by Sara Wheeler
He was also quietly building up a small art collection. His first major acquisition was Rodin’s bronze skater, which he bought for £640. GBS had famously sat for Rodin, and he had also sat for the young American expatriate sculptor Jacob Epstein (though when Epstein’s bust was finally completed Charlotte refused to let it into the house on the grounds that it made its subject look like a savage). Epstein’s work, with its stylised figures and powerful sexual component, represented the new and iconoclastic in art, and as such it attracted controversy for years: in the summer of 1925 the sculptor’s tribute to W. H. Hudson in Hyde Park, Rima, was to be tarred and feathered. In 1920 Epstein exhibited his first Christ at the Leicester Galleries in London. The Risen Christ was a startlingly beautiful bronze, a taller than life-size representation with enormously distended fingers raised, on the right hand, to display the open wound. The upright head was stern, dignified and quietly moving, though the features were hard, not crumpled like the faces of the standard nineteenth-century messiahs. Inevitably the conservative wing of public opinion weighed in with loud and warlike criticism of this outrageous strike at their securely held opinions. The ferocious Jesuit priest and social reformer Father Bernard Vaughan published his attack – ‘Is it Really Christ?’ – in the Graphic in February, objecting chiefly that the statue was not sufficiently English in appearance (it was more like an Asiatic, or a Hun, or, God forbid, ‘an American’). Shaw counter-attacked in the pages of the same magazine a month later with one of his most endearing pieces of polemic journalism. The operatic Christ favoured by Father Vaughan, he argued, had been invented by St Luke. ‘All the Christs in art must stand or fall by the power of suggesting to the beholder the sort of soul that he thinks was Christ’s soul.’ Indeed.
Cherry bought the Christ. He walked into the gallery shortly before the exhibition closed and paid £2,100 (about £45,000 today). The controversy had appealed to his anti-establishment streak, Shaw had encouraged the purchase, and he could see for himself that it was a remarkable work. Besides that, it was bound to annoy Canon Nance. He put it in the garden, where the servants had much to say about it for many years.
In the winter of 1918/19 an argument over a pair of motor cars created a rift between Kathleen and Cherry that never quite closed. She had handed over two vehicles to Snowdon Hedley, a colleague of Cherry’s from the squadron and now a captain; he was to organise repairs and sell the cars on her behalf. When no sale (or at least, no money) was forthcoming, Kathleen asked for the cars back. For months Cherry acted as intermediary, but finally a furious Kathleen, provoked by the sight of Hedley quaffing cocktails in Regent Street with ladies in silver dresses, put the matter into Farrer’s hands, and Cherry was summoned to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a series of formal interviews. He simmered with rage and frustration for weeks. ‘My natural kindness of heart,’ he wrote in a letter to Kathleen that was never sent, ‘of which I am daily reminded that I have too large a share, has placed me, all unwilling, between two of my friends in this matter . . . This has already meant at least four special journeys to London, telephones, telegrams and postage innumerable, at least a year off my life in mental distress [here he crossed out, ‘As well as lunches at the Café Royal which I shudder to contemplate’].’
The matter was settled without recourse to the courts, and Kathleen and Cherry tried to remain friends despite the chilly air that had descended. She continued to bring admirers to Lamer, among them the tall Norwegian explorer, oceanographer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen, whom Cherry considered the father of all modern sledge travel. Nansen stayed at Lamer for what he described as ‘two unforgettable days’ when the bluebells were out in the dell and daffodils covered the park. His exploits in the Arctic were legendary, and Cherry pumped him for details about sledge runners which he might include in the appendices to his double-decker book (the typescript was becoming more unwieldy as each month expired).
In 1921 Cherry saw much less of Kathleen. She had fallen in love with Hilton Young, a distinguished junior minister, and in March 1922 they married. Kathleen’s life was increasingly taken up with politics, and as Young had a house in the country she no longer needed Lamer. But more than a husband had come between Kathleen and Cherry. Even without the business of the cars, their friendship would inevitably have cooled. Cherry was distancing himself from the official side of the expedition. His attitude to Scott was maturing, and he needed to draw apart from his widow in order to see and write clearly.
In his search for a publisher it was to Shaw, of course, that Cherry turned. Smith, Elder were too close to the committee; and anyway Reggie was dead. Cherry had decided to get Never Again: Scott, Some Penguins and the Pole typeset and printed at his own expense, thereby retaining editorial control. It was a similar system to the one used by Shaw, who had begun publishing his work himself with Man and Superman in 1903, establishing a distribution arrangement with the firm of Constable that worked satisfactorily for almost half a century. In the middle of February 1920 Cherry approached Shaw’s printer, R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh, for a price for 240,000 words, in two volumes, with appendices totalling 72,000 words. He asked to be quoted on 1,000 and 1,500 copies. The matter was handled by Clarks’ director William Maxwell, who looked after Shaw’s voluminous oeuvre for many years. As the first chapters went up for setting straight into page proof, Cherry opened negotiations with the eminent fine-art publisher Emery Walker, whose offices were in Fleet Street. Besides being a friend of Shaw’s, Walker had known Scott and Wilson, and his company had worked on Scott’s Voyage of the ‘Discovery’. He was to undertake the reproduction of the illustrations in Never Again.
Finishing a book is largely a matter of stamina. Cherry sat it out in the library, writing sections or isolated paragraphs in longhand on separate sheets and arranging them for the typist who arrived from an agency and sat clacking in an upstairs room. When the typed pages came back downstairs he snipped them up and reordered the pieces. Although the recent glut of books on the expedition put him, in one sense, at a psychological disadvantage, a consideration of their contents helped focus his mind on the kind of book he had to write.
Scott’s executors had been first off the mark only months after the Terra Nova docked. The two volumes of Scott’s Last Expedition , edited by Leonard Huxley, went through half a dozen reprints in less than a year. Besides that, five of Cherry’s surviving shipmates had got their books out before him. Ray Priestley’s enchanting Antarctic Adventure had been published in 1914, though stocks had been destroyed in the war and the book was hard to obtain. Two years after Priestley, Griff had produced his breezy and agreeable With Scott: the Silver Lining (in a letter to Cherry he referred to it as ‘Ortobiogriffie’). The two books concentrated largely on parts of the expedition at which Cherry had not been present, and he praised them both in The Worst Journey, describing The Silver Lining as a book which offered ‘a true glimpse into the more boisterous side of our life’. Evans’ stiff and uninspiring South with Scott appeared in 1921, followed later the same year by Ponting’s equally wooden The Great White South. This last pair went on selling for many years, and although they were frequently offered as Sunday School prizes in the hope that the recipients would absorb some of their heroic spirit, they had little literary merit and made no serious attempt at critical analysis of motivation and personality. Finally Cherry had taken much delight in George Murray Levick’s Antarctic Penguins (1914). Dr Levick’s book is almost entirely about Adélies, amongst which he had spent much time (he was one of Campbell’s Northern Party). ‘If you think your own life hard,’ Cherry wrote, ‘and would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or steal this tale, and read it and see how the penguins live.’
So he struggled on, hunched over the old desk, stirring only when the housemaid crept in to lay more logs on the fire or when Miss Hill, the suitably antediluvian spinster who had replaced Miss Merchant, announced that luncheon was served. As the war receded and the book finally began to take shape, he ex
perienced a sense of purpose that was to coalesce into one of wellbeing. He tipped back his chair and looked out at the lawny vista unfurling beyond the window, or at the friendly books populating the old glass-fronted bookcases on either side, and at last he saw very clearly that he hadn’t slogged up the Beardmore in order to compile appendices listing the weight of pony fodder.
Battling to subdue his monstrous regiments of material, Cherry learned that his most faithful ally was the waste-paper basket. After weeks of work on a chapter he had called ‘Science’, out it all went. He also jettisoned the rambling, repetitive chapter on Antarctic psychology which he had planned to begin with a eulogy to Bill. In fact, the psychology section had some fresh and touching paragraphs. ‘Why do men who have returned [from the Antarctic] always wish to go back again to that hard and simple life?’ Cherry wondered.
What is it that we wish to gain? I believe it to be this. A man on such an expedition lives so close to nature, in whom he realises a giant force which is visibly, before his eyes, carving out the world, and he lives sometimes so close to the bedrock of existence, that it seems to him on his return to be almost impossible to live comfortably in England because life there is so complicated. To mention a small instance, it struck me as absurd that hundreds of men should be rushing to catch trains at big London termini. Why this waste of energy when there were other trains in less than an hour? . . . This, then, is what I believe has something to do with the call of the south.
It was also something to do with his own restless longings. He had never recaptured the fulfilment he had experienced during that first year on the ice.
In these pages he elaborated on ‘the bondage of possessions’, a state he perceived as the antithesis of the Antarctic experience (‘the Polar Party stands out as the negation of materialism’), and mused on the ‘mystical and invisible something which has been the object of all religions’. He had been deeply influenced by Lillie, a dedicated student of mysticism. In Cherry’s mind the rejection of materialism was an essential corollary to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an idea which, as he perceived it, was slipping out of fashion with disastrous consequences. The importance of the endless search for truth became one of his favourite themes.
He left some surprising embryonic essays among the abandoned material. One was written in response to a tub-thumping address by the Bishop of London, who wished to expunge the stain of prostitution from the streets of the capital. ‘Have you ever starved and had no means to get a bed from the frost?’ Cherry raged. Another essay, a long, reasoned account which reveals the breadth of his scientific reading, was a kind of thinking-man’s history of the planet. In this heady mix of geological theory and philosophical speculation Cherry strikes a peculiarly modern note. In a section on the function of carbon dioxide in climate change he shows that he knew all about the greenhouse effect. He discusses the role of thermohaline circulation in the oceans (without using the term) as well as the part played by changing polar oceanic currents in the growth of ice sheets – both topics keenly pursued by 21st-century scientists. While he recognised that in many areas ‘we are in guess land, but not in fairy land’, he believed there was no limit to what science could achieve. ‘We shall visit the moon now before very long,’ he prophesied, ‘probably within the next thousand years.’ He was less than 950 years out.
There was a kind of redemption in the act of writing. In the stillness of his library Cherry returned to the landscape where life had made sense. In his mind’s eye he saw the coast of Ross Island where land met solid sea in the pleated cliff of a glacier or a tangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges. He imagined sitting up again in a heavy reindeer-pelt bag, pushing back a gritty cambric tent flap and looking out over bloodless snowfields while ice crystals skittered through the blistering air and into his eyes. ‘Even now,’ he wrote, the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the icefields of the north; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the south.
He travelled far back through time and space to the small hut, where a single shaft of light from the midnight sun cut above the mound of snow piled against the window and fell on the jar of paint brushes on Bill’s small table, casting distorted shadows on the far wall. At the end of the evening Bill liked to stand there next to the table in his pyjamas, listening to Clara Butt singing ‘Abide with Me’ on the gramophone. ‘It is hard,’ Cherry wrote, ‘that often such men must go first when others far less worthy remain.’
He described standing at Hut Point watching the sun set behind the Western Mountains with Scott and the others in 1911, and then again a year later. The second time he was alone. He was on his hands and knees in the doorway of the hut after collapsing at the end of the journey to One Ton with Dimitri and the dogs, knowing that five men were slogging back across the Barrier and six more stranded somewhere up the coast. He would never forget those days, ‘Yet time will slowly but surely cause these dark memories to become as shadows, from which – and because of which – stand out in happy contrast the beauty, the simplicity, the good comradeship of it all. And the good times were such as the Gods might have envied us . . .’ Much of The Worst Journey sings faintly with the unquiet dissatisfactions of a man approaching middle-age. Its depictions of carefree days at Cape Evans read like a lament for lost innocence, and it is this that frees the book from the shackles of its time and place. Through his story Cherry reached out to something universal: the eclipse of youth, and the realm of abandoned dreams and narrowing choices that is the future.
The structure of the finished book is chronological, beginning with a historical introduction to Antarctic discovery and thereafter following the progress of the expedition. But the narrative is artfully interleaved with analysis and reflection. Within a single paragraph Cherry can range from historical disquisition through personal narrative and on to polemic. As he wrote ruefully of the Terra Nova:
People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively to the resources of that time, much better than the old tramp in which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and the morning are the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration ad hoc. Scott had the Discovery . But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and Ramsgate.
The mood of poetic musing mingled with practical explanation builds to a final meditation on the tawdry world to which the survivors came home. This counterpoint between the nobility of the spirit in which the expedition was undertaken and the grasping materialism of the post-war era, most clearly expressed in the plangent last page, reflected Cherry’s inner life more clearly than anything else he wrote. Besides his private griefs, the general feeling of decay and punctured ideals that he observed all around him had fuelled his disillusion. Most of the contemplative passages of The Worst Journey were written in 1921, when Britain was experiencing one of the most severe depressions since the industrial revolution. In March the government declared a state of emergency following critical labour disputes in the mines, and the following month coal was rationed. In June, unemployment passed two million.
As the years of writing painfully unfolded, Cherry had risen above his pessimism and by s
leight of hand turned the kernel of his story into a kind of parable. ‘And I tell you,’ he concluded, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.
It was the dislocation between the lushness of his Antarctic experience and the aridity of the present that formed his powerful sense of irony. From then on, irony became his dominant mode of expression. It suited him: it was as English as Kipling.
Cherry did not place himself at the centre of the stage; he was too modest. It was this that enabled him to write with such candour about his companions. The perspective of detached remembering that characterises so much of his account is most evident in his analysis of Scott. His thoughts on the man had matured, once the initial shock had subsided into a far-reaching, background grief. Scott himself had written about his conquest of his weaker nature, and Cherry deeply admired it. ‘Naturally so peevish,’ he wrote, ‘highly strung, irritable, depressed and moody . . . His triumphs are many – but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.’ He admired Scott hugely, but he was angry at him for the mistakes he had made, and struggled not to blame him for the deaths of Wilson and Birdie. The frank admission and exploration of an unheroic side to Scott’s character helped Cherry reconcile the bitterness he felt towards the man; temporarily, at least.
