Shute, Nevil

Nevil Shute-What Happened to the Corbetts.

This book was written in the year 1938 and published in April 1939, five months before the outbreak of the Second World War. At the time when it was written it was thought probable that war with Germany would come before long, and there was much activity in England over Air Raid Precautions. Most of these activities at that time were directed to countering bombing attacks by gas bombs, and there was little realisation by the public of the devastation that would be caused by high explosive or by fire.

At that time, I was connected with the aircraft industry and so, perhaps, better informed than most authors on the potentialities of the various forms of air attack. I wrote this story to tell people what the coming bombing attacks would really be like, and what they really had to guard against. I was right in my guess that gas would not be used and in the disruption of civil life that would be caused by high explosives. I over-looked the importance of fire. I would like to think that the publication of this novel at that time did something to direct attention to the danger of disease. In this the publishers, William Heinemann Limited, did a good job for the country, for they distributed a thousand copies free of charge to workers in Air Raid Precautions, not as remainders but on publication day.

In this edition I have retained the Author’s Note printed at the end of the book, because it seems to me to be of some historic interest.

Nevil Shute

Towards dawn Peter Corbett got up from the garage floor and, treading softly, moved into the driving seat of the saloon. Presently he fell into a doze, his head bowed forward on his arms, upon the steering-wheel.

He woke an hour later, dazed and stiff. A grey light filled the little wooden building; it was early March. The rain drummed steadily upon the roof and dripped and pattered from the eaves with little liquid noises, as it had done all through the night. He stirred and looked around him.

Behind him, in the rear seat of the car, lay Joan, his wife, sleeping uneasily. She was dressed oddly in an overcoat, pyjama trousers, and many woolly clothes; her short fair hair had fallen across her face in disarray. On the seat beside her was the basket cot with little Joan; so far as could be seen, the baby was asleep.

He moved and looked out of the window of the car. Beside the car Sophie their nurse was lying on a Li-Lo on the oil-stained floor, covered with an eiderdown, sleeping with her mouth open and snoring a little. Beyond her there was another little bed, carefully screened between the garden roller and a box of silver sand for bulbs. From that the bright eyes of Phyllis, his six-year-old daughter, looked up into his own; beside her lay John, his three-year-old son, asleep.

Moving very quietly, he got out of the driving seat and stood erect beside the car; he had a headache, and was feeling very ill. From her bed upon the floor, Phyllis whispered:

‘Daddy. May I get up?’

‘Not yet,’ he said mechanically. ‘It’s not time to get up yet. Go to sleep again.’

‘Weren’t they loud bangs, Daddy?’

‘Very loud,’ he said. He moved over to the garage window and looked out. Everything seemed much the same, but he could not see beyond the garden.

‘Daddy, were the bangs loud enough to be heard in London?’

‘Not in London.’ He was feeling sick; his mouth was coated and dry.

‘Would the bangs have been heard in Portsmouth, Daddy?’

‘No. I don’t know.’

‘Anyway, they’d have been heard all over Southampton, wouldn’t they, Daddy?’

‘That’s right,’ he said patiently. So much, indeed, was evident. ‘But now, try to sleep again and don’t talk any more, or you’ll wake Mummy and John. There won’t be any more bangs now.’

He stepped carefully across the Li-Lo to the corner, and stooped over the little bed. He pulled the rug across her. ‘It’s not time to get up yet. Are you warm enough?’

‘Yes, thank you, Daddy. Isn’t it fun, sleeping in the garage?’

‘Great fun,’ he said soberly. ‘Now, go to sleep again.’ He moved quietly down the garage past the car, opened the door, and went out into the garden. His raincoat had half dried upon him in the night. He had no hat; the rain beat on his face and ruffled hair, and this refreshed him.

He lived in a semi-detached house, a large house in a good suburban road. It had a well-kept garden stretching out behind to the back road; the wooden garage was at the end remote from the house. He lived comfortably in a fairly modest style; he was the junior partner of Johnson, Bellinger, and Corbett, solicitors, in Southampton. He ran a medium-sized car which he had bought second-hand, and a nine-ton cutter yacht which he had bought sixteenth-hand; these, with his three children, absorbed the whole of his income. He was thirty-four years old, a pleasant, ordinary young man of rather a studious turn.

He stood for a few moments in the garden in the rain, looking around. His house looked much the same as usual, so did the houses on each side of it. There was a window broken in a house a few doors down the road; otherwise he could see nothing wrong. He moved up the garden, opened the garden door, and went into his dining-room.

A sudden draught of cold air blew into his face, fluttering the papers on a table where the telephone was standing.

He frowned. There was a window open somewhere in the house. Someone had left it open in the confusion of the night-and on a rainy night like that! It was too bad. He passed through the hall into the drawing-room in the front of the house. In fact, the windows were all open, but they had not been left open by the maids. The glass in every pane was cracked and shattered. Most of it had fallen inwards from the frames, and was lying on the floor. The rain streamed in through the great apertures, trickling down the furniture and making little pools upon the carpet. The settee, and Joan’s easy chair, were drenched and sodden. Before the window the chintz curtains blew about, sopping and forlorn.

His lips narrowed to a line. ‘Christ,’ he said very quietly.

There was nothing to be done, and if there was, he was feeling too ill to do it. He turned from the ruined room, and went upstairs. A short inspection of the house showed him the extent of the damage; it was practically all confined to glass and damage from the rain. In the front of the house every pane of glass was shattered on the first and second floors; a few windows at the top remained intact. The back of the house was quite undamaged; the windows were unbroken and the rooms dry.

A clanging bell brought him to the nursery window in time to see a white ambulance go past the house at a considerable speed. He heard the brakes go on with violence as it passed him; it seemed to draw up down the road out of his sight. There was a commotion down there, noises of people and sounds that he could not place.

He turned from the window, went downstairs to the bathroom, opened the medicine cupboard on the wall, and took a couple of aspirins to ease his headache. Then he went down to the front door, opened it, and looked out.

The rain blew down the street in desolate great gusts; low over his head the grey clouds hurried past. Something peculiar about the houses opposite attracted his attention; he stared for a moment while a dull, tired brain picked up the threads. And then it came to him. Practically every window within sight was shattered like his own, and the rooms stood open to the rain.

He walked to the front gate, bareheaded in his raincoat, and looked down the road. A hundred yards away the ambulance was halted with a little crowd of people round it; they were putting a stretcher into it with care. It seemed to him that there were ruins there, as if the garden wall had fallen down on to the pavement. He knew what must have happened and it interested him; he went out of the gate and started down the road. The ambulance moved off as he drew near. He knew the house, of course. He did not know their name. He knew them as an elderly couple who drove a very old Sunbeam car, with a married daughter who stayed with them intermittently with her children. As he came up the little crowd turned to disperse, and Corbett saw for the first time the results of a bomb.

It had fallen in the front garden. There was a shallow crater there, three or four feet deep. Bursting before it had had time to penetrate far into the ground, the force of the explosion had gone sideways. The garden wall of that house and the next was nowhere to be seen; it was obliterated, lying in heaps of mould and shards of broken brick and mortar scattered the road. The front wall of the house had collapsed and had fallen in a great heap into the front garden, blocking the door and exposing dining-room and bedrooms to the air with all their furniture in place, much like an open doll’s house. A portion of the roof had slipped and now hung perilously, swaying and teetering in the wind; from time to time a slate crashed to the ground.

His next-door neighbour was there, Mr. Littlejohn, a builder of houses out at Sholing. Corbett knew his neighbour fairly well over the garden wall, and liked his comfortable manner. But now the broad rubicund face was drawn and tired, and very serious.

Corbett asked, a little foolishly:’ Is anybody hurt?’

The builder turned to him. ‘The maid. It’s her they’ve just taken away. But I don’t know if it was the explosion, or whether she had a fall getting down from her room. That’s her room, the one at the top with the wash-stand. Doesn’t look as if it had been touched now, does it?- barring the wall, of course.’

‘Where was she?’

‘Lying out in the garden here, all messed up.’

Corbett blinked. It seemed incredible. ‘What happened to the old people?’ he enquired.

‘They’re all right-but for the shock, of course. The blast must have been terrific in the house. See what it’s done to all our windows. But they sleep at the back, so I suppose they were all right.’

‘Are they in there now?’

Mr. Littlejohn shook his head. ‘Mrs. Wooding’s got them in her househer that lives at Number 56. They’ll be all right.’

He turned away. ‘I tried to telephone the hospital, but my line’s out of order. Is yours working?’

‘I haven’t tried it,’ said Corbett. ‘It was all right last night.’

‘I bet it’s not now.’

They turned, and walked together up the road towards their houses. ‘Well,’ said the builder heavily, ‘I got enough of this in the last war to last my lifetime. I didn’t never want to see it again.’

‘I was too young,’ said Corbett. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

‘Let’s hope you’ll never see it again.’ They walked on for a few paces in silence.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ said Corbett. ‘Where did you go?’

The builder laughed shortly. ‘Soon as I realised what it was I got my missus out of bed and we went down to the cellar. And then I thought, maybe there’d be a sort of slanting hit-like that one-and the house would fall on top of us. So then we went upstairs again, and sat on the stairs outside our bedroom, because that way we got a room and two walls between us and the outside-see? But there-whatever you do may be wrong.’

‘I know,’ said Corbett. ‘We went out to the garage.’

‘To the garage?’

‘I was afraid of the house coming down. But if the garage walls blew down on us-well, it’s all light wooden stuff, and besides, the car would keep it off you. So we lay on the floor beside the car.’

The builder nodded slowly. ‘That’s all right. But when all’s said and done, there’s nothing to beat a trench. A seven foot trench so that your head gets right beneath the ground, but not so deep you may get buried in it. That’s what you want to get-a trench dug in the garden.’

They paused for a moment by the builder’s gate. ‘What’s it all about, anyway?’ asked Corbett dully. ‘Are we at war?’

The other shook his head. ‘I dunno.’

‘Who do you think it is we’re fighting?’

‘Blowed if I know. One or other of ‘em. I suppose.’

Corbett went back into his house; before going out to rouse his family he poured himself out a whisky and soda. He stood for a few minutes in his dining-room drinking this, a weary and dishevelled figure in his sodden raincoat. Before him on the table was a copy of the Evening News of the night before, wide open at the centre page. His eyes fell on the cartoon. It represented the Prime Minister, very jocular, dangling a carrot before two donkeys separated from him by a wire fence. One of the donkeys had the head of Hitler, and the other, Mussolini. Corbett remembered how they had laughed over it at dinner-time. It did not seem so very funny now.

He stared at the paper. He had bought it from the boy on the corner, on his way back from the office, as he always did. He had had an interesting day, and not too tiring. He had got home about half-past six and had been to see the children in their beds before they went to sleep, and played with them a little. Then he had gone down with Joan, and before dinner they had planned a new position for the sweet pea hedge, taking it off the wall and putting it between the garage and the lilac-tree. She had showed him that the magnolia was coming out; they had talked about the errors of omission of the gardener, who came once a week. Then he had read the paper for a little; he remembered having heard during the day that all leave had been cancelled for the Fleet over at Portsmouth, because of the tension on the Continent. But there was always tension on the Continent, and leave had been cancelled many times before. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly alarming in the paper.