The Lonely Sea and the Sky Read online

  In early 1971 he made the passage in remarkably good time, 22.3 days, but didn't achieve his goal of 200 miles a day over the full distance. Nevertheless, for a man in his seventieth year to average 179 miles a day was pretty remarkable. He had the odd adventure coming back to England, including another serious knockdown when he thought for a while that the boat was sinking and he was done for. He survived to come back to a much quieter reception and set about writing the book of the voyage which he was determined was to be the best he had ever produced. He had difficulty in settling on a title and my contribution was to persuade him to call it The Romantic Challenge for it seemed to me he had been on a quixotic quest to get to the other side of the horizon as fast as he could. It was a good book but, unfortunately, all the other adventurers and explorers who were out there doing things and publishing books resulted in it not achieving the success of the round-the-world book or this The Lonely Sea and the Sky.

  Sometime in 1971 he was diagnosed with another cancer, this time of the blood, and it was the real thing. He fought it hard and, nothing daunted, entered for the 1972 single-handed transatlantic race. Some thought, when they saw his physical condition at the start, that his intention was to go out and end his days at sea. It was not so, and, when he realised he was no longer up to handling the boat all the way across, he turned back for home. He had another adventure on the way back when a French weather vessel, in seeking to offer assistance, passed too close and caught the rigging, thus breaking off part of the mizzen mast. Due to his return, I too had an adventure; I was enjoying myself at Henley when I was persuaded to fly to Culdrose airfield in Cornwall, be helicoptered out to rendezvous with HMS Salisbury in the Western Approaches, and put aboard Gipsy Moth V via a rubber launch, with a volunteer crew of Royal Navy chaps, to help the old man sail back. It was only a few weeks later that he finally gave up the struggle and died.

  Having read this book several times and lived through the later part of his life, it seems to me that this is a tremendous story of ups and downs, of setback and achievement. For me, when I read the words on the page, I can hear my father speaking. It is a good yarn, full of encouragement about what can be done against the odds. For him, the answer to the question 'Why did you do it?' was that it 'intensifies life'. What more could one ask?

  INTRODUCTION

  J. R. L. ANDERSON

  We know nothing of the boyhood of Ulysses, and it has always seemed to me a great loss that he did not write the story of his early life after he had got back from his travels. Perhaps he could not; perhaps Tennyson was right, and he set off again 'to sail beyond the sunset', leaving himself no time for recollection in tranquillity. But still, it is a pity.

  Autobiography is an intensely difficult task, and whatever satisfaction the writing of his own life may give the man who writes it, his readers will be satisfied seldom. If you are interested in a man, you want to know as much as you can about him, not only what he did, but what made him want to do it, what formed him, moulded him into the kind of man he is. Of what formed Ulysses, we know nothing; at the other extreme, in that lovely chapter of autobiography by W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, we read on with excitement to find suddenly that we have got to the last page and that Hudson is still about five years old. In so far as a man can succeed in making a rounded whole of a life that he has not yet finished living, I think Francis Chichester has succeeded in this book. His boyhood, his young manhood, achievement in maturity, all are there, credible, interesting always, and the more moving because the record is unadorned. How Homer would have loved a story Chichester tells of one of his early adventures in his North Devon woods. It is best to hear him tell it, in his quiet, unemphatic voice, rich in quartertones:

  Once I fell from a crow's nest in an oak tree. First I was falling through branches, hitting one and then another, and then for the last twenty feet or so, dropping clear. I hit the ground with a terrific whang, and everything went black. I was in great pain and wondered what damage had been done. I didn't move a millimetre from my position when I landed, just stayed dead still for what seemed a long time, although, perhaps, it was only about a quarter of an hour. Gradually, the shock went away, and I tried to move my legs and body. To my astonishment, nothing was broken, and in a few minutes I was moving about without much pain. Since then I have tried this technique time after time with success – relaxing completely after a fall, or a big shock.

  After his remarkable single-handed crossing of the Atlantic in 1962, Chichester began contemplating a book on the record of his life. I rather pressed him to it. I had been a good deal mixed up in the planning of his transatlantic voyage, and I had edited his logs to produce a book. It seems to me that Chichester is one of the really great men of our time – great in a personal way that is rare in this period of mass parties, mass achievement, and competing nationalism. Chichester is in the line of great individualists who have enriched human history, in which, perhaps, our English race is (or was) particularly rich – Martin Frobisher, Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, Waterton, Shackleton and their peers. So I pressed him to write some record of his life, before he became too deeply involved in the next adventure.

  His response to this was both flattering and vexatious. He said 'Yes', he would write the book I wanted him to write, but only if I would take his manuscript as he poured out memories of his life and put it into order for him. Now no man could feel other than proud at such a request, but to me it was vexing, and a severe practical problem too, because my association with Chichester has been solely related to the sea, and while we can talk the same language, as it were, here, his immense achievement in the air would have to be history rather than living experience. However, after some argument, I took it on. This book is the outcome of our partnership.

  I must make it clear that I have been throughout a most junior partner. I am by trade a carpenter in words (a joiner, perhaps, if I am feeling arrogant), and like any good carpenter I respect my material. This book is in no sense 'ghosted' – a horrible term for a horrible form of literary faking. Everything in this book is Chichester's own: all that I have done is to cut and tighten here and there, as a documentary film may be cut and tautened by its editor, and occasionally do the mortise-work for joining things together. I have added nothing, commented on nothing: Chichester speaks for himself. And I think that what he has to say is infinitely worth listening to. In an age when human society is inevitably becoming more and more highly organised, when great projects like the development of nuclear energy require the whole resources of the community, it is good to be reminded that one man's vision can still be the driving-force towards wholly individual achievement. Chichester is a single-hander, content to depend on himself, to get out of difficulties by himself. A superficial judgement would be that this is a selfish, or at least self-centred, attitude to life, but that would be a complete misunderstanding of Chichester's complex character. In the best sense, he is one of the least selfish men I have ever come across: he has undertaken whatever project he has set himself with no particular thought of gain, with no demands on others, and with a deep humility of conviction that in setting out to accomplish some hazardous purpose by himself he is fulfilling what he came into the world to do, and thereby performing a service. And in this, I think, he is quite right. His obvious services to the rest of us – his work on navigation for the RAF, for instance – have been great, but to my mind they are secondary to his demonstration of man's continuing ability to fend for himself – 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BEGINNING OF THINGS

  My first adventure was the snakebite. I was eleven, and I had been out in the woods in the spring. There was a sheltered valley with a stream, the Yeo, running down it, which led from my Aunt Rosalie's lake at Arlington; a lush little valley with huge clumps of a broad­leaved plant like a giant rhubarb. I saw a snake twisting through the undergrowth beside a ride through the wood where it had been sunning
itself. I caught it by the tail, got out my handkerchief and stowed it in that, then fastened the four corners together and set off for home, about 3 miles away. Halfway across a big hillside field I saw a beetle in the grass, and thought it would be nice for the snake to have a feed. I took it out and put it on the grass, but it paid no attention to the beetle. Holding it by its neck, I touched its mouth with the beetle, but still it paid no attention; instead, coiled itself up and, bending its head back, hissed at me. I moved my hand to put it back in the handkerchief and it struck my second finger. This stung like six wasp stings, and I danced about sucking the finger which quickly swelled tight and went blue. I put the viper back in the handkerchief and set off for home (I wonder why it did not bite me again?).

  I was alternately running and walking. My arm was swelling and painful, particularly in the armpit. I got very frightened and, being intensely religious then, knelt down on the grass track through the wood at the top of the hill and prayed that I would not die. It was a lovely spring day and dappled sunlight was coming through the trees. When I reached the road in the valley at the back of our house, I met a farmer on horseback and told him I had been bitten by a snake; I undid the handkerchief and showed it to him. He got down from his horse and killed it with his heel, for which I was sorry. When I reached home and told my father what had happened he said, 'What a thing to do, bringing the snake home; it might have bitten your sister.' (He was very fond of my sister.) He then told me to get on my bicycle and set off for the infirmary in Barnstaple, 4½ miles away. By the time I reached Barnstaple I was getting light-headed and lost my way in the town, although I knew it all perfectly well. I remember sitting on a bench in a waiting room. I was very hazy by this time, but I can still see the semi-oval white gauze-covered frame being put over my face, and still recall the dreadful feeling of suffocation when the chloroform that was poured on the mask began to take effect. I think that was the worst of the whole affair. I saw my father, who had harnessed the buggy and followed me, standing by my bed. There was a very sharp pain, presumably as they started slicing open my finger, and then I passed out.

  I heard afterwards that they had sent my father back to fetch the snake, so that they could use some of the poison as an antidote, but then decided not to do so, and waited until some stuff came down from London on a train. This arrived in the evening, and it rippled round inside me as they squirted syringefuls of it into the skin of my stomach. Afterwards, my father told me that they did not know until next morning if I was going to survive.

  This was my first experience of publicity. The adventure was reported in the local paper, and I seemed to have a stream of visitors in the hospital. They included Nancy Platt and my cousin Margaret, whom I adored.

  I do not know if I was born with a passion for spending all day alone in the wildest parts of the countryside. I suspect it was due to circumstances, such as the start of my school life. When I was seven I was sent off to school at Ellerslie, about 7 miles away. My parents used to drive me there in the family buggy. During my first term, the senior boys of the school were having a game, which was to prevent some of them from entering the building. I was standing on the concrete floor of the washplace at the time, with a row of basins round two sides of the room, and above the basins a row of oblong windows, hinged at the top, which pushed outwards. Through one of these windows appeared the head and shoulders of my brother, trying to get into the building. I picked up a handful of sawdust from a box on the floor and threw it in his face. It was a silly, thoughtless thing to do, but certainly not done from malice, only excitement. A bit of this sawdust went into his eye, and I can remember his bending over the basin and bathing it.

  As a result of this I was 'put in Coventry' for three weeks, and for the whole of that time not a single boy in the school spoke to me. My brother, who was four and a half years older than me, was one of the senior boys. I do not know if he had any part in the 'Coventry' punishment, but he never spoke to me during the period of it. It seems hard to believe that senior boys would do such a thing to a seven-year-old new boy, just because of a stupid joke that went wrong. I can assume only that I must have been very objectionable, perhaps precocious; I don't know.

  This episode turned me into a rebel against my fellows; every boy was an enemy unless he proved himself to be a friend. I seemed to have to fight for everything, and the school appeared as tough as a prison. To make matters worse, I was often in trouble with the headmaster. My first term I was up for a beating seven times. The headmaster, who was a big, powerful man, sent one up to one's dormitory at a fixed time. Here, one waited beside one's bed. Being kept waiting was the worst part, and I couldn't stop myself from trembling. He made us strip off our trousers, and beat us on the bare bottom. But not always. Sometimes he made us strip off and bend over, and then didn't beat us. Outside the windows of that dormitory there were creeping plants like Cape gooseberries with bobble-shaped fruit dangling in the wind. Waiting there, I used to see the sparrows flitting amongst this creeper, and this stayed in my memory as a picture of misery. After a year or so my parents took me away from this school; but not because of the tough conditions, only because I was always ill there, which was a nuisance.

  I made no friends at that school, and I had none at home. I had two sisters, but the older, Barbara, was five years younger than me, and we hadn't much in common in the way of adventure. I gradually drifted into the habit of setting off on my own into an escape world of excitement and adventure.

  By the time I was transferred to another preparatory school, the Old Ride, at Branksome, Bournemouth, I must have been a thorough savage, a rebel against everybody, including my parents. But I loved the Old Ride. I liked the boys, I liked the masters and I liked the place itself with its strong, pine smell, and the sandy soil covered with pine needles. In summer we used to go down to the sea through a chine in the cliff, and bathe every morning. The salty water and the hot sunshine made one feel so languorous that it was difficult to struggle back up the chine. I usually found time to scan some of the silvery-sided leaves looking for puss moth caterpillars, with their tapered green bodies and huge, dark-faced heads with two horns. We would be quite content to get a little brown egg or two on the underside of a leaf, and rear the caterpillars ourselves, until they made cocoons in a piece of pine bark. The headmaster, S. A. Phillips, with his stubby, round figure, walrus moustache (off which he would suck drops of soup) and big round spectacles which he pushed up his forehead, made his mistakes, but who doesn't? Perhaps one of the worst that I got involved in was when our dormitory was caught after Lights Out with everybody visiting some other boy in his bed. There was the most frightful hullabaloo about this, and we were brought up for questioning one at a time for week after week, and finally all flogged. We were told we were very lucky not to get the sack, and I believe that if we had not all been involved, we would have. No one mentioned the word 'homosexuality', and I would not have known what it meant if it had been mentioned. And as we used to visit every other bed in turn, I am quite sure that I must have known if any of the boys were interested in this vice. I don't think any of them knew anything about it, and that we merely used to go and swop yarns, and the whole spice of the matter was that it was forbidden to talk after Lights Out. Later, I nearly got expelled from my public school for the same offence when I was caught handing back a piece of India rubber that I had borrowed from another boy, and which was suspected of being a note. At that time I still did not know what homosexuality was, and was not in the least interested. Maybe this was unusual at a public school. My view is that only one or two boys went in for it, though the masters seemed to think that every boy in the school was at it.

  One of the first excitements at the Old Ride was a visit from HMS Eclipse, a cruiser training ship for Osborne cadets. We played cricket against them and, after dark, they turned their searchlight on to the school from where they were anchored in Bournemouth Bay, and I thought this was thrilling. From my dormitory window I could see the Old
Harry rocks at Swanage, and I wonder what I would have thought if a fortune-teller had told me that fifty years later I should be navigating Stormvogel in the dark to an anchorage near these rocks so that a new main halyard could be rove during the Fastnet race. One of the masters was a young parson called Copleston, who was a tremendous favourite with us. He came to stay at my home one holiday. My mother liked him, but I don't think my father did, and the visit was not a great success. Another great favourite as a master was a brother of Beverley Nichols; later he introduced me to Beverley at Marlborough. There was another young master who could not control boys, and I got involved in an episode that made me squirm with shame afterwards. We were out for a walk and crossing an open heathland on a hot summer's day. We were teasing this master, who was very well dressed (it was a Sunday), and wearing a bowler hat. While one boy distracted him in front, I tipped the hat over his eyes, whereupon he lashed out with his stick and hit the wrong boy, which caused tremendous joy amongst the rest of us. At that moment two of my cousins, who happened to be staying at a house near by, although I did not know it, arrived on the scene, also out for a walk. They called me over and gave me a good dressing down. Years later, I thought how awful this must have been for the master, who was really an extremely nice chap.