For those that love sailing, this book will give you goosebumps over the details that Childers shares about how to sail a boat. It is quickly apparent that Childers’s had a deep and abiding interest in sailing. The crew? Well Davies forgot to mention that he might need Carruthers to lend a hand with the sailing.Ĭarruthers has spent many hours, many days in fact on boats, but he doesn’t know the first bowline about sailing. Visions of a crewed yacht with a cook, and staff to pamper him evaporate when he sees the cramped conditions of the boat. When he arrives in Holland underwhelmed by the Dulcibella ( a reference to Erskine Childers’s sister of the same name). In fact, he thought he was a rather odd solitary fellow in school, but weighing the embarrassment of a lack of plans, and the potential awkwardness of spending too much time with a man he might start to find annoying he decides the embarrassment is more alarming than the potential awkwardness. Out of the blue, almost as if summoned by his stimulus deprived mind, a letter arrives from a University acquaintance inviting him for a bit of yachting in the Baltic, and a bit of sport shooting ducks. Despite his self-professing connections with all the right people he has hit a snag for plans to relieve the dullness of his carefully controlled existence. He is afraid that he will become even more bored. I thought the date and the placed justified the parallel: to my advantage even for the obscure Burmese administrator might well be a man of blunted sensibilities and course fibre, and at least he is alone with nature, while I-well, a young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly a brilliant future in the foreign Office, may be excused for a sense of complacent martyrdom, when, with his keen appreciation of the social calendar, he is doomed to the outer solitude of London in September.”Ĭarruthers is bored. It was in some such spirit, with an added touch of self-consciousness, that, at seven o’clock in the evening of September 23 in recent years, I was making my evening toilet in my chambers in Pall Mall. ”I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude-save for a few black faces-have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism.
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