On my hall windowsill is a group of old Pan paperbacks by Nevil Shute. There are nine of them. Many years ago I went through a phase of collecting these mid-20th century stories and became a little obsessive about finding editions of each book that had matching artwork on the front. I trailed charity shops looking for them. The Oxfam shop in Marylebone High Street provided particularly rich pickings. I could of course buy them very cheaply on line but I discovered that sellers didn’t realise that the artwork might matter to the buyer and thus you didn’t always get exactly the right edition.
I wrote about ‘A town like Alice’ some time ago now and it resonated with very many of you. (I have a second copy of that: a rather scruffy Book Club Associates hardback, foxed along the spine, smelling a little musty and with my father’s signature inside and a date 1953.) This time I picked out ‘The Pied Piper,’ a book I hadn’t read for decades. I remembered the very broad outline of the story but not the details and that kept me avidly turning the pages. I had forgotten the style of Nevil Shute’s writing. It is smooth and fluent with a somewhat unexpected, easy facility, almost an elegance. This makes it very pleasurable to read and moves the narrative forward in a satisfying fashion.
So, John Howard, an elderly man who loves fishing and has spent his working life as a country solicitor, travels to the Jura area of France after the outbreak of the Second World War but before the fall of France. Partially he is on holiday but also he is trying to assuage the grief caused by the death of his son, an RAF pilot.
Historically, Shute brings out in the first chapters of the story the complacency and the ill placed confidence of Europe as the Nazi invasion begins. Nobody could imagine that events would happen as they did. France would not be taken. Paris would not fall. These thoughts are reiterated and this mindset means that people do not take advantage of the time available to them. There is no sense of urgency.
Howard is asked to take two English children back to England with him. Their father works for the League of Nations in Geneva and whilst feeling sure that his work could continue whatever happened, the idea of the children being with relatives in England does seem preferable. His wife chooses to stay with her husband rather than her children. That particular choice is very much of its time I feel. The journey will surely be quick and easy. A train to Paris, another to the coast and then a boat over the channel.
Of course this is not the case and in a way the story starts here. There are hardly any trains and those that are running are filled with troops. Unbelievably the Nazis have taken Paris and the British have retreated to Dunkirk and then home. It is suddenly not very easy or popular to be English. To many French people, it appears that they have been deserted and there is also the issue of the Allies bombing areas of Northern France to either destroy German ships and tanks or to immobilise Nazi communication centres. Inevitably there were also civilian deaths. Last September I stayed in the small town of Lisieux in northern France and even at a distance of some 80 years, it was uncomfortable to learn that the vast majority of the town had been flattened by the Allies, even when one knows the strategic reasons would have been incontrovertible.
John Howard has difficulty in persuading the two English children to speak in French and keep their nationality hidden and eventually this causes great problems. In various travelling adventures along the way he also acquires a few more children, one of whom is Jewish, who all need, for varying reasons, to be removed from this uncertain, increasingly grave, wartime situation. They meet those who offer what little they have and don’t question why this ill-assorted little group are travelling in a rather random fashion and, inevitably, they come across those already filled with hatred and prejudice.
This story is very well constructed, has just the right amount of tension and is an excellent read. Copies are widely available from second-hand sites, very easy to find, particularly if you aren’t fussy about the artwork on the cover!
By the way, I recently read numbers 11 and 12 in the Rebus series by Ian Rankin: ‘Set in Darkness’ and ‘The Falls.’ Such good reading, sometimes late into the night. There are still another dozen books to go but I am limiting myself and refusing to binge read them.