Cherry (33 page)

So he struggled on, hunched over the old desk, stirring only when the housemaid crept in to lay more logs on the fire or when Miss Hill, the suitably antediluvian spinster who had replaced Miss Merchant, announced that luncheon was served. As the war receded and the book finally began to take shape, he experienced a sense of purpose that was to coalesce into one of wellbeing. He tipped back his chair and looked out at the lawny vista unfurling beyond the window, or at the friendly books populating the old glass-fronted bookcases on either side, and at last he saw very clearly that he hadn’t slogged up the Beardmore in order to compile appendices listing the weight of pony fodder.

Battling to subdue his monstrous regiments of material, Cherry learned that his most faithful ally was the waste-paper basket. After weeks of work on a chapter he had called ‘Science’, out it all went. He also jettisoned the rambling, repetitive chapter on Antarctic psychology which he had planned to begin with a eulogy to Bill. In fact, the psychology section had some fresh and touching paragraphs. ‘Why do men who have returned [from the Antarctic] always wish to go back again to that hard and simple life?’ Cherry wondered.

What is it that we wish to gain? I believe it to be this. A man on such an expedition lives so close to nature, in whom he realises a giant force which is visibly, before his eyes, carving out the world, and he lives sometimes so close to the bedrock of existence, that it seems to him on his return to be almost impossible to live comfortably in England because life there is so complicated. To mention a small instance, it struck me as absurd that hundreds of men should be rushing to catch trains at big London termini. Why this waste of energy when there were other trains in less than an hour? . . . This, then, is what I believe has something to do with the call of the south.

It was also something to do with his own restless longings. He had never recaptured the fulfilment he had experienced during that first year on the ice.

In these pages he elaborated on ‘the bondage of possessions’, a state he perceived as the antithesis of the Antarctic experience (‘the Polar Party stands out as the negation of materialism’), and mused on the ‘mystical and invisible something which has been the object of all religions’. He had been deeply influenced by Lillie, a dedicated student of mysticism. In Cherry’s mind the rejection of materialism was an essential corollary to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an idea which, as he perceived it, was slipping out of fashion with disastrous consequences. The importance of the endless search for truth became one of his favourite themes.

He left some surprising embryonic essays among the abandoned material. One was written in response to a tub-thumping address by the Bishop of London, who wished to expunge the stain of prostitution from the streets of the capital. ‘Have you ever starved and had no means to get a bed from the frost?’ Cherry raged. Another essay, a long, reasoned account which reveals the breadth of his scientific reading, was a kind of thinking-man’s history of the planet. In this heady mix of geological theory and philosophical speculation Cherry strikes a peculiarly modern note. In a section on the function of carbon dioxide in climate change he shows that he knew all about the greenhouse effect. He discusses the role of thermohaline circulation in the oceans (without using the term) as well as the part played by changing polar oceanic currents in the growth of ice sheets – both topics keenly pursued by 21st-century scientists. While he recognised that in many areas ‘we are in guess land, but not in fairy land’, he believed there was no limit to what science could achieve. ‘We shall visit the moon now before very long,’ he prophesied, ‘probably within the next thousand years.’ He was less than 950 years out.

There was a kind of redemption in the act of writing. In the stillness of his library Cherry returned to the landscape where life had made sense. In his mind’s eye he saw the coast of Ross Island where land met solid sea in the pleated cliff of a glacier or a tangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges. He imagined sitting up again in a heavy reindeer-pelt bag, pushing back a gritty cambric tent flap and looking out over bloodless snowfields while ice crystals skittered through the blistering air and into his eyes. ‘Even now,’ he wrote, the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the icefields of the north; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the south.

He travelled far back through time and space to the small hut, where a single shaft of light from the midnight sun cut above the mound of snow piled against the window and fell on the jar of paint brushes on Bill’s small table, casting distorted shadows on the far wall. At the end of the evening Bill liked to stand there next to the table in his pyjamas, listening to Clara Butt singing ‘Abide with Me’ on the gramophone. ‘It is hard,’ Cherry wrote, ‘that often such men must go first when others far less worthy remain.’

He described standing at Hut Point watching the sun set behind the Western Mountains with Scott and the others in 1911, and then again a year later. The second time he was alone. He was on his hands and knees in the doorway of the hut after collapsing at the end of the journey to One Ton with Dimitri and the dogs, knowing that five men were slogging back across the Barrier and six more stranded somewhere up the coast. He would never forget those days, ‘Yet time will slowly but surely cause these dark memories to become as shadows, from which – and because of which – stand out in happy contrast the beauty, the simplicity, the good comradeship of it all. And the good times were such as the Gods might have envied us . . .’ Much of
The Worst Journey
sings faintly with the unquiet dissatisfactions of a man approaching middle-age. Its depictions of carefree days at Cape Evans read like a lament for lost innocence, and it is this that frees the book from the shackles of its time and place. Through his story Cherry reached out to something universal: the eclipse of youth, and the realm of abandoned dreams and narrowing choices that is the future.

The structure of the finished book is chronological, beginning with a historical introduction to Antarctic discovery and thereafter following the progress of the expedition. But the narrative is artfully interleaved with analysis and reflection. Within a single paragraph Cherry can range from historical disquisition through personal narrative and on to polemic. As he wrote ruefully of the
Terra Nova
:

People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively to the resources of that time, much better than the old tramp in which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and the morning are the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers can live. Amundsen had the
Fram
, built for polar exploration
ad hoc
. Scott had the
Discovery
. But when one thinks of these
Nimrod
s and
Terra Nova
s, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and Ramsgate.

The mood of poetic musing mingled with practical explanation builds to a final meditation on the tawdry world to which the survivors came home. This counterpoint between the nobility of the spirit in which the expedition was undertaken and the grasping materialism of the post-war era, most clearly expressed in the plangent last page, reflected Cherry’s inner life more clearly than anything else he wrote. Besides his private griefs, the general feeling of decay and punctured ideals that he observed all around him had fuelled his disillusion. Most of the contemplative passages of
The Worst Journey
were written in 1921, when Britain was experiencing one of the most severe depressions since the industrial revolution. In March the government declared a state of emergency following critical labour disputes in the mines, and the following month coal was rationed. In June, unemployment passed two million.

As the years of writing painfully unfolded, Cherry had risen above his pessimism and by sleight of hand turned the kernel of his story into a kind of parable. ‘And I tell you,’ he concluded, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.

It was the dislocation between the lushness of his Antarctic experience and the aridity of the present that formed his powerful sense of irony. From then on, irony became his dominant mode of expression. It suited him: it was as English as Kipling.

Cherry did not place himself at the centre of the stage; he was too modest. It was this that enabled him to write with such candour about his companions. The perspective of detached remembering that characterises so much of his account is most evident in his analysis of Scott. His thoughts on the man had matured, once the initial shock had subsided into a far-reaching, background grief. Scott himself had written about his conquest of his weaker nature, and Cherry deeply admired it. ‘Naturally so peevish,’ he wrote, ‘highly strung, irritable, depressed and moody . . . His triumphs are many – but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.’ He admired Scott hugely, but he was angry at him for the mistakes he had made, and struggled not to blame him for the deaths of Wilson and Birdie. The frank admission and exploration of an unheroic side to Scott’s character helped Cherry reconcile the bitterness he felt towards the man; temporarily, at least.

Schooled by Shaw, Cherry had developed a sensitive awareness of the rhythm of his material. Seeing that the last chapter was tending to the apocalyptic, he leavened it with an account of the life of penguins, who function as a kind of group fool to his Lear. (‘We
must
admire them,’ he concludes, ‘if only because they are so much nicer than ourselves.’) He finessed the extracts he quoted from his own diary, and from the diaries and field notes of Birdie and Lashly, in order to vary the tone and pace of his narrative and provide the immediacy of a close-up shot. And he husbanded his reflections, allowing only the most potent to survive. Although he recalled the bad times – the resentment, sickness and crucifying cold – he also acknowledged the treachery by which the mind can create a paradise of the past. ‘So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember half.’

He had been worried about the book’s unwieldy title, and now it too was among the casualties. Talking over the winter journey with Shaw one day, Cherry concluded that he supposed it had indeed been ‘the worst journey in the world’. He was thinking of Scott’s comment when Cherry, Birdie and Bill staggered back into the hut encased in iron-hard windproofs and hollow-cheeked with tension and exhaustion. ‘You know,’ Scott had exclaimed, ‘this is the hardest journey ever made.’ A decade later, in the shadow of a chestnut tree, Shaw blinked. ‘There’s your title,’ he said.

Cherry is a master of the short sentence, and as a counterweight to his often abrupt style, he addresses the reader directly. Like many shy writers, he loved to do this on the page, because he could not do it in the drawing room. ‘A favourite pastime was the making of knots,’ he wrote of the weeks spent waiting at Hut Point. ‘Could you make a clove hitch with one hand?’ His prose is lean and supple, an almost classical model of the virtues of clarity. In a few brush strokes he conjures the troglodytic existence of Campbell’s Northern Party. ‘But they also had their good, or less bad days; such was midwinter night when they held their food in their hands and did not want to eat it, for they were full; or when they got through the
Te Deum
without a hitch; or when they killed some penguins; or got a ration of mustard plaster from the medical stores.’ The war seeped into the book, as it was bound to do (there is a blinded soldier crawling about in no man’s land in the Dardanelles, among other references), and infused the story with riper significance. Scott and the expedition came to represent the last flowering of an ideal before the blight set in.

Shaw had put Cherry in touch with Otto Kyllmann, his publisher at Constable, and in June 1922 Cherry signed a publicity and distribution contract with the firm. He went back to his printer – two years after the first pages of the manuscript had been typeset – and ordered a first run of 1,500 two-volume boxed sets. The books were to be produced with two different bindings: an expensive creamy white Morris which Cherry preferred, and a blue cloth which was put out at three guineas. Even that was a small fortune, but Cherry was determined to produce a sumptuous book with fold-out maps and colour illustrations.

Constable published on 4 December, and the reviews began appearing immediately. The
Daily News
headlined its piece ‘A Glorious Narrative’, and the deputy editor of the
Nation
, literary man-about-town H. M. Tomlinson, reassured the reader that ‘the man of taste and conscience would willingly forgo a weekend in Brighton [the same cost as the two volumes] in order to buy Mr Cherry-Garrard’s story’. One of the best notices, in the
Evening Standard
, was written by Cherry’s Christ Church contemporary George Mair, and it was this long, considered piece that attracted the most attention. ‘I should call the book,’ wrote Mair, ‘the most wonderful story in the world. I do not think that in the whole of the collections of Hakluyt and his successors, or even in the great modern travel books like those of Stanley and of Scott and Shackleton themselves, you will find anything so impelling and authentic in its appeal or any record so noble of a noble event.’ Mair was not the only critic who drew attention to Cherry’s thoughtful analysis of Scott’s character, which for the first time acknowledged dark as well as light. ‘The real value of the book is as a contribution to polar psychology,’ wrote the Antarctic historian Hugh Robert Mill in
Nature
. He judged it ‘in some ways the most remarkable’ of the six books that had appeared on the expedition. ‘The iron of his [Cherry’s] sufferings,’ Mill wrote with bombastic eloquence, ‘has entered into his soul and imparted a ferric quality to his recollections.’ The
Bookman
critic thought it scarcely decent even to review the work. ‘It would be more seemly to salute such a book with the ancient greeting of the Roman, standing with outstretched, uplifted arm in silent admiration of the great men and great deeds recorded.’ Cherry was ecstatic. ‘I’m having the time of my life,’ he revealed jubilantly to Kyllmann on 8 December. Several weeks later he reported gleefully, ‘Galsworthy has gone cracked about my book; says it is the best of all polar books.’
⁴³
This was what Scott had wanted: the tale had not been lost in the telling.