Cherry (30 page)

On 26 December 1916, Reggie threw himself out of a fourth-floor window at Green Street. He had been seriously depressed for weeks, and was known to be suicidal. It was not the first time he had been ill; he had almost had a breakdown in 1913. Nurses had been placed on round-the-clock duty, but in an unguarded moment poor Reggie had hurled himself out of the sash window in his pyjamas. Cherry had been close to him all his life, and Reggie had shared his Antarctic experience, good and bad, more intimately than anyone who was not actually there. Green Street had been Cherry’s second home. Most importantly of all, Reggie had been a link with Wilson, who still lived in Cherry’s fantasy life. ‘I want to say,’ the dying Wilson had written to the Smiths from the last tent, ‘how I have valued your friendship and your example, and how I and my beloved wife have loved you both from first to last.’

The funeral took place in London on 29 December. ‘We saw Mrs Wilson there,’ noted Kathleen. ‘She’s an absurd prig.’

His health more or less restored, in 1917 Cherry began to make fuller use of the house. Visitors colonised the spare bedrooms: Kathleen and Peter took the train up at least once a month, and when GBS and Charlotte were in Hertfordshire they used to walk over for lunch and invite everyone back to Ayot for tea. Peter caught newts, Kathleen sculpted, and in the season some of them shot. The whole party would then stroll back down the avenue of limes for dinner at Lamer, followed by a play-reading by GBS (occasionally he even banged out a song on the old silk-backed piano). When the weather was mild, people slept outside, and Kathleen danced barefoot in the moonlight in her nightie. Cherry knew that GBS was the draw: ‘It’s much better fun . . . when he’s here,’ he wrote to Christabel McLaren when she was planning her own visit.
³⁹
He relished his lesser role, while chuckling over the star attraction.

Meanwhile Cherry had got himself into a jam with Christine Davis. She was putting pressure on him to get engaged. ‘He was he says bounced into it by an old woman who said Christine was making herself ill wanting to know the situation,’ Kathleen reported to her diary after Cherry had stayed the night with her in London. Christine had also complained that he wasn’t passionate enough. But as many girlfriends were to discover, he was not given to external passions; they embarrassed him. At the end of May, to his immense relief, he divested himself of Christine, and she disappeared leaving no trace. By then, another young woman had begun to appear regularly at Lamer. Pussy Russell Cooke was a swan-like creature with a slender figure, crinkly dark hair she wore parted in the middle, and piercing brown eyes. She was classically English in appearance, with a creamy porcelain complexion and a becoming diffidence. Pussy had a handy chaperone in her brother Sydney, who went everywhere with her, and at the end of June Kathleen arrived at Lamer to find Cherry and Pussy ‘most intimate and cordial friends’. The pair of them slept on a bed of hay outside the revolving summer house, the spell of romance shattered only by Cherry’s old sleeptalking tricks and a stertorous Kathleen in the shelter (obviously Sydney wasn’t a very effective chaperone). Soon Charlotte Shaw was announcing conspiratorially to Kathleen that it could only be a matter of days before Cherry proposed to Pussy, and that she was sure Pussy would accept – though, personally, Charlotte had preferred Christine Davis.

Towards the end of a wet July the gang decamped to the Isle of Wight, where the Russell Cookes had a home near Newport. Cherry was to be a regular visitor at this house, which was called ‘Bellecroft’; it was there that he forged a friendship with the young Stephen Roskill, the son of Pussy’s half-sister and later a distinguished naval historian. That weekend in July 1917 Cherry and Pussy gazed lovingly at each other, but no proposal was forthcoming. A few days after they crossed the Solent and returned to Portsmouth, the assault on Passchendaele began to the north-east of Ypres.

Cherry saw Kathleen regularly throughout that year. She opened her London home to him as he opened Lamer to her. He confided in her, they read each other poetry, and she sent him warm, affectionate letters. He was fond of her son, Peter, who sometimes stayed on at Lamer when his mother had to return to her job at the Ministry of Pensions, and bought him a special junior bed at Heal’s. In London he took the boy to pantomimes and dined at Claridge’s with Kathleen, well aware of his position in the hierarchy: once, visiting for tea in 1915, Cherry was hastily shoved out of the door as Asquith – admittedly the prime minister – was about to arrive. If she rented a holiday cottage Cherry would often turn up, usually on Shaw’s coat-tails. Yet her diary reveals a cooler attitude. He rarely has more than a walk-on part in its discursive entries, the speaking roles being allocated to brighter stars such as GBS. Kathleen adored Shaw, and he was a large part of the attraction of Lamer (unusually, she also liked Charlotte). The feeling was mutual. Some years later Shaw told Kathleen that she was so like a man (this was meant to be a compliment) that his affection for her was ‘the nearest I ever came to homosexuality’. Kathleen’s romantic admirers were legion. Cherry was one of the few men on the planet to meet her without falling hopelessly in love; perhaps this lapse on his part explains her condescension. ‘He is coming on in intelligence,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but it’s acquired. He is very easily influenced. He is echoing Shaw . . . Are all young things like that?’

However undemonstrative and curmudgeonly he might be, Cherry was also capable of sustained support for a good cause. He leapt to the defence of the King penguins and other beasts that were allegedly being boiled alive for their oil on the Australian-owned Macquarie Island, out in the Southern Ocean 900 miles from Tasmania. Wilson had agitated against this barbaric practice after the
Discovery
expedition, and in 1917 Cherry once again took up his baton. The Yorkshire-born Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson was also campaigning for the penguins. Cherry knew and admired Mawson, and while he was in England they swapped notes on Macquarie Island and lobbied the Zoological Society. The value of each bird’s oil, minus freight, was about a farthing, but the voracious wartime demand for fats and oils meant that the King penguin was in danger of extinction. Cherry roped various famous friends into signing letters of protest, and even wrote to
The Times
supporting his enemy Sidney Harmer’s arguments against the slaughter.

Although he was now active and well, Cherry was still subject to moods. Bleak fogs descended on him intermittently throughout his adult life. At the beginning of May, during dinner at Lamer with Kathleen, GBS and Harley Granville Barker, he said almost nothing throughout the meal. It was partly his silence that appealed to Barker, a refugee from a failing marriage who was a frequent guest at Lamer that year. An actor, director, dramatist and poet of dazzling talent and unspeakable handwriting, Barker was twenty-one years younger than Shaw and the pair enjoyed a successful collaboration which resulted in the introduction of repertory to the London theatre.
⁴⁰
Barker had been using the Shaws’ Ayot house as a second home throughout the war (according to GBS he was ‘a regular domestic institution’), and, when they were away, he took to staying at Lamer instead. Although he was a heartbreakingly handsome man who could turn on the charm of Adonis himself, Barker also exuded a certain
froideur
, and it suited him to lose himself at Lamer during the day and join Cherry for dinner (‘If you happen to have other people coming or want to have them say no to me, for quite brutally I am bad company for strangers and casual acquaintances just now’). Besides that he was a glutton for luxury and appreciated the art and furniture that made Lamer such an endlessly beguiling house. Barker fulfilled a filial role for the childless Shaw, one which, to a certain extent, Cherry took over when Barker withdrew to Devon with his second wife.

Cherry’s real friends, however, were still mostly ex-Antarcticans. In the difficult middle war years, when it seemed as if the fighting would never end, he grew close to Denis Lillie, the sandy-haired, blue-eyed biologist who thought he had been a Persian in a previous existence. Like Cherry, Lillie could not fight. He was a conscientious objector.

Lillie had been a popular figure on board the
Terra Nova
, especially when he produced his excellent caricatures, though he had always seemed out of place in the rowdy wardroom. He was a thoughtful man, even a dreamer; the life of the spirit meant more to him than any other kind of life, and he did not fit into any of the readily available moulds. He discussed philosophical theory with Cherry, and they exchanged books on the subject. Cherry was not much of a mould man himself, and Lillie’s restless quest for something more than material satisfaction and conventional success reflected his own aspirations. Both men were searching for pattern and meaning. Currently working as a bacteriologist for the military, Lillie had been one of the few visitors at Lamer during the bad months in the middle of 1916. They became unusually intimate (‘I should love to see your chubby cheeks again’), and after one weekend Lillie scrawled with typical irreverence in his note of thanks that, ‘It was only my body which left you, for my ultimate Reality still walks behind your Bath chair and meditates about the many paths of your lovely garden. With love.’ He described his work as ‘examining military shit for three pounds a week’ (this was quite literally what he did), and was relieved that he didn’t have children, as it meant he would not have to answer the question currently screaming from the recruiting posters, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’

Lillie had decided that he was not the marrying type, claiming that he had evolved beyond it. In later years Scott’s young Norwegian skiing expert Tryggve Gran recounted that as they crossed the Equator on the
Terra Nova
Lillie had revealed that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. ‘When I see a naked man I blush,’ he allegedly said as the others sprawled shirtless on the deck in tropical sunshine, ‘I am split and I can’t help it. Luckily I understand myself and have the control to avoid doing anything wrong.’ Gran was a notoriously unreliable source, and it is hard to imagine anyone having the courage to say that under those circumstances; but perhaps Lillie did. In September 1916 he had been transferred to the pathology lab of a military hospital in Bournemouth, which he loathed (‘no nice cliffs or sea birds, only sand banks and orange peel’), and was appalled to learn the next year that Cherry was poised to become engaged to Christine Davis (‘being unconventional and as near to nature as I can get, it seems all wrong to me that you should have to tie yourself up for the sake of Society’), but he strove, generally, to be optimistic, whereas Cherry was permanently resigned to his destiny. In August 1917 Lillie returned to Lamer for a week. Writing in advance with details of his train to Hatfield, he concluded that, ‘if a motor does not turn up the wings of joy will waft me those four-and-a-half miles bag included. So don’t worry.’ They had a wonderful time together. ‘I do hope,’ Lillie wrote when he was back in horrible Bournemouth, ‘your throat and the rest of you continues to get well and worthy of the sunny spirit which I see under the label ACG.’ He was full of beans, and plans to go to East Africa.

In the spring of 1917 Cherry abandoned his attempt at writing a report for the museum based on his penguin notes and decided to concentrate on the official narrative. He sat at his father’s old desk in the library, endlessly drafting and redrafting pages. Alone at Lamer, his life ran on two tracks, the writing all too frequently derailed by the demands of the estate. When an odd-job boy was summoned from the village Cherry would turn over a discarded page of typescript and set down a list of tasks to keep him busy for the day (‘Clean all boots in boot room’). He broke for lunch at 12.30, when Miss Merchant served up a plate of rabbit stew or, on an exceptionally good day, a portion of pheasant. If the Shaws were not at Ayot he worked through the afternoon until the colours drained from the room, and when he was tired of ice and snow he sat in an armchair by the fire and read about the war in
Blackwood’s
.

By the middle of 1917 he had finished several chapters. He sent one of them off to Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont, an august and friendly Arctic hand whom he had sought out when he embarked on the project, and himself a writer of elegant prose. Cherry was still muddled about what kind of book he wanted to write, and was struggling to find the confidence to escape the limitations of a handy factual guide for future explorers. Somewhere in his subconscious he knew that he wanted to paint a landscape rather than draw a map, but it was several years before this realisation floated to the surface. He clung to his lists and tables and appendices of hard facts while more important subjects remained tangled in skeins of desires that he did not fully understand. In the meantime he had been requesting accounts of specific activities from other
Terra Nova
men. Lashly, the stoker who had tended the scurvy-ridden Teddy Evans, sent him his field notes (‘I know you would like a bit of shooting,’ wrote the seaman on his return from the Dardanelles and the Adriatic, where he had been serving with the Italian fleet, ‘but not at Germans’). Deb, newly married (according to Kathleen to a ‘very ordinary, middle-class girl with no sort of personality’), also sent material. He ended one of his cheery letters with typical sturdy candour: ‘I have seen Lyons and he is a blighter.’ This struck a chord with Cherry. As the architecture of the book took shape and he wrote and crossed out and rewrote the chapter breakdown on old expedition notepaper, he began to doubt that what was gestating in his mind could ever be compatible with the expectations of the dreaded committee. The small worm of anxiety wriggled away.

Food rationing, fuel shortages and air raids were sapping morale at home, and on the Continent, after the failed offensive known as Third Ypres and the unwritable horrors of Passchendaele, long trains were trundling across Europe transferring hundreds of thousands of German troops from the Eastern Front. ‘I see no end whatever of the whole beastly show,’ Cherry wrote to Emily Bowers in December 1917, ‘nor, I think, does anybody else.’ The gloom thickened into the black days of the last German offensive at the beginning of 1918. Defeats on the Western Front in March catapulted the nation into shock.
The Times
rallied as usual to shore up public confidence, issuing advice on all fronts, including the stern ‘Don’t think you know better than Haig’, even though most people over the age of ten probably did.