‘I worked on a superyacht... and was shocked by what I learnt about the uber-rich’
telegraph.co.ukHome Counties spent half of her 20s working as a steward and chef on luxury yachts, all played out before a dazzling backdrop of billionaire marinas and azure seas.She earned €40,000 tax-free at the height of that career, plus occasional four-figure cash tips, with board and lodging thrown in, enabling her to save a deposit for the flat she now lives in with her seven-month-old son Alfred.
But the reality of life aboard a super-yacht was somewhat less grand than it might seem to viewers of Succession, as she reveals in her new book, Behind Ocean Lines.For beyond the banal miseries of marine existence (‘stirring a thick sauce over a lurching stove must be the perfect recipe for seasickness’), White tells of gruelling 18-hour days spent micro-cleaning bathrooms with tweezers and cotton buds, and of guests’ outrageous demands.
One ‘yachtie’ she got chatting to at a crew bar in Montenegro told White that their ‘last guests had complained about the temperature of the water.
Could they do something about it? Perhaps heat the Adriatic?’There are the darker stories too: captains with ‘God complexes’ who bullied and even assaulted their crew.
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