Cherry (43 page)

For Angela, there was no question of hospitalisation. Cherry had a horror of hospitals. A day nurse and a night nurse were engaged instead, though Peter Ashton launched a renewed campaign for incarceration. For months Cherry barely improved. He was permanently numb, as if he had been filled to the brim with cold liquid lead. Suspended between dread and alienation, his mood beyond the reach of the mediating intellect, he found it almost impossible to achieve any kind of mental focus. He lost several stones in weight and looked shabby and buffeted, his shoulders stooped and his eyes pouched. When he stood at the window and saw ordinary men and women strolling up Gloucester Place, he turned to Angela and said, ‘Aren’t some people lucky? They can go to the park.’

He was reluctant to let her out of his sight. She had to telephone the loyal Jasper and ask him to sit with Cherry when she needed to shop or take the laundry to the blanchisserie in Mayfair. Peggy also came, and so did Isabel, Reggie’s widow, who would arrive early wearing a large hat and take Angela for a drive round the park. But she had little respite. Two days before her thirtieth birthday, they heard on the wireless that Geoffrey de Havilland’s aircraft had exploded during a test flight. His obituary in
The Times
described him as one of the best demonstration pilots in the Empire.

Cherry had entered a dark world in which the dominant emotion was anxiety, and he focused it on his physical ailments. The bodily symptoms of a depressed patient are not imagined: they are as real as broken bones, and Cherry’s went on and on. The link between mental and physical illness is one of the murkier areas of medicine.
⁶⁰
Cherry was reluctant to acknowledge that his physical problems had anything to do with his state of mind, even when all of them improved at the same time. Few severely depressed people can make the connection. A generation on, the American author William Styron also experienced catastrophic nervous breakdown at the relatively advanced age of sixty. He wrote powerfully about the tortures of depression-induced hypochondria. ‘It is easy,’ Styron thought, ‘to see how this condition [preoccupation with bodily ills] is part of the psyche’s apparatus of defence: unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mind announces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its perhaps correctable defects – not the precious and irreplaceable mind – that is going haywire.’
⁶¹

Cut off now almost entirely from the world beyond Dorset House, Cherry became hypersensitive to noise. When the Bertrand Russells played music in their flat Cherry sent Angela upstairs to tell them to stop. Quailing at the prospect of issuing orders to one of the towering intellects of the Western world, she havered. ‘I’d do it for you,’ Cherry persisted innocently, as if that situation would have been remotely comparable. During the winter of 1946/7, the coldest in both their lifetimes, black ice closed Baker Street for weeks, and traffic was diverted up Gloucester Place, hiking the decibel level. Falling temperatures and fuel shortages proved a devastating combination for London that winter, and both the big freeze and the power crisis dragged on into March. Transport strikes made everything worse. Further austerity measures were introduced as Britain counted the cost of the war, television broadcasting was suspended for a month to conserve fuel, and everyone ate corned beef.

Cherry was beyond the reach of his multitudinous doctors, his small band of loyal friends, and his wife. Six months into his illness his long-serving arthritis specialist recommended yet another doctor, a distinguished Harley Street neurologist called Rupert Reynell. Cherry was prejudiced against psychiatrists, afraid of the stigma their attentions attracted. But though the genial, Australian-born Reynell was in practice a psychiatrist, his neurological label made him acceptable.

The staple pharmacological remedies for depression were still bromides, paraldehyde, barbiturates and amphetamines, all unsatisfactory in different ways. Instead of dishing out pills, Reynell talked to Cherry and encouraged him to talk back. For many months, in sessions at the flat, Cherry talked about his Antarctic experiences in minute detail. Reynell hazarded medical opinions (it was he who diagnosed Dimitri as suffering from ‘hysterical hemiplegia’, for example). More often, he tossed in general comments. ‘Of course, she was an artist and she may have had a twist,’ he offered vaguely on Kathleen. As Cherry worked through his preoccupations Reynell tried to alter his thought processes and teach him new ways of thinking. Today it would be called cognitive therapy.

Quite literally, Reynell got him on his feet. He showed Cherry that he could rebuild his self-esteem, take control of his mind and restore his grip on reality. But Cherry’s recovery did not come in time for him to see his mother again. Evelyn died in Godalming on a freezing December day in 1946 at the age of eighty-nine. Angela went to the funeral at St Helen’s alone. ‘Cherry v. upset,’ she noted in her diary. He mourned in some far-off private place, his pain silent and unfathomable.

Then, in 1947, triumphs piled up. First, Angela got him into the hall. By February his arthritis was improving, though he began to get painful muscular spasms if he tried to do anything with his hands. By May he was able to write a short note thanking Hugh Farrer for his work on his stock portfolio. Soon Angela got him into the street, where he shuffled falteringly up and down past Gill’s eating and washing figures accompanied by the languid Lazarus, who eyed the smoking nostrils of the pony delivering the milk. Then she got him to lift his foot onto a kerb, and then into a taxi. By September he was walking twenty steps almost every day; he even made it to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to sign some papers (first making sure that the right kind of chair was available). His treatment, he said, ‘was almost like a miracle’. The mists had dissolved.

14

A Winter Journey Indeed

In July 1947, as Repton’s sweet chestnuts bloomed over the park, Sir Nicholas Cayzer, chairman of the Clan Line shipping firm, purchased Lamer for £45,000. The outdoor staff watched in bewilderment as a procession of removal men sweated on the gravel, bent under dark portraits in gilt frames, glazed cases of stuffed eagles and four-poster beds with fluted mahogany pillars.

Reynell believed that if Cherry were to stay well, he must cast off all responsibilities: he had therefore recommended the sale of Lamer. Cherry had accepted the suggestion calmly. He spoke of letting Lamer go with regret, as if someone else was making him do it. ‘He did love Lamer desperately,’ Angela reflected. ‘But he also wanted to get away from things.’ The literal shedding of responsibility mirrored an emotional equivalent, and somewhere in his psychic life the sale symbolised the renunciation of his past, a casting aside of the influence and expectations of his father and, more significantly, of the burden of his neuroses.

Angela was horrified. Who wouldn’t be, faced with the prospect of exchanging a lovely country house for a city shoebox? Shaw, now ninety-one, tried manfully to help her through it. ‘You will outlive Cherry,’ he wrote to her in August, ‘and he could not leave you with a white elephant like Lamer instead of a gilt-edged annuity.’ Shaw was putting a gloss on it. Lamer was not a white elephant; not to Angela. She was only thirty, and still hoped to overcome her husband’s resistance to children. But she had been boxed in. ‘Reynell was a miracle worker,’ she concluded ruefully. ‘How could I contradict him?’

Cherry never returned to Lamer. The furniture was auctioned without delay and the books put into the London salerooms. Six Chippendale armchairs with figured silk velvet seats went to a manufacturing tycoon in St Albans for £130. Local people who bought old mahogany pieces were astonished to find, when they got the booty home, that the drawers were stuffed with family documents. Angela tried to secrete away the most treasured items, knowing that Cherry would regret their loss. She saved the Wilson watercolours, and sneaked some of the furniture into the Harrods depository on the Thames, where it duly rotted. A polar sledge and cooker were hastily donated to Deb’s institute. Esptein’s
Louise
, a fine bust, was sold at auction for £110, but the sculptor’s long-fingered Christ rose from its packing case and was not sold, despite a peripatetic jaunt back to Epstein’s studio and a mooted sale at the Leicester Galleries.
⁶²

Reynell recommended a break in Eastbourne, the quiet Sussex resort renowned for its sunshine and sheltered from the prevailing southwesterlies by the chalky bulk of Beachy Head. In the autumn Cherry and Angela dutifully swayed down to the south coast on the Southern Railway, newly nationalised by Attlee’s Labour government. Following Reynell’s suggestion, they booked into a suite at the Grand Hotel, a splendid old monster on the seafront that harked back to the Victorian era.

Just sixty-five miles from France, Eastbourne was still emerging from the tunnel of war. Rolls of Dannert wire lolled alongside the bathing huts, anti-tank concrete blocks called Dragon’s Teeth lay beached on the grassy verges of the backstreets, and from his hotel window Cherry watched the old Martello tower disgorging weapons. He felt really well. Armed with notebook and binoculars, he and Angela took the little bus that climbed out of Eastbourne and dipped up and down the hollows of the South Downs along narrow roads shadowed by oak and beech. It was good birding country, and after lamb sandwiches and shandy in Alfriston they walked along the banks of the winding Cuckmere as it bent towards the shallow blue trapezium of sea at the Haven. At night, after dinner in their sitting room, they even foxtrotted round the Grand’s chandeliered ballroom. Angela had her husband back.

‘You really are a most satisfactory patient,’ wrote Reynell on receipt of a jolly note from Eastbourne. ‘I wish that all were as self-helpful. Sixty is generally considered too old for psychological treatment, but you have been a brilliant and heartening exception. Now I know that all that is necessary in such cases is that they shall have been trained in the Antarctic; have been on the “Worst Journey”; shall be very intelligent and still receptive, and lastly and very important, that they shall have a wife who is, amongst other things, courageous, cheerful and above all, selfless. ‘Having ensured the above trifles, I will know that the rest is easy.’

‘He has recovered his health rather miraculously,’ GBS wrote after his former neighbours turned up unannounced in the unseasonably warm March of 1948. Cherry had put on weight and was thriving. That year he bounced off to Epsom and Henley with a picnic stowed in the boot of a hired car, watched scullers training on the Thames at Mortlake, and spent lazy days at Bramley with gardening Elsie and cooking Fred. ‘The depressions lasted months,’ Angela recalled when she looked back on those years, ‘but they don’t seem much now.’ When Penguin proposed a single-volume, unabridged paperback of
The Worst Journey
, Cherry encouraged the project with zest. More than 165,000 copies of the two-volume edition had been sold, and in the summer Penguin duly ordered a first printing of 100,000 double-deckers.

When Reynell died suddenly of cancer Angela feared Cherry would relapse. But he didn’t. He was very happy. Sometimes, as she watched him bending to smell a rose in Queen Mary’s Gardens, she saw the tiny scar on the tip of his left ear where Dr Forest Smith had burnt him. He never even knew he had it.

Returned to the familiar territory of his right mind, he decided that he didn’t want to lose his books after all, so he went down to the Hodgson’s saleroom in Chancery Lane and bought some of them back. He also began appearing at the Hodgson’s office asking for books to be removed from sale just as the catalogues describing them were half-way through production. (On recapturing his 1713 edition of
Paradise Regained
, he inscribed the title page, ‘This is the Lamer copy saved by me.’) The rescue operation stimulated a serious interest in book-collecting, and Cherry’s raincoated form became a familiar landmark at the back of the salerooms on New Bond Street and Chancery Lane. Overhanging spires of volumes soon dominated even the large two-in-one flat, and he had to have a special library built in what had been the dining room – though the rarest volumes went straight into the vaults of Hoare’s bank. The jewel of his collection, acquired at Sotheby’s, was a flawless fourteenth-century missal from Paris, probably written for the private chapel of a member of the French royal family.
⁶³
In 1952 he was guest of honour at the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association dinner at the Mayfair Hotel. He gave a magisterial speech, ranging from the subject of reading and writing in the Antarctic to the value of books in general. ‘I think they are ultimately important,’ he told the audience, ‘as a record of conflict, between wisdom and human folly, between good and sheer human infamy, between light and darkness; and because the best of them include truth and beauty . . . The best stories are not what people do, but why they do it.’ In his saner moments Cherry saw that his greatest achievement had been to write a book unlike any other that did reveal the truth and beauty he sought so earnestly. Many adventurers write books, but Cherry’s transformation of a journey that was almost superhuman into a book that approached poetic genius was unique. Thirty years later a guest at the booksellers’ dinner recalled ‘the generosity, clarity and conviction of all that he said’.

Just as his chronic arthritis had been a manifestation of his debilitating depression, his energetic pursuit of his hobby was a symptom of his rebuilt self-esteem. But book-collecting ran counter to the claustrophobic culture of shortages and dock strikes. The London Olympics of 1948, the first for twelve years, became known as the austerity games, though in fact the adjective was applied to every aspect of British life in the pinched and colourless post-war years, the birth of the welfare state notwithstanding. Clothes rationing was about to be abolished after eight years, but Britain was broke, and soon the sugar ration was reduced again and sweets (much loved by Cherry, along with good chocolate and ice-cream) were brought back onto the ration books only three months after restrictions were lifted. In September 1949 Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer and prince of austerity, devalued the pound by thirty per cent. Whale meat, which people were already eating in the form of fresh steaks, appeared in tins, as if Spam had not been testing enough.

Money, as always, helped lighten the grey, and with Lamer sold and most of his investments holding up well, Cherry had more cash than at any other time in his life. Following the general trend to take up what had been left off in 1939, he and Angela booked a cabin on one of the first post-war cruises to Athens. Always content at sea, Cherry again prowled the deck with his sketch book in his pocket, rising before the sun and tracking the stars after it disappeared again. When they disembarked they had their picture taken at an ancient amphitheatre, both smiling in the diaphanous Greek sunshine, he enthroned in a stone priest’s seat, she standing in a full-skirted cotton frock with a nipped-in waist and an Audrey Hepburn headscarf tied under her chin.

In 1948 Sir Michael Balcon’s and Charles Frend’s Technicolor feature film
Scott of the Antarctic
was shown in London by royal command, with John Mills in the title role. Mills was already well established on the large screen as the star of numerous war films, and the story of the expedition was presented as a noble fable of class integration. Soon audiences up and down the country were marvelling at this iconic display of British heroism, a commodity that was in perilously short supply in the constipated late forties. While the feature was in production Cherry was asked to sign a form permitting the film-makers to change his character into anything they liked, and he replied by giving the studio bosses a good telling-off. Most of the ‘survivors’, as the press called them, were initially opposed to the project. ‘Besides a general aversion to the idea of yet more money being made out of the tragedy,’ Deb wrote, ‘the one common dread among us was that the story would be tampered with to suit the ends of Drama, a fear which found its extreme expression in wondering how the film people were going to introduce glamorous blondes into a polar hut.’ But Deb was won over, as most of them were, and some of the men even went onto the set at Ealing Studios and met the actors playing them. After watching the film at the command performance they crowded into the smoky foyer of the West End cinema as the flashbulbs popped and cast their votes in favour of Frend’s interpretation. Cherry stayed away, implacable.
⁶⁴
He never saw the film, though hostilities did not extend to the actors – he subsequently sat next to John Mills at dinner at Deb and Dorothy’s. It was a pity that he couldn’t allow himself to share in something that had given the others so much pleasure.

Cherry never saw a piece written by Frend after he had shot the film, citing as his formative influence
The Worst Journey in the World
. ‘The more I read [of
The Worst Journey
],’ wrote the director, ‘the more I felt that a film could be made of Scott’s last expedition.’ So Cherry couldn’t really complain. He had started it.

He was still obsessed, despite the passing years, and returned to the old Antarctic questions with renewed zeal, seizing every opportunity to interrogate his weary former shipmates (‘Try and throw your mind back . . .’). Deb, Silas and an increasingly deaf Sunny Jim bore the brunt of it, though Silas retired back to Canada and saw little of Cherry from 1949 onwards. Once again Cherry dwelt on Scott’s decision to take the dogs on further than he had planned, and on the repercussions of that decision. ‘Of course, it is this dog biscuit which is the crux of the whole problem,’ he wrote in the margin of his Antarctic journal in 1948. Once again, as he absorbed himself in the past, his anger and resentment towards Scott swelled. ‘Here was Scott,’ he wrote in one of his well-thumbed expedition volumes, with a tremendous urge to carry out his depôt and polar journeys. He depended on ponies and manhauling. What was it in Scott which prevented him from having good ponies and good manhaulers? Somewhere it is his own weakness. Why was he so easily persuaded by Kathleen and Teddy Evans? His bad ponies and bad manhaulers led to inevitable strains on himself and others. The polar party died and he left us in the power of Kathleen Scott and Teddy Evans and tragedy after tragedy has followed for forty years.

This was an exaggerated version of reality. Cherry’s tendency to explain his own behaviour in terms of external events, and other people’s in terms of their personalities, was a self-deluding habit that trapped him in a painful negative loop. Underneath the barrage of explanations his self-recrimination was Johnsonian in its magnitude; but this he could not put into words. Perhaps if he had been able to do so, he could have saved himself.

He decided to write a frank postscript to a new hardback library edition of
The Worst Journey
, a kind of ironic meditation that would reveal facts he had been obliged to leave out of the other versions. The single-volume paperback was selling well, but Cherry wanted to put certain things on record between hard covers. ‘It may be historically important,’ he told Allen Lane at Penguin. After years of silence he contacted Harold Raymond at Chatto, and was advised to make his own application for paper, which was still in short supply, although Chatto were again to handle distribution. When eventually he succeeded in getting the paper in his own name, he wrote triumphantly to Raymond, ‘I am now a publisher and can meet you on equal terms.’

He wrote the postscript in the small back room on the sixth floor of Dorset House, looking out over the gleaming slate roofs, sooty chimney-stacks and muggy London fogs. The hum of engines floated up from Gloucester Place, still punctuated by the cry of the dairyman’s boy as he brought the horse to the kerb. Cherry’s essay included new information about Scott’s orders to Meares, quoted within a painstaking but measured reappraisal of the crucial sledging journeys towards the end of the 1911/12 austral summer. Cherry had also found a solution to his dilemma over where to place the blame for the disaster. Scott was not at fault (‘in this sort of life orders have to be elastic’); it was the lack of vitamins that did it. ‘I feel more and more,’ he wrote, ‘that a ration free of, or seriously deficient in, vitamins played a leading part in this tragedy.’ Atch had given him the idea, and Reynell had endorsed it. As an explanation it attracted Cherry as it exonerated everyone from responsibility: vitamins had not been discovered when the
Terra Nova
sailed. His public reassessment of Scott was positive and considered (‘he viewed life as the struggle which it is’). It was followed by a hymn to Wilson and his ‘forgetfulness of self’, an ideal that Cherry deeply admired, though his own tragedy was that he was unable to participate in its wonder. He longed to cast off selfhood, as Wilson had, but his inner burdens weighed too heavily. It is impossible to understand the true nature of Cherry’s neuroses, and to feel how hard they pressed down; but from what he did reveal of his torments, it is clear that he did remarkably well to travel with them as far as he did.