Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  9

  The War had Won

  The last months of 1915 were grim. At Loos 16,000 British troops were killed in 19 days, and the advance of the line was still measured in yards per week. The public had not forgotten Scott in this harvest of death. He was sent out to the trenches as inspirational fuel: Ponting’s kinematograph was being shown to the regiments in France, images of the white battlefield of the south inspiring the Tommies before they went over the top. A grateful Forces chaplain wrote Ponting a thank-you letter from the front. ‘We all feel,’ he wrote, ‘we have inherited from Oates and his comrades a legacy and heritage of inestimable value in seeing through our present work.’

  Oates’ surviving comrades, however, were in need of some inspiration themselves. Atch was having a ghastly time on the Gallipoli peninsula, Deb’s battalion had suffered heavy losses in France when the village in which it was billeted was unexpectedly shelled, and poor old Ponting had been rejected by the War Office on the grounds that he was too old to serve as a field photographer. Pennell was commander on HMS Queen Mary. On 17 December he wrote to Cherry, ‘The war from a naval (big ship) point of view is about as dull as it could be. However, this fleet is the advance force of the Grand Fleet so if and when the Huns come out, we ought to be there.’ The Huns were indeed to come out, and Pennell was there, and it was not dull.

  Cherry hoped he might soon be well enough to return to duty. But where? He seriously considered going out to join Atch, although Turkey might not have been the ideal spot for a man with acute diarrhoea. After debating the matter by post, in September Atch duly asked the Admiralty to send his friend out to support him with a squadron of armoured cars. But Cherry still had bad bouts of colitis, and then he got flu on top. In November he was granted three months’ further sick leave on full pay.

  By the beginning of 1916 he had lost more weight, and was still very weak. In addition, he was horribly jumpy. Evelyn fended off visitors. He read The Times when he was up to it, either in bed or in the firelit library where the bald branches of the chestnuts danced on the glass-fronted bookcases. Despite the heavily glossed version of events served up to the public, a glance through the news pages did not provide a cheery start to the day for a sick and gloomy man quite capable of reading between the lines. He kept in touch with the men who had served in his unit as best he could, but as the war lurched from week to week letters from the field consisted of little more than a farrago of rumours. Cherry sent cheques to the men he had commanded: it was the nearest he ever came to a paternal relationship. Their mail to him was censored, and as a result often laughably anodyne, given the circumstances in which it was written. A missive from Private E. Snelling that arrived at Lamer in June 1916 is typical of so many hundreds of thousands that went out from the lousy hell of the trenches. ‘We have had some very nice weather lately,’ Snelling told Cherry helpfully, ‘been quite hot but these last few days have been stormy.’ Still, many of the men had happy memories of Lamer Park. ‘I very much miss the cheery mess we had in Squadron Five,’ wrote another young seaman. ‘I suppose it is always afterwards that we really appreciate anything fully and I realise that very much now. I hope one day we shall meet again but the world is so big and life so terribly busy that it is unlikely. But they were great days.’

  When he felt well Cherry was able to get out and walk through the leaf litter in the woods, the air viscous with the smell of rotting foliage. He watched young women root-gathering in the adjoining fields and hurrying off to their shifts at the new helmet factory in the village. It was whispered in the factory that Lord Cavan, a prominent Wheathampstead figure, had had a hand in the removal of Cherry’s inactive squadron from Lamer Park, as he suspected the men were time-wasters. It seems unlikely: Cavan had written warmly to Cherry at about that time. But it shows what an uncomfortable position Cherry was in. A woman in Ayot sent him a white feather, and he received an anonymous letter accusing him of cowardice. He turned to Reggie, as usual, for advice and support, but it was another bitter pill. His illness was as real as a shrapnel wound; if it was linked to or caused by something that was not physical, it was not less of an illness. That was a difficult thing to explain. And anyway, as his exact contemporary Siegfried Sassoon wrote, ‘The intimate mental history of any man who went to the War would make unheroic reading.’

  The pram returned to the back hall early in 1916 when Mildred and Peter’s son, another Peter, was born in an upstairs bedroom. The domestic routines of home did not comfort Cherry. He had never shared the concerns of his mother and sisters, and his vague sense of alienation now became more acute. At any rate, he preferred shooting to babies, and was well enough to bag a pheasant or two to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. But that February the Admiralty put him on half pay. As usual it was Atch who saw that he was in trouble. ‘Look here old chap,’ he wrote. ‘I believe a change of scene and taking your mind off things completely would very likely benefit you.’ He had unilaterally suggested to their Antarctic colleague Denis Lillie in Cambridge that he and Cherry plan a motor tour together. ‘Please forgive any interference,’ Atch asked Cherry after confessing what he had done, ‘but I would like to see you well . . . If it will relieve you write and tell me to be damned.’ As for Atch himself, he had ended the previous year in hospital with pleurisy. He was appalled at what had gone on in the Dardanelles. More than 265,000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded or missing following a series of botched attacks on the Gallipoli peninsula. ‘The public,’ he told Cherry, ‘have not the smallest inkling of what happened.’

  In the spring, Cherry’s health improved steadily. He put on weight, and was mentally strong enough to compose irate letters about his purchase of War Loan stock and his supertax, though he commented that ‘the constant poisoning from the bacillus and the sickness has left me rather a jumpy wreck’. The doctors ordered no hard work for at least nine months. ‘I don’t think there is much wrong with me,’ he wrote to Farrer, ‘except that this has left me very ragged out and the places inside which have been wrong are still tender, and so they keep me in bed still.’

  He was well enough to return to his official narrative. Contact was briefly re-established with Lyons, who had himself been battling to locate members of the expedition – those who were still alive, that is – and get hold of their notes. But the niggling concern over authority would not go away. ‘I have written to Lyons,’ Cherry told Farrer, ‘that I see he tacitly agrees that I was given a free hand.’ That was it for Lyons. Cherry did not contact him again for two-and-a-half years, by which time the book had crystallised, and was not an official narrative at all.

  The convalescent hospital had closed, and in April 1916 Evelyn announced that she could no longer afford to live at Lamer and was moving out. This, as she admitted privately to Farrer, was not quite the truth. She had fulfilled her role as guardian of the hearth, and she wanted Cherry to feel free to take his father’s place as paterfamilias. Evelyn’s sense of duty was even more finely tuned than her son’s. Within a month she had found a house to rent in Weston, on the outskirts of Southampton, and she threw herself into the task of interviewing servants. Cherry didn’t do much to dissuade her, and started looking for a housekeeper for Lamer. In the summer, Evelyn went, taking her three unmarried daughters with her.

  For the first time, Cherry was alone at Lamer. The house was quiet without the rustle of cretonne skirts and the peals of girlish chatter. He was not immune to the stillness; but it did not displease him. As the daffodils bloomed in the park he retreated to the summer house near the pond. It had a handle enabling the sitter to revolve it on its base and enjoy the sun at all angles. There, in the stillness behind the high yew hedge, he watched the oaks and beeches flower and observed the progress of a family of robins nesting in the willow. He noted the arrival of a hen sparrowhawk, and listed the species of tits hovering around the fruit trees. It was a stay against the chaos of the war, and he absorbed himself in the smallness of his garden while the world went mad.

&n
bsp; He felt he was getting better, though he continued to spend part of every day in bed. Towards the end of May the doctor had said he didn’t think there was much wrong with the actual wall of the intestines any more. A specialist confirmed that he had no ulceration left, but that there was still plenty of inflammation. ‘I am very gradually to get on my legs a bit,’ Cherry reported to Farrer, ‘and in under a year I ought to be able to lead a fairly normal life, but the process will cause an increase of pain and sickness.’

  Although his physical health was mending, his mental state remained uncertain. In the first months of the year he had finally assembled his Adélie penguin notes and submitted them to Dr Sidney Harmer at the Natural History Museum. The notes were little more than a transcript of Cherry’s diary, and Harmer judged that they were not publishable as they stood. When he was politely informed of the fact, Cherry exploded, claiming, inaccurately, that he had submitted the work in the form of rough notes and simply wanted an expert opinion. In his oddly unreasonable response to the shell-shocked Harmer, he continued:

  I shall be most interested to see how far those scientists, who have lived their comfortable lives in England, and who work out the material given to them by men who have been in the Antarctic, recognise the help given them by such men almost always after hardship, generally at some risk to their lives, sometimes at considerable risk to their future health.

  At the end of his vituperative letter he came to the point, to the thing that had been rankling for three years, since he had walked into the museum with three eggs in a small box. He had noted a spirit more than once at the museum which implied ‘that it is an honour conferred upon the collector that his results should be accepted’. He would cite, he said, ‘one example only. I handed over the Cape Crozier embryos, which nearly cost three men their lives, and has cost one man his health, to your museum personally, and . . . your representative never even said “thanks”.’

  Antarctica claimed headlines, even in war. Shackleton had been away for nineteen months when in March 1916 news came through that the Aurora, Endurance’s sister ship, had broken free of her moorings, leaving ten men stranded without adequate supplies at Cape Evans. Their plight was attracting extensive press coverage. Cherry had never met Shackleton, but he had been prejudiced against him by events that had unfolded eight years previously. Before setting out on the Nimrod expedition in 1907, Shackleton had reached an honourable arrangement with Scott, promising not to land in the part of the Antarctic around McMurdo Sound that Scott considered his own. (‘I don’t want to be selfish at anyone’s expense,’ Scott had written to him, ‘and least of all at that one of my own people, but still I think anyone who has had [anything] to do with exploration will regard this region primarily as mine.’) But Shackleton had been forced into landing in that very area by the treacherous ice conditions that blocked his preferred route. He had not had a choice; there was nowhere else to go. To Wilson, however, a broken promise was an irredeemable sin. ‘I wish to God,’ he wrote to Shackleton on his return, ‘you had done any mortal thing in the whole world rather than break the promise you had made.’ He subsequently ended his friendship with his old sledging mate. It was Wilson’s moral disapproval that influenced Cherry. When the Endurance was about to leave in 1914 he had loyally, if pointlessly, taken up Wilson’s baton, writing indignantly to Kathleen to ask whether Shackleton had said anything about using the Cape Evans hut and stores. ‘Do you think,’ he huffed, ‘he means to walk into our hut and use it without asking permission as his hut?’ But now, with the men stranded, he wrote to The Times, reassuring the public that the Ross Sea party would not be short of food at Cape Evans, and listing the stores left there in characteristic detail (456 pounds of cocoa, 608 pounds of lard and margarine . . .).

  Only three months after the news of the Aurora broke, the full story of Shackleton’s expedition thrilled a jaded nation. On 19 January 1915 the ice had frozen around the Endurance. She zigzagged for a thousand miles in the pincers of a floe, and after a long fight was crushed like an almond in a nutcracker. There was to be no transcontinental marching after all: facing apparently insuperable odds, Shackleton had to rescue his men from the maw of death. The twenty-eight castaways tried to haul supplies over the floating ice to land, but it was an impossible undertaking. They set up camp for six months instead, drifting hundreds of miles as they waited. They shot the dogs, and the carpenter’s cat. When the floes broke up they launched the three lifeboats they had salvaged from the Endurance and sailed to Elephant Island, an outpost of the South Shetlands. There was no hope of rescue, so six men set out in the best of the small boats and, navigating by dead reckoning, sailed 900 miles across the Southern Ocean. Close to land after seventeen days, freezing, wet and seriously dehydrated, they ran into a hurricane. ‘Darkness settled on six men driving a boat slamming at the seas and steadily baling death overboard,’ wrote the skipper, Frank Worsley. ‘The pale snow-capped peak gleamed aloft, resting on black shades of cliffs and rocks, fringed by a roaring line of foaming breakers – white horses of the hurricane, whose pounding hooves we felt, in imagination, smashing our frail craft.’ When Shackleton reached the whaling station at Stromness on South Georgia, he asked the bemused manager when the war had ended. It was May 1916.

  One of the five Shackleton had chosen to accompany him on his epic open boat journey was the feisty Irish seaman Tom Crean, Cherry’s old shipmate. Like most of the Endurance men, Crean enlisted for active duty as soon as he returned from South Georgia. (‘Emerged from a war with Nature,’ wrote Shackleton’s photographer, Frank Hurley, ‘we were destined to take our places in a war of nations. Life is one long call to conflict, anyway.’) Cherry sent Crean a cheque to help him on his feet. ‘We’ve had a hot time of it in the last 12 months,’ the seaman wrote back with characteristic understatement. ‘I must say the Boss [Shackleton] is a splendid gentleman and I done my duty towards him to the last.’ Cherry expressed guarded admiration for what the Boss had achieved. He had felt from the outset that the expedition was a ‘desperate venture’, and reckoned it was lucky that the Endurance went down when she did, convinced that if Shackleton had started on his march he would have met a more terminal kind of disaster. By the time he had finished The Worst Journey he was prepared to be more positive about Shackleton’s qualities. ‘For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation,’ Cherry wrote, ‘give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.’

  With the land armies locked in stalemate in France, on 31 May 1916 the Grand Fleet steamed into the Battle of Jutland. Perusing The Times while lounging in the revolving summer house in his tweed knickerbockers two days later, Cherry read that Harry Pennell had gone down with the Queen Mary. As he let the paper fall, happy memories of the wardroom rose like milk to the boil. The loss of Pennell touched him more profoundly than the columns of the glorious dead he skimmed each morning; what a mundane task that had become. He expressed his grief in a passage he planned to include in his book, but never in fact published. Those feelings were too personal for the public domain. ‘When you have a standard of work set by men like Wilson and Bowers,’ he wrote, you cannot go much higher. But Wilson always said that he could not touch Pennell. I do not know why he never had a nervous breakdown, because he simply could not go to sleep . . . But Wilson, Bowers and Pennell are all gone now – for Pennell was in the Queen Mary at Jutland, and we are left to talk of eight-hour days,36 and even that would not be so bad if we worked them! In Pennell’s heaven they will work thirty hours in the day . . . He will perhaps keep the Celestial Log Book, and the record of the animals sighted . . . And every now and then he would ask for leave to go and take some of his friends in Hell out for dinner. I hope he will ask me.

  There had been talk of the ‘Big Push’ since the beginning of June, and it came just as the swifts marked the arrival of summer in Lamer Park. On Saturday 1
July, one of the most horrible days in the history of humanity, the Battle of the Somme began. In the shimmering sunshine the British army suffered higher casualties than on any other day in its existence: almost 20,000 men were killed by German machine-guns. The Somme offensive unfurled in a deadly cascade of misjudgement and mismanagement (though not according to The Times) and ended in complete Allied failure. Among British troops it became known as ‘the Great Fuck-Up’. There was a terrible pathos about the self-delusion on the home front. What had been gained on the Somme, except the calligraphy of dry bones? No wonder the likes of Sassoon began their long keen of disillusioned protest. Cherry was beginning to sympathise with the pacifists. He, too, perceived the war through the lens of irony, and could no longer subsume the slaughter into the myth of Arthurian chivalry he had been taught at school. After the Somme, Cherry shared the view of Edmund Blunden that ‘neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.’

  Yet in his park, where he walked each day, so little had changed. The rhododendrons bloomed like pink crinolines and the swifts, noisy at dawn, toiled at their nests under the deep overhanging eaves of the cottages. Cherry’s favourite refuge, after the pirouetting hut, was the old brick arbour at the foot of the bluebell dell. In the peaceful summer evenings, as the bells of St Helen’s tolled faintly over generations of Garrards, the rooks returned to the tall elms, darkening the sky, and the stoaty smell of evening seeped from the wood. The water snails clung to the buttercups in the shallows of the Lea and the baby swallows hung on the twigs of the red willow. The buds swelled and opened and flowered and the leaves fell, and he was still there, doing nothing, while so many were doing so very much.