Slide Rule by Nevil Shute Page B

interest of the work, apart from the fact that it was my livelihood, and I was pretty sure that in my case writing in the evening was no detriment to the engineering.
    For these reasons I made up my mind to do what many other authors in a similar case have done in the past, and to write under my Christian names. My full name is Nevil Shute Norway; Nevil Shute was quite a good, euphoniousname for a novelist, and Mr. Norway could go on untroubled by his other interest and build up a sound reputation as an engineer. So it started, and so it has gone on to this day.
    So much for the book, which, as I say, was a matter of small moment to me at that time, for at Howden our difficulties were enormous. The contract for the construction of the ship had been taken at a fixed price, which was usual in those days though in later years the continual losses under fixed price contracts forced a more equitable form of agreement in the industry for the construction of experimental aircraft. However, there it was; it had become apparent even in those early days that a loss would be incurred upon the building of the ship, and the future did not hold sufficient prospect of continuity to justify a greater capital expenditure than was necessary for this one contract. It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers. Excluding hand tools, there were not more than a dozen machines employed in the construction of R.100. Economy was the paramount consideration in the shop equipment. A bitter little tale went round at Cardington, where they had everything they cared to ask for, to the effect that R.100 was getting on rather more quickly now that one of us had bought a car and lent the tool kit to the workshops.
    At Howden I lived with two of my staff of calculators in the village, in digs with a friendly garage proprietor; it was three miles from the airship shed and we used to walk that every morning and evening, sometimes with our dogs. We all had cars; the Morgan three-wheeler was soon to give place to an ancient Morris Cowley two-seater that served me well for some years. We tried to inject some night-life into Howden by gathering up the local girls and starting a Badminton club in a disused village hall, but thatwas a bit of an uphill job because the Howden residents were not night-life-minded. We joined a club in York and used to go there on Saturdays for relaxation and shopping, and on occasion we used to go as far as Leeds to dance at the Palais. We did a good deal of rough shooting, but my own main relaxation quickly became the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club, at that time in a hangar on Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome between York and Leeds.
    This was one of the first light aeroplane clubs to be assisted by the Air Ministry; it was started off with the gift of two de Havilland Moths with Cirrus Mark 1 engines, and a subsidy of a thousand pounds a year. That made a flying club financially possible, and the Yorkshire Club quickly attracted a fair cross-section of young Yorkshire men and women, so that a Sunday spent at the Club was a merry Sunday. Later on, I was to meet my wife there for the first time. As a pilot of a sort and as an aeronautical engineer I soon found myself elected to the Committee and charged with the business of looking after the day-to-day running of the enterprise. We had a full-time pilot instructor in charge, and a ground engineer, and I got into the habit of going over to the aerodrome twice a week to help them to sort out their troubles, and to do as much flying myself as I could afford. Quite early on I distinguished myself by hitting a wire fence with the undercarriage of the Moth as I was coming in to land and depositing it upon the aerodrome in an inverted attitude; after that episode it was to be twenty-four years before I damaged an aeroplane again, at Brindisi when I was flying back from Australia.
    The Yorkshire Aeroplane