Cherry (44 page)

Above all, he used the postscript to praise Wilson’s belief in the importance of ‘the response of the spirit’. ‘Wilson was working in a world which, I believe, was losing its ancient faiths without having much to put in their place. The rumblings of the storms to come reached us from the outside world when the ship came down.’ In a violent, angry and tired world, he continued, ‘Wilson sets a standard of faith and work . . . We have missed him ever since he died. But you must find him: his voice, it is a quiet voice, is for those who listen . . . and he will live, in many hearts.’

The postscript is a confused essay which adds little to the general reader’s understanding of what had unfolded. It wanders amiably away from the Pole to consider the regrettable dismantling of the empire and to wonder at the noble fighting spirit that saw England through two wars (‘a winter journey indeed’). Seaver called it ‘a somewhat tortuous document’; it was certainly eccentric. But Cherry’s passionate and sane appeal for the responsible use of knowledge rings true. Writing as atomic clouds rose on distant islands and hydrogen bombs took shape in labs on two continents, he noted, ‘We cannot stop knowledge: we must use it well or perish . . . Those who guide the world now may think they are doing quite well: so perhaps did the dodo. Man, having destroyed the whales, may end up by destroying himself.’ It was a prescient suggestion.

In the end he hauled himself above his obsessions and the clutter of the days and years and found that he could still touch his ideals. He cleared his mind, picked up his pen and wrote down what mattered – to him, and to anyone with half a heart. ‘To me, and perhaps to you, the interest in this story is the men, and it is the spirit of the men, “the response of the spirit”, which is interesting rather than what they did or failed to do: except in a superficial sense they never failed. That is how I see it, and I knew them pretty well.’

The Cherry-Garrards continued to enjoy Eastbourne, though not at the Grand. The hotel was a popular conference venue, and, even worse, the plain-speaking Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin, took holidays there until shortly before his death in the wet spring of 1951. Cherry was irritated when the public rooms swarmed with Labour Party officials and their wives and security men, and resented eating (as he perceived it) food left over by the roly-poly Bevin and his party. The rock-quarried Foreign Secretary was not only a Labour minister but a solid union man to boot. Cherry snorted at him, and at Britain’s socialist experiment and nationalisation programme. Like many of his class he felt that the vaunted ‘new equality’ discriminated against him; that, of course, was the point of it. In protest he moved from the Grand to the gabled brick and pebble-dash Hydro, a hotel at the far end of the front. On high ground and surrounded by a garden, the smaller, family-run Hydro became a second home to Cherry and Angela, and throughout the early fifties they decamped there for four or five weeks at a time, settling into a routine that revolved around concerts under the turquoise doughnut domes of the bandstand and grilled sole in the highceilinged dining room. Cherry loved pottering round the South Downs with his deerstalker and birding notebook, the latter stored in a cloth envelope that had been part of his Antarctic kit. The quintessential Englishness of the landscape appealed to him: purple hollyhocks in the garden of the thatched Clergy House at Alfriston, yellow wagtails dipping over the Pevensey marshes and the smell of drying grass at haymaking. He studied the birds that bobbed in the reeds of the chalky wetlands and hovered in the wrinkled air over the wheatfields. (‘Mottled on top of head and back. Lot of white in tail when spread. Nest exactly like a chaffinch. Chack-chack-chack.’) The landscape was so emblematic that during the war a painting of the Downs had appeared on morale-boosting posters above the slogan,
Your Britain, Fight for It Now
. But in 1950 a colder war crept over Beachy Head when a convoy of lorries trundled towards it loaded with materials for an underground radar bunker opposite the winking lighthouse. As Cherry had written, ‘We cannot stop knowledge.’ Shaw missed them; he complained that since they had left, there was only one couple in the village he could talk to. He remained a keen correspondent, and colluded enthusiastically in the quest to acquire rare books. When he put part of his own library up for sale at Sotheby’s Cherry snapped up several volumes, including a valuable Dante and the rather less valuable 1937
Oxford Companion to English Literature
which he took with him on a visit to Ayot. ‘I never opened this book,’ GBS wrote on the flyleaf in a shaky hand, ‘and am astonished to find that I ever possessed it. Companions are no use to me. But it is a pleasant surprise to find that it has passed on to so valued a friend as Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’ When Angela had an operation for varicose veins in the spring of 1950 Cherry seized on the opportunity to return to their favourite topic. ‘The nursing home,’ he wrote to Shaw in disbelief, ‘said to be the best in London, was like the Crimea before Florence Nightingale went out.’

Five months later, Shaw died. In his ninetieth year he had cited Cherry in a letter to
The Freethinker
. He had found in his young neighbour an example of the evolutionary appetite for power and knowledge that characterised the ‘Life Force’, the atheist’s substitute for the soul. (‘The squire abandons his comfortable country house, and undertakes “the worst journey in the world” to gather an egg or two of the Emperor penguin because it is a missing link in genetic theory.’) This, he claimed in triumph, was surely evidence that a godless world was not a world without meaning or purpose. It was an encouraging thought, and a touching epitaph to a true friendship.

In the same year, Cherry’s third sister, Mildred, died. She was followed ten days later by Isabel, Reggie’s widow, who was found dead at the age of eighty-seven at 11 Green Street, the elegant Mayfair house that had been a refuge to Cherry in his youth. She and Cherry had kept close; he thought she had ‘quite the best brain of any woman whom I have met’. She had seen, all too painfully, her husband’s depressive tendencies replicate themselves in his younger cousin. ‘Poor boy,’ she commented on Cherry before his marriage. ‘I wish he could have a happier outlook on life.’ She left him her collection of Wilson’s pencil drawings and water-colours, and Scott’s letters to Reggie. The house was turned into offices.

His losses did not drag him down, at least externally. He rejoiced heartily when Attlee’s government fell and the 77-year-old Churchill was returned as head of the ‘New Look’ Tory party. It was at the end of that year – perhaps to celebrate – that Cherry designed his own block-printed Christmas card from a sketch he had made of an Emperor in front of a smoking Erebus. He sent it out inscribed with a verse that rivalled Shaw’s in its appallingness (‘I come to you by Cherry drawn/To wish you joy this Christmas morn’). It was part of Shaw’s legacy.

Cherry still felt close to the Antarctic, and he was pleased when two members of Expéditions Polaires Françaises wrote to ask if they might present him with an egg from an Emperor colony they had reached by tractor. When the pair turned up Cherry and Angela took them to the Trocadero restaurant for dinner (whale meat was served) and were duly presented with the egg in a green box. But when he heard the Frenchmen’s stories Cherry did not wish that he had been able to do it their way. He agreed with Deb, who wrote in 1959 that present explorers ‘won’t believe it when one assures them that we were contented to be without wireless and aeroplanes and tractors, and that the only thing we could really envy them for is their ability to carry plenty of fuel so as to dry clothes in the tent and get better sleep’.

The Cherry-Garrards visited Wheathampstead occasionally in the middle fifties, despite the hole left by Shaw. Anti-aircraft posts still stood in the cornfields, banked with split sandbags. They avoided Lamer. The news of it was too terrible. Cayzer had instructed the Portmeirion architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis to remodel the dilapidated house. But in those grim post-war years property owners were required to obtain permission before spending more than £100 on improvements, and Cayzer was unable to procure any of the licences he needed. He quickly sold Lamer on to Grenville Hill, an unpopular local insurance broker and a former tenant of Cherry’s. Hill began to strip the estate of its assets, selling off the remaining outlying properties and plots of land and generally annoying everyone. After attempting to sell the house itself for conversion into a ‘school, country club or institution’, in 1949 he demolished most of it (licences not being required for that) and flogged everything saleable, including chimney-pieces. He began to build an ugly new property on the site using parts of the old exterior walls and some of the oak beams. Before he finished, he went bankrupt. Then died. The unfinished new house and 600 acres were purchased in 1953 by George Seabrook, the son of the man Cherry had taken to the High Court. Seabrook farmed the land and thinned the woods Cherry had planted, then he sold the house to Fred Drake, who was no relation to the earlier Drakes who had married into the Garrard family. It was no longer Lamer; but an experienced eye could still see Repton’s lines, and his sweet chestnuts still flowered in July.
⁶⁵

It was still a bleak time to be living in London. Most useful things remained in short supply, and the white stuccoed terraces circling Regent’s Park were peeling after years of neglect. Edmund Wilson observed: ‘There is about London a certain flavor of Soviet Moscow.’ In 1952, Angela and Cherry fled to the Mediterranean three times.

In the new year he had congestion of the lungs. The smog in the capital didn’t help. The previous December had brought the worst pea-souper in living memory, and Dorset House had disappeared in a murky gulp, with visibility on Gloucester Place down to five yards. A performance of
La Traviata
at Sadler’s Wells had to be called off when smog crept indoors and the audience could no longer see the stage. Now Cherry went off to the Hydro to recuperate, and in June he and Angela escaped the rain which unseasonably soaked the crowds on the day Elizabeth II was crowned by sailing off to Venice. While they were at sea the thrilling news came over the ship’s wireless that the third Pole had been conquered: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Everest. Cherry was immensely moved. Tenzing described the wind on the last reaches of the South Col as ‘roaring like a thousand tigers’. Like the Antarcticans, the climbers on Everest had a vision of another world. (‘I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this,’ Cherry had written at Cape Crozier. ‘I wondered why it did not carry away the earth.’) Less than five years after his triumph, Hillary and a small party became the first men since Scott to reach the South Pole overland. It was no longer quite such an awful place: the Americans had built a scientific station there, and the Stars and Stripes was flapping merrily on the hard ice. As a young man Hillary had been inspired by
The Worst Journey
(‘I read it time and again,’ he wrote in his autobiography). On his own Antarctic expedition he and his British partner Vivian ‘Bunny’ Fuchs used orange tracked vehicles (one of which was named ‘Rock’n’Roll’) that were descendants of the motors Scott had taken south. Four men, led by Hillary, also drove tractors to Cape Crozier and found the remains of the stone ‘igloo’ that had saved Cherry, Bill and Birdie. They dug out some of Bill’s pencil drawings, as well as the blubber stove and other relics, ‘chafed by nearly half a century of wind and drift but . . . in excellent condition’. A second party found the Emperor colony, still thriving.

Shortly after their return to London Cherry and Angela decided to take a more ambitious trip to Australia in the autumn. They were full of plans. Then quite suddenly, he broke down again. The familiar symptoms queued for recognition: dramatic weight loss, lack of interest in the outside world and a crushing listlessness which extended to a partial inability to move. It was a heavy blow to Angela. Seven years had gone by since the last breakdown, and they had been such happy ones, with no indication that another collapse was lurking.

He was incapacitated for months, and the Australian holiday was cancelled. The therapeutic sessions seven years previously had not resolved the fundamental conflict playing itself out in Cherry’s psyche. But despite the painful absence of Reynell, the breakdown was not terminal. By the end of the year Cherry was beginning to emerge from the tunnel. Once again Angela counted the number of steps he took each day, and the cold winter weeks were marked by small triumphs as he tottered to the end of the corridor, then down to the foyer, and finally all the way to the frosty lawns of Regent’s Park, where they watched out for the first crocus or a new family of mallards on the lake. He continued to be plagued with neuralgia and other physical ailments, obsessively consulting a dermatologist about a persistent rash and an eminent ear, nose and throat specialist about problems with his sinuses. His sensitivity to noise worsened; the growl of motors had become louder when traffic lights were installed on Gloucester Place directly under their sixth-floor windows, and workmen hammering down the corridors brought on a stomach upset. But by the late spring of 1954 he was well enough to return to the Mediterranean, sending a special Fortnum’s deck-chair to the ship ahead of time. Although he rarely disembarked, the long cruise did him good, and at the end of it they both felt confident about rebooking the Australian cruise for the autumn.

The six-month ‘ordinary run’ to Australia and back included a hugely long extra leg across the Pacific and down the coast of North America. But first, to get to Western Australia, the sparkling Orient Line ship
Oronsay
followed the route Cherry had taken on the
Ormuz
forty-five years earlier, when a passenger on another liner in the Suez Canal had shouted over to ask who had won the Derby. From Fremantle she proceeded round to the east coast. Angela was busy organising her husband’s medicines (‘I was haunted by his prescriptions’), and if the ship’s doctor couldn’t oblige, excursions were often arranged around the location of the pharmacy. In Auckland Cherry was pleased to see a copy of
The Worst Journey
displayed in a bookshop window. For the rest of the holiday he rarely went ashore, preferring to remain on deck, observing the teeming wharves through his field glasses or simply sitting in a deck-chair, a cup of tea in his hand. Angela usually disembarked on her own (‘Don’t be long’), and she fell in love with Suva in Fiji, returning to the cabin with pungent armfuls of tropical fruit. But at the next stop, Honolulu, uniformed men came on board to sniff out foreign foodstuffs (Hawaii was not yet an American state, but it had long been annexed, and American officials had a firm grip on the islands) and most of the fruit had to be thrown overboard. The
Oronsay
continued across to a bitterly cold Vancouver, and by 9 December she was off San Francisco. Cherry recognised the rocks beyond the harbour where he had watched seals playing in 1910, a young man full of hope, returning home to sign up for the adventure of a lifetime. On the way back, they went to all the same places in reverse order, meeting up in Sydney with Griffith Taylor and his wife Doris. Griff had recently retired to the Sydney suburb of Seaforth after a distinguished and often controversial career as a geographer. The ‘halo of good fellowship’ that Cherry had described so warmly in
The Worst Journey
was still hovering over his head.