Free The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute Page A

guess we all do.”
    There were some misunderstandings to be cleared up when they first arrived. A party of white American surveyors from the Eighth Air Force had come first to pick the site and mark it out, and they had told the village about the blacks who would arrive in a few days. They said that the Negro soldiers who were coming were rather primitive, and that the villagers would have to be both careful and tolerant. They said the Negroes could speak little English and did not understand the use of lavatories. When they were hungry, they would bark like a dog, and they had small, rudimentary tails concealed within their trousers, which made it difficult for them to sit down. Having drunk their beer and marked the site and had their fun with perfectly straight faces, the surveyors went away, and left the village in perplexity.
    Old Mr Marston, the gardener at the vicarage, raised the matter in the White Hart one night. “I asked Mr Kendall if it’s true what they were saying about these black soldiers that are coming,” he said. “About them barking when they want their victuals. He says it’s all just a story they were telling us, to get a rise out of us.”
    “Aye, that’s right,” said Mr Frobisher, the landlord ofthe pub. “They was just pulling our legs. Negroes don’t have tails, not any that I heard of.”
    A mournful little man who worked as a porter at the station said, “Well, I don’t think they was pulling our legs at all. Very nice and straight they spoke to me, they did. That corporal, he said this lot come straight from Africa. Africans, they are—that’s why they can’t speak English. There’s rum things happen in Africa, believe me.”
    The consensus of opinion was that the stories were improbable, but that it would be prudent to maintain a strict reserve when the visitors arrived.
    The story reached the Negro soldiers very quickly. In the March dusk, after their evening meal in the rough camp they were making on the bleak hilltop, a few coloured men walked down into the village. They came in a little party, smiling broadly. As they passed each villager they gave a realistic imitation of a pack of hungry dogs. They thought it was a great joke, and barked at everybody in tones varying from Pekinese to bloodhound. By the time they reached the White Hart, the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers to whom was owed some sort of apology.
    “They were real friendly, right from that first evening,” said Lesurier. “They made us feel like we were regular fellows.”
    It was not only that the villagers were conscious of their own stupidity. At that time there had been a great deal of prominence given in the English newspapers to the assistance America was sending in Lease-Lend, and thisassistance was obvious to everybody in Trenarth in the increasing numbers of American tractors, trucks, and jeeps to be seen in the streets. Like others, Bessie Frobisher, the buxom daughter of the landlord, had half believed the stories she had heard about the Negroes, and felt in a dim way that she owed recompense to these black, soft-spoken, well-behaved strangers in the bar. So she got out her electric iron, which had not functioned for a month, and brought it into the bar and put it on the counter, and said, “Can any of you mend an iron?”
    Sergeant Sam Lorimer picked it up in his enormous pink-palmed hands. “Sure, lady,” he said, “I can fix that for you.” He turned it over, examining it. “It don’t get hot no more?” he asked.
    She said, “It doesn’t get hot at all now. It used to be ever so good. It’s a job to get anything mended now, you know.”
    He called across the bar, “Hey, Dave, lend me your screw driver?”
    Lesurier lent his screw driver, and with that and a jack-knife they disembowelled the iron on the counter while the girl watched, picked up the broken thread of filament and made it fast, and re-assembled it. They tried it in