The notebook from 1937 is different. Somewhat. As with all the notebooks, he lists all the boys alphabetically; seventy-seven in this case. This time, Rodney is listed. He is nearly seventeen, attending Rugby, a public school, and is old enough to be on the expedition as one of the boys in his own right. He is not the youngest in the group. Next to the names of the boys, Levick writes in-depth summaries about the prowess of each one. Every boy, that is, except for two. Next to Rodney’s name, there is nothing, as if he is not good enough to warrant a description from his father, with or without Greek letters.
The other boy without a summary also catches my eye. He is listed as Gurney, E. R. (Harrow) 18.2 and next to his name Levick has written only one word: Killed.
This expedition had gone to the area around Trout River, which is part of Gros Morne National Park on the western side of Newfoundland facing the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the coastlines that Captain Cook had mapped with such adroitness two centuries earlier. It is also within a felled tree or two of where Sir Mayson Moss Beeton had his timber business.
Edward Ralph Gurney, I learn by reading on, fell down a cliff on August 11, 1937, when he and another boy left the camp without permission and tried to climb down the rock face beside a large waterfall. His companion managed to get back to the camp to raise the alarm, but Levick and the others in the search party were unable to find Edward before nightfall. When they found him the next morning, he was dead.
Suddenly, it is as if this ghost that is Levick turns to flesh and blood and is sitting there with me, because I start to see aspects of him more clearly than I ever have before. What hits me hard, almost as hard as the blow to poor Edward’s head that ended his life, is the way Levick reacts to all this. The expedition proceeds as if nothing has happened. They go camping and hiking in the forests around Trout River for the next three weeks with Levick writing in his diary and making notes about the boys, save for Rodney and, of course, no mention of Edward. He does, however, write out in his notebook the cable he sends to Edward’s parents. It chills me to read it; God knows how they must have felt upon receiving it:
With very great regret & sympathy I have to inform you that your son was accidentally killed yesterday by falling from a cliff. He was killed instantly. Am arranging for his funeral at Corner Brook the nearest Church Town.
Commander Levick, Trout Lake, Bonne Bay, Newfoundland
Such detachment. So brutally stark.
Edward’s body is buried in the small graveyard at Curling, a residential neighborhood in Corner Brook overlooking the sea: the same reward for dying young in a fall that had been accorded to Charles Bonner. But that is where the similarities end. Levick gets a wreath of spruce made for the grave with the inscription:
TO YOUR MEMORY
FROM YOUR COMPANIONS
OF THE
BSES. 1937.
So stiff and formal. No Tennyson or Browning. More Scott than Shackleton. That Victorian reserve. Murray Levick is a man who has looked death in the eye, his own and those of other men, more than should be bearable in one lifetime. Yet this chills me too. His complete lack of passion; his complete lack of empathy. To Your Memory From Your Companions: for fuck’s sake Levick, is that the best you can do? And you call yourself a writer?
I am in St John’s, Newfoundland. It is not that I am angry at Levick, more that I am disappointed in him. He has been my unseen guide, my Sherpa, and yet after the Antarctic and the travails of war, he no longer seems to be beating a path I would wish to follow. In my heart, I hope desperately that I will find evidence that he took that canoe trip down the Saskatchewan River, which he and Campbell had discussed at such length in the snow cave. That he tried to write the book about the journey, even if it, like his paper on the sexual behavior of the penguins, remained unpublished. Because, in a way that I have not appreciated until now, Levick is becoming my hero as much as my mentor, supplanting the handsome but troubled Cherry-Garrard, who knew a good word when he saw one, for sure, but lacked a scientist’s sensibilities. It is all about the journey with Cherry-Garrard, not the end result. I want my Levick to be both. To be the wild adventurer and scientist, but to come wrapped in the romance he discovered in the snow cave: his life in two acts. His second act has begun, but it does not seem to be benefiting from his reflection during the interval, during that winter he spent lying in the dark on the floor of the igloo with Campbell by his side.
St John’s is a city that seems at risk of tumbling into its own harbor, a line of ships along its edge, the only thing separating its buildings and people from the sea. From atop a headland, I realize this is because the wharves don’t stick out perpendicular from the shore; the ships are all tied up in one long line along the shore, bow to stern, like a conga-line of dancing boats.
I head inland to the flat-roofed brown building on the campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland that is its library. It is here that Victor Campbell chose to have his papers and records deposited rather than in Raymond Priestley’s Scott Polar Research Institute, which in itself might indicate some antagonism between men who had managed to coexist for so long on so little with barely a bad word between them. Campbell, it seems, did a lot of fishing and hunting once he settled in Newfoundland with Marit, but it is his diaries and notebooks from the Terra Nova Expedition, and especially those written in the snow cave, that once more bring everything powerfully back to me. The paper is stained with black fingerprints and smudges from the seal blubber. The writing is in pencil, the letters neat and at once larger, more rounded, and more spaced than Levick’s hand.
Campbell is, surprisingly, a man of two halves, as we like to say in New Zealand when referring to a rugby game. His writing is to the point, concise, not a wasted word on emotion, not an adjective to describe something as beautiful or horrific, whichever it might be, and surely he experienced both. But his illustrations, sketches in pencil, are wonderfully artful. What the man could not say with words, he said with lines and shading. One, in particular, is especially arresting. It is of the Terra Nova meeting the Fram at the Bay of Whales, that fateful moment when the lives of the Eastern Party were changed for good and Murray Levick was sent down an unexpected path to becoming the world’s first penguin biologist.
Yet, there is nothing in all the papers and notebooks I peruse to suggest that Campbell ever saw Levick again, let alone floated down some river with him. I find that strange, given what they have been through, given their plans, given their shared experiences of the awfulness of an Antarctic winter with very little and the tragedy of a Gallipoli campaign that achieved very little. Especially since Levick’s father-in-law lived in Newfoundland and the Levicks came, on numerous occasions, to Newfoundland with the exploring society. How hard would it have been to stop in and see an old chum, Levick, one with whom you had been to Hell and back?
I leave St John’s and head into the interior, trying to at least come to terms with what Newfoundland might have offered Levick that it could pull so hard on him compared to Campbell.
Immediately, I identify with the sense of wilderness that would have made Newfoundland a sort of green version of Antarctica for him: the flat barrier outcrops and the trees that go on for miles. I pass through Terra Nova National Park and, illogically perhaps, I assume that it must have been named after Scott’s ship. In fact, it is the old name for Newfoundland: Terra Nova, New Land.
Heading further northwest, toward Gros Morne National Park, I really see why this wild country, with its rugged forested tablelands, should be where Levick came. In his worldview, its extremes can push the body and turn boys to men. Except the luckless Edward, who it pushes too far, and the boy who doesn’t merit a mention, Rodney, who maybe it pushes too hard?
I find one more photo of Levick with Rodney. This one is of the two of them sitting by the little garden pond at their home, the White Barn, in Old Oxted in Surrey. Rodney has his mother’s mouth, oval and bursting with teeth, his dad’s ears, and his mum’s dark wavy hair. At eighteen, he sti
ll looks slighter and smaller than Levick, who is then sixty-two.
In some ways it must have been tough to have Levick for a dad; this man who only held you to restrain you; this man for whom discipline was such an asset as a scientist but such an impediment as a parent.
I cannot help having a soft spot for Rodney. He may have had some issues, but he was certainly not the fool that others made out. No doubt his father pushes him into Officer Cadet Training, a sort of version of the Ganges. The Second World War is just beginning—so much for the first ending all wars—and Rodney graduates on March 9, 1940, to become second lieutenant in the Corps of Royal Engineers. Eighteen months later, he is promoted to lieutenant, not long after London has endured a terrible bombing campaign and Christ Church is no more.
During the war, Levick is recalled to the Royal Navy to train a group of commandos to undertake a daring mission called Operation Tracer, which would have seen them sealed in caves beneath the Rock of Gibraltar for months, in conditions reminiscent of his time in the snow cave, to spy on German shipping movements. The mission is never deployed but Levick is: in 1943, he is used to train commandos and special operations forces at Lochailort Castle. There he teaches survival techniques and advises the men on how they can become tougher, both physically and psychologically. He even publishes his lectures as a pamphlet entitled Hardening of Commando Troops for Warfare.
Yes, I can imagine that he would not have been the easiest of dads to have.
I go to Budleigh Salterton on the coast of Devon where Levick spent the last years of his life. The countryside on the outskirts of the town is as bucolic as can be, with mown fields bordered by oaks and tall poplar trees. A soft light illuminates a low mist that is hugging the ground—ethereal—the remnants of the morning’s fog. It seems as if the earth itself is breathing.
At the seaside, the beach is a long gentle curve; a swathe of pale stones upon which a collection of colorful dinghies and small yachts have been left beached like wooden versions of Weddell seals. The sea is flat and calm, barely moving. In patches it is turquoise, in others purple, reflecting puffy bruised clouds that appear more moody than threatening. It reminds me of my last visit to the Cape Royds hut. The sky could have been the very same one.
Budleigh Salterton is a quiet town of restrained beauty, known locally as “God’s Waiting Room” because the average age of the residents is supposedly over seventy. Murray Levick had his appointment with God fourteen miles away, at the Poltimore House Nursing Home, where he died on May 30, 1956, from prostate cancer, just weeks before his eightieth birthday. Audrey, fourteen years his junior, lived for another twenty-four years in Budleigh Salterton. There are people in Budleigh Salterton who still remember the Levicks. One doctor says that Audrey was a formidable woman, who demanded house calls rather than coming down to the doctor’s surgery, as was the requirement for everyone else: he recalls that he felt like “running a mile” whenever she called.
In a sense, that would not be at all inappropriate: Murray Levick, as I have repeatedly discovered, was a stern disciplinarian who put great stock on physical fitness.
I make my way to the country lane where the Levicks lived. Their house is grander than most, just shy of a mansion. It is a large, two-storied, white roughcast house with a gray slate-tiled roof. Almost all the windows are divided into eight small panes making it look classic, old, and English, all at once. There are plantings all around the base of the house, including a large hydrangea bush by the entrance, which, jarringly, has flowers of different colors: some blue, some purple, some pink.
Rodney had continued to live here even after his mother died. Eventually, he died on March 28, 1999. According to the neighbors, he was “as mad as a meat axe.” He lived alone in a single room above the garage while the rest of the house fell into wrack and ruin, the pipes burst, and much of its contents, including his father’s mementoes from Antarctica, were damaged. He would often run around the property naked and could be seen timing himself as he biked, repeatedly, the several miles from the house to the beach, always intent on bettering the time he had taken on the previous trip.
From the house, it is possible to look across the pale fields, which are bordered by dark green hedgerows and trees, and make out the blue strip of water on the horizon that is Lyme Bay. It seems much too far to be enjoyable to bike it time and again. I am struck by a vision, probably an apocryphal one, but it will not go away: a naked Rodney hunched over his bicycle as he cycles from house to beach and back again, all the while looking at his wristwatch. I see a son whose sexuality might be regarded as seemingly as aberrant as any of the penguins Levick studied and one might suppose, a son who has never quite managed to live in the shadow of his father’s achievements at endurance.
I get access to Levick’s house. The people who purchased it off Rodney’s estate are still there. While much of the estate was sold at auction, including Levick’s Zoological Notes to an antiquarian book collector in London, there is still much that has been left behind in the house. The owners bring out Levick’s skis, his initials carved into the wood: the very skis, I believe, that he used to ski across to Hut Point with Campbell’s letter for Atkinson declaring that the entire Northern Party had survived the winter in a snow cave and their journey to Cape Evans. And there are many of Levick’s framed photos of the Adelie penguins at Cape Adare: his private collection. Had they been hung with pride on the living room walls, I cannot help wondering, or sequestered away like a stack of pornography?
Most intriguing of all is Levick’s actual chair, low-backed and covered in cream upholstery. The owners still have it in a corner of the living room. I take myself over to it immediately and sit in it. I feel connected to Levick in a palpably physical way. The chair is extraordinarily uncomfortable, which I suppose is fitting for a man who prided himself on enduring hardship. I realize, in that instant, that in some ways Rodney and I had both been living in Levick’s shadow, desperately wanting to move beyond it.
In one way, I suppose, I have. I have discovered an aspect of the penguins’ sexuality that Murray Levick would need a whole new Greek alphabet to record, if indeed he could even bring himself to do that. I have discovered not just penguin perverts, but penguin prostitutes.
It is the mid 1990s. Over four seasons at Cape Bird, Fiona Hunter and I study the copulations of Adelie penguins. We are there like foreign war correspondents, covering the Sperm Wars. We are primarily motivated by my earlier work, which has shown that these penguins often switch mates during the courtship period, opening up the possibility that some males risk rearing chicks that are not their own, given that we know sperm can survive for several days in the reproductive tracts of females. Theoretically, at least, when mate-switches occur, the eggs of the female may get fertilized by the male she has been with, rather than her new partner, even though he is the one that will provide the parental care. Our research has shown that these new males have a counterstrategy that involves bombarding their females relentlessly with sperm like the HMS Bacchante firing at Turkish positions on Gallipoli.
Like any good war correspondents then, we are concentrating on the conflict, on the guns going off. We are recording every copulation. When did it occur? Who was it between? Did he hit the target? We swab the females to measure the scale of the hits and we induce the males to engage in target practice by putting out decoys: corpses and fluffy toys.
No one—not Levick, not anyone—has ever monitored copulations in penguins as intensely as we do over those four summers. And, like war crimes, there are things you see that you are not looking for, that you have never supposed in your wildest dreams could happen, but the evidence keeps adding up and telling you otherwise.
Because we are trying to monitor so many birds all at once, we really focus on only one thing: the transfer of sperm from the male to the female, the thing that in the pornography industry is called the “cum shot.” We are using a recognized method for sampling behavior known as All Occurrence Sampling, whereby we re
cord every instance of the one thing in all individuals to the exclusion of all else. We are concentrating on the cum shot, not the courtship behavior leading up to it.
However, after the first egg is laid, it takes about three days before the female can lay the second egg. During this time, it is mainly the female’s male partner that sits on the egg (even though Levick thought otherwise). While he gets incubation underway, the female will often go in search of stones to shore up their nest. The problem she faces is that at this stage in the season, all the easy pickings with regard to nearby stones have long been scooped up by other birds.
We notice that the females adopt different strategies for getting stones. The most industrious and virtuous, those that adhere to the penguin equivalent of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, go searching for stones outside their subcolony, even if it means walking quite some distance. Others adopt a sneaky and arguably sinful approach: they steal stones from their neighbors’ nests. All this we know. We have seen it before, even when not covering the Sperm Wars. Levick had seen it too. We do not need to document it again. It is outside of our correspondents’ mandate.
However, we start noticing, without looking for it, that some females adopt a different ploy whereby they dupe males out of their stones by pretending they might have sex with them. What these females do is approach a single unattached male, who, with nothing to do but collect stones, has usually amassed an impressive collection of stones that form his empty nest. The female approaches such a male by adopting the preliminary pose for courtship. She bows deeply, bill nearly touching the ground. The male, will typically respond quickly—an anthropomorphic Levick might even say, enthusiastically—by bowing equally low and moving out of his nest. This is the final prelude to copulation, as it allows the female to lie down in his nest before he mounts her. Except that, what these duplicitous females do is that they don’t assume the position, they use the opportunity when presented with the male’s vacant nest and his wealth of stones, to reach across, remove one of his stones, and then carry it back to her own nest. The duped male is left horny and down a stone for his troubles. So pathetically desperate are these unpaired males to mate—and well they might be, as the breeding season is disappearing apace and with it any chances for their own breeding success—the female has only to repeat the charade and the male will stand aside again. In one case, we see a female take sixty-two stones from a male using this cloaca-teasing behavior.
A Polar Affair Page 31
