WIDE HORIZONS

The Second World War managed to inspire some very popular books and films, many of them, because of the situation at the time, fairly obvious propaganda platforms carrying fairly obvious messages. I'm thinking particularly of works like Target for Tonight, Mrs Mineva and Went The Day Well?  
A decade or so later the mood had changed somewhat, or levels of tension had lessened. Anyway, a certain layer of fiction and even sentimentality applied to the conflict was now seen to be perfectly acceptable, leading to Love Is A Many Splendour'd Thing, for example. The two book titles listed below, little known and probably largely forgotten today, belong to this later, softer genre, but they still managed to make a big impression on me when, as a relatively young and certainly impressionable chap, I read them for the very first time.
The story of the first one goes something like this. On March 7, 1951, The Daily Telegraph cried an announcement in its Personal Column which read: 'SEA-WYF. Am certain you are alive. Please get in touch. BISCUIT.'
Simple enough, you may say, but over the next few weeks there followed a steady stream of simularly intriguing notices - by which time the author JM Scott had become interested - including one, on April 11, which said: 'Publisher required for war story of three men of authority and one woman adrift fourteen weeks on float in Indian Ocean. Survivors parted with nicknames only and compact to forget.'
Well, Mr Scott did eventually get to write the story, and a cracking yarn it is, too. 'Violent and strange,' said one reviewer, 'this is  a most entertaining book, and the final explanation is too good to give away.' Quite right, and I won't. But I will add that 20th Century Fox later made a film of it. Titled Sea Wife, it starred Richard Burton, Basil Sydney, Cy Grant, and a youthful Joan Collins.
High Barbaree is a beast of a slightly different ilk, being even more wistful, for it pours on sentimentality with a very large spoon. Nevertheless, I liked it when I first read it, finding it puzzling and dreamy; and while I have no knowledge of a film ever being made of it, it still remains a fascinating yarn.
It goes like this. During the war in the South Pacific a Japanese submarine fires on a Catalina floatplane, and brings it down. At the same time, the plane scores a direct hit on the sub with a bomb, which duly sinks, leaving two surviving aircrew abroard the drifting seaplane. But as they drift, and as they begin to lose their grip on reality, one of the crew dreams he is being carried towards Turnbull's Island, a childhood obsession of his, and an island of mystery.
Of course, books like this are scarcely popular any more, now that grim reality tends to hog all our screens. But they are still worth a look. If you can find them.
(Sea-Wyf and Biscuit, by JM Scott. Heinemann, 1957. High Barbaree, by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall. Four Square Books, 1960)