The Lonely Sea and the Sky

by Sir Francis Chichester

  Then we had a German woman who taught music. She had a sharp nose and straggly, thin hair, and disliked me very much. She let me know this on every possible occasion. One day I said that my mother wanted me to learn music. I didn't, however. How could I be fond of music at that time, when I had to spend every singing lesson without uttering a word? I could not get out the sound I wanted to, and as a result had to stand up with the others and mouth the words without uttering a sound. With the possibility of my taking music lessons, Fraulein was as sweet as honey to me; but I don't know what the outcome would have been next term if the war had not intervened. She disappeared without trace. The school boiler stoker was called back to the Navy, and during one of his leaves he visited us, and held forth to an admiring group of boys telling us how the Hood and another great battleship were about to be launched and would blow the Kiel Canal gates up. Copleston, whom we called 'Pebbles', was a great one for Secret Service tales, and our walks along the cliff tops were made exciting by the thought of all the submarines near us at sea, and the spies round us on land.

  Somehow, I became captain of the cricket XI, although really I was never much good at cricket, I was also captain of the school. One of my friends of today, Air Commodore Allen Wheeler, who is now one of the brains of aircraft design, was a junior at the Old Ride at that time. He told me recently that he had been entered in a swimming race at the end of one term, and that I said to him, 'You have got to win – or else . . . ' and that he was so frightened that he went ahead and won. I expect I was still somewhat of a bully, and wonder if my experiences at Ellerslie were any excuse.

  I was also Number One in the drill squad which the school became as soon as the First World War broke out. This was the last time I 'took a parade', if you could call it that, until the middle of the Second World War when I was sent down to the Empire Flying School and had to take the parade as Duty Officer. I was scared stiff. Thirty years between parades is quite a long while, but we must have been hot stuff at the Old Ride, because I succeeded in foozling my way through the ordeal.

  CHAPTER 2

  SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE

  Marlborough College was a fearsome shock after the Old Ride; it seemed like entering a prison. 'A' House, which was stuffed with small boys newly arrived, was grim; the iron discipline was prison-like; and the food, no doubt made worse by the war, was terrible. The diet was 150 years out of date. We used to say that the roast meat was horseflesh; no doubt all boys say that sort of thing, but the reek of it turned one's stomach. However, we felt half-starved, and would have eaten anything. This feeling of starvation was certainly due to vitamin deficiency. From one term to the next we never had any fresh fruit or uncooked salad, or vegetables. There was no excuse for this – we could easily have grown these things ourselves in the college meadows – it was just sheer ignorance (or lack of enterprise) on the part of the management. It was no wonder that we had a general outbreak of boils at one time.

  Marlborough Downs are exceptionally cold (I have read somewhere that this is the coldest place in England). There was some heating in the form rooms, but none in the dormitories. The huge upper schoolroom, where 200 senior boys lived during the day when they weren't in actual classes, had only two open fires. Only the biggest boys were allowed to warm themselves at these fires. I decided that the occasional periods of warm-up available during the day only made one suffer more, so I wore nothing but a cotton shirt under my coat, discarded my waistcoat, and slept under only a single sheet at night. I aimed to get used to the conditions like the Tierra del Fuegan natives of a century ago, except that I didn't sleep inside a dead whale I was eating.

  The usual punishment was a beating; for instance, if late for early­morning school or if one failed to turn up at the fixed target for an afternoon's run. Most of the discipline was in the hands of the senior boys. Their sole form of punishment was beating, and this was so copiously applied for any infringement of an extensive and complicated social code that it amounted to licensed bullying. At certain stages of their career, boys could fasten one button of their coats, put one hand in a trouser pocket, and things of that sort. Upper School was ruled by four prefects, who sat in state at a table in front of the fire. One of them would carry notes round to the boys he was going to beat; this was during prep when we were all at our desks, and as soon as prep finished, all the 200 boys made a wild rush to encircle the prefect's desk. The chairs were pushed away, the victim bent over the desk, and he was beaten as hard as the prefect could possibly manage by taking a running jump and using a very long cane.

  We were allowed to buy milk and cereals, etc., to eat in Upper School during the afternoon, if we had the spare pocket money. The sour milk and other refuse were dumped in an evil-smelling, huge iron bin on wheels. I remember one boy who was unpopular being dumped headfirst in this bin by a number of bigger boys.

  My dormitory prefect was Edmonds and once, after he had beaten me (unfairly as I thought), his bed and bedding were completely missing the following night. Naturally, I knew that he would suspect me, so I had taken elaborate precautions to have nothing whatever to do with it, and had merely suggested the different steps to be taken for the project to be carried out successfully. It had to be carefully organised so that everybody had an equal share in it (except me, of course) so that no one person could be victimised. Edmonds did not beat me again after this.

  Marlborough was a better place in the summer term. Cricket was not compulsory and one was allowed to go off on one's own in the afternoon play period. I usually bicycled somewhere by myself: we were allowed to go within 10 miles of Marlborough. This enabled me to reach Upavon, where I used to lie in the grass on the edge of the airfield watching aircraft doing their 'circuits and bumps'; they would take off with their wheels a few feet over my head. On a fine sunny day bicycling along the hot, dusty road, army lorries would be passing in a steady procession. Sometimes I would find a nice patch in a wood, and lie there for an hour or two under the trees, reading, or watching the birds. Sometimes I would lie on the banks of a river watching the fish. These periods of comparative freedom were a great joy.

  I was crazy about rugby football, and had a burning ambition to get into the First XV. I used to wait with impatient, anxious hope for the team to be pinned on the games board. I had read with great interest about the tour of the New Zealand 'All Blacks' who won every match except the one against Cardiff during a tour of Britain. They had a new idea of playing only seven forwards instead of eight, thereby gaining an extra back, which tends to make the game much faster, provided that the forwards can hold the opposition. This seemed to me good tactics, and I suggested to the captain of the XV that it should be tried. He, too, thought it was a good idea, and changed the disposition of the team. Unfortunately, I was the eighth forward, and was therefore sacked; my place in the team went to my friend Paterson as an extra back. I would have played for the school XV against Wellington College (before the changeover to seven forwards), but I was ill in the sanatorium at that time. So I not only missed my First XV colours, but also the privilege of wearing blue shorts, which was accorded only to those who had played in the First XV against one of the major public schools, Wellington or Rugby. I once captained the Second XV in a match, but felt that I had failed because I had not reached my objective, the First XV. Considering that I had to play without my spectacles, and once ran in the opposite direction because the football, kicked high into the air, passed out of my range of sight, I now think that that particular ambition was a stupid one.

  When I first went to Marlborough I was a dedicated cadet of the Officers Training Corps, and when I went to the summer camp at Tidworth Pennings my first year there, I was the youngest boy of 2,000 from various public schools. The NCO of my tent was the same chap Edmonds whom I thought rather an ass. Evidently other people did too, because the Eton men raided our tent one day, took it to bits and distributed every item of bedding and kit all round the camp. In one way I sympathised with them, but on the ot
her hand, as the youngest boy, it fell to me to go and collect all this stuff and put it together again.

  I used to take the field days very seriously, and even wore two pairs of spectacles so that I could shoot off my blank cartridges more accurately at the 'enemy'. One of the attractions of the first camp was a mock dogfight between two aircraft. The wings were doped with stuff that made them semi-transparent. The other demonstration that excited me was shooting off mortar shells at an 'enemy' trench (unmanned).

  The masters were a mixed lot, but there was one man called Adams, the housemaster in the junior 'A' House, whom I admired enormously. He was severe, because it was the code, but he took a humane interest in his boys. Later he joined up in the army, and was killed in Flanders. He had sent back word that his books should be distributed among a few boys whom he named, of whom I was one. I have never been sadder over the death of anyone than I was about this man; he was a fine man, and in the absolute prime of life.

  There was something mean and niggardly about our existence at Marlborough; we seemed to be mentally, morally and physically constipated. The whole emphasis was on what you must not do, and I consider that I am only now beginning to shake off the deeply-rooted inhibition which had gripped me by the time I left. One instance of the effect of this is that until recently I would shake with fear if I had to get up and speak to more than half a dozen people, because the terror of doing or saying anything which would not be approved of by a mob code was so rooted in me.

  On the credit side, I did make some good friends at Marlborough. By the time I was a sixth former, and entitled to a study, three of us became almost inseparable. One was John Paterson, the son of a clergyman at East Bergholt in Essex. He was good-looking, dressed well and was good at games. The second of our triumvirate was M. E. Rowe, whom I christened 'The Mole', because of his sharp twitchy nose, shaggy eyebrows from under which he peered hard at you, and his untidy forelock (although perhaps that is unusual in a mole). Paterson joined the army, and was killed in Malaya in the Second World War; Rowe became a QC. Both these friends became prefects, but not me. I was regarded as too much of a rebel, I think.

  Another friend I made was Fred Smyth, who came not far from my home in North Devon. Fred also was good at games. I was very fond of his mother, and used to walk over every Sunday afternoon to their place at Stoke Rivers to have tea with them. Fred's mother made some wonderful rock cakes. The walk was 6 miles each way, but I used to look forward to it all the week. They were all 'horsy' people, and Fred became a first flight point-to-pointer. I used to be keen on bird-nesting. To add to my collection of birds' eggs was the nominal motive, but I think what really attracted me was the sport of climbing difficult trees after finding one with a nest in it. I used to go out for the whole day, roaming through the woods, which grew on the slopes of our Devon valleys. I could travel all day without ever emerging for more than a few yards from woodland, and it was part of the fun never to be seen by anybody. A buzzard's nest at the top of a tall tree, with no branches at all for the bottom twenty or thirty feet, was always a challenge. I don't think I ever took more than one egg from a nest; it was just a trophy that I was after.

  Towards the end of my time at Marlborough, a new idea was introduced into the school, of having the senior boys specialise in some subject. I chose mathematics. All day I worked at maths of one kind or another. I found it a great strain trying to keep interested hour after hour, day after day, week after week. I had a letter in 1962 from a Marlborough boy who said he had been following with interest my sailing voyages, 'I found your name carved on the desk I am sitting at. It looks as if you must have spent as many boring hours here as I have.' (I wrote back and said that I did not remember being a carver of desks. Could it have been a forgery?).

  There were thirty boys in this maths specialist form, and I was only eleventh in the form. I looked round one day at the ten boys above me, most of who were far cleverer than I was, or could ever hope to be. I thought to myself, 'What a knock-kneed, pigeon-breasted, anaemic, bespectacled, weedy crowd they are!' (I must have been in a liverish mood because I was bespectacled myself.) I thought, 'I can never hope to be as good as these chaps, and would I want to be, anyway? There must be something wrong with this set-up. Real life is flowing past, and leaving me behind.' I told my housemaster that I was leaving at the end of term.

  That was the last term of 1918, and the college caught the Spanish influenza epidemic. There were so many boys down with it that we were lying in rows on the floor of the sanatorium. I think most of us were pretty ill, but only a few died. I was at my worst when the Armistice was signed on 11 November, and I could hear the crowds shouting and cheering outside. I could not even lift myself on one elbow or move on my mattress.

  When I got home and told my father that I had left Marlborough, he was furious – justifiably so. I had treated him badly, and I do not know why I had not asked his permission to leave. Perhaps I wanted to be absolutely certain of leaving, and felt that he would not consent. I was due to go to the university and stay there until I was twenty-five, preparing for the Indian Civil Service. I felt that this was all wrong, and that I would not be living a proper life.

  CHAPTER 3

  FARMHAND

  I had read some old novels of my father's about Australia by Rolf Boldrewood. Two of them were Miner's Right and The Squatter's Dream, and there was another about bushrangers. I thought that this would be the right life for me, and I said that I wanted to emigrate to Australia. At that time our neighbours, the Royles, had a pheasant shoot on the Youlston property, and I took part as a beater. There was a sergeant of the New Zealand Army there on leave, and he asked me what I intended doing. When I told him, he said, 'Why don't you come to New Zealand? I will get you a job.' This meant that if I went to New Zealand I would know one person, whereas if I went to Australia I would know no one. That turned the scales in favour of New Zealand, and I now sought for a passage. But passages to New Zealand were very hard to get. All the ships were booked up for a long time to come.

  My father answered an advertisement for a boy on a farm in Leicestershire. The job was mine, and I took the train for Coalville, where I worked for seven months for J. G. de Ville. I was paid five shillings a week, and during that seven months de Ville gave me a pair of boots and one half day off to go to the Leicestershire Horse Show between milkings. It was a hard life, especially in winter, getting up in the dark to feed and milk the cows and working all day on jobs such as spreading manure. In the evenings came more milking, and more feeding of calves. I was lonely, and fell back on my dreams. I looked forward every night to getting to sleep, and had wonderful dreams of warm-hearted, friendly people, loveable people, and comfortable living, with nice things to touch and eat. I often dreamed of my cousin Margaret, whom I adored.

  I caught ringworm from the calves and could not get rid of the ugly sores, but summer arrived, and life became better. There was a wonderfully fine spell in June; the sun on the young grass, the smell of new-mown hay. Hard work from dawn to dusk induced a feeling of bodily fitness, of lustiness, with a kind of hazy, half-drugged stupor in the brain. De Ville had a daughter, Dorothy, (by his first wife) living with him. She was kind-hearted and amiable and I was madly in love with her. But I knew nothing; I was an oaf who didn't know what to do, or what to say, and I just had to suffer in silence. De Ville's second wife, who was part of the household, was not much older. She was a good-looking brunette who kept a tight rein on household affairs.

  There was a railway cutting through one part of the farm, where the mainline expresses thundered past without being visible. Whenever I heard them I used to feel lonely with a great homesickness, but precisely for what I did not know. One day while I was hoeing turnips, the airship R34 passed overhead on, I think, its maiden flight; it looked huge, new and shiny, and it went by slowly. De Ville not being near, I stopped hoeing turnips to watch it until it was out of sight. This was the first aircraft to make the double crossing of the Atlantic. I wond
er what I would have said if I had been told by a fortune-teller then that I would be the first holder of the Johnston Memorial Trophy, founded in memory of the navigator of the last airship to be built in England, the R101, which crashed in France.

  One of the more pleasant jobs on the farm was to drive the milk churns to the station. De Ville had an ex-stallion that had been retired late in life. (I think it was rather like de Ville himself, a tough character, but a hard-goer.) One day, on the way back from the station, I was sitting on the box seat of a flat-bottomed dray to which the stallion was harnessed. I had eleven seventeen-gallon churns, all empty, standing on the dray. There was an 'improver' working on a near-by farm, who had also delivered milk in a float with a frisky, fast mare. We started to race home. I was in the lead when we came to a right-angled turn with a large, round stone at the corner of the footpath to keep vehicles off. I was driving with the reins in one hand only, too cocky to use a second hand for turning the corner, and the nearside back wheel went over the boulder. The horse was going as fast as it could trot; I flew through the air, and looked up to the sky to see the milk churns around me like the great bear constellation coming to earth. The churns and I landed together, while the horse set off for home at full gallop. It went clean through two five-bar gates on the farm, and ended up snorting in de Ville's garden. When I arrived, which was definitely in second place, although I had run as fast as I could over the two-mile track, de Ville was waiting for me. He knocked me down in the dining room and held a chair over my head while he straddled my body. I listened to Dorothy sobbing in the next room out of sight, while wondering if the chair was going to come down or not. There wasn't anything that I could do that I could think of, and I was quite calm. I think this had an influence on him, and the chair did not descend. Then he gave me an hour to get out of the house with all my belongings.