The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  It was a measure of Bill’s flexibility that he quickly abandoned the notion of night and day, for in truth there was nothing to mark the difference. The cold never lessened, and apart from an hour at what passed for midday, when a dim and ghostly twilight stained the horizon, the blackness was absolute. Often we went without lunch because it was simply too painful to go through that whole wretched rigmarole of unpacking and repacking. We marched until we could go no further, or until Bill imagined Cherry’s feet were in danger. He never gave a thought to his own. The onset of frostbite is interesting, in that the warning symptoms, mainly a tingling of the affected parts, are similar to those of the thawing-out process.

  We made no attempt to attend to our frozen extremities until we’d eaten. The effect of hot food was nothing short of miraculous, as though it by-passed the usual channels of ingestion and entered straight into the bloodstream. As Bill rightly said, it was like putting a hot-water bottle to one’s heart. Then, it was easier to unwind our puttees, lever off our frozen finneskö and socks and begin to nurse our feet back to feeling.

  We even managed to laugh at the spectacle we made, Cherry leaning back with his toes paddling for warmth beneath Bill’s wind jacket and undervest, Bill doubled forward, his hands tucked into Cherry’s armpits, me with my nose held over the pan steaming on the cooker. If Ponting had been with us he’d have had a field day with his camera, though Lord knows what others would have construed from the images.

  I don’t understand by what magic I’ve been spared, but I was undoubtedly less affected by the cold than either Bill or Cherry. Never once since we made landfall have my feet become frozen. Oates, Meares, Atkinson, the Owner, even Gran, they’ve all been caught pretty badly at one time or another. Perhaps it has something to do with my height, or rather the lack of it, in that being closer to the ground my blood has less far to circulate. Whatever the reason, I can stand low temperatures better than the other fellows, a fact Bill finds strange, seeing I’ve spent most of my life in the tropics. It’s only my nose that ever gets nipped, it being so damnably prominent.

  That isn’t to say I got away entirely scot-free, for I had fearsome stomach cramps from our diet. Bill was on extra fat, Cherry had been persuaded to go for carbohydrates – he was usually doubled up with heartburn – and I was experimenting with proteids. I found I couldn’t eat all my pemmican ration, Bill balked at his quantity of butter, while Cherry complained of hunger and a craving for sweet things. He said he had a picture sitting in his head of a tin of peaches in thick syrup. In my opinion, the Huntley and Palmer biscuits made up from a secret recipe of Bill’s in consultation with a chemist, provided all the sugar we needed. There were two sorts, one called ‘Antarctic’, and the other ‘Emergency’, but as either label seemed to furnish a correct description of the pickle we were in, we ate both and never noticed the difference. I thought a lot about wedges of freshly baked bread, and boiled potatoes sprinkled with salt.

  On the sixth night – we were now into July and that day had slogged ten miles to gain three – Bill suggested we turn back.

  ‘Rather not,’ said Cherry. He was crouching over the cooker, pricking his blisters with a knife and blissfully wincing.

  ‘What do you think, Birdie?’ asked Bill. I knew he was wanting advice rather than an heroic, gung-ho affirmative.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s no denying conditions are far worse than we could have imagined, and I expect they’ll get worse.’

  ‘Dear God,’ he interjected.

  ‘But,’ I continued, ‘we have sufficient food, are in pretty rude health, and it strikes me that collecting these eggs is a jolly worthy enterprise. I happen to believe we can stick it.’

  I was speaking no more than the truth, having always found that willpower overcomes all adversities. One just has to believe that it’s within one’s spiritual domain to conquer difficulties. That is not to say that I don’t recognise there has to be a time to submit, possibly a time to die, merely that I’ve never yet been taken to the brink

  Aware of this lack of experience, I added, ‘It’s your decision, Uncle Bill, but speaking for myself, I say we go on.’ At which Cherry nodded vigorously.

  Bill cheered up after this and waxed on about the penguins. I must say they lead terrible lives, in that their undoubted maternal instinct leads more to infanticide than nurturing.

  ‘In their desire to further the existence of the species,’ Bill informed us, ‘they often trample their young to death. It’s a matter of too many mothers in charge of too few eggs.’

  ‘Smothering love,’ exclaimed Cherry.

  ‘If one of them should leave their egg unattended for a moment,’ Bill said, ‘another rushes up and instantly makes off with it, with the result they often get broken. The bereft bird sometimes goes to the lengths of fashioning an egg out of a lump of ice … it’s quite pathetic to watch the way they carry it around in the expectation of it hatching.’

  He and Cherry usually went on talking for an hour or more, by which time I was in the land of dreams. We were all troubled by nightmares on the winter journey, but whereas I drifted back into sleep Bill and Cherry apparently tossed and turned until the shivering dawn. Bill was hounded awake by images of that silver bird he’d glimpsed from the crow’s nest of the Terra Nova, and dear old Cherry was chased by a flood of treacle which threatened to engulf him. I could never remember what visions disturbed me. Bill used to say it gave him immense pleasure to lie there listening to my oblivious snores.

  That first, awful week we thought conditions had got about as bad as we could possibly encounter, and we were wrong. After rounding Cape Mackay we ran into a series of blizzards of such icy ferocity that our minds threatened to become as numbed as our bodies. We were almost worse off in the tent than out of it, for our breath and the steam from the cooker deposited a rim of hoar frost on the inner lining which, if we left the cooker burning long enough, gradually melted and dripped mercilessly down upon us. Our sleeping bags were daily turned into frozen boards, and in trying to prise them open one had to be careful lest the leather broke like glass. And then, of course, once they had thawed sufficiently for us to force our way into them, it was like lying in a damp ditch until, the cooker extinguished and the temperature plummeting, the outer covering began to stiffen all over again.

  I don’t know why I found it so easy to sleep, but I did; sometimes, or so the others told me, I dozed off in the middle of a conversation. During those moments when I was dragged back to consciousness by the agony of stomach cramps, I felt Cherry shuddering against my back. One night, dreaming I was watching a tap dancer on the stage of the music-hall, his arms hung forward in that peculiar puppet stance, I woke to hear the chattering of Bill’s teeth.

  Blizzard-bound, we passed the time speculating on who might be in that final party to reach the Pole. Both Cherry and I thought Bill would be one of them, for old time’s sake, but he insisted he was a scientist not a foot slogger, and he guessed the Owner would probably take myself and the two seamen, Lashly and Crean. I said surely Oates would be picked instead of me, and what about Teddy Evans, at which Bill laughed and said Evans hadn’t one chance in a hundred of being included. When we’d exhausted the possibilities, we conjectured what Amundsen was up to, and whether his chances were better than our own, bearing in mind the number of dogs he had with him.

  Bill was cautious; I suspect he knew a lot more about the Owner’s plans than he let on. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he said, ‘that dogs have always been considered preferable to other forms of transport, but we haven’t really tested the efficiency of the motor vehicles.’

  ‘Lashly says they only work on perfectly flat surface,’ Cherry argued. ‘And only in certain temperatures.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ I told them, ‘I think there’s an unsporting element in the use of either motors or dogs. Far better to stride out, nation against nation, man against man.’

  Bill held I was perhaps clinging to the inappropriate chivalry of a bygone
age.

  ‘I see no reason to be ashamed of that,’ I retorted.

  ‘Then you see eye to eye with Con,’ Bill said, in a tone of voice which coming from him was positively chilling. ‘I just hope the rest of us don’t have cause to regret such romantic notions.’

  Somewhat taken aback, I dropped the subject and switched to a topic we never tired of, namely what we might do when the whole exciting business was over and done with and we were back in England. ‘I shall spend an entire week swimming,’ I vowed. ‘And before that, an entire week eating.’

  Bill said he intended to make straight for the woods near Crippets, his childhood home in the vicinity of Cheltenham. ‘I got more joy from those woods,’ he lamented, ‘and learnt more of things worth knowing than anywhere else on earth. It’s the haunt of the badger, the fox and the owl, and in spring the bluebells mirror the colour of the sky.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Cherry, looking fit to cry.

  ‘When I had tuberculosis I used to go there at dawn, light my pipe, lean against a tree stump clutching Modern Painters and the New Testament, and watch the first sunbeams gradually lighting up the corners of the glade. I’ve never known such happiness. Of course, I believed I was dying, which alone brings extraordinary peace of mind.’

  This rather silenced Cherry. Pressed, he astonished Bill and me by blurting forth his ambition of taking out to supper every girl he met. ‘She wouldn’t even have to be pretty,’ he stuttered. ‘Just so long as she seemed to like me.’

  The blizzards subsiding, we stumbled onwards. Being the shortest, I led on the traces, Cherry and Bill fanning out behind. In the darkness Cherry was doubly blind; he could never wear his spectacles on the marches.

  A curious thing happened when we were relaying the sledges. With only the candle to light the way we found it easier to tread back in our earlier footprints, and at first there was nothing remarkable in our progress. Then I became aware that both Bill and Cherry were floundering behind more than usual. On looking round I was astonished to see they were advancing as though prancing over hot coals. Apparently their footsteps, due to some optical delusion, appeared before them as elevations rather than depressions, and they found themselves compelled to raise their feet to step over what they took to be hummocks. I wasn’t affected. They called each other all kinds of a fool, but it didn’t help, and they were forced into the absurdity of continuing to clamber over phantom mounds. If it hadn’t been so wearisome we might have laughed.

  On the twelfth day the temperature registered –69 degrees. Cherry crawled out of the tent and turned his head to the right, and instantly his balaclava froze to his wind-jacket. For four hours he had to pull with his head stuck in that position. Our clothing, with its accumulation of ice, was now becoming as heavy as lead, as were our sleeping-bags, and in the comparative warmth of the tent we lay in sodden misery. The days’ marches compared to the night ‘rests’ were heavenly, and both intervals of time were terrible beyond belief. Strange to think that in my mother’s garden the gold light of summer danced upon the maple leaves. Every morning, after I’d fumbled through the hour or more it took to light the candle in the lantern, Bill asked, ‘Should we turn back?’ and the answer mumbled through cracked lips was always the same, ‘No, we’ll stick it out.’

  I don’t know what kept the others going, beyond the fact that Bill wanted his penguin embryos and Cherry was prepared to follow him to hell if need be. For my part, I felt there was something splendid, sublime even, in pitting oneself against the odds. I’ve always been fortunate in the things I’ve wanted to do, always achieved the goals I’ve set myself. Over the years I’ve bumped into fellows I was on the Worcester with, and quite a few of them, not having got anywhere quick enough, had given up the sea and were sitting behind desks in dusty offices, and others of the same age as myself were still no further forward than first mate of some leaky barque trading between Australia and the Philippines.

  There is a portion of my life, of course, which has been less satisfactory. I’m well aware of how physically unprepossessing I must appear to the opposite sex, yet none the less I dream of meeting a girl who could care for me, the sort of girl my father found in my beloved mother. Those sisters I met in Melbourne, Dorothy and Mary, were frightfully nice. I liked Dorothy best, but she was the prettiest and had all the fellows flocking round her, and I’m just no good at dancing and paying compliments and all that rot. I never discovered which one sent me the jam, but I hope it was Dorothy. Seeing I haven’t yet reached thirty, I comfort myself with the thought there must be someone out there waiting for me to come through a door. And in the meantime, life is great fun and I couldn’t be more contented with my lot. The world is changing, and soon the machine will be of more importance than the body, and it’s tremendous luck to have been born into the last few seconds of an epoch in which a man is still required to stand up and be counted.

  It took us nineteen days to reach Cape Crozier. Bill was terribly bothered, as he’d told the Owner we’d be there and back in ten. I think I knew by then we’d get through. Sometime in the second week, when we were floundering across the pressure ridges, Mt Terror above us, but invisible, and the Barrier to our right, the moon flitted out from behind the clouds, and there, only five paces ahead of us, was a gigantic crevasse lidded with a shiny covering of thin ice. At the time we were running downhill, the sledges at our heels and, but for that sudden pale illumination we would most certainly have perished. I understood then that providence was on our side; it was unthinkable to believe God would save us simply to prolong the agony.

  From then on Bill insisted on going ahead with the lantern to make sure the surface was firm. I wanted to take my turn but he begged me to do as he bade. ‘I got us into this mess,’ he said, ‘and I simply couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you and Cherry.’

  It wasn’t all misery. On one of our halts we lay spread-eagled on the ice and stared up at a sky blazing with the glory of the most wonderful aurora I’d ever witnessed. I groaned beneath the splendour of those silken curtains, yellow, green, and orange, billowing at the window of the heavens.

  ‘Tell me, tell me,’ pleaded Cherry; without his glasses the whirling display was but a blur.

  I don’t know what I told him, for the effects were at first mesmeric, then hallucinatory. I was falling, diving towards a sea whose ripples spread and widened until they touched the edges of my soul. I know at one point Bill began to squeal with laughter – our lips were so split and caked with dried blood it was painful to open them fully – and when we demanded to know what was funny, he said, ‘Ask me what I’m doing here, you dear fellows.’

  Ever obliging, Cherry croaked, ‘What are you doing here, Uncle Bill?’ And he replied, ‘I’ve never liked crowds’, and then we all squealed, because we could see the humour of it: three ragged, frosted figures lying on their backs in the darkness of nowhere, emitting cries like stuck pigs as God’s own paintbrush splashed among the stars.

  At last we reached the Cape, and in a snowy dip between the twin peaks of the Knoll, 800 feet above the sea, we pitched our last camp and set to work to build the igloo. This was Bill’s pet project; before we left we spent hours poring over the sketches he made of this temporary refuge of ice and stones. He called it Oriana’s house, and sometimes we’d pretended to squabble as to where the sofa and the bookcases would go and who should have the bedroom overlooking the sea.

  We’d even practised building one like it on the shore below the hut, but that was in daylight and in the ‘mildness’ of March, and here the ice had hardened to the consistency of marble, and it was fearful labour cutting the blocks for the walls and shovelling the bits of gravel and drifted snow with which to pack the cracks. Still, in two days it was finished, the canvas roof secured, the blubber stove in place, and then we fought our way into those devilish sleeping-bags, whereupon I, at least, slept the sleep of the dead.

  We rose at three the next morning, into moonlight misty with fog. It’s at Cape Ev
ans that the Barrier, that great wall of ice which extends 400 miles south and east, meets the land, and we could just make out the tumultuous shapes of the pressure fields jostling the smudged edge of the frozen sea. On Bill’s reckoning it was four miles to the cliffs, and he wanted to get there by midday so as to have the benefit of the twilight hour. Blubber for the stove was now a more urgent priority than Emperor eggs; we were a quarter of a way through the fifth of those six precious tins of oil the Owner had so begrudged our taking.

  The last two miles took us through the pressure ridges, and by then the moon had gone. Imagine an acre, newly ploughed, in the heart of the English countryside, the noonday sun filtering through the branches of the oak trees at the boundary, the plump plough-horses standing motionless in the shade, the ploughboy fast asleep with his hat over his eyes. Then imagine, if you can, a field churned up by the flails of a plough so monstrous in size that the ensuing furrows sink sixty feet, the embankments on either side twisted and fissured into tortured mounds of glittering ice veined with crevasses, the whole landscape dim as the interior of a cave in which every shadow fades to deepest black. If you can imagine this, you may still have only the faintest, foggiest grasp of what we were up against.

  When we did get through, roped together and working with pickaxes; Bill couldn’t find his old route between the rock wall and the ice cliff. No matter how many attempts we made to clamber downwards, there was always too huge an obstacle or too great a drop. Then Bill would veer in another direction and shout out a warning of a crevasse ahead. I would cross, followed by Cherry, who, all but blind without his spectacles, stepped time without number into the void. Poor fellow, he was dreadfully upset at being such a handicap to us.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he panted, on each occasion we hauled him out. ‘I should never have come.’

  ‘You’re the best travelling companion a chap could wish for,’ I assured him. ‘Even if you do keep giving us the slip.’