Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} In the Wet by Nevil Shute In the Wet. All our eBooks are FREE to download! sign in or create a new account. EPUB 340 KB. Kindle 470 KB. $2.99. Support epubBooks by making a small PayPal donation purchase . This work is available in the U.S. and for countries where copyright is Life+50 or less. Description. Shute’s speculative glance into the future of the British Empire. An elderly clergyman stationed in the Australian bush is called to the bedside of a dying derelict. In his delirium Stevie tells a story of England in 1983 through the medium of a squadron air pilot in the service of Queen Elizabeth II. It is the rainy season. Drunk and delirious, an old man lies dying in the Queensland bush. In his opium-hazed last hours, a priest finds his deserted shack and listens to his last words. Half-awake and half-dreaming the old man tells the story of an adventure set decades in the future, in a very different world… 443 pages, with a reading time of. 6.75 hours (110,983 words) , and first published in 1953. This DRM-Free edition published by epubBooks , 2015 . Community Reviews. Your Review. Sign up or Log in to rate this book and submit a review. There are currently no other reviews for this book. Excerpt. I have never before sat down to write anything so long as this may be, though I have written plenty of sermons and articles for parish magazines. I don’t really know how to set about it, or how much I shall have to write, but as nobody is very likely to read it but myself perhaps that is of no great consequence. The fact is, however, that I have been so troubled in my mind since I came back from Blazing Downs that I have not been able to sleep very well or to work wholeheartedly upon my parish business, and my services in the church have been mechanical and absent-minded. I think it will help me if I try to write down what it is that has been bothering me, and then I think that I may send it to the Bishop for him to look over. Perhaps the trouble is that I am getting a little old for duty in this somewhat unusual parish, and if that should prove to be the case I must accept whatever he decides. Writing materials are not very easy to come by here, because Landsborough is only a small town. I went down to Art Duncan’s store just now to buy some paper, but all he had was pads of thin airmail paper and these exercise books that Miss Foster uses for the older children in the school when they have got past using slates. I got six of these books and I expect I shall want more before I have written all that I have to say, but that only leaves nine books in the store and I would not like to think that I was running the school short. I have asked Art to get in some more, and he will send an order out to Townsville by next week’s aeroplane. In fairness to anybody who should read what I am writing I think I should begin by putting down something about myself, so that he can form his own judgment on the credibility of my account. My name is Roger Hargreaves and I have been ordained as a priest in the Church of England for forty-one years; I was sixty-three years old last month. I was born in the year 1890 at Portsmouth in the south of England and I was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School. I was ordained in 1912 and became curate of St. Mark’s, at Guildford. In 1914 when the war broke out I went into the army as a chaplain, and I saw service in Gallipoli and in France. I was very fortunate in the war, because although I was blown up by a shell at Delville Wood during the Somme battle I was only in hospital for a few weeks, and I was able to return to the front line in less than four months. After the war I was rather unsettled, and disinclined to return to parochial work in an English town. I was twenty-eight years old, unmarried, and with nothing very much to keep me in England. It seemed to me that while I was still young and vigorous I should give a few years of my life to service in more difficult places, and after talking it over with the Bishop I left for Australia to join the Bush Brotherhood in Queensland. I served in the Bush Brotherhood for fourteen years, travelling very widely from Cloncurry to Toowoomba, from Birdsville to Burdekin. During that fourteen years I had no settled home, and I did not very often sleep more than two nights in one place. I drew fifty pounds a year from the Brotherhood which was quite sufficient for my clothes and personal expenses, and I had a small expense account for travelling though I seldom had to draw upon it. The people of the outback were most generous in helping me to travel from station to station for my christenings and weddings and funerals and services. They would always take me on to the next place in a truck or a utility, and in the wet when the roads are impassable to motors because of the mud I have been given the loan of a horse for as long as three months, so that I have been able to continue with my duties all through the rainy season. Nevil Shute. Nevil Shute lived, in some ways, as two very different people: Nevil Shute Norway, the successful airplane engineer and business entrepreneur, and Nevil Shute, the author of escapist adventure novels and science fiction. He was careful to keep the two separate, writing under a shortened version of his full name, fearing that his reputation as a best-selling novelist would undermine his credibility as an engineer whom people would trust with their lives in his airplanes. By the end of his unusual and successful career, however, he had made significant and enduring contributions to both aeronautical design and popular fiction—a claim that few others, if any, can make. Works in Biographical and Historical Context. A Taste for Adventure Nevil Shute Norway was born on January 17, 1899, in Ealing, west of London. He spoke with a stutter, a problem he never completely overcame. His father became the head of the postal service in Ireland, and in 1912 the family moved to Dublin. Shute served in the medical corps during the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, during which Irish rebels supporting independence from England occupied some key government offices; in the ensuing conflict, Shute's father's post office was burned. He enlisted in the infantry just before World War I ended. Shute began work as an engineer at the de Havilland Aircraft Company in 1922, where he learned to fly. While at de Havilland, Shute bought a typewriter, perhaps encouraged by the writing activities of his family: His grandmother had been a writer of children's books, his father had published travel books, and his mother edited a volume of correspondence about the family's experiences in the Irish rebellion. All of these genres influenced his later novels—the simple adventure narratives owe a debt to adolescent fiction, travel and life abroad is represented throughout Shute's novels, and the experiences of determined individuals confronting violence and the threat of death appear in many of Shute's stories. An Amusing Pastime In 1923 and 1924 Shute's first two novels were rejected by publishers, but he had learned that he enjoyed writing and could do it quickly, and he was determined to keep at it. He later spoke of his early work as not being particularly good, but Shute's novels come from the perspective of someone who found writing to be mostly a relaxing and amusing pastime to do after work. The many novels Shute wrote between 1924 and 1930 are often easy-to-read adventure stories about pilots, as Shute often flew a small plane himself during this time. Some of them did address serious issues, however, such as So Disdained (1928), which expressed his concern for pilots who, after serving in World War I, were now poorly paid. The American edition was published as The Mysterious Aviator . Wartime Efforts and Inspiration After 1938, Shute's novels began to show the political tensions of the period. When the war began, Shute was highly critical of America's refusal to come to the aid of Great Britain and its European allies. Pied Piper , about an elderly British lawyer who rescues refugee children from France just before the German invasion, was one of the books Shute aimed at American readers, hoping that the United States would end its isolation. After the war, Shute traveled to Burma to briefly work for the ministry of information, and he returned to England and his full-time writing career in 1945. The Chequer Board (1947) grew out of his time in Burma. In 1947 Shute traveled by car around the United States, seeking a firsthand glimpse into the real America so he could better describe it in several of his novels (written with an eye toward the American movie industry). Futuristic Visions In 1950 Shute and his family moved permanently to Australia.