No Cause For Alarm

ORDEAL--Nevil Shute--Morrow ($2.50).

At dawn Peter Corbett, junior partner of Johnson, Bellinger & Corbett, rose drunkenly from the clammy garage floor. He was wet, grease-smeared, his head ached and he was sick at his stomach. His wife and baby lay huddled asleep in the back seat of the Austin. In a junior bed, flanked by the garden roller and a sandbox, slept Phyllis, 6, John 3. The nurse lay rolled up in an eiderdown beside the car.

Such, for this typical middle-class English family, was the morning after the air raid. The town was Southampton, the story fictitious. But Ordeal makes the air raid and the days that follow as natural as death. The raid had come about midnight--without warning, without sound of planes. The Corbett house was not hit. Only the windows were missing, letting a cold March rain sough in over the rugs and furniture. "What's it all about, anyway?" asked Corbett. "I dunno," said Neighbor Littlejohn.

Blasted were electric power, gas, water, telephones. The toilet belched black sewage. But that day the Corbetts, millions like them in 20 cities over England, carried on. Repair crews filled the craters in the streets, restored skeleton public services. Two surgeons in Southampton's hospital performed 230 major operations in seven hours. Corbett dug a trench in his lawn, kicking himself for having laid by no gasproof room for a bomby day.

That night, because it was moonlit, they expected worse hell. But no bombers came at all. The next night it rained again. Again at midnight the bombs fell. Neighbor Littlejohn was wounded, his wife killed. Death missed the Corbetts by inches. Enemy planes had bombed blind, from above the clouds, taking sextant bearings from the stars.

Eventually, after much suffering--more vividly dramatized by lack of milk for the baby than by mangled bodies--the Corbetts reach Brest. In an ending that crackles patriotically with high hopes for England, Mrs. Corbett and the children embark for Canada, Peter returns to fight.

The Author last year showed his knack for popularization in his bestseller, Kindling, the tale of a Banker Bountiful who rescues an unemployed shipyard town. More effective, Ordeal gives him material closer home. Pilot in the Royal Air Force Reserve, Author Shute (real name: Nevil Shute Norway) was deputy chief engineer (later chief) of construction of the airship R100, sailed with her on the first trip to Canada. In 1931 he formed an airplane company, saw it grown to 1,000 employes when he resigned last April. Ordeal to the contrary, Author Shute declares he is no alarmist. Average casualty rate in air raids, he says, is one per bomb; the rate of death is one to three casualties; hence three bombs are needed to kill one civilian. Thus, Ordeal's typical air raid wounds only about 67,000, kills little more than 33,000.

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