Terra Incognita (29 page)

PART TWO

When you look upon such things there comes surging through the confusion of the mind an awareness of the dignity of the earth, of the unaccountable importance of being alive, and the thought comes out of nowhere that unhappiness rises not so much from lacking as from having too much . . . And you guess the end of the world will probably look like that, and the last men retreating from the cliffs will look out upon some such horizon, with all things at last in equilibrium, the winds quiet, the sea frozen, the sky composed, and the earth in glacial quietude.

Or so you fancy. Then along comes a walloping Antarctic blizzard and knocks such night dreaming into a cocked hat.

Richard E. Byrd, from
Discovery

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It's just that there are some things women don't do. They don't become Pope or President or go down to the Antarctic.

Harry Darlington, chief pilot on Finn Ronne's

1946–8 Antarctic Research Expedition

W
E LANDED
at Christchurch at half-past eleven in the morning on 25 January. When the aircraft door opened, the smell of trees and green things filled the plane. To us, it was as if we had come to the middle of a jungle. A 747 had just arrived from Singapore, and we all cleared customs together. The Singaporeans looked clean, elegant and ironed, as well as very little. They eyed us, a shaggy tribe of overdressed primates with matted hair and exhausted faces. The traffic even within the airport compound was overwhelming. I ordered a cappuccino at a café with the Swedish scientist who had read the part of Amundsen at the Pole on Christmas Day, and we both drooled over the frothy cups.

‘It's really too good to drink,' he said. ‘We should just look at it.'

Later, Roger took me to turn on the streetlights of Christchurch at SouthPower, where he worked. It was still possible to do it manually, and I flicked a switch and watched the city fizz to life. On the first night, savouring the darkness, I slept in the garden.

‘It's so
warm
,' I said to Roger the next morning when he returned from his daily run up the nearest hill.

‘What d'you expect?' he said. ‘It's the end of January – mid-summer, practically.'

When I went into town, I wanted to buy something in every shop. I ran into people I knew from the ice, and we quickly parked ourselves in coffee shops. It was as if we were looking for each other.

I wore a skirt, walked in the chequered shadows of trees, had my hair cut and opened my bag without being bitten by a crampon. I caught a bus to Lyttelton Museum, an overstuffed old building smelling of linoleum. The small Antarctic gallery displayed a vermilion parka identical to the one I had taken off the previous day, and curled photographs of the
Terra Nova
black cat, inevitably called Nigger, in the hammock specially made for him on the long voyage from Britain to New Zealand. Next to the pictures of Nigger, a little girl was riding Rumba through shafts of sepia sunlight. Rumba was one of Shackleton's ponies, only he never made it south – he was left behind to live out his life in Waikiri.

On my last night in Christchurch I was invited to a soiree in the Polar Room, the repository of an impressive collection of recent Antarctic memorabilia. It was presided over by the most assiduous keeper of the flame, an author, historian, eccentric and
bon viveur
called David Harrowfield. The Polar Room was tucked away at the back of his neat suburban house and clipped garden, and its trophies included the escape hatch from the first Scott Base bar and a bicycle modified with skis. Peter, the Asgaard Ranger I had met at Scott Base, arrived to model his original and much abused Ranger parka, which he had donated to the Polar Room, and large quantities of wine and sausage rolls were disgorged from the fridge. It was the centenary of the landing of the
Southern Cross
on the Antarctic continent, so David put on a special cape (I can't remember why it was special, if I ever knew) and declaimed from Borchgrevinck's diary until we had drunk the wine and eaten the sausage rolls. Then we went home.

Roger made me tomato on toast for breakfast as his last gesture of ‘NZ Operational Support', as he referred to himself. On my way out to the airport I found a sausage roll in my pocket. I stopped off at Canterbury Museum to meet the Antarctic curator and historian Baden Norris. They were cutting the grass in Hagley Park, and the air smelt sweet. Baden was waiting in the foyer for me when I arrived. He was a short, middle-aged man with a diffident manner and an encyclopedic knowledge of Antarctica. I took to him straight away. He had spent six weeks alone at Shackleton's hut in 1963, making sure American helicopters didn't land too close to the Adélie colony, which had halved since the first landing.

‘I felt I was never alone,' he said. As we walked around his gallery he told me that he had grown up in Lyttelton. ‘Antarctica was always part of my life,' he said, running his fingers through his grey hair. ‘My next-door neighbours were children of people who'd been on the early expeditions.'

He pointed out Spencer-Smith's ecclesiastical stoles, neatly folded in a glass cabinet. ‘Extraordinary man,' he commented, more to himself than to me. Spencer-Smith was a member of the Ross Sea party of Shackleton's
Endurance
expedition, and in his unpublished sledging journal, which came to light in 1981, a neat pencil hand records the laborious work of depot-laying and the powerful influence of the continent upon the human spirit. ‘All the old questionings seem to come up for answer in this quiet place,' he wrote, ‘but one is able to think more quietly than in civilisation.' He was a priest, and a polymath (he had ‘a long argument' with Stevens about the essential nature of a preposition), and his spirit was relentlessly cheerful until he died from scurvy and exhaustion lashed on the back of a sledge. When they had to leave him alone and sick in his tent for days he had delivered a sermon in French to occupy himself, and on All Souls' Day he recorded, ‘More trips around London this evening.'

∗

I flew to Auckland on a Hawker Siddely, and the man sitting next to me asked where I'd been. When I told him, he said, ‘Oh, my cousin went there.' Everybody in New Zealand knew someone who had been south, even if it were the milkman's brother. It brought the continent into their sphere of consciousness, and made it less remote, whereas in Britain and America what I had done was akin to going to the moon. ‘Antarctica does sit in your imagination more if you live in the south of New Zealand,' someone said. ‘Also, on a global scale, New Zealand is involved, for once.' A friend of Roger's remarked that he needed ‘to go for an Oatie', which meant visit the lavatory. The phrase had evolved from Oates's famous departure from the tent, with which everyone in New Zealand was familiar. Most revealing of all, a Maori waitress who had sat down at a truckstop to join me for a mug of tea said, ‘You know, when we feel a cold wind on our faces, we know where it's coming from.'

Perception of place is bound to be conditioned by nationality. The race to the North Pole was an American race, whereas there were no Americans in the south when Shackleton and Scott were manhauling across the ice. This partially explains why Antarctica's role in the American national psyche is less significant than its British counterpart. The media in America has tended to orientate public interest towards the Arctic, whereas the British press, generally, has done the opposite. An American scientist I met stooped over a seal hole on the Ross Sea remarked, ‘Antarctica seems to have been like the Wild West for Brits,' and after a pause he added, ‘Maybe it still is.'

None the less, to many people at home the Arctic and the Antarctic are indistinguishable. I had observed it when people issued warnings to me about polar bears and asked, as they frequently did, ‘When are you going back up there?' In reality, the two could hardly be more different. First, the Arctic is not a landmass, and the North Pole is on floating ice. Second, the Arctic Circle has an indigenous population. People can live within it unassisted. Musk oxen wander within 800 miles of the North Pole. Things grow.

Despite the fact that the outer edges of the Arctic Circle are able to sustain life, all the Frozen Beards agree that trekking to the North Pole is a much harsher business than its southern equivalent. Everyone who had been on northern expeditions remembered immediately how bad it had been, whereas – like an irresistible lover – Antarctica had seduced them into forgetting the pain. Mike Stroud, who had made three attempts with Sir Ranulph Fiennes to walk unaided across the sea ice to the North Pole and manhauled across the southern continent via the South Pole, was in no doubt about which he preferred. ‘The Arctic is an evil place. It's infinitely more threatening. You have to trek in winter, for a start – that's the only time it's frozen over – and getting to the North Pole doesn't have the same appeal as getting to the South Pole. Why is that? Is it a British thing? It occurs to me that it might be a remnant of Scott's influence. Antarctica is still very special in the British consciousness. Also, Antarctica was a mystery for much longer than the Arctic.'

Robert Swan, who has walked to both Poles, was characteristically exuberant on the subject. ‘The Arctic is dour and bad-tempered. It's a bastard kind of place. It drip feeds you arsenic in your tea. The Antarctic is far more beguiling – though it's more of a bastard in a way, as it lulls you into a false sense of security and then bangs you from behind with a sledge-hammer. It all looks much softer, but crevasses lurk – it's more psychopathic.' He anthropomorphised both places relentlessly. ‘Antarctica is like meeting a mass-murderer who looks nice. At least in the Arctic you
know
you're meeting a mass-murderer.' Before I left his huge Chelsea office he tipped his chair back, paused for a moment and, neatly reversing the biological distinction that separates the two places, said quietly – as quietly as he could say anything, that is – ‘The Arctic is a bit dead. The Antarctic is definitely much more alive. In the Arctic, it's as if someone has said, “
FREEZE
!”, whereas when we went up the Beardmore it was as if the landscape were saying “Hi, how's it going?”'

∗

Even in Auckland, I found Antarctica. It was one half of the city's largest tourist attraction, called ‘Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter'. I rode a sno-cat through a penguin colony, though the birds were still in transit from San Diego zoo and workmen were crouched on the fibreglass bergs, eating sandwiches, their thermos flasks balancing on the smiling heads of plastic seals. People were videoing the videos. They had even erected a replica of Scott's hut in which a piano occasionally broke spontaneously into the national anthem. The whole place endorsed the old imperial notion that this was part of Kiwi culture too, a particularly obsolete idea in the muggy, sub-tropical north island. Ed Hillary, though, had made a nice introductory film about Antarctica which played on a continuous loop, and he ended by saying, ‘It belongs to you.' I liked that.

I flew to LA, and thence to London. A sales rep from a computer company attached himself to me for the whole journey. He was wearing an Armani suit, and his face possessed none of those small wrinkles produced by thought. I last saw him next to the luggage carousel at Heathrow, the Armani looking as though he'd had a fight in it.

‘Nice to be back on Terra Cotta,' he said.

I spent two days in London, feeling like a visitor in my own life. When I turned up for mass at St Mark's on Regent's Park Canal, always one of my first ports of call, I was shocked to find a cardboard arrow pinned to the locked doors. It was pointing to the stone steps which led to the crypt. When I got down there, a dozen people squeezed into Sunday School chairs were gathered round a trestle table, bare save for a plain wooden cross. Mass had not yet begun.

I stood in the narrow doorway, baffled.

‘My dear,' said Father Tom as he strode towards me, arms outstretched. ‘You won't have heard.'

A gang had broken into our church the night before Remembrance Sunday and piled everything they could find into three enormous bonfires, which they lit, presumably warming their hands as they stood around enjoying the conflagration. The building had been virtually gutted, although the stained-glass window of St Mark wearing dashing purple slippers had not been fatally damaged. It was next to the Lady Chapel, and in it St Mark was writing in a large book, though he had been distracted (presumably by St Peter in the adjacent window) and had twisted away from his work as if eager to see what was going on. Besides the slippers, he was wearing a sumptuous emerald robe. I had grown very fond of the image.