Terra Incognita (31 page)

When the peninsula appeared it was fenced with high mountains, and the ocean lapped on a narrow strip of rocky shore beneath them. I had never seen Antarctica so thawed. Rothera Station was ten degrees further north than Ross Island, and on my inflatable globe the peninsula almost seemed to touch South America – whereas Ross Island was perilously close to the air valve, inches from anywhere to the north. At McMurdo the mean temperature in January is minus three degrees Celsius, whereas at Rothera it is a sweaty two degrees above zero. At the Pole, the January mean is minus twenty-eight. It can reach minus fifty at McMurdo in the winter, but the lowest temperature ever recorded at Rothera is minus thirty-nine.

The sun, shining weakly through the clouds, was hovering in the light grey sky some way above the western horizon. Here the nights were already dark, the sun setting before ten o'clock and rising at six, much as it does in a northern summer.

Nobody showed any sign of putting on their cold-weather clothes, and when we landed George was still wearing his tie. After we got off the aircraft, he gripped me by the shoulder.

‘The laddies and I have separate billets from the BAS men,' he said. ‘But don't worry. I'll come over to see you soon.' With that, he vanished.

I loitered on the apron, waiting once again for whatever was going to happen next. I had not expected banners welcoming me to Rothera but I had assumed that the base commander would send someone out to meet me, if only to avoid having to deal with the removal of my frozen corpse from the airstrip. Eventually I spotted a sno-cat trundling around the edge of the apron. I flagged it down, and smiled weakly at the Beard at the wheel.

‘Any chance of a lift to the main building?' I asked.

He nodded, and I climbed up, slinging my bag into the space behind the seats. The Beard was silent. I wondered if he often passed hitch-hikers.

We lurched to a standstill in front of a long, pale green building. It had two storeys, and was separated from the runway by an expanse of gravel and ice. Open water was visible a few hundred yards from each end, and behind the base a ridge of gentle hills, only partially ice-clad, afforded some protection against the wind. The Beard looked at me expectantly. ‘Thanks,' I said, dragging the bag down after me. There was only one entrance to the building, so I went through it.

Finding myself in a cramped lobby, I engaged in more loitering and took off my parka. Men were coming and going along the corridors, engaged in a variety of activities but united by the fact that they all ignored me. Short of erecting a sign outside the base saying ‘
GO AWAY
', they couldn't have made it clearer that I was unwelcome. Eventually a balding but youngish radio operator called Stu took me upstairs for a cup of tea. Everyone was crowding round a table of new mail in an institutional canteen-style dining room. Stu consulted a wall-chart and found the number of my pitroom. I was relieved to see my name written up there, for it meant at least they knew I was coming and were not about to send me back, though in reality they could not have done so as there was no means of getting back.

The pitroom was like my room at Scott Base – small, windowless and comfortable – except that there were two sets of bunks rather than one and it was painted in repulsive shades of brown and orange. Each bunk had curtains round it, which meant you could create a separate little box for yourself and hide in it. My morale faltered when I realised from the absence of belongings that I was to be alone in this room, for it meant I was the only woman on base. This late in the season there was no hope of any new ones arriving. Outside the door, someone belched like the volcanic lake in Cameroon which emitted gases so poisonous that hundreds died. I sat on my bunk and burst into tears.

Later, Stu reappeared. ‘Do you need anything?' he asked.

‘No, I'm fine,' I lied. ‘But thanks – thanks for asking.'

‘On Saturday nights we have a bit of a special dinner – table-cloths and lots of courses, that sort of thing. We get kind of dressed up.' He thought for a moment. ‘Why not come and meet everyone at the bar at seven-thirty?'

‘Great,' I said, the tone of my voice indicating that I did not believe it to be great at all. ‘Thanks.'

‘No worries,' said Stu cheerily. ‘See you later.'

‘Getting kind of dressed up' was a challenging concept. At half-past seven I made the best of a clean shirt and a half-clean pair of jeans, and sallied forth. There were about thirty-five people in the bar when I got there, and they were all talking loudly or guffawing with laughter. About eight of them were wearing ties. I introduced myself to a man in a sports jacket that was too small for him, but he immediately turned his back on me. Through careful observation, in the manner of a secret service agent, I gathered that purchasing a drink involved entering a tick in a column next to one's name on a special chart which was being tossed around chummily from hand to hand. I looked over a shoulder at this chart.

‘I don't expect your name will be there,' said the Beard who had given me a lift. But it was.

The meal was delicious. I sat next to a field assistant.

‘What exactly does a field assistant do?' I asked him.

‘Babysit the scientists,' he said.

It was difficult to make yourself heard over the permanent dull roar of badinage that characterised social events at Rothera. They practised a kind of chain-joking. A brief food fight broke out during the cheese course. Here were British men doing what they did best – reverting to childhood and behaving like gits. I had become an expert on this type of behaviour at university, having been sheltered from it at my old-fashioned girls' school. (Growing up in an ordinary working-class environment, I had also been sheltered from the horrors of the class jungle. I didn't realise people came off separate shelves until I went to Oxford.) At the end of my second week as a student, a formal dinner was held for freshmen in my college. When the first bread roll whizzed through the air, I thought it was a ball that had escaped from the cricket pitch next door. I was just wondering how they could be playing cricket in the dark when a wrapped pat of butter glanced off my tutor's shoulder and plopped into my brown windsor soup.

∗

The next morning, before anyone else got up, I had a look round the base. Labs, the radio room, the doctor's surgery, the boot room . . . Antarctic bases were starting to look awfully familiar. Rothera was about the same size as Scott Base and Terra Nova Bay, and it was about one twentieth of the size of McMurdo. The building was still, and silent, like a museum after closing time. I ran the palm of my hand over a smooth white wall. Then I heard a woman laughing faintly. I stood very still, trying to detect where this promising sound came from. Slowly, I padded along a narrow corridor until I was standing outside an unmarked door. A woman was talking very softly. I held an ear to the door. There was something . . . familiar about the voice. Several minutes passed. Suddenly, an orchestra struck up. I pushed the door open quietly. There was the night watchman, slumbering peacefully in an arm-chair, and on the video screen in front of him Julie Andrews was leaping down an Austrian mountainside followed by a row of rosy-cheeked von Trapp children. He had fallen asleep watching
The Sound of Music
.

Later, I sat in the sunshine on the steps of the main building drinking tea with Ben, a tall, lean marathon runner from Sheffield who was working at Rothera as a general base assistant. I had met him at the conference in Cambridge, and as soon as he spotted me stalking the Rothera corridors, he had welcomed me enthusiastically. I was pathetically grateful. Ben was pushing sixty and had first come to the ice as a dog-handler in 1961. He was a vegetarian, drove a Citroen two c.v. without a seatbelt and got up at 5.30 to meditate. He was revered by the others, who were all a good deal younger than he, as he had worked many seasons in the south during the golden age. I got the impression that he had come back to say goodbye.

Others were racing snowmobiles up an icy hill opposite the base. This hill was the gateway to the rest of the island. A route was flagged to the top, where it turned right along a tortuous traverse below Reptile Ridge, a 250-metre serrated edge extending north-west from Rothera.

‘It's their base now,' Ben said suddenly.

‘You're not gone yet, old boy,' said a small man who had thrown a portion of apple tart across the room at dinner the previous night. ‘And talking of going, we're supposed to be taking the boats out.'

Ben jumped up.

‘Come on, Sara,' he said. ‘I'm sure there's room for you.'

We took the tea things upstairs, struggled into red immersion suits in the boot room and walked down to the wharf. The small man was busily winching two fifteen-foot Humber inflatables with twenty-five-horsepower engines into the water. We climbed down a metal ladder attached to the wall of the jetty. It was a cloudless day, and the mountainsides around one side of the bay were gilded with sunlight. The apple-tart thrower smiled at me. The bergs were spotted with seals and penguins, and Wilson's petrels skimmed the wake behind the other Humber, the white bar on their tails twirling gracefully over the ruffled water as if they were dancing on the hem of a slip. After a three-month ornithological diet of skuas they looked miraculously tiny. A man in the bows was making notes on a small green pad. He was a terrestrial biologist working in the Life Sciences division of BAS.

‘Death Sciences, more like,' said the apple-tart thrower as this was explained to me. ‘They bloody kill everything!' The note-taker had spent the summer poking around under rocks in the ice-free areas around Rothera. He was looking for insects.

‘I haven't noticed any insects,' I said.

‘You need a microscope,' he replied apologetically. ‘They're mainly mites and springtails.'

‘What happens to them in the winter?' I asked. ‘Presumably they freeze.'

‘No, they don't. They accumulate anti-freeze. It's a substance close to glycerol, very similar to the stuff you put in your car. It means the water in their cells doesn't freeze.'

Life Sciences, as well as a number of other scientific divisions within BAS, is highly regarded in the international Antarctic community for the quality and value of its research. Besides investigating terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems in and around Antarctica, BAS also funds ground-breaking geophysical work and a range of upper atmospheric sciences. BAS people beat NASA, the American Antarctic programme, and everyone else in the field into a cocked hat when they announced that there was a hole in the ozone layer.

We stopped at a blue-eyed shag colony and scrambled up a rock to see the dark-eyed chicks, almost as tall as their parents but cocoa-brown and fluffy. The adults were white and black with long, smooth necks and eyes like blue marbles. Antarctica was throbbing with life, here on the banana belt. It seemed a long way from the biological haiku of the plateau.

Having crossed the Antarctic equivalent of the Atlantic, I had to make certain linguistic adjustments. I knew already about flashlights becoming torches and sleds mysteriously metamorphosing into sledges. In addition, in the ‘British sector', Scott tents were pyramid tents, Coleman lanterns were tilley lamps, Tuckers were sno-cats, thermarests were karrimats, bunny boots were RBLT's (this stood for rubber-bottom leather-top), dorms were pitrooms and the galley was the kitchen and dining room. Weather was defined by two words: manky, which meant bad, and dingle, which was good. In-between weather apparently never occurred.
¹

Thinking nostalgically of the office bestowed on me at McMurdo, I parked my laptop and notebooks in a corner of the sledge store. Soon I discovered that someone slept on the floor of this room, presumably in order to escape the pitrooms, which were known as deprivation chambers. In the mornings I was obliged to skulk outside, establishing whether this individual had risen.

I learnt how to drive Hondas, the four-wheel drive minitractors, and John Deeres, little green pick-ups which were a permanent feature of the landscape around Rothera, beetling across the gravel. I had a snowmobile refresher course and went to Radio School to learn how to set up a high-frequency antenna and squelch a VHF. I went to Meteorological School where the weatherman, Steve, taught me how to tell the difference between cirrus and stratocumulus, a Shutdown School to learn how to turn the engines off if a pilot keeled over in his plane, and a Medical School in which I learnt of the beneficial effects of athlete's foot powder on crotch rot and was taught how to perform a tracheotomy with a Swiss Army knife.

Twice a week everyone gathered in the dining room for a ‘Situation Report' at which the base commander announced news and impending events. This was followed by communal viewing of a video. The video was chosen on a rota system. Most people had seen all the videos on station several times, and their favourite trick was to pick a really bad film when it was their turn and then walk out after five minutes.

One day, after one of these videos, I tried to socialise in the bar. It was in a large room with a low ceiling, an institutional brown carpet and walls lined with the obligatory team photographs of hairy winterers clutching dogs and looking as if they played bass guitar for a superannuated heavy metal band. The drinking area was festooned with postcards of women's bottoms. There was a music system, a collection of vinyl records, a pool table and a dartboard. In the winter they held radio darts contests with other bases. After a couple of years of competition someone went to Bird Island and discovered that the small scientific station there, its occupants always keen participants, had never had a dartboard on the premises.

A man approaching the end of a two-and-a-half year tour of duty as a member of base support staff announced that he had remembered a good joke.