Terra Incognita (15 page)

These days, the residents of Antarctic field camps deliberately hid the chocolate to stop themselves overindulging.

Packed, fuelled and ready to set off for Shackleton's hut, Ann checked out with the radio people while I tested the level of the transmission fluid. On the journey we took it in turns to get out and measure the thickness of the ice with a drill. By mid-December the sea ice in front of base was beginning to melt.

‘If it's thinner than thirty inches', said Ann, ‘we turn back or find an alternative route.' But it never was.

After about two-and-a-half hours, beyond the seals at Big Razorback, beyond Scott's hut at Cape Evans and beyond the Barne Glacier, striped with its layer of ash, we left the Spryte by a large berg and walked over the ice to the volcanic hillock of the cape itself, following the caustic odour of penguins. Individual birds out walking never seemed to smell of anything, but tens of thousands of them at home stank like an ammonia factory. Shackleton's neat buff-coloured hut appeared nestling in a dell as we reached the brow of the hill, and out beyond it thousands of Adélies were standing in front of a panoramic view of the Transantarctics.

A pair of penguins had nested on top of a spoke from the Arrol-Johnstone car Shackleton took south, the first motor vehicle in Antarctica, and the carcass of a dog, well picked over by skuas, had frozen to the floor of the dog-house. I unlocked the door, and entered the tiny vestibule. The hut was smaller than Scott's, about thirty feet by twenty, and as everything was arranged around a central space it seemed more open.

Like the other huts, it had been built in London, then taken down and shipped south in pieces. The walls were made of smooth wooden planks, and the room was sparsely furnished with packing cases, a low table and, at the opposite end to the entrance, a hefty cast-iron stove connected to the roof by a bulky metal flue. A set of sledge runners hung from the rafters, and an assortment of pots, pans and lamps from the rickety shelves behind the stove. A door in the corner next to the entrance led to a small, windowless storeroom. In 1916 Ernest Joyce spent three months there studying penguins, and he, or someone, had scrawled in big letters on the crates at one end of the hut
Joyce's Skinning Academy
.

‘Aren't you going to sing the National Anthem, dear?' drawled Ann, nodding in the direction of a framed portrait of the King and Queen hanging in the middle of a side wall. Without waiting for a reply she stopped in front of a row of tins on a shelf behind the stove.

‘What's Irish Brawn?' she asked.

‘It's like a loaf of bread, but made from jellied pig's head,' I said.

‘Eat that a lot over there, do you?'

‘Not every day,' I said.

They had pinned postcards around the hut – a painting of an Elizabethan yeoman, and B. D. Sigmund's ‘The Bells of Ouseley'. I too carried a dozen familiar images around with me on my travels. I usually propped them up wherever I happened to be sleeping. They reminded me who I was, I suppose, like the creased photographs businessmen carry in their wallets. Mine were not rosy-cheeked children but images that had moved me over the years, now comforting and familiar landmarks in the daily blur of visual stimulation. Most of them depicted some kind of universal human theme, like Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus' or Stanley Spencer's ‘Resurrection',
¹
but one of them was Manet's boring old ‘Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase'.

‘I could live here,' said Ann, setting up her tripod in a corner.

‘Especially if he was here,' I said. ‘I'd like to have been picked for his team.'

‘What, more than Scott's?' she said, feigning horror.

‘Much more,' I replied. I was sitting at the head of the low table in the middle of the room.

‘Smile!' Ann said before letting off a puff of light.

Back in Britain, on a wet afternoon in August, I had met Shackleton's greatest living apostle. He had invited me to his home on Blackheath in south-east London, and I had been obliged to push my way through dripping branches to find his house. When I got there, he had forgotten I was coming. His name was Harding Dunnett, he was in his eighties, and he described himself as ‘a bit of an ancient mariner, these days'. Like Shackleton, he went to Dulwich College, and as a schoolboy he could remember seeing the
James Caird
arrive in 1924, by then resembling an old rowing boat. It had been donated to the school by one of Shackleton's benefactors, John Quiller Rowett, another alumnus who used to walk to school with Shackleton. He had become fed up with the little boat. The schoolboys knew nothing of their famous alumnus. ‘Scott was the myth,' Harding told me, ‘even at Dulwich.' The boat was loaned to the Maritime Museum, and when they too grew tired of it, they returned it to the school, which had nowhere to put it, so it was shoved in with the lawnmowers.

While researching a book on eminent Dulwich alumni, Dunnett unexpectedly came across Ernest Shackleton. ‘He just hit me between the eyes.' Dunnett committed himself to his hero's rehabilitation, and founded the James Caird Society, which I immediately joined and over the next year spent several happy evenings dining in the north cloister of Dulwich College in front of the restored boat itself, paying homage. I suspected that the other members were mumbling ‘Down with Scott' during the toasts. In the interests of objective research I had tried to join the Captain Scott Society, too, but they wouldn't have me – or any other woman. It was based in Cardiff, and Beryl Bainbridge had been invited to one of its dinners as guest speaker. She wasn't allowed to go to the lavatory, and had her hand slapped for trying to light a cigarette. In the morning she left before anyone else was up (though she had been allowed to visit the toilet by then).

Shackleton had become Dunnett's mission. ‘To hell with Scott,' he said as I disappeared into the wet bushes, and, tapping his forehead, he added, ‘he lacked it up here.'

∗

One day I found a note pinned to my office door inviting me to a Christmas party at the Movement Control Center. Despite the sinister name, the MCC fulfilled a benign role as a kind of on-ice airport terminal. It was the perfect venue for a bash as it was really a hangar, and they had put up a Christmas tree the size of one of those Californian redwoods people drive through. It was made out of parachutes. The party was very crowded, and people were serving beer and pizza from trestle tables. Trotsky materialised out of the gloom, laughing loudly at another feeble joke. He worked on the sea ice, and so he was packing up to go home.

‘Once it starts melting out', he said, ‘I haven't got anything to work on.' His LC-130 flight to Christchurch had been cancelled three days in a row.

He jumped up and began hurling a woman across the dance floor. The man selling beer raised his eyebrows.

‘Once the beakers have crated up their samples they don't have any work to do,' he shouted, ‘so they sleep all day and party all night.' ‘Beaker' was a character in
Sesame Street
, but the term had been appropriated and was applied to all scientists. Whether it was derogatory or not depended on the context and the attitude of the speaker. I was becoming more acculturated to Americans by the day, but I still had linguistic barriers to cross. I thought Kool Aid was an Antarctic charity until I was offered a raspberry flavoured tin of it.

Meanwhile an outbreak of lab art had resulted in an accretion of earrings in my office. I was perceived as the link between art and science in the lab, and the scientists began competing with each other to make earrings out of their equipment. I had a pair consisting of a cluster of luminous microcentrifuge tubes, another made with two tiny vials of glacier water, several pairs of glittering plastic zigzags used as fishbait, and so it went on.

I woke up in my room at five in the morning to see my roommate standing by the window, fully clothed. Our paths rarely crossed, as we both spent more time in the field than on station and led generally erratic lives.

‘Are you off?' I asked.

‘No,' she replied. ‘I've just come in.'

∗

The vertical borders of the maps I was using were not parallel. They were heading inexorably for 90 degrees south, and I was becoming increasingly preoccupied with following them down and reaching the Pole, where they all converged. I decided to concentrate solely on getting there rather than dashing off anywhere else, and I got myself on a Fridge-to-Freezer fuel flight later in the week.

To fill in time, I practised my cross-country skiing. I wasn't very good at it, but I got to know the south of Ross Island pretty well. Fortunately, I had found a very good skiing teacher. He was a veteran Antarctic support worker called Felix, and for years he had been circumventing the strict McMurdo regulations about what constituted ‘safe travel'. One day, we went out to the skiway. This is a landing strip consisting of compressed snow over glacial ice. The ‘ice runway', another facility at McMurdo, is sea ice stripped of its snow. As I puffed along behind him Felix told stories of his illegal escapades on the ice. He called his exploits ‘missions'.

‘I always launch on a Saturday night,' he said, ‘when no one suspects anything. Usually I stow my skis under a rock somewhere near McMurdo the day before, so I don't arouse suspicion.' Like all serious outlaws, he brought his own sleeping bag and bivvy sack south, plus a pair of mini-binoculars to scan the horizon for people who, if encountered, might rat on him.

‘What happens if you do see people?' I asked.

‘I lie low behind a snowhill till they've gone.'

Once, Felix had climbed Erebus alone.

‘I took a snowmobile at midnight, and it stopped going up at three in the morning at what I later reckoned was 8,000 feet. [At about this elevation snowmobile carburettors must be rejetted for altitude.] I climbed for nine hours. On the summit, I was hallucinating. I walked halfway round the crater, and the terrain got rough; I was frightened then. I knew that if I so much as sprained an ankle I'd be dead – but it was the best thing I've ever done.'

Felix went back to McMurdo early, and I stayed out on the ice alone. It was almost midnight when I skied back, and the temperature was hovering around zero degrees Celsius. The sky was burnished blue, streaked with a twisted ribbon of alto-cumulus, and dazzling honeyed sunlight flashed off the faces of the Transantarctics. As I stopped to lift my goggles, I glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye . . .

∗

Some time before coming south I had done a long line of radio interviews to talk about the publication of my book on Chile. At the first one, in Manchester, the interviewer asked me a specific question about the nature of fear. She was interested in how I could trek around alone in the high Andes, hopping in and out of antediluvian Bolivian lorries freighted with smuggled drugs. I was flummoxed by the probing nature of her enquiry, as she seemed convinced that I had some secret to impart which would empower all the women of the world, enabling them to fling down their aprons and run off to South America. I muddled through the interview, and the women of Manchester did not subsequently stampede to the airport, clogging the concourse in their frenzy to cross the Atlantic.

Over the next weeks I was repeatedly asked, ‘Weren't you afraid, alone over there?', and I was embarrassed to admit that I had never been frightened, not even at the worst moments. As a result, journalists suspected I was a freak – not a troublesome freak, but a benign, barking-mad free spirit, like the tweed-skirted Victorian ‘lady' travellers who rampaged across Africa with a fly-swat in their hand and three hundred heavily laden ‘natives' behind them.

What I could never quite tell anyone was that I was afraid of other things – so afraid that nothing that could happen to me up a Chilean mountain could possibly worry me. All my life, or at least since a long journey returning from a holiday in Cornwall on a green leather bench seat in the front of my father's first car when I was eight, the thoughts trailing nomadically round inside my head have intermittently staged a rebellion, coalesced into a mass of far-reaching grief and paralysing fear, caused my mouth to go dry, my hands to shake and all the colour to be blanched from the sky.

It would have been hard to explain this on a ‘talk' show. ‘Um, what are these thoughts actually rebelling about?' the interviewers would understandably have asked, riffling through their papers to find the next item.

The misery of the human condition is popular with the Nomadic Thoughts. The catalyst might be an old man replacing a box of teabags on the supermarket shelf, having held it up to his pebble glasses and peered at the price; or a young woman with Down's Syndrome staring out of the smeared window of the day centre around the corner from my home because there was nothing else to do, on that day or any other day; or another visit to another friend in another AIDS ward, watching young men shrivel up until they were replaced by new ones, and the supply never ran out.

Like many people, I was depressed and upset about these things. They made it hard to find the energy to go on – going on seemed pointless. The setting for my anguish was not a long-forgotten byway far from home but the nearby grubby corner of a London street where someone was eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully away. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of the inescapable misery of most people's lives, and the ultimate tragedy of all of them, it was hard not to be a pessimist. Sometimes I saw my own life stretching ahead of me blighted by depression, the asphyxiating kind of depression that felt as if a hod of bricks had been deposited on my chest. I was never going to find peace of mind (I would think at these times), I was never going to be usefully creative, and, like many people I knew or heard about, I would probably end up with a nervous breakdown. Just as you suck all the way down a stick of Brighton Rock and still find the word ‘Brighton' written through the mangled stub, I would never be able to escape from my melancholic nature.