by Sara Wheeler
Cherry was casting around for a project that would engage his creative energies. His rancour over the government’s land-taxing measures was to a large extent a symptom of a more general dissatisfaction. For a time the idea of building a home on new territory absorbed his attention. In the end, it was his book, not a house, that was to satisfy his creative longings, and as his plans to sell up were overshadowed by his increasing preoccupation with his manuscript, anxieties over authorial independence replaced land tax as his major obsession. Having reopened negotiations with Lyons, he sought legal advice to establish whether he could legitimately remove his book from the committee and publish it independently. He was ready to take the plunge. Counsel concluded that he would be free to publish as long as he first made separate copyright arrangements for the material he had obtained from other members of the expedition. This he did. But he made a meal of what followed. Having informed Lyons at the beginning of the year that the book ‘approaches completion’, he waited until the autumn to send him a 1,200-page bound typescript, insisting that he was offering it ‘as a completed work and not as a draft for recasting or unlimited amendment’. He was trying to goad Lyons into provoking the break.
It was not The Worst Journey in the World that he parcelled up for Lyons. Certain sections, polished up, would appear in the book he finally published three years later, but the architecture of this 1919 typescript was quite different. It included numerous lists of clothing and equipment, as well as separate articles on Antarctic cooking and other weighty topics. Furthermore, it had not yet acquired its title. It was called Never Again: Scott, Some Penguins and the Pole.
Lyons, who worked at the Meteorological Office, read the work during one of the proliferating strikes, and immediately wrote to congratulate its author. But when he raised specific points – in particular he wanted more details of stores and weather separate from the personal matter – Cherry pounced. ‘The refusal of my book does not come entirely as a surprise to me,’ he annnounced with lordly pomposity, ‘nor is it, as a matter of fact, entirely unwelcome. I will now proceed to make arrangements to publish it in the ordinary course of business, concerning which I anticipate no difficulty.’ A baffled Lyons replied that to his recollection the book had not been refused at all. ‘Am I to understand that you wish to withdraw from your preparation of a volume for the committee?’ he asked, genuinely perplexed.
Cherry knew he would have to proceed carefully if he was to ensure that the committee did not have the legal right to prevent him from going ahead with his own book. Grasping Lyons’ letter, he set off down the avenue of limes and through the rectory and down the garden path to GBS, who was contentedly spinning in his hut. Always willing to dispense detailed advice on any topic, GBS drafted a conciliatory reply (‘My dear Lyons’). The conflict ostensibly hinged on whether the book was to be a personal narrative or a kind of almanac for future explorers. The two, after all, were quite different, and Lyons had put forward the sensible suggestion that the distinction be made clear by a physical separation of material into two volumes. Cherry was not keen on this plan. He was concerned that the committee would treat any book he produced in the same way they had dealt with the expedition’s scientific reports (Lyons had told him they planned a print run of only 500 copies) and consign it to the dusty bookshelves of the universities. ‘I want it read,’ he told Lyons, ‘because I want the public to know to whom the credit of the work was due . . . If the book I have written is too readable, I am extremely sorry.’ The truth was that Cherry had not resolved the conflict in his own mind about what kind of book he wanted to write, and had not yet garnered the confidence to jettison the tedious lists and interminable appendices. His impatience and confusion found an outlet in the bitterness and intemperance of his attitude towards Lyons.
As 1919 progressed, Cherry tugged and tugged until he had his book back. The loyal Atch, anxious to avoid trouble, warned him that if anything displeased Evans he would certainly take action. ‘Teddy Evans is probably suffering from too many medals,’ Cherry reassured him breezily (after his dazzling performance commanding the Broke, Evans had featured regularly in the newspapers and had emerged as a classic war hero). Anyway, Cherry had been careful. ‘He comes out of my book,’ he told Atch, ‘far better than I desire or he deserves.’ It was true. Evans came out all right. Cherry had determined to be royally diplomatic. There was to be no criticism of Evans, none of the tortuous saga triggered by Scott’s decision to take the dogs further than planned, and no suggestion – though this remained in the book until a late draft – that the dual goals of science and the Pole had exposed the expedition to fatal pressure.
The Antarcticans’ widespread distrust of Evans came to a head in December. Teddy delivered a lecture at the Queen’s Hall in London chaired by Sir Eric Geddes, transport minister and former First Lord of the Admiralty, and the bones of the proceedings were subsequently published in The Times . In his unctuous paean to Teddy, the minister described him as ‘the right-hand man to Captain Scott’. This was too much for Ponting. He sent a long letter to all the morning newspapers ‘in the hope of correcting an erroneous impression that has been current for too long’. Rising majestically to the occasion, Ponting informed his readers, ‘without in any way detracting from the record of a brave sailor’, that Wilson was Scott’s right-hand man. Emphasising the vital roles of Atch and others, he went on to clarify the limited part played by Evans, who had not even been present for a large chunk of the expedition: he had ‘unfortunately’ been invalided home. The Times ran the letter, and Cherry wrote to thank Ponting, as did many others including Atch and Ory (‘Bill used to say that Evans was surprisingly stupid’). Further difficulties arose in the spring of 1921 when Evans’ book South With Scott was published. Determined to secure his footing, Cherry had bludgeoned Emily Bowers into accepting £100 in return for a written agreement to surrender copyright in the extracts he planned to use from Birdie’s diary. Evans had taken no such precaution, freely reprinting some of the same extracts for which Cherry had gone to such trouble to obtain exclusive copyright. A befuddled Mrs Bowers forgot that she had shown Evans the diary back in 1913. Leaning heavily on Shaw for advice on copyright law, Cherry despatched a strong letter to Collins, Evans’ publisher. The firm took cover behind its author, and Evans eventually replied personally from HMS Carlisle in Hong Kong. ‘I don’t like the tone of your letter,’ he wrote, ‘with its insinuated threat of process legal.’ The matter fizzled out, but Cherry had made his point.
By the start of 1920, Cherry’s professional relations with the committee had been severed. ‘You are now utterly untrammelled,’ Kathleen had written pointedly when she heard the news, ‘an estate which is always essential for your happiness, I know. Come and have lunch.’ Cherry summed up the events in the introduction to the book that was eventually published as The Worst Journey. ‘Unfortunately I could not reconcile a sincere personal confession with the decorous obliquity of an Official Narrative; and I found that I had put the Antarctic Committee in a difficulty from which I could rescue them only by taking the book off their hands.’ The kind of official narrative required by a committee would not, he continued with an honesty he had not felt able to show to Lyons, effect ‘any catharsis of the writer’s conscience’. Cherry knew that he had behaved badly towards Lyons. ‘In a most ruthless and high-handed way,’ he wrote in an unpublished paragraph, ‘I took [this book] out of the hands of the committee. No doubt they think me an unprincipled bounder. I am.’
The labour unrest that seethed through the summer of 1919 finally paralysed the country on 27 September, when the railway workers came out in a national stoppage. Food rationing was introduced, the government bared its teeth, and although the strike was settled in the first week of October, the industrial troubles spilled over into 1920 and permeated the nation with gloom.
Cherry shared the outrage of most of his class when he contemplated the horrible spectacle of working men asking for higher wages. He retreated to Lamer, wh
ere the Shaws eased him out of his black moods. The three of them strolled over his footpaths after lunching on eggs hollandaise and gooseberry tart, busily comparing blooms and harvests with those of the year before and the year before that. In the spring they admired the daffodils and cherry blossom, took notes on the cuckoo population and waited – with disapproval, in GBS’s case – for the shots of the woodmen culling the rooks. When it grew hotter they took lunch outside (Cherry loved picnics) and watched the harvest landscape swell and the stooks of corn multiply. In the autumn they contemplated the dripping elms from the warmer side of the window as the branches of the Norwegian maples swayed against heavy November skies.
In the cosy quietude between Christmas and New Year, folded into an armchair at Lamer, GBS set down a half-page Rules of Punctuation, explaining, with muscular examples of Shavian vigour, the usage of the semi-colon and colon. Cherry soon became a rabid deployer of both. But the Shaws did more than punctuate. Both picked over the typescript during the long months that Cherry spent reworking it, offering more felicitous phrasing, rearranging clauses or simply making suggestions (‘Good literary criticism has been passed as it was written, word by word and chapter by chapter’, Cherry noted). GBS was a gifted interpreter of unformed thoughts. He could also see where a phrase or a new idea needed elaborating, and many of his questions ended up in the text as rhetorical devices (‘What is pack?’ Cherry wrote to introduce his disquisition on pack ice). The adamantine clarity of The Worst Journey owes much to Shaw’s questions and responses as he strolled with Cherry through the spinneys, reliving, in gentle Hertfordshire, the cold and exhaustion, the exhilaration and wonder, the anxiety and grief. Looking back from a distance of almost thirty years, GBS claimed that the whole book had been his wife’s idea. ‘Charlotte told him he must write it, and promised to read his proofs and help him in every possible way. He had not thought of this, and still retained his boyish notions of Scott and the expedition. To him Amundsen was a lubberly candle-eating Swedish second-mate, who had meanly stolen a march on the heroic Scott . . .’ This was a typically Shavian misrepresentation of events, but the role of the Shaws was unquestionably crucial. From the beginning GBS was certain that if the book were to be worth anything, it had to address the relative merits of the protagonists with a mature eye. ‘I said to Cherry one day that international courtesy and sportsmanship made it advisable to be scrupulously just and polite to Amundsen. I suspect that this was the hardest pill for him to swallow; for the moment that he went into the question he had to admit that Amundsen was no scallawag, but a very great explorer.’ But when Cherry asked if he should acknowledge his editorial role, GBS was quick to dissuade him. In a letter from Wales, he wrote:
It would be fatal to make any suggestion of collaboration on my part . . . As my experience on the ice dates from the great frost of 1878 (or thereabouts) when I skated on the Serpentine, my intrusion into the Antarctic Circle would be extraordinarily ridiculous. Besides, the suggestion would be misleading . . . You need not be at all uneasy as to the integrity of your authorship. All books that deal with facts and public controversies are modified by consultation, mostly to a much greater extent than this one. It is only in pure fiction that the author takes no counsel.
While continuing to accumulate material for the lists of equipment that were still to append the second volume, Cherry experimented with character sketches and psychological analysis and began to craft a story that took into account not just the length of the sledge runners but also the motivation and personality of its protagonists. It was a daring approach: biography was only just then stirring from its Victorian cocoon of deference. Cherry knew enough about literature to see for himself that the real interest of the story lay in the men. Like most good writers, he had a visceral sense of his book before he put it into words. But without the Shaws’ encouragement, The Worst Journey may have remained an official narrative; and perhaps the dullest story in the world.
The romance with Pussy slowed to a terminal halt early in 1919, and once it was over she and Cherry became firmer friends. The following year he spent Christmas at Bellecroft with all the Russell Cookes, enjoying tramps over the windy Isle of Wight hills in the afternoon and listening to the gramophone during the long evenings in front of the fire. Pussy went on to get engaged to a bright young man called Jasper Harker, whose widowed mother Lizzie was the author of popular novels. Cherry remained intimate with both Jasper and Pussy for the rest of their lives, and Jasper in particular was to prove a steadfast supporter in the terrible times that lay ahead.
Cherry, meanwhile, began dallying in London with an art student called Thelma. He spent a lot of time in the capital in the years following the war, usually staying at the Berkeley Hotel, a grand, roomy old palace in Piccadilly where he felt at home. Thelma did not prove as lasting in his life as this august institution, and he was spotted abroad with other belles: the young Malcolm Sargent, then an organist but about to turn himself into a conductor, once arrived at Kathleen’s breathless with gossip about Cherry and a creature called Gladys Orr. He was obviously coping manfully with the rising tides of flapperdom that startled his conventional soul.
When he wasn’t labouring at his book or enjoying bouts of the high life, he began to experiment with short forms of writing. He made his journalistic debut in several magazines in 1919, often celebrating the appearance of his first piece by despatching an angry letter to the editor complaining about typographical errors. He wrote a dazzling review of Shackleton’s South for H. M. Massingham’s weekly, the Nation, displaying the flair and rhetorical flourish which was to come to maturity in The Worst Journey. ‘Some centuries ago, it seems,’ the review began, ‘when Scott was in the Antarctic . . .’ Cherry was critical of certain decisions, but overall he paid tribute to Shackleton. ‘Now I know,’ he wrote, ‘why it is that every man who has served under Shackleton swears by him.’ The piece ended with a vignette of three battered little boats and their exhausted, frostbitten crews. ‘Darkness is coming on,’ Cherry wrote, the sea is heavy, it is decided to lie off the cliffs and glaciers of Elephant Island and try and find a landing with the light. Heavy snow squalls and a cross sea – and both the wind and the sea rising. Many would have tried to get a little rest in preparation for the coming struggle. But Shackleton is afraid the boat made fast to his own may break adrift. She is hidden by the darkness, but a breaking wave reveals her presence every now and then. All night long he sits with his hand on the painter, which grows heavier and heavier with ice as the unseen seas urge by, and as the rope tightens and drops under his hand his thoughts are busy with future plans.
Cherry had not given up his campaign to end the penguin slaughter on Macquarie Island. At the beginning of April he wrote to The Times to tell its readers that the stories coming from that island ‘make the atrocities of Belgium sound like a Sunday School treat’. Appealing for parliamentary intervention, he ended with a paean to the birds themselves. ‘The penguin has won a little bit of affection from all of us because he is entirely lovable, and because he snaps his flippers at the worst conditions in the world. If we do not help him now we can never look him straight in the eyes again. Poor penguins, but poorer we.’ In the same month he wrote a piece for the Spectator appealing for government control over the killing of Antarctic fauna. The punch came in the last line. Having listed measures that should be taken to safeguard southern species, he concluded, ‘Otherwise the penguins will call us Huns, and we shall deserve every bit of it.’ He was so pleased with his Hun joke that when news came through in December that the killings were to stop he produced it again in another letter to The Times . While he was about it, he publicly thanked H. G. Wells, whose support he had co-opted. ‘ “There are some Huns among them”, the penguins say, “but the nice people, like The Times and Mr Wells, and others not so well known (but just as nice) have been too much for them”
. . . When the frost is in the trees and the snow is on the ground you will hear them [the penguins] say “thank yo
u”, and so does yours sincerely, Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’42
Shortly before the end of the war Shaw had introduced Cherry to Wells. It was difficult to see what they had in common. They were different in background, political instinct and temperament, and Wells, who plotted schemes to tax the rich with his friend Arnold Bennett, never really liked humanity much. But he and Cherry found common ground, and they met and corresponded occasionally for three decades. Wells was attracted to the potential for scientific investigation in the Antarctic and seized any opportunity to quiz Cherry on polar matters, whether in an armchair at Ayot, at a first-night drinks party in the Shaws’ London flat, or under a tree at Lamer. He had smuggled the Macquarie penguins into his 1919 novel The Undying Fire, a heavy-going twentieth-century rendition of the allegory of Job. (Wells must have had Cherry on his mind when he toiled over his book, as he also tossed in a reference to a parasitical liver disease in China.)
The penguins had offered Cherry the chance to expatiate on the Antarctic, and he was always on the look-out for other opportunities to refer to his favourite topic. In October 1919 he seized his pen in response to a long article in The Times on the efficacy of that new weapon of mechanised war, the tank. Pointing out that Scott had used a forerunner of the tank in the Antarctic, he disingenuously described the ‘considerable success’ of the motor sledges on the ice, going on to claim, with the deft, polished style that was becoming his trademark, ‘Fetch one of these two derelicts off the Barrier, and case it in armour, and you would have something very like the modern tank, which is largely an imitation of our old friends. With Churchill at the Admiralty and Scott still alive tanks would have been in action long before September 1915.’ This was demonstrably untrue, but it sounded nice, and it expressed the mood of elegiac melancholy that was to characterise his best writing.
