Cherry (12 page)

Birdie had fallen for Miss Betty. ‘Perhaps it is well I am off and I should not answer for myself after a little longer acquaintance . . . I don’t think so though. Both Cherry and I are able to see things as they should be though he – not being a sailor and having gone deeper – will like it less than I.’ However deep Cherry had gone, he was determined to conceal it from his mother. Later, before parcelling up his journal for despatch to Lamer where Evelyn was instructed to read it instead of a letter, he wrote up his South African entries without a single reference to his
coup de coeur
. ‘I did a lot of shopping,’ he concluded.

Meanwhile, who should turn up in Cape Town but Harry Woollcombe, last sighted in Brisbane. He was still preaching furiously for the Church of England Men’s Society, and had arrived in South Africa after an exhausting tour through New Zealand. He took Cherry off to meet the Archbishop and other eminent Cape Town personages, all less appealing than Miss Kitty. It was a busy time. Besides sightseeing (Cherry went up Table Mountain by Skeleton Gorge) there was a banquet to attend and mail to send.

They set sail again on 2 September, and Scott took over the command as far as Melbourne, sending Wilson on to Australia by steamship to recruit another geologist and continue fund-raising. Everyone was disappointed that Wilson was temporarily leaving the ship. ‘It will be terrible without “our Bill”,’ wrote Birdie, ‘as he was always the balancing point in the mess.’ Wilson, meanwhile, was keen to reassure Reggie that the faith they had invested in their protégé was being rewarded. ‘It is delightful to find,’ he wrote, ‘that he [Cherry] is such a real favourite with everyone. . . . You need have no fears for his eyesight. I have so often watched him and have been struck by the absence of all handicap when he might have been bothered by glasses . . .’

Shortly after the
Terra Nova
left Simonstown she steamed into the famous gales of the roaring forties. All the crew could do was put the engines at dead slow and sail as close to the wind as possible. The little ship rose on the crest of one mountain of water after another, plunging into the foamy valleys in between and rolling sharply, flinging anyone on deck against the rail. Men on the first and middle watches went aloft in the dark in seventy-mile-an-hour winds and driving hail, unable to see the canvas that was flapping crazily four feet away. Despite having broken a small bone in his wrist the night they left South Africa, Cherry learned to reef sails and to work flattened against the yard-arm, and he weathered the storms like an old hand. A member of the expedition later wrote that he was ‘one of the landsmen who took kindly to a sailor’s life’, and Wilson reported gleefully to Reggie that Cherry was ‘as strong as a horse’.

For this leg of the journey Cherry was the sole zoologist. He applied himself to the task with vigour, noting on 14 September that he had been lucky with the bird line and caught three Cape pigeons, two great grey shearwaters and one black-breasted petrel. Below deck the seamen were preparing camping gear, sewing up food bags and repairing lampwick bindings, while in the wardroom sledging plans were again discussed avidly. Cherry discovered that he had already been selected for the important journey with dogs, ponies and sledges to cache stores on the ice in preparation for the dash to the Pole. He was thrilled.

The men who did not know Scott now had the opportunity to see him in action. He was more aloof, as a captain, than his second-in-command Evans: according to Silas Wright, Scott ‘takes no part in skylarking – but always looks on with a grin’, whereas Evans, known as ‘the Skipper’, ‘has a taste for rowdyism’. Short, muscular Evans had a range of wardroom tricks up his sleeve. He was able to pick a man up by his teeth (by getting hold of his belt, for example), and was famed for his ability to rip a pack of cards in half. ‘Evans is leader in all these things,’ an observer wrote of the larks. The difference in personality and leadership style between Scott and his second-in-command was felt keenly throughout the expedition – and after it.

Scott was forty-two years old. He was not a fatherly leader. He was a reserved man, and, like Cherry, he was not at ease at cocktail parties. But Scott was more volatile, and he was subject to black moods that lasted for days. Temperamentally he was more complicated than his peers, especially in his self-doubt, which tortured him. He believed that he was by nature indolent, and that his most vital task was to triumph over his baser self. But he had worked tirelessly to raise funds for the expedition, trailing round the country addressing damp, half-empty halls in provincial towns, sometimes, through no fault of his own, bringing in as little as twenty pounds in a night. Throughout the months of preparation Scott put his shoulder to the punishing wheel of fund-raising without complaint, and he could be very persuasive. Nobody enjoys that kind of work, but Scott enjoyed it less than most. He used to say that the worst part of an expedition was over when the preparation was finished.

The scientists, mostly civilians, were unfamiliar with naval systems and traditions, and they instinctively identified with Wilson. Furthermore, Wilson was always willing to answer their questions and listen to their complaints. Good-natured Bill was one of the few men on the expedition who didn’t grow critical of Scott’s temper, and it was he, not the leader, who inspired superlatives from almost everyone. ‘To all his comrades,’ Raymond Priestley remembered, ‘[he was] the nearest thing to a perfect man they ever knew or can hope to know.’

At Port Melbourne the ship was met by a launch bearing Wilson, his wife Oriana, Kathleen, Hilda Evans and the mailbag. It was dark and lashing with rain, and the sea was rolling heavily, but the women had insisted on persevering, bullying Wilson, who was steering, into submission. ‘I hope,’ he wrote in his diary afterwards, ‘it will never fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after, at any rate in a motor launch, in a running sea at night time.’

Cherry had been invited to stay with the Reverend W. H. Fitchett, a friend of his cousin Reggie Smith. A keen traveller and author, whose uplifting books included the bestselling
Deeds that Won the Empire
, Fitchett had met Cherry through Reggie on a recent visit to England. He was principal of the Methodist Ladies’ College out at Hawthorn, where he and his family also lived. ‘Cherry-Garrard had a look of the stoke-hole about him,’ recalled Fitchett affectionately. ‘He was the picture of health, with his face bronzed. He wore a soft shirt, his nails were broken and dirty, his hands horny, but he was the same charming, sweet-natured gentleman as ever, and we greatly enjoyed having him with us.’

The college was a multi-pinnacled, pseudo-Gothic affair of the kind popular with Australian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century. The girls were in residence, and when a dashing young Englishman appeared
en route
to the Antarctic they rushed for their cameras and autograph books and vied to be his tennis partner. It was difficult to imagine a more attractive welcome.

Fitchett had heard a good deal about Wilson from Reggie, and Uncle Bill and his wife were duly invited out to the college. After they had gone Fitchett eagerly wrote to Reggie:

Mrs Wilson told me that she heard Captain Scott discussing the members of the staff with Wilson, and he summed up Apsley Cherry-Garrard saying, ‘He is tip-top always.’ They will select the party for the actual dash for the Pole on the test of their fitness when the moment comes for the adventure, and Dr Wilson told me that he thought Apsley Cherry-Garrard would be one of the chosen party. He is justifying his claim to a place in it by his cheerfulness, his pluck, and his activity.

The expedition left Melbourne on 16 October after some changes of personnel. Once again, Scott wasn’t with them: he was to rejoin them in New Zealand. Before they finally departed, the ship was inspected by an Australian admiral who paused at the sight of Nigger, the expedition cat, reclining magisterially in the hammock the seamen had made him, complete with bedding and pillow.
¹⁵

In Melbourne Scott had picked up a cable announcing news which was to alter the course of polar history and shape his own destiny. It read simply, ‘
Beg leave to inform you
Fram
proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen
.’

On 1 September 1909, embroiled in preparations for his North Pole bid, Amundsen had opened a newspaper and read that someone else had got there first (two people, actually). The air went out of his project as if from a balloon. The tall, inscrutable Norseman with ice-blue eyes considered his position, and kept his own counsel. His lively imagination was fuelled by his powerful ambition: like most explorers, he saw little point in coming second. He had been travelling and training on ice since he was a boy, and he was one of the most experienced ice-men alive. Above all, Amundsen was a man who wanted to make a splash.

He made up his mind to switch poles. Like all expedition leaders, he would certainly return to colossal debt, and it would be far easier to raise funds after the event if he planted the Norwegian flag at the South Pole, rather than following others to its northern counterpart (there was to be no footling around with science after all). With characteristic flair, and with the
Fram
due to sail in a matter of months, Amundsen did not reveal his new plans to the public, to his backers, or to his crew. He kept silent, and made the startling announcement on the deck of the
Fram
off Madeira. (The cable to Scott was despatched by Amundsen’s brother Leon, who left the ship at Madeira.) Each man on board was given the opportunity to quit the expedition, and offered a free passage home. None took it. They were going to the South Pole.

When Scott allowed the news to spread, Cherry and the other men were not greatly disturbed. They had no idea of its devastating implications. But what the telegram meant, Cherry wrote with hindsight, was, ‘I shall be at the South Pole before you.’

Cherry shovelled coal relentlessly. It was a horrible job, and the men doing it were stung mercilessly by ‘stokehold flies’: drops of hot oil from the engines above that dripped on the backs of their necks as they stooped to shovel. At this stage of the journey they were burning ‘patent fuel’, which made their eyes and skin sting horribly as it was full of pitch and resin. ‘We are all a bit stale,’ he wrote on 24 October, ‘and I think New Zealand will do us good.’ But even stale, uncomfortable and spotted with burning oil, he was happier than he had ever been.

In a small, cramped ship which made ceaseless demands, the most capable men were bound to emerge. In Australia Cherry wrote that, ‘Among the executive officers Scott was putting more and more trust in Campbell.’ Victor Campbell was first officer aboard the
Terra Nova
and a shy, steely Old Etonian in flight from a troubled marriage. A quiet and distinguished man with a high forehead and a strong chin, Campbell had transferred to the Royal Navy from the Merchant Service, though he had retired in 1902 at the age of twenty-seven. He lived part of each year in Norway, where he had become an accomplished skier; it was his love of skiing, in part, that had led him to join the expedition (he was the only man who could ski, except Gran, the young Norwegian). As first officer he had been responsible for routine and discipline on the voyage south, and as a result he had been nicknamed ‘the Wicked Mate’. ‘I was very frightened of Campbell,’ Cherry claimed; but the first officer was no martinet. ‘Campbell as the “President of the Purity Brigade” wears a halo,’ Wilson recorded in his diary, ‘but it has been broken so often that it hardly holds together and has a permanent cant.’

Cherry continued to impress Scott. ‘Cherry-Garrard has won all hearts,’ he wrote to Reggie. ‘He shows himself ready for any sort of hard work and is always to the front when the toughest jobs are on hand. He is the most unselfish, kind-hearted fellow . . .’ It was not a small achievement. Before they left home there had been sniggers at Cherry’s startling lack of any kind of qualification for the expedition; men had joked that he had been selected for his handy knowledge of Latin and Greek. (Titus Oates, the other ‘adaptable helper’, at least had experience with horses.) ‘You will be equally glad to know that he is exceedingly happy,’ Scott continued. ‘I haven’t asked if he is, but when I see his cheerful brown face charged with enthusiasm and wreathed in smiles I cannot doubt it – but indeed it is a good life for any young man who has the right stuff in him.’

On 28 October the
Terra Nova
steamed into Lyttelton in New Zealand. Cherry was again able to stay with a friendly family known to his own people, this time the Burtons, the English occupants of St Michael’s Vicarage in St Albans, just outside Christchurch. There was work to be done at the docks, but also time for fishing and dancing.

Cherry found a large pile of mail waiting for him in New Zealand. To compensate for her son’s second lengthy absence Evelyn deluged him with letters, telegrams, parcels and newspapers. At home she and the girls pored over reports of the expedition in the
Sphere
, looked up the
Terra Nova
’s position in the family atlas and compared her progress with the accounts in their well-thumbed copies of Scott’s
Voyage of the ‘Discovery’
and Shackleton’s
Heart of the Antarctic
. Pages of her letters concerned a crisis which had developed at Lamer three months after Cherry left. (Several people had mysteriously fallen ill; the cause was eventually located in malfunctioning drains.) She relied heavily on Farrer and Reggie, who frequently wrote to each other three times a day over some aspect of Cherry’s affairs (‘minding his cakes at home’, Reggie called it). Bank pass-books whizzed between them as they handled tottering piles of stocks and investments, as well as accounts for Denford, Lamer and the other estates. How relieved Cherry must have been to leave it all behind.

On 20 November Evelyn began a letter to her son to which she added each week for nine months, when it went south to catch the relief ship. It was 1910, yet in the very first entry she recorded, ‘We are all working up “Voluntary Aid Detachments” in case of war. Your offer of Lamer for a Hospital in case of Invasion has been accepted.’ (He stuck to it, too: four years later Lamer became a convalescent hospital.) She saw herself as a caretaker in her son’s absence (‘I feel you have left me in a place of great trust’) and was painfully anxious for him to approve of her decisions. ‘I am so very glad to find you think we did right about the drains,’ she told him after he had written from Lyttelton. She was praying hard, and ‘in the night when I wake up you are my first thought always’. (As she was bursting with pride about his exploits, Cherry was afraid that she might publish his journal when he mailed it home, so he wrote to her firmly from New Zealand banning such a project.) On Christmas Day, she said, they drank to his health round the dining-room table, ‘and hoped it would not be long before you brought a wife to Lamer’. They had twenty-nine years to wait. In Lyttelton the unloaded ship went into dry dock for a complete overhaul and was caulked to stop the leak that had kept the hand pumps occupied for the entire voyage. Taking the early train from Christchurch, Cherry worked as a stevedore as she was restowed. Her cargo now included New Zealand cheese, butter, bacon, ham and tongues, all of it colour-coded. Kathleen Scott was once more in evidence, positioning herself on the dock like a skirted sentry and checking all packages as they went on. Two prefabricated huts had been transported from London in pieces for the wintering party, and the skeletons of these were erected on a piece of wasteland near the dock. Finally the dogs and ponies waiting on Quail Island crowded on board; the well-travelled dog-handler, Cecil Meares, had brought them from Siberia. Meares knew a lot about dogs, but not a great deal about ponies.