Cherry (34 page)

Not all the reviews were positive. The
Manchester Guardian
’s man objected to being labelled a shopkeeper, and thought some of Cherry’s philosophising amounted to ‘slipshod thinking’. The unattributed review in
The Times
was sour. (Cherry had shamelessly suggested to
The Times
that Shaw review the book and, equally shamelessly, GBS had offered to do so. But he didn’t.)
The Worst Journey
would have been better, the reviewer thought, ‘if the personal element had been more concentrated. It contains much which has been told elsewhere in the same words.’ The dead hand of the committee was plainly visible in this piece. ‘He has evidently,’ the reviewer sniffed on, ‘quite in the post-war manner, resolved to say what he thinks and emphasise the “heroism” of the story as little as possible.’

Several readers objected vociferously to
The Worst Journey
. Kathleen was furious that her first husband had been portrayed in less than godlike terms (‘He has criticised Con in the most appalling fashion’). Cherry had sent her a boxed set inscribed ‘with very grateful thanks’; she quickly added a few ‘Rots!’ in the margins. Shaw wrote to her joking feebly that she’d better not come to Ayot as she might murder Cherry if she saw him. Her friends attacked the book in public and private, homing in on what they perceived as its rank disloyalty. Barrie went hurrying round to Kathleen’s house in Buckingham Palace Road and pointed out that, knowing both parties, Cherry’s contention that Scott lacked humour was rich. (Knowing a little about Barrie, his own observation is richer still.) He decided against impugning Cherry in print on the grounds that his action would only serve to publicise the offending volume. Shaw, as usual, had hurled himself into the conflict. Hearing of Kathleen’s anger, he sent her a long, typewritten apologia for Cherry and his book, scribbling at the top, ‘Keep this for a quiet hour: it is about Cherry and old times and sorrows.’ In this laborious and counter-productive letter he asked Kathleen to take
The Worst Journey
seriously, for Cherry, ‘always a case of suppressed ability, has found an outlet for it in this book . . . and . . . bringing a hero to life always involves exhibiting his faults as well as his qualities’. It might have been common sense, but Kathleen did not want to hear it. Shaw, she thought privately, seemed unconsciously determined to make her resent the author of
The Worst Journey
. ‘I have never admired Cherry,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but I am very fond of him and don’t want to have to cease to be.’ Further comment came issuing from the Shavian oracle. Having cheerfully analysed ‘Con’ as if he had known him all his life, GBS warned Kathleen of the dangers her friends were running when they denounced Cherry and his book: ‘The other day Cherry said to me quite spontaneously, “I had, as you know, the greatest admiration for Scott; but these people will end by hardening me against him: they will not listen to reason; and they know nothing about it.” ’

Kathleen’s doctor confirmed that she was pregnant at about this time, so she had other things on her mind. But Shaw’s words had not persuaded her. Five years later she tried to get Cherry’s description of Scott being ‘weak’ and ‘peevish’ removed from
The Worst Journey
. When that strategy failed she took a different tack, sanctioning her erstwhile admirer Stephen Gwynn, an Irish journalist and former MP, to write a hagiography of Scott in the hope that it would obliterate Cherry’s account in the manner of a palimpsest. But few read Stephen Gwynn now.

The mandarins at the Natural History Museum were also displeased. Cherry had flamboyantly exposed the indifference with which the museum had received the Emperor penguin eggs back in 1913. The exchange, skilfully presented as a comedy of manners (‘This ain’t an egg shop . . . Do you want me to put the police on to you?’), furnished Cherry with a striking contrast to the moral value of the winter journey and the spirit in which it was carried out (‘We did not forget the Please and Thank you . . .’). Scenting a good story, the press picked it up, and a purple-faced Harmer, now the dignified Sir Sidney, complained indignantly to both the
Daily News
and Cherry, insisting that his staff had been gravely maligned (‘the story seems devoid of any semblance to the truth’). Cherry drafted in the help of GBS (by post, inconveniently, as the Shaws were in London), and the pair of them tormented Harmer with courteous, clever letters that were impossible to refute. The main culprit at the museum was dead, but Cherry had a witness up his sleeve, as Scott’s sister Grace, who had accompanied him on one visit to the Cromwell Road, confirmed his account of events in writing. For a week or two rants from both sides enlivened the pages of several newspapers including
The Times Literary Supplement
, Harmer sending forth a stream of denials and Cherry noting that ‘the manners of the Natural History Museum have not changed for the better since 1913’.

Complaints notwithstanding, Shaw announced that the book’s success ‘has exceeded all expectations’. He considered that the reviews, ‘favourable or not, all show that he has impressed his vision of the expedition irresistibly on his readers’. ‘The book does seem to have made a hit,’ Cherry wrote to Emery Walker. ‘It has done what I specifically wanted it to do – get the business into some kind of perspective and proportion.’ Constable reported brisk sales, despite the high cover price, and a fortnight after publication a reprint was mooted. Soon a second edition was rolling off the Edinburgh presses with a short new preface, fewer plates (the stock of some of the panoramas had been exhausted) and some minor corrections. Buoyed up by his success, Cherry felt the deep sense of satisfaction that came from having achieved exactly what he had intended. ‘This post-war business is inartistic,’ he had written in his preface, ‘for it is seldom that anyone does anything well for the sake of doing it well.’ It had been a great relief, he said, to wander back into the past, a place which was so foreign that it seemed to him ‘an age in geological time’. After paying tribute to the contribution both Shaws had made to the development of his writing, he concluded: ‘At an advanced age, I am delighted to acknowledge that my education has at last begun.’

11

The Chaos which Threatens

The Worst Journey
had established Cherry’s reputation, and in 1923 he entered the sacred pages of Who’s Who. Despite his ambivalent attitude towards the establishment, a part of him yearned to belong, as parts of most of us do. He relished the social prestige conferred by his literary success. Through his book he had found a place in the world, and now he trotted zestfully round the country on social visits, accepting invitations to Emery Walker’s house in Gloucestershire, to Donegal, and to Devonshire, where, in the summer of 1923, he fell eighty feet down a cliff. Nothing was broken, but he could not sit down comfortably for weeks. He was also still a regular guest at Bellecroft, the Russell Cookes’ house on the Isle of Wight. Half a century later, Pussy’s nephew Stephen Roskill remembered those times. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘many of my happiest days were spent at Bellecroft in the 1920s when the house always seemed to be full of young, lively and intelligent people.’ Roskill was often at Lamer too. He remembered a goat there which always turned its back when people approached: Cherry had named it Evans. Roskill knew Evans the man as well, and remarked that he was ‘exactly the opposite to Cherry in being very self-advertising and flashy’.

Personal success notwithstanding, Cherry still fidgeted ceaselessly over the direction in which the country was heading, especially after January 1924 when Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour prime minister. (MacDonald was to hold office for just ten months, though he would be back.) Cherry’s political views changed little with the years. He had a visceral loathing of socialism but despised most politicians, whatever their allegiance, and shunned any involvement in party politics. In a description of the horse in
The Worst Journey
he wrote that the beast ‘rivals our politicians in that he has little real intellect’.

He still fretted relentlessly over his finances. The high rates of income tax and other duties imposed during the war had never been brought back down to pre-war levels, and Cherry’s response was to dispose of further assets. He was not alone: after 1918 a whole generation experienced a feeling of
après nous le déluge
that was to extend beyond the next war. In a famous
Encounter
article Nancy Mitford called it ‘the spirit of divest, divest’. Cherry put the remaining rump of the Wittenham estate on the market: the wood where he had considered building the house of his dreams, the Clumps that had inspired Nash, the ancient camp on Sinodun Hill. Rumours of the possible destruction of the camp incited a howl of protest on the Letters page of the
Sunday Times
, among other places, and eventually His Majesty’s Office of Works listed the site under the Ancient Monuments Act. Farrer tiptoed round a suggestion that Cherry might like to give a bit of it to the National Trust (‘Do not think I have turned socialist,’ he added hastily at the foot of his letter). ‘I have always admired Charles and his courteous end,’ Cherry replied tartly, ‘but even a king was not expected to pay his executioners.’

With Wittenham sold, he decreed that Denford had to go. ‘The country estate in my opinion is as out of date as foxhunting,’ he wrote to the long-serving (and long-suffering) Farrer. ‘It is a matter of opinion, but mine is a very clear one – we ought to get out.’ He was over-optimistic about the price he would get for Denford. After consulting with his mother, a reserve of £28,000 was agreed. But the business dragged on, and the estate remained his.

In the summer, the Denford furniture was auctioned in anticipation of a sale. The candlestick that had lit the way up the curling stairs, the grained tray-top washstand at which four generations of Cherrys had faced their day, the japanned coal scuttle that had frightened the little boy in the night nursery: it all went, all except the carpet in the library, which Evelyn wanted. Finally, the freehold and 785 acres were sold for £20,000. The money was invested to provide an income for Evelyn, as she was a life tenant of Denford under the terms of the General’s will. ‘My mother and I are both extremely glad to be out of Denford,’ Cherry informed Farrer in August, ‘and our disappointment at the price realised is compensated a good deal, I think, by our pleasure at shedding one more liability. I imagine the next step will be Bride Hall house and land here, and finally perhaps, if one can shed one’s taxation by so selling, Lamer.’

The Shaws were a permanent fixture in Cherry’s social life as girlfriends came and went. He got to know many of their huge cast of theatrical acquaintances: in the winter of 1923 he heard Sybil Thorndike read
Saint Joan
in the rectory sitting room. (Not long afterwards he watched her star in the première.) At about the same time both GBS and Cherry acquired giant four-valve wireless sets, and they spent hours keenly fiddling with the buttons and pontificating on the changes this startling new technology would bring as waves of indecipherable crackle broke over their bent heads. As the years passed, age yielded material for a far more gripping topic, their health, or, more precisely, their ailments. Eagerly exchanging symptoms along with names and addresses of specialist doctors, when one or the other was away they continued the debate on paper. ‘My bowels refused to act in the smallest degree,’ GBS revealed conspiratorially in a bulletin from Birmingham in October 1923, ‘though my digestion and appetite were as healthy as possible. In desperation I resorted to senna tea and paraffin oil . . .’ If a particularly exciting condition manifested itself while they were apart, the patient hurried home to report his symptoms. ‘We must compare damages when I return to Ayot,’ GBS wrote from Malvern after having his ribs X-rayed. On the rare occasions when neither had any difficulties they turned to Charlotte and her state of health, and in an emergency they furrowed their brows over the diseases of the servants.

Besides the vagaries of physical wellbeing, they also colluded on matters of municipal concern. They both campaigned vigorously against an odiferous rubbish dump a mile south of Ayot. This strange place, embroidered with flowers in spring and colonised by rats in every season, consisted of a cluster of gravel pits packed with refuse sent up from London by the ponging trainload. ‘My famous neighbour Mr Cherry-Garrard,’ Shaw confided to the local press, ‘sole survivor of “the worst journey in the world”, after the horrors of which one would suppose that no discomfort possible in these latitudes could seem to him worth mentioning, has written a letter implying plainly that there is little to choose between midwinter at the South Pole and midsummer at Lamer Park when the dump is in eruption.’ The unhealthy aspect of the dump, and the limitless range of illnesses for which it might be responsible, were of special concern to the two complainants when they did not have bigger fish to fry. ‘I was ulcerating somewhere,’ GBS reported eagerly from Boar’s Hill in May 1926, ‘and I take in and put out unnatural volumes of fluid.’ His receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature did nothing to stem the flow of medical data.

Cherry had been among the first in the county both to acquire a motor car and to install a coal-fired electricity generator. Yet he had an ambiguous attitude to change. For a decade he had been fretting about the bewildering shifts he observed in the world around him, and in the twenties he witnessed a rush of progress in sleepy villages around Lamer which had altered little in centuries. Although horses were still being shod in Wheathampstead at the forge behind the Swan, and one of them still pulled the pump for the municipal sewerage system, vehicles were gaining ground, and the furious honk of the horn on Cherry’s open-topped silver Vauxhall as he sped down to the station had been downgraded to a minor event in the village day. Soon the first petrol pump was exhaling its fumes outside the Abbot John pub, Wren’s wheelwright shop was replaced by a garage, and in 1925 the High Street was tarred. Gas had made its appearance in 1922 when forty lamps were purchased to replace the old oil ones, though they were turned off at ten o’clock each night on the basis that nothing ever happened after that hour.

Not far off, the pioneering new towns of Welwyn and Letchworth were burgeoning, and Wheathampstead labourers took the omnibus to the building sites during the increasingly frequent periods in which there were no jobs on the farms. These were the original garden cities, conceived at the turn of the century as a solution to urban overcrowding and designed to combine the best of town and country, with no pubs to distract the happy populace from gardening. GBS began to joke that Cherry’s estate would end up as Lamer Garden City.

The sodden summers of 1925 and 1926 drove several tenant farmers around Ayot and Wheathampstead to the edge, and over it, especially when the closure of the railway during the General Strike meant they couldn’t send their produce down to London. As small-scale agriculture continued its inexorable decline, light industry appeared in the form of Murphy & Son, an agrochemical factory that was almost as smelly as the dump. The Batford amalgam rubber plant which came soon afterwards was the first to install a hooter summoning the workers to their posts, and for many years it blared magnificently at 7.55 each morning. Murphy and the others strengthened the link, previously so frail, between Wheathampstead and the outside world. It was a connection that became steadily stronger during Cherry’s lifetime, until the village was just another small part of a deafening and homogeneous universe.

The brand of heroic melancholy spawned by the news of Scott’s death was out of place amid the languid sophistication of the twenties. It had more or less died in the trenches, or at least when the truth about the trenches was known. In the summer of 1924 it raised its head for a last Lazarus-like spasm when George Mallory and his youthful companion Sandy Irvine vanished on the summit ridge of Everest, ‘going strong for the top’.

Like Scott, Mallory was compared to Sir Galahad; like Scott, his failure on this earth was transmogrified into success in the world beyond. The Bishop of Chester, mourning the mountaineers at their memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral, referred to their last climb as ‘the ascent by which the kingly spirit goes up to the house of the Lord’. ‘The real value [of the expedition] is moral and spiritual,’
The Times
had written after the
Terra Nova
reached New Zealand. Cherry had known Mallory at Winchester, and after his death he likened him to Bill, his hero. ‘In a way,’ he wrote, ‘he who lies in the snow of the Barrier was like Mallory who lies on the snow of Mount Everest.’ But the days of heroic innocence were gone, and while the country was prepared to indulge in one last spree, for Cherry there was no return. In his memory, his dead friends stood alone. ‘Mallory was burning with a kind of fire, an ardent, impatient soul, winding himself up to a passion of effort the higher he got,’ he concluded. ‘Bill was not like that . . .’ In the long, lonely years of anguished recollection, Cherry regretted that he hadn’t asked Bill enough questions about himself, to learn what made him as he was. How many people have wished for their time again, once the beloved is gone? How little is learned from those lessons.

Cherry was now considered an authority, or at least an urbane commentator, on travel to remote regions, and in June 1926 the
Daily News
asked him to contribute to a debate on the future of exploration. Noting first the speed with which the world was shrinking (in the previous three months Alan Cobham had flown from London to Cape Town and back, and Amundsen, taking off from Spitsbergen in an airship, had flown over the North Pole and on to Alaska), Cherry developed a theme he had raised in
The Worst Journey
by suggesting that the future of polar exploration was in the air. ‘When an airship can be used like a motor-car,’ he suggested, ‘there will be no more blank spaces in the world.’ He predicted that large government-funded scientific stations would be built in the Antarctic, specifying Ross Island as a probable site.
⁴⁴
But it didn’t much interest him. The virgin territories of Asia, he reckoned, were more appealing: ‘Rather pick primulas in Szechwan than lava on the Beardmore now.’ Via this circuitous Chinese route he steered his argument round to the familiar comparison between the noble purity of the true expedition and the tawdry materialism of the modern world. ‘England has a genius for compromise, and in this dreadfully civilised world, with so many people and so many interests, compromise pays: a limited Monarchy, a limited Democracy, a limited Socialism, and now perhaps a limited Trade Unionism – and quite time too.’ (The TUC had called off the General Strike
⁴⁵
six weeks previously, leaving the striking miners to battle on alone.) A few of his father’s ideals of Englishness had survived in the toxic soil of his disillusion. ‘For the English do not really like compromise,’ he informed the confused readers of the
Daily News
, ‘and God, as I believe, does not want compromise. He wants people to have strong beliefs and to go all out for them.’ For the last fifty years of his life, Cherry believed the present to be all wrong. Like many in Britain, he looked back with Chekhovian longing to an imaginary pre-war society (more accurately pre-Antarctic, in his case), and as the distance from that halcyon time lengthened, so his dissaffection with the present intensified. Most people live in the past when they reach old age; by his early forties, Cherry already saw the present in black and white and looked backwards to a lost youth that glowed in glorious colours.

Evelyn had moved out of her rented house in Southampton with the long-suffering Peggy in tow and bought a property on a hill near Godalming in order to be near Mildred, her third daughter, who was living in Reigate in Surrey with her young family. The West House remained Evelyn’s home for over a quarter of a century. Cherry visited her occasionally, and they exchanged telephone conversations in which each shouted at the other before being cut off. He also saw Lassie and her brood in St Albans, where Lassie’s husband, now a canon, held a diocesan office, but otherwise he was growing distant from his family. Edith, having recovered from her childhood invalidity to conquer the Matterhorn, had continued upwards and embraced religion, hopping cheerily from church to church and giving away all her money. Cherry saw little of her, and disapproved of her financial piety. The rituals of birth and death meant nothing to him, and he refused to turn up for relatives’ funerals, staying away from Bedford in August 1927 when his uncle Colby Sharpin was buried. Colby had been a distinguished doctor as well as a carnation- and picotee-fancier of national standing. He died at 11 Lansdowne Road, two doors away from the red-brick house where Cherry was born. But Cherry was more self-absorbed than most, and his far-off, unremembered beginnings were irrelevant to him. He went through life apparently unconscious of the random stroke of fate that had led him to acquire his riches, and it never occurred to him that only an arbitrary set of events had separated him from a lifetime in a red-brick house in Lansdowne Road like his Uncle Colby.