by Sara Wheeler
Apart from the Shaws, as he entered the thirties and his own mid forties Cherry led a solitary life. His main hobby was bird-watching. His two-volume Birds of the British Isles by T. A. Coward was permanently at hand on a low table in the library, battered and bulging with newspaper cuttings reporting rare sightings. He went shooting, attended to his young trees and was permanently vexed by the moods of his temperamental coal-fired generator. When he needed company he whizzed over to Cambridge in the Vauxhall’s successor, a primrose Rolls convertible known as the ‘yellow peril’. He had commissioned a personalised model from the well-known firm of Mulliner’s, and, in an uncharacteristic display of vulgarity, had the family crest mounted in the centre of the doors. In Cambridge he remorselessly cultivated Frankie Drake and other bright young women on the staff of Deb’s research institute, taking one out for lunch and another out for dinner on the same day. He was well, physically and emotionally, for much of 1930 and 1931. But even in his bright periods he could turn sour. When he went to assist the sculptor C. S. Jagger with his Shackleton statue, commissioned for the new Royal Geographical Society building, the episode ended badly. Cherry had agreed to lend his polar mitts and lanyards, even though he claimed that he still wore them (‘I will freeze in the meantime’), because he admired Jagger’s work. He trekked down to the sculptor’s studio in the wilds of Battersea in south London, took one look at the preliminary sketches and told the baffled Jagger what he thought, which was not wholly complimentary. ‘A wasted afternoon,’ Cherry tartly informed poor Frankie Drake, who had organised the whole thing.
The economic and political crisis in the middle of 1931 that culminated in the end of the gold standard was potentially calamitous for investors like Cherry. Now the Depression bit, and although Wheathampstead, like most of the south-east, was not especially affected by the recession, it was not immune. The village was still reliant on agriculture, and farmers were suddenly even more hard pressed than they had been in the twenties. Casual work on the farms dropped off altogether, and in the mornings a gaggle of men queued outside the little forge behind the High Street, looking for work which was rarely offered. Elsewhere, even in the relatively prosperous south, ordinary people began to register their frustration with riots and hunger marches. Cherry prophesied darkly that graver disasters lay ahead.
In the spring of 1932 the Shaws brought Sidney and Beatrice Webb over to Lamer for lunch. The dining room was bright with May sunshine, the bronze figurines gleamed on the enamelled sideboard and a vase of freshly picked gold roses stood in the centre of the mahogany dining table. Sidney, the ugly and astonishingly brilliant son of a hairdresser,51 had gone to the Lords as Passfield after the May 1929 general election, combining the posts of Dominions and Colonial Secretary. Beatrice, the daughter of a plutocrat, had spent much of her adult life working for an improvement in the lot of the labouring classes. Shaw had recently inflamed her with his fanatical talk of the Soviet Paradise, and the pair of them, both in their seventies, were about to leave for Moscow to study the co-operative movement.
Despite sharing a birthday and a depressive tendency with Cherry, as a committed Fabian socialist and reformer Beatrice was an unlikely ally. The visit was a disaster. Beatrice recorded in her diary that Cherry, ‘ruined’ by the slump, ‘has become a semi-maniac in his hatred of the working class’. According to her, he had fallen out with neighbours, tenants and servants and spent his time raving apocalyptically. ‘In nine months’ time we shall all be starved,’ he told her as she sat on his Chippendale chair and sipped his wine. He was, she concluded, ‘a victim of his evil environment of irresponsible wealth and unmerited social prestige’. Can it really have been that simple? In Beatrice’s world, it was. ‘Years ago he [Cherry] was a personally attractive . . . rather distinguished youth with artistic and intellectual gifts, today he is drab and desolate, looks as if he were drinking and drugging as well as hating. I should not be surprised to hear that a revolver shot had solved his problem.’
It was true that Cherry had lost money in the Depression. He had invested in a range of foreign stocks, including South American and African railways, and much of that money had melted away. Yet he was very far from being ruined. His capacity for gloom was a facet of his Englishness, and he shared the unattractive upper-class habit of complaining about being ‘poor’. (In E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, Margaret Schlegel declares, ‘I’m tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor.’) But Beatrice Webb was a bad judge of character.52 There was something dimly recognisable in her caricature of Cherry, but when she reported his claim to have sacked 1,300 men, and his thanks to God that those men would starve, she undermined her credibility. And it was unlikely that he spoke highly of her.
In 1933, George Seaver’s biography of Wilson was published. Cherry contributed an introduction. Bill’s courage, he wrote, was especially poignant in an age when ‘ideals have been smashed by the million and disillusion has won the temporary day’. Cherry set Bill’s faith against a darkly pessimistic vision of the future (‘the chaos which threatens’), harking back to the happy days on the sunlit snow so many worlds before. ‘What they did,’ he wrote of the polar party, ‘has become part of the history of England, perhaps of the human race, as much as Columbus or the Elizabethans, David, Hector or Ulysses. They are an epic.’ He dictated the introduction to Betty Creswick, who had replaced Frankie Drake as Deb’s secretary at the institute. ‘There were moments,’ Creswick recalled, ‘when, as he paced up and down, and his inimitable prose poured from him in effortless perfection, emotion tightened his throat and he was hard put to it to keep his voice level.’
The process of writing The Worst Journey had provided Cherry with a definite purpose that nothing could replace. He had seriously considered writing a full-length book about Campbell’s Northern Party, but his passions were not engaged by the story, gripping and heroic though it was. He had said all he really wanted to say, and the truth was that he didn’t have another book in him. What more was there to add?
Instead, he returned again and again to the Terra Nova years. In middle age Cherry became more negative about Scott. The reconciliation he had effected between his bitterness at the death of his friends and his admiration for Scott had proved a temporary truce. He re-read accounts of the expedition, and exercised his spleen in the margins: ‘Scott was playing about with sea ice and running quite useless risks’; ‘Scott was extraordinarily ignorant of the physical condition of his men’; ‘Scott gave Seaman Evans, Birdie and Wilson a rotten time.’ ‘Scott was obsessed,’ he wrote angrily on the page of his journal describing their battle across the Plateau. He was poorly placed to talk about obsession. He made himself cross reading new books that rehashed the expedition, and on cruising holidays sat in a deck-chair with a pencil in his hand irritably scribbling ‘WJ’ in the margins to indicate that the writer had plundered his own book. At Antarctic reunion dinners he collared colleagues to quiz them on exactly what had happened at three o’clock on a particular afternoon two decades previously. Some of them didn’t like it. Over poached halibut and carrots at the Athenaeum during the hot, droughty summer of 1933, Cherry interrogated Sunny Jim, the meteorologist nicknamed after a cartoon character with a quiff. In the two decades since the expedition George Simpson (his real name) had risen to the rank of director at the Meteorological Office, and he now lived in Highgate in north London with his young family. He was much the same, though he had lost his quiff to the advancing years. He told Cherry bluntly that he didn’t want his feelings harrowed any more. Like Sunny Jim, most of the other Antarcticans had flourishing careers and families to occupy them, whereas Cherry had a superfluity of time in which to dwell on the past. But after Seaver’s biography of Wilson was published, Simpson wrote to congratulate Cherry on his introduction. ‘It was just what I would have wanted to say,’ he said. ‘I wish I could write.’
Cherry continued to pursue his conspiracy theories, compulsively working out who typed Scott’s journals and when, and ha
rping on about Teddy (groaning under the weight of his medals and recently knighted to boot, Evans would be an admiral before the decade was out). Sitting at his desk in the library, a solitary, greying figure surrounded by old books behind glass on beeswaxed shelves, Cherry listed letters in his possession from Scott, Wilson and Pennell showing that ‘Bowers and I were supposed to be the great successes of the expedition’. And when he made a fresh list of sledging distances, he found that he still topped the table.
The conflict between grief, recrimination and loyalty splintered something inside Cherry. In the lengthening autumn days he contemplated the good gone times, and the house closed in around him. The years of Depression were permeated with hopelessness for many people, but to a man already struggling under a burden of far-reaching sorrow it was a crushing time. The outlook was equally forbidding abroad. There had been much talk of world peace, and disarmament, but Cherry was sceptical. On the day the German people voted in the summer of 1932, foreign correspondent Randolph Churchill filed copy from Berlin predicting that, ‘The success of the Nazi party sooner or later means war.’ The following year, Hitler became chancellor.
12
Danced with AC-G
In the mid 1930s, as he approached fifty, Cherry regularly took two cruises a year. One was always scheduled to avoid Christmas, a festivity he disliked so vehemently that he talked about founding a society dedicated to its abolition (this was also a popular Shavian theme). Despite the explosion of commercial air travel, he was never tempted to fly to a fixed holiday destination. Cruising suited a single man like Cherry: everything was laid on, and it was easy to find a dinner companion in the smoking lounge or over a friendly game of deck quoits. His favoured route was through the Mediterranean. He would disembark in Marseilles or Palermo and walk over the ridges of sand and among the fish goggling on the early morning slabs along the jetty, or sketch the milky sea at sunset from under a plane tree. But mostly he liked to be on board. Surrounded by the sea, that most ancient symbol of the unconscious, he was able to make peace with himself, and with the ageless dead friends embalmed in his memory. When he walked the decks at night and held up his binoculars to look at Jupiter, he saw the familiar guide that had shown the way to Crozier. On a more practical level, he enjoyed retaining his creature comforts while marooned. Most Englishmen are obsessed with their bowels, and one who has suffered an acute and prolonged disease of those parts might be expected to be more than usually obsessed. On a P. & O. liner you knew where you were as far as lavatories were concerned, and that was worth a lot.
Back at home, Cherry’s Antarctic friends were pressing on with their careers. In 1934 Silas was appointed director of scientific research at the Admiralty, and the following year Sunny Jim was knighted for services to meteorology. Deb had become the first professor of Geography at Cambridge, and he was combining his duties at the faculty with his responsibilities as head of the research institute. Cherry often turned to Deb when he needed a confidant in the thirties, and he always found a steady, sturdy friend who responded with a genial mix of brisk practical advice and warm sensitivity. When he was well – his colitis still flared up occasionally, and he also had arthritis – Cherry would spend contented hours sketching at the institute (he sent postcards ahead, ‘Will be with you Thursday, heaven and housekeeper permitting’) and take Deb and Betty Creswick out for lunch at the University Arms. The menu now extended to extra-hot curries which Deb consumed until tears ran down his cheeks.
In February 1935 Ponting died, aged sixty-four. He had always been a figure of fun, ever since he took a case of cayenne pepper to the Antarctic to keep his feet warm, and he had not advanced his case in recent years when, desperate for funds as usual, he had patented a stuffed, fluffy penguin toy called a Ponko.53 Looking back to the far-off Terra Nova days, Silas, Deb and Cherry often chuckled privately when they thought of Ponting. Something calamitous always happened when he was in the vicinity, and if he was not there in person, his camera had the same effect. But the last two decades had been desperately sad ones for Ponting, characterised by a succession of business failures, ill health and depression. Cherry experienced an odd sense of loss when he died, as he left a hole nobody could fill. He was always whining about the small sums of money he had made from his Antarctic work, yet he was deeply committed to the memory of his dead friends, and he saw Cherry, whose book he admired hugely, as an eerie living link to Bill and the others. ‘Do you know,’ he once wrote to Seaver, ‘that whenever I see Cherry I find it difficult to find words. He wears that smile always, but I simply cannot help thinking back to that night when the three of them returned to the Hut looking like . . . beings from another planet . . . I have the feeling when in the presence of Cherry that he is almost of another world.’ It was this supernatural apparition who wrote Ponting’s obituary for the Royal Geographical Society’s journal. The Antarctic, Cherry stated, ‘is the most beautiful place in the world’, and he paid generous and sincere tribute to the man who ‘has enabled the world to share that beauty’. It is an exquisite piece of writing, building to a climax that conjures worlds in a single lapidary sentence: ‘Here in these pictures is beauty linked to tragedy – one of the great tragedies – and the beauty is inconceivable for it is endless and runs through eternity.’
For the rest of that year Cherry pondered the question of rearmament which was so exercising the politicians and the leader writers of The Times. He was minded to agree with Churchill, who was calling for a higher defence budget in the face of a horrifyingly militarised Germany. Cherry was not a warmonger. He hated war, but as a pragmatist he saw the prudence of heading it off. Mostly, however, he sheltered from his fears in the sanctuary of his park.
In an attempt to chivvy him out of his gloom Sunny Jim put him up for the Athenaeum. Conveniently situated on Pall Mall in the heart of St James’s, it was a popular club for established writers of the old-fashioned variety (including the sainted Kipling), a feature which appealed to Cherry, who continued to describe himself as an ‘author and explorer’ when required to state his occupation. In the elegant, somnolent rooms of the Athenaeum, where cigar smoke clung to the velvet curtains and antediluvian Tories wheezed through the swing doors for a spot of serious snoozing behind the ample pages of The Times, Cherry found the traditional atmosphere deeply reassuring – a semi-literal manifestation of the deep, deep sleep of England commemorated by Orwell. When the statutory two-year period had elapsed and his name came up for election, his candidate’s sheet was displayed as usual in the drawing room. It attracted a pleasing mix of supporters from both arts and sciences, the former led by the distinguished painter and principal of the Royal College of Art, Sir William Rothenstein. (The medic John Conybeare was so keen for Cherry to join that he signed the form twice.) Cherry was duly elected in November 1937, and often sauntered along to Pall Mall when he was in London, sinking into a horsehair armchair on a Saturday afternoon to talk about Mallory with his fellow climber Tom Longstaff, or eating Brown Windsor soup and stale bread rolls on a Monday evening with his Oxford contemporary Henry – now Sir Henry – Tizard, who was busy developing radar.
The Worst Journey, meanwhile, had acquired the status of a minor classic, and was beginning to pop up in antiquarian catalogues for upwards of ten guineas, an astonishing sum for a book published not much more than a decade previously. But it had again slipped out of print. Cherry determined that he would produce an affordable, one-volume edition to suit the times. He had approached the affable Otto Kyllmann at Constable with the idea back in September 1934, but they had failed to agree terms. Cherry abruptly terminated the long and successful partnership they had enjoyed, leaving Kyllmann to wonder what he had done wrong.
Having arranged to use Clarks’ to print the text again and Emery Walker the colour plates, Cherry came to a publicity and distribution arrangement with Chatto & Windus by which the firm would take fifteen per cent of net receipts. Shaw acted as unofficial literary agent for Cherry just as he had for Lawrence, and
in December 1936 he drafted a fresh contract a few days before Cherry left on his Christmas cruise. At the Chatto offices tucked behind Trafalgar Square, Cherry established a working relationship with director Harold Raymond which was to flourish for many years. Raymond was a sensitive publisher, and consistently handled Cherry – not the easiest of authors – with tact and intelligence.
In April 1937 The Worst Journey appeared for the first time in a single volume. The text was reproduced in full, as were four of the five original maps, but all the colour plates had to go, as did most of the black and white illustrations. The short new preface was essentially a tribute to Atch. At the end of it, Cherry made a political appeal. After alluding to the horrors of the Great War, he averred, ‘War is out of date; yet between jealousy and fear we are heading into another . . . The destruction caused by a major war between equally matched opponents will leave both of them down and out. Surely England should arm and remain outside unless she is attacked: she can dictate her terms when the others have finished.’ By now, this argument was raging in clubs and drawing rooms all over the country. Cherry did not share the view that rearmament would incite war. He believed that the country could only avoid conflict by rearming and regularly shook his head with exasperation over The Times’s editorials, as under Geoffrey Dawson the paper supported appeasement. When the reedy-voiced Neville Chamberlain replaced Baldwin as prime minister in May, Cherry was sceptical of his widely supported view that reconciliation was the best policy for bringing Germany into line. Despite himself, Cherry was at some level engaged with the most vigorous and modern aspects of the period. An anachronistic old grouch in so many ways, he was in touch, in this case, with what history would judge to be the right position, and was more ‘modern’ in his outlook than the wing-collared statesman on the tarmac. In this, as in his views on the social and individual fragmentation towed in the wake of twentieth-century progress, Cherry was not as out of step with The Waste Land and Ulysses as he thought he was.
