Me, You and Carruthers

Invasion lit and invasions

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

This book is extremely popular. Published in 1903, it has never been out of print. It set the tone for a genre, influenced everyone you could name from adventure writers to espionage fiction to modern sea stories. It has thus a large footprint. But is it any good? The first chapters, in which we are introduced to this character our narrator, a somewhat foppish and fashionable young man called Carruthers from the Foreign Office, are so brilliantly observed that I felt later that I had been written a cheque that the rest of the book did not quite honour. Although the rest of it is interesting, the first chapters proper are word-perfect.

It is framed in an introduction and epilogue by a supposed editor, Childers himself, who says that the bulk of the book was written pseudonymously and passed onto him for work and for analysis. He says that he has added a few sea charts, a few maps, to make it intelligible. And that he seriously hopes that those responsible for protecting the nation examine the intrigues which are described within the memoirs of this young man. For he has seen something that once seen must be acted upon — lest one shirk one’s duty, and risk leaving Britain at terrible risk, the threat of invasion hanging, Damoclean, above the country’s head.

This is heavy stuff, and a little leaden.

But I will talk for a moment of the book’s premise and its promise. Our hero Carruthers, stuck in London on some thankless administrative task, thinks quite like a living martyr about all the fun his contemporaries are likely to be having without him. They have all gone out to their country houses — they are visiting, as the Americans say, with each other — and in between the ballrooms and banqueting halls and grouse moors, they are having a good and proper time.

Trivial amusements save them from boredom and work. They have their flirtations, their friendships, their lives.

Some have taken to yachts — they are out there now, floating on a moving palace complete with servants. They are dressed nautically, but it is all for show. They wear crisp whites which are never soiled. Hired hands and servants keep the boats afloat and sailing.

Carruthers envies them. Earlier, he was for a moment contented by being given such a position of trust and responsibility in the heart of His Majesty’s government. But as he writes in his empty evenings witty and extensive letters to all his friends from a cold and solitary London routine, he notices that their responses to him — at first amused and amusing at the idea he could not join them out of town — begin to become briefer and curter and finally, they start to tail off entirely. Carruthers is left alone, alone with his work. He works alone in Whitehall; he dines solitarily in his club. He is bored and unsatisfied. And then Carruthers remembers another friend of his, someone who has quite out of the blue written him a letter.

That man is Davies, an odd duck that Carruthers remembers from years back. Davies has said that he is having a wonderful time in the Baltic. And he invites Carruthers to go sailing with him. The latter thinks about it, thinks about it for a time, and then — after much wounded looking about at his situation, and considering the strains of being trusted to do some work all summer long — decides to leave London. He will go a-sailing in the North Sea.

As the journey out starts to take shape, Davies inundates Carruthers with bizarre demands. For piece of metal, strange instruments and gauges, stoves, oilskins, things of that kind. Carruthers is confused. He wonders why he is being used as porter, as courier. Cannot we buy those things we need in the nearest luxurious stopping place? But he complies, spending quite a bit of money in the process. He buys what he has been told to buy and steadily, packages in tow, he makes his way across the continent to where the yacht is moored. And when he arrives he finds that it is not what he would like it to be.

Davies is pleased to see him but evasive. Carruthers approaches the boat, the Dulcibella, in the dark and in the rain. He trips over cables. He gets his fine clothes dirty. A parcel he picks up to throw to Davies gets his hands all wet and sticky.

Be careful with that, Davies calls down. It’s meat.

There are no servants; there are no hired hands. The yacht itself is almost a skiff. It’s a tub, half-rotten and dirty and filled with junk. Davies is irrepressible, even though he is a little sheepish at having lured Carruthers to his rotten boat on false pretences.

And then their adventure begins.

I won’t say more about it except to say that it is certainly intriguing. There’s nautical mayhem, real jeopardy, treachery, a shallow and sentimental romantic angle, and some of the piecing of facts together, and sneaking around in the dark, that later espionage fiction would so eagerly imitate. There’s just a bit more to it than messing about in boats.