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The Chequer Board - Nevile Shute
Like all of Shute's books, this is as much about people as events.
The title is taken from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam.
“Tis all a Chequer-board of nights and days
Where Destiny with men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.”
Four men meet in a military hospital during the WWII. John Turner is unable to see the other three because of an injury to his eyes, but they all help him by reading to him, or holding conversations with him.
One, a black man, has been accused of raping a white woman; the second, a paratrooper, is facing a murder charge; and the third has been betrayed by his wife. None of them has much too look forward to when they are well enough stand trial, or to go home.
Many years later, when Turner learns he has not long to live, he determines to find out what happened to the other three, and see if there is anything he can do to help them.
This a book about prejudice and preconceptions. It uses the 'N' word, but it was written at a time when that word was still in common use.
Each of the three men has faced misunderstanding in one form or another. Two of their stories (the strongest ones, I feel) relate to the way people have pre-conceptions or prejudices with regard other races. The third is also telling in its own way - it looks at the way the army trains a man to kill, but how that training can work against him in a non-combat situation.
One of the things I like about Shute's writing is that he doesn't rush. He tells the story as it happens to Turner. It shows us - as does 'One the Beach' that there are choices when we have fore-knowledge of our own death.
Shute lived in a slower world than ours. Even with aviation, it still took longer to get to places than it does now.
Turner is not a perfect man -he's done some wheeling and dealing in the black market, and his relationship with his wife is not all it could be. But his quest to help his fellow men draws him and his wife closer together for the time they have remaining.
All in all, this is a book that helps one remember that we're all just people. And that there are unexpected kind people in many different places.
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I was recently at a museum in Portland, Dorset devoted to the D-Day landing, and they had some stuff relating to black GIs stationed there - and commented that several mixed race babies were born locally.
I wonder if he'd known black GIs personally during the war?
Shute's knowledge of Burma would have been first hand.
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The Nevil Shute Foundation suggests that the Dave Lesurier episode was probably based on "reports by Walter White, Secretary of the NAACP,which came into Mr Shute's hands in 1946" -- at a guess, the Leroy Henry case, where a black soldier was sentenced to death by the US military for rape, and subsequently acquitted and returned to duty after outrage from the British press.
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"the military also found it necessary to remind local populations to, ironically, be tolerant of American racial proclivities"
"reports abound of the ease with which black troops engaged local women to attend their dances, and in far greater numbers than the women attended similar events organized by and for white GI's"
"Such activities were, of course, bound to elicit, at the very least, feelings of jealousy. 'Already we have found a little trouble for ourselves, wrote one white Corporal of the 19th Engineers:
'It seems that several outfits of colored troops preceded us over here and have succeeded pretty well in salting away the local feminine pulchritude, what little of it there is. They have all the natives convinced that they are 'full blooded American Indians' and the girls really go for them in preference to the white boys.
'One thing I noticed here and which I don't like is the fact that the English don't draw any color line. I've seen nice looking English girls out with American Negro soldiers as black as the ace of spades.I have not only seen the Negro boys dancing with the white girls, but we have actually seen them standing in doorways kissing the girls goodnight."
"In Britain the first major altercation occurred in Antrim in October 1942 when one black GI was killed by white troops because of interracial dating. In Leicester, England, in 1943, white paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne division attacked black GI's escorting white women to the local pubs and dances, claiming proprietary rights over the young ladies."
"in Britain it was reported that in London 'black Britons are incensed' as they were cursed at, and made to make way on the side-walk by white American soldiers. These injuries tended to manifest themselves as opposition to all 'Yanks,' regardless of color."
"Although initially British public opinion seemed to dismiss ideas that black troops were any more sexually aggressive than whites (and charges against black troops were often attacked by the general public), as the war proceeded American stereotypes seem to have taken hold and were one factor in the declining relations between the public and black troops."
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