Compulsive Liar.
by Published on 20th January 2021 08:58 PM
My wife and I have just watched a film on Netflix called, ‘uwantme2KILLhim?’ I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone but basically it's about a boy who fantasies (tells porkies) to impress the teenage boys and girls at his school. Well, that set me off telling my wife about compulsive liars I had either sailed with or known socially or have worked with.
Sometimes called pathological liars, they are also known as mythomania, they tell porky pies for no apparent reasons. I’m the most gullible person and tend to believe what people tell me.
Anyway, here are three mythomaniacs I have known over the years.
One was a fireman (No names no pack drills) who boasted that he had climbed up to the top of Mount Everest, had shot dead dozens of Mau Mau terrorists whilst serving with the British Army in Kenya. He was about 12 years old at the time of the rebellion in 1960! If anyone said they had done something extraordinary, he would trump them by saying he’d also done that, but faster, higher, and more often.
His wife apologised saying, “He tends to exaggerate.”
But the two most compulsive liars that I met, were a third-mate on a ship I sailed on, the other was an officer in the sea cadets. Both these men were what you might call, nice friendly men and both were very intelligent.
The 3rd mate, I’ll call him Cyril. Back in the mid-1960s, he must have been nearly 60 years old, he was by far the oldest 3rd mate I’ve ever sailed with. Standing out on the bridge-wing one day, he pointed to a vapour trail high in the clear blue sky, it must have been a jet plane flying at about 35000 feet.
He said, “That’s a VC10.”
I could only just make out a shiny image in front of the vapor. I said, “How do you know that you can hardly see it?”
He said, “My mother is a pilot, She fly’s jet planes. She has a pilot’s ‘B’ licence, meaning she can pilot passenger jets.” I thought at the time his mother must be getting on towards her 80th birthday.
Anyway, a few weeks later, he showed me a photograph. “This is a photo of my mum.”
I took the photo, studied it for a moment or two, turned it over, and said, “She’s in a coffin!”
He said, “Yes she’s dead, that’s why.”
I looked at the stout old woman, who’s sickle-shaped mouth, obviously devoid of dentures, had caved in, her nose resting on her chin. She looked like she had been shoehorned into a coffin two sizes too small for her.
I said, “This is the airline pilot!?”
“Em, yes. She was before she died.”
I thought if she’s a jet pilot I’m an astronaut.
Cyril was a hypochondriac as well as a mythomaniac, constantly dosing himself up with antidepressants (barbiturates I think) while on these drugs he told one porky after another, each one getting more outlandish.
During the war, he said he was manning an Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun firing at a Heinkel bomber attacking his ship. He said the plane was so low, he could not depress the gun sufficient to shoot at the aircraft because of the handrail, so he got a hacksaw and cut away the handrail.
One day he said, he’d ‘served his time’ as a cadet sailing on tea clippers on the New Zealand coast. A week later he said, he’d served his time with Elder Dempster Lines on the Narvik and Murmansk Convoys.
But the best tale was when we were sailing through the Bay of Biscay in a gale on our way to Petit Couronne in France. The sea spray was actually breaking over the bridge. He staggered into the radio room and said to me, “Bloody hell, sparky, I nearly got washed overboard.”
However, writing home to his wife from Rouen, he told her that he’d been washed overboard by one wave and then deposited back on the deck by another wave. We left the River Seine for Liverpool. When the ship docked at Liverpool there was a bevy of reporters and press photographers waiting to interview Cyril on his astonishing saga of being washed overboard and then being washed back aboard again. Cyril’s wife had told the press about his adventure.
The next man, I’ll call him Ted, was a Lieutenant (SCC) RNR with the Sea Cadet Corps. Ted was a manager with British Aerospace, a family man with a lovely wife and two kids. For a long while, I believed all the exciting things he had done. Shortly after joining the cadets, he said to me, “I passed over your house yesterday.”
I said, “you should have called in for a brew.”
He said, “I would have, but there was no place to land the plane. I was flying over your house.”
I had no reason to disbelieve him, he said he was on a jolly flying solo from Preston to the Isle of Mann and back. Others in the cadets warned me to take what Ted said with a good pinch of salt. He did not have a pilot’s licence and could not fly a kite, never mind a Cessna. Although I did take what he said with a pinch of salt, because he was such a nice bloke, I never challenged him on his adventures.
He said he was doing a sea cadet officer’s navigation course on HMS Brighton (F106) that had just undergone a multi-million-pound upgrade to a Leander Class Type Frigate. Sailing from Glasgow down the Clyde (At night) the skipper said to Ted, “Right, Lieutenant ***** I’m going below. You take over conning the ship out to sea, while I get my head down!!!”
Ted said, “I was really nervous being in charge of this newly refitted warship taking her down the Clyde at night.”
I had to laugh at that, seeing a skipper, in his right mind, handing over command of a major warship in the River Clyde to a sea cadet officer.
Next, he told me he was a fighter pilot in the Korean War and that he was the only pilot of a turboprop aircraft to shoot down a MIG jet. (He got that idea from the CO of Holyhead Sea Cadets who, while serving with the Fleet Air Arm, did actually shoot down a MIG jet with a propeller-driven aircraft.)
Ted said he was related to one of the VC winners at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu Wars. That may have been true of course, although I suspected he just been watching the movie Zulu.
And so on, each story more unbelievable than the last one.
I won’t bore readers further. I was just wondering if this article sets off a thread of similar experiences.
