Free The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute Page B

a lamp socket and it got hot at once.
    “It’s all okay now,” said Lorimer, “but the filament won’t last so long—it’s kind of rotten. It gets that way as it gets old.”
    “You can get new parts for irons like that,” said one, “I see them that day we was in Belfast.”
    “That’s so,” said Lorimer. “Maybe we could get one in Penzance.” He passed the iron back to Bessie. “Well,there you are, lady. It’s fixed right now, until it goes again.”
    She smiled at him. “It’s ever so kind of you to take the trouble,” she said. She turned to her father. “Dad, this gentleman’s mended my iron, and it works beautifully.”
    She used her normal language without thinking anything about it, but each Negro within hearing caught the word “gentleman” and stiffened for a moment in wonder. They certainly were in a foreign country, a long ways from home.
    Frobisher passed his hand over the iron to feel its warmth, and turned to Lorimer. “Aye, it works all right,” he said. “Will you take something on the house? A glass of beer?”
    The big Negro hung his head, smiling and confused. “Well, that’s real kind of you, mister,” he said.
    Within a few days the boys were fixing everything. They liked fixing things. They fixed the leg of the settee in the saloon bar, and they fixed the gate leading to old Mrs Pocock’s cottage garden. They fixed the Vicar’s Austin Seven, and they fixed the bit of wall by the war memorial, that a truck had knocked down. They fixed the counter flap of Robertson’s grocery shop, and they fixed the wheel of Mr Penlee’s dung cart. When Penlee gave them tea with all his family in the farm kitchen, as some recompense for what they had done to his cart, they were so overwhelmed that they turned up next Sunday in a body and limewashed his cow house.
    They fixed everything that needed fixing in Trenarth in a very few weeks. In a country that had been at war for over four years, with every able-bodied man and womancalled up for industry or for the forces, their presence was a real help to the village; the people liked them for it, and for their unfailing courtesy and good humour. They were well paid by English standards and they brought prosperity to Trenarth, which was a factor in their favour, but more important was the willing work they did; England in wartime had plenty of money, if little to spend it on. Some of them were gardeners in civil life, and used to come up shyly and ask if they might work in the garden, asking for nothing but the pleasure of tending flowers. Some of them were farm hands, and wanted to do nothing better in their spare time than to help the land girls clean the muck out of the cow houses. Inevitably they were asked in to a meal as interesting and honoured guests, and equally inevitably they would take the farmer’s daughter or the land girl to the pictures in Penzance.
    They had a grand time in those early days. They used to bring a couple of trucks down from the camp on Saturday afternoons to pick up the girls, and drive off to Penzance to the pictures in a great merry party, thirty or forty black young men and as many white girls, all laughing and jammed together in the great trucks, having a fine time.
    The Vicar, Mr Kendall, held unconventional views on most of the controversial subjects in the world, which no doubt accounted for the fact that at the age of fifty-three he had progressed no further than the living of St Jude’s, Trenarth. He stood with Mr Frobisher one afternoon, watching one of these expeditions as it started off, andsaid, “We’ll have a few black babies to look after, presently.”
    Mr Frobisher rubbed his chin. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “It’s the girls’ own business if they do. Colour apart, I like these fellows well enough, I must say.”
    The Vicar nodded. “I’d rather have them than some others of our gallant Allies,” he said darkly.
    It was in that halcyon time that Private David Lesurier became