Kimbrough, Emily. And a Right Good Crew. Illustrated by Mircea Vasiliu. Harper and Brothers, 1958.
Reason read: A pleasant end of the year read.
Sophie and Arthur Kober, Howard and Dorothy Lindsay, and Emily Kimbrough make up the “right good” crew. This is the story of the five of them are canal cruising aboard first the Venturer and then the Maid Marysue. They travel between Staffordshire and London with plenty of adventure along the way.
Parts about Kimbrough that made me laugh: she was a self proclaimed arguer. She liked a persuasive dialogue challenge. Throughout And a Right Good Crew she was witty and humorous. I loved how she described herself and her companions as heathens who didn’t know how to make a proper pot of tea. She shamelessly uses her daughter’s pregnancy to gain special treatment while traveling and desperately wanted to see how a game of darts was played. I think I would have liked to be friends with Emily Kimbrough.
A few scenes I enjoyed: shopping in 1950s England. They didn’t supply shoppers with containers for their purchases, (What is old is new again. Maine does provide shopping bags, either.) Arthur Kober’s attempt to steer the Maid Marysue, and the ringing of the bells.
Beyond a pleasant memoir, And a Right Good Crew includes some practical late 1950s information about traveling by canal: a glossary of terms, a step by step directive of how to take a boat through a lock, a list of books for suggested reading, and a tally of basic expenses.
As an aside, if you order a Bloody Mary in London, are you swearing at Mary?
Author fact: Kimbrough grew up in Chicago and developed a sense of wanderlust early on.
Book trivia: be forewarned, the details are a little dated. Case in point, the hire fee for a boat was twenty-nine pounds per week. A charge for a lad was six a week.
Head scratching lines, “He had phrased her incompetence delicately” (p 7), “We continued to impose our involuntary shock treatment” (p 180), and “Neither activity came even in the neighborhood of my comprehension” (p 224).
Setlist: Gershwin’s “A Woman is a Sometime Thing”.
Nancy said: Pearl included And a Right Good Crew as a humorous book about cruising. She had more to say about the book but you should check it out for yourself in Book Lust To Go (p 253).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Water, Water Everywhere” (p 253).
~*LunaSea*~ 