Kindling by Nevil Shute

off to inspect Sharples, walking slowly with a stick.
    The town was dreary with the sad Northern uniformity of long rows of grey houses on a minor scale. Dreary, he thought, but not so bad as some. The houses were better and larger than those which he remembered on his visits to other similar places on the north-east coast, Gateshead, Jarrow, and Sunderland; he judged the town to have been built more recently than those.
    It seemed to be a place of about forty thousand inhabitants; later he found that this guess of his was very nearly right. It stood on the edge of the river Haws a mile or so up from the sea; behind the town the hill rose gently to the north, crowned with sparse fields and the gaunt slag heaps of an idle mine.
    He found the one main street, Palmer Street, near the hospital. Like all the streets in the town this one was laid out with granite setts; there were rusted tram tracks down the middle of the street, but no trams ran. The shops were mostly small and unpretentious; a great number of them were unoccupied, with windows boarded up. He passed by two closed banks. On a fine corner site an extensive store was shuttered and deserted. On the façade above the windows he traced the outline letters of the sign that had been taken down, and realised that he was standing in a town that could no longer support Woolworths.
    He walked the length of Palmer Street. There were very few people to be seen although the afternoon waswarm and sunny; he passed a few knots of men standing idle at the corners, but he saw few women and fewer children. Very few vehicles passed him; for a time he was puzzled to identify an aspect of the town that was familiar and that yet eluded him. At last he realised it was the cleanness of the streets. There was no mud upon the granite setts, no rubbish in the gutters of the road, no smoke in the pale sky. The town was clean as a washed corpse.
    “It’s like Russia,” he muttered to himself. The empty streets, the shuttered shops, the lean, despondent people put him irresistibly in mind of Leningrad, where he had been some years before.
    He very soon grew tired, and was glad to cut his outing short and get back to the hospital. He went through to the Secretary’s room to take up his heavy burden of simple addition; he was ruefully conscious that he was not shining as a ledger clerk. Williams was out, but the Almoner was sitting at her desk.
    She glanced round as he came in. “Been out for your first walk?”
    He sank down in his chair. “I’ve been looking at Sharples,” he replied. “It’s the first time I’ve seen it.”
    She made no reply.
    He drummed with his fingers on the table for a minute. “What’s the unemployment here?” he said at last.
    She raised her head. “About seven thousand five hundred drawing from the P.A.C.,” she said. “I suppose it’s about nine thousand, more or less.”
    “That’s most of the wage earners, I suppose?”
    She nodded without speaking.
    He eyed her for a moment. “What happened here?” he asked gently.
    She turned to him. “I don’t know—none of us really know. This is a shipping town—Barlows, you know. Barlows really were Sharples—everyone seemed to work in Barlows, or in the plate mills, or the mine—and those were all mixed up with Barlows. The Yard employed about three thousand people all the time before the War, and in the War, and after the War, it went up to about four thousand, so they say.”
    She paused. “And then about five—no, six years ago, they started to lay off men. There didn’t seem to be any more orders for ships coming in.”
    “I know,” he said. “That happened all over the world.”
    “It was awful,” she said soberly. “I’ve lived here all my life. My father was solicitor to Barlows. It didn’t really matter much to us, because he was thinking of retiring anyway. But first of all they had to lay off the men, and then some of the staff. And then the mine shut down, without any warning at