Chanticleer Book Reviews

Author: tom-edwards

  • TOM – The ADVENTURES of a PORTSMOUTH LAD by Tom Edwards – Memoir, Action/Adventure, Coming of Age

    TOM – The ADVENTURES of a PORTSMOUTH LAD by Tom Edwards – Memoir, Action/Adventure, Coming of Age

    Tom Edwards grew up rough and never lost his yen for travel and new adventures, as shown in this wide-ranging portrait that spans numerous years and continents.

    The author depicts himself through the eyes of an omniscient observer, growing up as a sailor’s son in and around the city of Portsmouth, England during the Depression era. Many scenes of his childhood speak to the poverty in which the family, his mother, sister, and brother, lived in as they rarely saw the father/husband who was mostly away at sea.

    But the boy never realized they were poor until one Christmas when the better-off folk visited his neighborhood with boxes of fruit, cakes, and toys for the children. Vivid historical touches including everything from famous buildings, castles, and ships in the harbor are wrapped around childhood memories of the flannel vests slaked in camphor that children were forced to wear all winter, to the sports cards sold with cigarettes that children prized, saved, and fought over. Yet despite an absent father and a mother who seemed happy to have the old man gone, Tom chose the seafaring life.

    Born in 1929, Tom was accepted at Portsmouth Technical High School, and as the war was ending, he joined the Royal Navy, beginning his roving lifestyle. He was often punished in his training stint for being a daring young man, but he also managed to compete in various sports – swimming, boating, sailing, and once – but only once, boxing.

    Stationed in Ireland, he was then transferred to Malta, his first experience of a truly foreign place. That was followed by years in various countries of southern Africa and finally Australia. In those years he was married, twice, had daughters whom he loved but rarely saw as his wife kept returning to England, while he couldn’t bear the boredom of home for long.

    He mined for semi-precious gems, learned to fly gliders, played water polo, started a camera magazine, headed a rescue team, battled and won a fight against tuberculosis, worked in a dynamite factory, sailed around the world, and was shipwrecked three times, became a surveyor, a painter and ran art groups in three countries, and immigrated to Australia when independence movements in Africa began to make existence difficult for the former English colonizers.

    Edwards is known for his writing, his first book compellingly titled If I Should Die, composed after he joined an anti-terrorist unit in Rhodesia. His prose is colorful and well organized, and his interjections of significant events in the world add a stirring background – the abdication of Edward VIII, the coronation of Elizabeth II, the war and all its terrors told both by the history book and from the observant memory of a growing boy in a critical seaport city. Small details overlap the larger scheme of things, including a great deal of humor surrounding young men’s constant longing for, and occasional securing of, female companionship. He is careful to admit his flaws, such as his weaknesses as a husband, his incurable need to seek new adventures in new climes, and his now waning physical powers after a youth and manhood of grit and occasional glory.

    Edwards has made a comfortable name for himself in several spheres and here delivers a memoir that combines the larger historical picture and a plethora of nostalgia, revealing him as both gutsy and tenderhearted.

     

  • JANE SINCLAIR by Tom Edwards – 1800s romantic adventure

    JANE SINCLAIR by Tom Edwards – 1800s romantic adventure

    A rich romantic adventure set in late 1800s England that is suitable for Young Adults and fans of Romantic fiction, “Jane Sinclair” touches on personal themes of success and failure interwoven with major social and economic issues of the era.

    The tale’s heroine, Jane, is the only child of a Hampshire farming couple that dote on her and offer her every opportunity for education. Clearly exceptional, the girl soaks up learning so that by the time she encounters the upper-class Charles Cholmondelay, destined for study at Oxford, she proves herself his intellectual equal while charming his heart.

    However, his father, the brutal Sir Richard, is determined his son will have nothing to do with a commoner; his threats to her family cause Jane to run away to London, where, desperate and penniless, she fortuitously winds up in the household of a kindly man named Bob. Bob will all but adopt Jane, and, impressed by her honesty and intelligence, will help to set her up in a small business and, ultimately, in the management of a garment factory. There Jane shows her considerable entrepreneurial and leadership skills, and, recalling her own humble origins, demonstrates that she is well ahead of her time in wishing for her factory workers to have basic rights and to be treated more humanely—a cause which is ahead of its time.

    Making a name for herself as the lone female in a high-level business position, Jane meets again with Charles, now graduated and ready to work as a lawyer. They plan to marry soon, but Charles decides he needs one last adventure before he settles down. He sets off to sea with friends, while Jane goes to France and to inspect and purchase a new exotic clothing line. She also develops a friendship with members of the Suffragette movement and shows herself an admirable public speaker on their behalf. When she hears that Charles and his friends have been shipwrecked, though, her idyllic world collapses and she nearly dies from despair. Charles meanwhile is the captive of ruthless pirates, and escape seems all but hopeless.

    The author of this intricately layered saga, Australian Tom Edwards, is himself an artist and adventurer; the scenes he depicts of Charles at sea doubtless come from his own experiences in the Royal Navy, sailing around the world with friends in a small boat, and living in many unusual locales.

    On nearly every page of his tightly constructed story he demonstrates the care he has taken with historical detail, down to the soap brand Jane will use, the clothing she chooses to wear and manufacture, and even the toilets, or “WCs,” she insists on providing for her workers. The dialogue and use of idiomatic phrases also show much care, as does Jane’s a brush with a real person, Mrs. Goulden, mother of the noted English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.

    Jane Sinclair by Tom Edwards deftly combines an entertaining and well-conceived rags-to-riches story from the female viewpoint, with a passionate tale of love lost and regained, a stirring vision of manly exploits on the high seas, and a respectful acknowledgment of the ideals of the early feminist movement.