The Runaway by Ruth Morris

The Runaway, by 

Ruth Morris

 

(Published in America as ‘Runaway Girl’)

Updated April 30, 2015

*Contains Spoilers*

I plan to talk about children’s literature here occasionally, so I’ll begin with a book that fulfils all my self-imposed criteria for inclusion in this blog: it’s underrated, obscure, and (more or less) forgotten. It is out of print, though you can still find plenty of old copies on Amazon. It is also remarkably difficult to find any information about the author, Ruth Morris, who does not seem to have written any other books. 

 
Until I read The Runaway at the age of 10, Australia was just a big blank island on the map, sitting there at the bottom of the world, home to koalas, kangaroos, and a few dusty facts from geography lessons. It had never really occurred to me that real children might live there, children with the courage to walk off alone into the outback to escape their ghastly relatives.

The ‘outback’ itself was a new word and a new idea, opening up a vision of vast spaces and wild emptiness that was, and still is, fascinating for an English child from an intensively cultivated landscape. Other strange words were used by the characters in the story, none of them explained, so you had to guess from the context: swag, bonzer, beaut, billy, crook, tucker, kelpie, galah. 

From what I have been able to discover, the book was first published in 1961 by Michael Joseph. The American edition was retitled ‘Runaway Girl’ by Random House and came out in 1962. In 1964, it appeared in paperback under Penguin’s Peacock imprint. The U.S. edition was illustrated (by Beth Krush), the British edition wasn’t. 

The Penguin Peacock edition

Reading it again for the first time in decades, I was surprised by how closely it fitted my memory of it, and how well it has weathered the test of time. In fact I can’t see any reason why The Runaway should have disappeared from children’s shelves.

The American edition, retitled and with illustrations by Beth Krush

Joanne Mitchell, the narrator, is a 12-year-old orphan who has been living for some years with her aunt and uncle, wealthy socialites in Melbourne. Aunt Valeria, Joanne tells us, “used to tell her friends I was ‘a civilized child, intelligent about prettying up the house’.” But when Aunt Valeria and Uncle Robert take a cruise to Europe, Joanne is cast out of civilization and packed off to stay indefinitely on a sheep station in remote Queensland, with relatives she has never met. She’s OK with this idea, imagining picnics in the bush and exciting drives to visit other sheep stations. 

Her arrival at the isolated backwater is powerfully described. “Red dust lay thickly over the tired wooden station buildings and stirred little eddies underfoot.” She is met by Uncle Fred, “a bent stick of a man with sparse gray hair and the face of someone who is always stubbing his toe on disappointment.” A bleak lunch follows in the station hotel, heavy with uncomfortable silences over slices of cold boiled mutton. 

“ ‘How’s Aunt Lilian?’ ” Joanne asks, trying to make polite conversation. 

“ ‘Good. She’s good.’ The flies settled back on the tablecloth. And in the sugar bowl too.”

But Aunt Lilian is not good, she’s grim. When Fred and Joanne finally arrive at the sheep station after 30 miles by jeep over rough, empty country, it is clear that Aunt Lilian sees Joanne only as a useful pair of hands. The house is spartan, cheerless, scoured clean, the yard a flowerless desert. For the next two months, Joanne is an unpaid servant, helping the neurotic Lilian scrub every inch of the already spotless house, every day. Aunt Lilian is no Marilla Cuthbert – there is no warmth hiding behind her dour exterior.

Life with Aunt Lilian 

Joanne finally snaps after Aunt Lilian sends her to help out at her (Lilian’s) sister’s farm a few miles away. She travels alone, in a horse-drawn buggy, full of hope that the sister will be different. But she finds another bare yard, chained dogs, dirty scattered bones, and a neat, arid, empty house (Lilian’s sister is out). 

“A solitary petunia raised a defiant but ill-nourished head from the edge of a drain. It must have been a great-great grandchild of the last, long-forgotten cultivated flower that ever bloomed at Four Creeks.”

Turning the reluctant horse, Darkie, around, Joanne heads off into the unknown and the adventure begins. She cuts off her red hair and becomes Joe Casey, judging that a boy will attract less attention than a lone girl wandering and camping in the outback.

The character I remembered most clearly from my childhood reading of this book was the old sheep drover who encounters Joanne (now Joe) on the open road. This memory seemed slightly surprising; gnarled, short-tempered old men have no obvious appeal for 10-year-old female readers. The drover, though, is an original creation, and I was pleased to find him exactly the same, full of laconic anecdotes about the dogs, sheep, bars, and mates of his past, stories that always begin with “Knew a bloke once. . . ”

From a distance, the drover looks like “a mound of rags with a hat on top”. He is unimpressed by his young companion’s clumsiness in harnessing horses and lighting fires, and contemptuous of her ignorance of the subtle distinctions between types of sheepdog. But he saves Joe/Joanne from starvation, and teaches her how to survive in the bush. 

Camping in the outback with the sheep drover

The drover is not a cosy character. Joanne notes his tough treatment of his “dirty, smelly” dogs, and he blithely abandons her alone at a desolate crossroads when it suits him, with a casual “So long”. He’s a man of the road who doesn’t ask too many questions; he accepts you, but admits no responsibility. He does however give Joanne a puppy, which makes the lonely black nights camping rough in the bush a little more bearable.

The trio – Joanne, the horse, the puppy – continue the road trip, staying for a while with the Bryce family, a struggling mother and her brood of boys (the challenge of pretending to be a boy among real boys is something girl readers might empathise with). This brief respite is curtailed when Mrs Bryce’s husband returns and becomes suspicious of the cuckoo in his nest. 

Joanne’s sense of freedom and her discovery of the natural world is set against her acute loneliness and constant hunger. Every random stranger represents a possible threat: the danger of being discovered and sent back to Aunt Lilian. 

Joanne's lonely nights with Darkie the horse and Abby the puppy 

The happy ending, with Joanne finding a new home, is not delivered before a final burst of tension. She runs away one last time in the middle of the night, terrified that her new family will find out that she is not a boy, and reject her (echoes of Anne of Green Gables).

The conclusion gives the book a satisfying symmetry. Joanne’s story begins with a long-distance train journey westbound into the unknown, and ends with another long, despairing train ride to Brisbane, where she descends among strangers onto the platform, before her new father appears and all is well.

Re-reading the book, I was looking for reasons why it should be out of print, and couldn’t really find any. It is set in the 1950s, but there’s nothing that freezes the story in that era; it feels timeless. There is no racism. If you were hypersensitive, you might object to Mr Mitchell’s implication, on discovering Joanne is not a boy, that girls are naturally disposed to enjoy helping around the house. But the broader message is that girls are the equal of boys in terms of courage and survival in the wilderness. Adults might wonder why Joanne’s adoptive family were not contacted by social services, but this is not likely to worry young readers. The descriptions of Joanne’s puppy sometimes border on the over-sweet, but again, this seems unlikely to irritate the literary sensibilities of children. 

As a character, Joanne has an everygirl quality, making her easy to identify with. She has no exceptional talents or quirks, but is simply an affectionate, observant child in need of a home. She doesn’t seek adventure, but is forced to confront it. The story perhaps has more appeal for children outside Australia, because they are most likely to enjoy the exploration of an unknown territory and culture. Joanne is 12, but I would suggest a slightly younger readership (9 to 11), given the greater sophistication of children in 2015.

So who is, or was, Ruth Morris? The only information I could find initially came from the website Jane Badger Books, which says that she was born in 1926 in Queenscliff, Melbourne, Victoria, the daughter of the garrison commander at Port Phillip, Victoria, and was educated at Melbourne University. She taught for a while, then spent two years in England working on farms and for people with disabilities, before returning to Australia. The Runaway was apparently based on a journey she made through Queensland in an old Ford in 1956. 

This biographical information was confirmed by Dr Catriona Mills, senior researcher at AustLit, the Australian literature database. She said that they had no record of any publications other than The Runaway. 

Ruth Morris in 1961, when The Runaway was published. From the Australian Women's Weekly. 

Catriona Mills did however unearth three newspaper articles about the publication of the book. The first, in the Australian Women's Weekly, dated November 8, 1961, says that Ruth’s trip around Queensland lasted six months, was undertaken alone apart from her cattle dog, Cappy. “I never would have done it without him,” she said.

The article says that she married a Geoffrey Webb of Culcairn, New South Wales, after her trip, and, mysteriously, that she had finished another book “about two youngsters’ adventures in the foothills of the Baw Baws.”  But I could find no record of this book. Nor did the the Peacock edition of The Runaway include one of those useful ‘about the author’ sections that all Puffin books used to have.
 
It is surprising if Morris did not publish again, because The Runaway is the work of someone who enjoys writing and does it with conviction.

If anyone reading this knows anything more about Ruth Morris (not to be confused with the Canadian prison reformer of the same name, born in 1933), or would like to share anything else about The Runaway, please feel free to comment below. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

A galah (Eolophus roseicapillus). Joanne talks about seeing flocks of these pink birds against the pale blue skies of Queensland.  Photo: David Cook/Wikimedia Commons

Many thanks to Jane Badger Books, and to Dr Catriona Mills of AustLit, the Australian literature database, for the biographical information and links to newspapers. 

Links to articles from the National Library of Australia's Trove digitisation project: Australian Women's Weekly 1961, 1962; and The Canberra Times, 1962. 

What is it like to be a psychopath? 'Engleby' by Sebastian Faulks

What is it like to be a psychopath?

Another look at Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

The Sea of Ice, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1823. Also known as 'The Wreck of Hope'

* SPOILER ALERT * – please don’t read this if you have not read the novel.

Where would fiction be without the murderer, the psychopath, the serial killer, the ripper in the shadow, ‘the smiler with the knife’? Eviscerated, is the simple answer, with Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, Graham Greene’s Pinkie Brown, Ruth Rendell’s Teddy Grex, all cast out along with numberless other nightmarish figures who stalk the pages of crime fiction (and ghost stories). Some murderers are no more than plot devices, while others break out of their crime-genre boxes to secure an enduring place in the popular imagination. But, with very few exceptions, the interior life of the psychopath remains mysterious in fiction, we look at him or her from the outside, from the perspective of the police officer, psychiatrist, relative, or victim.

It seems fairly safe to assume that few novelists have committed murder, so it is unsurprising that many writers have preferred to investigate what it would feel like for a sane, sensitive character, for whom the idea of killing is alien and repulsive, to be drawn into murder through some accident or momentary moral failure. This imaginative effort has given us (among others) Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and more recently, the five undergraduate murderers in Donna Tartt’s superb novel, The Secret History. 

Getting under the skin of a genuine psychopath, showing the reader what the world might look like from their perspective, seems to me a more difficult task. Of course, ‘psychopath’ is an imprecise and elastic label of dubious medical or legal value, a word that means nothing more than ‘sick mind’, but in fiction, what it describes is popularly understood to mean a person without remorse, antisocial, manipulative, possibly sadistic, and probably delusional. 

Ruth Rendell has made an enormous contribution here, singlehandedly and prolifically creating some of the most frightening characters in fiction, such as Eunice Parchman (A Judgement in Stone), or Senta in The Bridesmaid, and Rendell invites the reader in to listen to their interior voices. But there’s still a narrowness to Rendell’s psychopaths. Like the fanatically hygienic Minty in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, they are trapped in, and defined by, their manias, obsessions, and fetishes; we watch in appalled fascination, tempered with sympathy, as the character’s compulsion or phobia expands and tightens its grip, distorting and conquering their reality. They murder to escape what seems to them a greater horror. Also, Rendell’s murderers are clearly mentally ill, and, like most fictional psychopaths I have met – they are so sick, so strange, so utterly beyond the borders of normal experience that they are oddly reassuring. The reader can think, ‘well, at least I’m not like that’.

Is Mike Engleby mentally ill? The answer is almost certainly yes, but the hesitation in making a glib diagnosis is part of what makes the character so disturbing and original. It is much more difficult to define yourself in contrast to Engleby. Instead of feeling comfortably distanced by his oddness, you catch yourself cheering him on as he lampoons lazy thinking, or exposes pretentiousness, complacency, and rudeness in others. He also elicits sympathy as he wrestles with the ‘curse of consciousness’, and when he is haunted by a sense of something that has been lost in modern life: 

“You need the air to be warm, not hot, but balmy with a smell of grass or hawthorn. You need the black outline of branches against a sky that, while dark, still has a blue shade to it. What you’re trying to do is get plugged into the depth of history going down through these villages, these houses, these lawns panting with their garden scent at evening.”

But the Mike Engleby who wrote that passage is the same person who can write the following about the final moments in the life of the young girl he has abducted and killed: 

“I don’t remember how, but I became aware that she had wet herself. Was there a smell? Did I hear it? I don’t know, but she’d made herself disgusting . . . her face was ugly with crying.” 

As the narrator, Engleby offers a number of possible causal explanations for his own ‘condition’: a violent father, poverty, a semi-detached mother, a sickeningly brutal experience of abuse and casual sadism as a scholarship boy at a squalid public school. He also suffers physical and psychological symptoms: headaches, insomnia, memory lapses, addictions, and episodes of dissociation in which he experiences a sudden violent dissolution of his sense of self, which he describes as a physical sensation. 

Any combination of these might be enough to make him a murderer, but this does not answer the old question of why other people who suffer similar difficulties do not kill. Faulks also probes the slippery question of guilt and insanity, and the extent to which the latter wipes out the former. In the novel, Engleby is committed to a psychiatric hospital (rather than prison) on the grounds of ‘personality disorder’, but whether he should be let off the hook in a larger moral sense is left to the reader to decide. I don’t think he should be, and I’ll explain why later. 

For me, the attempts at explanation, and the public school bullying chapter in particular, are the least interesting and successful aspects of the book.

The novel does three things brilliantly, however. First, it offers you a convincing experience of inhabiting the consciousness of someone who has committed murder, and he is an astute, perceptive, sardonically witty murderer with a phenomenal memory. 

Second, the story forces the reader to define precisely what is wrong about Engleby, what it is that he lacks. To achieve this, Faulks uses something akin to the Socratic method: as the story proceeds, he knocks away your assumptions about what a serial killer might be like (brutal, unreflective, inarticulate, blinkered, lacking in insight, humourless, unable to understand the perspective of others, incapable of change) building up a portrait of an original thinker, a damaged outsider who seems to possess far more insight than those around him, until finally, shockingly, Mike’s memory returns, and you are there with him in a dark Fenland lane, reliving the murder of Jennifer, forced to watch as he unmasks the monster. 

The shock comes not at the discovery that Mike has killed Jennifer (this is strongly signposted, you just don’t know how), but in his complete lack of simple pity for her terror (“her face was ugly with crying”), and the way he blames her for “what she’d made me do.”

The third excellent thing is spookier, and only emerged (for me) on a second reading. It concerns manipulation, a trait often attributed to the psychopath. Mike’s narrative voice (we are reading his journal, over several decades) is interspersed with long quotations from the diary of his principal victim, Jennifer, which Mike stole from her, along with one of her letters to her parents. It is these extracts that establish Jennifer’s character, her distinctive voice. But in one of the diary entries, the style changes markedly, gaining eloquence and flow; suddenly it sounds like Mike, and you start to wonder if some of the ‘voices’ (we also hear from Mike’s only friend, and his psychiatrist) are the creation of a clever simulator, and how far you, the reader, are being manipulated by the psychopath emerging from the pages. It’s an unsettling sensation. 

We first meet Mike as a student at Cambridge in 1972. He tells us he is in his second year at the university, describes his room, the architecture, the food, the dons, his favoured pubs, Folk Club, and his first sightings of Jennifer Arkland, the confident, fair-haired history student with whom he becomes obsessed. The narrative trots along entertainingly enough, but after a few pages you become aware of something slightly amiss. The tone is curiously flat, deadpan, like that of a clever boy at boarding school obliged to write a letter home. There’s also a striking lack of references to friends; he’s in his second year, but only seems to have acquaintances (“most nights, I go out alone”), and the only note of affection comes when he mentions his younger sister, Julie. In fact Julie is the only character in the novel who inspires any genuine tenderness in Mike, but she remains a ghostly, peripheral figure.

Mike does not explain why Jennifer, rather than any other female student, is the focus of his rapidly developing obsession. He doesn’t mention sexual attraction, and he has never talked to her, but wonders “what her room was like. What was her life like?” Mike then records a couple of strange speculative fantasies about teatime in her hall of residence, one cake-filled and cosy, the other bleak. But we don’t hear from the real Jennifer until Mike opens her private letter and reads her stolen diary. 

The style of these diary entries is perfectly judged by Faulks. Writing in an abbreviated, student-essay-notes form, Jennifer has a sure instinct for predictable adverbs and safe adjectives, combined with an artless unconcern for possible banality. The cold is ‘arctic’, she cycles ‘vigorously’ on her ‘trusty’ bike, she ‘dutifully’ sets her alarm for an early lecture. Studenty 1970s words like ‘zonked’ and ‘budge’ sprinkle the pages, but she is still a good enough writer to give us a vivid picture of her life and a strong sense of her physical presence. She sounds absolutely authentic. 

Jennifer can be seen as Mike’s opposite, which might explain his fascination with her. She is preternaturally cheerful, so full of optimism and gaiety that she feels obliged to tone it down for propriety’s sake. Even the Cambridge cold inspires good humour. She’s balanced, equable, conscientious without being a “swot”, bright rather than brilliant; she goes to pubs but doesn’t get drunk, it is her roommate Hannah who forgets keys, not her, and she has a healthy interest in boys, but knows she’s too young for a “long-term thing”. Her life is overflowing with friends, clubs, plays, boys, volleyball (she would have been a natural for Facebook) and, in stark contrast to Mike, she has the support of an extremely loving family and a stable, middle-class background.  

Jennifer is also profoundly unoriginal, and I think this is a strength in the novel. The temptation would have been to create an exceptional character, a warm and empathetic genius to point up the contrast with Mike and solicit the reader’s outrage at her death. But her ordinariness, or at least her youthful immaturity, helps to underline Mike’s lack of compassion. For the reader, Jennifer is not particularly interesting, but her death nevertheless provokes a sharp horror and pity. For Mike, the perpetrator, it really doesn’t, even though he is fascinated by her. 

When Jennifer first goes missing, Mike has no memory of the deed, and we do not know he is the killer. So he is reporting her disappearance in his journal from the standpoint of an innocent fellow student. His comments are revealing. While watching a TV appeal, Mike bursts out laughing at Jennifer’s boyfriend’s demeanour, which he considers artificial: “he put on a grown-up voice.” This  surprises another boy who is also watching. He (this boy) “looked up at the noise of my laughter with a puzzled and slightly accusing look. He appeared to have tears on his cheeks.”  Later, at a ‘service of hope’ for Jennifer (her body has not yet been found) a friend gives a tribute. Mike wonders “how Anne had got to know Jen so well and care about her so much so quickly. I mean, they were just student pals, weren’t they?” 

This heartless reaction is followed by an accurate but equally chilly dissection of newspaper editorial style when reporting missing girls, concluding shrewdly that “Notoriety is a very odd thing. From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself . . . something pious has attached itself to her.”

As Mike is preparing to leave Cambridge, thinking about what he will and won’t miss about the place, he hints at what he got back from his fixation with Jennifer: “What I liked about it (Cambridge) was a version lived by others. For instance, by Jennifer. I enjoyed her time here.” 

I enjoyed her time here. There’s something unnerving about that sentence when you remember he is talking about a girl who is missing, presumed dead. He might not realise he has killed her, but he knows her likely fate. There is also pathos in it: unable to engage with life himself, he borrows the perspective of someone who, in his view, is better equipped for living. 

The case goes cold, and over the next decade Mike moves on, hacking out a successful career on London newspapers, while Jennifer is marooned in 1974, aged 21, listening to prog rock, dazzled by the vista of her bright future, presumed dead. “I haven’t thought about Jennifer Arkland for years,” Mike notes at one point. James Stellings, his only friend from university, invites him to a dinner party with his wife and some well-heeled banker and lawyer friends. 

The description of this excruciating evening is one of the funniest episodes in the novel, and it is impossible not to sympathise wholeheartedly with Mike as, seated between two of the wives, he is obliged to discuss children’s schools, and au pairs, first with one, then the other, then back to the first “like watching Wimbledon in slow motion.”

“She asked me if I had any children and I said no. Then she told me which of her children were good at which subjects. . . . then she talked about the reputations of various schools that her children were not going to but which friends of hers had children at . . . ” 

Anyone who has ever been trapped in a similar situation will recognise this particular type of rudeness, a combination of  self-absorption and total lack of curiosity about other people. 

And yet . . . Toward the end of the book, after Mike has been found guilty and is confined to psychiatric hospital, Stellings still visits him regularly. We get to read Stellings’ witness statement, describing Mike. In it, Stellings sounds honest (we learn for the first time that Mike is physically unattractive), quite perceptive, and generous. “He (Mike) could be very funny, but he hardly ever laughed . . . I did like him, though . . . and I will stick by him.” 

Engleby however has nothing but contempt for Stellings’ assessment, calling him “pedestrian” and “radically inarticulate”. This then puts a different slant on that dinner party, and you wonder if Mike was really the victim of rudeness or the cause of it. The perspective shifts, and Engleby changes shape again. 

Mike Engleby tells us he has memorised Jennifer’s diary, word for word. But we only have his word for this. The suspicion I mentioned earlier, that Mike may have overwritten Jennifer, comes with this passage attributed to Jennifer, dated 25 May, 1972:

“So where’s it coming from, this feeling, this funny low euphoria? A little bit from the town, I think. I do love the dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings, even now in May. And then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard of King’s or Trin or Queens’, when everything that’s been pinched, and puritanical and cold and grudging and sixpence-in-the-gas-meter is suddenly swept away by the power and scale of those buildings, with their towers and crenellations and squandered empty spaces, built by men who knew that they’d calculated the mechanical laws of time and distance and there was therefore no need whatever to build small.”

I simply don’t believe that Jennifer could have written that at 19, when a year later she was writing like this: 

“Early college brek with Sue Jubb and Liz Burdene. Poor Sue’s hair looks as though she has been electrocuted as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. They just have tea and toast, but I get hungry later, so had to have the fried egg etc. The egg had been sitting for a long time so had to lever off hard little cap from the yolk. Underneath, it was fine. At least, nothing that salt and pepper and a bit of tinned tomato couldn’t disguise. Check pigeonhole for letter from Simon (nothing: sob) and pedal furiously to Sidgwick.” 

This second passage is entirely typical of Jennifer. Of course, Faulks may simply have slipped up and lost Jennifer’s voice in the first extract. But I prefer not to believe this. It is more interesting to think that this is Mike, playing with his readers, and using Jennifer - his idea of her - to breathe some life into his own experience. “What I liked about it was a version lived by others.”

The last pages of the book confirm Mike’s will to control the past, to control Jennifer, and to control her writing voice. They reveal his lack of real remorse. He creates a final diary entry for Jennifer, dated the day after her disappearance. This time, Jennifer gets into Mike’s car, but instead of driving off with her out of Cambridge, into the the fens toward her death, they end up at her house, in her bed.  The style is pure Jennifer, but nothing else about it is. Jennifer’s role in this repellent fantasy is only to comfort Mike Engleby. There’s no more of her reality as a separate person than there was when he ignored her terrified screams in the car, and smashed a slab of concrete on her head in a dark lane. 

The truth this book exposes is a simple one, that a person can have impressively superior gifts, but without compassion, these are hollow. The journey there, taken inside the mind of the killer, is exhilarating and entertaining as well as disturbing. 

While Engleby does not fall into the ‘forgotten’ or ‘obscure’ categories I imposed on this blog, I do think it is underrated. It is well worth a second read. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. Vintage Books, 2007.

John and Marie Christine Ridgway: 50 years of living dangerously

The Wandering Albatross - woodcut, 1837. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
John and Marie Christine Ridgway sailed around the world in 2003-4 to raise international awareness of the plight of the albatross: 19 out of 22 species are threatened with extinction. 

"I love the whole idea that maybe, riding the westerlies, albatrosses circle the globe every two years or so, living for eighty years or more, quite independent of man." John Ridgway, 1996.

John and Marie Christine Ridgway: 
fifty years of 

living dangerously

Book-cover blurbs, manipulatively edited to highlight the kindest bits of reviews, do not usually make for inspiring reading. So it is refreshing when you come across one that is witty, vivid, and original. Here’s what the novelist Len Deighton wrote for the back cover of one book by the Ridgway family, Then We Sailed Away (1996): 

“Don’t do it. Don’t abandon the cats, the garden and your beloved home to sail round the world with your family and your daughter’s boyfriend. Don’t be battered to despair in a shrieking October gale before reaching the grey wastes of the North Atlantic. Don’t have your pocket picked in a Bolivian prison yard. Don’t finish a long day chopping your way through the Andes jungle, infested with fleas, devastated by diarrhoea, with your pack-horse running with blood from the nightly attacks of vampire bats, only to find a large tarantula in your bedding…” 

“Don’t do any of that stuff,” Deighton continues, “because John Ridgway, a resourceful adventurer with an amazing writing talent, has done it for you.” 

If that doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what would. 

I know nothing about sailing, nor have I met any of the Ridgways, so this post is entirely based on a few of their books. Ever since I stumbled across a book called Amazon Journey (an expedition from the source of the river in the high Andes to its mouth in the Atlantic) in the late 1980s, the Ridgways have haunted my imagination. 

John Ridgway is someone who might have looked more at home in an earlier century, when the world’s wild places were still uncharted and inaccessible, before the tentacles of Google Maps started creeping into every forgotten dusty town and unvisited island, exposing all corners of the planet to the camera. He also sounds like one of those people for whom the phrase ‘good in a crisis’ was invented, and for people like this, when a crisis is not available, you have to go looking for one. 

After Amazon Journey, I read Road to Elizabeth (and re-read it several times), and then Marie Christine Ridgway’s No Place for a Woman. The places, journeys, and events described in these books are so far outside and beyond the experience of the average British family, and the images so powerful, that (for me at any rate) a walk in exposed country can trigger a ‘memory’ of marching across the empty Altiplano, and wooded hillsides can create pictures of the Ridgways hacking through 5,000 feet of precipitous, spidery thicket down to the Apurimac river. Even a gale blowing up the English Channel can recall Marie Christine’s terrifying account of battling through the Minch in mountainous December seas. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

A Force 9 gale in the North Atlantic: fairly ordinary weather 
for the Ridgways

I have never come across anyone else who has read these books, and only second-hand copies are available on Amazon, which suggests they are out of print. John Ridgway has an MBE, but never seems to be listed in those (fatuous) lists of ‘top 20 British adventurers’ that even respectable newspapers feature from time to time. His Wikipedia entry is surprisingly short. I found just one vintage ATV documentary on YouTube about the Ridgways, tracking their competition in the 1977-78 Whitbread Round the World race (worth a watch, more on this programme later in this post), but that was about it. Mentioning John Ridgway to friends brings the response (if I’m lucky) of ‘oh, yes, he rowed across the Atlantic with Chay Blyth’. Which is true (92 days at sea, 3,000 miles in an open boat in 1966, through two hurricanes), but this improbable voyage of endurance was the opening salvo in an extraordinary life dedicated to the spirit of adventure. 

To recap, John Ridgway has, apart from writing 11 books, sailed non-stop around the world, then navigated it a further two times, been the first to cross a Patagonian ice cap, tracked the Amazon river from its source in the high Andes to its mouth in Brazil, sailed all over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, survived hurricanes at sea, calving icebergs, extreme altitude sickness, and dangerous rapids. He has been lost in uncharted tropical forest, evaded Shining Path terrorists, and - perhaps the hardest test – survived being repeatedly cooped up in yachts with other people for months on end, without privacy and in all weathers. Sometimes he has been accompanied by Marie Christine and their daughters, sometimes other sailors and explorers, sometimes he has gone alone. 

These were not lavishly funded expeditions, carefully scripted and narrowly focused, but explorations that seem to have been inspired by a passion for pure adventure, for its own sake. The planning was done, of course, but a sense of impatience and spontaneity is present in all the books, together with the feeling that the outcome might turn out to be entirely different from the original plan. 

The journey described in Road to Elizabeth is perhaps the the most striking example of this: John, Marie Christine, and Rebecca set out for South America to meet an old friend, Elvin Berg, who had been farming coffee deep in the Peruvian backwoods. After discovering that this friend had been murdered by terrorists, they located his daughter, Elizabeth, by slipping into the government-designated ‘emergency zone’, then decided to adopt her, eventually bringing her home to Scotland. 

These strenuous, exhilarating and risky expeditions were undertaken as ‘holidays’ from the Ridgways’ day job running their School of Adventure at Ardmore, in the remote wilderness on the farthest edge of North West Scotland. The school, founded over 50 years ago by John and Marie Christine Ridgway with little money, no house, no electricity (for 18 years), and a good deal of pioneering hard labour, became was a success and has attracted 20,000 visitors. It is now run by their daughter Rebecca, whose C.V. includes being the first woman to kayak round Cape Horn. 

Exciting lives, however, do not necessarily make for exciting reading, as the thousands of (usually) predictable and pedestrian travel blogs plodding around the internet make plain. Anybody with a bit of cash can travel, some travel far and dangerously, and almost all of them will try to write about it, but it is surprising how few can do so without boring their readers. 

The writing – both John’s and Marie Christine’s (I have not yet read Rebecca’s book) – is unfussy, unsentimental, driven briskly along by a sense of needing to get to the next place and keep to the plan, but they draw you into the emotional and visual landscapes of their many journeys, so you’re left with the illusion that you made the trip yourself. The tone is quite dry, avoiding the temptation to become confessional or self-consciously ‘hilarious’; you’re left to read between the lines and picture it for yourself – and the imagined scenarios can sometimes be pretty funny as well as unnerving. 

Perhaps the big difference lies in their ability to notice precise physical details about the journeys – wild animals, birds, trees, and flowers (always carefully named), landscape and its effect on mood, bouts of illness, snatches of conversation, endless tins of sardines, strange smells, stranger people - and to remember and convey how this felt and what else was happening when they noticed them: the physical reality of a remembered experience. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Nothofagus obliqua - one of 36 species of nothofagus, a southern-hemisphere beech, observed frequently during the Ridgways' voyage along the coast of Chile in 1996.

John Ridgway has written that sometime during the extreme rigours of his original expedition rowing across the Atlantic, he found himself “deeply impressed by the permanence and the simplicity of the challenge posed by sea and sky. The artificial preoccupations of the world in which most people live were even more remote from my mind than from my body.” 

The decision to start the adventure school came from this - he wanted others to experience the immersion in the natural world that has become difficult for many people to experience. Apart from being exciting to read, the Ridgways’ books act as a gentle reminder that there is still a lot of wildness out there.

Photo: © Channel Light Vessel

*** *** ***

'Round the World with Ridgway': an ATV documentary available on YouTube

If you thought that reality TV was a new genre, watching this is something of of a revelation. Made way back in 1977-78, this film records most of the voyage made by English Rose VI in the Whitbread Round the World Race. 

With a crew of 13, skippered by John Ridgway with Marie Christine, it captures daily life on board the boat: the high spirits and grim humour, the setbacks and the exhilaration. It also documents the inevitable personality clashes, simmering tensions, and tempests that blow up among people living and working under pressure at close quarters (a living space of 10 feet by nine!) for months. All of this is exacerbated by the constant awareness of the camera crew recording everything. 

The film doesn’t show any of the crew in a particularly flattering light, and in that respect it foreshadows the reality programmes of recent years. But to balance this, there’s an impressive storm and unnervingly beautiful footage of sailing past crystal icebergs in the south Atlantic. 

Near the end of the film, there’s an odd time-warp scene where the crew are relaxing below deck, eating sandwiches, listening to the news on the radio, lost in their own thoughts. This informal, placid moment looks deceptively contemporary, like something that happened last week, but the voice on the radio is reporting the Amoco Cadiz oil spill, and a printing dispute at The Times. It is mid-March, 1978. 

Producer: Richard Creasey
Cameraman: Roger Deakins

Round the World with Ridgway documentary

Books mentioned in the article – available on order from the Ridgways' website and second-hand from Amazon. 

Amazon Journey (Hodder & Stoughton, 1972) by John Ridgway

Expedition to the source of the Amazon, and the voyage down it to the sea.

Also includes a strangely fascinating and detailed appendix, listing equipment, clothes and medical kit taken on the expedition – old fashioned puttees (there are instructions about how to put them on) are apparently effective for keeping snakes, ants, dirt, and worse from entering your boots. 

Road to Elizabeth (Gollancz, 1986) by John Ridgway

Extraordinary story of how an expedition to the Peruvian Andes led, via challenging terrain, danger, tragic news, illness, terrorist threats, and some happy coincidences, to the child who became the family's adopted daughter.

  

No Place for a Woman (Gollancz, 1991)  by Marie Christine Ridgway

My advice would be to read Marie Christine’s book after Road to Elizabeth. It offers a different and fascinating perspective on the couple’s story and how Elizabeth (now known as Isso) settled in Scotland after Peru (as well as nerve-racking accounts of exploring Patagonian ice in rubber dinghies). 

Then We Sailed Away (Little, Brown, 1996) by John, Marie Christine, and Rebecca Ridgway

John, Marie Christine, Rebecca and Isso on an odyssey in English Rose VI around the Caribbean, Galapagos, Marquesas, Chile coast, Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and home via Tristan da Cunha, Brazil, and the North Atlantic. Written jointly by John, Marie Christine and Rebecca, it is particularly interesting on wildlife and plants found along the way.

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

(Photo: DickDaniels/Wikimedia Commons)

The beautiful Red-tailed Tropic bird

Other books  

A Fighting Chance (Paul Hamlyn, 1966) by John Ridgway and Chay Blyth

Journey to Ardmore (Hodder & Stoughton, 1971) by John Ridgway  

Cockleshell Journey (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974) by John Ridgway 

Gino Watkins (OUP, 1974) by John Ridgway

Storm Passage (Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) by John Ridgway 

Round the World with Ridgway (Heinemann, 1978) by John and Marie Christine Ridgway 

Round the World Non-Stop (Patrick Stephens, 1985) by John Ridgway and Andy Briggs 

Flood Tide (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988) by John Ridgway

Something Amazing (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993) by Rebecca Ridgway 

*More information about the books: 

http://www.johnridgway.co.uk/books.html

*For the School of Adventure at Ardmore, click here: Ridgway Adventure