Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Schooled by Shaw, Cherry had developed a sensitive awareness of the rhythm of his material. Seeing that the last chapter was tending to the apocalyptic, he leavened it with an account of the life of penguins, who function as a kind of group fool to his Lear. (‘We must admire them,’ he concludes, ‘if only because they are so much nicer than ourselves.’) He finessed the extracts he quoted from his own diary, and from the diaries and field notes of Birdie and Lashly, in order to vary the tone and pace of his narrative and provide the immediacy of a close-up shot. And he husbanded his reflections, allowing only the most potent to survive. Although he recalled the bad times – the resentment, sickness and crucifying cold – he also acknowledged the treachery by which the mind can create a paradise of the past. ‘So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember half.’

  He had been worried about the book’s unwieldy title, and now it too was among the casualties. Talking over the winter journey with Shaw one day, Cherry concluded that he supposed it had indeed been ‘the worst journey in the world’. He was thinking of Scott’s comment when Cherry, Birdie and Bill staggered back into the hut encased in iron-hard windproofs and hollow-cheeked with tension and exhaustion. ‘You know,’ Scott had exclaimed, ‘this is the hardest journey ever made.’ A decade later, in the shadow of a chestnut tree, Shaw blinked. ‘There’s your title,’ he said.

  Cherry is a master of the short sentence, and as a counterweight to his often abrupt style, he addresses the reader directly. Like many shy writers, he loved to do this on the page, because he could not do it in the drawing room. ‘A favourite pastime was the making of knots,’ he wrote of the weeks spent waiting at Hut Point. ‘Could you make a clove hitch with one hand?’ His prose is lean and supple, an almost classical model of the virtues of clarity. In a few brush strokes he conjures the troglodytic existence of Campbell’s Northern Party. ‘But they also had their good, or less bad days; such was midwinter night when they held their food in their hands and did not want to eat it, for they were full; or when they got through the Te Deum without a hitch; or when they killed some penguins; or got a ration of mustard plaster from the medical stores.’ The war seeped into the book, as it was bound to do (there is a blinded soldier crawling about in no man’s land in the Dardanelles, among other references), and infused the story with riper significance. Scott and the expedition came to represent the last flowering of an ideal before the blight set in.

  Shaw had put Cherry in touch with Otto Kyllmann, his publisher at Constable, and in June 1922 Cherry signed a publicity and distribution contract with the firm. He went back to his printer – two years after the first pages of the manuscript had been typeset – and ordered a first run of 1,500 two-volume boxed sets. The books were to be produced with two different bindings: an expensive creamy white Morris which Cherry preferred, and a blue cloth which was put out at three guineas. Even that was a small fortune, but Cherry was determined to produce a sumptuous book with fold-out maps and colour illustrations.

  Constable published on 4 December, and the reviews began appearing immediately. The Daily News headlined its piece ‘A Glorious Narrative’, and the deputy editor of the Nation, literary man-about-town H. M. Tomlinson, reassured the reader that ‘the man of taste and conscience would willingly forgo a weekend in Brighton [the same cost as the two volumes] in order to buy Mr Cherry-Garrard’s story’. One of the best notices, in the Evening Standard, was written by Cherry’s Christ Church contemporary George Mair, and it was this long, considered piece that attracted the most attention. ‘I should call the book,’ wrote Mair, ‘the most wonderful story in the world. I do not think that in the whole of the collections of Hakluyt and his successors, or even in the great modern travel books like those of Stanley and of Scott and Shackleton themselves, you will find anything so impelling and authentic in its appeal or any record so noble of a noble event.’ Mair was not the only critic who drew attention to Cherry’s thoughtful analysis of Scott’s character, which for the first time acknowledged dark as well as light. ‘The real value of the book is as a contribution to polar psychology,’ wrote the Antarctic historian Hugh Robert Mill in Nature. He judged it ‘in some ways the most remarkable’ of the six books that had appeared on the expedition. ‘The iron of his [Cherry’s] sufferings,’ Mill wrote with bombastic eloquence, ‘has entered into his soul and imparted a ferric quality to his recollections.’ The Bookman critic thought it scarcely decent even to review the work. ‘It would be more seemly to salute such a book with the ancient greeting of the Roman, standing with outstretched, uplifted arm in silent admiration of the great men and great deeds recorded.’ Cherry was ecstatic. ‘I’m having the time of my life,’ he revealed jubilantly to Kyllmann on 8 December. Several weeks later he reported gleefully, ‘Galsworthy has gone cracked about my book; says it is the best of all polar books.’43 This was what Scott had wanted: the tale had not been lost in the telling.

  Not all the reviews were positive. The Manchester Guardian’s man objected to being labelled a shopkeeper, and thought some of Cherry’s philosophising amounted to ‘slipshod thinking’. The unattributed review in The Times was sour. (Cherry had shamelessly suggested to The Times that Shaw review the book and, equally shamelessly, GBS had offered to do so. But he didn’t.) The Worst Journey would have been better, the reviewer thought, ‘if the personal element had been more concentrated. It contains much which has been told elsewhere in the same words.’ The dead hand of the committee was plainly visible in this piece. ‘He has evidently,’ the reviewer sniffed on, ‘quite in the post-war manner, resolved to say what he thinks and emphasise the “heroism” of the story as little as possible.’

  Several readers objected vociferously to The Worst Journey. Kathleen was furious that her first husband had been portrayed in less than godlike terms (‘He has criticised Con in the most appalling fashion’). Cherry had sent her a boxed set inscribed ‘with very grateful thanks’; she quickly added a few ‘Rots!’ in the margins. Shaw wrote to her joking feebly that she’d better not come to Ayot as she might murder Cherry if she saw him. Her friends attacked the book in public and private, homing in on what they perceived as its rank disloyalty. Barrie went hurrying round to Kathleen’s house in Buckingham Palace Road and pointed out that, knowing both parties, Cherry’s contention that Scott lacked humour was rich. (Knowing a little about Barrie, his own observation is richer still.) He decided against impugning Cherry in print on the grounds that his action would only serve to publicise the offending volume. Shaw, as usual, had hurled himself into the conflict. Hearing of Kathleen’s anger, he sent her a long, typewritten apologia for Cherry and his book, scribbling at the top, ‘Keep this for a quiet hour: it is about Cherry and old times and sorrows.’ In this laborious and counter-productive letter he asked Kathleen to take The Worst Journey seriously, for Cherry, ‘always a case of suppressed ability, has found an outlet for it in this book . . . and . . . bringing a hero to life always involves exhibiting his faults as well as his qualities’. It might have been common sense, but Kathleen did not want to hear it. Shaw, she thought privately, seemed unconsciously determined to make her resent the author of The Worst Journey. ‘I have never admired Cherry,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but I am very fond of him and don’t want to have to cease to be.’ Further comment came issuing from the Shavian oracle. Having cheerfully analysed ‘Con’ as if he had known him all his life, GBS warned Kathleen of the dangers her friends were running when they denounced Cherry and his book: ‘The other day Cherry said to me quite spontaneously, “I had, as you know, the greatest admiration for Scott; but these people will end by hardening me against him: they will not listen to reason; and they know nothing about it.” ’

  Kathleen’s doctor confirmed that she was pregnant at about this time, so she had other things on her mind. But Shaw’s words had not persuaded her. Five years later she tried to get Cherry’s description of Scott being ‘weak’ and ‘peevish’ removed from The Worst Journey. When that strate
gy failed she took a different tack, sanctioning her erstwhile admirer Stephen Gwynn, an Irish journalist and former MP, to write a hagiography of Scott in the hope that it would obliterate Cherry’s account in the manner of a palimpsest. But few read Stephen Gwynn now.

  The mandarins at the Natural History Museum were also displeased. Cherry had flamboyantly exposed the indifference with which the museum had received the Emperor penguin eggs back in 1913. The exchange, skilfully presented as a comedy of manners (‘This ain’t an egg shop . . . Do you want me to put the police on to you?’), furnished Cherry with a striking contrast to the moral value of the winter journey and the spirit in which it was carried out (‘We did not forget the Please and Thank you . . .’). Scenting a good story, the press picked it up, and a purple-faced Harmer, now the dignified Sir Sidney, complained indignantly to both the Daily News and Cherry, insisting that his staff had been gravely maligned (‘the story seems devoid of any semblance to the truth’). Cherry drafted in the help of GBS (by post, inconveniently, as the Shaws were in London), and the pair of them tormented Harmer with courteous, clever letters that were impossible to refute. The main culprit at the museum was dead, but Cherry had a witness up his sleeve, as Scott’s sister Grace, who had accompanied him on one visit to the Cromwell Road, confirmed his account of events in writing. For a week or two rants from both sides enlivened the pages of several newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement, Harmer sending forth a stream of denials and Cherry noting that ‘the manners of the Natural History Museum have not changed for the better since 1913’.

  Complaints notwithstanding, Shaw announced that the book’s success ‘has exceeded all expectations’. He considered that the reviews, ‘favourable or not, all show that he has impressed his vision of the expedition irresistibly on his readers’. ‘The book does seem to have made a hit,’ Cherry wrote to Emery Walker. ‘It has done what I specifically wanted it to do – get the business into some kind of perspective and proportion.’ Constable reported brisk sales, despite the high cover price, and a fortnight after publication a reprint was mooted. Soon a second edition was rolling off the Edinburgh presses with a short new preface, fewer plates (the stock of some of the panoramas had been exhausted) and some minor corrections. Buoyed up by his success, Cherry felt the deep sense of satisfaction that came from having achieved exactly what he had intended. ‘This post-war business is inartistic,’ he had written in his preface, ‘for it is seldom that anyone does anything well for the sake of doing it well.’ It had been a great relief, he said, to wander back into the past, a place which was so foreign that it seemed to him ‘an age in geological time’. After paying tribute to the contribution both Shaws had made to the development of his writing, he concluded: ‘At an advanced age, I am delighted to acknowledge that my education has at last begun.’

  11

  The Chaos which Threatens

  The Worst Journey had established Cherry’s reputation, and in 1923 he entered the sacred pages of Who’s Who. Despite his ambivalent attitude towards the establishment, a part of him yearned to belong, as parts of most of us do. He relished the social prestige conferred by his literary success. Through his book he had found a place in the world, and now he trotted zestfully round the country on social visits, accepting invitations to Emery Walker’s house in Gloucestershire, to Donegal, and to Devonshire, where, in the summer of 1923, he fell eighty feet down a cliff. Nothing was broken, but he could not sit down comfortably for weeks. He was also still a regular guest at Bellecroft, the Russell Cookes’ house on the Isle of Wight. Half a century later, Pussy’s nephew Stephen Roskill remembered those times. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘many of my happiest days were spent at Bellecroft in the 1920s when the house always seemed to be full of young, lively and intelligent people.’ Roskill was often at Lamer too. He remembered a goat there which always turned its back when people approached: Cherry had named it Evans. Roskill knew Evans the man as well, and remarked that he was ‘exactly the opposite to Cherry in being very self-advertising and flashy’.

  Personal success notwithstanding, Cherry still fidgeted ceaselessly over the direction in which the country was heading, especially after January 1924 when Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour prime minister. (MacDonald was to hold office for just ten months, though he would be back.) Cherry’s political views changed little with the years. He had a visceral loathing of socialism but despised most politicians, whatever their allegiance, and shunned any involvement in party politics. In a description of the horse in The Worst Journey he wrote that the beast ‘rivals our politicians in that he has little real intellect’.

  He still fretted relentlessly over his finances. The high rates of income tax and other duties imposed during the war had never been brought back down to pre-war levels, and Cherry’s response was to dispose of further assets. He was not alone: after 1918 a whole generation experienced a feeling of après nous le déluge that was to extend beyond the next war. In a famous Encounter article Nancy Mitford called it ‘the spirit of divest, divest’. Cherry put the remaining rump of the Wittenham estate on the market: the wood where he had considered building the house of his dreams, the Clumps that had inspired Nash, the ancient camp on Sinodun Hill. Rumours of the possible destruction of the camp incited a howl of protest on the Letters page of the Sunday Times, among other places, and eventually His Majesty’s Office of Works listed the site under the Ancient Monuments Act. Farrer tiptoed round a suggestion that Cherry might like to give a bit of it to the National Trust (‘Do not think I have turned socialist,’ he added hastily at the foot of his letter). ‘I have always admired Charles and his courteous end,’ Cherry replied tartly, ‘but even a king was not expected to pay his executioners.’

  With Wittenham sold, he decreed that Denford had to go. ‘The country estate in my opinion is as out of date as foxhunting,’ he wrote to the long-serving (and long-suffering) Farrer. ‘It is a matter of opinion, but mine is a very clear one – we ought to get out.’ He was over-optimistic about the price he would get for Denford. After consulting with his mother, a reserve of £28,000 was agreed. But the business dragged on, and the estate remained his.

  In the summer, the Denford furniture was auctioned in anticipation of a sale. The candlestick that had lit the way up the curling stairs, the grained tray-top washstand at which four generations of Cherrys had faced their day, the japanned coal scuttle that had frightened the little boy in the night nursery: it all went, all except the carpet in the library, which Evelyn wanted. Finally, the freehold and 785 acres were sold for £20,000. The money was invested to provide an income for Evelyn, as she was a life tenant of Denford under the terms of the General’s will. ‘My mother and I are both extremely glad to be out of Denford,’ Cherry informed Farrer in August, ‘and our disappointment at the price realised is compensated a good deal, I think, by our pleasure at shedding one more liability. I imagine the next step will be Bride Hall house and land here, and finally perhaps, if one can shed one’s taxation by so selling, Lamer.’

  The Shaws were a permanent fixture in Cherry’s social life as girlfriends came and went. He got to know many of their huge cast of theatrical acquaintances: in the winter of 1923 he heard Sybil Thorndike read Saint Joan in the rectory sitting room. (Not long afterwards he watched her star in the première.) At about the same time both GBS and Cherry acquired giant four-valve wireless sets, and they spent hours keenly fiddling with the buttons and pontificating on the changes this startling new technology would bring as waves of indecipherable crackle broke over their bent heads. As the years passed, age yielded material for a far more gripping topic, their health, or, more precisely, their ailments. Eagerly exchanging symptoms along with names and addresses of specialist doctors, when one or the other was away they continued the debate on paper. ‘My bowels refused to act in the smallest degree,’ GBS revealed conspiratorially in a bulletin from Birmingham in October 1923, ‘though my digestion and appetite were as healthy as possible. In desperation I resorted to
senna tea and paraffin oil . . .’ If a particularly exciting condition manifested itself while they were apart, the patient hurried home to report his symptoms. ‘We must compare damages when I return to Ayot,’ GBS wrote from Malvern after having his ribs X-rayed. On the rare occasions when neither had any difficulties they turned to Charlotte and her state of health, and in an emergency they furrowed their brows over the diseases of the servants.

  Besides the vagaries of physical wellbeing, they also colluded on matters of municipal concern. They both campaigned vigorously against an odiferous rubbish dump a mile south of Ayot. This strange place, embroidered with flowers in spring and colonised by rats in every season, consisted of a cluster of gravel pits packed with refuse sent up from London by the ponging trainload. ‘My famous neighbour Mr Cherry-Garrard,’ Shaw confided to the local press, ‘sole survivor of “the worst journey in the world”, after the horrors of which one would suppose that no discomfort possible in these latitudes could seem to him worth mentioning, has written a letter implying plainly that there is little to choose between midwinter at the South Pole and midsummer at Lamer Park when the dump is in eruption.’ The unhealthy aspect of the dump, and the limitless range of illnesses for which it might be responsible, were of special concern to the two complainants when they did not have bigger fish to fry. ‘I was ulcerating somewhere,’ GBS reported eagerly from Boar’s Hill in May 1926, ‘and I take in and put out unnatural volumes of fluid.’ His receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature did nothing to stem the flow of medical data.