Authors: Nevil Shute
My father was a civil servant in the General Post Office, in London He wrote rather erudite travel books in his
spare time; but for a troublesome deafness he would have risen very high in the public service. As it was, he didn’t do so badly, for he became head of the Staff Branch about 1907 and we moved to a new, modern, larger house in Ealing and he started going to Royal levées and to Courts with my mother. That house again was on the edge of farming land and lay exactly on the line between Hendon and Brooklands, two of the earliest aerodromes in the London area.
I was eight years old when we went to live there, and my only brother, Fred, was about three years older. Thinking back over the five years that we spent in that house, I am surprised to recollect how much I knew about aeroplanes, bearing in mind my age. Perhaps the Children’s Encyclopædia had something to do with it, then a new publication and a very good one. Certainly before I was thirteen years old I built several model aeroplanes of wood, glue, and paper, with rubber motors, and I knew something about longitudinal stability and negative tail incidence. I remember a non-flying model aeroplane of sheet metal soldered together, which seems to show that I was interested in tools. Fred could not have built it because he was classical and literary, taking after my father, who held that a first class classical education was the foundation of all knowledge. Fred was an apt Latin and Greek scholar, widely read for his age but not much good with his hands, while I had little or no use for the classics or literature. Students of form in the best-seller world must make what they can of that one.
They may make more of this. From the age of five or six I stammered very badly, and I still do on occasion; it has long ceased to worry me and so, as is the way with stammers, it has become less troublesome. From my experience of many treatments for this thing I don’t think it is capable of cure except by increasing self-confidence,
and probably that only comes with age. A stammer certainly makes things tough for a little boy at school, and an unsympathetic master can make lessons so intolerable that escape becomes the only possible course. It was for me, so I played truant.
It probably wasn’t such a bad school for normal boys, that first preparatory school in Hammersmith. I don’t think I was there for longer than a year before I was withdrawn in deep disgrace, at the age of about eleven. My form master was a good one, a young fair haired New Zealander called Cox; if he should be still alive and read these words I would like him to know that it was not because of him that I ran away. The other masters weren’t so hot, and in my second or third term the place became unbearable.
No thought of telling my parents ever entered my head. I knew that everybody had to go to school and they would never agree to let me stay at home, and I was too inexperienced to realise that perhaps there might be better schools than this one, where all the masters were like Mr. Cox. I was a day boy and used to go to school by the old District Railway from Ealing, a journey of about half an hour. I had a season ticket and on the day of my revolt I travelled backwards and forwards between Hammersmith and Ealing all day with various intermediate stops when I got out and sat upon a foreign platform, watching the trains go by and savouring my great adventure. I went home at the usual time happier than I had been for many a day, and only had to lie a little to explain why I had no homework.
Appetite comes with eating, and a couple of days later I did it again. Before long I discovered that by paying another penny excess fare I could go on to South Kensington. There was the Science Museum, a wonderland of mechanical models in glass cases in amongst examples of the real thing. There was the actual original locomotive,
Stephenson’s Rocket, and dozens of scale model locomotives in glass cases, some of which would go by compressed air when you pressed a button. There were working models of steam hammers, and looms, and motor cars, and beam engines, and above all, there were aeroplanes. Sir Hiram Maxim’s machine dominated one hall, and Pilcher’s glider hung suspended beside Stringfellow’s model. In the glass cases there were models of everything that had flown up to date, the Wright machine, Mr. Henri Farman’s aeroplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle, the Antoinette, and best of all, the Blériot XI that had flown the English Channel.
For ten days I browsed in this wonderland with a mounting score of guilt and lies building up that I seemed powerless to do anything about. In the day time I could forget my crimes in studying the run of the wires from the
cloche
to the wings that controlled the wing warping on the Blériot, or trying to puzzle out how the engine of the Antoinette managed to run without a carburettor. The evenings at home became the purgatory that school had been, and it was almost a relief when the blow fell and the headmaster wrote to ask what had become of me.
I can’t remember very much about the row. My parents were good and kind but they were not mechanical, and it was difficult for them to understand that I was not telling a lot more lies when I told them I had spent most of my time in the Science Museum with the machines. They acted very wisely, because they did not send me back to Hammersmith. Instead, they sent me to live with friends at Oxford to go as a day boy to the Dragon School, then known simply as Lynams’ after the headmaster. So began an association with Oxford which has been, perhaps, one of the happiest and most formative influences of my life.
The masters at Lynams’, I found, were all like Mr. Cox
or even better. True, if you were lazy or unreasonably stupid you got hauled over the desk there and then and spanked with the form master’s hard hand till you blubbered, while the rest of the class looked on quaking in their shoes. That didn’t seem to matter, because I cannot remember any master in that school who did not inspire in me devotion and affection and respect, though of course ribald stories and nicknames for them were the rule. The headmaster was like nobody that I had ever seen or read about before.
C. C. Lynam had started the school with his brother in the nineties as a co-educational preparatory day school for the children of university dons. As it grew in popularity boarders became a part of the set-up and the co-educational aspect of it faded; when I was there there were about a hundred and twenty boys, half of whom were boarders, and about ten little girls. The success of the school in scholarship was phenomenal—I remember four Winchester scholarships in one year—partly no doubt owing to the hereditary ability of many of the children. The headmaster was known to everybody as The Skipper because yacht cruising was his passion; he was a big, red-faced, laughing man with white hair that was seldom cut and curled about his ears. His brother would have liked to abandon the co-educational aspect of the school but The Skipper would have none of that, for the simple and elemental reason that he liked little girls. He said that they were a civilising influence in a boys’ school and I think there was some truth in that, because Lynams’ was certainly a delightful school for the boys. I do not think that I can pay the school a higher tribute than to say that my stammer hardly mattered there.
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.