“How did you end up here?” a constant question from guests at Sea Gypsy, a good one, I often wonder myself? Had anyone asked a teen Linda would you spend 28 years running a resort on a small tropical island in the South China Sea there would have been a categorical and resounding NO!
A favourite 1938 Punch cartoon entitled The British Character: Adaptability to Foreign Conditions would appear to sum me up. Another anomaly considering I was born in Norway and applied for British nationality at the age of 19, but that’s another story.
The story of why is really one about my husband Daniel Wills and not about me at all.
Daniel was born in Singapore, the son of a British expatriate planter whose father and grandfather had also been in Malaya, as it then was. The plantation was in the state of Johor and Daniel had grown up loving the country and the people. Like most children of expats he was packed off to boarding school at a very young age but spent the long holidays playing on and around the plantation. His first language was Bahasa Melayu and his heart was truly Malaysian. His upbringing was very Somerset Maughan and I used to love listening to the stories of his young days, like trekking through the jungle with his family in full evening dress carrying a trifle to the next planter’s house for Christmas dinner.
Daniel and I had met in the Maldives some years earlier. I had set up and was operating a flying ambulance service and he was running a large dive base. Our relationship was one of those strange things that are hard to fathom or explain. Quite apart from the fact he was eleven years younger than me, our beliefs were just about 180 degrees diametrically opposed on any given topic from religion to politics, from music to literature. Lively debate was a healthy feature in our household but not arguments. We each respected the other’s opinion and enjoyed our discussions. Daniel adored the sea, lived for it since learning to dive at the age of 12, and made his career out of being in it one way or another. Apart from being a very qualified commercial diver he was a sporty, swimming, sailing, rugby playing, jungle trekking sort of chap that couldn’t stand cities and got lost trying to find his way back to the car park after the cinema. He hated living in Europe with a passion and only ever wanted to live in Asia. I only ever wanted to live slap bang in the middle of Chelsea and wear evening clothes. If I ever felt the need to commune with nature I read National Geographic. That way you don’t get dirty or sweaty and it doesn’t smell. Why I was even living and working in the Maldives is a long story and not one for this blog. Suffice it to say I never quite plan my life, it just sort of happens to me and I go with the flow.
Daniel had always wanted to “go home”. We had a successful commercial diving business in the Maldive Islands when a friend asked if he’d like to visit an island in Malaysia with a view to starting a dive base at a resort that was under construction. Daniel jumped at the chance of perhaps opening a dive base at this new resort as a way of getting a foot back into the land he loved. I was completely happy with our life in the Maldives and didn’t see this new venture as much of a threat. I thought it would just mean owning and operating the dive base in Malaysia as part of our existing commercial dive business. Daniel could commute and we would stay put on Male.
So off went hubby on a jolly to look at putting a dive base in this Malaysian resort and came back a week later having taken a ten year lease on 5 acres of beachfront jungle property. He had fallen in love with the resort where he had stayed, or rather the piece of land the so called resort was situated on, and asked the owner if we could lease it (after quite a few Tiger beers in the early hours of the morning I imagine). The owner not being too slow to spot a complete idiot when he saw one (even if he was also full of Tiger beer) produced a draft lease in short order and was ecstatic at the thought of handing the place over. He was sick of running it after seven years, we really should have asked why.
Friends and family used to believe that I wore the pants in our house as I appear to be independent, am fairly loud, say what I think and had generated my own income rather than be an employee since the age of 27. And of course I was so much older than Daniel. In truth he ruled the roost but there was no fist of iron. He was simply so nice about everything, so loving and kind that I never had the heart to disagree with what really made him happy. Also he was an exceedingly good breadwinner and didn’t mind if I didn’t want to work, which I felt gave him the right to decide where and how he was going to win the bread, so to speak. At the end of the day if building a beach resort with a dive base in Malaysia was what my husband wanted to do, that’s what we’d do. But don’t think that didn’t stop me telling him, long and very loud, ad nauseum (literally in my case) that he would absolutely hate running a resort once he’d built the damn thing!
Daniel set off almost immediately, leaving a very disgruntled and hormonal wife to close down our life in the Maldives. He was having the time of his life creating his idea of heaven, I was busy being completely unamused whilst winding up our business and destroying my nest when I should have been building one. I caught up with him two months before my due date only to discover a building site with no cohesive plan of how anything would actually be done and never a thought about sheets, towels, crockery, cutlery, menus, etc. Apparently that was all “my department” so I spent two weeks crawling around shop houses in Johor Bahru and then did what any self respecting mother to be would do in that situation, went home to my mother. My mother happened to be living in Florida at the time, Daniel managed to arrive two days prior to his son Richard’s birth, and we both had so much fun baby number two was instantly planned for the following monsoon!
Having opened in February 1993 the marketing comprised of Daniel visiting Raffles Marina, the Tanglin Club and the Singapore Cricket Club and announcing “Dan’s back in town, why don’t you all come up to the island?”.
By April 1993 I was pregnant again and by June 1993 Daniel told me he didn’t want to run a resort on Pulau Sibu (enormous will power stopped the “I told you so”) from which time he was constantly on the move looking for what he’d really like to do. Here I should mention that a great friend on mine, Nancy, a highly qualified and sought after professional nanny, had followed us to Pulau Sibu from the Maldives in 1993 to teach me how not to kill a baby, since I’d never wanted children and apparently had no natural instinct for being a mother whatsoever. Nancy became a very important part of the Sea Gypsy story and she was one of the reasons it was so easy for Daniel to keep leaving the island in 1993. She moved on in October 1993, not realising how soon she’d be returning or for how long.
Our daughter Jade was born in January 1994, again in Florida, and by the time I returned to the island in April 1994 I knew our time on Pulau Sibu was drawing to a close, and that was absolutely fine by me. In June 1994 Daniel was offered an excellent position at a fantastic new (not yet opened) Marina in Desaru, good salary, house, car, expenses and great prospects. Wonderful, just near the ferry to Singapore, I was finally going to have it all!
In mid August 1994 I received a message that Daniel had come off a jet ski, which I found odd as he hated them. Apparently they’d been putting buoys in to act as markers for slalom races at the official opening of the marina and Daniel had decided to test them out. The accident happened at 2.30 pm but there were no other managers on duty and no SOP for accidents at that time. It was midnight before we got him to the first (supposedly) good hospital in Johor Bahru, where they proceeded to butcher him. Moved to Singapore the following day it was already too late, he fought the good fight for six weeks but died of septicemia at the end of September 1994. He was 29 years old.
I said this would be the story of how I “ended up” on Pulau Sibu, however it really doesn’t explain why with no home on the mainland, no boat other than a tiny 40hp, US$50’000 in debt and two babies I decided to stay on Pulau Sibu. That story is for next time.
If you have been, thanks for reading x