Terra Incognita (30 page)

‘How was the South Pole?' asked Father Tom brightly.

It seemed very far off.

The next day my father drove me to the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

‘Where's the entrance?' he asked as we crawled along outside.

‘How should I know?' I snapped. This brief re-entry into the real world had made me disorientated and irritable. Since leaving McMurdo I had felt as if I existed only in suspended animation.

‘Sorry, dad,' I said weakly.

After a good deal of hanging around I flew to Ascension Island on a TriStar, the cover of the in-flight magazine in front of me depicting a customer descending by parachute. By mistake, the pilot referred to ‘the camera crew' rather than ‘the cabin crew' over the loudspeaker; you couldn't help wondering what was on his mind. The air force refuels its TriStars at Ascension en route to the Falkland Islands, and from there a British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 was to convey me back to Antarctica. I discovered that two other people on the plane were heading for Rothera, the main British station on the Antarctic Peninsula. They were both employees of Tilbury Douglas, the construction company contracted to carry out rebuilding works for the British Antarctic Survey as part of its Way Forward Programme. John was a plumber who had never travelled beyond Bournemouth, and George was a sixty-eight-year-old manager who had been brought out of retirement to oversee the job. George had already been south once, and was keen to impart his knowledge on this and any other matter. He emitted noise non-stop, in fact, like the continuousloop soundtrack at the Antarctic Encounter.

The crinkly coastline of Ascension, laced with white surf, was ringed with a band of streaky green which faded into the chinablue Atlantic. The island was goose-bumped with small peaks. When we landed the braying and overfed senior officers in the front row got off first, met by a mini-squadron of clean-shaven air force personnel marching along the tarmac in a uniform of pale khaki shorts with long socks and Hush Puppies. They looked like extras in a war film set in the Western Desert. A team of firefighters stood to attention in silver-foil outfits as the VIPs sped past, provoking the squaddies bound for the Falklands into a burst of Gary Glitter choruses. The rest of us were herded into a compound, and locked up. It was very hot and sticky despite the soft tropical breeze, and everyone bought cold cans of Becks beer.

‘I've never drunk beer in the morning before,' said John. George and I exchanged guilty glances. The squaddies were dispensing beer as if they might never see liquid again. Most of them were from RAF 20 Squadron, responsible for the ground-to-air missile system in the Falklands. An announcement over the loudspeaker informed us that anyone drunk would be offloaded, at which a great cheer went up, Ascension Island (beyond the compound at least) being rather more agreeable than the Falklands.

The compound consisted of a flagged concrete yard containing wooden tables with integrated chairs and parasols, and a pockmarked 1883 cannon. It was surrounded by a wire fence and lined on one side with palm trees. The small hills around the airstrip were littered with military hardware. One of them, higher than the others, stood out because it was green, not brown, and in a startling fit of imagination it had been named Green Mountain. It reminded me of Juan Fernandez, the Pacific island where the original Robinson Crusoe had been abandoned.

Not much had happened to Ascension Island or its famous green turtles since it was garrisoned by the Royal Marines in 1815, initially to prevent the French rescuing Napoleon from St Helena. Certainly nothing happened while we were there. The flight was delayed. The sun bleached the sky, and the squaddies began revealing an extensive range of tattoos. Hour after hour trickled by in this hot cage as further delays were announced over the rasping loudspeaker. George talked about his ‘laddies', by which he meant the builders, as if they were at nursery school. The Becks ran out. An announcement that we were being diverted to Rio provoked another cheer. The squaddies were envisaging sultry nights in the bars of Copacabana – but it was more likely to mean a long, stuffy evening on a bucket seat in another faceless airport.

∗

As we flew over wide green spaces and the thin ribbons of dusty, untravelled Brazilian roads, I suddenly longed for the freedom of anonymous travel. Brazil seemed a long way from the constraints of the ice. At that moment, I felt as if I were locked into a claustrophobic love affair, and although it was pulling me back to the south, a voice inside whispered urgently, ‘Escape while you can!'

At Rio airport George led an assault on the duty-free shops. We bought a bottle of red wine, a slab of goats' cheese and a box of crackers and had a picnic by the top of the escalators. When we reboarded, a flight attendant marched down the aisles spraying us with disinfectant from an aerosol held aloft like a flaming torch in a Viking raiding party.

We landed at Mount Pleasant airport on East Falkland, the sky a low miasma of blues and pinks. A line of people on the end of the strip were holding up placards inscribed with numbers. They were marking the pilot out often for his landing. In the terminal a pair of soldiers stood on the carousel and held up an array of missiles we might like to avoid stepping on; there were, they said, over a hundred minefields lurking in the tussock.

A bus conveyed us across the island to Port Stanley, and I asked the driver about the runway placards. ‘That's what we're reduced to down here,' he said, ‘to pass the time.'

George was depressed by the news that we were staying at FIPASS, a government-owned pontoon dock, rather than the fabled Upland Goose on Stanley's main street. I asked the driver how long it would take to get there. ‘It depends on the traffic,' he said, although we had not yet encountered a single vehicle. It was very dark, but, when we reached civilisation two pairs of whale jawbones were illuminated outside the cathedral like wishbones. We went on, until we passed again into the gloom. ‘Welcome to Alcatraz!' the driver said as he deposited us in driving rain at the bottom of a flight of metal stairs.

The Falklands Intermediate Port and Storage System, FIPASS, consists of a series of oil-rig barges built in Middlesborough and shipped in by the Ministry of Defence after the conflict. The Falkland Islands government purchased it from the Ministry of Defence in 1988. It was a perfectly acceptable place in which to stay, although there was a turd in the toilet bowl and a sex novel under my bunk. When I asked for a lightbulb, the nightwatchman handed it over with a sinister remark about how nice it was to look after a lady for a change.

∗

With George around, I could abnegate all responsibility for my life, as he planned it out for me in minute detail. It was very agreeable. In the morning we located my kitbag, which had been languishing all season in the bowels of FIPASS. It contained all my British-issue cold-weather gear, which I had tried on months before, on a sweltering day in Cambridge, and which had been sent down by ship at the beginning of the season. Myriam picked us up in the British Antarctic Survey Land Rover (every other vehicle was a Land Rover in the Falklands). She was the BAS representative, a saintly figure who deciphered scrawled faxes from the ice requesting goods for which she was obliged to scour the streets of Stanley. She showed me some of these request sheets. For some reason, there was a run on olives. I wondered what this could mean.

We strolled around Stanley for an hour, George in the lead, past the corrugated iron roofs and exuberant flowerbeds of Jubilee Villas and a vast new school that would have been filled with at least half a million pupils in the U.K. The roof of a small house in the trellis of quiet streets on the hill was painted with a Union Jack.

‘Look at that!' said George triumphantly, pointing to a sign indicating Thatcher Street. ‘That's the spirit.'

The landscape beyond the town was reminiscent of Tierra del Fuego. It was obvious, geographically, though I hadn't made the connection before, as inside my head the two-belonged to different worlds. But there they were, the same purple mists, saffron steppe and cadmium yellow slopes, the trail of lumpy steamer ducks breaking the surface of the water and the striped underwings of upland geese flapping against a bruised southern sky.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Being set on the idea

Of getting to Atlantis

You have discovered of course

Only the Ship of Fools is

Making the voyage this year,

As gales of abnormal force

Are predicted, and that you

Must therefore be ready to

Behave absurdly enough

To pass for one of The Boys,

At least appearing to love

Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

W. H. Auden, from
Atlantis

D
EPOSITED BY
the peerless Myriam at a diminutive airstrip outside Port Stanley, George, John and I presented our passports to a saturnine individual in a small, bare room while another man flossed his teeth. Nobody was interested in our luggage – they didn't even look at it, let alone set a sniffer dog loose among us.

‘Can we get on?' George asked the tooth-flosser.

‘If you like,' said the man.

The four-engine Dash-7 plane was luxurious after the Hercules that had conveyed me to McMurdo. It was carrying very little cargo, and there were only eight seats, so I was able to walk freely around the cabin rather than remaining wedged into a redwebbing seat. We could have played a game of football, and there was even a toilet.

The pilot waved me up to the jumpseat for take-off. As he revved the engines at the end of the runway all the long, tired hours in sweaty planes, all the delays and frustrations and wasted days melted into the long strip of wobbling tarmac. I was going back.

Stanley looked like Toytown from the air, neat and circumscribed and little, with primary colour roofs, small animals in green fields and a harbourful of Dufy-bright sails. The pilots chatted as we cleared the isolated farms on outlying islands, and it was odd to hear English accents over the headset. The pair of them cracked jokes about farting. It was a clue to what was in store.

The British Antarctic Survey originated in a secret wartime naval operation code-named Tabarin and launched in 1943 to ward off German cruisers in the South Atlantic. I watched an old film of Tabarin once. The doctor of the all-male team was a gynaecologist. The operation transferred to the Colonial Office in 1945 under the name Falkland Islands Dependency Survey, and in 1967 it transmogrified into a research institute within the Natural Environment Research Council. Before being permanently headquartered in Cambridge, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS, as it became known) was hived out all over the country, administration and logistics dwelling under the auspices of the Overseas Development Agency in London. Mike Richardson, a BAS base commander long before his days overseeing the South Atlantic at the Foreign Office, was put through his medical examinations during this period by a handlebar-moustached retired army colonel.

‘Have you got syphilis?' barked the man, pen poised above the voluminous forms.

‘No,' stammered Mike.

‘Why not?' snapped the colonel.

The peninsula, the wonky finger sticking out of the top left-hand corner of the continent, has always been the most contentious part of Antarctica. In 1948 Argentina, Chile and Britain sent warships south, and in the fifties an American Antarctican wrote that the territorial argy-bargy between the three nations on the peninsula ‘was so amusing to an onlooker it rivalled the machinations of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta'. During this period the explorer Wally Herbert said ‘protest notes were exchanged like cards in a game of snap.' When the Chileans announced in 1983 that at the bottom of an inlet off the northern tip of the peninsula, they had discovered two projectile heads like those used by indigenous peoples of Chile in the sixteenth century, the British and Argentinians voiced suspicions that the objects had been planted there to reinforce Chilean territorial claims.

Britain had been making sporadic claims in the region for many years.
¹
In 1820 Edward Bransfield claimed portions of the continent for Britain, and in 1908 and 1917 Letters Patent were issued to the same end. In 1920, when British Antarctic policy had begun to assume a coherent shape, the Under-Secretary of State at the British Colonial Office formally proposed that Britain should take over the whole continent for the Empire. Neither he nor anyone else knew what it was that they would be acquiring, even to the nearest million square miles; but they knew they wanted it.

During the Falklands War in 1982 members of the House of Lords voiced the concern that the conflict might spread to British Antarctic Territory. As a result, and after years of resource-paring, in 1983–4 BAS funding rose by more than sixty per cent. The relationship between science and politics in Antarctica has always been ambiguous. Scientists might well dislike political intervention, but the Falklands experience shows that they have had reason to be thankful for it.

It took four-and-a-half hours to reach the peninsula. The crew had purchased our lunch from the Stanley bakery, and we tucked into apple turnovers and slabs of malt loaf. Before long, icebergs appeared in the Southern Ocean, rimmed at the waterline with lurid lime green. I was feeling vaguely apprehensive, as I didn't really have a clue what was in store. I had been invited to spend two months with the small British team at Rothera and to travel with some of them on the peninsula. It was reputed to be a tightly knit community, and I wondered how they were going to take to an outsider. At the end of January, the season was already beginning to wind down – science parties would be coming in from the field while support staff on base prepared for winter. An ice-strengthened ship was due to arrive at Rothera at the end of March to resupply the station and take the summer stragglers – who included me – back up to the Falklands. By then, the polar night would be upon us.