by Sara Wheeler
Cherry’s real friends, however, were still mostly ex-Antarcticans. In the difficult middle war years, when it seemed as if the fighting would never end, he grew close to Denis Lillie, the sandy-haired, blue-eyed biologist who thought he had been a Persian in a previous existence. Like Cherry, Lillie could not fight. He was a conscientious objector.
Lillie had been a popular figure on board the Terra Nova, especially when he produced his excellent caricatures, though he had always seemed out of place in the rowdy wardroom. He was a thoughtful man, even a dreamer; the life of the spirit meant more to him than any other kind of life, and he did not fit into any of the readily available moulds. He discussed philosophical theory with Cherry, and they exchanged books on the subject. Cherry was not much of a mould man himself, and Lillie’s restless quest for something more than material satisfaction and conventional success reflected his own aspirations. Both men were searching for pattern and meaning. Currently working as a bacteriologist for the military, Lillie had been one of the few visitors at Lamer during the bad months in the middle of 1916. They became unusually intimate (‘I should love to see your chubby cheeks again’), and after one weekend Lillie scrawled with typical irreverence in his note of thanks that, ‘It was only my body which left you, for my ultimate Reality still walks behind your Bath chair and meditates about the many paths of your lovely garden. With love.’ He described his work as ‘examining military shit for three pounds a week’ (this was quite literally what he did), and was relieved that he didn’t have children, as it meant he would not have to answer the question currently screaming from the recruiting posters, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’
Lillie had decided that he was not the marrying type, claiming that he had evolved beyond it. In later years Scott’s young Norwegian skiing expert Tryggve Gran recounted that as they crossed the Equator on the Terra Nova Lillie had revealed that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. ‘When I see a naked man I blush,’ he allegedly said as the others sprawled shirtless on the deck in tropical sunshine, ‘I am split and I can’t help it. Luckily I understand myself and have the control to avoid doing anything wrong.’ Gran was a notoriously unreliable source, and it is hard to imagine anyone having the courage to say that under those circumstances; but perhaps Lillie did. In September 1916 he had been transferred to the pathology lab of a military hospital in Bournemouth, which he loathed (‘no nice cliffs or sea birds, only sand banks and orange peel’), and was appalled to learn the next year that Cherry was poised to become engaged to Christine Davis (‘being unconventional and as near to nature as I can get, it seems all wrong to me that you should have to tie yourself up for the sake of Society’), but he strove, generally, to be optimistic, whereas Cherry was permanently resigned to his destiny. In August 1917 Lillie returned to Lamer for a week. Writing in advance with details of his train to Hatfield, he concluded that, ‘if a motor does not turn up the wings of joy will waft me those four-and-a-half miles bag included. So don’t worry.’ They had a wonderful time together. ‘I do hope,’ Lillie wrote when he was back in horrible Bournemouth, ‘your throat and the rest of you continues to get well and worthy of the sunny spirit which I see under the label ACG.’ He was full of beans, and plans to go to East Africa.
In the spring of 1917 Cherry abandoned his attempt at writing a report for the museum based on his penguin notes and decided to concentrate on the official narrative. He sat at his father’s old desk in the library, endlessly drafting and redrafting pages. Alone at Lamer, his life ran on two tracks, the writing all too frequently derailed by the demands of the estate. When an odd-job boy was summoned from the village Cherry would turn over a discarded page of typescript and set down a list of tasks to keep him busy for the day (‘Clean all boots in boot room’). He broke for lunch at 12.30, when Miss Merchant served up a plate of rabbit stew or, on an exceptionally good day, a portion of pheasant. If the Shaws were not at Ayot he worked through the afternoon until the colours drained from the room, and when he was tired of ice and snow he sat in an armchair by the fire and read about the war in Blackwood’s.
By the middle of 1917 he had finished several chapters. He sent one of them off to Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont, an august and friendly Arctic hand whom he had sought out when he embarked on the project, and himself a writer of elegant prose. Cherry was still muddled about what kind of book he wanted to write, and was struggling to find the confidence to escape the limitations of a handy factual guide for future explorers. Somewhere in his subconscious he knew that he wanted to paint a landscape rather than draw a map, but it was several years before this realisation floated to the surface. He clung to his lists and tables and appendices of hard facts while more important subjects remained tangled in skeins of desires that he did not fully understand. In the meantime he had been requesting accounts of specific activities from other Terra Nova men. Lashly, the stoker who had tended the scurvy-ridden Teddy Evans, sent him his field notes (‘I know you would like a bit of shooting,’ wrote the seaman on his return from the Dardanelles and the Adriatic, where he had been serving with the Italian fleet, ‘but not at Germans’). Deb, newly married (according to Kathleen to a ‘very ordinary, middle-class girl with no sort of personality’), also sent material. He ended one of his cheery letters with typical sturdy candour: ‘I have seen Lyons and he is a blighter.’ This struck a chord with Cherry. As the architecture of the book took shape and he wrote and crossed out and rewrote the chapter breakdown on old expedition notepaper, he began to doubt that what was gestating in his mind could ever be compatible with the expectations of the dreaded committee. The small worm of anxiety wriggled away.
Food rationing, fuel shortages and air raids were sapping morale at home, and on the Continent, after the failed offensive known as Third Ypres and the unwritable horrors of Passchendaele, long trains were trundling across Europe transferring hundreds of thousands of German troops from the Eastern Front. ‘I see no end whatever of the whole beastly show,’ Cherry wrote to Emily Bowers in December 1917, ‘nor, I think, does anybody else.’ The gloom thickened into the black days of the last German offensive at the beginning of 1918. Defeats on the Western Front in March catapulted the nation into shock. The Times rallied as usual to shore up public confidence, issuing advice on all fronts, including the stern ‘Don’t think you know better than Haig’, even though most people over the age of ten probably did.
At Lamer, Kris the Beautiful went down with incurable tetanus, and one morning, shortly before the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, Cherry went out in his dressing-gown and shot him. It was an awful business. Everyone missed Kris. It had been Miss Merchant’s job to walk him, and, being inexperienced with huskies, she never quite mastered the task. Two decades later GBS still remembered the sight of her flying through the air on one end of Kris’s lead. Cherry was upset about the dog. He was also bored, and on the look-out for targets for his frustration.
At about this time Canon Nance, the pensioner Cherry had so warmly welcomed by telling the Bishop he was too antiquated, began to solicit opinion as to the form and location of a village war memorial. ‘If it be admitted that we want any reminder of the war beyond that of the national debt,’ Cherry began his letter on the subject waspishly, ‘I am entirely in sympathy with the general idea.’ He then took the opportunity to deliver a sermon of his own:
If it is to be in church it should be to the memory of those who have suffered and died for the principles of Christ. Personally, I think these principles are wrong: it is obvious that the bulk of the nation and also the clergy thinks so too: I believe that if A. wants to hit you on the head you had better hit him first, that you don’t do to others what you would wish to have done to you, in fact that the more Huns we can kill the better.
He really wanted to berate Nance about the plight of conscientious objectors. ‘At the same time there are some 900 men still left, men such as Clifford Allen and Stephen Hobhouse,41 whose professions before this war were those of true saints, who are su
ch good Christians that they have refused to act against their faith, and such brave men that they have faced persecution every whit as bad as that meted out to the Protestants of old: and some of them have suffered death.’ He was referring to the sentences handed out by the tribunals set up in the wake of the Military Service Act to deal with conscientious objectors. Though nominally permitted to exercise their conscience, the men who went before the tribunals were frequently used as whipping boys: a primitive way of expiating the horror of the front. As always in Britain, the moral majority leapt into action to denounce conscientious objectors. Even Lloyd George promised that he would make their path as hard as he could.
‘I have neither their convictions, nor, if I had them, should I have the courage,’ Cherry continued, ‘to face their illegal persecution (for it should not be unknown to you that such men were given total exemption by act of parliament). At the same time I have at least the decency to recognise their worth and to try and better their illegal treatment. It should of course be the first act of every official conscientious objector, namely the clergy, to publicly condemn the treatment of their universal brethren, but I gather that all they have done is sign a protest . . .’
Cherry instinctively identified with the intelligent misfit. It was, in part, what drew him so powerfully to Lillie, a conscientious objector himself. As for the ethics of war and the practices of the armed services, the cream of his idealism had soured into the curds of disillusion. He no longer believed that war was intrinsically noble. Britain had entered this one, at least in some measure, to refute militarism, so conscription seemed contrary. But did Nance deserve such a battering? Cherry was not really attacking him, of course; he was grappling with the response of organised religion in general to the war, as were many others. Sassoon conjured the hopeless inefficacy of the Church of England amid the carnage when he described a Forces chaplain delivering a pep talk to the latest batch of canon fodder as they were about to leave for France. ‘And now God go with you,’ concluded the padre. ‘I will go with you as far as the station.’
Cherry had continued to see a good deal of the swan-like Pussy, both in London and at Lamer. In October 1917 she had told Kathleen that she loved him more than anyone else in the world. (‘How amazing,’ noted Kathleen. ‘How could anyone love Cherry – like that?’) But by the following January Pussy had begun to complain ominously to Kathleen of ‘a slight waning in the Cherry love passages’. In middle-age Cherry said he was afraid of women. He once told Lillie that a happy married life was impossible for him, a claim that reflected his solipsistic confusion and sense of alienation, and not one that stood the test of time. Besides a superficial fear of feline gold-diggers, he had sufficient self-knowledge to see that he would not be able to make the compromises that children bring to their parents’ lives.
Coming down the stairs one fine day in May, he was pleased to see an envelope in Lillie’s hand on the hall table. But it was not from the hated Bournemouth, or from a new billet in some East African military headquarters. Lillie was in Bethlem mental hospital in south-east London following a severe nervous breakdown. ‘If you have a job on one of your farms I should like to lend a hand and live on a farm,’ Lillie wrote, ‘and really do some work. Also I should like to see you and have a talk.’
There had been no warning signs. Lillie had not been mentally ill before. He was neurotic, and profoundly restless, but he had seemed so full of spirit and plans. Cherry was horrified, and wrote immediately asking when he could visit. He suggested that Lillie come to Lamer and be nursed. A physician superintendent replied instead of his friend, saying that Lillie was neither well enough to have visitors, nor to leave the hospital. Cherry wrote again, impotent and desperate. On 3 August the Orwellian physician superintendent informed him categorically that ‘visiting is contra-indicated’. Lillie had been ‘frequently relapsing’, and visiting disturbed him greatly.
Lillie was in Bethlem for three years. When he was discharged, Cherry took him to the Berkeley Hotel and offered practical help, but Lillie never got over his breakdown. He eventually entered an asylum in Exeter, not far from his brother’s home. There he lived on and on, lost to the world. Both Cherry and Deb wrote to the asylum, asking if anything could be done for their old shipmate. They were told he had all the interests he could manage, and that although he was perfectly happy, ‘it was an incurable case’. Cherry never saw him again. Lillie died in Exeter in 1963. He was seventy-eight.
By October 1918 the pages on Cherry’s desk had grown into a pile several inches high. He discussed the material frequently with both Shaws, usually in the afternoon as teacakes disappeared into the wilderness of the Shavian beard. He even read some passages aloud to Kathleen, who noted, ‘I think it is not at all bad’, not the view she was to hold of the final version. He was fidgeting, of course, over the business of the dogs and Scott’s instructions for them, and he wrote to the dog-handler Cecil Meares, pressing him to reveal his exact orders. ‘I think you may make trouble,’ Atch warned. They were both adamant that Meares ‘disobeyed orders’ by not laying the depôt, but the allegation could not be backed up in writing. Cherry had to keep it to himself for another thirty years, until it all came out (or almost all) in a little-read postscript to his masterpiece.
The Allies advanced steadily through the autumn, and the killing continued. A tide of German prisoners appeared to work the farms on and around Lamer, and more wounded soldiers languished outside the Cricketer’s Arms. Columns listing a different kind of death sprang up in The Times : in October 2,225 Londoners died of flu. But on 11 November, at eleven o’clock on a lugubrious grey morning, Lloyd George announced the Armistice to the House, hoping that it brought an end to ‘all wars’. When the news reached Wheathampstead shopkeepers emerged onto the High Street to ring handbells, schoolchildren ran around waving flags, the policeman blew his whistle and everyone else banged tin trays. The masks came off the few streetlights, licensing restrictions were forgotten and men spilled from the Bull onto the street in a palpable release of tension. The fifteenth was designated Victory Day, and a celebratory beanfeast was hastily arranged in the meadow at Marford. Cherry saw little to celebrate. Worldwide, more than eight million men had died; the fighting might have ended, but the grief would never end. As the flags fluttered up and down the High Street and the bells of St Helen’s pealed jubilantly, he shared in an indeterminate sense of depletion. Vera Brittain spoke for many of Cherry’s generation when she described the desolation the war had left behind. ‘My mind,’ she wrote, ‘groped in a dark foggy confusion, uncertain of what had happened to it or what was going to happen.’
10
The Most Wonderful Story in the World
Though the old forms continue,’ Stephen McKenna wrote little more than a decade after he and Cherry had gone down from ‘T Christ Church, ‘the life that inspires them is new: the schools and universities, the learned professions and public services, the government itself are manned from a different class and activated by different ideals.’ The Versailles Peace Treaty was finally signed on 28 June 1919, but in Britain a numbed nation emerged from the war in bewildered confusion. Kipling summed it up as ‘waking from dreams’. The economic consequences of the slaughter (and the peace) included unemployment, widespread poverty and stagnant industry. The collective emotional consequences were harder to define.
Cherry shared the general disillusion that swelled through 1919. After Kimpton Bottom he had sold other farms on the estate, as well as cottages and chunks of land. Ever since he had returned from the Antarctic he had been moaning obsessively to Farrer about the punitive duties being imposed on landowners. ‘The country cannot tax the agricultural landlord out of existence,’ he thundered, ‘and expect him (as landlord) to carry on on the same generous terms as he has done in the past.’ To occupy himself while the sales were proceeding he began to weed the Lamer silver and jewellery. But it was not enough to satisfy his restless urges, and as the year wore on he decided to dispose of more s
ignificant manor-house properties. He was even thinking of getting rid of Lamer itself. It was primarily an agricultural estate, and farming had never interested him. He relied on his land agents Rumball & Edwards of St Albans to handle the bulk of his farm management, and perhaps because of that he was generally perceived as a benign employer and landlord who more or less kept to himself. He seldom went into the village; when he did he drove down the High Street in his open-topped car, honking his horn to alert loiterers (if he honked as he zoomed down to the station, the station-master held the train). Even his housekeeper rarely shopped locally, as provisions came rumbling up the drive in the large Shoolbreds lorry that made a loop of all the big houses.
He had the idea that he might move to Wittenham Wood, part of the Cherry estate in north-east Berkshire. A pre-Roman fortified camp loomed over nearby Shillingford, and the intermingling of history and landscape appealed to him. He had sold off some of his holdings at Little Wittenham, but still owned a sizeable piece of land there which abutted the Thames on the north side. He knew the area well, having undertaken many tours of inspection, and he hoped to build a small house in the wood, overlooking the river at the top of a slope called Trotman’s Stairs. The centrepiece of the estate was Wittenham Clumps, two breast-like hills north-west of Wallingford in the Sinodun range, each topped with a strangely symmetrical sculpted cluster of trees. The Clumps had recently inspired the young modernist artist Paul Nash, who described the country round them as ‘grey hollowed (or hallowed) hills crowned by old trees of Pan-ish places down by the river . . . full of strange enchantment. On every hand it seemed a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten.’ The dense wood where Cherry planned to build his house lay at the base of these hills. According to Nash it was ‘part of the early forest where the polecat still yelled in the night hours’. Nash first painted the Clumps in 1912 – calm, stylised landscapes in robust reds and blues – and he returned to them thirty-five years later, towards the end of his life.
