Free Round the Bend by Nevil Shute Page B

put my bag down. Ma was in the scullery, and when she heard the door go she called out, “That you, Alf?” She thought it was Dad.
    I said, “It’s me, Ma—Tom!” She came rushing out and put her arms round me and kissed me, and ticked me off for not letting them know which day I was coming. And then she said, “My, Tom, you do look brown. How long have you got at home?”
    “Only a week or two,” I said. “I’m getting a bigger aeroplane, and flying out again as soon as it’s ready.”
    “Not bust yet?” she asked.
    “Not quite,” I said. “Where’s Dad?”
    “He stepped out to the Lion for his game of darts,” she said. “He should be back now, any minute.”
    “Mind if I go down there and fetch him, Ma?”
    She nodded. “He’ll like you to meet his friends, Bert Topp and Harry Burke, and Chandler. Don’t be more’n a quarter of an hour, Tom. I’ll start getting supper now.”
    I went down to the pub, and there was Dad playing darts with Harry Burke. I said, “How do, Dad,” and he said, “How do, Tom,” and I told him I’d been home, and he told the barman to give me a pint, and went on with his game. The barman said, “Been out in the sun?” and I said, “Persian Gulf,” and he said, “Uh-huh,” and I sat and watched Dad going for the double at thefinish of the game. It was just as if I’d never been away at all, as if Bahrein and Gujar Singh, and Sharjah, and Yas Island were places and people I’d read about in a book.
    I walked home with Dad when he’d finished the game, and told him something about what I’d been doing on the way. Back home when we sat down to the light supper that they had before going to bed, Ma asked me, “What’s it like out where you’re working, Tom? What does it all look like?” She paused. “Is it all palm trees and dates and that?”
    “Not in the country,” I said. “Nothing grows outside the towns, because of the water. There’s no water at all. The land is desert-great flat stretches of sandy sort of earth, with maybe rocky hills or mountains here and there. All yellow and dried up under the sun. You get groves of date palms and greenery outside Bahrein and outside most towns, where they irrigate with water from wells.”
    Dad said, “Sounds a bad sort of country.”
    “I rather like it, Dad,” I said. “It gets hold of you, after a bit. It’s good for people—you don’t get any of the pansy boys out there. It can be lovely when you’re flying, too. Some places and in some lights, the desert goes a sort of rosy pink, all over, and then if you’re flying up a coast the sea can be a brilliant emerald green, or else a brilliant blue, with a strip of white surf all along the edge like a girl’s slip showing.”
    “Ever had a forced landing in it and got stranded?” Dad asked,
    I shook my head. “Not yet, and I don’t want one. I had to put down once because of a sandstorm, and sit it out in the cabin for five or six hours; then it got better and I took off and went on. I always take a petrol can of water in the aircraft.”
    Ma said, “My …”
    They wanted to know if I’d got anyone to help me, and I told them about Gujar Singh and Tarik. It was difficult, of course, to make them understand, however hard I was trying, however much they wanted to. Dad said,
    “Like niggers, I suppose they’d be?”
    I shook my head. “No, not like niggers. Gujar Singh’s an Indian.”
    “Lascars are Indians, I think,” Dad said. He only knew the types he’d seen about the docks, of course.
    “That’s right,” I said. “But this is a different sort of Indian. A better sort than lascars, more of an Army officer type.” I went on to describe what Gujar looked like, but I don’t know that a description of him really helped me in describing what I had come to feel; that our minds ran on similar tracks.
    Ma said, “They’d be heathens, I suppose?”
    The question worried me a bit, because I wanted her to like them. I wanted her to