I meant it.
I said I’d booked my fare and could they please loan me a thousand pounds for the ticket, a new backpack, and spending money until I got a job in New Zealand. Mother had an attack of the vapors about me being far too young and not finishing my A-levels and the dangers of young girls going hitchhiking, but Dad knew what I was on about.
He signed a check and gave me this letter of introduction to some old friends in Auckland. He’d been at university, Yale or Duke or somewhere, with the wife. Mother bought a money bag to put around my waist and a whistle to blow if/when I got raped. She helped me pack so that I didn’t start off already overweight. Dad lifted my bulging purple backpack into the car. They both cried at the airport. Then there was a five-hour delay while we waited for a blizzard to blow itself out. I wanted them to go, leave me, but they wouldn’t.
Remember, Martin, I rang you the night before I left?
You couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Why New Zealand, New Zealand for God’s sake? Because it’s as far away as I can possibly get, I said, unless I sign up for space travel, and after watching Christa McAuliffe’s spacecraft fly to pieces on the telly five minutes after takeoff, I wasn’t so keen on that. Jumbo jets to New Zealand don’t often go down in flames. They usually arrive.
Auckland’s a hole, you said. It wasn’t like you, Martin, that comment, not you at all. You’ve never been there, how could you know? I said, Missing me already? Desperately, you said. Come with me, I said. Take a trip. The slight pause at the other end of the phone made me think you just might. Come with me.
But you didn’t and Auckland wasn’t a hole. It was a Monday in January. Coming nonstop from Los Angeles, we flew in from the north, which meant over the Hauraki Gulf and the Waitamata Harbor. The pilot was a Kiwi who liked talking to his passengers, so we heard all about the famous cruising grounds, and Rangitoto, which is the circular volcanic island at the entrance to the harbor, and the anniversary regatta. This regatta, he explained, was why there were so many yachts out sailing: over a thousand, celebrating the founding of the city in… I think he said 1840. It was the oldest and largest one-day regatta in the world. Yawn. He apologized for the low cloud. Air traffic control had told him that occasional rain squalls were giving the yachts a hard time down there on the water. Just get this airplane down safely on the tarmac, I thought. I couldn’t see much anyway, just low green hills, white-speckled sea, drifting gray clouds. I was sitting between a fat businessman who had asked for (and got) two meals each mealtime and a very ugly baby attached to a young mother in leather jeans. Neither of them was going to tell me much about Auckland’s cheapest backpackers’ hostels, were they? We landed in the pouring rain at six at night. Actually, Martin, I was scared stiff.
I shall pass with dignity over the airport, where they made me empty out my backpack to the last pair of panty hose, and the bus trip into town, where I got off at the Hilton by mistake, instead of the Hylton Backpackers, and my first night in a dorm with two German lesbians who seemed to think I was one of them. I speak enough German to understand something of what they were saying. Eight o’clock next morning I got on the phone to Dad’s friends and by that night I was one of the family.
Now, to understand why I’m now a famous round-the-world yachtsperson, Martin, you’ve got to understand something about Auckland. The place is sailing-mad. In Britain we might think Cowes is something special, and over in America they’ve got Newport, Rhode Island, and Chesapeake Bay and Miami and San Diego, but in Auckland you don’t have to be rich to own a boat. Everybody sails something, or drives something flashy with a big engine, or small with a little outboard, or goes windsurfing or surfing or fishing or canoeing or rowing or just swimming. They’re sea-mad.
The family I stayed with weren’t rich, but they owned about five boats: a keelboat, three sailing dinghies, and a runabout with an outboard, and two Windsurfers. The keelboat was seventy years old, vintage wooden; the sailing dinghies were between ten and fifty years old; the Windsurfers were brand-new, and they kept them all in a scruffy tumbledown boat shed on the edge of the harbor. Perhaps “scruffy” isn’t quite the right word. “Messy,” “chaotic,” “a shambles,”—totally fascinating. You wanted it, some bolt, or block, or brass screw or length of rope or scrap of sail, Pete would find it for you, somewhere, like an archaeologist digging in a scrap heap.
They don’t really come into this story much—Pete and his boats and his mad, messy, chaotic, and fascinating family: the wife who went to Yale, five teenagers, four cars, five boats, two dogs, and a pet seagull—except as links in the chain that led me to be turning over the tape for side two.
Are you still listening, Martin?
Where was I? Oh yes, Pete the teacher. If I thought my father was slightly obsessed with his little day boat on the Norfolk Broads, I hadn’t then met Pete, or other equally boat-mad Aucklanders. Various members of the family and friends thereof sailed most weekends and all the summer holidays. They painted other weekends. They read yachting magazines at night and talked races and designs and sailing gossip round the dinner table. The house was full of sailing ship watercolors and wet life jackets.
When the Whitbread round-the-world yachts came to Auckland every four years, they hosted a crew, which meant providing dry stationary beds and iced beer for fifteen randy young men and doing great piles of their stinking laundry. One year they all took Spanish lessons because they were to be hosting a Spanish yacht. Next time it was the Russians. Pete taught science and maritime studies at a high school, “the wife” taught clinical psychology at the Auckland medical school, and the five kids were all students, from university down to primary school.
Now, I didn’t freeload, Martin. I really liked Mrs. Pete and Fanny, the daughter, same age as me, and I didn’t mind being teased about my Pommy accent and pale skin. During the two weeks I was there I pulled my weight with housework and shopping and odd jobs on the boats. All the schoolkids were going back to school at the start of their new year in February. I lay on the beach down by the boat shed, below the house, and stupidly got blistered quite badly on my shoulders. They’d warned me about New Zealand’s ultraviolet sun and holes in the ozone layer, but after Oxford’s snow I just couldn’t resist basking. I began to see Auckland as the beautiful city it is, between two harbors, with its little green hills that are dormant volcanoes. Not dead, note: dormant. They say one of them will pop sooner or later. You can climb up and see the old craters, shaped into deep and sinister cones.
Mid-February is lazy time in New Zealand. The kids are all back at school and university, but the country still feels like it’s on holiday. I had started to make halfhearted attempts to find a cheap apartment and get waitressing work when Pete suggested I meet some youngish blue-water yachting friends of his who were looking for crew.
The next if.
The silly thing is that I wasn’t then an athletic type, far from it. Yes, I’d done some sailing with Dad at home. I knew how to steer a boat and put the sails up, but I wasn’t really hooked on sailing as “my sport.” I didn’t particularly see the need to have a sport at all. I liked going to films, cooking things like sauces for pasta and especially rich Italian cheesecakes, just being with my friends. I loathed any exercise, but especially the team games we did at school, hockey and such. I was hopeless with a tennis racket, and no one swims much in England, though technically speaking I could stay afloat with a sort of breast-stroke. I was a bit plump. Let’s say, being truthful, very plump. I smoked quite a bit to avoid becoming plumper. I wore very baggy clothes, of dark and obscuring colors. I was a bit of a blob, really.
So I don’t suppose I looked like very promising crew material when I stepped aboard the Dolphin, which was tied up at a city marina, for the first time. And frankly, the thought of three months at sea at various strange angles, being frozen, bored, or sunburned to death, didn’t appeal to me much. I didn’t know if I’d get seasick out on the wide ocean, did I, as opposed to the sedate Norfolk Broads. And
the first sight of Barry and Harry Wildblood (cousins, and their real names, no kidding) didn’t do much for me.
If I was on the plump side, they were both as skinny as rakes, with hard muscles stretched taut over long bones, like scarecrows. Hair cut ferociously short, three days’ stubble, eyes wrinkled up, ice blue; the searching eyes of mad scientists you see in that National Geographic magazine with the yellow cover. They’d met Pete when they came to Auckland to avoid the Pacific hurricane season and do some work on the boat. Aged about thirty, give or take five years either side. It’s difficult to tell. They looked like ex-cops, actually, tough and mean. But Barry had very red lips at the center of his stubble, and a voice like silk. He laughed a lot. Harry was quieter, with tattoos of sailing ships on his arms. Their accents were vaguely English—hard to tell, though they told me they had New Zealand passports. They wore very short shorts, gold chains, Rolex Oyster watches, the best French sunglasses, and that was all. They both smelled nice, though French toiletries for men didn’t quite fit on a yacht.
I wasn’t too impressed. But the yacht was impressive. They took me on a tour. It was forty feet long, a steel ketch, New Zealand-built, their home for the past six years. On deck were lots of color-coded ropes, new sails in bright blue bags, and shining chrome. Below, a huge galley—sorry, kitchen—lots of varnished wood, Italian-looking cushions, two bunk rooms; everything tidy, clean. Electronic gear. Charts. Fresh flowers. They grew herbs. I noticed lots of books, CDs, tape cassettes. It all felt rather luxurious. I wondered what they did for money.
Now, Martin, and my eventual readers, you’re probably thinking, What was this nice sixteen-year-old English girl thinking of, going sailing with these mean-looking but mysteriously smiling rogues? They had welcomed me politely enough. I heard that they planned to write a book about their coming Pacific trip. They were going to study seabirds and Polynesian methods of navigation along the way, heading for Tahiti, Hawaii across to Vanuatu, the Solomons, many of the islands in between, and finally back to Auckland. We sat on the deck in the sunshine, drinking chardonnay, crunching macadamia and pine nuts. They asked me about my family, about England, about the sailing I’d done on the Norfolk Broads, but I got the distinct impression that I hadn’t passed the potential-crew test. Too young, too plump, too inexperienced —right on all counts. I told you I was a bit of a blob.
So I wasn’t thinking of vast Pacific oceans when I accepted their invitation to go sailing for a weekend around the inner Hauraki Gulf. A shakedown cruise, said Barry. I thought, why not, just for a bit of a laugh; these were Kiwis being kind to the young English visitor. Safety in numbers. Just bring enough gear for two nights. No food. They’d been provisioning the boat for the long voyage, due to start shortly, just as soon as the hurricane season was over. Bring wet-weather gear, swim togs, sunblock, a hat. Bring yourself.
They were friends of Pete’s, weren’t they? And Pete was a friend of my father’s. How naive can you get?
I honestly think they really did intend—at first—to drop me off back in Auckland before they headed off into the wild blue yonder. That’s another if…if I had not cooked dinner on that Friday night. But I’d looked in the food lockers and seen wonderful fresh provisions and offered to cook a pasta and make a salad. Harry produced extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pine nuts, fat cloves of garlic, capers, homemade fresh pasta, Gorgonzola.
That’s another thing about New Zealand, or Auckland, at any rate. For someone who loves good food, it’s Mecca. It was the capsicum season, the apple season, the peach, apricot, nectarine, raspberry, courgette, and tomato season. The city is surrounded by orchards and gardens. Perhaps it’s coming from England, where fruit and veggies are all wilted or frozen or horrendously expensive, but I’d never seen anything like the fresh stuff Pete’s wife brought on her way home from work every second day, nor what was loaded on that yacht.
So, when we came to anchor in a green bay fringed with trees, I made an Italian salad with basil and capers, and a pasta with Gorgonzola and pine nut sauce, and a frothy zabaglione with marsala and raspberries. Over a fire Barry built ashore with smooth stones, we butter-basted and grilled the three small snapper we’d caught with a line out over the side. It was a good meal, a wonderful meal. Barry and Harry loved it. That meal, I was shortly to realize, was my big mistake.
Now it’s wrong to say I was kidnapped, or abducted, or hijacked, or captured, or taken hostage, or any other legal word that a whole lot of horrified adults used when I finally reappeared in this world two years and seven months later. I just wasn’t allowed to get off, that’s all.
Hey, wait a minute, I hear you say. Not allowed) A sixteen-year-old, forced against her will to go blue-water sailing and heaven knows what else besides? That’s dreadful. Find these Wildblood cousins, charge them with all sorts of crimes, expose them to the world as child-stealers, exploiters, molesters, or worse. Who are these young men with so much money and so few morals that they can swan around the Pacific on a forty-foot yacht with a sixteen-year-old girl as their hijacked cook and bottle washer, and no doubt sexual object and slave? Feminists of the world unite against these scoundrels, these… these… men.
There won’t be any charges, Martin and readers. No recriminations. Just a sort of love, thanks for making me what I am. How can I convince you that it was the best thing that ever happened to me?
The night I cooked my fateful meal we lay on the beach and watched the stars come out. As we rowed out to the boat, phosphorescence swirled like a million Tinker Bells around my fingers and the blades of the oars. We had a glittering silver swim, and later that night I saw phosphorescent dolphins as we sailed out into the gulf. I was utterly at peace.
It wasn’t until I woke, until next morning, that I first thought something odd was going on. It wasn’t until I’d seen no land at all for three days that Barry admitted we were bound for the vast expanse of the Pacific. We were already well east of North Cape, New Zealand’s northernmost point. “We’ve passed the point of no return, sweetie,” said Harry with a disarming smile. “You are such a superb cook, we just had to keep you.”
Now this is where you might think me quite odd.
Barry and Harry, didn’t they expect—Martin and readers, aren’t you expecting—that I would be throwing tantrums, mounting a one-woman mutiny, demanding to tell the VHF radio that the yacht Dolphin had a kidnapped, helpless sixteen-year-old English girl aboard and would they please send a helicopter or a frigate from the Royal New Zealand Navy to get me off?
Wasn’t I terrified, terrorized, alone on the ocean with two strange and dubious men?
Didn’t I want my mum?
And of course I didn’t have a passport, traveler’s checks, enough gear, or two years’ supply of tampons and decent shampoo and sunblock and other girlish necessities.
At the very least, surely I would be refusing to go anywhere near the kitchen.
I worried about none of those things.
I decided to outwit Barry and Harry, for however long it took.
I allowed them to send a radio message to Pete, and therefore to my parents, that my plans had changed but I was perfectly okay. I determined that I would not complain—and I didn’t. I would not get seasick—and I didn’t. I would not allow myself to be touched or in any way sexually approached by Barry or Harry—and I didn’t. I would cook—and I did, superbly. I would enjoy the cooking—and I did. I would take the opportunity to learn everything I could from Barry and Harry about the sea, seamanship, the boat, all those things I listed earlier— and I did. I would always sleep watchfully—and I did. I would lose weight and become fit and strong and capable—and I did. I would become a woman—and I did.
Too good to be true, you are saying. No teenager could have that sort of self-control, that sort of stamina for two and a half years, especially in the cheek-by-jowl living of a forty-foot yacht with only two cabins. Come on.
But you are forgetting one thing: Barry and Harry were not child molesters or
rapists or murderers. They were decent people whose weakness for good food led them to convince themselves that they’d just played a little joke on me, and they’d let me get off at Fiji or somewhere. But by the time we called at Papeete in Tahiti for food and fuel, we’d become rather good friends. Without a passport or money, I joined in the elaborate precautions through which I escaped detection by any customs officer of the island ports we visited for that whole two years.
They never asked for any money from me. I shared their clothes, and found out how few clothes you actually need; how little washing when the rain is free and you let the oils in your skin do their work; how you can manage without tampons and shampoo and a choice of twenty-five varieties of deodorant.
It wasn’t that holier-than-thou back-to-nature stuff, it was just simple living with two together people in a small space with the right supplies aboard. We were in harmony with the sea and the elements. You looked after everything carefully, from brass screws to olive oil to every last inch of rope to every last squeeze of toothpaste, simply because you knew there wasn’t another supermarket just beyond the horizon.
When we were scudding along in the sunshine and I sensed they needed some privacy without having to shut themselves in their cabin, I would go and sit up by the bow (sorry, Martin, the sharp end), watching the froth of the bow wave swirling off the glistening arrowhead of the yacht for hours on end. Or I would steer while they lay on the foredeck, hidden from my view by the cabin top. Barry sang a lot—songs from the seventies, songs from shows, songs he wrote himself. He taught me sea chanteys and to play a ukulele, poker, five hundred, Chinese patience, and mah-jongg. I learned to navigate with a sextant, while Barry practiced his navigation, Polynesian style. Together we studied French and Maori. Harry spent a lot of time keeping a log and writing in a large notebook. Barry wrote his songs down too.
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