Cherry (31 page)

At Lamer, Kris the Beautiful went down with incurable tetanus, and one morning, shortly before the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, Cherry went out in his dressing-gown and shot him. It was an awful business. Everyone missed Kris. It had been Miss Merchant’s job to walk him, and, being inexperienced with huskies, she never quite mastered the task. Two decades later GBS still remembered the sight of her flying through the air on one end of Kris’s lead. Cherry was upset about the dog. He was also bored, and on the look-out for targets for his frustration.

At about this time Canon Nance, the pensioner Cherry had so warmly welcomed by telling the Bishop he was too antiquated, began to solicit opinion as to the form and location of a village war memorial. ‘If it be admitted that we want any reminder of the war beyond that of the national debt,’ Cherry began his letter on the subject waspishly, ‘I am entirely in sympathy with the general idea.’ He then took the opportunity to deliver a sermon of his own:

If it is to be in church it should be to the memory of those who have suffered and died for the principles of Christ. Personally, I think these principles are wrong: it is obvious that the bulk of the nation and also the clergy thinks so too: I believe that if A. wants to hit you on the head you had better hit him first, that you don’t do to others what you would wish to have done to you, in fact that the more Huns we can kill the better.

He really wanted to berate Nance about the plight of conscientious objectors. ‘At the same time there are some 900 men still left, men such as Clifford Allen and Stephen Hobhouse,
⁴¹
whose professions before this war were those of true saints, who are such good Christians that they have refused to act against their faith, and such brave men that they have faced persecution every whit as bad as that meted out to the Protestants of old: and some of them have suffered death.’ He was referring to the sentences handed out by the tribunals set up in the wake of the Military Service Act to deal with conscientious objectors. Though nominally permitted to exercise their conscience, the men who went before the tribunals were frequently used as whipping boys: a primitive way of expiating the horror of the front. As always in Britain, the moral majority leapt into action to denounce conscientious objectors. Even Lloyd George promised that he would make their path as hard as he could.

‘I have neither their convictions, nor, if I had them, should I have the courage,’ Cherry continued, ‘to face their illegal persecution (for it should not be unknown to you that such men were given total exemption by act of parliament). At the same time I have at least the decency to recognise their worth and to try and better their illegal treatment. It should of course be the first act of every official conscientious objector, namely the clergy, to publicly condemn the treatment of their universal brethren, but I gather that all they have done is sign a protest . . .’

Cherry instinctively identified with the intelligent misfit. It was, in part, what drew him so powerfully to Lillie, a conscientious objector himself. As for the ethics of war and the practices of the armed services, the cream of his idealism had soured into the curds of disillusion. He no longer believed that war was intrinsically noble. Britain had entered this one, at least in some measure, to refute militarism, so conscription seemed contrary. But did Nance deserve such a battering? Cherry was not really attacking him, of course; he was grappling with the response of organised religion in general to the war, as were many others. Sassoon conjured the hopeless inefficacy of the Church of England amid the carnage when he described a Forces chaplain delivering a pep talk to the latest batch of canon fodder as they were about to leave for France. ‘And now God go with you,’ concluded the padre. ‘I will go with you as far as the station.’

Cherry had continued to see a good deal of the swan-like Pussy, both in London and at Lamer. In October 1917 she had told Kathleen that she loved him more than anyone else in the world. (‘How amazing,’ noted Kathleen. ‘How could anyone love Cherry – like that?’) But by the following January Pussy had begun to complain ominously to Kathleen of ‘a slight waning in the Cherry love passages’. In middle-age Cherry said he was afraid of women. He once told Lillie that a happy married life was impossible for him, a claim that reflected his solipsistic confusion and sense of alienation, and not one that stood the test of time. Besides a superficial fear of feline gold-diggers, he had sufficient self-knowledge to see that he would not be able to make the compromises that children bring to their parents’ lives.

Coming down the stairs one fine day in May, he was pleased to see an envelope in Lillie’s hand on the hall table. But it was not from the hated Bournemouth, or from a new billet in some East African military headquarters. Lillie was in Bethlem mental hospital in south-east London following a severe nervous breakdown. ‘If you have a job on one of your farms I should like to lend a hand and live on a farm,’ Lillie wrote, ‘and really do some work. Also I should like to see you and have a talk.’

There had been no warning signs. Lillie had not been mentally ill before. He was neurotic, and profoundly restless, but he had seemed so full of spirit and plans. Cherry was horrified, and wrote immediately asking when he could visit. He suggested that Lillie come to Lamer and be nursed. A physician superintendent replied instead of his friend, saying that Lillie was neither well enough to have visitors, nor to leave the hospital. Cherry wrote again, impotent and desperate. On 3 August the Orwellian physician superintendent informed him categorically that ‘visiting is contra-indicated’. Lillie had been ‘frequently relapsing’, and visiting disturbed him greatly.

Lillie was in Bethlem for three years. When he was discharged, Cherry took him to the Berkeley Hotel and offered practical help, but Lillie never got over his breakdown. He eventually entered an asylum in Exeter, not far from his brother’s home. There he lived on and on, lost to the world. Both Cherry and Deb wrote to the asylum, asking if anything could be done for their old shipmate. They were told he had all the interests he could manage, and that although he was perfectly happy, ‘it was an incurable case’. Cherry never saw him again. Lillie died in Exeter in 1963. He was seventy-eight.

By October 1918 the pages on Cherry’s desk had grown into a pile several inches high. He discussed the material frequently with both Shaws, usually in the afternoon as teacakes disappeared into the wilderness of the Shavian beard. He even read some passages aloud to Kathleen, who noted, ‘I think it is not at all bad’, not the view she was to hold of the final version. He was fidgeting, of course, over the business of the dogs and Scott’s instructions for them, and he wrote to the dog-handler Cecil Meares, pressing him to reveal his exact orders. ‘I think you may make trouble,’ Atch warned. They were both adamant that Meares ‘disobeyed orders’ by not laying the depôt, but the allegation could not be backed up in writing. Cherry had to keep it to himself for another thirty years, until it all came out (or almost all) in a little-read postscript to his masterpiece.

The Allies advanced steadily through the autumn, and the killing continued. A tide of German prisoners appeared to work the farms on and around Lamer, and more wounded soldiers languished outside the Cricketer’s Arms. Columns listing a different kind of death sprang up in
The Times
: in October 2,225 Londoners died of flu. But on 11 November, at eleven o’clock on a lugubrious grey morning, Lloyd George announced the Armistice to the House, hoping that it brought an end to ‘all wars’. When the news reached Wheathampstead shopkeepers emerged onto the High Street to ring handbells, schoolchildren ran around waving flags, the policeman blew his whistle and everyone else banged tin trays. The masks came off the few streetlights, licensing restrictions were forgotten and men spilled from the Bull onto the street in a palpable release of tension. The fifteenth was designated Victory Day, and a celebratory beanfeast was hastily arranged in the meadow at Marford. Cherry saw little to celebrate. Worldwide, more than eight million men had died; the fighting might have ended, but the grief would never end. As the flags fluttered up and down the High Street and the bells of St Helen’s pealed jubilantly, he shared in an indeterminate sense of depletion. Vera Brittain spoke for many of Cherry’s generation when she described the desolation the war had left behind. ‘My mind,’ she wrote, ‘groped in a dark foggy confusion, uncertain of what had happened to it or what was going to happen.’

10

The Most Wonderful Story in the World

Though the old forms continue,’ Stephen McKenna wrote little more than a decade after he and Cherry had gone down from ‘T Christ Church, ‘the life that inspires them is new: the schools and universities, the learned professions and public services, the government itself are manned from a different class and activated by different ideals.’ The Versailles Peace Treaty was finally signed on 28 June 1919, but in Britain a numbed nation emerged from the war in bewildered confusion. Kipling summed it up as ‘waking from dreams’. The economic consequences of the slaughter (and the peace) included unemployment, widespread poverty and stagnant industry. The collective emotional consequences were harder to define.

Cherry shared the general disillusion that swelled through 1919. After Kimpton Bottom he had sold other farms on the estate, as well as cottages and chunks of land. Ever since he had returned from the Antarctic he had been moaning obsessively to Farrer about the punitive duties being imposed on landowners. ‘The country cannot tax the agricultural landlord out of existence,’ he thundered, ‘and expect him (as landlord) to carry on on the same generous terms as he has done in the past.’ To occupy himself while the sales were proceeding he began to weed the Lamer silver and jewellery. But it was not enough to satisfy his restless urges, and as the year wore on he decided to dispose of more significant manor-house properties. He was even thinking of getting rid of Lamer itself. It was primarily an agricultural estate, and farming had never interested him. He relied on his land agents Rumball & Edwards of St Albans to handle the bulk of his farm management, and perhaps because of that he was generally perceived as a benign employer and landlord who more or less kept to himself. He seldom went into the village; when he did he drove down the High Street in his open-topped car, honking his horn to alert loiterers (if he honked as he zoomed down to the station, the station-master held the train). Even his housekeeper rarely shopped locally, as provisions came rumbling up the drive in the large Shoolbreds lorry that made a loop of all the big houses.

He had the idea that he might move to Wittenham Wood, part of the Cherry estate in north-east Berkshire. A pre-Roman fortified camp loomed over nearby Shillingford, and the intermingling of history and landscape appealed to him. He had sold off some of his holdings at Little Wittenham, but still owned a sizeable piece of land there which abutted the Thames on the north side. He knew the area well, having undertaken many tours of inspection, and he hoped to build a small house in the wood, overlooking the river at the top of a slope called Trotman’s Stairs. The centrepiece of the estate was Wittenham Clumps, two breast-like hills north-west of Wallingford in the Sinodun range, each topped with a strangely symmetrical sculpted cluster of trees. The Clumps had recently inspired the young modernist artist Paul Nash, who described the country round them as ‘grey hollowed (or hallowed) hills crowned by old trees of Pan-ish places down by the river . . . full of strange enchantment. On every hand it seemed a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten.’ The dense wood where Cherry planned to build his house lay at the base of these hills. According to Nash it was ‘part of the early forest where the polecat still yelled in the night hours’. Nash first painted the Clumps in 1912 – calm, stylised landscapes in robust reds and blues – and he returned to them thirty-five years later, towards the end of his life.

Cherry was casting around for a project that would engage his creative energies. His rancour over the government’s land-taxing measures was to a large extent a symptom of a more general dissatisfaction. For a time the idea of building a home on new territory absorbed his attention. In the end, it was his book, not a house, that was to satisfy his creative longings, and as his plans to sell up were overshadowed by his increasing preoccupation with his manuscript, anxieties over authorial independence replaced land tax as his major obsession. Having reopened negotiations with Lyons, he sought legal advice to establish whether he could legitimately remove his book from the committee and publish it independently. He was ready to take the plunge. Counsel concluded that he would be free to publish as long as he first made separate copyright arrangements for the material he had obtained from other members of the expedition. This he did. But he made a meal of what followed. Having informed Lyons at the beginning of the year that the book ‘approaches completion’, he waited until the autumn to send him a 1,200-page bound typescript, insisting that he was offering it ‘as a completed work and not as a draft for recasting or unlimited amendment’. He was trying to goad Lyons into provoking the break.

It was not
The Worst Journey in the World
that he parcelled up for Lyons. Certain sections, polished up, would appear in the book he finally published three years later, but the architecture of this 1919 typescript was quite different. It included numerous lists of clothing and equipment, as well as separate articles on Antarctic cooking and other weighty topics. Furthermore, it had not yet acquired its title. It was called
Never Again: Scott, Some Penguins and the Pole
.

Lyons, who worked at the Meteorological Office, read the work during one of the proliferating strikes, and immediately wrote to congratulate its author. But when he raised specific points – in particular he wanted more details of stores and weather separate from the personal matter – Cherry pounced. ‘The refusal of my book does not come entirely as a surprise to me,’ he annnounced with lordly pomposity, ‘nor is it, as a matter of fact, entirely unwelcome. I will now proceed to make arrangements to publish it in the ordinary course of business, concerning which I anticipate no difficulty.’ A baffled Lyons replied that to his recollection the book had not been refused at all. ‘Am I to understand that you wish to withdraw from your preparation of a volume for the committee?’ he asked, genuinely perplexed.

Cherry knew he would have to proceed carefully if he was to ensure that the committee did not have the legal right to prevent him from going ahead with his own book. Grasping Lyons’ letter, he set off down the avenue of limes and through the rectory and down the garden path to GBS, who was contentedly spinning in his hut. Always willing to dispense detailed advice on any topic, GBS drafted a conciliatory reply (‘My dear Lyons’). The conflict ostensibly hinged on whether the book was to be a personal narrative or a kind of almanac for future explorers. The two, after all, were quite different, and Lyons had put forward the sensible suggestion that the distinction be made clear by a physical separation of material into two volumes. Cherry was not keen on this plan. He was concerned that the committee would treat any book he produced in the same way they had dealt with the expedition’s scientific reports (Lyons had told him they planned a print run of only 500 copies) and consign it to the dusty bookshelves of the universities. ‘I want it read,’ he told Lyons, ‘because I want the public to know to whom the credit of the work was due . . . If the book I have written is too readable, I am extremely sorry.’ The truth was that Cherry had not resolved the conflict in his own mind about what kind of book he wanted to write, and had not yet garnered the confidence to jettison the tedious lists and interminable appendices. His impatience and confusion found an outlet in the bitterness and intemperance of his attitude towards Lyons.

As 1919 progressed, Cherry tugged and tugged until he had his book back. The loyal Atch, anxious to avoid trouble, warned him that if anything displeased Evans he would certainly take action. ‘Teddy Evans is probably suffering from too many medals,’ Cherry reassured him breezily (after his dazzling performance commanding the
Broke
, Evans had featured regularly in the newspapers and had emerged as a classic war hero). Anyway, Cherry had been careful. ‘He comes out of my book,’ he told Atch, ‘far better than I desire or he deserves.’ It was true. Evans came out all right. Cherry had determined to be royally diplomatic. There was to be no criticism of Evans, none of the tortuous saga triggered by Scott’s decision to take the dogs further than planned, and no suggestion – though this remained in the book until a late draft – that the dual goals of science and the Pole had exposed the expedition to fatal pressure.

The Antarcticans’ widespread distrust of Evans came to a head in December. Teddy delivered a lecture at the Queen’s Hall in London chaired by Sir Eric Geddes, transport minister and former First Lord of the Admiralty, and the bones of the proceedings were subsequently published in
The Times
. In his unctuous paean to Teddy, the minister described him as ‘the right-hand man to Captain Scott’. This was too much for Ponting. He sent a long letter to all the morning newspapers ‘in the hope of correcting an erroneous impression that has been current for too long’. Rising majestically to the occasion, Ponting informed his readers, ‘without in any way detracting from the record of a brave sailor’, that Wilson was Scott’s right-hand man. Emphasising the vital roles of Atch and others, he went on to clarify the limited part played by Evans, who had not even been present for a large chunk of the expedition: he had ‘unfortunately’ been invalided home.
The Times
ran the letter, and Cherry wrote to thank Ponting, as did many others including Atch and Ory (‘Bill used to say that Evans was surprisingly stupid’). Further difficulties arose in the spring of 1921 when Evans’ book
South With Scott
was published. Determined to secure his footing, Cherry had bludgeoned Emily Bowers into accepting £100 in return for a written agreement to surrender copyright in the extracts he planned to use from Birdie’s diary. Evans had taken no such precaution, freely reprinting some of the same extracts for which Cherry had gone to such trouble to obtain exclusive copyright. A befuddled Mrs Bowers forgot that she had shown Evans the diary back in 1913. Leaning heavily on Shaw for advice on copyright law, Cherry despatched a strong letter to Collins, Evans’ publisher. The firm took cover behind its author, and Evans eventually replied personally from HMS
Carlisle
in Hong Kong. ‘I don’t like the tone of your letter,’ he wrote, ‘with its insinuated threat of process legal.’ The matter fizzled out, but Cherry had made his point.

By the start of 1920, Cherry’s professional relations with the committee had been severed. ‘You are now utterly untrammelled,’ Kathleen had written pointedly when she heard the news, ‘an estate which is always essential for your happiness, I know. Come and have lunch.’ Cherry summed up the events in the introduction to the book that was eventually published as
The Worst Journey
. ‘Unfortunately I could not reconcile a sincere personal confession with the decorous obliquity of an Official Narrative; and I found that I had put the Antarctic Committee in a difficulty from which I could rescue them only by taking the book off their hands.’ The kind of official narrative required by a committee would not, he continued with an honesty he had not felt able to show to Lyons, effect ‘any catharsis of the writer’s conscience’. Cherry knew that he had behaved badly towards Lyons. ‘In a most ruthless and high-handed way,’ he wrote in an unpublished paragraph, ‘I took [this book] out of the hands of the committee. No doubt they think me an unprincipled bounder. I am.’

The labour unrest that seethed through the summer of 1919 finally paralysed the country on 27 September, when the railway workers came out in a national stoppage. Food rationing was introduced, the government bared its teeth, and although the strike was settled in the first week of October, the industrial troubles spilled over into 1920 and permeated the nation with gloom.

Cherry shared the outrage of most of his class when he contemplated the horrible spectacle of working men asking for higher wages. He retreated to Lamer, where the Shaws eased him out of his black moods. The three of them strolled over his footpaths after lunching on eggs hollandaise and gooseberry tart, busily comparing blooms and harvests with those of the year before and the year before that. In the spring they admired the daffodils and cherry blossom, took notes on the cuckoo population and waited – with disapproval, in GBS’s case – for the shots of the woodmen culling the rooks. When it grew hotter they took lunch outside (Cherry loved picnics) and watched the harvest landscape swell and the stooks of corn multiply. In the autumn they contemplated the dripping elms from the warmer side of the window as the branches of the Norwegian maples swayed against heavy November skies.

In the cosy quietude between Christmas and New Year, folded into an armchair at Lamer, GBS set down a half-page Rules of Punctuation, explaining, with muscular examples of Shavian vigour, the usage of the semi-colon and colon. Cherry soon became a rabid deployer of both. But the Shaws did more than punctuate. Both picked over the typescript during the long months that Cherry spent reworking it, offering more felicitous phrasing, rearranging clauses or simply making suggestions (‘Good literary criticism has been passed as it was written, word by word and chapter by chapter’, Cherry noted). GBS was a gifted interpreter of unformed thoughts. He could also see where a phrase or a new idea needed elaborating, and many of his questions ended up in the text as rhetorical devices (‘What is pack?’ Cherry wrote to introduce his disquisition on pack ice). The adamantine clarity of
The Worst Journey
owes much to Shaw’s questions and responses as he strolled with Cherry through the spinneys, reliving, in gentle Hertfordshire, the cold and exhaustion, the exhilaration and wonder, the anxiety and grief. Looking back from a distance of almost thirty years, GBS claimed that the whole book had been his wife’s idea. ‘Charlotte told him he must write it, and promised to read his proofs and help him in every possible way. He had not thought of this, and still retained his boyish notions of Scott and the expedition. To him Amundsen was a lubberly candle-eating Swedish second-mate, who had meanly stolen a march on the heroic Scott . . .’ This was a typically Shavian misrepresentation of events, but the role of the Shaws was unquestionably crucial. From the beginning GBS was certain that if the book were to be worth anything, it had to address the relative merits of the protagonists with a mature eye. ‘I said to Cherry one day that international courtesy and sportsmanship made it advisable to be scrupulously just and polite to Amundsen. I suspect that this was the hardest pill for him to swallow; for the moment that he went into the question he had to admit that Amundsen was no scallawag, but a very great explorer.’ But when Cherry asked if he should acknowledge his editorial role, GBS was quick to dissuade him. In a letter from Wales, he wrote: