Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Both house and park had grown shabby. The brickwork was mottled and dusted with a powdery grey film of lichen, the mechanism that allowed the summer house to revolve was seized with rust, the grass was shaggy and many of the hedges were overgrown, spoiling Repton’s lines. Now, as the war advanced, the house decayed and the estate turned yellow with rippling corn. Cherry and Angela withdrew to the library, while the other rooms were shrouded in dust sheets and shut up. In the musty specimen room on the ground floor where Cherry’s oars hung in parallel on the west wall, a furry lid of dust closed over the glass cases that billeted armies of pinioned moths, and thin bluish mildew crept over yak-tail brushes and Zulu shields from the far-off days of the General’s soldiering. Coal was short, especially in the bitter winter of 1939/40 when the Hertfordshire roads were often silent with snow. They kept the fire going in the library and ate at the small mahogany table underneath a large oil painting of a gloomy morning on Loch Tulla. In the evening they drank their gin ration with an orange beverage made from swede, and ate mashed potato, beetroot and rabbits that Cherry shot flat-eared in the standing corn. Angela kept two hen-houses on the rough ground at the back of the house, and poached eggs made a frequent appearance, served with maize and cabbage or marrows grown on frames in the kitchen garden.

  The war took over. The villagers closed the High Street for fundraising days, the Wheathampstead Youth Service collected conkers for the Macleans factory to turn into toothpaste, and the Women’s Voluntary Service made pasties for the gangs of recently recruited agricultural workers. In June 1940 the fighting came closer when a bomb killed nine people in Cambridge. Tin-hatted women from the Wheathampstead Air Raid Precautions service began to clamber onto village roofs in their belted mackintoshes, scanning the skies for German aircraft. The road signs at the station crossroads were removed to fox the invaders, now expected hourly.

  Fighter Command outgunned the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain that summer, but the bombs didn’t stop falling. Wheathampstead took hits earmarked for the Hatfield aerodrome. A tall brown flower of earth blossomed next to the broach spire of St Helen’s, the blast shattering a stained-glass image of a genuflecting St John. In November, a bad month, a storm of shrapnel hailed down on the Shaws’ roof, and in December a 2,000-pound bomb detonated at the dump cracked fourteen windows at Lamer and twisted the front door. The air-raid siren squealed remorselessly from Ayot, and from his bedroom window Cherry followed the criss-crossing beams of the searchlights as they roamed the sky, freezing the same grey vistas of gentle Hertfordshire hills as they had in the other war, twenty-four years before. During the Blitz the villagers could hear the dull rumbling from London, and on the porch roof, dawn after dawn, Cherry watched the luminous glow of fires roaring through the bombed-out buildings of the capital.

  Before the war he had been against Churchill, though they were on the same side over appeasement and shared the same romantic respect for the monarchy and august institutions such as the House of Lords. But when Churchill dramatically replaced the aldermanic Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940 and began assuring everyone over the wireless that their little island would be defended whatever the cost might be, like hundreds of thousands of others Cherry’s patriotic instinct was stirred. After the fall of France and the poignant, plucky heroism of Dunkirk he signed up with the Local Defence Volunteers. This well-intentioned auxiliary force, soon renamed the Home Guard, was chronically short of weapons, which was perhaps a good thing as its men were more of a danger to themselves than to the enemy. Cherry was having trouble with his feet at the time, and he obtained permission to parade in his house slippers. The sergeant in charge of Cherry’s section was called Hall, and he was also the baker. With the chaff still prickly under his shirt, Cherry presented himself at platoon headquarters every evening to be marched down the High Street by Hall, the entire straggling body wheeling to the left to collect a batch of doughnuts before proceeding to guarantee the safety of the crossroads.

  Many of the big Hertfordshire houses were requisitioned. Brocket Hall near Ayot was colonised by pasty-faced nursing mothers from the East End and Canadian soldiers who carved their names, numbers and home addresses inches deep on the James Paine bridge. Bride Hall, which had been part of the Lamer estate until Cherry sold it, was occupied by officers of the Special Operations Executive, set up in July 1940 as part of the Secret Service. The friendly SOE men made regular social calls at Lamer. They appreciated Cherry’s restrained, affable hospitality, informed conversation and well-stocked library, and their host in turn enjoyed their company immensely. As for Lamer itself, the authorities had their eye on it. A group of men in brown pork pie hats came to size it up.

  The Shaws retreated to Ayot for most of the war, accompanied for long stretches by GBS’s secretary Blanche Patch, who knitted for the soldiers and complained about the cold. They lunched with Cherry and Angela on Sunday and Wednesday, alternating between Ayot and Lamer. After Charlotte was diagnosed with Paget’s disease she would arrive up the drive by car while GBS was still marching down the footpaths and under the lime trees. He remained as sprightly as ever, and rose to greet the war with stoic good humour. When he heard the siren wail, he would hurry to the piano and begin hammering out jolly operatic tunes, and when he discovered a new barber in Welwyn he sent Cherry a postcard raving, ‘he wields a new electric automatic hair mower with extraordinary dexterity’.

  The war cut them off, but it brought them closer to their neighbours. Geoffrey de Havilland became a favourite at Lamer. Cherry knew his father, Geoffrey senior, the aviation pioneer and test pilot who had moved his company to nearby Hatfield in 1920. The younger Geoffrey was the firm’s chief test pilot, and he used to telephone from the aerodrome to say he was going up for a spin in the latest Dragonfly or Flamingo, if Cherry and Angela would care to join him. Cherry approached aeroplane flights with the same quizzical detachment that he brought to all new experiences. But he loved to see Lamer from the air. At ground level, de Havilland kept a model railway, and its tiny sidings and miniature level crossing captivated Cherry almost as much as his dizzying ascensions.

  At the beginning of the war Cherry’s publishers forwarded a fan letter from Ettie Desborough. An Edwardian hostess of the powdered footman school, in her dazzling youth Ettie had been painted by Sargent. Now, in her dotage, she had become an Antarctic devotee and a passionate admirer of The Worst Journey, and she was thrilled to learn that Cherry lived in the same county. He and Angela were soon invited over to the crenellated vastness of Panshanger Hall near Hertford where Ettie and her husband, the first and last Lord Desborough, were living in splendid decrepitude, shrunk into one small room and attended by an aged butler (they had recently been joined by a dead German pilot whose plane was brought down on the lawn). Lord Desborough, once a great athlete, took Angela punting on the section of the Mimram that flowed through the Panshanger grounds, and the two couples continued to exchange visits till the late forties. When petrol rationing kept them at home, Ettie wrote instead, ending her increasingly spidery letters, To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

  The Antarcticans who had survived the first war were too old to serve again, but most played their part on the home front. Murray Levick, author of the book about Adélie penguins that Cherry admired so much, trained commandos in extreme-environment survival. Silas worked on the development of radar at the Admiralty and served in the Home Guard. Initially a sergeant, with characteristic irreverence he demoted himself gradually to lance-corporal by snipping off his stripes one by one. At his day job he occupied the post of director of scientific research throughout the war, and was knighted for his services in 1946. Together with his wife Edith, he often met Cherry and Angela at the Berkeley, along with Sunny Jim and Dorothy, Lady Simpson. As for Deb, the institute was taken over by a section of the Naval Intelligence Division, so he made himself useful teaching RAF officer cadets the theory of navigation. Teddy Evans, now an Admiralty grandee, had another fine war. Churchill sent hi
m on a secret mission to Norway before that country fell, and Evans met the beleaguered King Haakon on the run, in the bedroom of a small hillside farmhouse. Back at home Teddy was loaned to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and during the Blitz he toured the air-raid shelters of the capital, medals flashing, to stiffen morale.

  William Lashly, the man who had nursed a failing Evans back to life almost three decades previously, saw little of the war: he died in 1940. Although in recent years Cherry had seen him only at smoky reunion dinners at the Café Royal, in the period following their return from the south the two had been close; as close, at least, as a quasi-officer and a seaman could be (in 1916 Cherry wrote to say how much he would like ‘to have a yarn’ with his old sledging mate). After the first war, in which he had served in the Naval Reserve, Lashly was demobilised at the age of fiftyone. He returned to his pre-war work as a customs officer at the Board of Trade in Cardiff, and remained in Wales until he retired, whereupon he moved back to Hambledon, the Hampshire village of his birth. He called his last home Minna Bluff after an Antarctic headland not far from Hut Point. Lashly had been to Lamer, and had collaborated on The Worst Journey by sending Cherry a set of his field notes which he had copied out specially. When Cherry instructed Hatchards, one of the bookshops where he kept an account, to send him Shackleton’s South, Lashly wrote that the gift ‘came from one who do not forget we were once plodding over the snow to try to reach our goal, I don’t think we shall ever forget those times . . .’ He was a sober, solid stoker whom Cherry admired immensely: he considered that Lashly would have made a fine fourth man for the polar party, with Scott, Wilson and Bowers. Cherry submitted a touching obituary to the journal Polar Record. ‘So now he lies at peace,’ he concluded after an appreciation of Lashly’s considerable achievements. ‘No more facing the utmost physical toil, starvation and death together: no more knowing you can’t go on and going on all the same: no more continual hunger awake or asleep; just peace.’

  Nine months of Blitz ended in May 1941, leaving 30,000 British civilians dead. But what Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic ground desperately on, followed in the summer by widespread discouragement at home over events in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Nobody really believed Britain could win the war. Cherry certainly didn’t. Bombs, blockade and the strain on the railways brought accumulating shortages, clothes rationing was introduced (until new ration books were printed, margarine coupons had to be used) and only a siege economy kept the country alive. When Angela’s mother sent a basket of oranges to the Shaws from Ipswich, Charlotte wrote to her, ‘I think the only really great pleasure in this terrible time is seeing Angela’s sweet face sometimes. She is the one bright spot. And it is bright.’

  War stimulated the public appetite for adventure tales dignified by noble purpose, as Raymond had predicted, and the blackout hours were long. The Worst Journey flourished. The Chatto hardback sold well, requests for translation rights arrived from locations as exotic as Burma, and Penguin reprinted their two volumes as well as a special Forces Book Club edition. Nancy Mitford gave sales an extra push when she wrote a long, lively piece for the New Statesman in which she called The Worst Journey ‘the best book in the world on that particular subject’. Like Ettie Desborough, she had become obsessed with the expedition (she could remember hearing the news of Scott’s death as a girl of eight). She even called her draughty upstairs lavatory ‘the Beardmore’.57

  After a large batch of unbound copies was destroyed in the Blitz, Cherry was furious to discover that His Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes planned to include the lost stock as a credit item on the grounds that Cherry would at some point receive monies for the bombed goods when he made a claim to the War Damage Commission. The interminable correspondence between him, his private bankers, the tax people and Raymond began to wear him down.

  One day towards the end of 1941 Angela returned from a trip to London to find the staff in a flap. Mr Cherry-Garrard, the kitchen maid revealed in low and urgent tones, had been standing guard all day in the warren of servants’ rooms at the back of the house, proclaiming with ringing confidence that robbers were about to strike. He had also telephoned his neighbour Dick Oakley, asking him, in a whisper, to hurry over as a clutch of Germans were hiding in the rhododendron bushes. Soon he was telling the SOE officers that there were ‘people’ in the house, as well as machines in the attics sending messages over the roofs.

  Cherry was not depressed. He was cheery and busy and full of the war effort. Quietly delusional, he was experiencing a psychotic episode, almost certainly a manifestation of a pathological anxiety. (Like nightmares, delusions usually involve predators and persecutors such as Cherry’s Germans.) His imagination had become so overloaded that he could no longer protect himself from his fears. But the episodes quickly passed. The friendly SOE officers toured the attic with Cherry before they left each night, confirming that there were no people up there, or machines: just a lot of dust-choked boxes. The delusional phase would have passed without fuss if Cherry hadn’t told William Pope Genge about the people hiding in the house. Genge was an employee of Rumball & Edwards, the St Albans firm that had managed the Lamer estate for more than a generation, and he passed the news on to an alarmed Lassie, who in turn telephoned Mildred’s husband Peter Ashton.

  Ashton habitually played the role of man of the family. The canon was dead, and except for Mildred, Peter’s wife, the sisters were husbandless. (Until Cherry married, Ashton’s son, also Peter, was the heir to Lamer.)

  On hearing the news, he announced authoritatively that his brother-in-law should be in a mental home. Soon he was crunching up the drive with Mr Webb, a solicitor at Farrers’, and Dr Henry Yellowlees, OBE, physician for mental diseases at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, lecturer in psychological medicine and Harley Street consultant.

  The grim little group gathered under Loch Tulla, sipping tea and waiting for Yellowlees to pronounce while Ashton, his jaw set, jabbed the fire with the poker and sized up the furniture. The identification of neurophysiological and neurochemical factors in psychotic disorders was a long way off. Diagnosis depended not on science but on handwriting. Yellowlees gravely asked the patient if he would care to write a line or two. The gently sloping hand with which Cherry contentedly obliged was all the evidence Yellowlees needed to diagnose ‘general paralysis of the insane’. Antipsychotic medication did not yet exist, and the three visitors agreed that immediate incarceration was the only solution. Yellowlees already had a mental hospital in mind. It was The Retreat in distant York, a pre-Victorian asylum where he had served as physician superintendent.58

  Angela, intimidated and afraid, felt certain that the harmless delusions would pass without intervention, but after another visit from the tyrannical Webb she understood that she was in danger of being overpowered. In desperation she set out down the avenue of limes and hurried over to the old rectory, where an appalled Charlotte propelled her along the garden path to the revolving hut, where they found the master sitting in his wicker chair at his flap-top table in the glow of the electric heater, fingering his portable typewriter. He had never heard such rot. Inserting a fresh sheet into the portable, he clacked off a sharp letter to Webb and Yellowlees for Angela to copy out. After insisting that Cherry was not mental-hospital fodder, the letter ended, ‘Please stop coming here.’ When he had whipped out the sheet he looked up at Angela. ‘I’m going to add a PS saying Yellowlees is a bloody fool!’ he said with a glint in his eye. It was the only time she ever heard him swear.

  ‘The Shaws were wonderful,’ Angela remembered. ‘They turned it from something nightmarish into something quite manageable. They were so normal and nice.’

  A week later she went to London for a meeting with Webb, Ashton and Yellowlees, accompanied, for moral support, by her father and Noël, who first took her for a fortifying lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store. On Christmas Eve she rang Yellowlees and told him she didn’t want to see him again. ‘You may think you are doing t
he best thing for your husband,’ he retorted, ‘but in fact you are doing the worst.’ Soon afterwards she received a letter from Webb that ended, ‘We should be so upset if anything were to happen to you’, implying that Cherry might murder her.

  Webb continued to telephone, Ashton to insist and Yellowlees to send in his bills, and then they all gave up. As for Cherry, he quickly recovered. He never knew about the intervention of the Shaws, and had a memory blackout covering the whole delusional period. Some months later, when someone mentioned Pearl Harbor, he was amazed to hear of it.

  The live-in staff disappeared, called elsewhere by the remorseless demands of war, and the Cherry-Garrards were left with only a daily. Angela mastered the solid fuel Aga, learned to operate the water pump and made her own butter, a quarter of a pound at a time. They both liked it when the daily went home and they were alone. Evelyn was baffled at the idea of surviving at Lamer without the platoon of servants she had deployed. ‘But who brings you your tea in the morning?’ she wrote incredulously to Angela. ‘We think you are a very wonderful person,’ she wrote again when she heard that Angela had helped with the fundraising for ‘Wings for Victory’ week and joined the village branch of the Women’s Volunteer Service, ‘and how you get through that amount of work I cannot imagine.’