Cherry (7 page)

When he went home in the holidays, he found that little had changed except the elder girls’ skirts, which were shorter. In the early mornings he jumped his horse, Harebell, over the estate’s high hedges, and afterwards he sat in the kitchen under the row of copper pots eating bread and honey. But further afield, things really were changing. At the end of 1905 Balfour resigned as prime minister, and the following year he watched the general election from the sidelines, knowing his style of paternalism was doomed: the Liberals triumphed in an anti-Tory landslide unparalleled until 1945. A decade of Tory hegemony was over, and the General shuddered, along with the rest of the country’s landowners. Furthermore, another enemy had entered the field. The Labour Representation Committee, the party’s forerunner, was formed in 1900; by 1905, Labour candidates had trebled their share of the vote.

Another event in the closing weeks of 1905 was discussed avidly in the junior common rooms by young men with a taste for adventure. It did not have the seismic effect of a prime-ministerial resignation, but it was widely reported in the British press none the less. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had pioneered a route through the North-West Passage. Ever since Elizabeth I stood at her window to wave farewell to Martin Frobisher as he sailed from Greenwich in 1576, mariners and adventurers had sought to find a way from the Atlantic through to the Pacific. Confounded by ice and the jigsaw of an unmapped archipelago, none had succeeded. In Frobisher’s day the goal had ultimately been commercial: the sea-route offered a short cut to the wealth of Cathay away from the baleful influence of Spain and Portugal. By the nineteenth century the dogged expeditioners were inspired by the reward of national and personal prestige. The Admiralty despatched a series of British naval ships to the high latitudes, culminating in Sir John Franklin’s grisly 1845 endeavour. American expeditions joined the race, their stories enthralling the public waiting comfortably at home. Although a Briton, Commander Robert McClure, led the first transit of the elusive Passage, he did it in stages, in two ships and on a sledge. The dauntless Amundsen was the first man to sail through the North-West Passage in a single ship.

Apsley had read widely on the subject of exploration, and had recently devoured a copy of Robert Falcon Scott’s
The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’
, the story of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. He immediately recognised the significance of Amundsen’s feat in the Arctic. But he had no idea that even the North-West Passage would not mark the Norwegian’s greatest achievement. That was yet to come.

In June 1906, on the fiftieth anniversary of military operations in India, the General’s name appeared on the Birthday Honours List as a Companion of the Bath. He had been ill since the spring with an undiagnosed condition that made his legs swollen and painful. Apsley dashed back from Oxford whenever he could and sat for hours massaging his father’s calves. When the old man was no longer able to run the estate his son acted
in loco parentis
. At the age of twenty he helped organise a voluminous inventory and valuation for insurance purposes. The resulting document ran to more than two hundred pages, including twenty-nine pages listing the family silver. He began to seek the advice of Arthur Farrer, a friend and former neighbour of the General’s and a lawyer in his family firm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.
⁸
The relationship between Apsley and Farrer, one which was to last many decades, now shifted gently into professional gear.

That October, though it was term time, Apsley was back at home, attending to the General. He wrote to Farrer:

Father said he would very much like you to bring down the paper you spoke about. I hope you will pardon me for not telling him that it was not necessary for anyone to come, since I know that he very much likes to see you, so much so that I do not think you will mind the trouble though it must mean a lot to you. The Doctor says that it is impossible to say that he is any better, but he is not any worse, and, as was expected, the pain is leaving the right leg, which will enable him to be turned off his back, which is most important . . . Will you let me know yr day and train?

After Farrer’s visit, Apsley wrote again. ‘Sir Lander [the specialist] has just left. He says that he thinks Father is past the present crisis, but that he does not think he will recover quickly. Also he told me that though he does not say that Father will be actually crippled, he will never, he thinks, get about in the same way again . . . I only hope Father will not know this, if it is true . . .’

Some years previously the General had made a will, bequeathing appropriate portions to the girls, a life interest in Denford to Evelyn and the rest to his son. As was standard practice, the Lamer estate was entailed, which meant that it could not be sold or bequeathed to anyone except the heir by descent. Apsley in effect was to be the custodial owner until it passed to the next generation, as the General had been before him. But the old soldier had felt the winds of change. Seeing that things didn’t look good for landowners, he decided to free his son’s hand, and when Apsley turned twenty-one, on 2 January 1907, the General formally broke the entail. Fewer than forty years later, every inch of family land would be gone.

Back at Oxford, Apsley learned to fence during his third year, and in the autumn and summer, when there was no rowing practice, he took an early morning dip in the Cherwell. He progressed to the 2nd VIII, and, in the spring, to the transcendent glories of the 1st. Watching him on the river one morning, the boat club secretary noted in the log book that Cherry-Garrard ‘showed promise’, and in the autumn term of his fourth year he was duly given a trial for the University Boat Club. It was a tremendous honour, though he was not eventually selected, ‘being very short in the water and not giving his crew time’. In the summer he had just missed a place in the college 1st VIII. Christ Church went on to go Head of the River for the first time in forty-nine years, inciting scenes of extravagant debauchery. A few weeks later Apsley was ‘spare man’ at the Henley Royal Regatta, obliged to watch from the bank in his straw boater. He determined to do better next year.

He spent the second half of his third year darting between Hertfordshire and Oxford. In May 1907 the family’s old coachman, Hobbs, who had served the General and his horses since the Denford days, had a heart attack. The young master wrote to him from Oxford:

I was very sorry to hear a few days ago that you are not to work . . . I very much hope that this will find you feeling pretty fit, it’s always pretty feeble work strolling about and not being allowed to do anything.

I am having a great time, I am not allowed to go into training yet, and so there is no chance of any very serious rowing for me yet, but I am going to row in some sculling races and also in a Four against a London Four on Whit Monday. I bathe every morning at seven, do very little work, play cricket and fence – so you see I am having a merry time . . . I am glad to hear Harebell is very fit and fresh; I only wish I had her here for a ride. I hope this good sun will do you and Father lots of good.

Hobbs was obliged to retire. When Apsley heard, he wrote again. ‘I am very very sorry. You have been with us so many years, as long as, and longer than, I can remember – that we shall all miss you very much.’

On 15 June Apsley brought a cricket eleven over from Oxford to play a local team on Nomansland Common. It was a high point of a summer otherwise dominated by the General’s painful illness. A doctor was now in almost permanent attendance. That summer, to celebrate the forthcoming Jubilee of the Relief of Lucknow, Lord Roberts led the survivors in a ceremony at the King’s Levee, but the General was too ill to attend. He was invited to a Mutiny veterans’ banquet, hosted by the
Daily Telegraph
, to take place in December, and, in a touching display of hope, the family spoke of their wish that he would be well enough to attend. In some dark place in their hearts, they must have known that he would not. In the autumn, after a tense summer at home, Apsley began his last year at Oxford. He moved into 19 Pembroke Street, sharing his modest lodgings with a postgraduate mathematical scholar. It was a narrow, higgledypiggledy street two or three minutes’ walk from the main entrance of the college, and 19 was one of the medieval houses on the left-hand side going up. It was a bad time. Telegrams arrived at the porter’s lodge summoning Apsley home and he would dash off a note to his tutor and run to the station in the fog to catch the next train to London, arriving at Wheathampstead as the lampman propped his short ladder against the wall of the station house. Reporters called at Lamer for news and bulletins were issued in
The Times
as well as local papers. ‘The seeds of his illness,’ one report stated authoritatively in a pleasing example of journalistic imagination triumphing over evidence, ‘were sown during the Indian Mutiny, probably at the Relief of Lucknow, where the General had a trying time.’

Apsley Cherry-Garrard senior died on 8 November 1907, shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon. He was seventy-five. The family were all there. The next day his coffin was brought into the drawing room. One of the wreaths was from Hobbs, and the message ran, ‘In ever loving memory of a kind master, from his old coachman.’ In her note thanking him, Evelyn, convulsed with grief and loss, wrote that she was feeling ‘as if it cannot all be real, but that we must be in some awful dream, from which we shall wake presently’.

The funeral was to take place on Friday 15 November. The day before, Apsley wrote to Hobbs, ‘I had thought of asking you to walk with the men in the procession tomorrow, but I thought of your heart and decided that perhaps it was better not. However as it is your wish to come we shall be most glad. Please tell Mr Owen [the local builder] or whoever is arranging the front part of the procession that I wish you to walk in front of the bier. I am sure Father would have liked you to do this.’ As a postscript he added, ‘You will have to regulate your pace according to the slow marches of the soldiers behind you.’

The General was buried on a grey November day in an eddy of fast-falling leaves. The men who worked on the estate met at the house and walked down to the village in front of the bearer party sent by his regiment. The pall covering the coffin was a Union Jack, and on it lay the old soldier’s plumed helmet and sword; his medals were carried in front of the coffin. When the procession reached the station, the tenants joined the front of the group. The High Street was lined with people, shops were closed and blinds drawn. The bells of St Helen’s rang half muffled, and hundreds attended the service. On Apsley’s wreath, the message read simply, ‘From Laddie’.

By this time, dead Garrards had moved out of the church and into the churchyard. The General was buried under a granite cross in the shadow of the slender broach spire. After the coffin was lowered, the girls stood on the lip of the grave in the glaucous twilight, and each dropped in a posy of lilies of the valley. Edith was six years old.

The obituary in the
St Albans Times
said, ‘As a proof of his dislike for self-prominence it may be stated that the people of Wheathampstead were practically unaware of his brilliant military career, and some of his intimate friends knew little of the distinguished service rendered to his country in the Indian Mutiny and the several wars which followed.’ He passed this endearing modesty down to his only son, along with a large fortune.

Loss flooded through the old house like water through a hole in a ship’s hull. The remaining Cherry-Garrards had to get away, so they spent some weeks in that first awful winter without him in Brighton, the retirement home of Evelyn’s father, Henry Sharpin, who had remarried after his first wife died. But on Good Friday 1908 they experienced another tragedy when Dr Sharpin died of a heart attack. They buried him in Bedford.

Apsley spent the winter and spring shuttling between Lamer, Brighton and Oxford. It was a desperate period for him, with Finals looming horribly and a cold, empty space where the central presence of his life had been. He struggled to balance the demands of the estate with the requirements of his degree course: he was frequently obliged to abandon his books to attend to some pressing matter on one of the properties. Besides Lamer and Denford, he was responsible for Little Wittenham, a large Cherry estate in north Berkshire.
⁹
In February he had to dash over there to inspect the school, which was in need of repair. Rowing was a bright spot. In Eights’ Week he finally rowed in the 1st VIII, and Christ Church again triumphed. Following that, his crew won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta, beating off Eton by a length-and-a-half in a dramatic final. It was the first time the House had won the Grand.

In June, dressed in academic gown and mortarboard, he sloped along the High Street to Schools, the late-Victorian building that has struck terror into so many trembling students. He had spent much of his final year sorting out the General’s affairs and running the estates, and he had buried his father and grandfather in the space of five months. The tension between competing demands and responsibilities, combined with a highly-strung disposition, was a heavy burden for a young man. No wonder he got a third-class degree.

He was back at Lamer when the news came through. It was not a surprise, and anyway thirds were more common then than they are now. In the year Apsley graduated, a third of students got one; in Modern History it was the biggest overall category, with nineteen men achieving a fourth. Given the cult of the amateur that still persisted, in some quarters thirds were a source of pride.

3

Untrodden Fields

Apsley came down from Oxford in the summer of 1908 at a loose end, perplexed by the bewildering speed at which the world around him was changing. On the road, the battle between the horse and the internal combustion engine was edging towards its inexorable conclusion. Motorised taxis, motorised buses, Ford’s announcement of the Model T, a car most middle-class people could afford, a royal commission to look into traffic congestion: for five years the pages of
The Times
had been crowded with stories about the motor car, and even in Wheathampstead representatives of the species had been sighted. Above ground, since Orville Wright had made the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, non-flying flying machines had been pranged into apple trees on a weekly basis. More significantly, records were being made in the air with similar regularity. Below ground, too, distances shrank as electric underground trains rumbled out of London’s Baker Street.

The newspapers were also burgeoning with ugly stories of social unrest. In October the young Liberal politician Winston Churchill made a speech in which he said that the perilous problem of unemployment demanded special remedies; those remedies would lead people into ‘new and untrodden fields in British politics’. This kind of talk made Apsley uneasy. As the country marched towards progress and change, he felt curiously out of step. In his heart he was still a Victorian; in many ways he was to die a Victorian. But, like many men of his background, as he matured he longed to shake off the suffocating effects of his early years. ‘It was not a question of unhappiness,’ explained Lytton Strachey, ‘so much as restriction and oppression – the subtle unperceived weight of the circumambient air.’

Apsley had the vague idea that he might study law, and he told his mother that this was his long-term plan – though he was not eager to begin immediately. He didn’t need to work at all: the General’s estate had been valued at £102,000 gross (£5 million today), and Lamer alone at £44,052 (over £2 million). Rents flowed in regularly and an extensive portfolio of stocks and shares yielded dividends and bonuses. But Apsley’s spirit was restless, and he was looking for something real – something solid – to occupy his time. He recoiled from the sedate life of the country squire. Those who did not know him expected him to follow in his father’s distinguished footsteps and take up soldiering. He admired his father hugely, but he was not of the warrior caste. Never a natural leader, Apsley was too neurotic for the army, and too afraid of making mistakes. What should he do? He accepted his responsibilities as head of the household, and felt his duty keenly; but he could not yet submit. Furthermore, without its dominating paterfamilias Lamer no longer seemed like home. The girls had created their own cosy domestic world on which external events had little bearing. They helped their mother in charity work, went off to stay with relations and organised heavy schedules of dancing classes, tea parties, plays and concerts. (The suffragettes might have been making progress elsewhere in Britain, but nobody chained herself to the Lamer railings.) Apsley was an outsider, even in his own house.

Travel offered the perfect short-term escape. Apsley had grown up on the General’s stories of bivouacking on the veldt, and as a schoolboy he had thrilled to tales of tall-masted ships creaking in the pincers of an ice floe and doughty Britons battling malaria as they hacked their way to vast inland seas. He had plenty of money. The problem was that he had nowhere to go.

In this frame of mind, early in the autumn of 1908 Apsley had taken the train up to Scotland to stay at his cousin Reginald Smith’s bungalow in Cortachy, near Kirriemuir. Smith was the son of one of the General’s sisters. He was thirty years older than Apsley, and when he first swung his young cousin over his shoulders on the Denford lawns he was already a brilliant junior barrister.

A tall, patrician Old Etonian with dark skin and an elongated face, Reggie had a first-class degree in Classics. Despite having become a King’s Counsel he had abandoned the law in order to head the London publishing firm of Smith, Elder & Co., whose list included Trollope, Browning and Thackeray. His wife Isabel’s maiden name, confusingly, was also Smith: she was the daughter of the Smith, Elder publisher George Smith, who had discovered Charlotte Brontë. The childless Smiths lived in an elegant townhouse in Mayfair’s Green Street, and since his father’s death Apsley, always close to both of them, had turned to Reggie and Isabel for advice and companionship. A paternal figure so much nearer Apsley’s age than the General had been, Reggie was a measured, sensitive man who below the surface was highly-strung and prone to anxiety, like his younger cousin.

Reggie was also the editor of the
Cornhill
magazine, in which capacity he had recently provoked a volley of angry comments from Virginia Woolf
¹⁰
(‘that fool of a man’) for rejecting a piece she had written. This egregious oversight notwithstanding, Reggie was intelligent, thoughtful and highly principled, and his long face usually wore a serious expression as he chewed on his pipe and peered down through his glasses. He was known for his courtesy and meticulous attention to detail, and a private income enabled him to pursue quality rather than profit in his professional life. Austere and spare in face and figure, he seemed formidable on first impression, but he had a big heart. His authors were devoted to him (at least six dedicated their books to him), and so were many with whom he worked to help run a hospital in a poor area of east London.

The Smiths had transformed their Scottish bungalow, called ‘Burnside’, from a shepherd’s cottage into a homely shooting lodge. French doors in the dining room opened onto a rose-covered veranda and a garden which sloped down to a row of birch trees bordering the road through Glen Prosen. It was a cosy little lodge which smelt of griddled bannocks and sweet peas. That summer the Smiths had lent it to their close friends Edward and Oriana Wilson. And so Apsley arrived, bereaved, rudderless and vulnerable. The General had been dead for less than a year. His son walked smartly up the steep path to the lodge and met the man who would tower over the rest of his life like a colossus.

Edward Wilson, known as ‘Bill’, had been to the Antarctic on Scott’s first expedition, which left England in 1901. He met Reginald Smith four years later when he accompanied Scott to the Smith, Elder offices to discuss the book of the expedition, which the firm duly published. Smith and Wilson were both meditative, judicious men with a highly developed moral sensibility, and they became great friends. The Wilsons were frequent visitors to Kirriemuir, and before Bill left on his second Antarctic expedition, Reggie gave him an engraved watch. ‘From now onward till we return . . .’ Wilson wrote in a thank-you note, ‘not a single day will pass but I shall be reminded by the simple inscription on the back of the watch of the friend whose friendship has made all but the very highest principles in life impossible. We feel that to possess the friendship of yourself and Mrs Smith is to possess something which will outlast watches, and will still be going when the last of them has stopped.’

Born in 1872, Wilson was a doctor’s son from Cheltenham. The family lived in a ten-bedroom Regency house in the genteel streets of the town itself, and Wilson’s mother Mary also leased a farm out towards the village of Leckhampton. A towering figure in the world of chicken breeding (she was the distinguished author of the definitive
ABC of Poultry
), Mary Wilson took the smallholding to enable her to experiment with cattle. It was there that her second son had spent his happiest days. As a teenager he was often to be found crouching over the bulrushes in the pond, examining young frogs and collecting tadpoles, or roaming over the gentle Cotswold hills observing nightjars silhouetted against the great spur of rock to the north. He liked to spend the night out in the woods, returning for breakfast with two plover’s eggs in his pocket, and he knew the name of every bird that sang. A friend who went birding with him noted how observant he was. ‘I have seen him,’ recalled John Fraser, ‘suddenly stop and then swoop down like a merlin hawk and produce a large grass snake. I had not seen it: Wilson had seen it . . . and had beaten the snake for quickness . . . He was tall and thin, rather like a thoroughbred racehorse.’

Following his father into medicine, Wilson studied at Cambridge, where he rowed in the college boat. But while pursuing further medical studies in London he contracted tuberculosis, and was obliged to take a year off in Switzerland. Against the odds, he recovered, but the disease left him with scarred lungs. He remained deeply involved with the natural world, and after qualifying as a doctor he continued to work as a zoologist and naturalist. Wilson was mostly interested in small things. When he was asked why he had made no contribution to the study of the stars, he replied that he would love to try, if only he could hold and examine a cluster of them in his hand. In the field of natural history he was a keen and gifted illustrator, a fact that was to stimulate Apsley to take up sketching and painting.

Wilson was a tall, lean figure with clear blue eyes, reddish-brown hair and a swift, raking stride. A committed Christian prone to asceticism, he strove to rise above the comforts of the flesh and draw closer to the God who lived in his heart. Once, staying in a hotel while away from home with his research, he realised that he was beginning to prefer bathing in hot water to cold, a bad sign, ‘and something must be done to stop it’. He sought to sublimate the self, and aspired to a Christ-like ideal. As a young medical student he worked among the poor and resolved ‘to let nothing stand in the way of doing everyone a good turn’. But he was not outwardly pious, in that he kept his religion to himself, and he was a genial companion. In public he was funny and playful, and when he was amused the corners of his mouth twisted into a quizzical smile. In short, he was a man of action and a mystic: a potent combination. He was also highly-strung like Reggie Smith, and suffered from a kind of social neurosis. As a young man he took sedatives before taxing social encounters, and it required far more courage for him to face an audience than to cross a crevasse. Apsley found Wilson’s belief in a divine purpose deeply attractive, as it imposed a pattern on an otherwise inchoate, confusing universe. Besides recognising Wilson as a mentor, he saw an inner calm in the older man that he badly wanted.

Shortly before he left on the
Discovery
, Wilson married Oriana Souper, the daughter of a clergyman who was also a headmaster. She was the matron of a preparatory school. Like Wilson, Oriana was a committed Christian. Her relationship with her husband was tightly bound up with their religious faith. ‘Without a love for God,’ he wrote to her from the Antarctic, ‘I can’t imagine either loving you or being loved by you.’

Wilson had first become attracted to the Antarctic in 1900. He was spotted sketching at London Zoo by its Secretary, a friend of his father’s and one of the organisers of Scott’s first polar endeavour, the British National Antarctic Expedition which was to set sail the following year. Despite a poor health report, Wilson was selected as second medical officer, vertebrate zoologist and artist, and he turned out to be a vital presence, whether on board ship, out sledging or cooped up in the hut. He was quite capable of cavorting naked in the wardroom when horseplay broke out after dinner; yet he always had time to listen to a shipmate’s troubles. On the
Discovery
expedition Wilson marched to within 500 miles of the Pole with Scott and Shackleton; he also carried out groundbreaking work on the embryology of the Emperor penguin.

Both Scott and his fellow explorer Ernest Shackleton were powerfully drawn to Wilson. Shackleton wrote to him in February 1907 (‘My dear Billy’) literally begging him to be second-in-command on his own
Nimrod
expedition: ‘it will be a thousand times better with you’. Wilson was not only an outstanding sledger and inspirational scientist. He was also adaptable and good at improvising: key qualities in any camp. Most importantly, he was an unquenchable fountain of emotional support and wise counsel. But to Shackleton’s bitter disappointment, Wilson wouldn’t go with him. He had been appointed field researcher, physiologist and anatomist to the Department of Agriculture’s Grouse Disease Inquiry, investigating a bizarre ailment that was decimating birds on British moors. It was a major project, and one that Wilson was committed to seeing through. But he was determined to return to the Antarctic when it was finished.

The polar regions were in fashion in the early years of the twentieth century. They represented the last white spaces on the map, mysterious, romantic and untamed, and the power of the unknown worked hard on the human spirit. Victorian explorers, geographers and chancers had filled in the map of Africa, naming its lakes, claiming its lands and gasping for their lives in its broiling climate. The icy purity at the world’s ends encapsulated a more potent kind of romance. ‘Of all the continents,’ wrote a celebrated American explorer, ‘Antarctica is the fairest, white and unspoiled, spacious and austere, fashioned in the clean, antiseptic quarries of an Ice Age.’

The High Arctic, remote and perilous though it was, had been at least partially charted by generations of explorers. The Antarctic still lay behind a hoary veil: before Captain James Cook’s second voyage in 1772 many had believed that there was a fertile Shangri-La in the far south. Cook, the first man to cross the Antarctic Circle, laid the myth to rest when he announced that there could be no people down there: it was too cold. The continent itself was sighted through the sepulchral fog in 1820, and although it is not clear who spotted it first, it was probably the Estonian Thaddeus Bellingshausen, despatched south by Tsar Alexander I. Bellingshausen was a fine explorer, but it was the Englishman James Clark Ross who discovered great swathes of the ice shelf surrounding Antarctica during a Royal Navy voyage between 1839 and 1843. From the bridge of the ice-strengthened
Erebus
, Ross, reputedly the most handsome man in the navy, looked over at the glittering peaks of Victoria Land, and at a mighty smoking volcano that he named after his ship.