by Gil McNeil
Sharon had prepared the storm jib as our first sail. With only 21 feet of mast, we would have to raise it sideways, with the corner that was normally sheeted in becoming the top. Clipping it to the halyard, it took her less than two seconds to hoist it aloft. Hannah sheeted it off and it bulged with the breeze. Ropes tightened on the winches and the new support lines creaked.
We were off again, with Miki at the wheel.
Adrienne asked the search and rescue service to stand down. We would give them positional reports every six hours. Meanwhile, I sent a message to Charlotte:
We are doing nine knots towards Chile. We will just head in the general direction of the coast at 50°S until we have some information on where to go.
It is really difficult trying not to show how much my heart is breaking at the moment and to keep people’s spirits up at the same time. Adrienne is being great and mopping up the tears so we don’t drown.
Lots of love and thoughts, Tracy.
Nobody underestimated the danger we still faced. We were deep into the Southern Ocean on a crippled yacht, directly in the path of two more fronts. George and Lee wanted us to get further north because the lows would catch and pass us quickly. The next would arrive within 48 hours, bringing forecast winds of up to 45 knots. I knew the jury rig wouldn’t stand up to a severe storm.
Helena and Hannah began preparing the boat for the rougher weather, checking the drogues, tweaking the jury rig and filling any holes on deck with epoxy. Sharon and Fred worked for hours in the dungeon to turn the staysail into a main.
In London, a media release was drafted to break the news. As I read the statement, I seemed almost detached. So much had happened in the previous eighteen hours that I hadn’t thought about the ramifications of failure. Here it was, set out for me; summed up in a few paragraphs:
Royal & SunAlliance, the 92ft catamaran skippered by Tracy Edwards with an all-female crew of ten, has been forced to abandon its attempts on the Round the World non-stop record for the Trophée Jules Verne.
In pitch darkness at 0850 GMT this morning, on her forty-third day at sea having covered approximately 15,200 miles since setting off from Ushant, north-west France on 3rd February, disaster struck Royal & SunAlliance. In 40-feet seas and winds gusting from 30 to 50 knots, a huge wave came up behind them, lifting the stern and burying both bows in the wave ahead bringing the boat to a shuddering halt. About five minutes later, creaking could be heard from the top of the mast and the whole thing just crumpled over the port side and broke up as it hit the hull.
The all-female crew, who are safe and well, are getting to grips with the new challenge of making the boat sailable and heading for land, some 2,000 miles away in South America. There is no possibility of pursuing the record.
At the time of the disaster, the boat had covered about 350 miles in the last twenty-four hours, and had averaged 435 miles a day over the last nine days in the relentless pursuit of the record of 71 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 8 seconds set last year by Frenchman Olivier de Kersauson.
Speaking from the boat, Tracy Edwards said: ‘We are disappointed beyond belief as we were so close to getting to Cape Horn in such good time against the record. Words cannot describe how we feel at the moment although the girls are once again pulling on their reserves of strength to get through this.’
These words didn’t even come close to conveying how I really felt. I was devastated. That night I cried silently, overcome by a sense of having sacrificed four years of my life for nothing. I woke after six hours, hollow-eyed and echoing inside. I didn’t want to speak to anyone or hear words of comfort.
It was as though someone had died and nobody knew what to say. All of the girls were grieving; unable to talk about how they felt because the shared sadness would have been overwhelming. I was grateful for the fact that nobody mentioned what happened, but I knew I couldn’t hide for ever. Eventually, I would have to put on my bravest face and confront reality.
At first light, Emma R. began filming some reaction scenes for the BBC documentary. I didn’t know if there’d still be one.
‘I really can’t believe this has happened,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t meant to. We have all been to the finish so many times in our minds. We were so frigging close. We were going to be a day behind Olivier at Cape Horn and we were going to burn him off on the way home. We were going to do it. I just can’t believe it.’
Next she interviewed Adrienne who, true to form, said: ‘We could have dithered around and made it, coming in behind Olivier but ahead of where people expected. Instead, we took it as a serious record attempt and sailed the boat like it should be sailed. We were up to it, but the rig wasn’t.’
I woke in the milky grey light of the God Pod. Adrienne’s bunk was empty. A sound of hammering puzzled me and then I felt my chest. I took a deep breath and tried to slow my heart.
Had it all been a dream?
One glance at the blank navigation screens removed any doubt.
That’s it for me, I thought. I’m never setting foot on a boat again. I don’t want to break records. I don’t want to go sailing. I want to curl up in bed and never show my face again. From now on if I need a challenge I’ll take up crocheting.
I had been wrong to do this. I had set myself too big a task; bitten off more than I could chew. And all those doubters would now be crowing, ‘I told you so.’
They were right. I was wrong.
Tilting my head I saw Sam’s legs at the wheel and could hear Sharon whispering. I wanted to hear her voice boom, but she had lost her Kiwi bluster and brightness. I wanted to hear Sam laugh and Helena tell a rude joke in her matter-of-fact accent. I wanted to hear Fred mix up her English words and Emma say, ‘Oops’ when she split something in the galley.
Most of all, I wanted to turn back the clock and start again. Not just 24 hours – I couldn’t have stopped that mast coming down – but four years. I wanted to recreate that moment when the idea of winning the Jules Verne trophy first came to me. Then I would bury it so deeply that it never occurred to me again.
The shock hadn’t dissipated. It had settled on the boat like suffocating fog. The 2,000 miles to Chile stretched in front of us like a prison sentence. We were in the middle of nowhere on a floating platform with a 21-foot pole sticking up from the middle. Our once beautiful sails were cut up and hanging limply from the top.
There was not a breath of wind yet still the ‘big cat’ clawed her way eastwards at 5 knots. She had brought us through the most dangerous ocean in the world, battling conditions known only to a few sailors. Only when the sea picked her up and dashed her down did she finally surrender.
I had changed the watch system because we didn’t need three girls on deck any more. From now on we’d sail in pairs, working three hours on and nine hours off. This gave everybody a chance to recuperate.
Adrienne and I barely slept during those few days because important decisions still had to be made. The girls seemed to hide away, cocooned in their sleeping bags. Nobody wanted to talk.
By Friday they began to spend less time sleeping. They emerged on deck or gathered in the God Pod to read their mail. Nobody discussed the race or the record. Occasionally, I felt an arm around my shoulders. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. Fine.’
As the girls started taking over, Adrienne and I retreated and slept.
I thought back to 1990 when Maiden sailed into Southampton at the end of the Whitbread. An armada of yachts, power boats and dinghies came out to meet us for the final three miles. I had never been so proud or so moved.
From feeling on top of the world I now scrabbled on the floor on my hands and knees. One minute I was right up there, a success story, the next minute I was nothing. The disappointment was almost suffocating. I had failed. I had let my family, friends and supporters down.
That night as I collected the emails, I found a message from Ed. He had sent me another poem by one of my favourite writers, Robert Service. It was a lovely gesture and very moving.
Maybe Ed had more feminine qualities than I had first suspected.
THE QUITTER
When you’re lost in the Wild, and you’re scared as a child,
And Death looks you bang in the eye,
And you’re sore as a boil, it’s according to Hoyle
To cock your revolver and . . . die.
But the Code of a Man says: ‘Fight all you can,’
And self-dissolution is barred.
In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow . . .
It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.
‘You’re sick of the game!’ Well, now that’s a shame.
You’re young and you’re brave and you’re bright.
‘You’ve had a raw deal!’ I know – but don’t squeal,
Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
It’s the plugging away that will win you the day,
So don’t be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it’s so easy to quit.
It’s the keeping-your-chin-up that’s hard.
It’s easy to cry that you’re beaten – and die;
It’s easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope’s out of sight –
Why that’s the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each gruelling bout
All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try – it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.
FAITH AND HOPE FLY SOUTH
JOANNE HARRIS
HOW NICE OF you to take the trouble. It isn’t everyone who would give up their time to listen to two old biddies with nothing much to do with themselves but talk. Still, there’s always something going on here at the Meadowbank Home; some domestic drama, some everyday farce. I tell you, some days the Meadowbank Home is just like the West End, as I often tell my son Tom when he calls in on his weekly dash to somewhere else, bearing petrol-station flowers (usually chrysanths, which last a long time, more’s the pity), and stirring tales of the World Outside.
Well, no, not really – I made that last bit up. Tom’s conversation tends to be rather like his flowers: sensible, unimaginative and bland. But he does come, bless him, which is more than you could say for most of them, with their soap-opera lives and their executive posts and their touching belief that life stops at sixty (or should), with all of those unsightly, worrying creases neatly tucked away. Hope and I know better.
You know Hope, of course. Being blind, I think she appreciates your visits even more than I do; they try to find things to entertain us, but when you’ve been a professor at Cambridge, with theatres and cocktail parties and May Balls and Christmas concerts at King’s, you never really learn to appreciate those Tuesday-night bingo games. On the other hand, you do learn to appreciate small pleasures (small pleasures being by far the commonest) because, as some French friend of Hope’s used to say, one can imagine even Sisyphus happy. (Sisyphus, in case you don’t know, was the fellow doomed by the gods to roll a rock up a hill for ever.) I’m not an intellectual, like Hope, but I think I see what he means. He’s saying there’s nothing you can’t get used to – given time.
Of course, in a place like this, there are always your malcontents. There’s Polish John, whose name no one can ever pronounce, who never has a good word to say to any of us. Or Mr Braun, who has quite a sense of humour in spite of being a German, but who gets very depressed when they show war films on TV. Or Mrs Swathen, whom everybody envies because her son and his family take her out every single week, who has grandchildren who visit her and a sweet-faced daughter-in-law who brings her presents; but Mrs Swathen gripes and moans continually because she is bored, and the children don’t come often enough, and her bowels are bad, and the food is dreadful, and no one knows what she has to suffer. Mrs Swathen is the only person (except for Lorraine, the new nurse) who has ever made Hope lose her temper. Still, we manage, Hope and I. Like Sara in A Little Princess (a book Hope loved as a child and I re-read to her just last month when we finished Lolita), we try not to let the Mrs Swathens of this world poison our lives. We take our pleasures where we can. We try to behave like princesses, even if we are not.
Of course, there are exceptions. This week, for example, this August 10th, on the occasion of the Meadowbank Home’s annual day trip to the sea. Every year in August we go, all of us packed into a fat orange coach with blankets and picnics and flasks of milky tea and the Meadowbank nurses – cheery or harassed, according to type – on what Hope calls the Incontinence Express to Blackpool.
I’ve always liked Blackpool. We used to go there every year, you know, when Tom was little, and I remember watching him playing in the rock pools while Peter lay asleep on the warm grey sand and the waves sighed in and out on the shingle. In those days it was our place; we had our regular guesthouse, where everyone remembered us, and Mrs Neames made bacon and eggs for breakfast and always cooed over how much Tom had grown. We had our regular teashop, too, where we went for hot chocolate after we’d gone swimming in the cold sea, and our chip shop, the Happy Haddock, where we always went for lunch. Perhaps that’s why I still love it now: the long beach; the parade of shops; the pier; the waterfront where the big waves crash over the road at high tide. Hope loves it by default; you’d think Blackpool would be a bit of a climbdown for her, after holidays on the Riviera, but Hope would never say so, and looks forward to our trips, I think, with as much enthusiasm and excitement as I do myself – which made it all the harder to take when Lorraine told us that this year we couldn’t go.
Lorraine is our newest nurse, a poison blonde with pencilled lips and a smell of Silk Cut and Juicy Fruit gum. She replaces Kelly, who was dim but innocuous, and she is a great favourite of Maureen, the general manager. Lorraine, too, has her favourites, among whom Hope and I do not count, and when Maureen is away (which is about once a week), she holds court in the Residents’ Lounge, drinking tea, eating digestive biscuits and stirring up unrest. Mrs Swathen, a great admirer of hers, says that Lorraine is the only really sensible person at the Meadowbank Home, although Hope and I have noticed that their conversation revolves principally around Mrs Swathen’s undeserving son, and how much he is to inherit when Mrs Swathen dies. Far too much, or so I understand – with the result that after only a couple of months here, Lorraine has already managed to convince Mrs Swathen that she is badly neglected.
‘Ambulance-chaser,’ says Hope in disgust. You get them from time to time in places like this; insinuating girls like Lorraine, flattering the malcontents, spreading their poison. And poison is addictive; in time people come to depend on that poison, as they do on those poisonous reality shows Lorraine enjoys so much. Little pleasures fade, and one comes to realise that there are greater pleasures to be had in self-pity, and complaint, and viciousness towards one’s fellow residents. That’s Lorraine; and although Maureen is no Samaritan, with her Father Christmas jollity and vacuum salesman’s smile she is infinitely better than Lorraine, who thinks that Hope and I are too clever by half, and who tries in her underhand way to rob us of every small pleasure we still have left.
Our trip to Blackpool, for instance.
Let me explain. A few months ago, Hope and I escaped from the home – a day trip to London, that’s all, but to the Meadowbank staff it might as well have been a jailbreak. That was just before Maureen’s time – Lorraine’s too – but I can tell that the thought of such a breakout appals her. Lorraine is equally appalled – for a different reason – and often speaks to us in the syrupy tones of a cross nursery teacher, explaining how naughty it was of us to run away, how worried everyone was on our behalf, and how it serves us right that we missed the chance to sign up for the Blackpool trip this August, and must now stay behind with Chris, the orderly, and Sad Harry, the emergency nurse.
Sign up, my foot. We never used to have to sign up for our day trips. With Maureen in charge, however, things have changed; Health and Safety have got
involved; there is insurance to consider, permission slips to sign and a whole administrative procedure to put into place before even the shortest excursion can be considered.
‘I’m sorry, girls, but you had your chance,’ said Lorraine virtuously. ‘Rules are rules, and surely you don’t expect Maureen to make an exception for you.’
I have to say I don’t much like the idea of Tom having to sign a slip – it reminds me so much of the times when he used to bring those forms home from grammar school, wanting permission to go on trips to France, or even skiing in Italy; trips we could barely afford but which we paid for anyway because Tom was a good boy, Tom was going to do well, and Peter and I didn’t want to show him up in front of his friends. Now, of course, Tom holidays all over the place – New York, Florida, Sydney, Tenerife – though he has yet to invite me on any of his trips. He never had much imagination, you know. He never imagines, poor boy, that I might dream of hurtling down the piste noire at Val d’Isère, or being serenaded in Venice, or lounging in a hammock in Hawaii with a Mai Tai in each hand. I suppose he still thinks Blackpool’s all I’ve ever wanted.
As for Hope – well, Hope rarely lets her feelings show. I see them, because I know Hope better than anyone, but I doubt Lorraine got much satisfaction. ‘Blackpool?’ she said in her snootiest, most dismissive Cambridge voice. ‘Not really my cup of tea, Lorraine. We had a villa, you know, in Eze-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera. We went there, the three of us, twice a year, all the time Priss was growing up. It was quiet in those days – not as overrun with film people and celebrities as it is now – but we used to pop down to Cannes from time to time, if there was a party we really wanted to go to. Most of the time, though, we stayed by the pool, or went sailing in Xavier’s yacht – he was a friend of Cary Grant’s, you know, and on several occasions Cary and I—’