- Shute, Nevil.
Trustee from the Toolroom.
New York: Vintage Books, [1960] 2010.
ISBN 978-0-345-02663-7.
-
Keith Stewart is an unexceptional man. “[Y]ou may see a little man
get in at West Ealing, dressed in a shabby raincoat over a blue suit. He
is one of hundreds of thousands like him in industrial England, pale-faced,
running to fat a little, rather hard up. His hands show evidence of manual
work, his eyes and forehead evidence of intellect.” He earns his
living by making mechanical models and writing articles about them which
are published, with directions, in the London weekly Miniature
Mechanic. His modest income from the magazine has allowed him to
give up his toolroom job at an aircraft subcontractor. Along with
the income his wife Katie earns from her job in a shop, they make ends
meet and are paying down the mortgage on their house, half of which they
rent out.
Keith's sister Jo married well. Her husband, John Dermott, is a
retired naval officer and nephew of Lord Dungannon, with an
independent income from the family fortune. Like many people in
postwar Britain, the Dermotts have begun to chafe under the ceaseless
austerity, grey collectivism, and shrinking freedom of what was once
the vanguard of civilisation and have decided to emigrate to the west
coast of Canada, to live the rest of their lives in freedom. They've
decided to make their journey an adventure, making the voyage from
Britain to Vancouver through the Panama Canal in their modest but
oceangoing sailboat Shearwater. Keith and Katie agree to
look after their young daughter Janice, whose parents don't want to
take out of school and who might not tolerate a long ocean voyage
well.
Tragedy befalls the Dermotts, as they are shipwrecked and drowned in a
tropical storm in the Pacific. Keith and Katie have agreed to become
Janice's trustees in such an event and, consulting the Dermotts' solicitor,
are astonished to learn that their fortune, assumed substantial, has
almost entirely vanished. While they can get along and support Janice,
she'll not be able to receive the education they assumed her parents
intended her to have.
Given the confiscatory capital controls in effect at the time, Keith
has an idea what may have happened to the Dermott fortune. “And
he was the trustee.” Keith Stewart, who had never set foot outside
of England, and can barely afford a modest holiday, suddenly finds himself
faced with figuring out how to travel to the other side of the world, to
a location that isn't even on his map, and undertake a difficult and
risky mission.
Keith discovers that while nobody would recognise him on the street
or think him out of the ordinary, his writing for Miniature
Mechanic has made him a celebrity in what, more than half
a century later, would be called the “maker subculture”,
and that these people are resourceful, creative, willing to bend the
rules to get things done and help one another, and some dispose of
substantial wealth. By a chain of connections which might have seemed
implausible at the outset but is the kind of thing which happens all of
the time in the real world, Keith Stewart, modelmaker and scribbler,
sets out on an epic adventure.
This is a thoroughly satisfying and utterly charming
story. It is charming because the characters are such
good people; the kind you'd feel privileged to have as
friends. But they are also realistic; the author's career was
immersed in the engineering and entrepreneurial milieu, and
understands these folks in detail. This is a world, devoid of
much of what we consider to be modern, you'll find yourself admiring;
it is a joy to visit it. The last two paragraphs will make you shiver.
This novel is currently unavailable in a print edition, so I have
linked to the Kindle edition in the head. Used paperback copies are
readily available. There is an
unabridged audio version of this book.
August 2015 