13ritannia's man
Benny Green
The reappearance, in paperback form, of Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands draws attention to a book which would read strangely at any time, but doubly so now that the world for which it was written has been whisked by events into the remotest past. The Riddle of the Sands was among the earliest, and was perhaps the best, of those Edwardian callto-arms thrillers which acquired their tension from the British neurosis, real or imagined, regarding the possibility of some lesser breed without the law constituting a serious threat to their world dominance. It is not altogether without significance that the book appeared in 1903, soon after the painfully public exposure of the blimpish blithering of Buller and company on the veldt, or that it was written by an Englishman who had served in that war and seen for himself that resourcefulness was hardly the British High Command's long suit.
Childers's book created an immediate sensation, and retains much of its old magnetism today, although for quite different reasons. When The Riddle of the Sands was first published, it was part of that curious campaign of self-induced terror by which the snug and secure British liked deliciously to chill their own imperial marrow from time to time, perhaps to alleviate the tedium of a world whose sporting attention was divided between the leg-glances directed by Ranjitsinhji towards the Hove boundary and those other leg glances directed no less accurately by the King towards Mrs. Keppel. It was with a perfectly straight face that Childers established a convention destined to peter out ten years later in the unwitting bathos of Saki's When William Came, in which the all-conquering Kaiser is finally thwarted by the intransigence of a bunch of Boy Scouts.
No such absurdities mar the texture of The Riddle of the Sands, which is why its magnetism has lasted so well. For if it was originally meant to scare the British, and perhaps even stimulate them into action, by rattling the bones of the German bogey, its fascination today lies in the way the presumption of Childers's plot so precisely locates the period of its genesis; the British are Top Nation; this exalted status is in acordance with the wishes of God Almighty; the Germans are not to be trusted, all this being implied at a time when policy could still be condensed into the simple words which at one point Childers puts into the mouth of his hero: "We're a maritime nation; we've grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it we starve. We're unique in that way, just as our huge empire, only linked by the sea, is unique. And yet see what mountains of apathy and conceit have had to be tackled. It's not the people's fault. We've been so safe so long, and grown so rich, that we've forgotten what we owe it to. But there's no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen."
Childers presents the archetypal escapist portrait of the Public School Empire, where the caverns of Whitehall are deserted in the shooting season, and where in high summer no ennobled rump flops into the concave sanctuary of the Club armchair. Sadly, what Childers also does is to assume that all Englishmen are as interested as he is in the arts of navigation and seamanship, although to be fair, considering the nature of the tale he had to tell, it is hard to see how he could have avoided those elements altogther. The Riddle of the Sands is the story of how the seven-tonner Dulcibella ' stumbles on a German plot to use the sand-channels off the Fresiari Islands to expedite an invasion of Britain. There is a peripheral love interest, and a narrator who is actually called Carruthers, but the heart of the book resides in its hero Davies, who is so strong a projection of the Englishman of imperial fiction, modest, brave, above all decent, that not even the incomprehensible nautical smalltalk can obscure his outlines: "She was buried at once by the beam sea, and the jib flew to blazes; but the reefed stays'l stood, she recovered gamely and I held on, though I knew it could only be for a few minutes, as the centre-plate was up, and made frightful leeway towards the bark."
No wonder that Arnold Bennett once confided to his journal, "Read Riddle of the Sands. Very annoying style."
That Davies remains representative was proved to me most unexpectedly two years ago when, in conversation with Kenneth More, and remembering Reach for the Shy and North West Frontier, I asked him if he had ever heard of Davies or thought of playing him. More told me that although he had not read Childers's book, he had received several letters drawing atention to his affinities with Davies who, by the way, remains unportrayed to this day. The Riddle of the Sands is interesting for another reason, in that it shows how an author can fail utterly to understand what he is doing. The yachting savoir faire which tempted Childers to turn his novel into a textbook, and which eventually led him to renegacy and violent martyrdom, very nearly foundered ' Dulcibella,' and it was only the irrepressible buoyancy of his tale that kept the whole project from sinking under the dead weight of all those luffs and jibs. This inadvertently comic situation, where a man writes one book under the delusion he is writing quite another, obtained also in that other nautical classic of the period, Three Men in a Boat, conceived as a river guide sanctified by gobbets of that indigestible sanctimonious swill which Jerome K. Jerome mistook all his life for religious passion. But just as Harris and George remained triumphantly pagan, so does The Riddle of the Sands remain triumphantly fictional.
Childers's own career proved far more hair-raising than anything he ever dreamed up for Davies. Becoming a convert to Home Rule in 1910, he took to gunrunning, and in 1914 sailed with a thousand smuggled rifles under the very bows of the British fleet at Spithead. In 1922, having urged the Irish not to sign Lloyd George's treaty, he aligned 'himself with the diehards, was arrested and executed by a firing squad. And although they were Irish bullets which killed him, in a sense the finger that pulled the trigger was British; for a man whose one truly memorable act was his literary perpetuation of the stiffupper-lip Englishman, it was a bizarre end indeed. How many authors ever end up being shot by their own 'hero? One consolation: had it not been for that firing squad, there would probably be no new paperback edition at all. By bringing Childers's life to so premature an end, the authorities brought forward by many years the date at which his works would come into public domain — November 24, 1972.
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