Former gamekeeper, joiner and nature reserve warden charts his journey through triumph and tragedy in new book

STANDFIRST: After a lifetime of messing around with boats, a former gamekeeper, joiner and nature reserve warden charts his journey through triumph and tragedy in a new book to raise funds for a charity that saved his life

WORDS IAN LAMMING

We are sitting in a boat, on the back of a trailer, outside a shed and nowhere near water. I would not normally mention the setting of an interview but, on this occasion, it is important because the boat is everything.

Sixteen feet long, the Yachting Monthly Senior is more than a boat to its owner Martin Norris, it is a metaphor, a time machine, physical and mental therapy and the inspiration for his new book Pilgrim’s (surprisingly slow) Progress, which he has just finished for a good cause.

Ironically, the cause has nothing to do with water but rather air transport, the Great North Air Ambulance helicopter that transported his battered and broken body from his Cockermouth home to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle after his ladder slipped while he was cleaning moss from the gutters. Without the aid of those pilots and doctors the 66-year-old believes he would not have seen his 61st birthday.

The first line of the book, written on a train, by the way, hints that there is more to this author than meets the eye: “This is the story of how I came to build a boat,” it begins. “But it is intended to be much more than that…

“Although sadness and tragedy is a recurring theme throughout, it is not essentially a tragic story and hopefully may even raise a smile,” he writes. It does, largely due to an irreverent style that only comes with life (and near death) experience and an indelible appreciation of nature.

But first the tragedy, of which there is much, though the erstwhile Yorkshireman, now an adopted son of Cumbria, seldom dwells upon it; that would be self-indulgent.

Two of Martin’s brothers died prematurely, Jonny in a motor bike crash, aged just 17, and Pat in a climbing accident in the Peak District at 18. Then, in 2014, not long after he been discussing the idea of building a boat with his sister Gill, she was killed in a freak accident with a lawnmower, ironically, just weeks after she had attended a course on lawnmower safety.

He found out in the most brutal fashion. “My phone rang upstairs. ‘Gill calling’, it said on the screen. ‘Hello Gill,’ I said. ‘It is not Gill, Gill is dead’,” returned the voice on the other end.

That is more than enough tragedy for most people, but not Martin. Not wanting to dwell, it may be enough to say that his best friend Richard Longstaff was killed on the snowy slopes of Scafell, falling 400ft after losing his footing on ice. He made the same journey to the RVI, in the same helicopter, but sadly failed to survive his injuries.

Martin’s wife Lynette suddenly lost her job as headteacher in brutal fashion after her school was taken over by an academy. They had so sell their home and while he was trying to make good repairs highlighted in the survey, he fell from the eaves breaking his back, pelvis, ribs, vertebrae, collapsing a lung and suffering head injuries too. He took the words of his consultant – “you have crossed the bridge” – to mean back to the land of the living.

And so to the boat, the point of the book and the means to raise at least £1,000 for the air ambulance.

A patchwork of saved wood, the small yacht has become a metaphor for life as Martin tries to rebuild his body and soul. “I convalesced in Spain and daydreamed of building it,” he recalls. “I wanted to spend my active life being as close to nature as possible and needed the vehicle to do so.

“It wasn’t particularly easy and there was a lot of pain but I was determined to carry on as normal. There were times when I crawled into the cabin and couldn’t move and just lay there but I absolutely refused to give in to it and I realised that while I could feel the pain it meant I was still alive.”

Martin’s obsession with boats began as a child and his first was a scale model, built by his mining engineer father, called Sea Urchin. The plans date back to the 1950s, a period he identifies with the most and while the hull follows them to the inch, the rest of the build he “figured out himself”.

“I have acquired and saved wood over the years, as my dad would say ‘it might come in’,” says Martin. “Some was from an old oak tree growing here, which we felled when it became unsafe, other is from a mahogany bedhead we had as children. The lockers are made from oak from the house next door. The tiller handle is Tasmanian Huon pine, the oldest living organism on the planet with trees up to 3,000 years old. I even used a couple of ebony piano keys from a piano my dad smashed to bits as stops to prevent the trays sliding out.

“I needed a rig for someone who was getting on in years and was lacking in mobility, so I used the Chinese junk style which I can manage on my own. At the base of the tabernacle there is a crown, a coin commemorating the centenary of the Great War, in which both my granddads fought exactly a century before I built the boat from 2014-18.”

The boat was launched on Derwentwater on his father’s birthday and named Pilgrim after John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and representing the journey he has taken from leaving school – after which he became a gamekeeper on the Queen’s Sandringham Estate.

“I used to speak to the Queen and I remember being told off by the Duke of Edinburgh,” he recalls. “They called me The Boy and I’d been helping with a shoot, which is extremely hard work, and because I was tired I was slumped against a gate post. The Duke called over the head gamekeeper and announced ‘I didn’t realise our gate posts needed propping up’ and I got told off.

“There were good memories. The unmarried men lived in loose boxes – we were known as the bothy boys – and I used to get £9 per fortnight so never had any money. It’s probably why I’m still tight with money now. But we used to help ourselves to the apricots and peaches in the royal glasshouses.”

Money and the promise of a trade took Martin to Slough and a government training scheme to become a joiner but the dream job remained working outside with nature. For 14 years he worked as an area manager with the Lake District National Park and a nature reserve warden on Walney Island for two years.

A lover of art as well as nature Martin set up a studio-cum-workshop on land next to his former house called the Pot Duck Factory, PDF for short, from which ceramic wildlife creations emerged over a decade, each with an accompanying anecdote.

The link between his art and his boat has never been stronger. “You have to be out in the environment to see things so I can come back here and work,” he says. “I spotted these pink footed geese while drifting in my boat,” he adds showing off one ceramic. “Right in the middle was an American snow goose which must have been blown off course by storms and will never be able to return home because of the prevailing winds. The pink footed geese will be its new family.

“I love nature and life now is all about trying to get closer to it. I’ve counted 22 species of birds here around my workshop.”

So when he is not on the water or in his workshop, he will be in his boat, perhaps on the back of his trailer with a cup of coffee, but enjoying nature nonetheless.

• Martin’s ceramics are available through Percy House Gallery, Cockermouth, and Thornthwaite Gallery, at Seldom Seen, where his book is also available. To buy copies of Pilgrim’s (surprisingly slow) Progress, email Martin at boatpilgrim@gmail.com. To make a donation towards his fundraising for the Great North Air Ambulance, go to justgiving.com and search for