Nevil Shute Norway - Pastoral (Nevil Shute Norway) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Gunnar was a big young man with a red face and curly black hair, good-tempered, methodical, and rather slow. So far as Marshall knew, he had never made a mistake in navigation, and no emergency had ever made him hurry. He never passed a course or distance verbally, but wrote it down and gave it to his captain. He had explained this once to Marshall. ‘No mistakes,’ he had said, beaming good-humouredly. ‘No mistakes this way. Perhaps one day you think I say something when I mean differently, so I think it better that I write it down.’ He always crossed his sevens in the continental style.

These two, Phillips and Gunnar Franck, formed the backbone of the crew; the others came and went in training or dilution of the air crews, but the rear-gunner and the navigator stayed with Marshall. He had reflected once or twice that all of them were fishermen, and had once suggested that a heraldic roach, rampant in or upon a field of gules, should decorate the front fuselage of the current Wimpey. The Wing Commander had taken a poor view of that and Marshall, lying in bed in the pale sunlight, was not altogether sorry that the scheme had come to nothing. A roach was a lousy fish to put upon a Wellington. A pike, a pike with great snapping jaws and very fierce would be altogether different.

Sitting up in bed he assembled his new rod. It was a very little rod, a slender wand of steel more like a rapier than a rod, not more than five feet long. It was beautifully made and finished. The sun glinted on the chromium-plated rings above the wand; the shaped cork grip nestled in the palm of his hand. He fitted the little multiplying reel and flicked tentatively in the air above his bed. A chap could chuck a plug the hell of a way with that.

The WAAF batwoman found him sitting so when she brought in his tea, critically examining his new rod. ‘My,’ she said, ‘what’s that you’ve got?’

‘Fishing-rod,’ he said.

She said again: ‘My . . .’ Them pyjamas were a dream. ‘Well, here’s your tea. Now you get up, ’n let me do this room.’

‘I’ll get up in a minute.’

She said: ‘Don’t sit there playing with your fishing-rod. I got my work to do.’

She went out, and the pilot sat on in his bed, sipping the large cup of hot, sweet tea that she had brought him. He was in no hurry to get up. He had missed breakfast by the best part of a couple of hours, and it was a full hour and a half before lunch. For decency, he would have to go and look his Wimpey over; he could do that before lunch. He did not want to fly it; for the moment he was sated with flying. What he wanted most of all to do, and what he certainly would do when he had had a meal, was to take his new rod and his new reel and his new plugs, and ride three miles on his bicycle to Coldstone millpool, and see if he could get a pike.

He took the rod to pieces and packed it away again, and presently he got out of bed. He walked over to the window and looked out. He could not see the aerodrome. He looked out over a small valley, pasture and ploughland alternating in chequers, parted by hedges and great bushy trees. It was very still, and quiet, and sunny. Over to the right a little squad of WAAFs were standing in open order in a field doing physical jerks. The girls wore battledress in Air Force blue; the Section Officer who was drilling them wore grey trousers and a grey jumper with a polo neck. She stood facing them. ‘One—two—down—up—swing—stretch—down. Not bad. Let’s try that once again.’ A mile away he heard the village church of Hartley Magna chime the quarters, and then strike eleven.

He rubbed his hand across his face, yawned, stretched, and went to the bathroom.

Half an hour later he was getting on his bicycle to ride around the ring runway to dispersal. He rode slowly with one hand in his pocket, savouring the freshness of the morning. He passed various Wellingtons upon their little concrete bays. One had a gaping, jagged hole at the trailing edge of its starboard extension plane, that had removed a portion of the aileron and put the flap permanently halfway down. He glanced at it casually, without much interest, as he passed. It was a big job. Nobody was doing anything about it yet.

He came to his own Wellington, R for Robert. The ground crew were working on it; the fitters had stripped the port engine of its cowling, and there was somebody in the cockpit. Marshall got off his bicycle and laid it down upon the grass, and strolled over to the port engine.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘How do we go?’

One of the fitters said: ‘You got an oil leak. Filter casting’s cracked. Did you know?’

Marshall shook his head. ‘Pressure was all right. Might have been five pounds down. Is it bad?’

The man went to the engine and wiped the casting with a dirty rag; immediately the new oil showed the crack. ‘You were nearly dry on this side,’ he said. ‘Not more’n two gallons in the tank.’

Marshall looked again. ‘Did something hit that?’ he asked. ‘Or did it just go?’

‘Just went, I should say.’ The man wiped it again. ‘I don’t see any mark.’ He glanced up at the pilot. ‘Is that right, it was Turin?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Much stuff about?’

‘Not much. Seen anything of Sergeant Pilot Franck this morning?’

‘He’s inside, sir.’

There were several people in the fuselage: Gunnar Franck, and the corporal rigger, and one of the men from Vickers. Marshall swung himself in and said: ‘What’s this in aid of?’

Franck turned to him. ‘There is little holes,’ he said. ‘In the bomb doors and the underneath of the rear fuselage, and the tail also. I have thought that it was the rats, maybe.’

Marshall said: ‘Very likely. Couldn’t have been anything else.’ He bent with them to examine the damage, which was no more than superficial, and heard what the technician proposed to do about it. ‘Strong teeth the little muggers have,’ he observed, fingering a buckled duralumin bracing of the geodetic.

Gunnar said: ‘Also, they have strong stomachs. I have found the droppings.’ He opened his hand and showed three tiny, jagged fragments of shell-case.

‘They’re not well,’ said Marshall.

Phillips came down the fuselage from the rear turret. Marshall said: ‘Everything all right your end?’

‘Okay. I never fired a round all night, bar testing. I’ll check up with the target this afternoon, soon as I can get it.’

They got out of the aircraft and stood beside it in the warm sunlight. Before them stretched the field, criss-crossed with the wide runways, empty, idle, and still. Phillips said: ‘None of our lot bought it, did they?’

Marshall shook his head. ‘It was a bit of cake.’ He turned from the machine. ‘I’m going up to Coldstone Mill this afternoon to try and get a pike,’ he said. ‘You coming along?’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘If I go out, I’ll go to the river.’ He meant, to fish for roach. ‘But I got a date for the pictures tonight, so I don’t suppose I’ll go. Wouldn’t hardly be worth it.’

The pilot said: ‘I’ve got a twisted wire cast that I got in Oxford, and a single wire cast, and a sort of artificial gut cast—thick stuff. Which would you use?’

‘With them plugs and the little rod? I’d use the single wire.’

‘Not the gut?’

‘I dunno. I never used that fancy sort of stuff for spinning. If there’s a fish there and he likes the bait, he wouldn’t bother about wire or gut.’

‘They don’t notice?’

‘Naow—not pike don’t. I knew a chap one time, in Elvington it was, used to use brass picture-wire, fishing for pike. And he got plenty. Tain’t like as if it was roach.’ He paused, stooped under the fuselage and fingered a little rent in the belly fabric; then he straightened up again. ‘You should do all right this afternoon,’ he said. ‘They like the sunny days.’