My Account
I have always believed that you can’t score a goal if you don’t kick the football and my life has been filled with adventure because of that mantra. I was born in North London a bloody long time ago – 1947, on the wrong side of the tracks. My earliest memories are of steam locomotives puffing passed my bedroom window and London still heavily damaged from the wartime blitz. My Mum came from a long line of landed gentry, but her grandfather ran off with a farm girl and was disinherited. Mum performed on the stage and played theatres like Drury Lane in London’s famed West End. Luckily, I inherited some of her artistic talent. She suffered from depression and sadly, this led to her death in 1970. My Dad enlisted at the start of World War II as a private. He was shot while riding a motorcycle and crashed. The bike chain almost severed his leg and he never walked properly again. He was invalided out having attained the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major. He must’ve been a strong man to achieve that rank, but I never knew that side of him. The injury finally claimed his life in 1972 – his weak leg slipped off the clutch at a busy intersection and the car lurched forward into the speeding traffic. He was killed along with two of my aunts. Losing three family members at the same time was terrible.
My Mum sent me to a private Catholic school across the tracks, which she could barely afford. Before the year was out, the nuns told her I would burn in the fires of hell. I was six years old. I know now that I have dyslexia, but at the time they thought I was stupid and ‘bone idle’ – that’s the complete opposite of what I am. I was severely bullied when I moved to the local state school. I wasn’t gay, in fact, I’ve never had a homosexual experience, but I was tall with long hair and didn’t fit in. One day I’d had enough and fought back. I remember the headmaster watching me punching the bully from his office window. He gave me a wry smile when he came and broke up the fight. Since then I have always faced up to bullies.
I’ve always loved boats and the sea; my grandfather was a mariner who died when his ship was sunk during the World War I at the Battle of Jutland. I have written a series of historical novels about my piratical ancestors. They plundered booty off the Cornish coast during the 1700s. The first, called Pearce’s Ocean, was published in 2003. My dyslexia makes my writing practically indecipherable, but computers opened up a whole new creative world for me. At 18, I went with a friend to the Scilly Isles on a diving holiday. Diving wasn’t the recreational sport it is today. My dive tanks were two fire extinguishers left over from the war and I didn’t have an air gauge. When it became difficult to breathe, we kicked like mad for the surface, managing a few more puffs as the air in the tanks expanded. The next year we returned and got stuck into the salvage diving business. There are over 400 charted wrecks off the Scilly Isles. We started diving for scrap metal between 30 and 50 metres down. I learned about using underwater explosives from Doug, a WWII veteran and explosives expert. We placed submarine gelignite under the huge engine of a sunken steam ship. The powerful force lifted the engine and completely rolled it over. We then salvaged the valuable condenser it had been resting on. It was 1967 and the warship HMS Association, which sank in 1707 with the loss of all 800 crew, had been located and was being salvaged. Four other ships went down with her that night with the loss of 1550 men. It is still the Royal Navy’s worst peacetime disaster. I helped salvage 2000 artefacts, including silver and gold coins. That summer was a fantastic time in my life – the beautiful girls working in the hotels would come and meet us treasure-seeking dive boys. I could sing and play the guitar, and we would lie on the beach long into the night and do what young girls and boys do. The girls loved my guitar playing. I picked it up when I was 14 and found it easy to play. Folk legend John Renbourn gave me lessons on finger-style. We used to play at Les Cousins – the top club in London. It was under the legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott’s and I ended up jamming with Paul Simon. John also taught Paul finger-style and our playing style is very similar. When John was at the height of his powers in 1965 he had a minor car accident on his way to a gig. I stood in for him that night and played to over 400 people at the club. I loved it, but stage fright meant I needed a few drinks before going on, so I didn’t pursue that career.
I met my future wife in Germany in 1969. She is a person of supreme courage, but I won’t mention her name to spare her blushes. I was running a sales team selling encyclopaedias to US servicemen and was earning up to a $1000 a week. At that time, $50 a week would have been a good wage. My future wife was from New Zealand and wanted to travel. My proposal to her was, ‘You want to travel and I want to sail. Let’s get married and sail back to New Zealand’. She said ‘yes’, which turned out to be a fateful decision, because the brave girl was to sail across the Pacific while pregnant. We bought our first boat Spray – a 62-year-old, 40-foot (12m) yacht – in Penarth on the Severn estuary in Wales. Spray is now 106 years old and resides in the Bay of Islands. The River Severn has a 12-metre rise and fall of tide – it was a hell of a place to learn to sail. I had no official sailing qualifications because I can’t learn from books, but I had sea-sense. In those days there wasn’t GPS. I learned celestial navigation from a piece of cardboard with four diagrams drawn on it. One of the most satisfying achievements of my life was, after 28 days at sea, watching the majestic Caribbean island of Saba rise on the horizon exactly where I reckoned it would. We set sail in the spring of 1972, there are hundreds of memorable moments on that trip, but a couple stick in my mind. We were in the doldrums off Colombia and my wife was on watch. She nervously called my name. The biggest dorsal fin I had ever seen was cruising alongside the boat. It belonged to a 40-foot (12m) orca. I know that because it was the same size as the boat! At that time, whaling was still operating and a couple of boats had been sunk by angry orca. We barely breathed, but the old guy left us in peace.
After arriving in NZ, we built a house in Greenhithe and I worked as a sales manager for a safety equipment company. Even before we had kids we agreed it was better to show them the world, rather than have them learn about it through television. Over the next 10 years I honed my skills and built Freebooter, a 60-foot (18m) kauri ketch. Freebooter is another term for a pirate; it was a nod to my ancestors. We started our circumnavigation of the world in 1984 with our two sons, Alden, 7, and Courtney, 10. We were away for five years and the whole trip was funded by money I earned building and repairing boats in various ports. The boys did correspondence classes and went to schools all over the world. They learned in grass huts on the islands off Papua New Guinea and spoke fluent Spanish after a year of school in Spain. We had always wanted a daughter and decided to adopt. We sailed to Venezuela and started the year-long process of adoption. The mother superior at the orphanage was impressed by our boys’ Spanish and never once spoke to us in English. Eventually we had a three-month trial period with 10-year-old Yusmari. We then went to the Venezuelan court and the judge asked Yusmari if she wanted to live with us. She said she would love to, and that is why the adoption has been so successful. We then set sail and continued on our adventure. I believe my children have had the best education on earth. There were some scary moments, like the time they returned with a two-metre long barracuda! And when I had a run in with a four-metre-long tiger shark while spear fishing. I had cramp and it was circling me before going in for the kill, I screamed into my snorkel and headed straight for it – always stand up to bullies. It saved my life that day. My kids had an amazing childhood and they have all grown to be wonderful adults. Alden is now a charter captain, Courtney is a successful businessman, and my daughter has made me a very proud grandparent.
We returned to reality and Greenhithe in 1989. When my wife and I were in an adventurous environment we were a dynamite team – we were not so good in the daily humdrum of regular life. We separated in 1992 and it still saddens me that it didn’t work out. Ten years ago, I bought a timber house in Sandspit and set about completely renovating it. I continued with my writing and I also started to feel more comfortable living my life as a woman. Technically, I am transitioning and I take female hormones. In 2013 I started work on writing my transgender musical, People Like Us. I wrote all the 18 original songs and the musical ran at the Pumphouse Theatre in Takapuna earlier this year. We now have one of the best musical and opera directors in the country – Jonathan Alver – involved. I’m optimistic that the musical will play in Auckland City soon.
Sailing the world is easy, transitioning is very difficult, my family do not want Tony to die so I have to have some duality in my life. I wear a wedding ring, which symbolises the marriage of Tony and Joanna. Coming out is hard, but it is liberating and another adventure is unfolding.
