Authors: Nevil Shute
He parked the aircraft on the tarmac where a little group of officers were waiting by a couple of cars, and stopped the engines. He slipped out of his seat, put on his cap and straightened his tunic, and went aft into the saloon. The
Queen, coming out of her cabin, turned to speak to him. “Thank you so much, Commander Anderson,” she said. “It’s been a very easy flight.”
He said, “I’m very sorry about this diversion, madam. It’s going to put you to a lot of trouble, I’m afraid. We’ll try and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “I know it’s nothing to do with you. Thank you for a very safe and pleasant journey.” She turned, and left the machine.
He stopped by Rosemary’s seat and helped her with her hand luggage, and followed her down the steps on to the tarmac. A bitter wind from the North Sea whipped round them in the darkness. He said, “You’re going on to London with the Queen, I suppose?”
“I think so, Nigger,” she said. “I believe we’re driving into York to catch a train at ten-twenty. What will you be doing?”
“I shall stay here with the aircraft,” he said. “We’ll fly her down to White Waltham tomorrow. If we’re allowed to fly at all in England,” he added bitterly.
“I wish I was coming with you,” she said wearily. “It’ll be three in the morning by the time we reach King’s Cross.”
He left her then, to arrange with the R.A.F. to hangar the machine; he stayed with the party till the tractor had drawn the Ceres under cover and the doors were shut. Then he walked over to the R.A.F. mess. He found that the Queen and the Consort were dining with the R.A.F. Commandant in his house; the rest of the party were already at dinner in the mess. Transport to York had been arranged for eight forty-five.
He had a few words with Frank Cox before he left for London with the party. “I’ll ring you tomorrow morning, here,” the Group Captain said. “About eleven o’clock, I
should think. As soon as I’ve got clearance for you to fly down to White Waltham.”
David asked directly, “Is White Waltham still open to us, sir?”
“I haven’t heard it’s not. Have you heard anything?”
“No. I just wondered.”
“I think that’s going to be all right.… I don’t think you need worry about this, Nigger. It’s just another pinprick. It’s nothing to do with you or with your crew. They could have found out all about you from B.O.A.C. if they didn’t know already.” He paused. “No, it’s something quite different, that’s to do with the Queen. I’d forget about it, if I were you.”
“It’ll be a long time before I do that,” the pilot said grimly. “She’s my Queen as well as yours, you know. I’m not a bloody Pommie.”
The Group Captain looked up at him, startled. “That’s a point of view I hadn’t thought about.”
“It’s about time somebody started thinking about it,” David said. “My Queen’s dead tired now, and some Pommie bastard’s forcing her to travel for six hours longer, by car and train, in the middle of the night, for no reason at all. I don’t like it. My High Commissioner won’t like it, either. And Canberra won’t like it, when they hear what’s happened.”
There was a short silence. Then the Group Captain looked up, smiling. “Difficult, isn’t it?” he remarked.
“Too right, it’s difficult,” the Australian said. And then he added, “All Pommies aren’t bloody. I used that as a kind of figure of speech.”
“Most Aussies are bastards, though,” said the Group Captain. “Prickly bloody types to deal with.”
They laughed together over a cup of coffee.
Next day David flew Tare down to White Waltham.
He found Dewar there with Sugar, rather envious of the Australians in their flight around the world, and anxious to hear all about it. David spoke to Frank Cox upon the telephone and received his permission to lay up Tare for a comprehensive inspection by the manufacturers that would take three days, and set this in motion with the firm. On the following day he flew the machine to Hatfield in the morning and handed it over to de Havilland’s, and returned to White Waltham by road.
That afternoon he got a telephone call from the High Commissioner’s office, making an appointment for him to see Mr. Harry Ferguson next afternoon. He had been summoned to similar appointments with the High Commissioner several times during his service in the Queen’s Flight, to report on his work and upon any organisational difficulties that might have arisen, and he had shown him over Tare at White Waltham. It was natural that the High Commissioner should want an account of the flight to and from Australia. David rang up Rosemary to ask her to dine with him that evening, and made an appointment to pick her up at her flat at seven o’clock.
Mr. Ferguson, fat and genial in a grey suit, made David welcome and sat him down in the chair on the other side of the desk. As David had supposed, he wanted to know all about the flight, and he was particularly interested in Christmas Island. “What’s it like there?” he enquired. “I’ve never seen it. I don’t suppose many other people have, either.”
“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 Shepherd’s 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’œuvres 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.”