Cherry (25 page)

Unlike his former shipmates, Cherry had no fixed plans, and no career to follow. When the grouse season opened he went up to the Smiths’ Scottish cottage to cool down with a spot of shooting on the moors of Glen Prosen. It was where he had met Wilson, so the ghosts were there too. He strode along the broomy banks of the South Esk streams and dwelt on what to do next with his life, still keen to acquire a profession. His interminable correspondence with his solicitor had led him to abandon his plan to study law. He now turned instead to medicine, a career with the defined sense of purpose that he sought. He was surrounded by successful doctors on his mother’s side of the family and, more significantly, he was still under Bill’s influence (‘I feel how happy Bill would be to know that you are doing this,’ Ory wrote). But he had no real conception of the years of hard labour involved in qualifying as a doctor from a standing start as a 27-year-old with a mediocre history degree and a taste for travel.

None the less, as the first plane trees yellowed on the cambered streets of the capital he began hospital work as a junior trainee observer. Right from the start he found it difficult to apply himself to the job, as he was still spending much of his time sorting the expedition’s zoological specimens at the Natural History Museum. He had also begun working up his notes on Antarctic birds for official publication, corresponding on the subject with Sidney Harmer, a zealous departmental head at the museum. It was the start of an unhappy and misguided attempt to reproduce an academic report as if he were a scientist. As for the relationship with Harmer, it was to end very badly indeed.

In addition, Cherry was busy giving illustrated lectures on the Antarctic to schools and working men’s clubs around Wheathampstead. When Ponting found out that his slides were being used, he fired off a long and aggrieved letter insisting that he had exclusive rights in expedition images. Cherry hosed him down, pointing out that his lectures were small and free of charge, and Ponting was extinguished until the following February, when he learned that Cherry was speaking in Leeds. Once again he erupted into thunderous protest. The disagreement finally petered out when the pair united against a common enemy: Evans. In the summer of 1913 Teddy had embarked on an ambitious lecture tour of his own. He was still officially on cordial terms with Cherry, who chaired his lecture in St Albans that November, but Ponting was furious that Evans was using his expedition slides so fecklessly.

Meanwhile Kathleen wanted to know what was to be done about the
South Polar Times
. In the end Cherry handed the originals over to Reggie to prepare for reproduction, and the early numbers subsequently went on display at the British Museum. Cherry was annoyed to see that they were labelled ‘Lent by Lady Scott’, as he didn’t consider them hers to lend. He was beginning to feel wary of Kathleen. ‘Lady Scott’s possessive instinct,’ he noted, ‘not only of Scott but of the whole expedition, is a very strong one.’ He kept the final volume to himself.

Since Cherry had left Cape Evans and its bitter memories he had been coping with both bereavement and a growing sense of personal betrayal by Evans, the committee and the press. Now, as he settled back in to the rhythms of home, he also had to acknowledge the collapse of the moral certainties that had characterised the England of his youth.

Between the death of Edward VII and the war, a period which coincided almost exactly with the absence of Scott’s second expedition, Britain had been traumatised by a series of shattering challenges to the existing order. The House of Lords had lost its power of veto (the crucial vote took place the day Lassie walked up the aisle), and the notion of the paternal responsibility of the noble few had vanished with it. The Liberals had been preparing legislation to abolish the power of the Lords just before the
Terra Nova
left England, and while he was in the Antarctic Cherry had read reports of its progress when the ship brought news. Back at home in the aftermath of the great parliamentary drama – probably the greatest of the century – he recognised that the ground had shifted under the feet of his class. In his childhood the cabinet had been peopled with mighty landowners such as the bearded giant Lord Salisbury down the road at Hatfield House. Now the absolute power of the Lords had been removed, the vast landed estates were crippled, and well-fed patricians like the General no longer spoke for the masses.

After August 1911 turbulence on other fronts had further shaken the tottering British establishment. The notion of Home Rule in Ireland had preoccupied the nation for years, and while Scott was struggling up the Beardmore it had become an obsession. There was even talk of civil war. In 1913 the Lords twice rejected the Home Rule Bill, and in the spring of 1914 a fresh Home Rule crisis engulfed the country. The idea of an Irish parliament was even more alien to thorough-going imperialists like Cherry than the objectives of the suffragette movement, another symbol of the rejection of the existing order. The women, as intrepid, brave and pioneering as any polar explorer, had come a long way since the
Terra Nova
sailed out of Cardiff. In the summer of 1912 they had started setting fire to post-boxes, and in the first months of 1914 they embarked on a more ambitious arson spree. There was still no evidence of conflagration in Wheathampstead, but Cherry noted with bewilderment that the pretty girls walking through St James’s Park near the expedition offices were no longer trussed up in Victorian fashions that thrust out their buttocks and breasts.

Finally, the wave of labour unrest that had unsettled Cherry when he learned of it in the Antarctic (‘the rumblings of the storms to come’) had indeed continued on its unstoppable trajectory. By the summer of 1914 a general strike was looming out of the foggy hinterland. In his absence, the security of Cherry’s past had dissolved like so many fragments of ice. Throughout his childhood he had inhaled the vapour of paternalistic Toryism and the moral seriousness of Victorian virtue; it was part of him. He was not yet thirty, and he was a relic.

On the cultural front, too, iconoclastic new movements had sprung forth in almost every arena. Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet had caused a sensation, and at the end of May 1914 London was shocked by the deeply modern music of Richard Strauss. Kathleen Scott’s friend Isadora Duncan had been enjoying fabulous success for some time – she had even danced for King Edward – but many were still offended by her free-style methods and the tunic in which she insisted on deploying them. A Post-Impressionist exhibition at a London gallery had provoked an angry and almost hysterical reaction among critics and public alike. On the lower cultural slopes, moving pictures continued to capture the popular imagination. The men had come back from the ice to find that the number of cinemas in London had quadrupled.

Antarctica, like the past, was a place where the anxieties of the twentieth century did not intrude. The expedition cut like a canyon between Cherry’s childhood and the rest of his life, and when he looked back beyond it to his youth he saw, dimly, the lost world of Rupert Brooke, the flaxen-haired poet who, rightly or wrongly, came to embody the romantic, self-sacrificing ideal of the young Englishman of Cherry’s generation. After the war, Brooke’s poetry appealed to many nostalgic for the certainty of the past, a sunlit era when the Grantchester clock stood permanently at ten to three. But for Cherry, it was not the war that had transformed that world of lyrical innocence. By the spring of 1914 it was already gone.

The allure of an Antarctic explorer was comparable to that of a major sports star in our own less heroic age, and when good looks, a whopping income and a country seat were thrown in it wasn’t surprising that Cherry found himself surrounded by pretty girls. Over the winter of 1913 he had become attached to one admirer in particular, and if they weren’t dancing to the ragtime that was all the rage at the Berkeley Hotel or breathing in cigar smoke at the Café Royal, Cherry was showing her off in the chaotic expedition offices or at Reggie and Isabel’s house in Green Street. She remains anonymous, as no information about her has survived.

Yet he was still immersed in the expedition. For many years after his return from the ice Cherry quietly undertook small acts of kindness towards the
Terra Nova
crewmen; during the war he was even on the look-out for needy
Discovery
men. The chief beneficiary was Petty Officer George Abbott, a naval gymnastics instructor and wrestling champion who had been a member of Campbell’s Northern Party. Despite severing the tendons of three fingers in a disagreement with a Weddell seal, Abbott had held up well during the horrors of Inexpressible Island, but on the voyage home he had a breakdown. Especially sensitive to cases of nervous collapse, a condition with which he closely identified, Cherry went down to visit Abbott in hospital in Southampton and paid for his treatment. When Abbott lost his pension because he had been transferred from a naval hospital to a civil one, Cherry campaigned on his behalf and secured his rights, a process which eventually culminated in general reforms in the treatment of invalided servicemen.

Cherry had plenty to do, but despite his new girlfriend and his half-baked medical plans, he didn’t have enough to think about. Atch saw yet again that his tendency to dwell on the expedition and its aftermath was threatening his mental wellbeing. He had an idea. He had just been seconded to a medical research expedition to eastern China led by Dr Robert Leiper, a distinguished Scottish helminthologist at the London School of Tropical Medicine and a scientist so devoted to his subject that he once swallowed a fish tapeworm to observe the effect it had upon his stomach. The expedition had been funded both to investigate a parasitic flatworm which was finding its way inside British seamen in Chinese waters and causing Asiatic schistosomiasis, and to study the spread of bilharziasis. Why didn’t Cherry come along to help out for a month or two in his familiar role as zoological assistant?

This was just the ticket. A chance to escape again, and on a medical expedition to boot. Cherry was soon off on another round of visits gathering equipment and supplies, his Harrods account bending under the strain. In the middle of the preparations a letter arrived at Lamer which was to have a decisive effect on the course of the next decade. It was from Colonel H. G. Lyons, secretary of the expedition’s publications committee. After a poor start (‘Dear Mr Garrad’), Lyons revealed that Evans, who as Scott’s deputy was naturally first in line to write the official narrative of the expedition, was too busy to take on the job. Would Cherry do it? This too was Atch’s suggestion. It was what both he and Cherry had wanted all along. Cherry immediately wrote to Lyons, gleefully accepting his offer. They agreed to meet on his return from China.

On 20 February 1914, ten months after he had arrived home from the Antarctic, Cherry boarded the P. & O. steamer SS Malwa with Leiper and Atch. Reggie was to accompany them as far as Marseilles. Kathleen and Ory saw them off as if they were returning to the Antarctic, and the event was recorded in
The Times
. ‘Among all the heroes of the [
Terra Nova
] expedition,’ trilled the report, ‘survivors state that no-one acquitted himself more usefully than Mr Cherry-Garrard.’

As the air on deck grew warmer, Cherry wore the old arguments threadbare with Atch and once again relished the confined freedom of an oceangoing ship. But at Port Said he was intercepted by a wire from Farrer concerning the tenants of Watling Street, the old Garrard property in the City of London. The house had been occupied for many years by a large firm of cotton traders who wanted to buy the dilapidated property so that they could pull it down and build a new one. Farrer advised him to sell, interest being more favourable than rent. Cherry cabled back
Yes
.

After an uneventful passage through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea they crossed the Indian Ocean and changed ships in Colombo, arriving in a rainy Shanghai on 30 March. Proximity to both the coast and the Yangtze River made the city an ideal base for an expedition researching a condition afflicting people living and working close to water (in some regions sixty per cent of the population had the disease). Leiper and his men hired a houseboat, turned it into a floating laboratory and pottered up the canals of the Yangtze, the main trade route to the largest silk- and tea-producing regions of China. Their first task was to find an infected patient from whom they could collect the worm’s eggs.

Since Cherry’s last visit to Asia on his cargo ship tour, China had lost her emperor. The parliament established to replace dynastic succession was barely lurching from one week to the next, threatened by such baleful enemies as the army and even more volatile warlords. Before setting off on the houseboat, Cherry wrote to Farrer from Shanghai’s Astor House Hotel.

The country is in a most disturbed state. White Wolf looks like setting up an independent kingdom in Szechuan, and he is a better soldier than the Imperial troops; trade is more or less at a standstill, one man shot himself 3 days ago owing to financial difficulties and I hear that there are many in the same state. At present this part of China seems all right as regards safety – but they are expecting another revolution later on and they say that it is going to be much worse than the last. The general opinion is that China is in practically the same state as 400 years ago and they may do just the same things.

Cherry was carrying round a small maroon Winsor & Newton notebook in which to jot suggestions for his official expedition narrative. From the outset he and Atch were concerned about potential editorial interference from committee bogeyman Lyons, already a Porlockian figure in Cherry’s imagination. But Cherry was too methodical to hold off important list-making. Jiggling in a rickshaw along the muddy lanes that filleted the fertile lowlands abutting the canals, he compiled a rough inventory of drawings to be commissioned (‘eye goggles, sledge, tapered runners of sledge . . .’) and a formidable ‘To Do’ list which included requests to relatives for permission to use the polar party’s notebooks; correspondence with suppliers asking for details of exactly what had been supplied; and multitudinous notes to himself (‘Find out the cause of the fur falling out of the sleeping bags’). He started writing letters to this effect, and posted them when he returned to a chilly Shanghai, where he found time to carouse in the club-rooms with Atch (as a sizeable port and manufacturing centre Shanghai had a lively expatriate community). His good watch was stolen.