by Nevil Shute
‘He didn’t drop it,’ I said. ‘One wing came off. Introduce me.’
Donk said, ‘This is Daisy, and this is Lily, and this is Judy. This is Johnnie Pascoe. He’s as mad as – well, as mad as holes.’
The others were in ordinary clothes, but Judy was in uniform, a W.A.A.C., and she was lovely. Even in the two-tone drab buttoned up to the neck she made the others look like two pennyworth of muck. My face was oily, so were my hands, and my old maternity just reeked of it. I turned straight to her. ‘I’d like to shake hands, but I’ll make you in a mess,’ I said. ‘You doing anything tonight?’
She laughed up at me, and it was perfect. ‘Yes.’
‘Any of these hoodlums here?’
‘No.’
‘Then put him off and come and have dinner with me at the Savoy.’
She laughed again, and shook her head.
Donk said, ‘She’s in Picardy Princess. You remember the little French girl at the estaminet?’
I turned to her again. ‘You’re not Judy Lester?’
She nodded, laughing.
I touched the sleeve of her uniform, and started walking on air. ‘But what’s this in aid of?’
‘Part time,’ she said. ‘I drive General Cadell in the mornings.’
‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘will you have dinner with me?’
She laughed. ‘I can’t. I’m on in the First Act.’
‘Will you have supper with me after the show? I’ll make a party.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
She laughed again, adorably. ‘All right. But I go home at midnight.’
‘You won’t tonight,’ I said. ‘What do you like to eat best?’
‘Smoked salmon and ice cream.’
‘Tournedos in between?’
She nodded. And then, on the tarmac by the Sopwith Camel, she clasped her hands together, bent a knee, put on a woebegone air, and said, ‘Oh sir – I am but a simple village maid. I know not what you intend by these fine gifts, so far above my station in life.’
I blinked at her, and then the others burst into a roar of laughter. Donk said, ‘You’ll know before the evening’s out.’
She drew herself up now with regal dignity, and said icily, ‘Sir, though my father earns his living underground at the corner of the Edgware and the Harrow Roads, I still have that which a maid values more than anything on earth.’
Donk said, ‘You won’t have it long.’
I was getting the hang of this now. ‘Lady,’ I said, ‘I thought of asking this lot to my party, but I’m not so sure now. What about you and me just dining alone?’
She laughed at me. ‘Not much. I go with the party.’
‘In words of one syllable,’ said Bose, ‘if you feed her you’ve got to feed us all.’
‘It’s worth it,’ I said. I turned to her. ‘Can I pick you up at the stage door?’
She nodded, and when she smiled at me my heart turned over.
‘What time?’
‘Ten past eleven.’ And then she asked, ‘Is this your new aeroplane?’
I nodded. ‘I only got it yesterday.’
‘Are you pleased with it?’
‘It’s a beauty,’ I said proudly. ‘It’s as fast as an S.E.5 and much handier. It’s a hundred and thirty horsepower.’
‘That’s terrific.’ She came apart from the others with me and I showed her the engine, dripping a little clear yellow oil and making little sizzling noises. ‘Are you taking it out to the Front?’
I nodded. ‘We’re forming up a new Squadron now. I’m to lead one of the Flights.’
‘Captain Boswell was saying that you shot down seven Germans.’
‘The eighth shot me down. I was lucky and got down behind our lines.’
She glanced at the one gold stripe upon my sleeve. ‘Is that how you got your wound stripe?’
‘I’m going to cut it in half,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t worth a whole stripe.’
‘Have you ever crashed?’
‘Six times,’ I said. ‘The seventh is the lucky one. Do you drink champagne?’
She laughed. ‘Kind sir, I know not what to say!’
‘You don’t have to talk to it,’ I said. ‘Just drink it.’
She said, ‘Jiminny! Here’s the General coming. I’ll have to go.’
I looked, and saw all the high brass coming, but they were the length of the hangar away. By side-stepping a couple of paces we could get behind the fuselage. ‘Come this way,’ I said. ‘I want to give you a kiss.’
She laughed. ‘Not much.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re all oily. You’ll mess up my uniform. I wear this in the Third Act, for the Grand Finale. Besides, I don’t know you.’
‘First part makes sense,’ I said. ‘Last part – that’s damn nonsense.’
‘I must go. They’re coming.’
I let her go, reluctantly. ‘Ten past eleven?’
She nodded, and ran quickly to the dark green Crossley tourer parked by the hangar and swung the starting handle. When the General came up she was standing stiffly to attention. She saluted him just as she saluted in the Grand Finale in the footlights with the orchestra crashing and banging away before her feet, and opened the back door for him to get in, while we stood laughing. Then she went round to the driver’s seat and got in, let the clutch in too hard, and stalled the engine. The others were all laughing fit to burst, but I ran over and grabbed the starting handle and swung it for her. She gave me a lovely smile and got away with a jerk and a crash of gears.
That afternoon I got my Flight together for a dog-fight. For the first ten minutes Donk and Jerry and Tim Collins, a New Zealander, were to set on me and try and get me in their sights, and then I’d pull out while Jerry and Tim set on Donk and I watched. I wanted Tim to have a good work out because he’d only just come down to us from the School of Aerial Fighting at Ayr. The first ten minutes went all right and then I pulled out at about ten thousand and Donk started in. Donk was a good pilot on a Camel and he had them all tied up; over and over again they got behind him but when they went to line up on him he just wasn’t there. I sat around a little way away watching their mistakes to tell them on the ground, and so I saw it happen. I suppose they got mad or something because they both came in at the same moment, Tim only looking ahead and Jerry with Tim in the blind spot underneath the engine as he dove in on the same line. Jerry’s wheels took Tim’s top plane clean away and the rest of the wings collapsed, and there was just a heap of wreckage in the air, and Tim going down in the bare fuselage without any wings, Jerry flying round without any wheels, and Donk and me fluttering about like a couple of wet hens. Tim went into some greenhouses near Hanworth and made a hole four feet deep, and Donk and I shepherded Jerry back to Hounslow where he made a belly landing in the middle of the field and stepped out of it unhurt; his Camel was repairable. All we wanted was one new Camel and one new pilot. Jerry was all cut up and talking a lot of nonsense, so I put him into my machine and sent him up to practise aerobatics, telling him I’d have his hide if he bent it, while I went off to see the C.O. We fixed the funeral for Friday at Feltham and I said I’d write to his folks in New Zealand and see about a wreath from the Squadron. I waited till Jerry got down in my Camel, with a bottle of egg-nog in each pocket of my overcoat, and when I’d satisfied myself he hadn’t done my Camel any harm we had an egg-nog in the hangar. Then Donk came along and we had another, and then Bose came so we had another, and by that time things didn’t look so bad. We all went into Town by tube and got out at Piccadilly.
We got a beautiful wreath for Timmy at the florists’, from the Squadron, ten guineas, and I told them where to send it. And then there were so many lovely flowers in the shop I got a bright idea, and I told the Duchess who was serving us I wanted a bouquet. A really nice one, carnations and things. She said in her funeral voice, ‘To go with the wreath, sir?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is another thing again. This is for a lady on th
e stage. In Picardy Princess. I want it to hand up across the footlights, so let’s make it good.’
She gave me a dirty look as if she was the Second Gravedigger, but she’d had ten guineas off us and she could see another five coming so she got busy with the carnations and the fern. We got behind a stand of pot-plants where I thought she couldn’t see us and had another egg-nog. When I got my bouquet it was gorgeous, all pink and white and green and done up with silver paper round the bottom. Donk and I had a service flat in High Street Kensington and we took Jerry home with us for the night. Bose went off to book a table at the Savoy and dig up a red-head that he knew for Jerry to take his mind off things, which she did, and arranged to meet for dinner at Murray’s. I had a bath and changed into my best uniform and sat looking at my bouquet.
They hadn’t got any seats for Picardy Princess that night, not one in the whole house, but they’d got a box so I took that. I might have filled it up with the others but I didn’t; I wanted to look at her alone. So I didn’t tell them anything about it but just said I’d join up with them at the Savoy, and went and dined at the R.A.C. and sneaked out to the theatre alone. I felt awfully conspicuous alone in the box and wished I’d brought the others with me, and I think she knew that, because she spotted me almost immediately and sang her two songs straight at me, so that the audience began to turn and look at me in the box, and laugh about us, because they could see I was in the Flying Corps and that I’d got the M.C. and the Croix de Guerre. To top it off, after the Grand Finale when the attendant took my bouquet up and handed it to her across the footlights she buried her face in it, and then looked up laughing, and blew a kiss at me. I stood up in the box and blew one back at her, and that brought the house down of course. Then I was round at the stage door in the alley at the back, waiting for her, in my new trench coat.
She came hurrying out and dragged me back into the dressing room she shared with two other girls, to show me the bouquet as her dresser had put it out in a great vase. I had never been back-stage before, and it was all new to me, the shabby walls, the brilliant lights, the half-dressed girls. She insisted on giving me a buttonhole from the bouquet to wear at the Savoy, but my maternity hadn’t got a buttonhole to put it in, so she tucked the carnation into the strap of my Sam Browne and secured it with a safety pin just underneath the strap. Then I waited while she did up her face, and helped her into her fur coat, and then we were off chattering and chi-hiking together to the taxi I had waiting, walking on air.
The crowd were all at the Savoy when we got there and the party was in full swing, and they chipped us about having tarried on the way, which we hadn’t – much. The red-head was there with Jerry, but my grandmother told me always to steer clear of a red-headed woman in black underwear, so I did. I took Judy in my arms for the first time as we danced together, and we liked it, and did it again, and again, with only a pause now and then to nibble a bit of smoked salmon or take a gulp of champagne as we rubbed knees under the table. Then, before we’d hardly got started to get to know each other, the band was playing ‘God Save the King’, because it was two o’clock.
Jerry must have been a bit lit up by that time, I suppose. I forget what made him do it, but in the foyer of the Savoy the red-head stooped to pick up something and he gave her a resounding smack on her black behind. She was a much bigger girl than Judy, but Judy went into one of her acts. She faced up to Jerry, eyes aflame. ‘You contemptible cur!’ she said. ‘How dare you strike an innocent child like that! Poor little Evie, only six years old, and her mother still in the home for delinquent girls! Oh, how I despise you! Why don’t you hit somebody your own size? Why don’t you hit me? O – oh … Ow!’ And she flung herself on the floor of the foyer of the Savoy just as if she had been knocked down, her hand to the side of her face, the other pointing dramatically at Jerry, who was all at sea. A crowd gathered round, of course, and we were all laughing fit to burst, and then the manager came out and wasn’t sure if it was going to make a legal case or not, and we picked up Judy who was moaning and saying that the brute had broken her jaw, and the hall porter with a couple of bell-hops pushed us all out into the Savoy Court where the taxis were. I got Judy into a taxi and took her to the flat in St John’s Wood that she shared with another girl, and she lay in my arms all the way while we kissed each other, and it wasn’t nearly long enough.
I was writing to Timmy’s mother in Palmerston North, wherever that may be, next morning, and saying what a terrible loss he was to the Squadron and how he’d died fighting the Germans just as if he’d been at the Front, and all the other things – the standard sort of letter – when Donk came in with the news that Chuck Patterson was killed, up at Waddington. Chuck was flying in a Bristol Fighter in the gunner’s cockpit and they had a forced landing. The pilot, an English boy called Jenkins, tried to get into a field and hit the fence and turned it on its back. Chuck was thrown out, and when he came to, the machine was burning and the pilot in it, trapped. So Chuck went in to try and get him out, and then the petrol tank exploded. Chuck died in hospital next day. He and I were in the same year at McGill together doing first year Engineering, and we joined up on the same day. This sure was a rough sort of war.
Judy.
Flowers, lots and lots of them. The Duchess smiling when I went into the shop.
Funerals, and firing parties. ‘Rest on your arms reversed …’
The bright sunlight in the chasms of the cumulus, the brilliance of the white clouds, the blueness of the sky. The blipping engines and the smell of castor oil and cordite from the guns.
Dancing with Judy, and the softness of her breasts against my uniform. The whispers in her ear as we danced, that never seemed to get finished.
The fun of that early summer, and the laughter, and the deaths.
Judy.
The day we had together down at Henley in the punt, when we changed into bathing things among the bushes and went swimming in the river, and I took one of her stockings so she had to take the other off and go back to London without any stockings on at all, Judy Lester, in Picardy Princess. The footlights, and the songs …
Dancing with Judy. ‘If you were the only girl in the world …’ The Bing Boys, and George Robey.
Sandy McPhail diving on the target in Staines Reservoir just ahead of me when the C.C. gear failed and shot off one blade of his propeller. The engine falling out of the machine, the Camel fluttering down in weaves and spins into the water with the two machine guns running wild and spraying the whole countryside with bullets, the white plume of gas that showed its track. Sandy swimming ashore fit as a flea with nothing to show for it but a cut lip and a bruised eyebrow, and the colossal binge we had at Murray’s to present him with a medal for saving life – his own. The laughter, and the kisses, and the drinks.
Judy.
The investiture at Buckingham Palace, with Judy watching from the gallery. The King in naval uniform, the Sailor King, the little pointed brown beard close to my face as he pinned on the silver cross, the firm handshake. The party we had afterwards on that fine summer day when we should all have been flying and weren’t because of the investiture, the lunch at Gattis, the drinks, the kisses, and the dinghy race on the lake in Regent’s Park. Taking Judy back to the flat in High Street, Kensington, to give her a cold bath so that she’d be sober enough to go on in the evening.
Judy.
The day we got our orders for going to France in ten days’ time, the day I didn’t have a drink all day but picked up Judy at ten past eleven at the stage door and walked her out under the trees of Leicester Square amongst all the tarts, and took her in my arms and told her, and asked her to marry me.
Judy.
The exhibition of formation flying and stunt flying that we put on for a bunch of brass hats from the War Office, nineteen of us at full squadron strength. The pilot from South Africa with ginger hair who got his fin and rudder taken off by Ben’s propeller and went spinning slowly down doing everything he knew to get control again, although
he must have known that you can never hope to fly a Camel without rudder because of the gyroscopic torque. The explosion when the tank burst as he hit the ground and the great column of black smoke that acted as a windsock for us all to land by, all eighteen of us. The Australian from Bendigo, Tom Foreman, who ‘went crook’ in front of all the generals because we don’t have parachutes and the Germans do …
The special licence. Judy.
The military funeral at Feltham in the morning, the Union Jack over the coffin on the gun carriage, the Dead March, the muffled drums, the firing squad, the prayers. The frantic rush back to the flat for a bite to eat and a couple of drinks before getting married to Judy in the afternoon, the flowers, the old slipper, the confetti at the railway carriage. Skindle’s at Maidenhead, the calm summer evening, and Judy.
Judy.
The relief and the release from tensions in the morning, the little secret smiles, the breakfast tray in bed with the sun streaming in on us. The familiar hiss and crackle of a flock of Clerget Camels that brought us hopping out of bed and out on the verandah in our night things as the Squadron peeled off one by one and started in to beat up Skindle’s. Jerry doing a full roll below the level of our window, Donk running his wheels along the river so that they made two light furrows on the water for a hundred yards and set the moored punts rocking. Bose going through the telephone line and taking away a length of it streaming from his undercarriage. The blipping engines, the waving pilots, the startled onlookers, and Judy waving at them in her nightie in the sun …
Judy.
Judy back in the show that evening, and the whole Squadron in the stalls chi-hiking at us and Judy ad-libbing back at them across the footlights, the laughter, and the fun. The four of them that set on me during the Grand Finale and dragged me out and through the little door and shoved me on the stage beside her, the glare of the footlights, the welcome from Daisy Holmes, the leading lady, as she gave us the centre of the stage, the orchestra switching from the Grand Finale to the ‘Wedding March’, the shouts and the laughter and the cheers from the audience, the many curtains. The impromptu supper on the stage with all the cast and all the Squadron, the champagne, the toasts.
