Sailors Remember
Wild Waters. By Klaus Toxopeus. (Victor Gollancz. 15s.) Two books of reminiscences by two men who have dedicated their lives to the sea; the one a retired Captain in the Royal Navy, the other the skipper of a Dutch lifeboat. If the former is likely to prove the more popular, it is because it is set in a framework which most of us can recognise. It was Captain Edwards's early wish to become an officer in the Royal Navy; and his book is the story of how it took him seventeen years to fulfil this ambition. His parents could not afford the cost of a cadetship; but at fourteen young Edwards already knew his own mind, and in 1896 he shipped as a boy (pay Is. a month) in the Norwegian barque Solheim. There followed a four-year apprenticeship in British sailing-ships, at the end of which the author passed his examination for Second Mate. After an interlude in a Boer War troopship he became an officer in the Royal Mail Line. He was temporarily released for reserve training in the Navy, and was so successful in this that in 1913, at the age of thirty-one, he applied for and was granted a permanent commission as Lieutenant.
The charm of this book is that, although it was written in 1952, its style and presentation match exactly the period which it describes. The Crusoeish chapter headings at once create the atmosphere: '1 Make a Resolve. I Also go Ashore': 'In Sail with a Shanghaied Crew': 'The Lady takes the Helm and I am Inspected.' Parents are throughout referred to as 'people,' disagreements as 'a bit of a breeze,' most expletives are 'Demme!' Yet there is nothing laughable in this; for the author, a man of roots, is blessed with humour and a sense of proportion. Some of the most touching passages concern the brief periods of leave spent with his family, to whom he was devoted: there are echoes here of the Winslow Boy, even of Pooter In all this Captain Edwards has a sharp eye and a wonderfully reten. tive memory. Nor is he shy of describing at length his courtini both of, the lady whom he married and others whom he didn't, but such is his sense of propriety, then and now, that one cannot take the least •offence.
This book is not only a delightful evocation of life in the Edwardian era, but an endearing self-portrait of a wholly endearing man. thought, when I started it, how wise Captain Edwards had been tc confine it to the period of his quest. Yet at the end I found myself wishing for more.
Wild Waters has evidently been a best-seller in Holland; but it IS unlikely that the same fortune will await it here—or rather no more likely than if, say, Coxswain Blogg had written an autobiography which had been translated into Dutch. 'For the narrow waters it which Klaas Toxopeus has spent most of his life remain alien to us and his book lacks that universal appeal which gives a work of at1 its permanent value. That Toxopeus is a superb seaman, of great courage, ability and single-mindedness, no one would dispute. Bu he is not a writer. He cannot, like Captain Edwards, create atmo sphere or see beyond his own frontiers; and exciting and terrible though his many voyages of mercy must have been, they become monotonous and repetitive in the telling.
LUDOVIC KENNED1
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