As soon as possible Ross made his escape, and went down to the seaplane. He had his work to do, clean, practical and material work with metal parts and oil and grease, fit healers for a sick mind.
Nevil Shute, An Old Captivity (1939).
You wouldn’t think it from his books, where the characters live in modest houses, rarely have servants and eat very ordinary food, and where Australia with its rough egalitarianism is the ideal society, but Nevil Shute Norway, to give him his real name, was from the upper-middle classes. He grew up in Edwardian/Georgian comfort, if not wealth,mostly in London, although there were some years in Ireland, living in Blackrock, Dublin, when his father was the Postmaster-General in Ireland – his tenure took in the 1916 Rising. Shute had a stammer, so he did not become an officer, and joined the army at 18 as a private. After demobilisation he went to Balliol College, in Oxford, to study engineering, and after that became involved in aviation for the next quarter-century or so. His novels are animated with the vivid joy of living in a world which has aeroplanes and other fascinating machines, and fascinating people, too, of both sexes and all social classes and races. His attitude to other races (Aboriginal Australians figure in some of his books, and Native Americans) and classes, and to women, while not entirely free of ‘othering’, is nonetheless refreshingly different from many of his contemporaries. He takes people as he finds them and never disparages routinely on the basis of race, class or gender. It might have been his experience in the ranks or his experience in the new field of air engineering, which attracted people from all backgrounds, that gave him such a broad perspective on life and people. Or maybe it was just his personality. He eventually settled in Australia with his wife and children, where he died at the age of 61. I’ll discuss three of his novels today, in reverse order of publication.
Requiem for a Wren (1955) is a very unusual book, narrated by the prospective brother-in-law (had his brother not died) of Janet, an academic’s daughter who becomes a member of the Women’s Royal Navy (popularly known as Wrens) straight out of school in 1939-40 and who quickly discovers that she is a crack shot and has a mechanical mind. She thoroughly enjoys messing about with aeroplanes and other machines and she loves the camaraderie and fellowship of her job. However, she makes one mistake (a very understandable one) that has fatal results, and after that her fiance dies, in an unrelated incident, and then she seems to go to pieces. As her friend and fellow-Wren Viola points out to Alan, the narrator, after the war; ‘we’ve had it.’ Like Janet, they have spent their youth acquiring skills that are no use whatsoever in a post-war world, and having relationships that didn’t survive the conflict, sometimes because the other people literally did not survive, but sometimes because of utterly changed circumstances. Viola, a talented draughtswoman, works in set design at Pinewood Studios and in the evenings, paints pictures of motor torpedo boats and other such military vehicles, which she has no trouble selling.(There were some renowned female military artists in Britain.) She and Alan cannot even fall in love properly, both are so bedevilled by might-have-beens. The war, as Alan points out, keeps on killing long after it is over. I don’t like the ‘ending’ of the book (which is its beginning – the book is a ‘flashback’) but I can appreciate its poetic value all the same.
In The Wet (1953)is set in the wet season in Queensland (so vividly described you feel damp reading it) in the late 1940s, and the narrator is Roger, an elderly bush clergyman, who befriends a reprobate alcoholic ex-stockman Stevie. Stevie lives out in the bush with Liang, a ‘Chinaman’ and Buddhist; is there an implication of a gay relationship? In any case, Stevie smokes a lot of opium, and falls ill, and when Roger goes out to give him the last rites, Stevie spins a great yarn set in the future, over the night vigil. His name is David Andrews, he lives with his wife Rosemary in Canberra, it is 1982, and he is a highly-skilled pilot flying between Australia and England. England is dreary after 30 years of socialism; although Shute with his usual fair-mindedness concedes that some socialist measures were necessary, he believes it has gone too far. The Queen has given up Balmoral and Sandringham but the public still aren’t satisfied. Charles has married and has 2 sons; Anne is married to a duke and has a daughter. (Andrew and Edward weren’t born in the early 1950s). The Queen decides the best thing for her to do is to move to Australia. As usual, Shute’s lucid and clear descriptions of machines steal the show, even for the non-mechanically-minded, but he is no economist, and his description of England’s (never Britain’s, oddly) economic decline is unconvincing. And strangely, he hasn’t foreseen any developments in telecommunications. (This was a great disappointment to my father, who loved his books and who worked in telecommunications.) But there is great heart in this book all the same, and a kind of rough egalitarianism; race and sex do not bar people from any kind of work, although Shute cannot imagine the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
No Highway (1948) is narrated by Dennis Scott, an aircraft engineer in a position of authority in Farnborough, where planes are made and tested, in Britain. One of the scientists working under him is a rather eccentric man, Mr Honey, (these are formal times; we only find out his first name towards the end and I forget it already) who has devoted his life to studying metal fatigue in aircraft. Honey is war-widowed (his wife was killed by a V2) and has a 12-year-old daughter, Elspeth; their heart-breakingly odd domestic life is described very sensitively. Scott’s wife, Shirley, gets to know Elspeth in the school where she teaches, and finds out that father and daughter are firm believers in pyramidology, and the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and automatic writing and table-rapping. All this seems to undermine Honey’s credibility as a scientist. Honey finds himself on a transatlantic journey on one of the aircraft he believes to be doomed, the Reindeer – it’s a long story, but he didn’t know it had so many flying hours before he embarked. The plane lands safely in Newfoundland but not before Honey has convinced a stewardess, Marjorie and another passenger, Monica, a famous actress, of the dangers, and actually raised serious doubts in the captain, Samuelson. The internal politics of the aircraft industry and all its stakeholders are quite entertainingly gone into. The rather strange love story between Honey and Marjorie is a bit too ‘helpmeet’ for modern tastes – for my taste anyway – though, as always, Shute’s females are convincing characters. The novel is all the more significant because in 1954 the British were forced to ground their entire de Havilland Comet fleet due to several fatal accidents attributed to metal fatigue. The tests Mr Honey would have insisted upon, were not done before the Comet was launched in 1951. Shute published this book in 1948 and a film was made of it in 1951 (with James Stewart) so there was no excuse for such negligence.
I’ve also read A Town Like Alice, An Old Captivity, Ruined City, So Disdained and Pied Piper, and I might write about these books another time; Alice is particularly beguiling, featuring a very strong female character. So Disdained was his first novel, published in 1928, and is remarkably non-judgmental about anti-British espionage by an Englishman. (His publishers then, Cassells, made him change all his ‘bloodys’ to ‘ruddys’, which annoyed him.) An Old Captivity has science-fiction elements. Shute has a refreshing regard for the supernatural and fantastical, and even some of Mr Honey’s strange beliefs are vindicated in No Highway.
Shute is an optimist, partly because of his teenage experience in the bloody second decade of the twentieth century. In his memoir he remarks that after his older brother Fred died in the war in 1915, he naturally assumed he would die in combat too, and never thought of planning for adult life or life after the war. He understood how kamikaze pilots could be produced in Japan in the Second World War because he himself and others like him, he believes, could have been kamikaze pilots no problem at all, in the First. Surviving the conflict intact seems to have given him a boundless appreciation for life and humanity as well as machines, and this shines through in his novels.
An additional note: I read most of these books in tattered Pan paperbacks which belonged to my father. What would the ordinary reading public in the 1960s and 70s have done, without Pan and Penguin? Nearly all the novels in our house were Pan, with some Penguins.
Nevil Shute, An Old Captivity (London: Heinemann 1939: Pan 1969)
———————No Highway (London: Heinemann 1948: Pan 1963)
———————In The Wet (London: Heinemann 1953: Pan 1969)
———————-Requiem For A Wren (London: Heinemann 1955).
———————-Slide Rule (memoir) (London: Heinemann 1954: Pan 1968)
David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951-57 (London: Bloomsbury 2009) for information about the Comet. Kynaston’s series of books on post-war British history, beginning with Austerity Britain, are masterpieces of narration. He has got up to 1965 with his latest, A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. With his strong narratives, colourful asides and most of all, his giving-everyone-their-due fairness, he is the Nevil Shute of historians.
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