William M.P.  McFee was born at sea in 1881.  His father, an English skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long voyage.  His mother was a native of Nova Scotia.  They settled in New Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was educated in the city schools of which the first pages of Casuals of the Sea give a pleasant description.  Then he went to a well-known grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk—­what we would call over here a high school.  He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.

At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.  This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse, Smithfield Market, and the famous “Bart’s” Hospital.  In fact, the office of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665.  His father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred pounds sterling.  McFee has often wondered just what he got for the money.  However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else is an established way of working out one’s destiny in England, and at the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform.  You will find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out in Aliens.

After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling’s mantle.  This was at the time of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either imitating Kipling or reacting from him.

His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives and thoughts of the working classes.  He was strongly influenced by socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books.  He came to live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic Utopia made him uneasy.  His afternoons were spent at the British Museum reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own.  Competent engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind.  As early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.

In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste.  He jumped at the chance.  Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year (1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write.  The reader of Aliens will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he reaches page 416.  “Netley” is but a thin disguise.  I suspect a certain liveliness in the ozone of Nutley.  Did not Frank Stockton write some of his best tales there?  Some day some literary meteorologist will explain how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley (N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)