The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (5 page)

Water

The Misfit

12 March 2001

Dear Poppy

I was sorry not to see you this weekend. Weekends are always a bit lonely here when you’re not around. You missed a glorious display in the Gardens – the crocus carpet is in full bloom already – very early this year – and to stroll along Cherry Walk, one’s eyes taking in swathe upon swathe of these white and purple beauties, their heads bobbing in the breeze, is to realize that spring has come again – finally! Anyway, I hope you had a good time with your mother. Did she take you anywhere, do anything interesting with you? The NFT were showing
The Magnificent Ambersons
on Saturday evening and I would also have liked to take you along to that. I went by myself in the end, but while I was there I bumped into a friend of mine, Martin Wellbourne, and his wife Elizabeth, and they were kind enough to invite me for supper with them afterwards. So it was not such a solitary evening after all.

Now, about our plans for Saturday. I think I mentioned that there was a show at Tate Britain at the moment that you might find especially interesting? They are showing some films and photographs by a new young artist called Tacita Dean. You might possibly have heard of her already. A couple of years ago she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. If you don’t like the sound of it, just say so and we shall certainly find something else to do, but I hope you will want to come. I have to say that I have very particular and personal reasons for wanting to see this show. You see, it contains a short film inspired by the disappearance at sea of the lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in the summer of 1969 – and even, so I am led to believe, some photographs of his ill-fated yacht, the
Teignmouth Electron
, which Ms Dean has taken just in the last couple of years, travelling for this purpose to its final resting place at Cayman Brac in the Caribbean.

It occurs to me that you might not know what on earth I am talking about here. It also occurs to me that, if I am to tell you a little bit about my fascination with the story of Donald Crowhurst, this is going to turn into a very long letter. But, no matter. It is Monday morning, an empty day stretches ahead of me, and there is nothing I like better than writing to my niece. So, excuse me for a moment while I go and pour myself another cup of coffee, and I shall try to explain.

Well now.

If I am to make you understand what the figure of Donald Crowhurst meant to me, when I was an eight-year-old boy, then I must take you back – back more than thirty years, to the England of 1968 – a place, and a time, which already seem unimaginably remote. I’m sure that the mention of that year summons up all sorts of associations for you: the year of student radicalism, the counter-culture – anti-Vietnam rallies and The Beatles’
White Album
and all of that. Well, that only tells part of the story. England was – and always has been – a more complicated place than people would have us believe. What would you say if I told you that, in my memory of things, the great hero, the defining figure of that era was not John Lennon or Che Guevara, but a conservative, old-fashioned, sixty-five-year-old vegetarian with the looks and bearing of an avuncular Latin master? Can you even guess who I might be talking about? Does his name even mean anything any more?

I’m referring to Sir Francis Chichester.

You probably have no idea who Sir Francis Chichester was. Let me tell you, then. He was a yachtsman, a mariner – one of the most brilliant that England has ever produced. And in 1968 he was a celebrity, one of the most famous and talked-about people in the country. As famous as David Beckham is today, or Robbie Williams? Yes, I should think so. And his achievement, although it might seem pointless, I suppose, to today’s younger generation, remains, in many people’s eyes, much greater than simply playing football or writing pop songs. He was famous for sailing around the world, single-handed, in his boat
Gypsy Moth
. He completed the voyage in 226 days, and most incredibly of all, during that time he made only one stop, in Australia. It was a magnificent feat of seamanship, courage and endurance, performed by the most unlikely of heroes.

I had the enormous good fortune to grow up next to the sea. I think you’ve visited the town where your mother and I grew up, haven’t you? Shaldon, it is called, in Devon. We lived in a large Georgian house close to the water. Shaldon itself, however, is built around a relatively modest saltwater inlet, and to get to the seafront proper you have to go half a mile up the road to neighbouring Teignmouth. And here you will find everything you might want from a seaside resort: a pier, beaches, amusement arcades, miniature golf, dozens of boarding houses and, of course, down by the docks, a lively marina, where yachtsmen and boaters of every description would gather every day, and the air was always alive with the whispering noises of masts and rigging as they creaked and shifted in the breeze. From an early age – ever since I can remember – my mother and father used to take me down to the marina to watch those comings and goings, the ceaseless ebb and flow of maritime life. Although we never sailed ourselves, we knew plenty of people who did: by the age of eight I was a veteran of several modest ocean voyages aboard yachts belonging to my parents’ friends, and had developed a deep schoolboy fascination for all things nautical.

No wonder, then, that Francis Chichester and his accomplishment loomed so large in my consciousness. Although we never actually made the pilgrimage along the coast to Plymouth to see him make his return landing in May 1967, I vividly remember watching coverage of the event – along with millions of others – live on BBC television. If I remember rightly, the normal schedules had even been cleared for the purpose. Plymouth docks and the area surrounding them were covered with swarms of well-wishers – hundreds of thousands of them. They cheered and applauded and waved their Union Jacks in the air as
Gypsy Moth
glided into the harbour, surrounded by launches carrying journalists and TV camera crews. Chichester himself stood on the deck and waved back, looking tanned, serene and healthy – not at all like someone who had spent the last seven and a half months enduring an extreme form of solitary confinement. It had been an occasion which made my heart swell with uncomplicated patriotic pride – something I cannot remember feeling very often since. And after that, I began keeping a scrapbook, full of cuttings about Chichester’s voyage and any other boating-related stories I could cull from the newspapers my parents favoured.

Those newspapers, I seem to remember, were the
Daily Mail
on weekdays, and on Sundays – along with at least half of the nation, it always seemed back then – the
Sunday Times
. And it was in the
Sunday Times
, on 17 March, 1968, that I read this electrifying announcement:

£
5,000

The
£
5,000
Sunday Times
round-the-world race prize will be awarded to the single-handed yachstman who completes the fastest non-stop navigation of the world departing after 1 June and before 31 October, 1968, from a port on the British mainland, and rounding the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn).

A race! And a race that would top Chichester’s achievement by subjecting the competitors to an even more extreme test of survival – a
non-stop
circumnavigation. Quite apart from the trial of seamanship involved, could anybody survive such an ordeal, psychologically? As I said, I had already sailed in one or two yachts. I knew what the cabins were like: surprisingly cosy, sometimes, and surprisingly well equipped, but above all
tiny
. Even smaller than my little bedroom at home. The fact that Chichester had lived in such a confined space for so long was, to me, almost his most impressive feat. It seemed incredible that these men were prepared to live like that for so many cramped, waterlogged months.

Who were these masochists, in any case? Already, after reading a few of the
Sunday Times
reports, I had concluded for myself that the strongest contender was a French yachtsman called Bernard Moitessier. He was a fabulous seaman – lean, sinewy, and totally dedicated to the life of the lone explorer. He had already sailed his 39-foot boat
Joshua
through the fearsome waters of the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, encountering (and surviving) terrifying storms in the process. It appeared that he was reluctant to enter the race, but under its rules, he had no choice: the
Sunday Times
had cleverly arranged things so that any sailor who set off round the world between June and October was a contender for the prize, whether they wanted it or not. I pinned my colours to Moitessier and even persuaded my parents to buy me an expensive hardback copy of his book,
Sailing to the Reefs
, for my eighth birthday. The writing was rather too dense and poetic for me to enjoy, but I pored for hours over the black-and-white photographs of the muscular Moitessier powering his boat through the waves and swinging effortlessly from rope to rope amid the rigging of his yacht like a nautical Tarzan.

The other entrants to the race, announced one by one, failed to capture my imagination in the same way. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old English merchant marine officer; Chay Blyth, a former army sergeant, one year his junior; Donald Crowhurst, aged thirty-six, a British engineer and manager of an electronics company; Nigel Tetley, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and four others. None of them seemed in Moitessier’s league. One or two of them, from what I could gather, had barely been to sea before. But then something happened to change my mind, and my allegiance. My father came in from work one day with a copy of the
Teignmouth Post and Gazette
and showed me the front-page story – which announced, amazingly, that one of the entrants to the race, Donald Crowhurst, had now decided not just that he was going to set sail from Teignmouth, but that he had even agreed to name his yacht
Teignmouth Electron
. (In return, as it later emerged, for a number of local sponsorship deals.)

The name of the man who had persuaded Crowhurst to bestow these benefits on a town with which he otherwise had no connection was Rodney Hallworth: a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter, now Devon-based press agent and assiduous promoter of anything and everything that might raise the profile of Teignmouth in the eyes of the wider world. From the stories which he now began to feed to the local and national newspapers, I began to build up an image in my mind of Donald Crowhurst as a kind of yachting superhero: the dark horse of the race, and therefore its most intriguing and alluring competitor. Not only was he an accomplished seaman, apparently, he was an electronics wizard, and a designer of genius, who despite making a late entrance into the race was going to snatch it from under the noses of his rivals by setting sail in a sleek, modern, radically innovative vehicle which had been built to his own specifications – a trimaran, no less, with a unique self-righting system which would activate in case of a capsize, and which was controlled (here was the clincher – the word which, in 1968, set everybody’s pulse racing) by a
computer
.

Instantly, Donald Crowhurst became the focus of all my interest and admiration. He was due to arrive in Teignmouth in only a matter of weeks – and I, for one, couldn’t wait.

A support committee had now been formed, and one of my father’s sailing friends was a keen member. In this way we were drip-fed pieces of information. Crowhurst’s boat was finished, we were told, and he was already sailing it from a boatyard in Norfolk round to the Devon coast. He would be with us in a matter of days. As it turned out, this forecast was optimistic. Teething troubles dogged that maiden voyage, which took four times as long as it should have done, and it was mid-October by the time Crowhurst and his team made it to Teignmouth. On the Friday afternoon after his arrival, my mother picked me up from school and took me down to the harbour to catch an early glimpse of my hero and to watch some of his preparations.

Every child, I imagine, has a defining moment at some point in their lives, when the meaning of the word ‘disappointment’ becomes cruelly apparent to them. A moment when they realize that the world, which they had hitherto conceived as being ripe with promise, rich with infinite possibilities, is in reality a flawed and circumscribed place. That moment can be devastating, and can linger in the mind for years afterwards, much stronger than the memory of early joys and infant excitements. And in my case, it came that grey Friday afternoon in mid-October, when I had my first sight of Donald Crowhurst.

This was the man who was going to win the
Sunday Times
round-the-world yacht race? The man who was going to defeat Moitessier, the brilliant, experienced Frenchman? And this was
Teignmouth Electron
, the ultimate in modern boat design, which was going to skim across the massive waves of the Southern Ocean, every nuance of its fleet-footed movement tempered and adjusted by the latest in computer technology?

Frankly, both of these things seemed hard to credit. Crowhurst cut a poor, diminished figure: after all the bravado of his newspaper interviews, I had been expecting someone with an aura of confidence about him, some sense of derring-do – a
presence
, in other words. Instead, he seemed ineffectual and preoccupied. I have the impression (in retrospect, of course) that he was alarmed, even terrified, by the spotlight that had been turned upon him, and the weight of expectation that came with it. As for the much vaunted
Teignmouth Electron
, not only did it look puny and fragile, but the preparations around it were shambolic. The boat itself seemed to be still under construction, with a succession of workmen trooping on and off it every day, performing endless repairs, while on the quayside bewildering numbers of supplies were steadily accumulating in messy piles – everything from carpenter’s tools to radio equipment to tins of soup and corned beef. In and around all this chaos, Crowhurst himself pottered aimlessly, posing for the omnipresent camera crew, quarrelling with his boat-builders, popping into telephone kiosks to remonstrate with would-be suppliers, and every day looking more and more obviously sick with apprehension.