Free The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute

conversation, “back home we call this checkers.”
    They set up the board on Turner’s bed, and arranged the pieces.
    “Where’s your home?” asked Turner, also making conversation. “What part of the States do you come from?”
    “Nashville,” said the Negro. “Nashville, in the State of Tennessee.”
    Turner thought for a moment. “That’s over somewhere in the West, isn’t it? Or is that Texas?”
    “No,
sir
. Tennessee is in the South, between the Lakesand Florida. Not right South like Mississippi or Louisiana, just halfway South.”
    “I see,” said Turner, not much interested. “Been over here long?”
    “Four-and-a-half months.” They began to play.
    “Do you like it over here?”
    “It’s a long way from home, Cap’n,” said the Negro quietly. “You get to feeling sometimes that you’re quite a ways from home, and then you get lonely. But most of us colored boys like England pretty well.”
    Presently Turner asked, “What do you do in Nashville? What do you work at?”
    “I got a job with the Filtair Corporation.”
    “What’s that?”
    The Negro glanced at him, surprised. “Why, that’s quite a business, Cap’n, back in Nashville. They got over five thousand hands working now, with war contracts. Make air cleaners for autos and trucks and tanks, and airplane engines, too.” He paused, and then he said, “My Dad, he’s been with them over twelve years now. That’s a long while to be with one corporation in the States, specially for a colored person.”
    “What does he do there?”
    “Runs the print machine, making the blueprints from the drawings. He’s a draftsman really, makes a darned fine engineering drawing. We lived up in Hartford when I was a lil’ boy, and he worked there as a draftsman. Then we moved back down South because his pa died and Grandma needed looking after. But I guess there’s difficulties in the South you don’t get in Connecticut. Yes, my dad works in the print room.” He said that he hadbeen sent to the James Hollis School for Colored Boys in Nashville.
    The ex-draughtsman had given his son as good an education as a coloured boy could get.
    “Pa wanted me to be a draftsman too, and I did the course at school, and I liked it well enough. But then when I left school I couldn’t get a start nohow. No,
sir;
not in Nashville!”
    “Why not?”
    The Negro looked at him. “Things is mighty funny in some states,” he said quietly. “In Filtair, colored people don’t do drafting. I guess if I’d gone up to Hartford I’d have got a start all right, but Ma was poorly, and not much money, either. I got taken on as a garage hand at Filtair; it’s all colored in the garage. Then I got to drive a truck for them, and then they put the filters on the Type 83 Bulldozer for desert service, and I got to driving that around sometimes for experimental trials. Then when I got drafted they found I knew how to drive a bulldozer so they put me into a construction unit.” He thought for a minute. “I guess I’d have been in a construction unit anyway,” he said. “They don’t send us on combat service.”
    In the winter of 1942 he had been moved across the Atlantic; he was stationed for a month or two in Northern Ireland with his unit. An airstrip had been needed in the region of Penzance. By March 1943, his construction company, with three others, was working on a hilltop just above the little village of Trenarth, four miles from Penzance, levelling the fields, breaking down walls, demolishing farmhouses, making roads and runways.
    Trenarth is a little place on the railway, at the junction of the main line and the North Coast line. It is a place of about a thousand inhabitants, with a small market square, a church built in the year 1356, and a public house. The construction companies were all Negro except for a few white technicians; the impact of fifteen hundred coloured soldiers on this little place was considerable.
    “I like Trenarth,” he said. “I