by Nevil Shute
“It’s a pretty little place,” the pilot said. “Just one of these coral atolls. The strip’s all right, but refuelling arrangements are a bit antiquated. If we’re going to go there often, we should have proper fuel storage tanks, and a modern pump and hoses. They’ll probably be needed for strategic reasons, anyway.”
“Will you write me a report on that, Commander?”
David made a note in his diary.
“I’ve never been to any of those coral islands,” said Mr. Ferguson. “I’d like to go, one day. Where did the Queen stay?”
“In the District Officer’s house.” David told him all about it, and then he went on, and told him how much the Queen seemed to have enjoyed the day’s rest on Christmas Island. “If she’s likely to be travelling from Canada to Australia much,” he said, “she’ll be going there pretty frequently, because it’s the natural refuelling point for us. I know she’d very much appreciate a little house there of her own.”
Harry Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “She would?”
David told him of the conversation that he had overheard between the Queen and the Consort. “It’s a long way from Ottawa to Canberra,” he said. “Even in a Ceres, it’s eighteen flying hours, and that’s a long trip for a woman of her age without a break. Nine or ten hours at a stretch is quite enough. If she had a little house there — just a little one, with two bedrooms only — she’d probably use it, and stay there a day to break the flight. Will she be going that way often?”
“She may. Under the new arrangements, she may well be doing that trip every three or four months.”
David did not like to ask what new arrangements those might be. “I should think the Federal Government might cough up a little weatherboard house,” he said.
“I think they might,” the High Commissioner said. “Who would provide the service?”
“She’d have the steward and the stewardess out of the aeroplane,” the pilot said. “She won’t need any more than that. She’s got her own maid travelling with her, too.”
They discussed it for a little. “Will you put all this in your report?” the High Commissioner said. “It’s little things like this we want to know.” David made his note. “Now, what’s all this I’ve heard about the trouble you had landing in this country? This business about going up to Yorkshire?”
David told him.
In the end, Harry Ferguson said, “I see. London airport is a civil airport, and they demand first class instrument landing certificates for pilots landing there in bad weather conditions. And those certificates are only issued to civil pilots. They got you on that.”
“That’s right,” the pilot said. “Service pilots don’t use London airport in the normal way, and they don’t have civil licences. That was the excuse for sending us to Driffield, which is an R.A.F. aerodrome — because we’re an R.A.A.F. crew.”
“Wasn’t there an R.A.F. aerodrome closer than Yorkshire?”
“There must have been,” the pilot said. “Dozens of them.”
“Did they know that you were trained by B.O.A.C. to the standard of their crews?”
“They must have known,” the pilot repeated. “We told them in the signals. I’ve got the copies here.” He passed them across the desk to the High Commissioner, who read them carefully. “Anyway,” he said, “B.O.A.C. didn’t train us down at Hurn. We trained them.”
Mr. Ferguson laid the papers down. “I see. Somebody was just being awkward.”
“I think so,” said the pilot. “Frank Cox thought that somebody was out to make things difficult and tiring for the Queen. Teach her not to go flying with colonials again.”
“I see.”
There was a pause, and then the High Commissioner said, “How do you feel about the British now, now that you’ve had more experience of them?”
The pilot grinned. “I think their policemen are just wonderful,” he said. And then he added, more seriously, “I’ve got nothing to complain about, sir. This is the first unpleasantness we’ve had. I don’t think this was aimed against us, as a crew.”
Mr. Ferguson inclined his head. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I think that it was probably upon a higher level than that.”
They discussed a little routine business, and David left Australia House and walked down the length of the Strand on the way to his club. There was a raw nip in the air, and a light, foggy drizzle that struck chill after the warm benison of Canberra. The people in the streets looked pale and stunted in comparison with the glowing health of his own countrymen, and yet there was an air of purpose and determination about them that was always novel to him. Again, he was torn between dislike and admiration for them; no negligible people, these. These were the people who produced the Ceres, and a thousand other marvels that his country could not match. He walked to his club in Pall Mall and sat looking at the weekly reviews to bring himself up to date with the temper of England since he had gone away. Something had evidently happened in the House of Commons that had brought the subject of multiple voting to the forefront of the news, but he could not gather from the weekly papers what that was. He sat with a cup of tea turning over the reviews. There was much talk in the Conservative papers about electoral reform, and there were bitter articles in the Labour papers about an audacious attempt on the part of the Tories to kill democracy and to regain an obsolete form of government by privilege. It was all rather unhappy reading, a record of disunity on fundamental principles that he could not recall in his own country; he put the papers aside with a sigh, nostalgic for the country on the far side of the world that he had left so recently.
He called for Rosemary in her flat at seven o’clock. She took him to a very small, very discreet little restaurant in Shepherds Market, where the tables were widely separated to enable the patrons to talk confidentially, where the proprietor exhibited sheer genius in circumventing the rationing restrictions, and where the bill was in line with the benefits of the establishment. He handed her coat to the waiter, and they sat down with a glass of sherry and a tomato juice. He asked her, “What was the journey down to London like?”
“There was a fog,” she said. “We didn’t get into King’s Cross till after half past three.”
“You had a sleeper, I suppose?”
She shook her head. “They couldn’t lay it on at such short notice. They put on an extra first class coach for us. She was looking awfully tired when we got to London.”
He bit his lip. “I’m very sore about all this,” he said. “It was so totally unnecessary.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “A report came through the office this morning from the Air Ministry. It wasn’t anything to do with you.”
“I know. That doesn’t stop me being sore. Do you know who the nigger in the woodpile was?”
She hesitated. “Forget about it,” she said at last. “It’s not a thing that concerns either of us.”
“All right.” They sat in silence for a time. Presently he asked, “Did anyone come to meet her at King’s Cross?”
“Charles and Anne came,” she said. “It was very sweet of them to turn out at that time in the morning.”
His lip curled a little. “No Prime Minister? No one from the Cabinet?”
“No.”
He said no more, and presently the hors d’oeuvres were served. When the waiter had gone away, he said, “I’ve been reading the weeklies to find out what’s been happening while we’ve been away. There seems to be a lot going on about this multiple voting.”
She nodded. “I think there is.”
“The Government seem very bitter.”
“Yes,” she said, “they are. People are usually bitter when they see something threatened that they believe in with all their hearts and souls. And this Government believes in the old principle of one man, one vote. They believe in that very sincerely.”
“And is that threatened now?” he asked.
“I think it is, Nigger,” she said seriously. “Somehow, I don’t believe it can
go on much longer here.”
“What’s going to stop it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the quality of the people.”
He could have made a bitter and a scornful remark at that, but he didn’t do it because Rosemary was English, and he loved her. And as they ate in silence he thought about her words, and about the purpose and determination of these people. Perhaps she was right; perhaps the English really had a quality that would ultimately lead them out of difficulties. He did not care to ask her what she meant just then, so he turned the conversation and began to tell her about the proposal to put up a little house on Christmas Island for the Queen to use if she went there again. “I was going to put forward that as a suggestion in my report, and Harry Ferguson said he’d endorse it.” He looked at her diffidently. “Do you think that’s all right?”
“Oh, Nigger, she’ll love it!” the girl exclaimed. “It’ll come out of the blue, as a suggestion from the Australian Government, will it?”
“I should think so,” he replied. “You don’t think it would be speaking out of turn if I put it in the report?”
“Of course it’s not.” She turned to him. “She’s in such difficulties here,” she said. “A little thing like that would make a world of difference to her. Just the thought that somebody, somewhere, is trying to make things easier for her, even if it’s on the other side of the world and in the middle of the Pacific.”
“Do you think I might tell that to Harry Ferguson — verbally? There’s something about giving twice if you give quickly.”
She smiled. “It’s in all the Latin textbooks.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t tell him if you’re seeing him again, but he’s probably got a good idea of it already.”
“He speaks to Canberra almost every day,” the pilot said. “He could probably fix up a little thing like that upon the telephone.”
They finished their meal and sat smoking over their coffee. “My father came up yesterday,” she said presently. “He spent the night in the flat with me, on a camp bed in the sitting room. He doesn’t very often come to London, but I can’t get down to Oxford this week end — I’m on duty. He wanted to hear all about our trip.”
“Has he gone back now?” David asked.
She nodded. “He went back this morning.”
“I’d like to meet him some time.”
“I want you to,” she said. “I wanted him to stay tonight and come and dine with us here, but he had to get back — he’s got tutorials or something.” She paused. “He talked for a long time last night before we went to bed. He’d got some very interesting things to say.”
“What about?”
“Just everything,” she replied vaguely. “About this miserable crisis. About England. He thinks the people of this country are getting better and better.”
The pilot wrinkled his brow in perplexity. “Better?”
She nodded. “He said that all the duds were going, and they’d been going for a long time now.” She stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “Of course, Daddy’s sixty-three and he can remember quite a long time back. He fought in the second war, in the Royal Armoured Corps. He was talking a lot last night about the things he saw when he was a young man. About the sort of people who got out of France and Holland when they were invaded, and the sort who stayed behind.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “He said that when a country was invaded by the enemy, the first to go were the very intelligent and patriotic and adventurous people, who left because they were resolved to go on fighting with the Allies, fighting from a better ground. But after that, he said, the refugees consisted of the timid people, and the selfish people, and the people who put moneymaking first; people who would never fight for their own country or for anything else. Daddy hasn’t got a lot of use for refugees. He said that after those had gone, France was a better place. The people who stayed on under the Germans were good, steady people mostly, people who weren’t going to be kicked out of their country by any invader, people with guts and commonsense.” She paused. “He said that that’s what’s been happening in England for the last twenty years. All the timid people and the selfish people have been getting out.”
The pilot glanced at her, interested. “That’s quite a new one to me. Did he mean that the average of the British people was sort of worse twenty years ago than it is now?”
“That’s what he said,” she replied. “He said he notices it in the young men coming up to college. They’re better types now than they were thirty years ago, when he went back to Oxford after the second war. They’ve got more character. They think for themselves more — they don’t take anything for granted, like they used to. That’s what he said.”
“I wonder if that’s true?” the pilot remarked.
“I think it’s probably right,” the girl said slowly. “Daddy’s no fool, and he rubs shoulders with a lot of first class people up at Oxford. And it fits in, too. Adversity makes people better sometimes, makes them cleverer and tougher. It might happen with a country, just the same.”
“Do you think that’s got anything to do with all this fuss about the multiple vote?” he asked.
“I think it has,” she said. “I think Iorwerth Jones is running into difficulties he didn’t quite expect.”
8
FOR THE NEXT few days David saw little of Rosemary. He went with his crew to Hatfield and fetched Tare back to White Waltham, and with Frank Cox began the business of obtaining British civil instrument landing certificates to enable them to use London airport in emergency. They went together to the Air Ministry and were received by a bland civil servant of medium grade, who suggested that the requirements of the regulations would be met if the Australians and the Canadians abandoned their service ranks during their employment in the Queen’s Flight and requalified as civilian pilots for all grades of licence, a proceeding which would have taken all their time for about six weeks. Dewar and David said that this seemed rather unnecessary, and the official said that he was sorry, but that he was bound by the rules of his department. David and Dewar went away and put the matter in the hands of their High Commissioners.
A few days later, quite abruptly, they were summoned to the Ministry again. This time they were received by a much higher official, the Second Secretary. He greeted them very genially, and said that he was glad that the matter of their licences had been adjusted. Upon his desk he had a set of civil licences already made out for all the members of the Australian and Canadian crews; first class master pilots’ licences for Wing Commander Dewar and Wing Commander Anderson, and a sheaf of civil pilot’s, radio operator’s, and engineer’s licences for all the other crew members. The officers gathered up this mass of paper, somewhat dazed, and retired with it to the Royal Aero Club.
“Bit of a change of tone,” said David. “What’s done that?”
“God knows,” said Dewar. “I asked Frank, but he went all cagey. I think they’ve got the wind up over something.” There was a pause, and then the Canadian said, “Did he tell you I’m for Ottawa again?”
“No. When are you going?”
“Tomorrow night. I’m taking Charles over — with all his family.”
David stared at him. “How long is he going for?”
“You can search me. I’m taking off at eight o’clock tomorrow night, with the Prince and Princess, three children, valet, maid, secretary and three quarters of a ton of luggage. After that I’m waiting there for orders.”
“Nothing about that in the papers, is there?”
“Not yet. Keep it under your hat.”
“Of course.”
That was on December the 10th. David turned up next evening with Ryder to see Sugar leave and to assist if necessary. There was no hitch; the Prince of Wales arrived with his family and suite in three cars and got out on the dark, windy tarmac by the aeroplane, and got into it quickly. The door was shut, the inboard engines started, and Sugar moved towards the runway. Frank Cox and David stood wat
ching the tail light as it dwindled in the sky upon the way to Canada, and then turned to the warmth and brightness of the office.
In the office Frank Cox turned to him, and said, “Your turn next, Nigger.”
David asked, “Is anything laid on?”
“More or less. The Havants are going to Kenya, to Nyeri.”
“When?”
“Friday or Saturday. No date has been fixed yet. Probably Saturday, I should think.”
David nodded. “We’ll be ready. Are we staying out there, or coming straight back here?”
“Coming straight back,” the Group Captain said. “There may be another job quite soon after that.”
The pilot laughed. “One’s enough to worry about at a time. This Nyeri trip. There’s a strip at a place called Nanyuki that they use, isn’t there?”
“That’s right.” They turned to the files, and Cox pulled out the chart and details for Nanyuki. “Have you been there?”
David shook his head. “No.” He studied the runway details, the altitude, and the surrounding terrain. “We’ll be all right to put down there in daylight,” he said. “We’ll be flying light by the time we get there — seven or eight hours. I wouldn’t try it for the first time in bad weather, or at night. Nairobi’s the alternative, I suppose.”
They spent a quarter of an hour studying the route. “Well, that’s all right,” the pilot said at last. “Take off at seven in the morning. If that’s too early for them, then it’s a night landing at Nairobi. In that case they’d better stay the night there, and go on next day by car.”
Frank Cox jotted down the figures on the back of an envelope. “They could leave here late at night, and make a night flight,” he said. “Take off at eleven and arrive at nine in the morning. That might be better for them — let the children sleep all night.”
“All the family going?”
