by Sara Wheeler
Cherry had been among the first in the county both to acquire a motor car and to install a coal-fired electricity generator. Yet he had an ambiguous attitude to change. For a decade he had been fretting about the bewildering shifts he observed in the world around him, and in the twenties he witnessed a rush of progress in sleepy villages around Lamer which had altered little in centuries. Although horses were still being shod in Wheathampstead at the forge behind the Swan, and one of them still pulled the pump for the municipal sewerage system, vehicles were gaining ground, and the furious honk of the horn on Cherry’s open-topped silver Vauxhall as he sped down to the station had been downgraded to a minor event in the village day. Soon the first petrol pump was exhaling its fumes outside the Abbot John pub, Wren’s wheelwright shop was replaced by a garage, and in 1925 the High Street was tarred. Gas had made its appearance in 1922 when forty lamps were purchased to replace the old oil ones, though they were turned off at ten o’clock each night on the basis that nothing ever happened after that hour.
Not far off, the pioneering new towns of Welwyn and Letchworth were burgeoning, and Wheathampstead labourers took the omnibus to the building sites during the increasingly frequent periods in which there were no jobs on the farms. These were the original garden cities, conceived at the turn of the century as a solution to urban overcrowding and designed to combine the best of town and country, with no pubs to distract the happy populace from gardening. GBS began to joke that Cherry’s estate would end up as Lamer Garden City.
The sodden summers of 1925 and 1926 drove several tenant farmers around Ayot and Wheathampstead to the edge, and over it, especially when the closure of the railway during the General Strike meant they couldn’t send their produce down to London. As small-scale agriculture continued its inexorable decline, light industry appeared in the form of Murphy & Son, an agrochemical factory that was almost as smelly as the dump. The Batford amalgam rubber plant which came soon afterwards was the first to install a hooter summoning the workers to their posts, and for many years it blared magnificently at 7.55 each morning. Murphy and the others strengthened the link, previously so frail, between Wheathampstead and the outside world. It was a connection that became steadily stronger during Cherry’s lifetime, until the village was just another small part of a deafening and homogeneous universe.
The brand of heroic melancholy spawned by the news of Scott’s death was out of place amid the languid sophistication of the twenties. It had more or less died in the trenches, or at least when the truth about the trenches was known. In the summer of 1924 it raised its head for a last Lazarus-like spasm when George Mallory and his youthful companion Sandy Irvine vanished on the summit ridge of Everest, ‘going strong for the top’.
Like Scott, Mallory was compared to Sir Galahad; like Scott, his failure on this earth was transmogrified into success in the world beyond. The Bishop of Chester, mourning the mountaineers at their memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral, referred to their last climb as ‘the ascent by which the kingly spirit goes up to the house of the Lord’. ‘The real value [of the expedition] is moral and spiritual,’ The Times had written after the Terra Nova reached New Zealand. Cherry had known Mallory at Winchester, and after his death he likened him to Bill, his hero. ‘In a way,’ he wrote, ‘he who lies in the snow of the Barrier was like Mallory who lies on the snow of Mount Everest.’ But the days of heroic innocence were gone, and while the country was prepared to indulge in one last spree, for Cherry there was no return. In his memory, his dead friends stood alone. ‘Mallory was burning with a kind of fire, an ardent, impatient soul, winding himself up to a passion of effort the higher he got,’ he concluded. ‘Bill was not like that . . .’ In the long, lonely years of anguished recollection, Cherry regretted that he hadn’t asked Bill enough questions about himself, to learn what made him as he was. How many people have wished for their time again, once the beloved is gone? How little is learned from those lessons.
Cherry was now considered an authority, or at least an urbane commentator, on travel to remote regions, and in June 1926 the Daily News asked him to contribute to a debate on the future of exploration. Noting first the speed with which the world was shrinking (in the previous three months Alan Cobham had flown from London to Cape Town and back, and Amundsen, taking off from Spitsbergen in an airship, had flown over the North Pole and on to Alaska), Cherry developed a theme he had raised in The Worst Journey by suggesting that the future of polar exploration was in the air. ‘When an airship can be used like a motor-car,’ he suggested, ‘there will be no more blank spaces in the world.’ He predicted that large government-funded scientific stations would be built in the Antarctic, specifying Ross Island as a probable site.44 But it didn’t much interest him. The virgin territories of Asia, he reckoned, were more appealing: ‘Rather pick primulas in Szechwan than lava on the Beardmore now.’ Via this circuitous Chinese route he steered his argument round to the familiar comparison between the noble purity of the true expedition and the tawdry materialism of the modern world. ‘England has a genius for compromise, and in this dreadfully civilised world, with so many people and so many interests, compromise pays: a limited Monarchy, a limited Democracy, a limited Socialism, and now perhaps a limited Trade Unionism – and quite time too.’ (The TUC had called off the General Strike45 six weeks previously, leaving the striking miners to battle on alone.) A few of his father’s ideals of Englishness had survived in the toxic soil of his disillusion. ‘For the English do not really like compromise,’ he informed the confused readers of the Daily News, ‘and God, as I believe, does not want compromise. He wants people to have strong beliefs and to go all out for them.’ For the last fifty years of his life, Cherry believed the present to be all wrong. Like many in Britain, he looked back with Chekhovian longing to an imaginary pre-war society (more accurately pre-Antarctic, in his case), and as the distance from that halcyon time lengthened, so his dissaffection with the present intensified. Most people live in the past when they reach old age; by his early forties, Cherry already saw the present in black and white and looked backwards to a lost youth that glowed in glorious colours.
Evelyn had moved out of her rented house in Southampton with the long-suffering Peggy in tow and bought a property on a hill near Godalming in order to be near Mildred, her third daughter, who was living in Reigate in Surrey with her young family. The West House remained Evelyn’s home for over a quarter of a century. Cherry visited her occasionally, and they exchanged telephone conversations in which each shouted at the other before being cut off. He also saw Lassie and her brood in St Albans, where Lassie’s husband, now a canon, held a diocesan office, but otherwise he was growing distant from his family. Edith, having recovered from her childhood invalidity to conquer the Matterhorn, had continued upwards and embraced religion, hopping cheerily from church to church and giving away all her money. Cherry saw little of her, and disapproved of her financial piety. The rituals of birth and death meant nothing to him, and he refused to turn up for relatives’ funerals, staying away from Bedford in August 1927 when his uncle Colby Sharpin was buried. Colby had been a distinguished doctor as well as a carnation- and picotee-fancier of national standing. He died at 11 Lansdowne Road, two doors away from the red-brick house where Cherry was born. But Cherry was more self-absorbed than most, and his far-off, unremembered beginnings were irrelevant to him. He went through life apparently unconscious of the random stroke of fate that had led him to acquire his riches, and it never occurred to him that only an arbitrary set of events had separated him from a lifetime in a red-brick house in Lansdowne Road like his Uncle Colby.
As for the villagers, he was wholly indifferent to them. He paid his tithes, made his squirely contributions to hospital funds, complained occasionally and otherwise maintained a dignified distance – as long as people kept off his land. He chased away boys he caught bird-nesting in the spinneys, took the names of the girls who gathered bluebells in the dell by the ice house and banned the collection of firewood
on the grounds that people were taking too much. Despite all that, his policy of non-intervention was popular with his tenant farmers. But if Cherry ever felt exploited, he showed immense determination.
His most protracted dispute in the mid twenties was with George Seabrook, the tenant of Lamer Farm, at 350 acres the largest on the estate.46 Seabrook, whose family had worked the land there for generations, kept eighty ewes, thirty steers and three milking cows, as well as a flock of turkeys and a hundred head of poultry which, being truly free range, often popped up in unexpected places. For years Cherry had been asking him to refrain from grazing his horses in parkland near the house as they were gnawing the elm trees. Despite heavy expenditure on fencing and tree guards, the elms continued to sustain damage. ‘Legally I believe I can put machinery in motion,’ Cherry had written in an impassioned letter to Seabrook in May 1923, ‘but that kind of thing leaves bitter feelings . . . I care far more for these trees which are sometimes hundreds of years old than I do about rents: I care so much that I do not think I can discuss the matter personally with calmness.’
The machinery, however, was the only solution. After two more years of demands and conciliatory gestures, Farrer was instructed and, incredibly, in December 1926 Cherry-Garrard v. Seabrook was heard in front of Justice Tomlin in the High Court. Affidavits were read from the bemused gardener Hyde, as well as Currell the woodman, and the judge gravely leafed through lists of numbered trees defaced with ‘slight patches’, ‘severe patches’ or ‘very severe patches’. After an interim injunction ordering Seabrook to refrain from permitting his horses to eat the trees, the proceedings staggered to a botched settlement at the beginning of 1927. It was a Pyrrhic victory for Cherry. As he had predicted, there were bitter feelings. The Farmers’ Union insinuated that they might blacklist him. Not that he cared about that: he was determined to get out of agricultural land.
He had fallen into a depression towards the end of the case, and found it difficult to keep the trees and their horsey teeth marks in proportion. On bad days he couldn’t get out of bed, and when he thought of Reggie, he was afraid. This was ominous. ‘No man is greater than the man who can conquer himself,’ he had written in a discarded description of Scott. But here he was, unable to conquer his own disposition. His failure to overcome his black mood trapped him in a wretched cycle of despair, and as the daffodils nodded behind the summer house and the May blossom cheered the park, Cherry retreated into autumnal gloom.
On good days he came down to breakfast when the factory hooter sounded, and as he tackled cook’s coddled eggs and dark coffee under the eyes of his ancestors he asked himself how much longer he was prepared to struggle to keep Lamer going. Would he be the one to let it out of the family? The estate had already shrunk to 900 acres, of which 143 were parkland. He seemed to think that if things continued as they were, he would be ruined. The reality was that he was still very wealthy indeed. His capital had recently swollen by £18,000 (around half a million pounds in today’s terms) when he had been paid the final tranche of the mortgage on Upper Forest Estate near Swansea. It was a great relief, and an end at last to the torrents of correspondence spewing out of Glamorgan almost daily.
Despite his lack of interest in land, Cherry was devoted to his trees, as Seabrook had discovered, and he planted 300 acres of larch and beech, most of which replaced cornfields. The planting was not simply inspired by dendrophilous tendencies: he did it to avoid land tax, which woodland did not attract. But he cherished his trees as if they were people, and when the Hertfordshire Hunt persisted in riding over the young plantations, Cherry angrily banned hunting at Lamer for the first time in the history of the estate.47 Huntsmen do not easily break their habits, and in 1929 Cherry brought an action for trespass and damage. In court, the defendants’ counsel tried gamely to elicit a motive. ‘Was it hurt pride? A taste for litigation? A crank’s distaste for good old-fashioned British blood sports? Mr Cherry-Garrard is a famous explorer, as everyone knows; why make a mountain out of a mole hill?’ ‘I have brought this as a test-case,’ Cherry replied with his characteristic inscrutability. ‘I am here for a decision.’ When he got one, he smiled inside. He had won again.
When he had no troublesome farmers or huntsmen to pursue, the chaos of Cherry’s inner life manifested itself in a steady war of attrition against his old enemies, the tax commissioners and the clergy. In his fantasy life the country was led by a benign despot who ruled according to a strict policy of laissez-faire, levied income tax at a discretionary rate and administered a sharp kicking to any representative of the Church of England who raised his voice in protest. In October 1929 his natural pessimism was painfully gratified when the collapse of the New York stock market precipitated global economic depression. British exports were paralysed, unemployment rose dramatically and in his 1930 budget Philip Snowden, the chancellor who smoked Turkish cigarettes in an ivory holder, raised income tax and surtax and, to Cherry’s rage, revived proposals for a tax on land value.
Throughout these years, Cherry remained obsessed with the burden of the property owner. The estate contracted in violent spurts, and in some corner of his mind he associated the final sale – the sale of Lamer – with the final casting-off of anxieties. He loved Lamer deeply; every yard of the park had its associations. Each day he saw his father’s waxed moustache in the large oil on the dining-room wall, and the recriminations stalked his imagination. The tension between his ancestral duty, his attachment to his estate and the desire to liberate himself from the responsibilities of the landlord tightened as each year progressed. But for all his talk, he could not yet sell Lamer.
In 1925, through the Shaws, Cherry had met the gnome-like T. E. Lawrence. Already a national hero widely known as the uncrowned king of Arabia, Lawrence had enlisted in the air force under the assumed name of Ross, ostensibly to escape his own legend. When the story got out he was forced to leave. He changed his name again, this time to Shaw, and after a stint in the Tank Corps was transferred to the RAF Cadet College at Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get there from London he had to drive near Wheathampstead, and he was in the habit of stopping off at the Shaws for the weekend. Once installed, he accompanied his hosts to Lamer for lunch. Charlotte especially was fond of Lawrence: she was thirty years his senior, yet they were remarkably intimate. GBS had tinkered away at the flabby typescript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom for two years, and both Shaws inevitably drew comparisons between that book and The Worst Journey. When Lawrence told them, with typically ostentatious self-deprecation, that nobody would be interested in the subject matter of his unpublished volume, GBS, citing the success of Cherry’s book, asked why sand should not have the same appeal as snow.
Lawrence was two years younger than Cherry. He was a small man with engaging eyes and a cupid-bow mouth, and looked boyish into his forties. With sly contrivance he had manipulated the facts of his life and stoked the legend that blazed around him. He was more intellectually magnetic than Cherry, and more dazzling. Shaw was effusive in his praise of Seven Pillars , but it has none of The Worst Journey’s artful spontaneity: its prose is convoluted, its imagery overburdened. Lawrence’s letters are much better; in them he becomes lovable. As for his relationship with Cherry: although they were never particularly close, their inner lives were more similar than their public personas suggested. Both men fought long and terrible battles with the masked enemies of fear, doubt and introspection. Both were frequently unhappy. Lawrence explained to Charlotte that he had no faith in himself as a writer and so had ‘backed out of the race’. Frustrated by the tensions between literature and action, he claimed he no longer wished to be ‘a half and half: a Cherry-Garrard’. Yet for all his pseudonyms and flights to the ranks, Lawrence was a more public man than Cherry.
Lawrence admired The Worst Journey (‘one of the great travel books’) and adored Lamer (‘It has an astonishing feeling of being intact and undisturbed’). When Cherry subscribed thirty guineas to the private, slimmed-down edition of Seven Pillars, Lawrence s
igned his copy, ‘A. C-G. from T. E. Shaw . . . shamefacedly, for I feel that my bad journey is so much worse told than his.’ For once, he was right. In his Spectator review of Revolt in the Desert (the anorectically abridged version of the edited Seven Pillars), GBS linked Cherry and Lawrence (‘Do tell me that his praise scares you, also,’ Lawrence wrote girlishly to Cherry). It was astonishing, reckoned Shaw the elder, to find such a superlative synthesis of literature and action in two young men of the same generation. Commenting on this privately to Cherry, Lawrence suggested, ‘If our sexes had been different (one of us, I mean) we could have pulled off a eugenicist’s dream.’ The thought beggars the imagination.
Lawrence inhabited a twilit zone between reality and fantasy. He had a passion for concealment, and cultivated his own image with relentless intensity. This was foreign to Cherry’s mental world. In the end, Charlotte grew apart from Lawrence. ‘He’s such a liar,’ she told Cherry, and soon he too drifted out of touch with Lawrence (the weekend visits to Ayot had ceased at the end of 1926, when Lawrence was posted abroad). After Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935, his brother Arnold asked Cherry to contribute to a collection of essays. T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, published by Jonathan Cape in 1937, included a short analytical piece by Cherry in which he wrote of his friend’s crucifying anxieties from a very near perspective. ‘Experiences such as Lawrence had been through,’ he said, ‘do not drop you: they torture you.’ He knew all about that. ‘To go through a terrible time of mental and physical stress,’ wrote Cherry, ‘and to write it down as honestly as possible is a good way of getting some of it off your nerves. I write from personal experience.’ But only ‘some’ of this stress was removable: later, in Lawrence’s case, ‘Having been knocked about so much, all these troubles and primitive and subconscious fears began to come to the surface.’ This was plainly Cherry’s case also. ‘In the long run,’ he stated bleakly, ‘no man can escape himself.’
