Cherry (53 page)
56
Jasper Harker became Director-General of M.I.5. Pussy’s brother Sydney Russell Cooke had also worked for the security services. In 1930 he was found dead in mysterious circumstances in his flat in King’s Bench Walk. Russian involvement was widely suspected.
57
Twenty years later she wrote about Scott in greater detail in
The Water Beetle
, drawing heavily on
The Worst Journey
and referring to Cherry as ‘the only one [on the expedition] who could be called an intellectual’. But she also wrote privately on the subject to Evelyn Waugh. ‘If Cherry-Garrard had been more of a chap,’ she told him, ‘he would have rescued them [the polar party], but nobody has ever said so . . . Scott or Amundsen would have tried, no doubt.’ Fortunately Cherry was not alive to read this: it was the accusation he most feared. Mitford could conceivably have been right on this occasion, but in general she and Waugh were fond of launching duff opinions on matters of which they knew little. In his reply to ‘Darling Nancy’, Waugh cheerfully announced that Scott had probably eaten Oates’ body.
58
Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel
Mrs Dalloway
satirised an eminent Harley Street specialist who incarcerated his mental patients willy-nilly. Woolf was familiar with The Retreat as Roger Fry’s wife Helen had been locked up there. Of course, Woolf also knew all about mental illness from the inside. But even she would not have dared invent the name Yellowlees.
59
Lees-Milne recorded that Kathleen was the worst-dressed woman he knew, which was one of the nicest things anyone ever said about her.
60
There is evidence that severe depression suppresses the immune system. Furthermore, it is clinically proven that whatever physical illnesses a patient might have, depression makes the prognosis worse.
61
Sylvia Plath, another victim of depression, ascribed exactly the same need to discover a physical illness to the protagonist of her novel
The Bell Jar
. ‘I would rather,’ says Esther Greenwood, splayed in a psychiatric ward in the wake of a nervous breakdown and compulsively taking her temperature, ‘have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my mind.’
62
It can now be seen in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
63
Cherry’s investments were shrewd. His collection of illuminated manuscripts, printed books and Americana was sold at Sotheby’s in 1961, in separate lots, for £64,215 (about £829,000 today). The missal fetched £22,000 (£284,000).
64
Barry Letts was the actor who played Cherry. As it turned out, most of his important scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor, including Cape Crozier and the dog journey to One Ton.
A generation later, Cherry was again portrayed on film, this time on the small screen. In the 1985 television series
The Last Place on Earth
, based on Roland Huntford’s joint biography of Scott and Amundsen, he was played by an unknown English actor called Hugh Grant.
65
And still do.
66
The last private owners of Denford bequeathed the estate to an order of Catholic nuns who ran it as a prep school until 1967, when it became Norland College, a training institute for nannies. The ruins of the chapel are visible among the beech trees, if you look hard, but nobody at the college is aware of the quartet of rotting Victorians that lies close by the children’s playground.
Acknowledgments
The mystery and opacity of much of Cherry’s long life meant that I often had to turn to others for advice, and I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the debts that I owe to the following individuals: John Allen; Allan Ashworth; Steve Blake at the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery; Malcolm Burr; Peter Clarkson; Amy Coburn; Trevor Cornford; Judith Curthoys at Christ Church, Oxford; Alison Edmonds; Ann L. Ferguson at Cornell; Evelyn Forbes; Steve Forbes; Oliver Garnett; Dave and Angela Gifford; John Gott; Bob Headland, Lucy Martin, Shirley Sawtell and the other staff of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; Michael Holroyd; Simon Houfe; Clifford H. Irwin; Andrew Isles; Ruth Jeavons; Harry King; Nick Lambourn; Andrew Lycett; Luke McKernan; Steve Martin at the Mitchell Library in Sydney; Bruno Pappalardo at the Public Record Office at Kew; the late Alan Ross; Steve Sinon; Ian Smith; Mick Smith; Lisa Spurrier at the Berkshire Record Office; Barry Stephenson at Bedford Central Library; Penny Stokes; Melinda Varcoe; David Wilson; and Peter Wordie. Like many authors before me I am immensely grateful to Douglas Matthews, who prepared the index. Churchill College gave me a temporary home in Cambridge, and I owe a particular debt to Andrew Tristram and other members of staff there.
I particularly want to thank Roland Huntford. He shared his material with unstinting generosity, compiled background reading lists and offered practical advice. I think, in the end, that we disagree about many important issues (and people); but that, of course, couldn’t matter less. At the beginning he told me graciously that Cherry was a closed book to him, and that the subject needed a female biographer. I don’t know if the latter is true, but it was typically generous of Roland to say it.
I owe much to my publisher Dan Franklin, my editor Tristan Jones and my agent Gillon Aitken, and also to my editor at Random House in New York, Joy de Menil. My former editor, Tony Colwell, who taught me so much, always wanted me to write Cherry’s biography. He had the first draft at his bedside when he died. As the final script took shape I tried to imagine him at my side, like the old days. Jeremy Lewis and Lucinda Riches battled through early drafts, as always; I rely on them. Peter Graham, my editor of first resort, lived for years with Cherry as well as with me, and still he was an astute reader. As for Hugh Turner, who contributed so very much at the beginning and the end: somehow, he understood everything.
My largest debt, of course, is to Cherry’s widow Angela Mathias. When she agreed to co-operate with a biographer for the first time she had little idea what lay on the road ahead. Nobody will ever know the journey that she and I made together. I want to say that for my part I am most glad that we did it; and that we kept going till the end. Thank you.
I am extremely grateful to the following for permission to quote from published and unpublished works: Berkshire Record Office (Cherry-Garrard Papers); Barbara Debenham and June Debenham Back (
The Quiet Land
and unpublished material by Frank Debenham); The Hon. Edward Broke Evans (
South with Scott
and unpublished material by E. R. G. R. Evans); Chatto & Windus and the University of Reading (Chatto & Windus Archive); Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (Garrard Papers); Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (Emery Walker Collection and George Bernard Shaw Collection); Lord Kennet of the Dene (Kathleen Scott’s diary); the London School of Economics (Beatrice Webb’s diary); Angela Mathias (
The Worst Journey in the World
and unpublished material by Apsley Cherry-Garrard); Mitchell Library, State University of New South Wales (Cherry’s marginalia); John Murray Ltd (
Edward Wilson of the Antarctic
,
Birdie Bowers of the Antarctic
and
The Faith of Edward Wilson
by George Seaver); Ohio State University Press (Silas Wright’s diary); Penguin Ltd and the University of Bristol (Penguin Archive); Scott Polar Research Institute (unpublished material by Henry Bowers, Frank Debenham, Pat Keohane, Lawrence Oates, Raymond Priestley, Kathleen Scott, Robert Scott, George Simpson, Thomas Williamson, Edward and Oriana Wilson, and Cherry himself ); the Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of Bernard Shaw; Temple University Libraries, Pennsylvania (Constable & Co. Directors’ Files); the Trustees of the Will of Mrs Bernard Shaw.
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum; Christ Church College, Oxford; Mr John Gott; Mrs Angela Mathias; Scott Polar Research Institute; Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand; Winchester College; and Mr Peter Wordie.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyright material reproduced herein. The author and publishers apologise for any inadvertent omissions, and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.
SARA WHEELER is the author of
Terra Incognita
and
Travels in a Thin Country,
both available as Modern Library trade paperbacks, and was co-editor of
Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women’s New Travel Writing.
Terra Incognita,
an international best-seller about her travels in Antarctica, was chosen by Beryl Bainbridge as one of the Best Books of the Year;
Travels in a Thin Country,
on Chile, was short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award.
Also by Sara Wheeler
AN ISLAND APART
TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY
TERRA INCOGNITA
2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Sara Wheeler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House UK, London, in 2001.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wheeler, Sara.
Cherry: a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard/Sara Wheeler.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43078-6
v3.0