Slide Rule by Nevil Shute Page A

common on the aerodrome immediately outside the shed, and we got many snipe. This state of affairs continued till the day we left, though the game moved out a few hundred yards from the shed as the work got under way.
    Throughout 1925 and 1926 we laboured to make order of the chaos we had found, and to design the airship at the same time. By the end of the latter year there were twenty houses on the aerodrome occupied by the wives and families of the staff. The water supply and sewage plant had been put in order, and a considerable powerplant installed to supply the electrical needs of the station. A hydrogen-generating plant had been set up beside the shed, and the site had been cleared of the enormous ruins that disfigured it. Offices and works had been set up and equipped; by the end of 1926 the place was running as a reasonably efficient manufacturing concern.
    In the middle of all this absorbing work
Marazan
was published. Perhaps no novelist ever treated the production of his first book more lightly; I expected to make little money out of it, and the expectation was realised. By the time the book went out of print it had just made the advance royalty of £30. It stayed out of print for twenty six years; when it was finally reissued in a cheap edition it made £432 in royalties in the first six months. I think it is a very good thing that we cannot see into the future. If I had known that a future as an author awaited me I suppose I should have given up engineering at an early stage, and my life would certainly have been the poorer for it.
    One or two points about the publication of that early book may interest young authors. Mr. Newman Flower of Cassell asked me to come and see him, which I did before we moved to Howden. At that interview he said he liked the book and wanted to publish it, but that there was one obstacle; he said that it concerned a matter with which they frequently had trouble when dealing with young authors. I asked what it was, whereupon he said, “The House of Cassell does not print the word ‘bloody’.” So we changed them all into ‘ruddy’.
    He then posted me an agreement for the publication of the book. By that time I had joined the Authors’ Society, and had made a study of the terms of a desirable literary agreement. I wrote back to him objecting to practically every clause of the agreement, with the result that he replied that there were so many differences between usthat he thought that no business would be possible, and sent me back the book.
    The firm of literary agents, A. P. Watt & Son, had been agents for my father in the past, and for more famous men, including Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Edgar Wallace. I had been at Balliol with a young member of the firm, R. P. Watt, and at this stage I took my troubles to him, remarking, I think, that I had made a fool of myself. He undertook to put the matter right and handle the book for me, with the result that Cassell published it upon the standard agreement used by A. P. Watt & Son. Since then I have never done any of my own literary business at all, but I have left it all to Watt. I could not have a better agent, or a more loyal friend.
    When this book was published, I had to face up to the question of acknowledging the authorship. Writing fiction in the evenings was a relaxation to me at that time, an amusement to which I turned as other people would play patience. I did not take it very seriously, and I don’t think it entered my head at the time that it would ever provide me with a serious income. During the daytime I was working in a fairly important position on a very important engineering job, for a very large and famous engineering company. It seemed to me that Vickers would probably take a poor view of an employee who wrote novels on the side; hard-bitten professional engineers might well consider such a man to be not a serious person. Of my two activities the airship work was by far the more important to me in the