Sylvia Cook is just home from her part-time job at a DIY store in Leatherhead. The 73-year-old taught upholstery before she retired. She lives with her grown-up son in the same modest semi where she was raised in prime Reggie Perrin country, commuter-belt Surrey. The only clue to a life less ordinary is a framed invitation, propped up against a wall. Beneath the Buckingham Palace crest, it requests the pleasure of her company at a reception given by the Queen last December, “for those involved in exploration and adventure”.
“Oh, that,” she says, as if it were a ticket to the church bazaar. “I couldn’t go, which was a shame because I do like meeting new people. I’d broken my shoulder, slipping over when I was dancing.” She pauses. Her voice is plummy but soft. “But, anyway, I didn’t really deserve it. It should have been addressed to Johnny. He was the one who liked that sort of thing.”
It is 40 years since Cook and her swashbuckling boyfriend, John Fairfax, became the first people ever to row across the Pacific Ocean, all 8,000 miles of it, from San Francisco to Australia. It took them four days short of a year. They survived shark attacks, a cyclone, a broken rudder and being washed up on a coral reef, plus edgy encounters with Pacific islanders who were shocked by her skimpy bathing costume. “It was actually a very decent bathing costume,” she protests, “but they rushed forward and wrapped a skirt round me.”
Fairfax didn’t live to see the anniversary. His death, earlier this month in Las Vegas, saw him hailed by obituary writers as the last of the “old-style adventurers”. Indeed, “Adventurer” was how he described himself in his passport. He’d led a peripatetic and flamboyant life as a sometime pirate, smuggler, skipper, mink farmer and gambler.
So did Cook put “adventurer” or “upholsterer” in her passport? “I wouldn’t have done anything by myself,” she says firmly. “That was down to Johnny.” Yet she is, for all the show of normality, no less a true original than her former partner, albeit in her own understated way. She tells of the extraordinary things she has done as if describing a badly organised but amusing picnic. This is the woman who rowed the Pacific even though she couldn’t swim (“If we’d ended up in the ocean, swimming would only have prolonged the agony”). And then there is her other habit. “I’ve never been a worrier. If I worried on the boat, I just fell asleep.”
The start of her partnership – professional and “quite soon after” personal – with the half-English, half-Bulgarian Fairfax is wonderfully romantic. He’d come to Britain in 1967 with £300 in his pocket, to raise money for the first solo crossing of the Atlantic by an oarsman. To find a sponsor, he placed a newspaper advertisement.
“I’d just ended a lousy marriage,” Cook recalls, “was working as a secretary and rowing competitively. I wanted something to get my teeth into. I’d never even been out of England. So I replied, saying I’ve no money, but can I help? Johnny came to meet me. He kept asking for glasses of water. Later, he told me he did it so he could look at my legs as I walked backwards and forwards. I was quite skinny in those days.”
In photographs, Fairfax is just as she describes him, dashingly handsome and decidedly louche, but the tall, sultry Cook is no less striking, very Jane Birkin with her thick, shoulder-length dark hair, toothy smile, long legs and mini skirts.
While Fairfax prepared for his Atlantic crossing – principally on the Serpentine in Hyde Park (“he’d never rowed before”) – she acted as his Girl Friday. When he set off from the Canary Islands in January 1969, she saw him off. There were no support vessels, satellite phones or webcams. When he arrived back on terra firma, in Florida, she was waiting on the beach. The first thing he told her was that he now wanted to cross the Pacific. “ 'Next time, though,’ he said, 'I’m going to take a girl.’ I knew it had got to be me.”
Did she say that to him? She makes a show of looking offended. “No, of course not. I waited to be asked.” Pause. “It took him a few days.”
She must have had doubts. “No, probably because I was stupid and unimaginative. I almost chickened out at one stage but that was because it was taking so long to get ready. Johnny didn’t want kids and my biological clock was plummeting. When I told him I wasn’t coming, he was very off-hand. 'I’ll put another advert in the paper,’ he said.” She giggles at the memory.
The lowest point of the trip came, she recalls, towards the end when a shark bit a chunk out of Fairfax’s arm as he was fishing for food. She produces a graphic picture of the open wound. “It was too big to stitch, so I just bound it up. There was this triangle of flesh dangling down and I couldn’t decide whether to leave it or cut it off. Johnny was ashen and I did begin to think – what if he dies? What will I do with the body? If I threw it overboard, everyone would think I’d bumped him off.”
With Fairfax still ailing, they were caught up for five days in Cyclone Emily: “It was like being on the South Downs, but they were all moving.” When it finally passed, they were still 700 miles off the coast of Australia and Fairfax could no longer do his share of the rowing. I have to deduce this: Cook wasn’t going to draw it to my attention. “I did what I could,” she says and shrugs. “I didn’t do it all in a day.” Without her, though, the adventure would have ended in failure.
Was there never talk of marriage? “He said he would never marry and that we had an open relationship. I didn’t like that. He’d say, 'Oh, Sylvie is like my sister.’ Pretty incestuous kind of sister, I’d think.” But she never pushed him. “I know that is what smart girls do, but it would have built up resentment.”
There was one last adventure. In 1974, they returned to Washington Island, mid-Pacific, in an attempt to salvage a cargo of lead ingots. This time, though, they took a big boat and a crew. One of them, Cook adds matter-of-factly, is the father of her son. “Probably better not to go into that. Johnny was behaving badly.”
The salvage didn’t work out, either. Afterwards Cook settled back into life in England, bought a flat in Kingston – “my bit of security” – raised her son alone, taught, and ended up living in her parents’ old house. It was “not very me, really”. Indeed: neither the neighbours nor her work colleagues at B&Q know about her other life. (“How do you start the conversation?”)
Everything points to Fairfax being the love of her life. “I never knew if I was in love with him or his life. Or if there was a difference. He was a bit of a dreamer, but if you don’t dream you don’t achieve.” Like all old-school adventurers, Cook has a stiff upper lip. “I was surprised when he got married [in 1982],” she concedes. “His wife was 10 years younger and so different from me – blonde and ultra-feminine. You know, all grooming and looks and fashions. She was awful to me at first.”
Her friendship with Fairfax, though, endured. He called a few days before his death to say how well he was. “I couldn’t even speak about it when I first heard the news,” she says, as a tear appears in the corner of her eye.
