by Nevil Shute
I know of no life so restful as the life of a private soldier. In those days it was assumed that he was quite incapable of any rational thought or responsibility; his corporal shepherded him about and told him where to go and what to do. He never had to think for himself about anything at all. If he didn’t turn up on parade it was a valid defence to say he didn’t know he had to, and the corporal got blamed for not looking after his men properly. In after years it was considered an eccentricity when T. E. Lawrence retired to the ranks of the Royal Air Force in time of peace to write The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but it was no eccentricity to me. I know of no mode of life that permits such mental leisure, such time for reflection, except perhaps the monastery or prison. Looking back on it, I think that those months spent in the ranks were better for me ultimately than if I had spent the last months of the war mentally strained by the responsibilities of an officer who takes his job seriously.
I was a cheerful, competent young soldier in the Isle of Grain when to our wonder the war ended, on November 11th 1918. I had not then acquired a taste for beer but practically everyone else in my hut had, and I had a busy time looking after my friends on that Armistice night. I remember leading one of them outside to micturate and vomit, and the words he used to celebrate the coming of Peace. He said,
“If my wife was to see me now, do you know what she’d say?”
“You’re all right,” I told him. “Anyhow, what would she say?”
There was a long pause. Then he pronounced portentously, “She’d say, ‘You blackguard!’”
2
WITH THE ENDING of the war, considerable mental readjustments were necessary for all young men. For four years of my adolescence I had lived in a world that was growing steadily bleaker and grimmer, and in that four years I had grown to accept the fact that in a very short time I should probably be dead. I cannot remember any particular resentment at this prospect; indeed, in some ways it was even stimulating. It has puzzled many people to imagine how the Japanese produced their Kamikazes, or suicide pilots, in the last war. It has never been much of a puzzle to me, however; in 1918 anybody could have made a Kamikaze pilot out of me.
In the Isle of Grain after the Armistice, therefore, I had to readjust my ideas considerably, and readjust them to the fact that there was a strange stuff called fun to be got out of life. Whatever capricious Fate decides the course of one’s life was careful in my case to see that the transition to fun didn’t come too suddenly, because my introduction to the merry new world opening before me was by way of a series of funerals. At that time there was a terrible epidemic of influenza ravaging the country, and men and women were dying of it all over England. Deaths in the army became so numerous that my battalion was ordered to provide a permanent funeral party to tour round Kent with a gun carriage and a dozen specially drilled men to conduct military funerals. I was drafted into this party and became proficient in the grand, sweeping motion of reversing arms, and in the moving collapse that follows on the only order in the army that is not given in a tone of command— “Rest on your arms reversed.” The Dead March still brings back memories to me of pleasant excursions through Kent by train or truck, freed from the pressure of military training and with a new, unknown, and glamorous world opening before me.
At the end of that war demobilisation was in order of jobs and not on length of service, and in that unjust system students were the first to be demobilised. My father was anxious that I should go to Oxford and I was willing enough, only stipulating that I should take Engineering, since my mind was firmly upon aeroplanes. My father canvassed opinion amongst his friends on the prospects for Oxford or Cambridge engineers. Somebody who must have been particularly well informed told him that he had never known one of them to fail to succeed in life, but not as an engineer. I think that there may be some truth in that still.
Accordingly two or three weeks after the Armistice I got leave from my funeral party and travelled up to Oxford to be interviewed by the Master of Balliol, A. L. Smith. My military service totalled just over a year, which excused me from matriculation, ‘Divers’, or any examination whatsoever till my Finals at the close of my university career, and this talk with A. L. Smith was the sole criterion for getting me in to Balliol and the University, though I suppose some kind of a report from school was added to it. I cannot remember in the least what we talked about, but at the end of half an hour I was accepted and told to come along as soon as I could get out of the army. I bet the Master of Balliol wishes that he could select his undergraduates in that way now! Competitive examinations covering the whole country, as today, may be the fairest way to judge between vast numbers of candidates, but the old system of personal selection at any rate gave the Master the sort of undergraduates he felt that he could teach.
In December 1918 the ranks of the army at home were hurriedly combed for clerks to man the demobilisation centres; a student could obviously function as a clerk and the fact that when the centre opened the first man to be demobilised would be me carried no weight with the sergeant. Accordingly I was sent to Shorncliffe Camp near Folkestone for training in the simple clerical routines that were involved. Shorncliffe had been an R.A.F. instructional camp, and there were still one or two aircraft there, derelict in a hangar. I spent hours sitting in the smelly, oily cockpit of a Sopwith Camel, studying the instruments and the controls and making sure that I knew how everything functioned. It was the first aircraft that I had ever had the opportunity to handle and examine intimately, and I made the most of it. I backed it up with a little book by Sayers on the theory of aeroplane construction and by a very comprehensive anonymous booked called Practical Flying. All told, I did a lot of aviation study in my last days in the Army.
We had a mutiny at Shorncliffe, but nobody was shot for it. We were an undisciplined mob of men drawn from all units, with few officers, discontented with our lot and impatient to go home. One day when the Orderly Officer came in during dinner and asked, in accordance with the regulations, if there were any complaints, somebody threw half a loaf of bread at him, and then we were all standing up and pelting him with bread; he ran like a rabbit. We then all formed up in a body and marched down to the Town Hall of Folkestone to find the Mayor and complain formally about the quality of the food. We didn’t get much change out of the Mayor, but we found the Labour candidate in the forthcoming election, who came out and addressed us and said it was a damned shame, so we all went back to the camp feeling we had struck a blow for freedom. The army dealt with the incident by declaring that our course of instruction was over, and sending us off to our demobilisation centres.
Aviation pursued me still, for I was sent to Dover, where the centre was a camp on a saddle of land behind the Castle. And there, railed round and let in to the turf, was the stone silhouette of a little monoplane, because this was where Blériot had landed when he had flown the English Channel only nine years previously. Beside that little stone paving the demobilisation centre was set up; I worked there for two days and then walked through it to demobilise myself.
I do not propose to deal with the three and a half years that I spent at Oxford in any detail, because I was a very ordinary, humdrum undergraduate. I excelled at nothing, won one prize only, which I spent upon a set of drawing instruments and a copy of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, rowed in the college second eight, and took third class honours in Engineering at the end. I left Oxford with a deep affection for Balliol and with a wide circle of friends which still endures, and with the memory of three and a half happy, carefree, and entirely satisfactory years safe in the bag, so that they can never be taken away from me. At the end of them, however, I don’t think that I was noticeably different. Perhaps, like others of my generation, I was already mature when I went there.
A number of things happened during my Oxford vacations, however, which were important to me. In recent years the character of university vacations seems to have changed, and it is usual now both in England and in the Commonwealth for an
undergraduate to take paid work in the vacations to assist with his expenses. In my day this was most unusual. The concept then was that the vacations were a time for leisure and for private study and reflection upon information that had been gleaned from university dons during the term. Leisure, in that context, meant working at whatever interested one most, whether cruising around the Continent in an old car to study political conditions in post-war Europe, or walking about with a gun and a dog getting to know something about the family estates, or working unpaid in an aeroplane design office, as I did. Paid work was almost unheard of in my day, not, I think, because there was anything socially derogatory about it but because it was seldom possible to get paid for doing the things you wanted to do for a short time, and in those more affluent days most undergraduates had sufficient money to enable them to live modestly in the vacations while they worked upon the things that interested them most.
In that first Long Vacation of 1919 I did no work, but laid the foundations for a recreation that has served me well. My old friend and schoolmate, Oliver Sturt, had come up to Oxford after a short service in the Navy. He found an advertisement in the Personal column of The Times by an old Southampton solicitor, Mr. Hepherd, who wanted two undergraduates to help him to sail his yacht; we put in for the job and got it.
The Aeolia was a heavy, straight, stem yawl of 28 tons Thames measurement, gaff rigged of course, and with a long bowsprit. Her gear was massive and complicated by modern standards, and she had no engine; relatively few yachts had an engine in those days. Hepherd kept her in the Hamble River off Luke’s Yard; before the war he had had three paid hands, but now with increasing costs he had only one, a Brixham fisherman. Getting that cumbersome old boat to sea under sail down the narrow river was a nightmare, for there was barely room for her to gather way upon one tack when it was necessary to come about again. Running on the mud and kedging off was normal, and collisions with other boats moored in the river were so frequent that it was the usual practice for the owner to keep a supply of visiting cards handy near the cockpit. When you collided with another yacht and carried away his crosstrees or his forestay you would apologise politely for what was an everyday occurrence and hand your card to the owner or his paid hand requesting him to send you in the bill, and go bumping on your way to sea, while the paid hand on the other boat got busy to replace the broken crosstrees or the forestay. No bad feeling was engendered by these incidents, because they were normal to the sport of yachting in those days.
In the old Aeolia I learned a lot of seamanship that summer. We started on a cruise to Cornwall by going aboard at Southampton one afternoon; we sailed a little way down Southampton Water and anchored off Netley for the night. That was the night of the official Peace celebrations and it blew a gale. We dragged our anchor for two miles down Southampton Water in the middle of the night and never knew it, for the bottom is soft mud so that the dragging chain made no noise. We finished up foul of the Hamble Spit buoy with our anchor chain wound round the buoy chain and the big red rusty metal buoy surging up and down alongside us and savaging our top-sides. Getting out of a mess like that in bad weather under sail alone is no joke, especially when you don’t know which way round to go to unwind the chains; Oliver and I tossed for it, and he lost, and went overboard and dived down in among the seaweed under the buoy to feel for the lie of the chains. I have always admired him for that job, though I suppose I should have done it if it had come to me. In the middle of this mess a ship’s lifeboat came drifting down towards us, derelict; we went out in the dinghy and secured it astern of us.
There was, of course, no question of nipping in to port to hand over that lifeboat to the Customs and claim salvage; only vessels with engines can indulge in deviations of that sort. We towed that lifeboat with us for a week till we made port at Weymouth, fifty miles or so to the west. Aeolia was a fine seaworthy vessel of her type, and with a good turn of speed when she was clean, but she had lain in the Hamble River all the war and Hepherd had not been able to get her slipped for a scrub before we started, owing to paid hand trouble and the slow demobilisation of men from the Navy, so that we started on that cruise with five years’ accumulation of wood, barnacles, and sponges on her bottom. That was a calm, hot summer; the climax was reached when it took us three days and four nights to cross the West Bay from Weymouth to Brixham, a distance of about fifty-five miles. We had to row ashore one blazing afternoon to buy bread at Seaton, a row of about six miles in to the beach from where the vessel was becalmed, Oliver and I rowing rather a heavy dinghy with the two girls of the party in the stern, laden with shopping baskets. A little breeze came up while we were on shore, and enabled the vessel to stand in towards the town to shorten our row back.
At Brixham, full of sailing smacks in those days, we laid the ship against the quay at high tide and let her dry out, and cleaned her bottom, and painted one side of her with antifouling composition before the tide stopped work; after that she sailed very well. We put her ashore again upon a beach in the Helford River and let her lie down on her side as the tide fell while we camped on shore, and painted the other side. There was a lot more hard work in yachting in those days than there is now, and that summer I learned a great deal about kedge anchors, warping, and manœuvring a big boat under sail in narrow channels that has stood me in good stead ever since.
I have given some space to that first cruise westwards from the Solent because although I have made many since, you can only do a thing for the first time once. Since then I have sailed in a number of yachts and owned two cruising boats, and I have cruised the coast from Portsmouth to the Scillies a number of times, but that first cruise in the old Aeolia stays in my mind as the best remembered, and perhaps the happiest, of the lot. Hepherd must have been well over seventy years old, I think; he had spent all his holidays upon the sea throughout his life, which was then near its end, and much of what he knew he taught me that summer, and in the following summer when I sailed with him again in a smaller vessel, the Rothion, of 11 tons. He went then to spend the winter in Ceylon with a daughter married to a tea planter, and he planned to come home again in May for a summer on his boat, because he knew no other way of life that brought him such content. I would have cruised with him again that summer, but he died on the way home, in the Mediterranean. It was his birthday and he had celebrated it by winning a deck quoits competition, and perhaps with a good dinner. When his cabin steward called him next morning he asked to see the doctor, and ten minutes later he was dead. He was buried at sea in the Mediterranean, a good end for an old man who showed me great kindness, and who enjoyed his life and the sea right up to the last.
The other thing that happened to me in the Oxford vacations was that I commenced work with aircraft. Through the Professor of Engineering and a colleague of his I got a somewhat indirect introduction to Mr. C. C. Walker. Mr. Walker was one of the senior officials of The Aircraft Manufacturing Company at Hendon, known as Airco for short. Captain Geoffrey de Havilland was the chief designer of Airco and the company had built large numbers of de Havilland machines throughout the war, from the D.H.1 to the D.H.11. By modem standards the factory at Hendon would be small, but in those days it was enormous and far too large to be kept going on the peace time demand for aircraft.
I wrote to Mr. Walker offering him my services without payment in the university vacations, and to my concern he did not answer my letter. Taking my courage in both hands I went to Hendon and walked into this big works and asked to see him. I found him perfectly charming, and glad to have me as an unpaid, very junior assistant in the design office and on wind tunnel research. And so I learned my first lesson in commercial life — when in doubt about an applicant, wait and see if he’s got enough initiative to come after the job; if he does, engage him, and you won’t go far wrong. In later years when I was sitting on the other side of the desk I pursued those tactics whenever I could and always engaged the man who took most trouble to get the job, and I was never disappointed.
Airc
o at that time was near its end as a company manufacturing aeroplanes and de Havilland and Walker were already making plans to start a new company of their own, to be known as the de Havilland Aircraft Company. In the meantime they were allowed to go on working in the empty design offices that had been so busy in the war, with a very small staff most of whom were working out their notice. They had the use of a wind tunnel which was seven feet square in its working section and capable of a wind velocity of about a hundred feet per second, a good equipment for its day, and here they were testing models for the new commercial aeroplanes they hoped to build.
I was fortunate in beginning my association with de Havillands at this time, before the new company was formed, when they had practically no staff at all and were glad of any unpaid help. It is interesting to think back to those beginnings of a great company. When I went back to them for the summer vacation I found that all the paid design staff at Airco had vanished except one apprentice called Mackenzie, but de Havilland and Walker were still working in the echoing, empty offices, and the wind tunnel was still going upon the aerodynamic models of the new designs, and one woodworker was still making the models. Throughout that summer Mackenzie and I worked the wind tunnel and carried on the tests, assisted now and then by Mr. Walker when the job demanded three men, plotting the results on many graphs and estimating the performance of the aircraft, doing the hack work for two great designers, listening to their sane, practical experience as they pored over the results upon our drawing boards for hours on end. Some people are born lucky, and I count myself lucky that my aviation career opened in such circumstances as those.
There were still a few aircraft going through the shops, to be examined thoughtfully in the lunch hour. Mostly these were repair and overhaul jobs. The London–Paris service in those early days was run by Aircraft Transport and Travel Ltd using mostly D.H.16s; the D.H.16 was a single engined aircraft with a Napier Lion engine, based upon the D.H.9a of the war. It was a biplane with one pilot in an open cockpit just behind the engine and under the centre section of the upper plane, and behind him was a very cramped little cabin for four passengers. There was, of course, no wireless and no toilet or anything like that; the machine cruised at about a hundred miles an hour, so that if there was a beam wind or a head wind the trip to Paris would take over three hours. Engines were not so reliable in those days as they are now and there were no navigational aids at all; judged by modern standards there were many accidents, but the service grew.
