Terra Incognita (40 page)

It had not been one long idyll, but the unhappy memories had begun to fade before I even unlocked my front door, and it seemed to me that I had been cast out of paradise. I felt perpetually thwarted. Above all, I sensed that I had not yet completed the journey.

Something was left undone.

The Patron dragged me out to seedy Greek cafés in north London, and random thoughts on the Scott myth bounced between us like a beach ball. Jeremy was writing the official biography of Cyril Connolly. The book was also a covert autobiography, though Jeremy rarely admitted it, and I couldn't quite see why it was necessary as he had published two books about himself already. So flattered was he when I told him he was to appear in my book that he was trying to smuggle me into Connolly's life. Feeling at last he had something to offer to justify his patronal role, Jeremy glugged another tumbler of retsina and launched into a lengthy peroration on Connolly's response to the Scott myth.

‘You see, Connolly writes that when he was seven he shook hands with Scott in Simonstown, South Africa,' he concluded.

The
Terra Nova
had sailed from Britain without its captain. Scott had remained to drum up more funds, and then hurried to South Africa to meet the ship. We both pondered the connections between these two extraordinary men, as different as we were, Patron and protégée. Jeremy was fifty, happily married, irretrievably English and a sedentary anarchist. A darling of London's literary coterie, he had hands like root vegetables and had never been further south than Seaford.

He looked out of the rain-spattered window, ate an olive, and appeared to be on the verge of delivering some small but crucial comment which would enable me to decipher the legend that Scott had become. I waited, wondering what he had done with the olive pit.

‘I'm almost certain', he said finally, furrowing his brow and waving the empty retsina bottle at the waiter, ‘that Connolly made it all up.'

I talked to my friends on the ice by electronic mail. I lived, vicariously, through the emotional rollercoaster of Airdrop at the Pole, when a C-141 took off from Christchurch, refuelled twice in the air and tossed out boxes the size of upright pianos to twenty-eight people waiting in darkness on the polar plateau in an ambient temperature of minus seventy Celsius. (This, surely, was a testament to what the human spirit can achieve.) The Polies had talked of little else for weeks. When it was over and the parcels had been torn open and the bruised fruit digested, they realised they were only halfway through the winter of perpetual night. One of them wrote about ‘a terrible void'.

It started to seem so distant. Nansen had said that when he returned from the Arctic the months on the ice were like ‘a far-off dream from another world'. Often, at my desk with the window open on long summer nights, I strained my ears to hear the still, small voice beyond the honking horns, the inebriated shouts and the blasts of music from passing cars. Sometimes I went downstairs, switched on the slide projector standing ready on the dining table where no one ever dined, turned off the lights and watched Mount Erebus appear on the cracked white wall. I would soon let go of my worries about tax bills, broken washing machines, the recalcitrant boyfriend or the vexing queue of newspaper articles waiting to be written. If it was one of the bad days when more pressing anxieties weighed down upon me, and I was haunted by the old familiar ghosts, I could almost always send them away too – though I generally had to persevere with the slides on the cracked wall to do that, and travel beyond the Transantarctics and over the luminous plateau.

In the early days of Antarctic travel, many men got married as soon as they reached home. Both Scott and Byrd noted a stampede to the altar. In the case of Scott's men a double phenomenon occurred – they started marrying each other's relatives, to keep it in the family, as it were. Wright and Griffith Taylor, who now have adjacent valleys named after them, married Priestley's sisters, and Priestley retaliated by marrying one of Debenham's relatives. In desperation I considered this option, but a lack of suitable candidates soon forced me to reject it.

One night, when I couldn't sleep, I went out and lay in the hammock. It was easier to take myself south when it was dark, as by then it was dark there all the time. As I looked up, suddenly I realised what I had to do. I had seen the door close on Antarctica as darkness crept over the peninsula. I had to see it open again. This time I didn't need to travel around when I got back there. I wanted to sit still and take it all in.

Only God knows what made me think I could do it. The American programme alone sends people to Antarctica in August, so I asked them if they would take me. They chewed it over for a while, and rang me up a few times. It was a hot summer in England. Then one Friday night in June, while I was sitting at my desk with the window open, trying to describe the underwater call of the Weddell seal, Guy Guthridge called from the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation.

‘Pack your bags,' he said.

∗

On the plane to Christchurch I began to read a book by a clinical psychologist called Glin Bennet. It was called
Beyond Endurance
, and one chapter was about ‘the intellectual inertia' of wintering in Antarctica. To demonstrate the way groups can disintegrate, Bennet quoted the story of a meteorologist arriving at an Antarctic base in the fifties, just as winter ended. Nobody came out of the hut to greet him and his party, and they slowly realised that the group had collapsed during the long months of darkness. ‘We discovered, in the different rooms', the meteorologist wrote, ‘little animal dens where, as base life had broken down and they had become no longer on speaking terms with one another, each man had retired to make himself a little corner in the wreck of his personality.'

Academics had had a field day with the psychology of the Antarctic winter. Papers had been presented to a conference on ‘The Human Experience in Antarctica: Applications to Life in Space', and, using winter bases as laboratories for human behaviour, one academic said, ‘Lessons learned in the Antarctic and other extreme settings should facilitate interplanetary exploration and the establishment of permanent settlements in space.' The U.S. Navy recognised ‘a winter-over syndrome' in which seventy-two per cent of the sample reported severe depression and sixty-five per cent had problems with hostility and anger. A condition called Big Eye had entered the textbooks, a result of insomnia caused by total darkness. References were made to the incident in 1955 when one member of the team sent in to prepare for International Geophysical Year developed such acute schizophrenia that a special room lined with mattresses had to be built next to the infirmary.

The Eskimos could have saved them the trouble of their research – they know all about the depression of the long night. They call it
perlerorneq
, which means ‘to feel the weight of life'.

Just as ‘the long, dark night of the soul' is a popular literary metaphor for spiritual turmoil, so the polar winter perfectly mirrors the inner darkness which seems to have fallen so often. Frederick Cook, one of the first to overwinter in the pack ice, wrote in his diary in 1898, ‘The curtain of blackness which has fallen over the outer world of icy desolation has also descended upon the inner world of our souls . . . The night soaks hourly a little more colour from our blood.'

A cart grated past my seat, followed by a cheery stewardess propelling it down the narrow aisle. She laid trays on the fold-down tables above our knees as the sun spilled through the pebble window. I carried on with Cook. ‘The grayness of the first days of the night', he wrote, ‘has given way to a soul-despairing darkness, broken only at noon by a feeble yellow haze on the northern sky. I can think of nothing more disheartening, more destructive to human energy, than this dense, unbroken blackness of the long polar night.'

I wondered what in the world I was going to find.

∗

Camilla, my old friend, flew down from Wellington to join me in Christchurch, and I smuggled her into the clothing-issue session. It was nine months since I had gone through the same routine in the same room, only this time the piles were higher. Winter temperatures required even more layers. I left Christchurch for McMurdo at three in the morning, on the same turbo-prop that had conveyed me there before, and as we cruised over the Southern Ocean the temperature jumped up and down while people jammed their elbows through the red webbing. I enjoyed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The sky was streaked with angry apricot flashes when we landed, and the ice had absorbed a gloomy purple light. A mist was hanging at the feet of the Transantarctics so that the peaks appeared to be suspended between ice and sky. Once again, I felt as if I had come home. That no longer seemed bizarre – it was a comfortable feeling. When I caught sight of myself in someone else's glacier glasses, I saw that I was smiling.

Three days before I arrived, on 20 August, the sun had risen over Ross Island for the first time since 24 April. Already, for a few hours in every twenty-four the residents of McMurdo were enjoying a dusky daylight, though they had not yet seen the sun, as from McMurdo it was obscured behind Mount Erebus. My physiological clock had responded to total light by urging me not to go to bed; I wondered if so much darkness would have the reverse effect.

The flight was one of eight which made the round trip between Christchurch and McMurdo during the third week of August in the annual operation known as Winfly. The function of this complex annual undertaking, timed to take place during the continent's brief cusp between darkness and light, is to resupply the station and bring support staff to the ice to prepare for the forthcoming science season, which begins in October. It also allows a six-week handover period with winterers preparing to leave the ice. Of the 244 winterers in 1995, thirty left during Winfly (one because she was pregnant), and 200 new faces arrived on the ice.

The first person I saw had tied a knot in his beard, but everyone looked healthy enough after their ‘weary spell of darkness'. They were fish-belly white, of course, and they all caught colds from us and diarrhoea from the freshies our planes brought them. Most of them weren't sure how they felt. When I sat down to breakfast on the first day, the woman opposite me burst out, ‘Wow, it's so good to see new faces!', yet posters appeared in the dorms saying
‘Coming soon to a room near you: the roommate from hell, Winfly 1995
' next to a screaming Munch-like face and a bemused individual standing in a doorway holding a suitcase. I didn't need a poster to tell me I had entered staked-out territory – it was obvious. They had been padding the corridors and battling along the windy walkways for six months without seeing a single new creature.

‘I felt the futility of my existence,' the woman at breakfast told me when I asked her how she had found the winter isolation. ‘Nothing mattered. And the hopelessness of the world surviving. It lingers still.'

It was like watching a whole community coming out of hibernation. I trod very carefully. The experience put me in mind of an extremely ancient uncle in the west country who was apprenticed as a printer at the age of fourteen. On his first day he had boarded the bus to the factory at six in the morning, clutching a packet of corned-beef sandwiches. All was well until a group of hoary old printers got on the bus a mile or two later. One of them stopped alongside my young uncle and thundered: ‘That's my seat, lad.'

I was allocated a bed in a room in the same dark corridor as the Corner Bar, the latter no longer under the supervision of Mike the carpenter, as he had retired to ply his trade in the north during the austral winter. It had been left in the hands of his henchman John, its only regular social gathering Coffee at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning.

‘Come along,' said John when he passed me in the gloomy corridor.

Outside the window, daylight lingered like a promise. Six people were lounging around the low smoked-plexiglass table, which was spread with coffee mugs, plates of muffins and bottles of liquor. The Budweiser clock and target-practice penguin were there. When the six people saw me, they fell silent and stared as if I had been wearing no parka, no jeans, no layers of thermals, no boots nor socks and no underwear. It was as if I had walked in stark naked.

‘I guess it was like waking up to find a total stranger in the bedroom,' one of them said later.

The winterers stood alone, as they always had. I envied them. Charles Laseron, Mawson's assistant biologist, put it like this. ‘As the first rounding of the Horn is to the sailor, so a winter in the ice is to a polar explorer. It puts the hallmark on his experience. Having successfully emerged from the embryonic stage, he is now fully fledged, and can take his place in the select fraternity.'

Frozen-Sausage Bill was back, his eyes still the colour of cornflower hearts. He was preparing to whip pork products out of boots at safety lectures. Just as the same names cropped up in the history books, so I saw the same faces back on the ice. J. M. Barrie, who only travelled south vicariously, noted from his leather armchair that everyone who went to Antarctica came back vowing that nothing in heaven or earth would tempt them to go near polar regions again – and at the end of six months they were on their knees in front of whoever might be able to get them there.

It was certainly cold; typically about thirty below, and in those first few days the sun didn't rise until shortly before midday, and it set two hours later. When a storm came in, ropes were strung up between the dorms and the galley, so we had something to cling to. But when it was clear, the skies were diaphanous, frosting the Transantarctics in pastel pinks and blues, the slopes of each peak as sharply defined as the faces of a diamond. Each morning was lighter than its predecessor. It seemed as if summer were rushing in at unnaturally high speed, like one of those long exposure natural history films of a flower opening.