Terra Incognita (37 page)

∗

When we got back to Rothera the planes were parked on the apron, spruced up for their long ferry flights to Cambridge like cars on a showroom forecourt. The four Otters looked helpless without their skis, crouching behind the Dash.

The next day the seven pilots and five air mechanics trooped in and out of the station, discussing routes in loud voices. In the evening Al produced a four-course dinner, the air unit supplied champagne, a number of people made speeches, bread rolls whizzed through the air and we all got drunk. I was on housekeeping duty the following morning, and when I started the dining room looked like the site of a very small civil war in which neither side had emerged victorious. A pair of training shoes had been stowed in the fridge, and congealed baked beans clung like glue to the sandwich maker. We saw the planes off at eight o'clock. It was gusting forty knots, and very cold. Great swathes of snow were sweeping across the ramp like smoke, tumbling over the ice cliffs opposite the point and dissolving into a gunmetal grey sea. The sun was peeking over the bergs in the bay as one by one the pilots zipped themselves into their flying suits and took off for Stanley, first stop on the long haul home.

The sense of shut-down was especially powerful then. We felt as if the birds had migrated. People lingered longer at the tables after dinner, and at night the bar might be empty except for two or three men playing Scrabble. People talked to me more easily, and seemed to find it less of a gruelling experience than they had done during the first weeks of my tenure. Our favourite topic of conversation was Relief. It was what they called the week when the ship anchored at the wharf and disgorged a year's supplies.

‘I hope that one stays,' one of the winterers said as we pressed our foreheads against a window one morning and watched a particularly fine iceberg in the bay. They were waiting for the landscape to settle for the winter, and they wanted their favourite bergs to be marooned, like them. As for the rest of us, at particular moments, when the evening light fell at a certain angle on the pack, people who had been talking for months about going home would say that they were going to miss the ice.

∗

On Sunday 19 March at eight o'clock in the morning we were sprawled out in the dining room, clutching mugs of coffee, when we heard the low elephant grief of a ship's horn. RRS
Bransfield
had appeared beyond the furthest berg. We all went down to the wharf, of course. Some of us were boarding the ship for the day, as it was taking a clean-up team to Horseshoe Island before Relief. The base there had scarcely been touched since the fifties, and as a short-term measure it had been decided to remove the rubbish and make the huts good against the depredations of time and weather.

The captain sent over a boat with a scow lashed to its side, and we filled nets with rolls of roofing felt and tossed them down into the scow. Then we climbed down from the wharf into the boat and motored to the rope ladder dangling over the side of the ship.

We sailed on a calm, steely sea, past snowy petrels dancing in the bands of light on the horizon and solitary penguins on tabular bergs. A chippie from the building team was standing next to me on deck. He was a diminutive creature with powerful shoulders, a gallery of tattoos and a rasping Glaswegian accent, and when he was drunk he always ended up in a fight (though not with me). A rainbow had arched over Horseshoe. The chippie said it was amazing how the sunshine changed everything.

‘I'm a bit of an agnostic,' he said, ‘a doubting Thomas. But this – it makes you think there is a God.'

Horseshoe Island was shoe-horned between Bourgeois Fjord and Square Bay, off the Fallieres Coast. A station was established there in 1955 and occupied continuously until it was evacuated on 21 August 1960, since when it has been used occasionally by field parties. It was imaginatively known as Base. Y. In his book
Of Ice and Men
, Sir Vivien Fuchs recounts a radio hoax at Horseshoe in 1955. They used to indulge in radio pranks every five minutes in those days, but this one was particularly well orchestrated. Two of the men tuned the bunkroom receiver so that their colleagues thought they had picked up a Falklands radio station, whereas in fact they were listening to material broadcast from the room next door. Naturally all the music played was drawn from the meagre selection on base, so to allay suspicion one of the perpetrators performed on the bagpipes and mouth organ (it was gratifying to learn that at the Bluff we had unwittingly been adhering to tradition). Even after they had broadcast a news story announcing that Marilyn Monroe was to lead an expedition up Everest, one man still hadn't tumbled to it. ‘The final broadcast', Fuchs wrote, ‘took place the day before everyone except this man was to leave on a sledging trip, he being left behind as caretaker. The “news” received that evening reported a revolution in Argentina where fighting had broken out between the Army and Navy. It included a warning that likely conflicts which would follow at Argentine Antarctic stations could well lead to the losers seeking political asylum at the nearest British bases, and called on everyone to keep calm and use their heads.'

Before I left England, Sir Vivien had invited me to his home in Cambridge to talk about his Antarctic adventures. A pair of porcelain penguins were guarding the fireplace, and Sir Vivien was wearing a blue plaid BAS-style flannel shirt. He was in his eighties and still handsome, with clear, china-blue eyes and an efflorescence of nut-brown eyebrows, and when his face creased into a smile he was irresistible.

As a young man his tutor at Cambridge was James Wordie, Scott's chief of scientific staff. Fuchs spent many seasons in the Antarctic, and in 1950 the Falkland Islands Dependencies Scientific Bureau was founded under his direction. During the 1955–8 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which he led, with Sir Edmund Hillary in command of the New Zealand support party, Fuchs crossed the continent for the first time, using dogs and tractors. Together they wrote a book about it, and in spite of the sno-cats and the radio telephone and the electric sewing machine they seemed to mark the end of an unbroken line which Scott started when he sailed down the Thames aboard
Discovery
.

At one lapidary moment in the Fuchs-Hillary account the authors are invited aboard a visiting ship, and the captain sends a smaller vessel over to fetch them. Faced with a twenty-foot ladder up to the deck, a sailor asks Hillary if he can manage the climb.

Fuchs was committed to the memory of the dogs. ‘I remember very well,' he said, ‘back at Stonington in the forties a chap got annoyed and said, “Well, I'm going outside to have a word with the dogs.” Then he'd come back in and the whole argument had disappeared. I spent years driving dogs and then I became a tractor man, perforce; though I don't think a dog man ever becomes a real tractor man.'

When I returned from the ice a magazine ran a competition requesting readers to submit their all-time favourite newspaper headlines. Several people with long memories had sent in ‘
DR FUCHS OFF TO SOUTH ICE
', but only one had saved the cutting from the same newspaper which recorded a subsequent visit Sir Vivien had made. The sub-editor, following the hallowed principle that if it works once it can work a second time, had settled on ‘
DR FUCHS OFF AGAIN
'.

∗

Relief began on Monday morning. We had been divided into four teams, and mine spent the morning in navy boilersuits and hard hats unloading boxes on the 'tween deck. In the afternoon, we put the goods away on base. Everyone's eyes lit up when they saw crates of oranges. During the afternoon we sat on the step in the sunshine, waiting for fresh loads and taking it in turns to fetch pots of tea and plates of flapjacks.

Mealtimes were changed to bring us in sync with the ship. We had tea at five, then returned to our duties for a further two hours. It was my birthday on the second day of Relief, and after this last shift I was drinking tea in the dining room when Al emerged from the kitchen carrying a pink-and-white cake designed to look like a book and iced with the words
Into The Unknown: Happy Birthday Sara
, with my name down the spine and a bookmark protruding from the top.

For the last two days we unloaded fuel drums while the winterers took it in turns to visit the ship's dentist, returning looking pained and asking Al for soup. The grease ice
¹
around the wharf was thickening every day: in Antarctica the freeze and thaw of the sea replaced the rise and fall of sap. When the sun emerged, the dull matt grey water lit up like a face breaking into a smile.

I was appointed nightwatchman for my last three days at Rothera. It was a duty shared among all the support staff, to prevent the base from burning down, among other things. On the first night I was suffering from excruciating period pains, and at dinner someone had told me that my face looked like a bowl of porridge.

‘It's because I have severe menstrual cramps,' I announced loudly.

Silence descended, and I immediately felt better. I didn't want to be an honorary man, and I was fed up with carrying used tampons around in a plastic bag in my pocket, trying to find somewhere to abandon them. It was tempting to play people at their own game and stow these bags under their pillows.

Nightwatch began with a midnight patrol. I was convinced that I was going to be responsible for the total destruction of base, and then everyone would be able to announce triumphantly that both writers and women were superfluous to requirements in Antarctica, and that the combination of the two was nothing short of deadly. At half-past twelve I found myself wedged between two small huts, shining my torch into the dial of the ice-core freezer. I was especially terrified of melting the ice cores. I had heard many stories about it happening, producing what they called the most expensive ice cubes in the history of the world. This dial read ten below. ‘Shouldn't it be twenty?' I thought. ‘Or am I being paranoid?' A wrong decision would either mean having my head bitten off for unnecessarily waking a slumbering electrician, or melting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of ice cores. I went to wake the hapless electrician. I was very pleased that I did, as the freezer was off, but it made me frightened about what might happen next.

In the hangar I told myself cheerily that Antarctica was the world's last refuge from fear, but the dangers lurking in the shadows of a high, empty, unlit concrete building had been inculcated too effectively into my psyche. Every two hours I checked the generator and the reverse-osmosis plant, and at three o'clock I climbed the hill behind base to take a weather observation. At five-thirty I turned on the coffee urn and the pastry ovens and began the waking-up routine. This involved creeping into pitrooms and shaking slumbering male bodies by the tautly-muscled shoulder. It should have been a highlight, but somehow it never lived up to expectations.

I got to know the base better during those quiet, dark nights. Rothera was a warren of nooks and hidden corners. I found places where I hadn't been before, and finally poked my head into the sauna, which I had never dared to visit during the day. It was an old fridge heated by a spiral coil in a cast-iron bucket. A torn copy of
Motorcycling World
lay on the floor.

On my last night, the one before the ship left, three people partied all night, so I had company on watch. At six in the morning we drove down to the ship in the enormous Delta truck, its lights flashing, and fell out of the high cab on to the wharf. It seemed a good way to end.

∗

I found my cabin, and slept through the journey to Horseshoe, where we collected the clean-up team. In three days the grease ice had thickened into pancake. When we got back to Rothera the crew threw a party on board for the winterers. At five o'clock the captain gave the word, the horn sounded and after a flurry of awkward embraces the fifteen winterers, who wouldn't see another soul for seven months, walked down the gangplank. As they shrank, reeling and striding around the wharf, they set off pink flares and yellow rockets, and we waved until they disappeared.

Winter. It was as if a door had closed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings

To his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks:

He withers all in silence, and his hand

Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

William Blake, ‘To Winter'

I
ONCE MET
a former captain of the Antarctic support ship HMS
Endurance
. He had a great love of the south.

‘I took a ship where no ship had been before,' he said, ‘and that was a thrill. In the mid-eighties I felt that we were pushing back the boundaries of man's knowledge. It was good sailoring down there.' Like Scott, he had been obliged by the Navy Act to conduct a church service on board each Sunday, and described reading the lesson on deck in the wintry sunshine while Antarctic terns flew around the prow.

The Royal Research Ship
Bransfield
was old and decrepit, but we had ‘good sailoring' on her, too. The journey to the Falklands took a week. There were three decks: one for the officers and senior BAS personnel, one for other BAS people and one for the crew. Each had its own mess. Ours – the middle one – was furnished with chipped blue formica tables seating twelve, each equipped with a row of sauce bottles standing to attention in slots.

I was sharing a cabin with an amiable cargo supervisor from BAS HQ. She had been invited upstairs to eat in the wardroom, but I had not, which made her feel very embarrassed, but I couldn't have cared less. The cabin had a long leatherette couch along the porthole wall. The walls were mint green and the carpet and bunk curtains were orange, a colour scheme designed to make you puke should the roll of the sea fail.