ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY man to do his duty, and every child to know about it. This year being the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar, it is hardly surprising to find flotillas of fiction about Nelson and the Napoleonic wars appearing on our horizon.

Elizabeth Laird’s Secrets of the Fearless is an enjoyable period romp, not dissimilar to Michael Molloy’s Peter Raven adventure published this year and the forthcoming Powder Monkey by Paul Dowswell. No matter: the knowledge of how young boys were pressed into the Navy by being tricked into taking the king’s shilling is subsumed by the romance of life on the ocean wave.

In any case, the 12-year-old John Barr has already lost everything thanks to some crooked lawyers who have bankrupted his Scottish father out of their small estate and accused them of murder. Father and son are separated, and John goes to work as a powder monkey on HMS Fearless, a 600-strong man o’ war under the command of a heroic Captain Bannerman. John is a boy straight out of G. A. Henty, being brave, honourable and perhaps a trifle dim compared with the quiet Kit, who becomes his best friend. He gets sea sick, learns to climb the rigging and encounters a bullying bosun, who is oddly interested in the satchel that John has brought from home. Thanks to the quick wits of his friends, John is able to hide it and discover that he has a codebook with which to befuddle the French spies on board ship.

These days, boys no more dream of running away to sea than they long to be traindrivers, but books such as Secrets of the Fearless may blow upon the dying embers of imaginations incinerated by computerised spaceships. The film of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander is the favourite movie of almost every boy aged 10 to 13, inculcating all kinds of old-fashioned ideas about the values of duty and comradeship which tend to be thin on the ground elsewhere.

Apart from the appeal of seeing really big cannons blowing people to smithereens, the film depicts a world without girls — which, I’m afraid, is where Laird’s novel starts to fall down. As those familiar with the genre might guess, Kit is a French aristocratic girl in disguise. This might make it more interesting to girls who have got halfway through the story, but it is likely to lose the boy who is the natural audience for it, especially once John starts to fall in love.

John and Kit smuggle themselves into France to discover more about what those dammed Frogs are up to. Shot at and separated from their superior officers, they must flee to safety after John is wounded.

From here, it nosedives into romance. Boys just about tolerate cross-dressing girls in an adventure story if they stay firmly boyish, as the heroine of Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason does, but even girls are likely to get restive by the time Kit wows the French with her ballgown.

Secrets of the Fearless is well-written and starts promisingly, with all the details of life on board ship made more interesting since the author’s great-great-great-grandfather also served in the Napoleonic wars. The bits that my children and I loved were about when our hero must “sleep squashed up in a hammock, eat nothing but weevily biscuit, be permanently cold, soaked and at risk of my life (and) live as close as hogs in a sty with a set of fellows I don’t care about”.

Worse things happen at sea, and that is why old and young alike revel in tales about it. Let us hope that in John and Kit’s next adventure there is a lot more discomfort and a lot less kissing.

SECRETS OF THE FEARLESS (10+)
by Elizabeth Laird
Macmillan, £12.99; 320pp
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

What's more

NELSON
by Richard Brassey
(Brilliant Brits, £3.99)

This excellent biography series tells the story of famous Britons in admirably clear, concise and very funny strip cartoons. Nelson’s victories, wounds and love life all briskly described. Perfect for 8+.

LITTLE TIM SERIES
by Edward Ardizzone
(Scholastic)

Old-fashioned but utterly adorable series by the great illustrator in which a small boy continually runs off to sea and has adventures before being reunited with his loving parents. Read it and weep. 6+

PIRATES!
by Celia Rees
(Bloomsbury, £5.99)

This is more like it for girls of 11+. Two half-sisters run away from slavery and a forced marriage to piracy in the Caribbean.

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