Joanne McNeill: Offbeat memoirs are inspirational

Joanne McNeill.

Assuming no cool dark delicious mountain pools are handy and it's too hot to sleep, when temperatures blister and everything swims, the only answer is to switch off, tune out, lie down in the translucent green shade of the grapevine and drift off on the imaginary breeze of a good book.

Somehow the remarkable stars of the books which carried me through the worst of last week - John Wray's South Sea Vagabonds and Barry Brickell: A Head of Steam by Christine Leov-Lealand - seemed to share a theme.

Johnny Wray's is an epic 1930s tale of building his first vessel, a sturdy 34-foot, cutter-rigged, beamy, kauri carvel Ngataki, to his own design from scrounged materials on his parents' Remuera front lawn, and sailing away.

Wray (1909-1986) writes in the witty, understated, self-deprecating style of the era, sans juicy biographical details, so readers can't know whether he was a convention-defying prodigy or not, whereas Leov-Lealand reveals Brickell displayed early promise by nearly burning down his parents' tinder dry, Devonport villa when he fired up a kiln under the floorboards as a child.

However, by the time they were young men, they were both clearly temperamentally unsuited to complying with their parents' hopes of proper jobs in carpeted offices.

They did try.

But when Wray, with a head full of sailing dreams, was made redundant in 1933, he decided, despite assets of only a few pounds and a motorcycle, to build a boat. Helped by mates, he learned as he went, borrowing tools, devising fiendish equipment, towing in driftwood kauri logs for milling, stapling with tarred fencing wire cooked in his mother's oven, and caulking with pyjamas.

The saga of building and transporting the finished vessel to its launching is far more terrifying than his ensuing ocean sailing adventures (albeit without GPS or Epirb).

It was nevertheless astonishing to discover pouring oil on troubled waters is no mere metaphor. Hove-to in wild seas, twice Wray successfully tied a leaking bag of oil over the side to calm the waves breaking over his ship. Apparently it's an age-old technique, based on surface tension, documented by Aristotle, Pliny, the Venerable Bede no less, and Benjamin Franklin who demonstrated it on a choppy lake. Who knew?

Brickell (1935-2016), an organic outdoorsman and prodigious worker, loathed the office jobs and smart clothes necessary to fund studies for his teaching degree. After two terms teaching at Coromandel High School, he quit and concentrated on a massive lifetime of artistic output of pots, both singular and domestic, integrating those with Driving Creek Railway, now a highly successful tourism destination.

He had several imaginary alternative personae, including stationmaster "Humphrey P, Colefax" and expert "Dr Erskine".

Both Brickell and Wray are said to have inspired generations. In common, their "success" was the incidental by-product of having followed their hearts.

Could either have done what they did under current strictures?

I can't imagine kindly police stopping traffic today for a helmetless young fellow on a 350cc Royal Enfield precariously towing boat lengths of milled timber through busy Auckland streets. I doubt Brickell's strategy of returning pesky bureaucratic mail after stamping it "Unsatisfactory" to buy time would work now either.

Defying societal norms by following hearts into original creative adventures is no easier now than it ever was, more's the pity.