There was a time in the 1970s when daydreams of escape from suburban Britain seemed often to drift towards intrepid sea voyages. Thor Heyerdahl’s televised rafting adventures had something to do with it, and Francis Chichester’s fabled circumnavigation; those adventures stirred a salty restlessness in a generation of men who had grown up with the war stories of fathers and grandfathers and felt the need, in midlife, for tales of their own. One such individual was Maurice Bailey, a hot-metal typesetter from Derby. Bailey, a shy and awkward man, survivor of a miserable childhood, found love for the first time at 30, when he married Maralyn Harrison in 1963. Nearly a decade later, at a time when Britain had elected a yachtsman, Ted Heath, as prime minister, the Baileys abandoned their bungalow and their camping holidays in the Lake District and set out together on a sailing boat to New Zealand.
The Baileys’ voyage was not a whim. They had spent the previous five years building and kitting out their boat, which they called Auralyn, an amalgam of their names, the nearest thing they could imagine to parenthood. Maurice was an old-school hobbyist, who believed a serious seaman should leave as little as possible to chance. He taught himself to navigate using a sextant and the stars – Auralyn had no electronic instruments – and deputed a willing Maralyn to take charge of a galley in which “fresh fruits were individually wrapped in newspaper and turned regularly to avoid bruising”.
Their meticulous planning lasted beyond the Panama Canal when, en route to the Galápagos islands, the hull of the Auralyn was shattered by a surfacing whale. The Baileys subsequently survived for nearly four months together on a rubber dinghy not big enough for either of them to lie down on, before being picked up, close to death, by a South Korean trawler. For a year or two, back home, they became a celebrity couple. They were paid £10,000 for their survival story by the Daily Express; Margaret Thatcher, then education secretary, presented Maralyn with an award as “woman of the year” in 1974; their memoir, 117 Days Adrift, which described how they fished with safety pins, and rationed rain water, and ate turtles on the fathomless ocean, was a bestseller.
This beautifully conceived book by Sophie Elmhirst, her first, retells the Baileys’ story not just as that extraordinary tale of endurance, but as a singular and universal kind of love story – because, as she writes: “What else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”
Elmhirst, a journalist who specialises in wryly acute and deeply researched “long reads” in the Guardian and elsewhere, brings all her curiosity for detail to this story. She writes sentences with the kind of care that the Baileys might have devoted to varnishing their main deck or plotting an accurate course to harbour. As she reads between the lines of Maurice’s volumes of recollection and Maralyn’s diary notes, she locates the truer cadences of their relationship, or adds lyrical framings of her own to their story. “Love,” she notes at one point, “when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke” – letting the reader hear the echo of the fateful leviathan’s tail in that last phrase.
In interesting ways, Elmhirst’s story becomes as much about the vast emptiness around the couple at its centre as about their ever more desperate daily rituals on the dinghy. A note to the book suggests that she was drawn to their tale during the isolation of lockdown, when existential thoughts edged every relationship. One defence against that darkness, either the long nights that the Baileys spent in the raging ocean, or the lesser anxieties of the pandemic, is seen to rest in mundane habit and ritual. The Baileys had no motor, no sail, no means of attracting attention as they drifted 1,500 miles in a deflating dinghy, but they knew all the same that “all homes, however small and insubstantial, require a system”. They placed their faith to begin with in drawing up lists of the things they did have – a jar of Coffee Mate, a biography of Richard III, a tin of Sainsbury’s ravioli and a Huntley & Palmers Dundee cake that they were saving for Maralyn’s birthday – and set about building the best life they could from there.
There is a period comedy to some of this; the writing is quietly alive to the world not only of Maurice and Maralyn but to the fellow travellers they meet at different ports before the drama unfolds, couples who share their doomed ambitions of escape from the caricatures of the 1970s: Nevil and Sheila, Brian and Sue, with their outrage over pinched bottoms and their asti spumante to toast Christmas in the Caribbean.
That occasional Abigail’s Party flavour is set against the howling human endurance and resourcefulness that somehow kept the Baileys alive and sane. Maralyn emerges as a character with the most profound kind of strength, refusing hour by hour her husband’s despair, now making playing cards for games of whist on the desolate ocean, now working out how to kill sharks for supper. Still, they are a partnership. Maurice’s comparative weakness is suggested as the source of all of Maralyn’s resolve: what saved her, she told one interviewer, was principally “having someone to think about, rather than think about myself all the time”. One of the thoughts Maurice’s thin hold on life enabled her to avoid was the fact that she could not swim.
The emotional acuity of the book lies as much in those passages of high drama as in the before and the after of them. The Baileys were commissioned to write another book about another voyage, but of course no one wants to read a story that goes to plan and so, eventually, they ended up on a different kind of raft: “back on land, just like everyone else. A bungalow, a dog, a garden.”
Adventures are always set outside of the normal terms of life, but here Elmhirst lets her readers experience the extremes not only of those 117 days at sea but the ways in which they shaped and were shaped by the many thousands of days of Maurice and Maralyn’s relationship either side of them. The result is a compelling book about a shipwreck, but also as thoughtful a tale about marriage, for better and worse, as you are likely to read.
• Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
