Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died at Osborne, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight. She was eighty-one, and had been on the throne for sixty-three years. Two days later the entire school was summoned to the flint-faced Chamber Court. There the boys were marshalled into order and marched, in the rain, to Winchester Guildhall, where they listened to the formal announcement of the accession of Edward VII being read from the steps.

  Wars and royal deaths notwithstanding, the school year unfurled in a succession of unchanging internal rituals interspersed with the meetings of a bewildering variety of clubs, the most prestigious of which was the Debating Society. Apsley was not one of the young bloods who stood up and declaimed in their best Ciceronian English about the moral necessity of war or the benefits of free trade, nor did he hold office in the Golf Club, the Shakespeare Society or the Orchestral Society. His school record was unblemished by achievement either in the classroom or on the sports field. He showed no particular gift for turning Burke’s speeches into Greek, and there were no early glimmerings of the limpid prose that characterised his mature writing. He won no prizes and did not bat for the 1st XI. Throughout his Winchester career he was a boy in the background, peeping shyly round a flint pillar or awkwardly relacing his football boots on a spongy touchline. It was impossible to foresee, in this introverted boy, the team player who would blossom in the Antarctic a decade later.

  His sense of isolation was shared by many of his peers, though his excessive short-sightedness singled him out for special misery. For years the General refused to believe that his son could not see. Influenced by the army’s refusal to allow soldiers to wear glasses, he considered imperfect vision a slur on the family name. But as Apsley’s schoolwork grew increasingly demanding, the problem loomed too large even for the General to ignore, and when he was about fifteen the boy was at last kitted out with a pair of pebble-lensed glasses. (In 1902 the army relented, too.)

  Shortly before he returned from Winchester at the end of his second year, Apsley acquired yet another sister, bringing the total to five. Edith was born at home on 7 July 1901, in her father’s sixty-ninth year. The old soldier had just been made High Sheriff of Hertfordshire. It was a prestigious appointment, and the ceremony in Hertford lasted several days, necessitating a mass expedition from Lamer and a group booking at the Dimsdale Arms. At home the General had joined his ancestors on the dining-room wall: a dark and glossy three-quarter-length portrait had been commissioned, sat for and hung. The year after he was appointed Sheriff the venerable Lord Salisbury made his final exit from Downing Street, replaced by his languid nephew Arthur Balfour (the first prime minister to go to Buckingham Palace in a motor car). But how faintly the vibrations of the outside world reached Lamer during those years. The faded silk on the back of the upright piano; the taste of ginger beer and the smell of boiling strawberry jam; the sanctuary of the stable-yard: these were the immutable landmarks of the children’s youth. The downy-faced Apsley still collected shells and moths and butterflies, but he was now allowed to attend Lamer Balls in the school holidays. (The General marched among the guests at midnight sharp, grasping his fob watch and saying goodbye.) He had been confirmed – a universal rite of passage in the public schools – after labouring over his catechism books. Compulsory chapel-keeping had beaten out any interest in organised religion, as it usually does. He was never attracted back to the Church. Like many, the adult Apsley had an instinctual yearning for the mystical but an intellectual inability to swallow the tenets of Christianity.

  Other developmental milestones were more enjoyable than confirmation. During one school holiday, out shooting with Father, Apsley was handed a gun. He no longer had to trot behind the men, holding his father’s shooting notebook. He had never been close to the younger girls, and now, as the school years marched on, their ice-floe of common experience shrank alarmingly. In the late summer of 1903 his mother took him down to London to buy new school clothes, and, for the last time, after shopping they ate custard ices in glass dishes under the trees outside Gunter’s in Berkeley Square.

  That autumn, Apsley became a House Prefect (in the final year it was difficult not to achieve that rank) and was at last qualified to boss the juniors around. One candidate was Charles Scott-Moncrieff, who had just arrived at Kenny’s. He went on to be a magisterial translator of Proust, but at school he distinguished himself with a literary work of his own – a story of teenage fellatio which appeared in a school magazine (not the Wykehamist, sadly) and promptly brought the publication to a close.

  Although in later life Apsley was a model of conventional Wykehamist self-sufficiency, it was a result of his natural shyness, not of absorption in the school’s culture. He did not feel that he was a member of an especially prestigious club; he did not attend reunions, and kept in touch with few boys. It was not Winchester’s fault: Apsley was not suited to large, overpowering crowds; he came into his own in smaller groups, and was never at ease with swells or bloods.

  He left Winchester at a climactic moment in its modern history. The highlight of the school calendar was the Eton cricket match in June. Boys, parents and masters all attended, the maters trussed up in long frocks and elaborate hats, grasping parasols and languishing in deck chairs. Having lost to Eton three years in a row, in 1904 Winchester triumphed by eight wickets. Three weeks later, a team of Wykehamists also won the Public Schools’ Shooting Championship, and the entire school went to the station to greet George Mallory and the other victorious marksmen. Apsley watched these events from the outside, pleased that he would soon be leaving Winchester and its cloistered rituals for the last time. But a fresh set of fears lay at the other end of the summer holidays. He had been offered a place to read Classics at Christ Church, his father’s old Oxford college.

  Oxford was throbbing with Edwardian ebullience, and Christ Church heaved with Byronic youths. Known as ‘the House’ (from the Latin Aedes Christi ), it was reputedly the most aristocratic of the colleges; one of Apsley’s contemporaries, describing the wooden noticeboards at the foot of each staircase which announced the occupants of the rooms above, noted, ‘In other colleges the surnames alone were painted, but presumably the House was so full of noblemen that commoners had to have the distinguishing mark of Mr.’

  Apsley was billeted in Old Library 6, and he kept the room for three years. To reach it he walked through the wide, tranquil space of Tom Quad, with its fountained lily pond and leaping Mercury, down into Cloisters and off into a passageway with a wood-panelled ceiling carved with bunches of grapes. Old Library was off this passageway, and 6 was a large room on the first floor. It had two oak doors and, in the opposite wall, a pair of arched sash windows that looked across a small courtyard onto the Venetian Gothic walls of the new Meadow Buildings. When Apsley sat quietly in his shabby leather armchair, he could hear the faint rattle of carts, wagons and dumpy horse-drawn omnibuses floating over from St Aldate’s.

  Apsley was a handsome eighteen-year-old, his dark brown hair straight, glossy and parted left of centre. His features were neat and well proportioned and his eyes chocolate-brown and velvety, like his mother’s. But he was overly conscious of his wire-framed pebble glasses, and at college was prone to skulking between the columns of the library bays. He would hurry back to his room in the late afternoon light, past the butterscotch gargoyles of Cloisters, and listen to the crackly tunes of a distant gramophone while he prepared for the uncomfortable ritual of cutlets and watery cabbage in Hall. He did not make friends easily, and he struggled to master college etiquette. Freshmen were not to speak to senior men living on the same staircase; they were to wait until the seniors visited them and left their cards. Similarly, freshmen were not to take the armchairs in front of the fire in the junior common room as these were reserved for seniors. As for teaching, Oxford was still in the grip of conservative forces, many of the dons living in a Jurassic age of human consciousness. A few years before Apsley arrived at Oxford a tutor at Brasenose, a splendid college on the other side o
f the High Street, sent a letter of condolence to the parents of one of his undergraduates who had died. ‘It may be of some consolation to you,’ he wrote, ‘to know that the young man would in any case have had to go down at the end of the present term owing to his failure to pass Responsions.’

  Academic attitudes were similarly fossilised. The Provost of Oriel College, Dr C. L. Shadwell, elected in 1905, was proud to announce, ‘Show me a researcher and I’ll show you a fool.’ A man who did plenty of research and was no fool was H. T. Tizard, an exact contemporary of Apsley’s at Oxford (Tizard was at Magdalen) and later an eminent scientist and adviser to Churchill. The two men knew each other, Tizard resurfacing thirty years later to support Apsley’s application to join the Athenaeum. He noted that far from extending the boundaries of knowledge, most Oxford dons of their vintage were ‘content to live like gentlemen, passing to the younger generation the knowledge that had been amassed by others’.

  Compton Mackenzie’s novel Sinister Street is partially set in the Christ Church of the period. ‘Nothing anywhere seemed as yet to hint that the general flippancy of Oxford which was merely an extension of the public school spirit was in danger of dying out’, comments Mackenzie. ‘Oxford was still the apotheosis of the amateur. It was still surprising when the head of a house or a don or an undergraduate achieved anything in a manner that did not savour of happy chance.’ Apsley was adrift in another strangely closed community, a country boy who did not belong among the braying aristocrats roaming arm-in-arm through Tom Quad. Like Michael Fane, the protagonist of Sinister Street, it seemed to him that he alone was not in the club, and that he stood, a solitary figure, in the wings of a glittering show. He sat at his desk in the long evenings, a pool of light from his lamp flooding the pages of Thucydides, and gazed unhappily over at the blazing light from Meadows.

  Then, after a few weeks, Apsley made a great discovery. Poor eyesight wasn’t a handicap when it came to rowing. At almost five feet ten he was among the taller students, and though he was slightly built, he was fit. He immediately took part in trials for torpids, the spring-term intercollegiate races in eight-man boats. Soon he was rowing bow in the college 3rd VIII. He may have been quiet and shy, neither aristocratic nor wonderfully clever, but he could row, and that meant he belonged. He thrived in the enforced companionship of a small team, and since he had few outlets for his enthusiasms, rowing took on a great importance in his life. By the autumn of 1905 he was in the 1st IV. As a man in a college boat, he was one of the lucky ones who posed for crew photographs in the Palladian grandeur of Peckwater, standing nervously, jacket buttoned and hands in pockets, by the stone doorway emblazoned with rowing victories. The crews trained in the early morning, running from Meadow gate down the wide avenue to the shrouded river, where they carried their boat from the boathouse in the clammy mist. Torpids dominated the spring term, and summers revolved around the pistol shots of the Eights’ Week races and parental visits to the boathouses for salmon mayonnaise, trembling jellies and a glass of hock.

  The tyranny of games, so vice-like at Winchester, was broken at Oxford, and in an atmosphere of greater choice, Apsley, always anxious, found it easier to participate. Social rituals notwithstanding, Oxford was a release from the robotically prescribed routine of school. Stephen McKenna, a future journalist and Liberal politician and a near contemporary of Apsley’s at the House, commented that ‘many who had been despised and rejected at school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights’. Apsley was never a social light, but at university he could at least glow.

  One who shone very brightly was George Mair, a modern history scholar who had a room near Old Library 6. Mair was an influential figure in college. He went on to become a modestly successful literary journalist, and when The Worst Journey in the World made Apsley famous fourteen years after he left Oxford, Mair remembered him as ‘a dark, lean, rather silent man who was short-sighted and always wore spectacles. He used to row in the college boat, and used sometimes to afflict his friends by his anxiety as to whether he was pulling as well as he should.’ Mair went on to deliver a convincing verdict on his friend’s personality: ‘Otherwise he was remarkable only for a certain taste in natural history, an extreme shyness, and a nervousness which was not what we commonly call nervousness, but rather a sensitive imagination which made him see further round things than other people, and, like a tightly stretched wire, made him react more quickly than other and duller men.’ In later years Apsley was not just liable to react more quickly, but also to respond more profoundly than other men, sometimes with appalling consequences. A tightly stretched wire indeed.

  Women were not admitted as full members of the university, and they scarcely featured in the lives of most male undergraduates. Twenty years later the art historian and Old Wykehamist Kenneth Clark wrote that ‘it was practically impossible to meet a girl at Oxford’, and he turned out to be quite good at meeting girls. A shy boy from Hertfordshire had no chance, even one with five sisters. One of Apsley’s peers called it ‘a life of familiarity without intimacy’. Of course, there were sentimental attachments in college; but if Apsley enjoyed any, their story has slipped away. Little is known of his emotional life during this period. Leonard Woolf, born in 1880, offers a clue to general attitudes towards sex at that time. ‘How dense the barbaric darkness was,’ wrote Woolf, in which the Victorian middle-class boy and youth was left to drift sexually is shown by the fact that no relation or teacher, indeed no adult, ever mentioned the subject of sex to me. No information or advice on this devastating fever in one’s blood and brain was ever given to me. Love and lust, like the functions of the bowels and bladder, were subjects which could not be discussed or even mentioned.

  Stuart Mais (pronounced ‘Mays’) was among Apsley’s friends at Christ Church. In later years, after being sacked as Professor of English from the new Cadet College at Cranwell, S. P. B. Mais became a well-known Fleet Street journalist.7 The pair stayed in touch, and Mais, like Cherry a great nature lover, enjoyed going to stay at Lamer. More extrovert than his friend, Mais adored Oxford. ‘In my time at any rate,’ he wrote, ‘life at “the House” was very much a country house existence. Our every want was instantly catered for. We had but to shout for our scout, and immediately the courteous, almost P. G. Wodehouse-like valet-butler would appear to attend to our wishes and see them carried out.’ Apsley did not join the Union or indulge in the stew of political societies at Oxford. Union hacks dogmatising in their robust Johnsonian manner were anathema to him, and so were dazzling characters such as the aesthete Philip Sassoon and the toffs vomiting out of their windows after a session with their dining clubs. The High Tory conservatism of his father and his father’s father ran through him like woodgrain.

  As for work: Apsley floundered in oceans of Ovid and seas of Sallust. Increasingly, he felt that he wasn’t cut out to be a classicist, and after grinding through his first-year exams he flung aside his Homer and switched to Modern History, a subject deemed suitable for students who were not quite up to Latin and Greek.

  When he went home in the holidays, he found that little had changed except the elder girls’ skirts, which were shorter. In the early mornings he jumped his horse, Harebell, over the estate’s high hedges, and afterwards he sat in the kitchen under the row of copper pots eating bread and honey. But further afield, things really were changing. At the end of 1905 Balfour resigned as prime minister, and the following year he watched the general election from the sidelines, knowing his style of paternalism was doomed: the Liberals triumphed in an anti-Tory landslide unparalleled until 1945. A decade of Tory hegemony was over, and the General shuddered, along with the rest of the country’s landowners. Furthermore, another enemy had entered the field. The Labour Representation Committee, the party’s forerunner, was formed in 1900; by 1905, Labour candidates had trebled their share of the vote.

  Another event in the closing weeks of 1905 was discussed avidly in the junior common rooms by young men with a taste for adventure. It did
not have the seismic effect of a prime-ministerial resignation, but it was widely reported in the British press none the less. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had pioneered a route through the North-West Passage. Ever since Elizabeth I stood at her window to wave farewell to Martin Frobisher as he sailed from Greenwich in 1576, mariners and adventurers had sought to find a way from the Atlantic through to the Pacific. Confounded by ice and the jigsaw of an unmapped archipelago, none had succeeded. In Frobisher’s day the goal had ultimately been commercial: the sea-route offered a short cut to the wealth of Cathay away from the baleful influence of Spain and Portugal. By the nineteenth century the dogged expeditioners were inspired by the reward of national and personal prestige. The Admiralty despatched a series of British naval ships to the high latitudes, culminating in Sir John Franklin’s grisly 1845 endeavour. American expeditions joined the race, their stories enthralling the public waiting comfortably at home. Although a Briton, Commander Robert McClure, led the first transit of the elusive Passage, he did it in stages, in two ships and on a sledge. The dauntless Amundsen was the first man to sail through the North-West Passage in a single ship.

  Apsley had read widely on the subject of exploration, and had recently devoured a copy of Robert Falcon Scott’s The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’ , the story of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. He immediately recognised the significance of Amundsen’s feat in the Arctic. But he had no idea that even the North-West Passage would not mark the Norwegian’s greatest achievement. That was yet to come.

  In June 1906, on the fiftieth anniversary of military operations in India, the General’s name appeared on the Birthday Honours List as a Companion of the Bath. He had been ill since the spring with an undiagnosed condition that made his legs swollen and painful. Apsley dashed back from Oxford whenever he could and sat for hours massaging his father’s calves. When the old man was no longer able to run the estate his son acted in loco parentis . At the age of twenty he helped organise a voluminous inventory and valuation for insurance purposes. The resulting document ran to more than two hundred pages, including twenty-nine pages listing the family silver. He began to seek the advice of Arthur Farrer, a friend and former neighbour of the General’s and a lawyer in his family firm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.8 The relationship between Apsley and Farrer, one which was to last many decades, now shifted gently into professional gear.