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A Citizen of the Sea

Old Junk — By H. M. Tomlinson

There are times when one is tempted to make a kind of childish division of mankind into two groups and to say: ‘These are the men who live on the land and these are they whose home is the sea.’ Is the division quite idle? Perhaps it were better to say: ‘These are the men who are ruled by the land and these who are governed by the sea.’ For you may meet the citizens of the sea far away from their own kingdom, carried away, to all outward resemblance, and absorbed by the immediate life of the land, yet are they never other than foreigners; their glance, however keen and discerning, still is a wondering glance; and what they discover is not the familiarity of things, but their strangeness. They see it all like this because they have just ‘come off the ship,’ as it were. For long they have been identified with the moving waters, the changing skies, winds, stars, the dawn running into bright day, and evening falling on the fields of night. This is the life, changing, but ever changeless, in which men live nearest to that which enchants them, and to that which threatens to overwhelm them. Here the terrible monotony of ceaseless distraction is unknown; neither can men die that wilful first death to all outward things as they can on land—refusing to look any longer upon the sky or to care whether the wind be foul or fair. But through everything it is the calmness of those sea-governed men which compels us most. Shall we of the land ever be calm again? Shall we ever find our way out of this hideous Exhibition with its lights and bands and wounded soldiers and German guns? There is a quivering madness in all this feverish activity. Perhaps we are afraid that when we do reach the last turnstile we shall push one another over the edge of the world, into space—into darkness.

It is at times like these that we find it extraordinary page 10 comfort to have in our midst a citizen of the sea, a writer like Mr. H. M. Tomlinson. We feel that he is calm, not because he has renounced life, but because he lives in the memory of that solemn gesture with which the sea blesses or dismisses or destroys her own. The breath of the sea sounds in all his writings. Whether he tells of an accident at a mine-head, or the front-line trenches in Flanders, or children dancing, or boots to read at midnight—if we listen, it is there and we are not deceived. There is a quality of remoteness and detachment in his work, but it is never because he has turned aside from life. On the contrary he steps ashore and is passionately involved in it. Deliberately he enters into the anguish of experience and suffering; he gives himself to it because of his great love for human beings; yet the comfort of being ‘lost’—of being just a part of the whole and merged in it—is denied him. He is always that foreigner with keen wondering glance, thinking over the strangeness of it all….

And when life is not tragic, when children dance, or he visits the African Coast, or a lonely little grocer's boy shows him his home-made ‘wireless,’ then are we conscious of his unbroken, unspoilt joy in lovely things and funny ones. He is alive; real things stir him profoundly. He has no need to exaggerate or heighten his effects. One is content to believe that what he tells you happened to him and it was the important thing; it was the spiritual truth which was revealed. This is the life, changeless and changing, wonderfully conveyed to us in the pages of ‘Old Junk.’ There is a quality in the prose that one might wish to call ‘magic’; it is full of the quivering light and rainbow colours of the unsubstantial shore. One might dream as one puts the book down that one has only to listen, to hear the tide, on the turn, then sweeping in full and strong.