While WO2 lies squarely within the Edwardian high adventure tradition, it has a wider literary significance. There are parallels with the classic boating thriller The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers, regarded as one of the finest early secret service stories of literary distinction (alongside Kim by Rudyard Kipling, published the year before). This well-drawn, exciting story of amateur espionage, involving two contrasting young male protagonists sailing in the Baltic and Frisian Islands who stumble across pre-invasion manoeuvres by the German navy, was prescient in calling attention to Germany as a potential threat to Britain, especially at a time (pre-Entente Cordiale) when France was perceived as the nation’s principal enemy. WO2, with its allusions to Germany’s international subterfuge and developing armaments programme, was published in the year leading up to WW1. It forms part of the small but influential body of fiction dubbed ‘invasion literature’, alongside The Riddle of the Sands and The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Quex, published in 1906. All were stories with a purpose, written from patriotic leanings, and intended to raise public awareness of the threat of war with Germany and call for preparedness. Together, they provide an interesting insight into pre-WW1 British perceptions.
These novels were precursors to the adventure spy fiction of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow (1917) and E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation (1920)—all involving the rounding-up of German spy gangs at the outbreak of WW1. This influence carried over to WW2. A. G. MacDonell’s The Crew of the Anaconda (1940) is in the same vein; it features the tracking down of German spies by the owner of a motor cruiser and his friends in the early days of WW2. It continues the literary association between small boats and international conspiracy threats, in the tradition of The Riddle of the Sands and WO2. One commentator has described The Crew of the Anaconda as a kind of WW2 equivalent to The Thirty-Nine Steps. Other espionage adventure thrillers with a nautical flavour from that period include Hammond Innes’ Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), featuring the Cornish coastline, disused tin mines and a secret U-boat base; also John Ferguson’s Terror on the Island (1942), which involves abstracting an invention from Germany prior to the outbreak of WW2.
R. Austin Freeman’s The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) is a tale involving the forgery of banknotes and murder on board a yacht off Wolf Rock in Cornwall. There is a significant boating influence in several thrillers by A. E. W. Mason, including The Dean’s Elbow (1930), and The House in Lordship Lane (1946) featuring Inspector Hanaud. Mason was himself a secret agent in WW1, as well as a keen yachtsman. One thinks also of various sea mysteries of the 1930s, including those by Taffrail (Captain Taprell Dorling—‘the Marryat of the modern Navy’) such as Mid-Atlantic (1936), John Remenham’s Sea Gold (1930), John C. Woodiwiss’s Mouseback (1939), Peter Drax’s High Seas Murder (1939) and Ernest McReay’s Murder at Eight Bells (1939). Later, a strong nautical theme can be seen in the novels of Andrew Garve, for example The Megstone Plot (1956) and A Hero for Leanda (1959); Edward Young’s espionage thriller The Fifth Passenger (1963); as well as several boating thrillers by J. R. L. Anderson, including Death in the North Sea (1975) from the series featuring Colonel Peter Blair, and Redundancy Pay (1976), also known as Death in the Channel.
Maurice Drake’s influence can also be seen in some of the sea mysteries of famous Golden Age detection writer Freeman Wills Crofts. The Golden Age commentator Curtis Evans has noted that Crofts was a great admirer of Drake’s sea adventure stories, and interestingly maintains he borrowed the surname of Maxwell Cheyne, the protagonist of Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926), from Willis Cheyne in WO2. There are similarities too between Joan Merrill, the heroine of Crofts’ story and Pamela Brand in WO2. Both stories feature Dartmouth harbour in their plots. Crofts’ earlier novel The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) also displays the influence of The Riddle of the Sands and WO2. It centres on investigations by amateur sleuths into illicit smuggling activities, using boats ferrying pit props which sail from the Bordeaux coast canals across to the Humber Estuary.
Time now to rediscover and enjoy afresh the exciting adventures of sea-farers James Carthew-West and Austin Voogdt, as they tackle the strange mystery of the mud flats at Terneuzen, amid increasing dangers to themselves, and against a backdrop of the looming shadow of international conflict.
NIGEL MOSS
September 2017
CHAPTER I
CONCERNING A FOOL AND HIS MONEY
I WOKE on Exmouth beach that early summer morning much as I should think a doomed soul might wake, Resurrection Day. To the southward rosy, sunlit cliffs showed through faint haze like great opals—like the Gates of Pearl—and the bright business of getting-up was going on all around. Hard by the slimy piles of the wooden pier, in a corner tainted by rotting seaweed and dead shell-fish, I came slowly to consciousness, my eyes clogged and aching, a foul taste in my mouth, and in my mind lurking uneasiness as of a judgment to come. And lying out all night on dewy shingle had made me stiff in every joint, and sore as though I had been beaten all over with a stick.
The young day was one of heaven’s own, all blue and gold. The two men whose crunching feet upon the shingle had roused me were aboard the dinghy that had been mine twelve hours before—my Royal Torbay burgee still fluttering gaily at her masthead. Her new owner was swabbing dew from off her seats, pointing out her merits to his companion the while. He spoke of me, a thumb jerked over one shoulder to show where I lay upon the beach. ‘That there West’—the wind brought me that much; that, and a scornful laugh from the other. The whole bright day seemed laughing at me in derision, and I dropped my arms upon my face again and tried to get another hour of forgetfulness. I was at the bottom end of things. Poor comfort to reflect that I only had myself to blame.
I’d been on my uppers once before, at Kingston, in Jamaica, just after the earthquake; but I was fit then, with a clear conscience, and there was plenty to do. Now, with two years of idling and folly to my discredit, I only had the sore knowledge of chances thrown away. Besides, the past winter had tried me hard: poverty and loneliness and the sight of one’s property slipping away day by day make a man ripe for any foolishness by way of a change. Only the day before I’d parted with the dinghy, almost my last asset, and now, on the morrow, the price didn’t seem good enough. A rotten waterman’s tub, scarcely seaworthy, in part exchange; a couple of pound’s worth of loose silver in my pocket. And worst of all was the uncertainty as to what I should do next.
There had been no uncertainty at Kingston. There were more jobs there than men to do them, and I took the first that offered and did right well out of it. I had been with the Deutsche-West-Indie people till then, third mate on their Oldenburg, and we got into Kingston harbour the day after the town tumbled about the folk’s ears. Trier, our skipper, did the right sort of thing—called at the Consulate and offered free passages out of the place to as many Germans as he could carry, and so on—and then, having done what he considered his duty, was all for the sea again. But I wouldn’t go. Able-bodied whites were badly wanted ashore. Rescue parties were busy; there was a fearful mess to tidy up everywhere; there had been some bad cases of looting, and people were afraid the niggers would get out of hand.
My word, but that was work, that relief business! Awful, a lot of it—ghastly; but I don’t know when I enjoyed myself so much in my life. There were still lots of people alive and buried in the ruins, and we had to get them out. At first I was in a mixed lot of whites and blacks and yellows; and they were a mixture, too! Our foreman was a full-blooded nigger carpenter, a fine chap, a devil to work, and as strong as a bull. We had two doctors, one of ’em off a Japanese man-o’-war in harbour and the other a visitor—a tourist. Their head assistant was another tourist, a woman, wife of a vicar in Lancashire when she was at home; but she’d been a hospital nurse, and she pitched in, like the rest of us. There were nine or ten American sailors, and three of them wouldn’t speak to us English. There had been some fuss with
our governor, who had declined the services of the American battleships’ crews, I believe, and they were wild as hawks about it. Dozens of them had sneaked ashore to help, the officers winking at it. One of our three must have known something about permanent deserting unless he’d picked up his Cockney accent in the States. They were good men, those three, and the Cockney wasn’t the worst of ’em. Then there was the son of the Mayor of Kingston and a yellow-bearded Finnish ship’s cook and a Chinese laundryman. Those were all the notabilities. The rank and file were niggers, some of them women.
After a week there weren’t any more of the living imprisoned, and we had to attend to the dead. Faugh! In the tropics. Awful! They broke our gang up and put the mayor’s son and myself in charge of another lot digging out bodies and burning them. The mayor’s son didn’t work up to his collar, I considered. So we had words about it, and he went off with his nose in the air. To do the chap justice, I think now he only meant to go a hundred yards and come back again, but I hadn’t time to think of that then, so I hove a half-brick at him and shouted to him to go to Hades. The brick got him in the back of the knee and brought him down in the road, and I sent a nigger to drag him into the shade and went on with the work. When I went to look for him he had cleared, and I never saw him again, but I fancy the incident had a good deal to do with my being left severely alone after things were tidy once more.
When the land breeze had blown the smoke of the last hideous burning away out to sea I was on my beam-ends, so I cabled the governor: ‘Detained here for want of funds.’ I might as well have saved my money, for I ought to have known what the reply would be. ‘Capital experience. Pitch in and earn some, my son,’ he cabled back.
A hard case, my old man. That’s him all over. Nobody else in the world would have paid for those two unnecessary words at the end, just to show it wasn’t because he was short of cash that he wouldn’t help me.
The relief gangs had broken up and the sailors and most of the tourists departed—and there was I in a suit of rags, my hair about four inches long, and not a notion of what to do next. It was the long hair decided me, I think. I hunted up my nigger carpenter and got him to build me a little lean-to shack against the ruins of the Presbyterian church, promising to pay him when I could. Then I got a sheet of tin, painted a gaudy Chinese dragon on it with the words:
PROF. WATSON
TATTOOING ARTIST
and nailed it up over my door. I copied the dragon from the cover of a packet of Chinese crackers that was blowing about on a rubbish heap, and tattooing anybody can do, if they’ve got the sense to keep their needles clean.
As luck would have it, I hadn’t long to wait for customers. In fact I was busy from the first day. When the shipping began to ply regularly again there were heaps of tourists to see the ruined town, and lots of them came to be tattooed as a souvenir of their visit. One chap gave me a photo of my shack, with me outside it at work on a sailor’s arm. I begged the negative of him, had a few hundreds printed as postcards, and used to make a shilling apiece out of them. Things just boomed. I paid my carpenter and set him at work on a little frame house in a plot I hired, and when it was done I shifted my sign there and settled down to business in earnest. Then I got an assistant—a young Japanese from a sailing ship that had been wrecked on Culebra, in the Virgin Islands. He really was an artist, that chap, and his work put me out of conceit with my own botching. So after two years I sold him the house and business, lock, stock and barrel, and cleared out for home. As a souvenir he did a bit of his best work on my chest whilst I was waiting for my steamer. A lovely bit of tattooing it is: a masterpiece, an eagle holding a fish.
I landed in Plymouth with about six hundred pounds in my pocket, and knocked it down in two years. Lazy, lovely South Devon held me. I was fool enough to let the old man’s cablegram rankle, and I never went near him—just sent him a card to say where I was, which he answered with another, and that’s all the communication we held with one another. I loafed about from one place to another, idling, drinking more than was any use to me, and generally wasting my time. I’d earned six hundred pounds as easily as falling off a log, and thought it would be easy enough to earn another lot when that was gone.
There’s a class of man common on the south coast of England, and especially in Devonshire, who is no manner of use to himself or anybody else. The natives call them remittance men, and that exactly describes them. They’re idlers, mostly sons of busy professional men or manufacturers in London, the Midlands or the north. They idle more or less gracefully; they go fishing and sail small boats, or get drunk and sleep in the sun. They’re very little use to anybody, as I’ve said already, and I wouldn’t mention them if I hadn’t lived with them—been one of them, if you like. They were my only associates for two years, and they and sleepy South Devon brought me down to sleeping out on Exmouth beach.
It was just after Christmas when I landed at Plymouth, and by the spring I’d got tired of messing about and fuddling in a garrison town and thought I’d like a bit of sailing for the summer. Of course every waster I’d picked up with knew of the very boat that would suit me, and I should think I inspected half the rotten tubs in Devon and Cornwall before I found the packet I wanted.
I only heard of her by accident. A boat-builder at Yealmpton had built her as an experiment to the order of his brother-in-law, who was a fisherman in the Brixham fleet. The brother-in-law—a man with more notions in his head than money in his pocket—had died bankrupt before his boat was rigged, and the Yealmpton man had her left on his hands, and half the south Devon coast was laughing at him, for it appeared she was useless to anybody, being the wrong build for a trawler and too small for a coasting boat.
I went over and saw her one Saturday afternoon and fell in love with her on the spot. Her hold, too small for freights, was amply big enough for me, and besides it left more cabin room at each end of her. She was a beauty, to my thinking; a good, beamy boat, not too deep in draught, and built like a house. The builder, normally an honest man, in building for his sister’s husband had put real good stuff into the boat. The day I was there two other fellows had come down from Brixham to see her and were jeering at her, to cheapen her, I suppose. The builder was raving her praises, and I got into his good graces at once by speaking the truth, saying that she was a well-built craft, honest material and honest work in her.
That was the way to tackle the man, for he’d put his heart into her timbers. The other two sheered off and I bought her, hull and masts only, as she stood, for a hundred and ten pounds, and she was dirt cheap at the price. For another hundred he rigged her, fisherman fashion, rough hard gear throughout to stand any weather, divided her hold with cheap matchboard bulkheads into a saloon with two cabins, and decked over her hatch with four skylights. And I got to sea with her, well-pleased, before the middle of June.
Brett had named her the Luck and Charity, of all outlandish names, but I didn’t bother to change it. Sure enough she brought me luck in the end—the best of luck—and at first she was a charity to the fraternity of wasters, and no mistake.
With her hold turned into cabins she was a very roomy packet. Though she was only forty-five feet or so between the perpendiculars, she was fifteen in the beam, every inch. There was a little skipper’s cabin aft, about twelve feet by nine, with just head-room enough to stand upright, two bunks and a flap table; the big square hatch we decked over was about eight feet by thirteen, and there was a roomy forepeak—almost fit to be called a forecastle—with two bunks on each side. Altogether we could shake down ten men without crowding, though I’ve often slept fifteen aboard, the extra members of the family sleeping on the cabin seats or on the floor.
It was an idle time, those two years, but past question I enjoyed it. The wasters were delighted, of course, and I was the dearest old chappie in the west of England whilst funds lasted. It worked out about level, though; they had cheap quarters and I had a cheap crew, so everybody was pleased. We put to sea or stayed on moorings just
as the weather served or the whim took us, so mostly we had fair-weather cruising. Ashore, there was plenty of company. There’s a freemasonry of sorts amongst remittance men: they snarl behind each other’s backs pretty much, but can unite upon occasion. I happened to be the occasion this time, and there was plenty of visiting, and card-playing, and fuddling, and remarkably mixed company whenever we went ashore to revel.
The first winter I tied her up in Teignmouth harbour and lived ashore, and when the spring came started off again. Not being built for a yacht the Luck and Charity wanted a lot of ballast, but she wasn’t too deep for getting in and out of those little west of England harbours, and by the end of the second summer I knew the coast from Swanage to Land’s End like the back of my hand. And very useful knowledge it has proved to be since then.
It didn’t seem so useful, though, when I came to tie up for the second winter. I chose Exmouth Bight for anchorage this time. You can’t play the fool without spending money and I was cleaned out down to the last fiver. Exmouth is a free harbour—no dues unless you go into dock—and so Exmouth looked the place for me. The winter before I’d had plenty of invitations ashore, but this time the wasters had got wind of my circumstances and invitations were off. On the whole it seemed a cheerful prospect.
I kept my one paid hand hard at it, lowering topmasts and stripping gear, and, when the lot was snugged down for the winter, paid him off and told him to clear out and go home. He was a stolid shockhead from Topsham, called Hezekiah Pym. The wasters used to laugh at him, and certainly he was the quaintest sample of a yachtsman I ever met. But he might have been born on the water, so handy was he afloat, and he had served my turn so well that I felt sorry to part with him. I had to pawn my watch to make up the money I owed him, and even then it was a near thing. It was a real good watch that my father had given me when I was twenty-one; but the pawnbroker wouldn’t advance me more than the value of the gold case because, he said, the crest and motto engraved on it spoilt its sale value. The result was that when I’d made up ’Kiah’s money I hadn’t half-a-sovereign to my name.
The Mystery of the Mud Flats Page 2