You can fit eight people in an FJ. Three in the back and one reclining across their knees, driver plus two in the front with another scrunched on their knees, head pressed against the roof. So we rode out of the car park, all sweaty bodies and shrieks of joy and writhing delight. You can see how it was to become both the high and low point of my life.
That Summer in Melbourne was glorious, heat wave followed heatwave, interrupted by fierce storms. This city at the time was the largest metropolitan area in the world, larger in area than any of the great cities with their teeming millions—London, New York, Bombay, Peking—none of them were near as big on the ground. The reason was that Melbourne had the lowest population density of any city in the world, with mostly single-storey family homes sitting on a quarter-acre block. Even back in the early sixties, with only 2 million population, the city was a circle fifty miles in diameter with the wedge of Port Phillip Bay cut out of the south-west, arrowing the city centre.
It was south-west we journeyed first, on that triumphant hot summer night, working the gear-stick between Sammy Quick’s seething knees, the rear-vision blocked by Janie’s astonishing cleavage. Every window was down but still we steamed up. I was on a hundred mile journey around the suburbs which would end in Moorabbin, three hours later.
First stop was to drop the Dunne’ sisters in Altona, on the south-west side of the bay. Laura gave me a sweet kiss on my sweaty brow and Maggie, not to be upstaged, planted a more serious slobber on my lips. And I suddenly realised that it was not the first stop, but the last, that was the one that would matter.
In the preface of a later edition of So Disdained, Nevil Shute apologised to his readers for writing a second formula thriller, but really this is rather more a prototype of his works to come. The only thing he does need to answer for is that off-putting title, which in America was changed to the generic The Mysterious Aviator—a rare example of such an alteration being an improvement.
In fact it is a fine old yarn of the free-wheeling days of aviation between the wars. The hero encounters a WW1 flying buddy in very bad shape, whom he discovers has crash-landed a long-range bomber at the end of a mission that the authorities will clearly regard as treason. Thus he sets out to save his mate’s reputation and put matters to rights with the real traitors, and it all ends up as a chase from France into the middle of Fascist Italy.
It’s all a bit of a jumble—Biggles for adults at heart—but it does provide a good portrait of the world as it was in 1927. Shute was always better able to see what would and would not eventually be important in periods in which he lived and wrote, and so a work like this is far more readable and less dated than most similar stuff of its time.
