by Nevil Shute
The list of the boys who have attained distinction from that school would be endless, and of the little girls who shared my classes I remember best, perhaps, Naomi Haldane, who as Naomi Mitchison turned into a well known novelist and writer upon social matters, and Norah Joliffe, a soft-spoken, shy, pretty little girl in my form who walked off with every kind of academic distinction and went straight on to become a don at Cambridge, dying before she was fifty. There can be little doubt that The Skipper had good material to work with in his pupils, but I think the main credit for the happiness of the school must go entirely to the headmaster himself.
As I have said, he was a very keen yachtsman. He had a succession of three or four sailing yachts that he called the Blue Dragon, in which he used to cruise around the north of Scotland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys and the Shetlands, during the Easter and the summer holidays. Towards the end of my time at the school he took a term off and sailed his boat across to Norway and up the coast to the North Cape. He was therefore a man accustomed to hardships and to risking his life in a mild way, unlike many schoolmasters. If I have learned one thing in my fifty-four years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.
I lived with friends and went as a day boy to this pleasant school. Mr. Sturt was a don at Queen’s and my parents had met them on some holiday in Cornwall; they had a house immediately beside the school. The Sturts lived well enough but they were not particularly affluent and I imagine they were glad to have me as a paying guest to go to school with their son Oliver; for me the benefit was great. The Sturts had three children and lived a free and easy life; the summer was one long carnival of swimming or diving or boating, in punts or canoes upon the river Cherwell which runs past the school or in rowing boats or sailing dinghies upon the Upper River, the Thames above the city of Oxford. I mastered all these crafts before I was fourteen, and fished for the first time in my life, for the fat chub that nosed around the boathouse piles and could be seen sniffing at the worm if you kept very still, or for roach in the Thames.
With all these country pleasures I cannot remember any great mechanical interests at Lynams’ except the motor bikes of the masters. Motor bicycles at that time, in 1911 and 1912, were novelties, somewhat experimental and entirely fascinating. Most of the masters had a motor bicycle and The Skipper had a little car built up of motor bicycle components, then known as a cyclecar. All these vehicles were continually in trouble and I used to spend hours at the shed door that we were not allowed to enter, watching the masters as they mended punctures or fiddled uncertainly with an engine that refused to start. In Oxford itself there was a fascinating place in Longwall Street, a garage run by a young man called Morris who built light cars made out of bought components in a window of the garage, so that you could see the car actually being made. They said that he was making them at the rate of nearly one a week, fitted with White and Poppe engines. Later on he made them quicker than that.
Those were the amusements of the term time; in comparison my holidays in my suburban home were almost dull. Our summer holiday task at Lynams’ was to keep a diary, and the high spot of my diary for the summer of 1911 was the first Air Race round Britain, which passed directly over our house on the first lap between Brooklands and Hendon. The little boy who was myself, of course, knew all the aeroplanes by sight and drew them in his diary, the Blériot which won the race, the Morane-Borel, the Deperdussin, and the Valkyrie, names practically forgotten now. I remember particularly the Etrich monoplane, a graceful thing for those days with swept, birdlike wings, that flew over last of all late on a summer evening; it was powered by an immensely powerful motor of 120 horsepower, more than twice the power of most of the other machines, and alone of all the competitors it carried a passenger. Later on, in the early days of the first war, we were to become familiar with a development of this machine as the German Taube.
In the year 1912 a great change came into our lives, for my father accepted the job of Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, which meant that he became King of the Post Office in that country. It was not promotion because the salary was the same as he had been getting in London, and in view of his increasing deafness it may be that he was being shunted into a dead end. He was glad to take the job, however, for a variety of reasons. My mother’s health was causing him anxiety; I think he felt that the change to new and more social surroundings from the somewhat humdrum life of a London suburb would help her by creating new interests, and perhaps he felt pleasure himself in the idea of being in complete control of a considerable enterprise, though in a smaller sphere. I should have felt like that myself in his position; life in London has never attracted me very much. To live beside great people and among great affairs is stimulating for a time when you are young. But when you have met a fair selection of the great people, when you have had the great affairs, I think a man of only average ability finds more solid satisfaction in a smaller milieu. For most of us life is fuller and more satisfying when one is a big frog in a little puddle than when one is battling on as a little frog in a big puddle, and perhaps for this reason I have always preferred myself to live in the provinces rather than in London. Thinking back over the years, I rather think that the same motives may have taken my father to his job in Ireland.
It meant great changes for my brother and myself. My father’s job in Ireland in those days carried a considerable social position which both he and my mother were well capable of maintaining; my father was a good classical scholar, the author of a number of books, and a very good host with a keen sense of humour. My mother was the daughter of a Major-General in the Indian Army and very well up in all the usages of polite society in those far-off days; there was little that she did not know about precedence, visiting cards, calling, and ‘at home’ days. Their social position in Ireland required a very different house from the modern villa in a row that we had lived in up till then, and my father leased an old rambling country house at Blackrock ten miles south of Dublin, a house with about thirteen acres of grounds, a large walled garden, good stables, and a long range of glass houses. In those days of cheap service he had no difficulty in staffing this house with three indoor servants, a gardener, and a gardener’s boy without overspending his salary even though my brother and I were at the most expensive stage of education. And here my father and mother blossomed out into the country house life that in those days was the reward that good and faithful servants of the King expected in their later years and on retirement. For two years until the first war they led a very happy life at South Hill near Blackrock. Though nobody knew it at the time, that sort of country house life was near its end for the majority of Englishmen, and I am glad my parents had that happiness while it was still there to enjoy.
For Fred and myself, that house opened up new country pleasures we had hardly dreamed of. There was a pony to be ridden or driven in a trap, hay to be made and carted, greenhouses to be walked through in wonder. Fred had not got on very well at Rugby, which at that time was rather a tough school, I think; he had two abdominal operations while he was there and spent more time in the sanatorium than out of it. My father removed him when we went to Ireland and sent him to Trinity College at the early age of sixteen; he lived at home and went to Dublin every day. His room rapidly became filled with books. There was an exciting new poet called John Masefield writing about things that had never found a place in poetry before, so that the critics were saying scornfully that Dauber wasn’t really a poem at all. There was a terrific man called Algernon Blackwood writing mystical stories with a supernatural tinge, and there were the Pre-Raphaelites to be discovered, with The Wood Beyond the World and The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and presently there was Swinburne. Life was not all literature for Fred, though, because he acquired a very pretty little .22 seven-chambered revolver with which we both learned
to shoot the weathercock with remarkable accuracy. I remember that little gun with pleasure even now, and wish I had it still.
There were other excitements, too. In those two years before the first war our girl cousins from Cornwall came to stay with us more than once. Patty was about Fred’s age and was his confidante, and it was from her that I derived what little knowledge I possess about Geraldine Fitzgerald. I only met Geraldine once; she was one of those ravishingly beautiful young Irish girls with dark hair and a perfect complexion, who wanted to go on the stage. There is a Geraldine Fitzgerald in Hollywood who played magnificently opposite Bette Davis in Dark Victory years ago, and since has played the lead in many famous movies; if she should be the same she will remember Fred Norway, who at the age of seventeen proposed to her on top of a Dublin tram and was rejected very kindly while she twisted her tram ticket nervously to pieces, and who died of wounds in France two years later. If not, perhaps she will forgive me.
Round the next corner and in the next street
Adventure lies in wait for you.
Oh, who can tell what you may meet
Round the next corner and in the next street!
Could life be anything but sweet
When all is hazardous and new?
Round the next corner and in the next street
Adventure lies in wait for you.
That isn’t mine; I wish it was. It was written by E. F. A. Geach at Oxford a few years after the time of which I am writing, and to me it epitomises those years before the first war, and my early youth. It may not be good poetry to the critics of such matters, but it has pleased me for nearly thirty-five years.
In the spring of 1913 I left Lynams’ and went to Shrewsbury School, into Oldham’s house. Shrewsbury at that time was a fine school on the up-grade under a vigorous and imaginative young headmaster, C. A. Alington, and Oldham’s was the newest and one of the best houses in the school. I made many friends there who are close friends still, not least my old housemaster. On form the years that I spent there should have been a very happy time, and when I say that they were not I am saying nothing against Shrewsbury. I had been there little over a year when war broke out, in August 1914, and the remainder of my time at school was mostly spent in preparation for war till finally my own turn came, and I left school, and went to war myself.
In those circumstances I don’t think any school could possibly have been a very happy place, resilient though youth may be. I was in uniform already when the war broke out because, like most boys, I belonged to the school Officers’ Training Corps and the end of the summer term found me in the annual training camp at Rugeley. That was a tented camp shared with contingents from many other schools under their own masters as officers, where a few regular army officers put us through manœuvres on a considerable scale based, of course, entirely upon Boer War tactics. Britain mobilised when we had been there only a few days and the regular officers and cooks and orderlies marched off more or less directly to France, and we were sent home, still in our khaki uniforms, all terribly excited.
When I got back to my home in Ireland I found that Fred had already applied for a commission in the army. He failed his medical and had to have a minor operation before going up again; in the meantime my father had had time to think it over and decided that Fred had better go in for a commission in the regular army so that if the war went on for years he would have a profession when it was over. Fred was very much annoyed about this because he reckoned that if he messed around too long he’d miss the war, but my father was adamant and Fred passed into Sandhurst in October 1914. In those days the sausage machine worked quickly, and by April 1915 Fred was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, Cornwall being our family county.
We had a motor bicycle between us by that time, a new Rudge Multi. My parents must have been very wise to launch out on this extravagance at a time when my father must have foreseen rising taxation, for the Rudge cost nearly £60, a lot of money in those days. Although completely unmechanical himself, my father saw good sense in Fred’s contention that every officer ought to know something about motors, revolutionary though that doctrine seemed. My mother had another angle on it; she foresaw that in the holidays my life would be empty without Fred since we had been so much together, and she thought that if I had a motor bicycle while Fred was away at the war it would ease the loneliness. So in September 1914 when I was fifteen years old I took delivery of the Rudge from the depot in Stephen’s Green, Fred being in hospital. I had never ridden a motor bicycle before though I had a very comprehensive theoretical knowledge, and I was too shy to admit my inexperience. The Rudge mechanic gave me a shove off in amongst the trams and for a moment I was out of control while my body accustomed itself to the unfamiliar weight of the machine and the great surge of power that small movements of the throttle produced, for the Rudge was no lightweight but a man-sized, powerful machine. Then I got the hang of it and rode round Stephen’s Green a couple of times gingerly manipulating the infinitely variable gear, and finally rode it home in triumph. From time to time in life one gets a moment of sheer ecstasy; I had one of them that day.
Fred had the Rudge at Sandhurst through the winter, and I went back to school, where military training was now to take up much of our free time. In the spring he was commissioned and posted to the depot of the regiment at Falmouth, and in the Easter holidays my father and mother took me there to stay for a fortnight so that we could see something of Fred before he went to France.
I think war was still romantic in those days, early in 1915; certainly nobody yet had any conception of what casualties could do to a nation. Fred was very smart in his new uniform, his Sam Browne belt beautifully polished, his sword impressive, his revolver massive, new, and fragrant with clean gun oil. The only casualty that had touched me till that time was a distant cousin, Captain de Courcy Ireland, who was an officer in the regular army and in the Royal Flying Corps. Enemy action had not yet produced many casualties among flying people because we were still in the stage when if you saw a hostile aeroplane you manœuvred to get close enough to fire your revolver at it, leaning from your cockpit in the most daring fashion to do so while you flew your own machine with one hand, in itself no small feat in those days. De Courcy was lost flying a Blériot from England to France on Christmas Eve; he took off from some field near Dover and was never seen again. Since then I have flown the Channel many times in my Proctor and I have never done so without a thought for my relation, staggering out across the black December sea in a single-seater powered by an engine of fifty dubious horsepower at the most, cruising at less than sixty miles an hour, incapable of getting higher than about three thousand feet, with no instruments except a rev counter, no radio, no compass, little fuel, battling on to get to France in order that the army might have eyes to see what the Germans were doing on the far side of the hill, and failing to make it.
Fred went to Flanders with a draft, and I rode the Rudge Multi home. It was the first big journey I had made alone in my life, and it took me four days to get from Falmouth to Holyhead. Nearly forty years later it is difficult to see why it should have taken me so long, for I did nothing else but travel. I can remember a vague impression that a hundred miles was an enormous distance and a good day’s riding, and I think the fact of the matter must be that roads were generally bad in those days, and motor bicycles much slower than we now recollect. Probably the bad roads, small tyres, and poor springing made a journey very tiring; I can very well remember aching wrists. In adventure and fatigue the journey was probably comparable in these days to a drive from London to Rome or from Boston to Chicago, and that I accomplished it without mishap gave my self-confidence a boost which was rather needed, for I still stammered very badly.
In the middle of the summer term Fred was badly wounded, at a place called l’Epinette near Armentières. In the trench warfare of those days the curious operation of mining was common on both sides. Where the trenches were frequently with
in a hundred yards of each other you would collect a party of miners, coal miners in civil life, perhaps, and dig a tunnel underground till the end of it was beneath the enemy trench. The enemy was well aware of what was going on, because he could hear the men digging underground, but he was generally powerless to do anything about it. I doubt if such a thing could happen nowadays with the increased fire power of the infantry, but in that war it was a common tactic. The climax, of course, was that you filled the end of the tunnel with high explosive, fired it with a fuse at a suitable moment, and blew up the enemy trench; in the confusion you then assaulted with infantry and gained a few yards. In these days of mobile warfare it seems a great deal of effort for very little advantage, but that is the way things were in 1915.
Fred’s bit of trench was mined by the Germans and everyone knew it. The only things that could be done about it were retreat or counter-attack, and the local situation permitted neither. Those last days after the noise of tunnelling had stopped, waiting for the balloon to go up, must have been very trying for Fred; he wrote home a couple of jocular letters about it to my parents. It went up at dawn on June 13th and twenty-four of Fred’s platoon were killed or wounded by the explosion; at the same moment the Germans put down an artillery barrage. Fred was unhurt, but his sergeant and several men were buried by the débris. No doubt, having survived the explosion, he had the strengthening feeling that I know so well—‘This can’t happen to me’—for he led a party of men out from the remains of the trench to dig out his sergeant. There the shell got him.
