Book 232: Bermuda (English) – A Fall from Aloft (Brian BURLAND)

They were just passing out of the harbour now and there, not seventy-five yards away, was his uncle’s house – pink with a white roof. And there too was the dock and the bathhouses and the diving board. The tender was sucking up a great wave behind her as they entered Two Rock Passage – they always did, tenders and tugs and sometimes a big ship. James and his brothers and cousins would jump in and ride the waves; you could be lifted clear back onto the dock, the wave acting as a billowy elevator. The game then was to keep your feet on the slippery surface as the wave sucked down and away sometimes even exposing the harbour floor: white coral sand, black sea-puddings, purple ferns, brain stones and a few old pop bottles they should have dived up, before tea, last week. Afterwards his aunt always gave them iced tea – with mint leaves, from her garden, green against the yellow, itself smoky with sugar. It was delicious was iced tea with mint; he could remember the first time he’d tasted it.

For Bermuda I found only slim pickings. It came down to a choice between Peter Benchley’s The Deep, which I was sure would be a great read (if it is anything as good as Jaws), but while I’m sure Benchley must have visited Bermuda often, I couldn’t confirm if he had lived there; or A Fall from Aloft  by Brian Burland (an undoubted Bermudian, though the story doesn’t really spend any time on the island – but then again, The Deep no doubt spends most of its time at sea as well). In the end I chose the latter, and didn’t regret it.

I ended up acquiring another ex-library book, from Bolton Public Libraries in Massachusetts, US, as these second-hand books increasingly are. The title comes from a 13-year-old sailor’s tombstone from 1777 in Bermuda.

Although the protagonist of this story is a boy, it’s definitely not a junior fiction novel. Warning, adult themes!

In 1942, James Berkeley, who is 13 (or at least claims to be), is being sent by his estranged parents from Bermuda across the perilous, U-boat-infested Atlantic to England for boarding school. (I assume that a lot of this is autobiographical for Burland, who would have been the same age – the descriptions are so realistic that I don’t think it could have been written otherwise).

Little James can’t have been a very nice boy and his parents were no doubt relieved to have found a way of getting him out of their hair – he was always lying, stealing, bullying (especially Jews), lazy and a delinquent – and sexually precocious. But he has come to feel guilty about all of this, and by the time he sails off is convinced that he’s a bad person and a coward. The voyage becomes a literal ‘rite of passage’ for James.

Some readers might be offended by the vulgarity of the sailors’ speech – and the sexual descriptions. But these are not gratuitous but real. Burland also captures onomatopoeia of ship’s noises, such as the overrunning propeller out of the water, and the sailors’ argot, and ends with one in the refrain of ‘lost-at-sea, lost-at-sea’.

James is brave but haunted by quite reasonable fears – of drowning at sea after ‘falling from aloft’ (he has to perilously load blankets onto a lifeboat each time there is an attack threat), or from the ship being torpedoed – or maybe even the precarious pre-fab ‘Liberty ship’ just coming apart at the welds (there were no rivets). Burland perfectly captures the uncertainty and fear of the Atlantic convoy passengers and sailors. For secrecy’s sake, they don’t even know where they are, and have no real idea about when or where they might be attacked by the German submarines lurking like sea monsters beneath the waves. They’re also uncertain about what protection, if any, they have – is the destroyer escort still actually there? Burland’s description of life at sea is very realistic.

There is also the theme of class and race distinction – James is privileged and white, considered above the ‘blacks’ and seamen.

In the end, I felt that this forgotten gem might just be one of the best coming-of-age novels ever written. Another one that deserves to be read!

Burland, Brian (1931 – 2010), A Fall from Aloft, London, Barrie & Rockliff, the Cresset Press, 1968, SBN 214.66722.7