passage home. It’s different for us. If we went out, we’d have to go for good.”
“I know,” Jennifer said slowly. “The trouble is, I believe I might like it, and stay there for good. I don’t want to do that....”
The little ties that held her to her own land were still strong, ties of friendships, of places that she knew, of things she had grown up with. She went on with her work and life in Blackheath for another three days, uncertain and irresolute. On the following Tuesday she got a telegram from the Orient Line,
“Can offer returned single tourist passage Melbourne in Orion sailing December 3rd holding open for you till midday November 23rd.”
November the twenty-third was in two days’ time, and if she took this she would have to sail within a fortnight. Her first reaction was that she couldn’t possibly go. It was too soon; she hadn’t made up her mind. She got the telegram on her return from work; Shirley Hyman was out that evening, and there was nobody else with whom she could discuss the matter.
It was impossible for Jennifer to stay in her room that evening; she was too worried and restless. She had her tea in an abstracted daze, and walked across the heath and took a train for Charing Cross, knowing that it was in her power to have done with that heath and with that train. It was not raining but the night was cold and windy; the chilly draughts whipped round her on the platform in the darkness. In Australia it would be high summer....
The train was unheated owing to fuel shortages, and she was very cold by the time she got to Charing Cross. She went out of the station and turned eastwards up the Strand, and there she met a disappointment. She had hoped that the bright lights and the traffic would be stimulating and cheerful, and that England would hold out a hand there for her to hang on to. But the shop windows were all dark because of fuel rationing, and the Strand seemed sombre and deserted, with little life. She was there now, however, and very cold; she walked eastwards quickly for the exercise. She stopped now and then to look into a shop window in the light of an arc lamp, but there was no joy in it.
Warmth and feeling were coming back into her feet as she passed Waterloo Bridge. She went on past the Law Courts, down Fleet Street, empty and dark but for the street lamps and the lights and clamour from the newspaper offices. By the time she reached the bottom of Ludgate Hill she was warm and comfortable again and beginning to wonder why she had come there, and where she was heading for. There was no point in walking on into the City. She moved up the hill at a slower pace, looking for a bus-stop, and so she came to St. Paul’s Cathedral, an immense black mass towering up into the darkness from the blitz desolation that surrounded it.
She moved towards it, and stood staring at the mass of masonry. This was the sort of thing that Australia would never have to show her, this masterpiece of Wren. If she left England she would be leaving this for ever, and a hundred other beauties of the same kind that the new country could never show her. She stood there thinking of these things, and two devastating little words came into her mind — so what?
She had been taken inside St. Paul’s once as a schoolgirl. She remembered it as the biggest building that she had ever been in, and for that alone. She knew that she was probably foolish and ignorant, because there must be much more to St. Paul’s than that, but she stepped back till she could see the whole bulk in the fleeting moonlight as the swift clouds passed and re-passed. She would be leaving this for ever, and she must be honest with herself about it.
Would she miss it very much? She tried to examine her own feelings, and she said to herself, “Well, there it is. Now am I getting a great thrill out of it?” She had to confess within her own mind that she wasn’t. The enormous, inert mass of masonry meant little to her; there was nothing in those great columns of stone to affect her decision one way or the other.
She turned back towards the West End, rather thoughtful. A bus came rattling by and stopped near her; she ran and got on to it, and rode back up Fleet Street. She got off at Charing Cross and walked on to Trafalgar Square. She stood by St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields for a time looking round her, at the National Gallery, the Nelson Column, the Admiralty Arch, the long broad way that was Whitehall. Here was the centre of her country, the very essence of it. Here were the irreplaceable things that she would have to do without if she left England. Surely, that would be unbearable?
She felt that there must be something wrong with her, because she knew that it wouldn’t be unbearable at all. In fact, she didn’t much care if she never saw any of them again.
She had a queer feeling now that she was becoming a stranger in her own country, that she no longer fitted in. She had to consult her parents in Leicester about this matter of the passage, and there was so little time. She thought for a few minutes and then went diffidently into the Charing Cross Hotel and spoke to the girl at the desk, and ordered coffee and biscuits in the writing-room, and sat down to write a letter to her father and mother.
She put the matter very simply to them, and asked them to telegraph her to advise her what to do.
Then she went by Underground to St. Pancras station and posted her letter in the special box upon the platform, so that it would get to them next morning.
She got a telegram from them in answer when she returned from work next day. It read,
“Think you had better go but come home for a few days first our dearest love.
“Daddy and Mummy.”
She sailed a fortnight later for Australia in the Orion.
Four
THE MAN WITH the crushed fingers got down awkwardly from the cab of the rickety, dust-covered truck into the timber road; his mate climbed over the tailboard and dropped down into the road beside him. He raised a hand to the driver. “Thanks, Jack. We’ll be right.” The door of the cab slammed to, the engine roared, and the truck moved on, swaying and lurching down the unmetalled road in a great cloud of dust.
The two men stood together at the entrance to the timber camp. The wooden hutments stood in a forest in a valley. A little river ran beyond the buildings and a mountain climbed up steeply beyond that, covered in eucalyptus gum trees, full of brilliantly-coloured parrots. The buildings stood among the trees for shade from the hot Victorian sunlight, blazing down out of a cloudless sky. “This way,” the well man said. “Down here, fourth hut along.”
They turned into the camp; the hand of the injured man was wrapped in a bloodstained rag, and he walked with it thrust into his open shirt as in a sling. He asked, “What’s the bastard’s name?”
“Splinter,” said his mate. “He’ll fix you up.”
“What’s the bastard’s real name?”
“Splinter — that’s all the name he’s got. He’s right, as good as any doctor.”
“Company ought to keep a mucking doctor here,” the injured man said. “They’ve got no mucking right to carry on with just a first-aid box. One day some bastard’s going to cop it proper, and I hope it’s Mr. Mucking Forrest.”
“Hurting bad?”
“Like bloody hell. I’ll go down to the Jig tonight; get mucking well pissed.”
They went into the fourth hut by the door in its end, and into a central corridor of bare, unpainted, rather dirty wood. The uninjured man opened a door at random and said to a man inside, “Say, Jack — which is Splinter’s room?”
“Last on the left, down by the wash-room. Someone hurt?”
“Too right. Fred here got his hand under a log.”
“Aw, look — he may be in the canteen. See if he’s in the room — if not, I’ll go find him.”
The two men went down the passage t
o the last room and opened the door. There was a man inside sitting on the bed reading an old newspaper, a lean, swarthy, black-haired man about thirty-five years old. He looked up as they entered.
“Aw, Splinter,” said the uninjured man, “this is Fred.” The dark man smiled, and nodded slightly. “He got his hand mucked up.”
The man got up from the bed. “Let me see.” He spoke with a pronounced Central European accent.
The other turned to go. “I’ll get along, Fred. You’ll be right.”
The injured man withdrew his hand from his shirt and began to unwrap the bloodstained rags carefully, with fingers that trembled a little. The man called Splinter noted that, and stopped him. “Wait, and sit down — on the bed.” He switched on the current to a china electric jug and dropped a few instruments into it to boil. Then he rolled up his sleeves and took a white enamel bowl and a bottle of disinfectant from the cupboard and went out to the bathroom; he came back with his hands washed and sterile and with warm water in the bowl. He moved the bare wooden table to a convenient position in front of the man and waited till the water in the jug boiled, opening a packet of lint while he waited, and adding a little disinfectant to the water in the bowl. Then he sat down facing his patient with the table between them, arranged the hand in a relaxed position, and began his work.
Presently, “This is a bad injury,” he said softly. “It must hurt you a great deal. Now, let me see if it is possible that you can move the fingers. Just bend a little, to show that you can move them. This one ... so. And now this one ... so. And this one ... so. That is good. It hurts very much now, but a fortnight’s holiday and it will soon be well.”
“Cripes,” said the man, “is it going to hurt like this a mucking fortnight?”
“It will not hurt when I have done with it,” the dark man said. “Not unless you make a hit — unless you hit it. You must wear it in a sling till it is well, and keep it carefully. I must now hurt you a little more. Will you like whisky?”
