The smell of HB cigarettes and currywurst lingered in the booking hall. It was still light, this being June, but I’d missed the last ferry to Nordeney. I took the train from Bremen and arrived at Norddeich-Mole at just after eight thirty. But before leaving Germany, perhaps on a whim, but more likely to try to satisfy a long-held wish, I decided to make a short visit to the Nordsee coast. I packed the book again, of course, when I split up with my German girlfriend of that time and decided to head back to Britain. Though I never read it again, at least not until very recently, I would still take an occasional look at those maps, as if to try to recapture something from my childhood. I only read the book once in my teens, but it lived on in my imagination so vividly that I kept that copy with me when I left home to go to university and afterwards when I lived for a time in Germany. Boats like the Dulcibella, in which the two heroes of The Riddle of the Sands, Davies and Carruthers, sailed these waters. Dreams involving the sea, sand and swift boats. For me, with the feverish imagination of a child who spent rather too much time in his own head, these maps were a rich source of day-dreams. Maps of Germany’s East Frisian coastline and sea charts of the channels and sandbanks around the island of Nordeney. What captured my imagination right from the first were the pen and ink maps that illustrated the text. I’m not sure how it ended up with us.įrom early childhood that book fascinated me, although I didn’t actually read it until I was a teenager. It seemed to me that we’d had it forever, though the inscription in it told me that it was actually a school prize from the 1950s belonging to my Dad’s cousin. We had an old copy of The Riddle of the Sands in our house when I was a boy.

The riddle of the sands book review