Cherry (35 page)

As for the villagers, he was wholly indifferent to them. He paid his tithes, made his squirely contributions to hospital funds, complained occasionally and otherwise maintained a dignified distance – as long as people kept off his land. He chased away boys he caught bird-nesting in the spinneys, took the names of the girls who gathered bluebells in the dell by the ice house and banned the collection of firewood on the grounds that people were taking too much. Despite all that, his policy of non-intervention was popular with his tenant farmers. But if Cherry ever felt exploited, he showed immense determination.

His most protracted dispute in the mid twenties was with George Seabrook, the tenant of Lamer Farm, at 350 acres the largest on the estate.
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Seabrook, whose family had worked the land there for generations, kept eighty ewes, thirty steers and three milking cows, as well as a flock of turkeys and a hundred head of poultry which, being truly free range, often popped up in unexpected places. For years Cherry had been asking him to refrain from grazing his horses in parkland near the house as they were gnawing the elm trees. Despite heavy expenditure on fencing and tree guards, the elms continued to sustain damage. ‘Legally I believe I can put machinery in motion,’ Cherry had written in an impassioned letter to Seabrook in May 1923, ‘but that kind of thing leaves bitter feelings . . . I care far more for these trees which are sometimes hundreds of years old than I do about rents: I care so much that I do not think I can discuss the matter personally with calmness.’

The machinery, however, was the only solution. After two more years of demands and conciliatory gestures, Farrer was instructed and, incredibly, in December 1926
Cherry-Garrard
v.
Seabrook
was heard in front of Justice Tomlin in the High Court. Affidavits were read from the bemused gardener Hyde, as well as Currell the woodman, and the judge gravely leafed through lists of numbered trees defaced with ‘slight patches’, ‘severe patches’ or ‘very severe patches’. After an interim injunction ordering Seabrook to refrain from permitting his horses to eat the trees, the proceedings staggered to a botched settlement at the beginning of 1927. It was a Pyrrhic victory for Cherry. As he had predicted, there were bitter feelings. The Farmers’ Union insinuated that they might blacklist him. Not that he cared about that: he was determined to get out of agricultural land.

He had fallen into a depression towards the end of the case, and found it difficult to keep the trees and their horsey teeth marks in proportion. On bad days he couldn’t get out of bed, and when he thought of Reggie, he was afraid. This was ominous. ‘No man is greater than the man who can conquer himself,’ he had written in a discarded description of Scott. But here he was, unable to conquer his own disposition. His failure to overcome his black mood trapped him in a wretched cycle of despair, and as the daffodils nodded behind the summer house and the May blossom cheered the park, Cherry retreated into autumnal gloom.

On good days he came down to breakfast when the factory hooter sounded, and as he tackled cook’s coddled eggs and dark coffee under the eyes of his ancestors he asked himself how much longer he was prepared to struggle to keep Lamer going. Would he be the one to let it out of the family? The estate had already shrunk to 900 acres, of which 143 were parkland. He seemed to think that if things continued as they were, he would be ruined. The reality was that he was still very wealthy indeed. His capital had recently swollen by £18,000 (around half a million pounds in today’s terms) when he had been paid the final tranche of the mortgage on Upper Forest Estate near Swansea. It was a great relief, and an end at last to the torrents of correspondence spewing out of Glamorgan almost daily.

Despite his lack of interest in land, Cherry was devoted to his trees, as Seabrook had discovered, and he planted 300 acres of larch and beech, most of which replaced cornfields. The planting was not simply inspired by dendrophilous tendencies: he did it to avoid land tax, which woodland did not attract. But he cherished his trees as if they were people, and when the Hertfordshire Hunt persisted in riding over the young plantations, Cherry angrily banned hunting at Lamer for the first time in the history of the estate.
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Huntsmen do not easily break their habits, and in 1929 Cherry brought an action for trespass and damage. In court, the defendants’ counsel tried gamely to elicit a motive. ‘Was it hurt pride? A taste for litigation? A crank’s distaste for good old-fashioned British blood sports? Mr Cherry-Garrard is a famous explorer, as everyone knows; why make a mountain out of a mole hill?’ ‘I have brought this as a test-case,’ Cherry replied with his characteristic inscrutability. ‘I am here for a decision.’ When he got one, he smiled inside. He had won again.

When he had no troublesome farmers or huntsmen to pursue, the chaos of Cherry’s inner life manifested itself in a steady war of attrition against his old enemies, the tax commissioners and the clergy. In his fantasy life the country was led by a benign despot who ruled according to a strict policy of laissez-faire, levied income tax at a discretionary rate and administered a sharp kicking to any representative of the Church of England who raised his voice in protest. In October 1929 his natural pessimism was painfully gratified when the collapse of the New York stock market precipitated global economic depression. British exports were paralysed, unemployment rose dramatically and in his 1930 budget Philip Snowden, the chancellor who smoked Turkish cigarettes in an ivory holder, raised income tax and surtax and, to Cherry’s rage, revived proposals for a tax on land value.

Throughout these years, Cherry remained obsessed with the burden of the property owner. The estate contracted in violent spurts, and in some corner of his mind he associated the final sale – the sale of Lamer – with the final casting-off of anxieties. He loved Lamer deeply; every yard of the park had its associations. Each day he saw his father’s waxed moustache in the large oil on the dining-room wall, and the recriminations stalked his imagination. The tension between his ancestral duty, his attachment to his estate and the desire to liberate himself from the responsibilities of the landlord tightened as each year progressed. But for all his talk, he could not yet sell Lamer.

In 1925, through the Shaws, Cherry had met the gnome-like T. E. Lawrence. Already a national hero widely known as the uncrowned king of Arabia, Lawrence had enlisted in the air force under the assumed name of Ross, ostensibly to escape his own legend. When the story got out he was forced to leave. He changed his name again, this time to Shaw, and after a stint in the Tank Corps was transferred to the RAF Cadet College at Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get there from London he had to drive near Wheathampstead, and he was in the habit of stopping off at the Shaws for the weekend. Once installed, he accompanied his hosts to Lamer for lunch. Charlotte especially was fond of Lawrence: she was thirty years his senior, yet they were remarkably intimate. GBS had tinkered away at the flabby typescript of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
for two years, and both Shaws inevitably drew comparisons between that book and
The Worst Journey
. When Lawrence told them, with typically ostentatious self-deprecation, that nobody would be interested in the subject matter of his unpublished volume, GBS, citing the success of Cherry’s book, asked why sand should not have the same appeal as snow.

Lawrence was two years younger than Cherry. He was a small man with engaging eyes and a cupid-bow mouth, and looked boyish into his forties. With sly contrivance he had manipulated the facts of his life and stoked the legend that blazed around him. He was more intellectually magnetic than Cherry, and more dazzling. Shaw was effusive in his praise of
Seven Pillars
, but it has none of
The Worst Journey
’s artful spontaneity: its prose is convoluted, its imagery overburdened. Lawrence’s letters are much better; in them he becomes lovable. As for his relationship with Cherry: although they were never particularly close, their inner lives were more similar than their public personas suggested. Both men fought long and terrible battles with the masked enemies of fear, doubt and introspection. Both were frequently unhappy. Lawrence explained to Charlotte that he had no faith in himself as a writer and so had ‘backed out of the race’. Frustrated by the tensions between literature and action, he claimed he no longer wished to be ‘a half and half: a Cherry-Garrard’. Yet for all his pseudonyms and flights to the ranks, Lawrence was a more public man than Cherry.

Lawrence admired
The Worst Journey
(‘one of the great travel books’) and adored Lamer (‘It has an astonishing feeling of being intact and undisturbed’). When Cherry subscribed thirty guineas to the private, slimmed-down edition of Seven Pillars, Lawrence signed his copy, ‘A. C-G. from T. E. Shaw . . . shamefacedly, for I feel that my bad journey is so much worse told than his.’ For once, he was right. In his
Spectator
review of
Revolt in the Desert
(the anorectically abridged version of the edited
Seven Pillars
), GBS linked Cherry and Lawrence (‘Do tell me that his praise scares you, also,’ Lawrence wrote girlishly to Cherry). It was astonishing, reckoned Shaw the elder, to find such a superlative synthesis of literature and action in two young men of the same generation. Commenting on this privately to Cherry, Lawrence suggested, ‘If our sexes had been different (one of us, I mean) we could have pulled off a eugenicist’s dream.’ The thought beggars the imagination.

Lawrence inhabited a twilit zone between reality and fantasy. He had a passion for concealment, and cultivated his own image with relentless intensity. This was foreign to Cherry’s mental world. In the end, Charlotte grew apart from Lawrence. ‘He’s such a liar,’ she told Cherry, and soon he too drifted out of touch with Lawrence (the weekend visits to Ayot had ceased at the end of 1926, when Lawrence was posted abroad). After Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935, his brother Arnold asked Cherry to contribute to a collection of essays.
T. E. Lawrence by his Friends
, published by Jonathan Cape in 1937, included a short analytical piece by Cherry in which he wrote of his friend’s crucifying anxieties from a very near perspective. ‘Experiences such as Lawrence had been through,’ he said, ‘do not drop you: they torture you.’ He knew all about that. ‘To go through a terrible time of mental and physical stress,’ wrote Cherry, ‘and to write it down as honestly as possible is a good way of getting some of it off your nerves. I write from personal experience.’ But only ‘some’ of this stress was removable: later, in Lawrence’s case, ‘Having been knocked about so much, all these troubles and primitive and subconscious fears began to come to the surface.’ This was plainly Cherry’s case also. ‘In the long run,’ he stated bleakly, ‘no man can escape himself.’

The Worst Journey
had drifted out of print, and in 1929, seven years after its first appearance, it was reissued by Constable. Shaw provided a 200-word publicity blurb (‘It was perhaps the only real stroke of luck in Scott’s ill-fated expedition that Cherry-Garrard, the one survivor of the winter journey, happened to be able to describe it so effectively’) which was printed prominently on the dust jacket. From an Italian hotel where he was on holiday GBS also dispatched advice on obtaining the best deal in America, where the Dial Press were also to publish a new edition.

Otto Kyllmann at Constable had proposed a scheme for an American edition back in October 1922, and Cherry had engaged Shaw’s lawyer in New York to register copyright in
The Worst Journey in the World
. Constable duly secured a deal with the well-known firm of George H. Doran, and a small run of specially printed copies was imported into the United States at the end of February 1923. The book failed to make an impact, though a lone reviewer compared Cherry to Teddy Roosevelt (‘He is a man after Roosevelt’s own heart. His refusal to allow his nearsightedness to interfere with his exploration was especially Rooseveltian’).

Doran allowed the book to go out of print, and now the Lincoln Mac Veagh imprint at the Dial Press was about to have another go with a single-volume edition printed in the US and priced at five dollars.
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This time, the book had a chance. Antarctica had rarely been off the front pages in the months prior to publication: the young Virginian naval pilot Richard Byrd claimed to have flown over the South Pole in an aluminium Ford trimotor – the first man at ninety south since Scott. Three years previously Byrd, an outstanding egotist even by the demanding standards of polar explorers, had become the first man to fly over the North Pole (or so it was believed at the time: Byrd has since been discredited). In 1928, already famous and sponsored in part by the
New York Times
, he had sailed down to the Antarctic with three aircraft on board his ship and established a base called Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf. With the benefit of radio technology and a
Times
journalist on the team, Byrd was able to thrill the public with his adventures on a daily basis, and his exploits received the kind of attention lavished on the moon landings forty years later. On 29 November 1929, the very day that Byrd peered down at the awful South Pole through the pebble-glass window of the Ford, Cherry signed a fiveyear agreement with Dial. In the week the book was published Byrd returned to a hero’s welcome which included a ticker-tape parade and a speech by the Mayor of New York in which the deeply unattractive Byrd, with pleasing American understatement, was called ‘one of the finest human beings ever born into the world throughout its fine history’. Medals and banquets were lavished upon him, followed by receptions at the White House and promotion to rear-admiral by means of a special bill rushed through Congress by President Hoover. Furthermore, although only Americans could afford such fabulously equipped expeditions in the twenties, Byrd did not have the Antarctic to himself. In 1928 the Australian Hubert Wilkins had made the first powered flight over the continent (with a news contract with Hearst in his pocket) and he had gone on to discover new land by air and to map vast tracts of Graham Land on what is now known to be the Antarctic Peninsula. Douglas Mawson had recently returned to the south leading a joint British, Australian and New Zealand research expedition which was cruising between King George V Land and Enderby Land and exploring inland by air, and the Norwegian Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen was charting another segment of the coast by seaplane from a whaler. So when, in the spring of 1930,
The Worst Journey
was at last widely available to American readers, the time was ripe.