Denys Val Baker (1917–1984)

This was a fantastic read in regards for its hidden gems. Some stories lost my interest but it certainly gave me a taste of H.E. Bates that I am now willing to explore more of. All the stories have sexual under-tones and some more prominent then others but it certainly is more grass roots lust and fancy then erotic so don't be expecting long passages describing characters or actions, it's purely rolling in the hay most of the time or chasing around near rivers - sadly the piece I felt betrayed the whole milieu of the book was the piece written by Denys Val Baker (The Editor) which was more of a schoolboy fantasy piece written kind of in the fashion for the author's own titillation rather then for any understanding of human behavior we ourselves as readers might draw from it. Do not misread my remark as being negative towards Denys, for I am grateful he put the whole book together in the first place and therefore he has earned his indulgence.… (more)

I don't remember ever coming across Denys Val Baker before, but he seems to have been fairly well-known in his time as a novelist and author of humorous memoirs, and according to Wikipedia was prominent in the Cornish arts scene. But then again, Wikipedia calls him a life-long vegetarian, and that doesn't seem to square with all the exuberant descriptions of meat and fish meals in this book. Maybe he simply got fed up with writing "...and I had a mushroom omelette".

Val Baker describes how he and his wife, living beside the water in St Ives, decided to buy a boat and ended up with Sanu, a converted 60ft MFV ("Motor Fishing Vessel" - a Royal Navy classification for small seagoing tenders, about 1000 of which were built for service in WWII; no actual fishing involved). Big by cruising standards, but they had six teenage children between them, so they needed something with plenty of beds. And diesel fuel was cheap in the sixties. They load it up with the kids and over a series of years take it on summer cruises to the Netherlands, Sweden, Brittany, Northern Spain, and eventually the Mediterranean.

He writes about these journeys in an ironic-deprecatory style rather like that of Roger Pilkington's Small boat books (he mentions Pilkington several times). There are the requisite dangers and accidents, but he never quite manages to convey the degree of fear implied by the title - it's all fairly generic really. There's a bit of period charm to their adventures, from time to time, but a lot of it is finding Rotterdam modern, Amsterdam dirty, and Stockholm expensive. The Germans he meets are all clearly closet Nazis, whilst languages other than English are a complete mystery to him (somewhat surprising for a writer who apparently prided himself on his Welshness). Rather lazy writing, and not much evidence of the kind of detailed research Pilkington used to do into the places he was going to visit and write about.

Something that amused me - although not Val Baker's fault - was the way he picked out the recovery of the Vasa as an example of the sort of major project the Swedes could achieve that would never get off the ground in the UK. He obviously didn't know that, as he was writing, the Mary Rose Trust were busy raising the money to do just that in the Solent!

The only time the book really grabbed me was when he was writing about the difficulty they had convincing themselves to start using the boat again after a particularly disastrous trip where they found themselves stuck for weeks in Bilbao waiting for expensive repairs. The sort of experience that would persuade a lot of boat-owners to sell up at a loss and take up tapestry-work or bookbinding instead, and it nearly did for them, but they got over it. That part of the book really seemed to come from the heart.

Apart from a couple of maps and the slightly fanciful picture of Sanu smashing through the waves on the dust jacket (by the ubiquitous illustrator Donald Swan, who had worked with Jess Val Baker at her St Hilary Pottery in the early 1950s), there aren't any illustrations, and the overall production of the book is rather poor: we like to think of the early 70s as an idyllic pre-computer age when humans still did typesetting and proofreading, but whilst there's plenty of evidence of the former here, the proofreading stage seems to have been skipped. They didn't even spot that the names of Val Baker's children change their spelling from one page to the next, never mind what they did to foreign placenames. Val Baker wrote for a living, and it was obviously more important for him to get his work out there on the shelves quickly than to invest time in making it perfect.

But interesting, anyway.… (more)