BOOKS
Sophie Elmhirst investigates the allure of leaving behind daily life to head for open waters and new horizons, and follows the adventure of an intrepid couple who left their conventional existence behind
ON HOLIDAY IN MOROCCO IN MY TWENTIES, ESCAPING A JOB
I didn’t like, I went hiking in the mountains. My days at home were spent in front of a computer performing almost entirely meaningless tasks. Up there, under a stark blue sky, sleeping in a freezing hut, I imagined I would finally figure it all out and correct the wayward, stop-start trajectory that was apparently my life.
Going away was a way of getting away, but it was also a pursuit of fantasy. This is so often the lure of travel: that we might be someone different – even someone better – somewhere else.
Around that time, I was on a strict diet of escapist literature, and I was looking for tips. Top of the pile was the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s seminal book Walden (subtitled Life in the Woods in the 1854 first edition). Thoreau spent two years living in a cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, because, as he put it, ‘I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’.
By his reckoning, Thoreau wasn’t abandoning life so much as fashioning a new model: one defined by simplicity and selfreliance, a total immersion in nature. He wanted to escape the petty distractions of society, to strip himself of all unnecessary luxury. Pare it all back, live in nature, embrace solitude and, by his logic, you’d discover the fundamentals of existence. He’d be able, finally, ‘to suck the marrow out of life’. It was convincing to me at the time: get away from everything (and everyone) and perhaps I’d finally feel a little more alive.
That urge to flee was the first thing that drew me to the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a young married couple from Derby, whose extraordinary story is the subject of my first book, Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story. In 1972, the Baileys decided to abandon their jobs and conventional lives, sell their home and embark on a long voyage on their small boat. Their plan was to sail around the world and start a new life in New Zealand. For Maurice, in particular, their departure felt seminal. Any act of migration contains a dual force: what someone is leaving behind, and what they are going towards – or, at least, what they imagine they’re going towards.
Maurice believed leaving England would relieve him of his former self: a lonely, awkward young man who had survived an affectioness childhood. Much like Thoreau, he wanted to abandon the claustrophobic conventions of society and, in his case, suburban life: the painfully s
