Well Done, Carruthers!

In the depths of last winter the bathroom, if by no means warm, was the least glacial room in the house. Ever since the children were born it’s also been the only place in our North Norfolk home in which there is sufficient freedom from interruption to read. I was convalescing from Zadie Smith (On Beauty) and needed the literary equivalent of comfort food: of toad in the hole, cottage pie or dead man’s leg. The choice was Howard’s End, Brideshead Revisited or The Riddle of the Sands, all steadfast companions since I grew out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was a rattle of rain on the bathroom window. It was an evening for Erskine Childers. I closed the door firmly on the children, drew the bath and settled down to read.

At once I was immersed in the pleasingly familiar plot. The riddle of the title is the motive behind an apparent attempt to wreck Arthur Davies, the hero of Childers’ Edwardian thriller, in the treacherous shoal waters of the German Frisian islands. The story culminates in the revelation that the perpetrator of the attempt, who goes under the name of Herr Dollmann, is a disgraced English naval officer trying to put Davies off the scent of a German plan to invade England. Davies and his companion, the narrator Carruthers, discover the plot and unmask the villain; Dollmann’s innocent daughter Clara falls into Davies’s welcoming arms; and Dollmann himself is conveniently lost at sea as the Englishmen flee the coast in their yacht Dulcibella. As such it’s a cleverly wrought whydunit, worrying away at Dollmann’s motive up to the climax with the mainspring force of a detective novel. In its course, there are episodes worthy of Childers’ friend John Buchan. As a race against time, Childers’ account of his heroes beating the fog and tide to the island of Memmert vies with Richard Hannay’s passage of the Col of the Swallows in Mr Standfast; Carruthers’ wonderful tour de force when he piles the tug carrying the Kaiser on to the Buse Tief sands matches the final vanquishing of Dominic Medina in The Three Hostages. Nevertheless, an invasion novel of a sort that – for obvious reasons – was popular in its day might seem to have little contemporary resonance. So far as we know, Chancellor Merkel has no immediate plans to invade England. The Riddle is of course a yachting story, and it certainly appeals to the sailing fraternity – into which I was press-ganged about the time of the Beatles’ first LP. Yachts have been hailed as the most beautiful of man’s creations, but they are also the least efficient method yet conceived of getting from waterfront to waterfront. They are wet, uncontrollable, contrary, marginally dangerous, ruinously expensive and as addictive as Dom Perignon. Perhaps Ovid was right about the great worth of things with no actual utility. Anyway, here Childers’ great gift is his vraisemblance, his ability to conjure up the setting and painful circumstances of sailing a very small yacht in shoal waters in autumn in a way that puts the reader four square in the yachtsmen’s place. An extremely sharp eye for detail, an ear to match the eye, and a nice line in simile are the marks of the man. Now where’s that bit? I leafed through the book and found it. It’s when our heroes, en route from the gentle cruising ground of the Baltic to the Frisians, find themselves in the eye of a storm:

Every loose article in the boat became audibly restless. Cans clinked, cupboards rattled, lockers uttered hollow groans. Small things sidled out of dark hiding-places, and danced grotesque drunken figures on the floor, like goblins in a haunted glade. The mast whined dolorously at every heel, and the centreboard hiccoughed and choked. Overhead another horde of demons seemed to have been let loose. The deck and mast were conductors which magnified every sound and made the tap-tap of every rope’s end resemble the blows of a hammer, and the slapping of the halyards against the mast the rattle of a Maxim gun. The whole tumult beat time to a rhythmical chorus which became maddening.

Yes, that was the passage, and as the rain hammered on the bathroom window it seemed to me that the bath was getting decidedly colder, the wind outside stiffening. I drew a little more hot water. And yet, and yet. Somehow, the Riddle’s got something that clearly goes beyond most of the other yachting classics – Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World, E. F. Knight’s The Falcon on the Baltic, Maurice Griffiths’ The Magic of the Swatchways, perhaps even Arthur Ransome’s Racundra’s First Cruise. Or there again, perhaps not, I thought. Maybe both Ransome and Childers were actually writing classics that just happened to be set at sea. Certainly, Ransome’s masterly account of his maiden voyage in the Baltic in a 30-foot ketch is as much about the crew as the sailing. In particular, it is about Racundra’s mate Carl Sehmel, whom Ransome later used as the model for the eponymous old sailor in Peter Duck. I wondered. I thumbed through my dog-eared paperback of The Riddle, just avoiding dropping it into the bath. It fell open at this passage. Dollmann’s accomplice, Commander von Bruning, is encouraging Davies and Carruthers to return to England. They are being towed by his steam-cutter to shelter in the lee of Spiekeroog, one of the eight enchantingly named islands that form the German Frisian chain:

A queer thought was haunting me, too, that such skill and judgement as I possessed was slipping from me as we left the land and faced again the rigours of this exacting sea. Davies, I very well knew, was under exactly the opposite spell – a spell which even the reproach of the tow-rope could not dispel. His face, in the glow of the binnacle, was beginning to wear that same look of contentment and resolve that I had seen on it the night we had sailed to Kiel from Schlei Fiord.

This, in many respects strangely, is the heart of this thriller, detective novel, arguably the first spy story. Childers was indeed interested in depicting people, a quality more rare among writers than I once supposed. Most such genre-writing uses the ‘characters’ merely as a means to advance the story. No so Childers. In Davies and Carruthers the author creates two engagingly contrasted figures whom he dramatizes in considerable depth and to great effect. The pair had been contemporaries at Oxford (where else?). Davies, though, is the unsophisticated, inarticulate, self-effacing patriot with a passion for the sea. Carruthers is a very different animal, the civil service high-flyer who, in his own words, ‘knows the right people, belongs to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly brilliant future in the Foreign Office’. The renewal and indeed deepening of the pair’s slight friendship in common pursuit of the shared ‘quest’ is as much the theme of The Riddle as is the invasion plot or what Childers himself called ‘the yachting story’. It is a book about the stolid values of Davies against the glittering charm of Carruthers; about the gradual realization on the part of the narrator that the man he patronized at university (‘not one of my immediate set . . . I thought him dull’) has infinitely more to him than he supposed. Not only is there much in Davies to admire; there is much beyond the compass of Carruthers himself. As the narrator confesses:

An armchair critic is one thing, but a sunburnt, brine-burnt zealot smarting under a personal discontent, athirst for a means . . . of contributing to the great cause, the maritime supremacy of Great Britain, that was quite another thing. He drew his inspiration from the very wind and spray. He communed with his tiller, I believe, and marshalled his figures with its help. To hear him talk was to feel a clarifying air blustering into a close clubroom, where men bandy ineffectual platitudes, and mumble old shibboleths, and go away and do nothing

At the time of publication of The Riddle of the Sands in 1903, Childers’ closest friend was Basil Williams, later to become a distinguished professional historian. In the first memorial to his friend, Williams remarked on the ‘rich vein of human feeling’ that characterized the book. This is the quality that makes it transcend its thriller genre. It is a true novel and a very good one at that. Indeed, as Geoffrey Household declared in his splendid introduction to the Penguin edition of Childers’ masterpiece, ‘He wrote only one novel, and that is immortal.’ I shivered. The bathwater now was tepid and from downstairs came the crescendo of the children discussing the finer points of the lie of the Monopoly dice. Time was up, but with Erskine Childers it had – as ever – been time well spent.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 27 © Jim Ring 2010