I cannot imagine now why the thought of leaving my work and committing myself to three years away from home caused me so much anguish. I tremble sometimes to think of what a wrench it was to leave my dear wife Oriana, and how quickly I have adapted to the parting. I can only suppose that it’s in a man’s nature, and mine in particular, to bury regrets and make the best of things once a decision has been made.
I’m fortunate, of course, in that my fellow voyagers have turned out to be so congenial. With the exception of one or two, and I readily admit my antipathy towards them springs not so much from their defects as from my own deplorable lack of tolerance, one couldn’t wish for more delightful companions. Campbell will make an excellent leader, Pennell and Atkinson are absolutely splendid, Nelson a perfect treasure, and young Cherry Garrard as deserving of encouragement as any man I’ve met. As for Titus Oates, I’m beginning to suspect there is a great deal more to him than his air of amused taciturnity would have us believe.
And then there’s Birdie: it strikes me as mysterious the way the right man emerges just when destiny has need of him. I really believe Bowers to have been placed at our disposal by something other than chance. Listening to his history – and he’s the most modest of fellows – his navigation of the Irrawady, his accounts of shore-leaves spent bicycling across India, through terrain menaced by bear, leopard and elephant with nothing more formidable than a butterfly net strapped to his back, one can only marvel at his endurance.
Con recognised his worth at once, which is why he signed him on. The rest of us took him at face value; we thought him too young, too unprepossessing, too short of stature to rise above the common herd. We should have remembered Napoleon.
Just before dinner the other evening Nelson spotted a Portuguese man-of-war floating in its glassy bubble off the port side. They’re astonishingly beautiful in their natural element, reflecting water and sky. Once removed from the sea they go out like a candle, the colour snuffed away. I did a painting of it, all the same. Birdie, studying both the finished water-colour and the shrunken original, remarked how obviously the finger of God illuminates the animate world.
It’s significant, after so short a time, how we have all shaken down and begun to work as a team. Birdie and I are usually the first up in the morning. The ship now having run into the doldrums, and below decks often as steamy as a Turkish bath, we sleep on top of the ice-house. There are few more enjoyable experiences in this world than lying under the shooting stars to the sound of the wind moaning through the rigging, and the voice of dear old Birdie asking his interminable questions.
First job for everyone is a stint at the pumps – the ancient ship leaks like a sieve – after which some of us go over the side to bathe and others make do with hauling up buckets of sea water. I must say I’m considerably less enamoured of the former method since a shark made a beeline for Birdie. He, not at all put out, merely removed that absurd green hat he wears at all times and sweeping it round above his head hollered so loudly the shark took fright and fled. When I asked him if he had not felt afraid, he said, ‘Certainly, Uncle Bill, but it wouldn’t have done to let the beggar know it.’
When it rains, as it frequently does in these latitudes, you’ve never seen such a sight topside. The entire ship’s company strips off and stands naked beneath the tropical downpour. Some of us take the opportunity to wash our clothes in the stream that forms between the laboratories and the ward-room skylight.
By eight o’clock I’m generally in the crow’s-nest with my sketch-book and colours. The sunsets and sunrises in these regions are spectacular. Sometimes the equatorial sky resembles a vast continent soaring above us, its snow-capped mountains ringed with fire, its blue oceans edged by shores of blazing gold. At others, the clouds, sliding from pink to green to sullen purple, press so low that the ship quivers and stands still, stuck in black water under the bell-jar of the heavens, until, as though some mighty artery had burst, the sun nudges the horizon and stains the world with crimson light.
For two or three hours I make my poor attempts to capture such wonderful effects on paper, and then continue my work on Lord Lovat’s survey of diseases in grouse which I hope to complete by the time we reach Simonstown. Any odd hour left over sees me at the ward-room table working out sledging rations for the depot journey.
Lord knows what I should do if the crow’s-nest wasn’t available to me. Quite apart from its being the best vantage point from which to work, it also enables me to be solitary. Constant companionship exhausts me, and but for my lonely hours up against the sky I would find the boisterous evenings unbearable. I’m something of a dull fish, and though I’m flattered when one or other of the chaps come to me with their grievances – and sooner or later they all do – I’m much afraid that my reputation for patience and impartiality stems more from lassitude than involvement. Better to say nothing than to condemn, and to laugh with than to criticise, and so much happier.
Con is far more intuitive than I am. For example: upon first meeting Cherry-Garrard he deduced him to be a timid young man, much diminished by a domineering father and an over-protective mother. I haven’t the slightest idea how he reached such a conclusion on such short acquaintance, but I daresay he’s right. I have no quarrel with his additional observation that Cherry’s heart is in the right place.
The fact that we all mix so well is greatly to the credit of Teddy Evans. Though he could be considered somewhat lightweight, a little too boyish at all times, his lack of complexity and absence of moods are in the best interests of those under his command. The men respond to him well, and he seems to bear not the smallest grudge towards Petty Officer Evans, whose drunken behaviour after the Lord Mayor’s reception in Cardiff – it took six men to carry him back to the ship – caused so much personal affront. What one needs in these cramped conditions is to be under the government of a sunny disposition, and in this respect Teddy more than fills the bill.
He’s the leader of the pack when it comes to ragging; it was he who instigated the originally innocent game of ‘The Parish Priest Has Lost His Cap’, which now ends with the entire ward-room losing their trousers. I haven’t laughed so much in years. Titus says he’s never known a rowdier mess, yet it’s all good clean fun. We behave as though we were June boys again, waiting to go into bat, and I’m convinced that these frequent displays of bubbling high spirits bode well for the greater game ahead.
Last night, lying alongside each other in our sleeping-bags on top of the ice-house, and having exhausted me with his queries as to the reproductive processes of dolphins, thrashers and kingfish, Birdie asked me what I thought of Con. ‘You’re close to him, Bill,’ he said. ‘I have enormous respect for him myself, but I’d value your opinion.’
‘He’s the best,’ I replied, without hesitation. ‘If he seems unapproachable at times, it’s to do with his sense of fair play. He doesn’t want to appear to have favourites. He once confided that although he considers the sea his whole life and wouldn’t have it otherwise he nevertheless feels something of a misfit.’
Birdie immediately wanted to know what I meant. I tried to explain how Con has often thought that being subjected to Naval discipline at such an early age, hardly more than a child, has perhaps turned him from what might have been his true direction. ‘He fancies it has made him too rigid in his ways, too protective of himself.’
‘When I was a boy on the Worcester,’ Birdie said, ‘they dragged me under the hose every morning and scrubbed me with a deck brush until I bled. Particularly my nose, it being so prominent.’
‘You poor old fellow,’ I exclaimed, and meant it. He must have been such a very small boy.
‘What direction might he have gone in?’ he suddenly enquired.
‘I’m not sure,’ I told him. ‘And nor is he, his nature being a peculiar mixture of the man of action and the dreamer …’ And here I trailed into silence, feeling I had already said far too much, at which Birdie, sensitive fellow that he is, changed tack instantly and chir
ruped that he couldn’t wait to see South Trinidad Island.
Thinking about my wife in the warm darkness it occurred to me there is something of the female in both Con and Birdie, though it surfaces in different ways: while only one is capricious, both are equally perceptive.
I’m not altogether sure Oriana cares for Con, any more than she admires Kathleen Scott. I’m in favour of Mrs S, even if she is a little too forthright in her ways and not at all inclined to take a back seat, for there’s no denying she’s made Scott a happier man. She once informed me, without the trace of a smile, that she couldn’t stand women and would much prefer the world to be composed entirely of men and children.
It’s understandable, I suppose, that Oriana should regard Con as something of a rival, he being the one to entice me from her side. When we discussed whether I should go south I told her I felt Con needed me, that in many ways I regarded him as my responsibility.
‘And then, of course,’ she said, ‘you have such a feeling of the absolute necessity to be doing something, at any hour of the day or night … before the end comes.’
I have often found that women reach the heart of the matter without having the faintest idea of the route.
Something happened to me on the morning of July 16th – the ninth anniversary of my wedding-day which disturbs me. It was dawn, and I was standing in the crow’s-nest trying to see what effects might be achieved by dragging my thumb across a wash of vermilion water-colour, humming a Schubert song, the one Oriana sang the night we first met, when suddenly my head was filled with pictures of my time at medical school.
In those days, and I cringe now to think what a prig I was, I seriously considered becoming a missionary. My father was very much against it, as well he might be. He had supported me, without complaint, through three years of university and two years of medical training at St George’s Hospital, and here I was about to throw it all up in favour of Africa. He didn’t tell me it was out of the question; he simply suggested I should defer a decision until I had passed my final exams.
The conceit that I might be cut out to help others doubtless stemmed from my experiences as a Sunday School teacher at the Caius Mission in Battersea, where I read Bible stories to the children and gave lantern-slide lectures on life in other lands. I have never forgotten that slum brat who attended with eyes bandaged, both being bunged up with ophthalmia and blepharitis. At each change of the slide he would peer up from his grimy bandages for a second or so, and then hide his head in his hands until he heard the click of the lantern heralding the next.
It was hardly a bed of roses teaching those unwashed children – the girls smelled worse than the boys, for some brought babies with them, who howled throughout, and what with their wailing and the cry of the Hokey-Pokey man in the street outside, not to mention the Church Army band practising in the hall next door, I sometimes went home with my voice a mere croak.
I was seeing the mission-room in my mind’s eye, those rows of shaven heads illuminated in a slant of sunlight writhing with dust, when, by some trick of the early light in the sky above me, the sea below broke into a thousand glittering fragments, and in that heavenly dazzle I clearly saw a creature, half man, half bird, soaring above the waves.
A moment before I had been as warm as toast, and now I was so cold I shuddered, and in that shuddering blinked, and the creature was gone, though not before I had gazed down into those lidless eyes fixed on mine, observed where its powerful shoulders jutted into wings, followed the silver spray kicked up by its cruel talons as it skimmed the bright water. There was no doubt in my mind that the apparition was a harbinger of death and yet, in the blaze of that terrible second a sensation akin to joy, something pitched between sexual arousal and fear bubbled up inside me. Still my body shook, and through chattering teeth I heard myself stuttering over and over, ‘So cold … so cold … so cold.’
I don’t know how long the trembling lasted; time itself stood still. It was but gradually that I became aware of my surroundings: the sea, dark blue and choppy, the sun continuing to flood the horizon, my hand with its bloodied thumb quivering on the surface of my sketching-pad.
I have thought of an explanation, though it’s far from rational. In my first year as a Junior House Surgeon one of my fingers became infected after conducting a postmortem, and I was reduced to slicing the swollen skin to bleed out the poison. This, and the recollection of that boy with the bandaged eyes, had led perhaps to a juxtaposition of the natural and the spiritual world, lifted that inner shutter on the mind which generally confines us in the dark and blinds us to things undreamt of in our philosophy.
That I was alarmed by this omen – portent, call it what you will – puzzles me, because I’m no stranger to death. Indeed, there was a period after I’d contracted tuberculosis when I ran to greet it. My life, then, revolved round bacilli and expectoration and the precise amount of perspiration lost in the feverish nights, and I was weary of it. Worst of all was my having to do without tobacco. For some months I persisted in smoking, but finally the bouts of coughing that followed each blissful inhalation outweighed the pleasure. There was an afternoon in the Alps – I had climbed 8000 feet above the Dischma valley, the pleuritic pains in my lungs echoed in my ribs and back, my wretched pulse pounding at the rate of 168 per minute – when I almost gave up the fight and would willingly have left this world. Wanting to die isn’t a sin, merely the presumption that one can choose the moment. I crouched on a clump of grass, clutching a bunch of saxifrage in flower to my heaving chest, and waited: not so much for the end as a beginning. Then, from somewhere below, beyond the green larches and the purple meadows, I heard a Great Spotted Woodpecker rattling in a fir wood, and I caught my breath and knew I must stay, if only to fulfil the purpose – whatever that may be – for which I’ve been put on this earth.
God moves in mysterious ways. A year later, having applied for the post of junior surgeon and zoologist to the Polar Expedition of 1901, I sailed south. Where sunshine, wholesome food and mountain air had failed to heal my diseased lungs, hunger, frost-bite and ordeal by blizzard affected a cure. As the body lives so does the spirit, and both must be born, and broken, in order to reach the light.
I didn’t tell anyone about that glittering bird for several days. Then, just past midnight on the 23rd a fearful racket broke out on deck and I woke on the ice-house to find Rennick, Teddy Evans and Birdie dancing and singing by starlight on top of the main hatch dog-kennel. This impromptu war dance turned out to be in celebration of my thirty-eighth birthday and succeeded in rousing everyone on board.
Later, we had a tremendous scrap in which Cherry, Campbell and I held the Nursery against the rest of the ward-room. The Nursery, originally designed to accommodate four, and now sleeping six of the younger members of the scientific staff as well as housing the pianola, forms the gangway between the engine room and the ward-room. There is only one door, and such was the crush, not to mention the combined charges of Oates and Atkinson as they hurled themselves against the wood, it’s a miracle it withstood the onslaught and remained in one piece. Likewise ourselves; half of us were naked at the finish, having had the clothes torn off our backs. I can’t think this sort of behaviour will continue once Con takes command. He’s not a spoilsport by any means, but I reckon his presence will put a damper on our exuberance.
It wasn’t until the small hours that I climbed back into my sleeping bag and, turning to Birdie, confided what I had seen that dawn morning the previous week. I knew for certain he would listen sympathetically. Otherwise I wouldn’t have opened my mouth, though I daresay my tongue was somewhat loosened by the quantities of wine I’d downed. Nor did I imagine he’d be so foolish as to suggest I’d seen an extra large albatross – all the same, I was unprepared for his response.
‘I expect,’ I told him, having described the dazzling light between water and sky, ‘that it was some trick of the rising sun, some mirage conjured up by the inner eye.’
‘I don’t agree, Uncle Bil
l,’ he said. ‘It’s true that some of us see what we want to see, but I don’t put you in that category. That apart, I know from first-hand experience there are some things we should accept for what they are.’ And then he told me the following story:
‘I was serving as third mate on the Loch Torridon in the spring of 1902. I wasn’t very happy … due to circumstances I won’t go into. It wasn’t a contented ship; the captain was no good and every time we put into port one or other of the crew deserted. We berthed at Adelaide to take on sulphide ore, tallow and wheat. The steward jumped ship and I had to go into town to get the cook out of jail. The new crew came on board fighting drunk. There was one chap in particular, a brute with a golden eagle tattooed on his bald pate, who would make Petty Officer Evans look like an angel.’
‘Come now,’ I interrupted, ‘be fair. Evans is an excellent worker and he hasn’t touched a drop since we left Cardiff.’
‘Point taken,’ Birdie said. ‘At any rate, this fellow was a swine and he made my life a misery. I tried to persuade the Captain to dismiss him but he wouldn’t hear of it. Eventually, at three o’clock in the morning we got up anchor, trimmed yards, set sails and were off. I was at my lowest. I’d been reading a lot, you see, thinking about things … all sorts of things. I was bothered about leaving my mother. She doesn’t really like the career I’ve chosen, and yet she’s never stopped me. I’m her only son. It’s made me feel selfish, taken the joy out of it.’
He peered at me in the darkness to see if I understood. I didn’t, not altogether. It’s a thing Con and he and Cherry and Titus Oates all share, this bond with their mothers – but then, of course, their fathers are long since dead, whereas mine is alive. It was dear old Dad who fostered my interest in botany and encouraged me to go on walking tours through the countryside, so it’s only natural I should feel closer to him than to my mother, there being so much more we have in common. When I was at Cambridge my mother wrote complaining I never allowed her to know what I really thought, that I was too reserved. I tore her letter into bits, but the sentences remain intact in my head.
The Birthday Boys Page 5
