Wallace Collins

Swell Tide Shimmy: to Jamaica with Love Wallace Collins

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 Two. Shortly 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, willing himself to survive the traumatic results from a freak guest of wind that caught his parachute, and carried him away off course and down into an icy stream. He recovers, however, enough to justify himself and his Commanding Officer that he was in Britain to fight in World War Two 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?he does not accept it as fact?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.