Cherry (24 page)

The press had little information and much space to fill (a Toronto newspaper reported soberly the day the
Terra Nova
reached Lyttelton that sixty-six men had died), and as always, the critics were ready. Cherry read in several American papers that ‘all that could be done was not done’, and in
The Times
that the returning parties might have ‘tapped’ oil from the depôts, leaving Scott short. Worse, many editorials focused on the inaction of Cherry and Dimitri during their dog journey to One Ton. The
Sydney Morning Herald
cited a rumour ‘that relations between the present heads of the expedition are more than a little strained, and the suggestion is made this may possibly be in connection with the work of the relief parties in March of last year’. It was not all the fault of the newsmen. The bulletins sent out to the press by the committee were truncated, and sometimes manipulated. Cherry was furious that Evans and others had referred to his already infamous dog journey to One Ton as a relief journey, a term he angrily rejected. And above all the noise Cherry heard the parroted cry
cui bono
– what was the point of these hazardous expeditions? ‘All these questions and many others were discussed by comfortable old gentlemen sitting plumply before their club fire with a condensed official report and some pages of hearsay on their knees,’ he wrote later in an unpublished draft of
The Worst Journey
. ‘Given one April day on the Barrier they themselves would have curled up and died.’

His mother cabled her sympathy. ‘Do not worry about press criticism,’ he wired back. ‘I know all we could do was done there was not shadow dissension among us all the year please post this Reggie Apsley.’ She cabled in reply that ‘congratulations’ were pouring in to Lamer on his safe return. ‘Longing to get you home’, she added.

The public had no idea of the sequence of events that had resulted in Cherry being stuck at One Ton. Nobody was interested in that kind of tedious detail. ‘All kinds of wild conjectures in the papers this morning,’ Cherry wrote in his diary on 15 February. The reports included Dimitri’s assertion that he had wanted to take the dogs on alone from One Ton. If Cherry had allowed Dimitri to go on, pundits mused, he might have found the polar party alive. Cherry tried to keep calm. ‘I don’t know that it matters,’ he wrote bravely. There were bright spots. He saw more of Mrs Wilson (‘Oh! She is wonderful’) and dined with Kinsey’s daughter at her house on Papanui Road. ‘Beautiful table, good dinner, pretty girls in London frocks: what does a miserable explorer want better than that?’ Sunday was a good day, as there were no papers. He played tennis, and enjoyed an excursion to Ashley Gorge, smelling the pines with his host Henry Burton.

He had foreseen criticism: in the last weeks on the ice he had discussed the reaction they would face with Atch and the others. But he had never imagined it would be personal; it hadn’t crossed his mind that people would say he could have – should have – gone on from One Ton. He sat in his room at the Burtons’ and went back to his journal. Leafing through to the note he had written on the Barrier after finding the bodies, he added to it, ‘It seems to be necessary to point out that when we started back from One Ton Depôt we had no reason to suppose that there was anything wrong with the polar party.’ He had thought this was obvious; but it wasn’t. On 21 February he wrote:

a horrid day. Everybody everywhere seemed to be saying the wrong thing. One asked whether ‘there would have to be an enquiry’: a shopman told me they had been supposing all kinds of things about my journey south etc ad nauseam. I wish official sources would tell the truth and finish the whole rotten business. Meanwhile I am in the dirt tub and except an official denial of rumours nothing has been done. What a rotten end it is to a good expedition.

‘Official sources’, however, persisted in not telling the whole story. On the day Evans left for England Cherry found papers on the floor of the
Terra Nova
wardroom which included information about Scott’s original orders for the dogs. These papers would, he inferred, almost certainly have been tossed over the side had he not picked them up, and he ascribed what was probably carelessness to a cover-up concocted by Evans and Francis Drake, a navy paymaster and the expedition secretary.

Lilian Burton wrote to Evelyn that Cherry was strong and well and bright. ‘He looks just a little older,’ she said tactfully, ‘and one can see the shadow on his face in repose which the awful strain of these last two years must leave for a while.’ Atch again told him to rest, and to take a roundabout journey home, but Cherry had already organised his passage on a mail ship. He would not leave the country until the zoological specimens were either despatched to England or safely donated to museums in New Zealand. There was time for golf and more tennis, and even a little theatre, but it was interspersed with mail, telegrams, visits to Ory and organisation of the specimens. Atch went up to Wellington to meet Kathleen, now Lady Scott, when her ship arrived. She too wanted the matter of the oil shortage kept as quiet as possible, and again Atch put his foot down.

At least Kathleen was not prepared to hand control to Evans, especially after she had read the criticisms of him in her husband’s diary. This was a relief to Cherry. ‘It is a horrid business,’ he wrote, ‘for her and for everybody: but there it is, and it would be an everlasting shame if the story of this expedition were told by the one big failure on it.’ A few days later Cherry received a note from Kathleen. ‘I know’, she told him, ‘how splendidly you stuck through it all . . . I feel you’ve borne the strain with a heroism equal to anybody’s, and bless you for it.’ He was very glad, and wrote to Reggie that she was one of the few people whose opinion mattered to him.

On 6 March the
Terra Nova
sailed for England under Pennell’s command with Cherry’s dog, Kris, howling cravenly on deck in a most un-Bolshevik manner. Cherry was then free to spend more time with Kinsey. Scott had thought a lot of him, and now Cherry took a liking to him too, partly because Kinsey was suspicious of Evans. He gave Cherry a copy of Scott’s last letter to him, written in the tent. ‘You will pull the expedition together I’m sure,’ it said. ‘Teddy Evans is not to be trusted over much though he means well.’

Cherry spent his last week in New Zealand playing tennis, motoring about the countryside and sorting specimens at Christchurch Museum. He was touched by a letter he received from Deb, already back in Sydney, exclaiming that he was ‘damned disgusted’ about the misunderstandings in the newspapers, especially the one about Dimitri wanting to go on from One Ton. It made him boil, fulminated Deb, ‘that the men who should have did not set the papers right on that point, even at the expense of showing Dimitri up . . . But I believe these things will only make us stick closer together, and anyhow damn the world!’

On 17 March Cherry left Lyttelton on the mail steamer
Osterley
with a note from Atch in his pocket wishing him
bon voyage
and thanking him for his loyalty. New Zealand had been a mixed experience. There was sweetness in the return to the world – the exotic colours, the ripe fruit, the new faces. On the other hand, reading about himself in the papers had been agony. But he kept his head. At one point he said it almost seemed as if the interlude in the Antarctic had never happened. It had already taken on the quality of a dream.

8

Kipling in Real Life

The Osterley steamed wearily into the Bay of Naples through a warm April shower, and on the glistening wharf Evelyn and her daughters Peggy and Edith strained for the first sight of Laddie. After a very happy reunion they sailed back to Plymouth together and were soon gratefully enveloped within the familiar quiet bustle of Lamer. The servants had prepared for the young master’s return with mounting excitement, and only one was disappointed: Mrs Hyde, the aged wife of a long-serving gardener, had been standing at the window of the lodge all morning, waiting eagerly for the carriage bearing Cherry home at last. But when she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, the carriage swept up the drive unseen.

It was as he remembered. He walked out on the shaved lawn in the cool night air and stood in the shadows of the chestnuts. Owls were hooting in the pear trees, nightjars chugging in the wood, and in the walled garden the willows flexed their limbs over the pond. Crayfish still jittered in the shallows of the Lea at the bottom of the slope, and laburnum and lilac still bloomed on the wall of the kitchen garden where raspberry canes were standing guard, neatly trussed with Tilbury’s green twine. Indoors the silk was a little more faded on the back of the piano, but his gloomy relatives still glowered down from their old positions on the walls. These were the places of his childhood imaginings, and they embodied something deeply loved.

He dangled his gurgling baby niece Susan on his knee, and shook the hand of his new brother-in-law the vicar, whose two children from his previous marriage had found a second home at Lamer. As for the girls, Elsie had been to Jamaica and New York before coming out to meet him in Italy, and Mildred was about to go to India: as a neighbour wrote to Evelyn, there must have been a travelling microbe lurking among the family genes.

There was a mountain of business, as usual, including fresh drafts of his sisters’ settlements, Lassie’s marriage necessitating complicated changes. On the estates tenants had vacated, electricity had been installed and cottages built, and in his study Cherry perused the prices of prudently purchased debenture stock. He had come back a richer man. Rents had been flowing in from Denford, Lamer, Little Wittenham and the Watling Street house in London, and at the end of 1913 he received a payment from the Swansea estate on which he had inherited the role of mortgagee to the tune of £27,500 (well over a million today). He instructed his brokers to reinvest.

Beyond the gentle slopes of Hertfordshire, expedition business pressed upon him. Days after his return he hurried down to the hectic Victoria Street offices, where letters were going out in their hundreds on black-edged expedition paper, soliciting funds (the expedition had virtually gone bankrupt while its members were in the Antarctic), thanking donors and keeping relatives informed. Teddy Evans, much in evidence, was recovering from fresh tragedy: his wife Hilda had died of peritonitis on the journey home from New Zealand. But he threw himself into expedition work, and addressed an audience of 9,000 at the Albert Hall. On Atch’s advice, Cherry was on the platform alongside him, maintaining an appearance of taciturn dignity while churning hotly inside. More happily, Cherry was able to pick up Kris, who was a free hound after eight days in quarantine.

Cherry was drawn to the families of his dead friends. He became fond of Birdie’s mother Emily (‘Sometimes you seem a little bit of him left to me,’ she told him), and his sister Mary, known as May, and he went down to Henley-on-Thames for tea with Scott’s mother and one of his sisters. He often saw Kathleen. But of all the relatives, he was closest to Oriana Wilson. Like Kathleen and Scott’s mother she had been up to Lamer in his absence, and now she and Cherry embarked on a friendship that was to last until her death in 1945. A tall and handsome, though not beautiful, woman, Ory was restless and independent, and she hated publicity, a characteristic that appealed deeply to Cherry. She had a strong smile with a hint of the iceberg, and was reserved and friendly at the same time. If she didn’t like someone – Kathleen Scott, for instance – she behaved as if that person didn’t exist. She felt protective of Cherry, as her husband had. But she was not as soft as Bill.

On 14 June the
Terra Nova
sailed into Cardiff under Pennell’s command, three years after she had left. There were no banquets. Cherry was there to meet her, and so were Ory and Caroline Oates, Titus’s formidable mother. Mrs Oates had already read her son’s diary, as it had been brought back ahead of the ship, and she had been interviewing survivors in an attempt to establish what had really happened (‘Oh, he was just champion,’ one of the seamen kept saying when remembering Titus). A strong and intelligent woman quite capable of reading between the lines, she did not accept the notion of heroic explorers dying for the honour of their country: she suspected that Scott had been a bungler. Teddy Evans and Atch both told her that Titus had regretted going on the expedition – on one occasion he had to be talked out of returning with the ship before the southern journey had even begun. Her son, Caroline concluded, had been ‘disgusted with the way in which the whole thing was done’.

A few weeks later King George received the
Terra Nova
men at Buckingham Palace to present them with Polar medals.
³²
The officers lined up with gleaming buttons and burnished epaulettes while the scientists and Cherry skulked in the background in top hats and spats. The widows had been invited, and afterwards everyone thronged into a reception at Caxton Hall for sherry and stewed tea. The King told Ponting he hoped every British schoolboy would see his pictures, as they were sure to promote the spirit of adventure that had made the Empire. As it turned out many hundreds of thousands of schoolboys did; but it was too late for the Empire.

Atch and other friendly Antarcticans went up and down to Lamer, where their trains were met at the station by the rackety Lamer carriage. They slept outside in the green surge of summer, Cherry’s tribe of sisters entertained them on the piano, and the mowing machine buzzed lazily down the slope to the river as they finished their picnics with wobbly puddings and bottled blackberries. It was not quite the fabled Edwardian country house set, but it was an agreeably cosy scaled-down version.

Ory was often there that first summer. Cherry had been helping her locate and sort Bill’s possessions. She offered him his green leather copy of Tennyson back, but Cherry wanted her to keep it. Ory too was suspicious of the London committee, now in full spate marshalling material for publication, raising funds for the widows and moulding the public image of the dead heroes. It was chaired by the autocratic figure of Lord Curzon, president of the Royal Geographical Society since 1911, former viceroy of India and a man, Cherry noted, whom nobody in England would dare gainsay. The expedition belonged to the committee now. In June Cherry was told off by Francis Drake, its secretary, for communicating with a firm which had donated a typewriter to the
Terra Nova
back in 1910. ‘It is very undesirable,’ Drake wrote officiously, ‘to have any interference in our business arrangements . . . You should have consulted either Captain Evans or myself.’ Depressed by the direction post-expedition events were taking, Cherry was cheered only by indications from Kathleen that Teddy was not going to have it all his own way. (‘Reginald Smith,’ she confided to her diary in October, ‘comes to show me a preposterous letter written by that disgraceful creature Evans.’)

Reggie suggested that Cherry have the volumes of his journal typed up by a secretary at his firm’s offices. Before handing them over, Cherry went through them carefully underlining critical passages which were to be edited out of the typed version. After the job was done, the original handwritten notebooks were locked in the Lamer strong room. At the same time, Leonard Huxley, a former schoolmaster and one of Reggie’s readers at Smith, Elder, was editing Scott’s diaries for publication and commissioning supplementary material. At Huxley’s request, Cherry lent him a copy of his typed journals. Huxley told Smith they were ‘gorgeous’.

Meanwhile, late in the summer of 1913, Cherry delivered the three Emperor penguin eggs from Crozier to the Natural History branch of the British Museum, that supreme piece of bombastic Victorian architecture in South Kensington. At first, a junior assistant was reluctant even to accept the bitterly won specimens. Cherry was passed to a senior member of staff and then forced to wait in a corridor while the man conversed at length with a more important visitor. Finally, someone grudgingly took the eggs in, and with immense difficulty Cherry extracted a receipt. To compound the insult, when Cherry visited the museum some time later accompanied by Grace, one of Scott’s sisters, the first person they spoke to denied ever having seen the eggs (‘How stupid that minor custodian was!’ Grace remembered).

The frosty reaction of the museum staff was memorably parodied, nine years later, in
The Worst Journey
: Cherry represents himself as the Heroic Explorer in the exchange, his frustration rising to a murderous plot in the hushed museum corridors. The episode was a potent metaphor for Cherry’s fractured ideals, and as the book took shape in his mind the painful disparity between the effort of retrieving the eggs and the response they met with at the museum came to exemplify one of his central themes. (Furthermore, when Dr C. W. Parsons published the official results of the embryo work many years later, he concluded that ‘neither [the three Emperor embryos nor the series of Adélie embryos] has added greatly to our knowledge of penguin embryology’.)
³³

Called
Scott’s Last Expedition
and appended with supplementary material, Scott’s diaries appeared in two volumes in October 1913. They were received with widespread acclaim. The long review in
Punch
, unsigned but in fact written by A. A. Milne, noted, ‘There is courage and strength and loyalty and love shining out of the second volume no less than out of the first.’ Cherry believed Milne’s thoughtful piece was ‘quite the nicest thing that has been written on the expedition’. But he was uneasy with the glib heroism which Scott’s prose fostered in the public imagination. Scott and the myth-makers had turned the story into a simple allegory of the Christian journey, a sort of
Pilgrim’s Progress
on ice. Yet Cherry’s two best friends were dead, and no amount of allegories could bring them back. Cherry was struggling not to blame Scott; he was not yet able to acknowledge his anger towards him, even to himself. Later, he came to feel deeply threatened by
Scott’s Last Expedition
, convinced that it didn’t tell the whole story, or even the true story. It was an unfair assessment, and a reflection of Cherry’s lack of perspective. Scott’s diaries were edited for publication, but not substantially. Most of the cuts dealt with critical remarks: it was natural for a leader to express doubts about individuals in the privacy of his diary, and equally natural for his remarks to be edited out when the diaries were published. Cherry’s general unhappiness about the excisions had not yet formed in 1913, but he was disturbed by one point in
Scott’s Last Expedition
from the day it appeared. The book failed to make it clear that Scott had taken the dogs on further than planned, and that as a result of jumbled orders there was no dog food laid at One Ton.

Cherry suspected the committee of a cover-up to make Scott look perfect. Nobody was prepared to say that the dog food depôt had never been laid: not Evans, not Kathleen, not Curzon. Atch tried to say it, but he was bludgeoned into quietude. Seeing that Atch had little weight against the steamrolling tactics of the committee, Cherry decided to go to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for an official interview with Farrer, who was the expedition’s solicitor as well as his own. But Farrer wasn’t playing. ‘They would not listen,’ he insisted when Cherry said he wanted to go up before the committee himself to explain the role of his dog journey. ‘They will say you are overstrained. You see, there must be no scandal.’ It was not just a refusal: it was an implied threat. ‘The committee,’ Cherry noted in the margin of his Antarctic journal, ‘meant to hush up everything. I was to be sacrificed.’

The other Antarcticans had taken up where they had left off before the expedition, the navy men returning to service, the scientists to their research. Atch, who as a naval research surgeon was in both camps, was working on his polar parasites at the London School of Tropical Medicine. The civilian scientists were writing up their material as well as arranging postgraduate or teaching positions to supplement their meagre incomes. There had been endless talk, during the long days spent waiting for the ship, of how they would manage to produce their reports on the paltry expedition fees. They were all full of plans.

Silas Wright went straight back to Cambridge and took up a position as lecturer in surveying and cartography in the Department of Geography. In 1914 he married one of Ray Priestley’s sisters. Griff Taylor, who had come home after the first year down south, had been working for the Australian federal government, carrying out geological surveys. In 1913 he was granted permission to move to England to collaborate with the other Antarctic scientists. He joined Silas at Cambridge, and married another Priestley sister. Deb (Frank Debenham) also moved to England to finish his postgraduate studies at Cambridge, taking up a place at Caius, Wilson’s old college. As for Ponting, he had produced his moving picture film and had a heavy lecture programme planned for 1914.

Leading stoker William Lashly was forty-five when he returned from the Antarctic. He was discharged from the navy with a pension; but, with characteristic determination, the day after he was formally released he enlisted in the Naval Reserve. For Lashly’s colleague Tom Crean the call of the Antarctic remained irresistible. In the spring of 1914 he was again loaned by the navy to a ship heading for the polar regions. He was returning to the Antarctic with Shackleton, serving – not in the ranks but as second officer – on an ambitious expedition which was to be the first to march the whole way across the continent. According to Shackleton’s plan, his ship, the
Endurance
, was to deposit a small party on the Weddell Sea coast, from where the men would march to the Pole, on across the Plateau and down the Beardmore to Cape Evans. On the last leg they would pick up depôts laid by another party left by the
Aurora
on the Ross Sea side.