Cherry (32 page)

It would be fatal to make any suggestion of collaboration on my part . . . As my experience on the ice dates from the great frost of 1878 (or thereabouts) when I skated on the Serpentine, my intrusion into the Antarctic Circle would be extraordinarily ridiculous. Besides, the suggestion would be misleading . . . You need not be at all uneasy as to the integrity of your authorship. All books that deal with facts and public controversies are modified by consultation, mostly to a much greater extent than this one. It is only in pure fiction that the author takes no counsel.

While continuing to accumulate material for the lists of equipment that were still to append the second volume, Cherry experimented with character sketches and psychological analysis and began to craft a story that took into account not just the length of the sledge runners but also the motivation and personality of its protagonists. It was a daring approach: biography was only just then stirring from its Victorian cocoon of deference. Cherry knew enough about literature to see for himself that the real interest of the story lay in the men. Like most good writers, he had a visceral sense of his book before he put it into words. But without the Shaws’ encouragement,
The Worst Journey
may have remained an official narrative; and perhaps the dullest story in the world.

The romance with Pussy slowed to a terminal halt early in 1919, and once it was over she and Cherry became firmer friends. The following year he spent Christmas at Bellecroft with all the Russell Cookes, enjoying tramps over the windy Isle of Wight hills in the afternoon and listening to the gramophone during the long evenings in front of the fire. Pussy went on to get engaged to a bright young man called Jasper Harker, whose widowed mother Lizzie was the author of popular novels. Cherry remained intimate with both Jasper and Pussy for the rest of their lives, and Jasper in particular was to prove a steadfast supporter in the terrible times that lay ahead.

Cherry, meanwhile, began dallying in London with an art student called Thelma. He spent a lot of time in the capital in the years following the war, usually staying at the Berkeley Hotel, a grand, roomy old palace in Piccadilly where he felt at home. Thelma did not prove as lasting in his life as this august institution, and he was spotted abroad with other
belles
: the young Malcolm Sargent, then an organist but about to turn himself into a conductor, once arrived at Kathleen’s breathless with gossip about Cherry and a creature called Gladys Orr. He was obviously coping manfully with the rising tides of flapperdom that startled his conventional soul.

When he wasn’t labouring at his book or enjoying bouts of the high life, he began to experiment with short forms of writing. He made his journalistic debut in several magazines in 1919, often celebrating the appearance of his first piece by despatching an angry letter to the editor complaining about typographical errors. He wrote a dazzling review of Shackleton’s
South
for H. M. Massingham’s weekly, the
Nation
, displaying the flair and rhetorical flourish which was to come to maturity in
The Worst Journey
. ‘Some centuries ago, it seems,’ the review began, ‘when Scott was in the Antarctic . . .’ Cherry was critical of certain decisions, but overall he paid tribute to Shackleton. ‘Now I know,’ he wrote, ‘why it is that every man who has served under Shackleton swears by him.’ The piece ended with a vignette of three battered little boats and their exhausted, frostbitten crews. ‘Darkness is coming on,’ Cherry wrote, the sea is heavy, it is decided to lie off the cliffs and glaciers of Elephant Island and try and find a landing with the light. Heavy snow squalls and a cross sea – and both the wind and the sea rising. Many would have tried to get a little rest in preparation for the coming struggle. But Shackleton is afraid the boat made fast to his own may break adrift. She is hidden by the darkness, but a breaking wave reveals her presence every now and then. All night long he sits with his hand on the painter, which grows heavier and heavier with ice as the unseen seas urge by, and as the rope tightens and drops under his hand his thoughts are busy with future plans.

Cherry had not given up his campaign to end the penguin slaughter on Macquarie Island. At the beginning of April he wrote to
The Times
to tell its readers that the stories coming from that island ‘make the atrocities of Belgium sound like a Sunday School treat’. Appealing for parliamentary intervention, he ended with a paean to the birds themselves. ‘The penguin has won a little bit of affection from all of us because he is entirely lovable, and because he snaps his flippers at the worst conditions in the world. If we do not help him now we can never look him straight in the eyes again. Poor penguins, but poorer we.’ In the same month he wrote a piece for the
Spectator
appealing for government control over the killing of Antarctic fauna. The punch came in the last line. Having listed measures that should be taken to safeguard southern species, he concluded, ‘Otherwise the penguins will call us Huns, and we shall deserve every bit of it.’ He was so pleased with his Hun joke that when news came through in December that the killings were to stop he produced it again in another letter to
The Times
. While he was about it, he publicly thanked H. G. Wells, whose support he had co-opted. ‘ “There are some Huns among them”, the penguins say, “but the nice people, like
The Times
and Mr Wells, and others not so well known (but just as nice) have been too much for them”

. . . When the frost is in the trees and the snow is on the ground you will hear them [the penguins] say “thank you”, and so does yours sincerely, Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’
⁴²

Shortly before the end of the war Shaw had introduced Cherry to Wells. It was difficult to see what they had in common. They were different in background, political instinct and temperament, and Wells, who plotted schemes to tax the rich with his friend Arnold Bennett, never really liked humanity much. But he and Cherry found common ground, and they met and corresponded occasionally for three decades. Wells was attracted to the potential for scientific investigation in the Antarctic and seized any opportunity to quiz Cherry on polar matters, whether in an armchair at Ayot, at a first-night drinks party in the Shaws’ London flat, or under a tree at Lamer. He had smuggled the Macquarie penguins into his 1919 novel
The Undying Fire
, a heavy-going twentieth-century rendition of the allegory of Job. (Wells must have had Cherry on his mind when he toiled over his book, as he also tossed in a reference to a parasitical liver disease in China.)

The penguins had offered Cherry the chance to expatiate on the Antarctic, and he was always on the look-out for other opportunities to refer to his favourite topic. In October 1919 he seized his pen in response to a long article in
The Times
on the efficacy of that new weapon of mechanised war, the tank. Pointing out that Scott had used a forerunner of the tank in the Antarctic, he disingenuously described the ‘considerable success’ of the motor sledges on the ice, going on to claim, with the deft, polished style that was becoming his trademark, ‘Fetch one of these two derelicts off the Barrier, and case it in armour, and you would have something very like the modern tank, which is largely an imitation of our old friends. With Churchill at the Admiralty and Scott still alive tanks would have been in action long before September 1915.’ This was demonstrably untrue, but it sounded nice, and it expressed the mood of elegiac melancholy that was to characterise his best writing.

He was also quietly building up a small art collection. His first major acquisition was Rodin’s bronze skater, which he bought for £640. GBS had famously sat for Rodin, and he had also sat for the young American expatriate sculptor Jacob Epstein (though when Epstein’s bust was finally completed Charlotte refused to let it into the house on the grounds that it made its subject look like a savage). Epstein’s work, with its stylised figures and powerful sexual component, represented the new and iconoclastic in art, and as such it attracted controversy for years: in the summer of 1925 the sculptor’s tribute to W. H. Hudson in Hyde Park, Rima, was to be tarred and feathered. In 1920 Epstein exhibited his first Christ at the Leicester Galleries in London. The
Risen Christ
was a startlingly beautiful bronze, a taller than life-size representation with enormously distended fingers raised, on the right hand, to display the open wound. The upright head was stern, dignified and quietly moving, though the features were hard, not crumpled like the faces of the standard nineteenth-century messiahs. Inevitably the conservative wing of public opinion weighed in with loud and warlike criticism of this outrageous strike at their securely held opinions. The ferocious Jesuit priest and social reformer Father Bernard Vaughan published his attack – ‘Is it Really Christ?’ – in the
Graphic
in February, objecting chiefly that the statue was not sufficiently English in appearance (it was more like an Asiatic, or a Hun, or, God forbid, ‘
an American
’). Shaw counter-attacked in the pages of the same magazine a month later with one of his most endearing pieces of polemic journalism. The operatic Christ favoured by Father Vaughan, he argued, had been invented by St Luke. ‘All the Christs in art must stand or fall by the power of suggesting to the beholder the sort of soul that he thinks was Christ’s soul.’ Indeed.

Cherry bought the Christ. He walked into the gallery shortly before the exhibition closed and paid £2,100 (about £45,000 today). The controversy had appealed to his anti-establishment streak, Shaw had encouraged the purchase, and he could see for himself that it was a remarkable work. Besides that, it was bound to annoy Canon Nance. He put it in the garden, where the servants had much to say about it for many years.

In the winter of 1918/19 an argument over a pair of motor cars created a rift between Kathleen and Cherry that never quite closed. She had handed over two vehicles to Snowdon Hedley, a colleague of Cherry’s from the squadron and now a captain; he was to organise repairs and sell the cars on her behalf. When no sale (or at least, no money) was forthcoming, Kathleen asked for the cars back. For months Cherry acted as intermediary, but finally a furious Kathleen, provoked by the sight of Hedley quaffing cocktails in Regent Street with ladies in silver dresses, put the matter into Farrer’s hands, and Cherry was summoned to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a series of formal interviews. He simmered with rage and frustration for weeks. ‘My natural kindness of heart,’ he wrote in a letter to Kathleen that was never sent, ‘of which I am daily reminded that I have too large a share, has placed me, all unwilling, between two of my friends in this matter . . . This has already meant at least four special journeys to London, telephones, telegrams and postage innumerable, at least a year off my life in mental distress [here he crossed out, ‘As well as lunches at the Café Royal which I shudder to contemplate’].’

The matter was settled without recourse to the courts, and Kathleen and Cherry tried to remain friends despite the chilly air that had descended. She continued to bring admirers to Lamer, among them the tall Norwegian explorer, oceanographer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen, whom Cherry considered the father of all modern sledge travel. Nansen stayed at Lamer for what he described as ‘two unforgettable days’ when the bluebells were out in the dell and daffodils covered the park. His exploits in the Arctic were legendary, and Cherry pumped him for details about sledge runners which he might include in the appendices to his double-decker book (the typescript was becoming more unwieldy as each month expired).

In 1921 Cherry saw much less of Kathleen. She had fallen in love with Hilton Young, a distinguished junior minister, and in March 1922 they married. Kathleen’s life was increasingly taken up with politics, and as Young had a house in the country she no longer needed Lamer. But more than a husband had come between Kathleen and Cherry. Even without the business of the cars, their friendship would inevitably have cooled. Cherry was distancing himself from the official side of the expedition. His attitude to Scott was maturing, and he needed to draw apart from his widow in order to see and write clearly.

In his search for a publisher it was to Shaw, of course, that Cherry turned. Smith, Elder were too close to the committee; and anyway Reggie was dead. Cherry had decided to get
Never Again: Scott, Some Penguins and the Pole
typeset and printed at his own expense, thereby retaining editorial control. It was a similar system to the one used by Shaw, who had begun publishing his work himself with
Man and Superman
in 1903, establishing a distribution arrangement with the firm of Constable that worked satisfactorily for almost half a century. In the middle of February 1920 Cherry approached Shaw’s printer, R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh, for a price for 240,000 words, in two volumes, with appendices totalling 72,000 words. He asked to be quoted on 1,000 and 1,500 copies. The matter was handled by Clarks’ director William Maxwell, who looked after Shaw’s voluminous oeuvre for many years. As the first chapters went up for setting straight into page proof, Cherry opened negotiations with the eminent fine-art publisher Emery Walker, whose offices were in Fleet Street. Besides being a friend of Shaw’s, Walker had known Scott and Wilson, and his company had worked on Scott’s
Voyage of the ‘Discovery’
. He was to undertake the reproduction of the illustrations in
Never Again.

Finishing a book is largely a matter of stamina. Cherry sat it out in the library, writing sections or isolated paragraphs in longhand on separate sheets and arranging them for the typist who arrived from an agency and sat clacking in an upstairs room. When the typed pages came back downstairs he snipped them up and reordered the pieces. Although the recent glut of books on the expedition put him, in one sense, at a psychological disadvantage, a consideration of their contents helped focus his mind on the kind of book he had to write.

Scott’s executors had been first off the mark only months after the
Terra Nova
docked. The two volumes of
Scott’s Last Expedition
, edited by Leonard Huxley, went through half a dozen reprints in less than a year. Besides that, five of Cherry’s surviving shipmates had got their books out before him. Ray Priestley’s enchanting
Antarctic Adventure
had been published in 1914, though stocks had been destroyed in the war and the book was hard to obtain. Two years after Priestley, Griff had produced his breezy and agreeable
With Scott: the Silver Lining
(in a letter to Cherry he referred to it as ‘Ortobiogriffie’). The two books concentrated largely on parts of the expedition at which Cherry had not been present, and he praised them both in
The Worst Journey
, describing
The Silver Lining
as a book which offered ‘a true glimpse into the more boisterous side of our life’. Evans’ stiff and uninspiring
South with Scott
appeared in 1921, followed later the same year by Ponting’s equally wooden
The Great White South
. This last pair went on selling for many years, and although they were frequently offered as Sunday School prizes in the hope that the recipients would absorb some of their heroic spirit, they had little literary merit and made no serious attempt at critical analysis of motivation and personality. Finally Cherry had taken much delight in George Murray Levick’s
Antarctic Penguins
(1914). Dr Levick’s book is almost entirely about Adélies, amongst which he had spent much time (he was one of Campbell’s Northern Party). ‘If you think your own life hard,’ Cherry wrote, ‘and would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or steal this tale, and read it and see how the penguins live.’