A Small Tale of the Great Circle

While the First World War is regularly depicted by the nature of its horror, it was also a period whereby the excitement of inventions and the suggestion of an exciting time to come churned up the aspirations of some. Add to this the imagining of a treasure hunt in an exotic location and the excitement squashed fear.

All you had to do was survive, to learn how to sail. But there was the small matter of the interloper who could make the enterprise so much easier to accomplish. But that man was self-evidently unscrupulous, not to say demonic; it could all be sunk so easily by antagonism so hard to suppress. They all relied on the other and no one was being completely frank. They all lied, as we do.

A sickly child at birth, at the age of eight Dexter Hand was diagnosed with TB. This required a lengthy stay in a sanitorium, which saved his life. But the ravages of the complaint did not go away. They remained to haunt his life. He participated in all the sports and although he had the instincts for the games, he did not have the capacity.

He lived normally when he could and adopted excuses when he couldn’t. He worked as a technical author for a good part of his adult life. So elaborate was his world of deception, excusing himself over his lung condition, that a deflection to romantic writing was an obvious recourse. He could be someone else if needs be. The characters he portrays here are all him. The covert world of secret illness, and its unsuspected torments, has its day here too.