Cherry (2 page)

1

Ancestral Voices

In the restless years of middle age Cherry used to sit in the bow-window of his library, turning the pages of the journals he had kept in the Antarctic three decades before. Absorbed in those far-off years, he jotted notes in the margins, as if the expedition had not yet reached its conclusion. ‘All Scott’s orders had been altered,’ he wrote crossly. ‘Scott
should have asked the doctors for their advice
.’ Beyond the trimmed lawns outside, the familiar figure of Tilbury, the head gardener, stooped over the rhododendrons. The rooks returned to their nests in the elms, briefly darkening the sky. Cherry leafed through the flimsy notebooks, recalling the rippled glaciers that tumbled down Mount Erebus, their gleaming cliffs casting long blue shadows; the crunching patter of dogs on the march; the pale, shadowless light of the ice shelf and a smudgy sun wreathed in mist. ‘Those first days of sledging were wonderful!’ he had written. In the quiet of his library he heard again the hiss of the Primus after a long, hard day on the trail, and smelt the homely infusion of tobacco as the night sun sieved through the green cambric of the tent. He tasted the tea flavoured with burnt blubber, and felt the rush of relief as tiny points of light from the kippered hut glimmered faintly in the unforgiving darkness of an Antarctic winter. ‘Can we ever forget those days?’ he wrote.

Cherry tortured himself over his actions in February 1912, when he had driven a team of dogs 150 miles south to a food depôt to wait for Captain Scott and his four companions; they were expected to return from the Pole at any day. Winter was closing in and Cherry was navigating for the first time in his life, desperately handicapped by short sight, brutal temperatures and diminishing light. He reached the food depôt with his Russian dog-driver, and, following instructions, they stopped, pinned down in a tiny tent in hundreds of miles of opaque, swirling drift. They could not go on: they had no dog food to spare. Cherry remembered straining his eyes in the milky light of the Great Ice Barrier, looking for men who never came. One night he was so sure he could see figures approaching that he had reached for his boots and set out to meet them.

The truth was that he could have gone on. He could have pressed on through the blizzard, killing a dog at a time to feed to the others. He had been ordered to spare the dogs, but, as he had once written, ‘In this sort of life orders have to be elastic.’ If he had killed the dogs, and if he had journeyed just twelve-and-a-half miles further, there was a tiny chance that he might have stumbled on a small pyramid tent in which three men were dying. One was Captain Scott. The other two were Birdie Bowers and Bill Wilson, the closest friends Cherry had ever had. It was Bill who had got him onto the expedition; Bill who had stood in for his dead father; Bill who had taught him the things he came to think were most important. In death and in life, Bill was never far from Cherry’s mind. ‘If you knew him,’ he wrote of his mentor, ‘you could not like him: you simply had to love him.’ When, having missed Scott and the others, he got back to the hut that was their Antarctic base, Cherry dreamt that his friends walked in. Almost two decades later he noted in the margin of his polar journal, ‘My relief was so intense that I can remember waking up to the disappointment even now.’

Ten months after the journey to the food depôt Cherry and a search party found the tent, piled with snow and weighted to the ice by three mottled corpses. He went through Bill’s pockets, collecting the contents for his widow. The body was hard, like stone. After prayers, they left the three men side by side in their sleeping bags, removing the bamboo tent poles and collapsing the cambric over them. The sun was dipping low over the Pole, the Barrier almost in shadow, and the sky was a mass of iridescent cloud, dark against gold and emerald. Cherry said it was a grave which kings must envy.

From that day, he was obsessed by the thought that he might have saved them. ‘If we [he and the Russian dog-driver] had travelled on for a day and a half,’ he wrote, ‘we might have left some food and oil on one of the cairns, hoping that they would see it.’ It was a devastating realisation. ‘But we never dreamed that they were in great want. It will always to the end of my life be a great sorrow to me that we did not do this.’

When the remnants of the expedition reached New Zealand, Cherry was judged harshly by the press for his decision not to march on from the depôt. But his own psyche was the hardest judge. At the end of the ghastly day on which they uncovered the bodies, he turned again to his journal and wrote, ‘I am almost afraid to go to sleep now.’ He knew the dreams that were waiting.

Still a bachelor as he approached fifty, he had inherited the seats of both the Cherrys and the Garrards, and prudent investments yielded a generous income, even in the pinched 1930s. He had lived on the Lamer estate in Hertfordshire, the ancestral home of the Garrards, since he was a small child, and after the departure of his mother during the war he had had the handsome Georgian manor to himself. More importantly, for his inner life at least, he had been immensely gratified by the success of
The Worst Journey in the World
following its first publication in 1922. He was thirty-six when it came out, and he said later that it was a sequel to the friendship that had existed between him, Bill and Birdie. The book had taken many years to complete, and as he pored over the pages in the quiet library, his head lowered over his father’s desk, he heard again the long-silenced voices calling out across the ice, and glimpsed the familiar smiles he had loved so long ago. As he brooded, he looked back at his vanished self, and when he took up his pen once more his restless reflection seeped into his prose. Much of
The Worst Journey
is infused with a particular, plangent nostalgia.

A winter journey to Cape Crozier lay at the heart of his book, and as he grew older it took on an iconic role in his life. During their first winter on the ice, Cherry, Bill and Birdie had set out to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin, incubated, alone in the natural world, during the Antarctic darkness. At the time, it was widely believed that if examined at an early stage of development, Emperor embryos would yield a rare Darwinian prize: they would reveal the link between birds and reptiles. The journey to fetch the eggs took five weeks: the temperature fell to minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the tent blew away and the men’s necks froze the moment they bent to pull their sledges. Then their teeth shattered in the cold. Yet, Cherry wrote, ‘We did not forget the Please and Thank you . . . And we kept our tempers, even with God.’ Only seven months later Bill and Birdie perished on the Great Ice Barrier with Scott, and when Cherry finally got the precious eggs home the staff at the Natural History Museum made him wait in a corridor, then turned up their noses. The eggs became the central symbol of Cherry’s parable. ‘If you march your Winter Journeys,’ he wrote at the end of his epic, ‘you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.’ He had thought his way beyond crampons and rations and snow-blindness, and entered the immortal zone.

For a time it appeared that the process of writing his Antarctic story had quietened his anxieties: a kind of cathartic redemption. There had been happy months and years when the house was filled with the talk of young people. Girlfriends had come and gone; new friendships had been forged. But as the years unravelled, the various editions of
The Worst Journey
lined up on the glazed bookshelves could not assuage Cherry’s guilt and self-recrimination. The truths he had captured in his work were more difficult to find off the page.

He was born, on 2 January 1886, at 15 Lansdowne Road, a detached, red-brick house on a tree-lined avenue in deeply respectable Bedford. There was nothing ornate about the houses in the street: they were designed for large, middle-class families with more aspirations than cash. His father, Colonel Apsley Cherry, was fifty-three, the second son of a prosperous family of lawyers and civil servants who had settled in Berkshire a generation before him; his mother, Evelyn Sharpin, was twenty-eight, the daughter of an eminent Bedford doctor.

Colonel Cherry had crinkly brown hair streaked with grey, white sideburns, a high forehead and a strong nose above a neatly waxed handlebar moustache, and he was an upright figure in both the physical and the moral sense. After school at Harrow, which he hated, he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and then, like many younger brothers, went off to fight wars. He joined the 90th Light Infantry as a junior officer, and in 1857, on his way to China with a detachment of his regiment, he was shipwrecked close to Sumatra, not far off the Equator. The soldiers rowed to a small island, and although Apsley Cherry lost most of his gear, his bed floated ashore. The men ate pineapples and coconuts for a week, and then a passing ship brought rescue and news. ‘The sepoys have kicked up a row in India,’ Apsley wrote to his mother. It turned out to be more than a row: it was the Indian Mutiny. China was forgotten, Apsley Cherry packed up his dried-out bed and the detachment was re-routed to Calcutta on a relief ship. He went on to serve with gallantry in the Mutiny, fighting in the assault, relief and capture of Lucknow, and in the reconquest of Oude. He got a medal with two clasps for all that.

Apsley wrote frequently and affectionately to his family. From Alumbagh, near Lucknow, he asked his mother, ‘Send this please to Amy and Emily, just to shew them, what of course they must know already, that they are never forgotten by their brother Apsley.’ He was a natural soldier. ‘I don’t think,’ he wrote to his mother during the siege of Lucknow, when men were falling all around him, ‘you need be in much fear for my being hit at this work, for I don’t think I was born to be shot.’ A cosy domesticity clings to the letters, cheating the miles and the years. Describing an abscess on his hand, he wrote, ‘I can fancy you examining into the subject in the brown medicine book!’

After three years’ staff service in Bengal, he returned on leave to Denford, the family estate in Berkshire. In his heart he had never really left. What gripped him most keenly was the shooting. ‘Mind you give me an account of any good bags,’ he wrote to his brother George from Lucknow. George in turn made sure that Apsley was involved in such vital issues as the appointment of a new gamekeeper. It helped diffuse the tension of war. ‘It seems to be a great partridge year,’ wrote Apsley in the same letter, continuing without even a line break, ‘A battlefield is the most awful place you ever saw.’ He was a committed correspondent, once dashing off a letter ‘during an interval in the firing’. When George wrote asking if he or Mother could help out financially, Apsley replied breezily, ‘I thank you exceedingly for thinking of it but truly I have lots here . . . we live on our rations and loot the rest.’

Apsley stayed in India for twenty years. He was promoted to major in 1874, and three years later, still with the 90th Light, he went to southern Africa, where settlers were fighting over their territorial rights. Relations between the first colonists, the Dutch-speaking Boers, and the more recent British immigrants had been tense for decades. That year, 1877, Britain annexed the Boer Republic of the Transvaal as the first step in a campaign to create a South African federation, thereby bringing the whole southern region of the continent under British control. Terrible battles followed, and Apsley Cherry was present at the most gruesome. ‘All the morning,’ he wrote on 1 May 1878, ‘I have been burying men.’ He was mentioned in despatches and received a medal with clasp and the brevet (temporary promotion) of lieutenant-colonel, later to be made permanent. The responsibility lay heavily. ‘If you have to fight against great odds,’ he wrote, ‘do so as a subaltern, not as one in command, sleep and rest is better than a brevet.’

As the bodies piled up, he grew disenchanted. ‘What a fearful mistake the annexing of the Transvaal now appears,’ he wrote in January 1879. ‘What on earth we want of millions of square miles of such a country when we have millions of unoccupied land in hand which only, they say, wants scratching to produce anything, I can’t imagine. It seems to me that whatever you read about South Africa in books is a falsehood.’ The lies printed about the African campaigns in the British newspapers is a leitmotif of his correspondence. In a letter to his friend Alfred Welby from Balte Spruit in Zululand on 29 March 1879, Apsley Cherry explained that he couldn’t write to his mother: she would be terrified if she knew how shattering it was there. He wasn’t even able to write to his brother, as the women of the house would recognise his handwriting when they saw the envelope on the hall table.

His bitter feelings in Africa never dented his faith in the virtues of imperialism. He remained an exemplary soldier. The one-eyed Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, an outstanding soldier himself, called Apsley Cherry the bravest man he had ever seen. Yet Apsley was not afraid to be human. On Easter Sunday 1879 he confided to Welby from Balte Spruit, ‘Between you and me, don’t send this on to Denford, the incessant work and anxiety to do the best, etc, etc, is a little beyond what I am able for, as long as what I am responsible for goes straight I am fit enough, but when orders are misunderstood or not carried out and things don’t go straight, it is not in me to take it easy, and I get seedy.’ It could have been his son writing, when orders were misunderstood in the Antarctic.

Colonel Cherry left Africa at the end of 1879, after two grim years of service, and sailed back to India. The news from home was bad the next spring: his mother had died. She had gone on for thirty-two years longer than her husband. Some time after that Apsley Cherry returned to England, and in July 1883 he was put in charge of the garrison at Kempston Barracks on the outskirts of Bedford, about fifty miles north of London. It was tame work compared with the Zulus and the sepoys and the heat and disease of India and Africa, but perhaps he was grateful. He was fifty years old.

Bedford was a logical home for the old soldier. It was a strong Anglo-Indian centre: a man who went to Bedford Modern School in the 1880s remembered that seventeen of his classmates had been born in India. The retired soldiers, sailors, planters and officials who made up such a large part of the townsfolk were known as Squatters, presumably because they had taken up at Bedford after decamping from the colonies. They were not wealthy – the richer ones probably went to Cheltenham – but they liked to play the Society game. Army officers and the top layer of professionals, which meant mainly doctors and lawyers (no trade!), paraded up and down the High Street every morning from eleven o’clock to half-past twelve in a frenzy of hat-doffing. The regatta at the end of July signalled the end of the Season and a mass exodus to the seaside. It was said that you could fire a cannon down the High Street in August without hitting anyone.