Swell Tide Shimmy

About the Book

Stanley Dawson is a young Jamaican who volunteers for military service in the Royal Air Force then goes off to Great Britain to fight in World War II. After his arrival in England he becomes a casualty, not from action in combat, but from injuries he sustains during a training exercise. His experience in his weeks of hospitalization, left him determined to overcome the debilitating effects of frost bite he suffered. He recovers enough to justify to himself and his Commanding Officer that he was in Britain to fight in World War II as a Royal Air Force man.

The long term effect of his injury catches up with him, however, soon after his return to Jamaica four years later, where he struggles to maintain himself as the old campaigner of organized combat—the war veteran—against casual, but a sharp-edged lifestyle of his boyhood friends. It is a way of life that makes him search for a clue to his apparent, irreparable existence. He senses that he is, not only partially incapacitated but spiritually dazed. His illness is made worse by the confusing political trend and the rising tide of emerging differing political opinions and the immediacy of social consciousness then sweeping the island.

About the Author

Wallace Collins was born in Kingston, Jamaica the second of seven sons to parents who raised him to believe in his self worth. As a skilled cabinetmaker he immigrated to London, England where he met and married his wife. There he applied his skill as a cabinet maker by day and at night attended night school. Later he migrated to Toronto, Canada where he began to write seriously. Finally, he moved to New York where he has been living for the past thirty years. Wallace Collins is a graduate of Queens College, and has worked most of his life as a cabinetmaker in the countries in which he has lived. He has since retired from work and is now writing fiction and poetry full time.