I have no idea what to make of this novella by Richard Hughes. It’s about a white English family living in Jamaica in the early part of the 20th century. The book focuses on the children, specifically the oldest daughter, Emily, and I think it’s supposed to be some sort of metaphor for humanity, but I think it’s more appropriately called a study in underestimating young girls.
The book starts with a mild earthquake, followed by a hurricane that brings the family’s house down around them. We’re supposed to believe the children are completely unfazed by losing the only home they remember having, which just goes to show that Hughes knows nothing about children. Yes, they adapt to new circumstances more quickly and easily than adults, but that’s not the same as being completely unfazed by them, or not even registering them.
After the hurricane, the parents decide to send their children back to England to get away from the dangers of Jamaica. Shortly after setting sail, they are accidentally kidnapped by pirates and it is mistakenly reported to the parents that the children have been murdered.
So they go adventuring with the pirates for a while and are treated more or less like members of the crew until the pirate captain decides it’s too dangerous for him and his crew to get caught with these missing English children so he manages to offload them onto a ship headed for England, at which point they are told by the adults on the new ship that they must have endured something awful. The children don’t refute these assertions, but accept them as fact because they’re not used to correcting adults, and that part did ring true for me. I can think of a number of times when I was told something as a child that I didn’t refute and I always wondered afterwards why I didn’t speak up.
At one point, the pirates take the captain of another ship hostage, tie him up, and leave him alone with Emily for a few minutes. Although he’s tied up, there’s a knife on the floor (I can’t remember how it got there) and Emily is terrified the man will use the knife to get free and attack her, so she preemptively kills him. She’s also suffering from a very bad leg wound, which got infected, so it’s not clear if she’s entirely lucid while she’s killing this man, especially since, once he’s dead, she just goes back to bed and immediately falls asleep.
Another girl is accused of the murder by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The pirates throw her overboard as punishment, but Emily’s younger siblings, not realizing anything that has just happened, rescue her and pull her back on board, which is probably the one merciful thing anyone does in this course of this book.
From then on, Emily is more or less consumed with hiding the true circumstances of the murder from everyone, and because everyone assumes she’s this sweet, innocent little girl incapable of keeping secrets, no one suspects her of anything, and that I did find believable. People are always underestimating women, and especially young girls.