Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Pussy Harker, Cherry’s old girlfriend, and her amiable husband Jasper, who worked for the government intelligence services,56 were regular house guests at Lamer in the late thirties, and so was Cherry’s niece Susan, Lassie’s daughter. All got on famously with Angela. As for GBS and Charlotte, they both adored her, and she in turn became immensely fond of them. While Charlotte was a mother figure, with GBS, a man sixty years her senior, Angela shared a girlish sense of humour. When she revealed how much she admired Wells, she and Cherry were immediately invited to a luncheon party at Whitehall Court, the Shaws’ London flat, at which the great man was to be present. Wells was writing All Aboard for Ararat, the protagonist of which, Noah Lammock, is a modern incarnation of his Old Testament namesake. Over lunch Angela was teased for failing to answer some biblical questions. Taking the ribbing in the spirit in which it was intended, she rounded on Wells. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What kind of wood was the ark made of ?’ He didn’t know – but she did. (It was gopher wood.)

  After lunch Cherry and Angela were parting on separate errands and Wells, an enthusiastic adulterer, was on his way to a lecture. He offered Angela a lift in his taxi. Cherry looked down at them from the Shaws’ window. ‘I watched with misgivings,’ he reported later, ‘as Angela climbed into a car with Wells.’

  It was an odd time to be happy. Most people in the country were now as fatalistic about the advent of war as Cherry, who had been forecasting Armageddon for some time. Snouty, fish-eyed gas masks were hanging in the halls at Lamer and Ipswich, and two days before Angela’s twenty-second birthday Chamberlain recalled the House of Commons from holiday. Kathleen Scott, married to her politician, recorded in her diary that evening, ‘Things look very dark in England. Everyone is in complete despair. Trenches are being feverishly dug in the park. There are guns upon Marble Arch.’ But the next day she was celebrating her friend Chamberlain’s third departure to negotiate with Hitler, and soon the 69-year-old Prime Minister was waving his piece of paper from the steps of his plane at Heston Aerodrome, infecting the country with euphoria over the ‘peace agreement’ he had concluded at the expense of the Czechs.

  Cherry now employed a chauffeur for long journeys, mainly because of the vertiginous rise in the number of motor vehicles on the road. Ownership of private cars increased ninefold between the wars (though as taxation was based on horsepower, few drivers had a Rolls, crested or otherwise). He had an account with Cecil Allen, a Wheathampstead coal merchant who had a taxi firm on the side (this meant he had one car, which he drove as a taxi). Together Cherry and Allen motored off to the Henley Regatta and other sporting events. The outings were islands on which to shelter, briefly, from the swelling storm. Cherry liked to mingle with the public instead of buying access to the privileged enclosures. It was easier to lose yourself in a crowd, and he relished the anonymity of the throng. It was a kind of liberation.

  In June 1939 Cherry invited Angela to join them for the Derby. It was a brilliant summer day, the flowers were out on Epsom Downs, and after a picnic the three of them worked their way to the front of the crowd and stood together on Tattenham Corner to see Blue Peter gallop first past the post. On the way back up to Lamer, the placards outside the newsagents’ shops shouted joyfully, ‘BLUE SKIES, BLUEBELLS, BLUE PETER’.

  Raymond had told Cherry that the Penguin edition was denting Chatto’s hardback sales, but in fact the single-volume Worst Journey continued to sell steadily. In May 1939, when stocks were low, Raymond suggested a reprint. (In normal circumstances a publisher will order a reprint without consulting the author, but in the case of The Worst Journey, Cherry was his own publisher, and Chatto were only his distributor.) Cherry was staying with friends in a small hotel in the north Norfolk marshes when he received Raymond’s letter. He wrote back to say that he was all for reprinting, but he wanted to wait to see ‘how things turn out in Europe, and what expenditure I have to put into land’. Back at home in July he informed Raymond that ‘if these blasted and never to be cursed sufficiently politicians haven’t knocked the world to bits, I will then go into another printing’. There was something here beyond the scowling ill-temper of the crosspatch. In the midst of crisis Cherry listened to the radio and heard politicians trying to pass themselves off as leaders, only to remember what men like Bill had done. It was no wonder that he hit out in exasperation.

  He decided to get another cruise in before the world was destroyed, and at the beginning of August he boarded SS Orion again at Immingham with all four Turners. They were to visit Iceland, the Baltic and the fjords. It was not the most auspicious month in human history to be loitering in the North Sea. Danzig (now Gdansk), a Free City on the Baltic supposedly protected by a League of Nations’ mandate, had to be hurriedly struck off the itinerary as news came over the wireless of mounting hostilities. Having been the object of secret negotiations between the Poles and the Nazis, and before that a pawn in Halifax’s appeals to Hitler, Danzig was teetering towards German control. To buy time, the harried captain of the Orion first made an unscheduled stop at Kirkwall – the Orkneys at least were not yet featuring in Hitler’s plans. Cherry loved the saffron moors and purple mists of the bleak Orkney landscape, and after visiting the tomb of the Arctic explorer John Rae in the cathedral, he and Angela eagerly set off on foot towards the colonies of puffins and eider ducks.

  After peaceful visits to Reykjavik and the fjords they stopped in Oslo and, with special permission, visited Amundsen’s ship the Fram (they had done the same thing on their previous cruise to Norway). Cherry was delighted to step on the smooth decks, as he had begun to see Amundsen as the brilliantly gifted explorer that he was. But his mood darkened with the ship when, on her return passage across the North Sea, the Orion had to be blacked out. Tension, insecurity and rumour swirled around the ballroom as Cherry and Angela stumbled round the dance floor, he in a white tie and she in an evening gown, falling towards each other as the Orion headed to the uncertainty waiting on Humberside. A man’s mind might easily turn to making big decisions while he was still free to do so.

  Three days after the Orion docked, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi–Soviet pact while Angela was having lunch with Cherry at the Berkeley. A week later, on Friday 1 September, Cherry telephoned and asked her to marry him.

  He suggested she think about it, and told her he would call back later for an answer. She didn’t need to think about it. ‘I had fallen in love with him,’ she remembered, ‘and I never thought he was going to ask.’ Her mother was upstairs, and Angela determined to go up and tell her straightaway. She took one step up, hesitated and returned to ground level. The stepping up and down continued for some minutes until she abandoned the project and went into the garden to tell Noël, who was filling sandbags which would in due course guard Ipswich against marauding Germans.

  When they heard the news, the Turners were shocked and pleased – even Clara was pleased. Shocked, because they hadn’t been aware of how serious the relationship had become. Pleased, because they liked Cherry, and of course because he was wealthy: no parent could deny being pleased about that. The age difference didn’t concern them very much. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for a man to marry a woman a generation younger than himself.

  When Cherry telephoned again after a few hours’ anxious striding among the sweet chestnuts, Angela accepted. ‘I’m so thankful I don’t know what to say,’ he murmured. Referring years later to one of her copies of The Worst Journey, Angela noted that these were almost exactly the words Cherry had used to describe the moment when Birdie found the tent at Cape Crozier: ‘We were so thankful we said nothing.’ He had found a more permanent refuge.

  They decided to marry immediately, before gas masks were permanently strapped to their faces. Angela rushed into Ipswich with Noël to buy a platinum wedding ring. Cherry made a hasty trip to Godalming, feeling that it wouldn’t be right to announce the news to his unsuspecting mother on the telephone, particularly as she had a weak heart. Evelyn was thrilled, despite t
he fact that she had never met her future daughter-in-law. Apsley, as he was still called by his family, was settling down at last, and that, in Evelyn’s world, was the important thing. In the middle of it all, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.

  Cherry had booked Allen to drive him to Ipswich and back on Wednesday 6 September. ‘I am to be married,’ he announced after the car had crunched up the gravel at first light. ‘To whom?’ replied the astounded chauffeur. ‘You know,’ said Cherry, ‘that young lady we took to the Derby.’ On the three-hour journey to Ipswich they stopped the car so that Cherry could practise his lines.

  Like many couples at that difficult time, Cherry and Angela had obtained an instant special licence allowing them to marry in a church. The short ceremony took place at St Margaret’s, near the Turners’ home, witnessed only by Angela’s parents, two of her uncles, Noël and Allen, who doubled up as best man. None of Cherry’s family were present. Hasty arrangements were commonplace in those early days of the war. ‘We all thought we were going to be gassed at any moment,’ Angela recalled. She wore a light silk calf-length dress which buttoned all the way down the front, and a fox fur stole with the head still attached. He wore a light suit and a pale tie, and carried his hat. His hair was neatly parted in the centre, and he looked relaxed and happy. On the marriage certificate, under rank or profession, he wrote, ‘of independent means’. He must have been too bashful to write ‘explorer’, at his age, in such an intimate company. He was fifty-three ( just a year older than his father had been when he married), while his wife was coming up to twenty-three.

  The reception back at the Turners’ house featured a cold roast chicken and salad (lettuce, tomato, hard-boiled eggs and Heinz salad cream) served with white wine and followed by sherry trifle and Bird’s custard. Once the maid had cleared away the plates Cherry produced a single-sided, ready-printed will form from his inside pocket. He had already filled it in, leaving everything to Angela, and now he signed it, handing it to the maid and Allen to be witnessed. (His executors were Sunny Jim and Farrer – not Arthur, but Hugh, his son, who had taken over at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.) As for maintenance, it was agreed that both Cherry and Angela’s father Kenneth would provide the bride with £100 a year. With the formalities out of the way, Cherry, Angela and Allen left for Hertfordshire. Cherry was anxious to get back before dark as headlights had been banned in the interests of national security, resulting in a huge leap in fatalities. Masked versions were not yet widely available.

  After an uneventful run home they motored up the gravel drive to find the rooks returning to the elms and the housekeeper and maids waiting on the porch, wreathed in smiles. There were to be no honeymoon rituals. There was a war on.

  To announce their marriage they had tiny cards printed with the words ‘with Mr and Mrs Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s compliments’, and in the top right-hand corner ‘Angela Turner’ appeared, pierced with an arrow. These were sent out without the customary slice of crumbling wedding cake, as nobody’s mind was on cake. On the High Street, where the news was billed above troop crossings to France, shoppers expressed astonishment and surprise that the old curmudgeon had gone and done it at last.

  Three days after they were married Lassie came to lunch, and a few days after that Allen drove them to Godalming. Evelyn’s heart problems had confined her to bed at the West House. She ruled her small empire in good spirits from a reclining position, waited on by Peggy and a lady’s maid. Evelyn adored her new daughter-in-law. For the next seven years Cherry and Angela visited her regularly (she never got up again), and Peggy and Angela became great friends. Peggy played the violin in the Charterhouse choir but was otherwise more or less imprisoned in the West House, nursing her mother. Like Cherry and Reggie, she was prone to depression, and in the early forties she had a breakdown.

  Everyone liked Angela. She was perennially good-natured (Seaver said her name was her nature) and cheerfully tolerant of Cherry’s foibles. Deb, who was her friend for thirty years and adored her, eventually said she was like a member of the expedition. She dealt with the dramatic transformation from aspiring student nurse to lady of the manor with dignity and warm good humour. Within weeks of her marriage she was more involved in village life than her husband had ever been. She bicycled down to the High Street and shopped in person, and on Sunday attended morning service at St Helen’s alone, sitting quietly at the end of a pew in the Lamer chapel alongside several centuries of dead Garrards. The villagers were thrilled. George Seabrook, the son of the man Cherry had taken to court and himself a tenant farmer, was so fond of her that when his daughter was born he called her Angela. Soon little Angelas were proliferating all over Wheathampstead.

  As for Cherry, he followed the progress of the war through the BBC’s special wireless reports and settled down to the deep, deep peace of conjugal pottering. He continued to take the train down to London, either to keep appointments with one of his squadron of doctors or to see a film with Angela. In the autumn of 1939 the capital was pleasantly empty, with less traffic on the streets and fewer people in the shops and parks. The bombs were not falling after all. But it was impossible not to feel the war all around. Gaggles of small, white-faced children with numbers on their backs vanished into tube stations on their way to the strange countryside and stranger families. In the new year butter and bacon were rationed, followed shortly by other essential foodstuffs. Worse, Cherry’s Russian Gold cigarettes disappeared from the shelves. The yellow peril was put on bricks in a gesture to conserve petrol for the war effort, and Cherry bought a Baby Austin. It might have guzzled less petrol, but it was not a Rolls-Royce, and the air inside it thickened with swear words as Cherry vainly pressed his foot to the floor.

  The question of a hardback reprint was raised again in October 1939. During the August cruise Cherry had written to Raymond to say he would consider another printing ‘if there are no panics [when we get back]’. Now Raymond saw his chance. ‘One can’t exactly say that there have been no panics,’ he wrote, ‘but before long a good deal of money will be spent by various organisations on books suitable for troops, hospitals and so on, and The Worst Journey would certainly be in demand in directions like that.’ Before the month had expired the title had indeed appeared on the National Book Council’s list of suitable reading material for the forces. Scott had been fed to the troops in the first war, and now he was being cooked up again for the second.

  Cherry couldn’t make his mind up about the reprint, and fidgeted about how much the war was going to cost him and what the government would make him do with his land. When he decided not to go ahead, Raymond, keen to exploit the emerging heroism market, suggested that Chatto might take on the burden, and the risk, of publication. It was a sensible idea, as publishing had become a far more taxing business. Raw materials were in desperately short supply, and the government told the paper mills it intended to commandeer all production. When paper was available for civilians, stringent quotas were imposed based on pre-war usage. Inevitably, prices rose sharply, sometimes every fortnight. In addition, Cherry’s printer, Clarks’ of Edinburgh, was regularly disrupted by air-raid warnings. During an acute food shortage in the capital, Clarks’ director William Maxwell was so sorry for Raymond that with a quotation for printing The Worst Journey he included a packet of Dunbar kippers. Nobody seemed able to commit to anything, and every transaction was subject to long delays. It made it awfully difficult to get a book out. ‘If a manufacturer is neither in a position to say when he can deliver goods,’ Raymond wrote to Maxwell in exasperation at the beginning of November, ‘nor how much they will cost when delivered, we had all better shut up our shops and play shove ha’penny until the end of the war.’ But he had enjoyed the kippers.

  The Worst Journey was eventually reprinted in December 1939 on a slightly different basis, with Chatto taking on most of the production arrangements. It had gone up to 8s 6d, and to Cherry’s regret the exigencies of wartime meant that the colour jacket had to be abandoned. At about the same time A
llen Lane approached Cherry to see if he could rescue the American rights from the Dial Press. Lane had just opened an American branch of his firm and was working hard to build the list. The rights had indeed lapsed, but nothing ever came of Lane’s idea. As Cherry was indifferent to foreign editions he did little to encourage any of them. Polish publishers asked many times in the thirties if they might buy the rights, but Cherry refused. Following another feverish request from Warsaw in the summer of 1939, a time when most people might have been inclined to show the Poles some sympathy, Cherry told Penguin bleakly, ‘I do not think there is much point in its being translated into Polish.’

  At the beginning of December, Cherry was ill. The medical repertoire of his middle age included arthritis, rheumatism, backache, bronchial congestion and a chronic sensitivity of the bowel, the latter a relic of his colitis. In addition, his teeth often needed attention: the few that had survived the Antarctic had to be regularly maintained by a dentist from Harpenden, as did his top and bottom sets of dentures. Angela accompanied him up and down to London to see doctors, chased around for his prescriptions and indulged his many whims. She had become a nurse after all. But whether he was ill or not, Cherry spent an increasing amount of time worrying about his health. Most of his obsessional concern over physical ailments was a manifestation of anxiety transferred from mental distress. That, of course, was more difficult to identify, let alone address; but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

  13

  A Darker Continent

  In the dying days of summer 1940 the evening air over the estate thickened with the sweet smell of harvest dust, and Cherry, sweating into his hairy tweed jacket, chugged along the pale horizon in a tractor, his silhouette vanishing into the feather-branched elms. The demands of war had compelled Cherry to turn himself into a farmer, and once he got started, he enjoyed it: it gave him a sense of purpose. He conferred earnestly with representatives of the War Agricultural Committee, and to comply with new regulations ordered hundreds of acres of Lamer parkland and pasture to be ploughed up and sown with corn and wheat. He bought fertiliser and seed, organised the boys who walked over to shock and sheave after school, and supervised the driver and feeder of the clanking threshing machine that was hired by all the farmers in turn. As he tended his fields and marshalled his workers, he became attuned to the rhythm of the seasons.