A Vital Spark
HOW A VITAL SPARK WAS LIT
People ask what I write about and I try to tell them but it’s easier if I use a book like Vital Spark to explain it’s not what that is important but why. I can’t write about something I don’t care about. For example, Vital Spark came from my love of the Cape of Good hope area as far as the semi-desert Karoo towns to its north. Cape Town, the old stop over for the East India Company ships, is the best known but the stop off could just as easily have been at Saldanha or the sheltered Langebaan Lagoon – if the British had made up their minds to stay before the Portuguese and the Dutch took over.
Table Bay is of course exposed to the worst of the storms and the wrecks are not all ancient – cargo ships still run aground there – there was even a cargo vessel called America under the waves. The sunken America was used by the Royal Cape Yacht Club as a turning mark for yacht racing for its very own America Cup.
A little South is Hout Bay where the old sailors filled up with firewood for their galley stoves – hout being Dutch for wood.
Further round is the old Royal Navy base at Simonstown with its annual Navy Day and model ship display I wrote about for Model Boats. Simonstown is in False Bay, sheltered by the Cape Peninsula that ends in Cape Point and next to the antique shops of Fischhoek.
What happened was that I was busy with a writing course with Writer’s Bureau and doing a bit of freelance journalism in the sailing magazines and my tutor decided I was the natural successor to Bernard Cornwell and his Strom Child novel. What do you expect in a sea story? I asked myself. Pirates, smugglers, and, since South Africa is the home of diamonds, naturally they provide the vital spark. Through the model boats I had seen how ships are made invisible to radar, so that went in and, since Cecil Rhodes and his Cape to Cairo railway is a big part of the British history in the area, that had to make its way into the tale. I had interviewed several skippers in a Round the World race, so I threw that in too and one can’t have a modern story about Africa without child soldiers being rescued and had a lot of fun planning and writing.
Sullatober