BC Cook
JIMMY Buffett taught us that sometimes, well-told fiction is better than reality. Tristan Jones would have agreed. His own life packed enough interesting material to keep inquisitive grandchildren gathered wide-eyed at his feet for years, yet halfway through his life’s journey he upped the ante and reinvented himself. Separating fact from fiction in Tristan Jones’ life is one thing, but whatever you think of him, there is no denying his power with the pen.
Take the following passage from his account of his years in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Although the record shows that he did serve, indeed it would be impossible to recount the tale any other way, many of the people and stories in the book may or may not be legitimate. Jones says he changed names and places to protect the innocent, but did he also invent entire episodes to add drama to his past?
In this passage, Jones describes a time he served aboard a converted ocean liner taken in by the navy as an armed transport. Having just been torpedoed, Jones and his crewmates are trying to abandon ship, all semblance of order having gone out the porthole. Let’s pick up the action as a British destroyer tries to pull alongside the mortally stricken vessel:
“As I write I remember many things, all in a rush, with extreme vividness; I could try to set down in words the rush of the sea between the ships, the grinding rumble and screech as Brooke scrunched her hull alongside Cameroon; the shouts of the men, some jocular now, some crying in their despair and fright, as one sickening lurch and crash of both ships, one against the other, followed the previous one. It will not do.
“So that you will clearly understand what happened I must write down what followed in cold, precise phrases, just as, when I try to dissect my memories, they come to me like frames in a fast-moving film suddenly stopped for a few seconds. It is only thus that I can write what followed Brooke’s sacrificial gesture.
“The facts are visible, tangible to me; part of my senses, part of me, keeping their place in space and time, in part of my life. They needed only a U-boat or two, a 1,000-ton destroyer and a converted liner of about 20,000 tons, an Atlantic gale, a raging fire, about one and a half thousand men and about three and a half hours before and after dusk. These facts made a whole that had facets galore, a complicated series of menacing events that could be seen in glimpses by the eye. But there was something else besides. Something invisible, a directing spirit of comradely essence, a willingness to lay down lives for the sake of friends.
“The facts were plain. Brooke ground and smashed in that raging sea alongside of the sinking Cameroon for three hours and saved the lives of 180 men.
“It is difficult to give an impression of the risk of jumping from a ship’s deck in the screaming wind over mountainous seas, one minute forty feet above the upper works of a destroyer, able almost to look down her funnel, and the next moment fifteen feet or so below the destroyer’s upper deck. The slightest misjudgment in the moment of the jump, the slightest hesitation when the moment came, the slightest weakness in grabbing on to the destroyer, and we were, any of us, with no doubt at all, dead.”
After holding the reader suspended in a “And then? And then?” curiosity for two more paragraphs, Jones delivers that payoff. He leapt from his sinking ship to the destroyer, his deliverer. What happened? That will have to wait for next time.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for over 30 years. He is a director and historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org)
