Among human beings caught up in a hectic life, it is often the case that a thought will come across our mental screen, sometimes from a comment overheard, or a sign encountered, or even from a prolonged and heated public discussion, and the thought flits in and flits out and is gone. And then some time later, when the original thought is apparently erased from our mental storehouse, an incident will occur bringing the idea back front and centre and reminding you of your original observation.
This week, with public notice being given in the press regarding various views of a well-known song of mine – Not A Blade Of Grass – I was reminded of an incident, going back 20 years, that made me reflect, for the first but not the last time, on how the work of an artist can produce, in the same monogamous audience it was aimed at, such differing interpretations. The incident involves a Trini friend in Canada in the 1970s, who had told me this gripping World War Two story of a Trinidad schooner captain, named Johnny Edgehill who, in the course of ferrying a cargo of salt from St Maarten to Trinidad, had been sunk by German submarines off the coast of Grenada. The German U-boat captain had offered to give Johnny time to abandon ship before the torpedo assault, but the Trini bluntly refused the offer and went to his grave with his vessel. The song, Sink the Schooner, was not one of the Tradewinds’ major hits but got good airplay in, obviously, Trinidad, and in Barbados and St Vincent with those islands’ tradition of sailing ships.
I wrote the song purely as a paean to a very brave man displaying singular courage; as the
