Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  The winter of 1941/2 was another severe one, and Cherry had trouble with his hip. He had been prescribed poultices, which had to be scooped from the tin, heated and applied with a spatula. This, like everything else, was Angela’s job, and the wretched poultice was always either too hot or too cold. ‘We think he [Apsley] is very lucky to have you,’ wrote Evelyn, though she had no idea just how lucky. Besides his hip, for months he could hardly write because of the arthritis in his fingers. His spirits lowered. Angela would lure him into the village with promises of something interesting to see, but he had never enjoyed playing lord of the manor and was increasingly uncomfortable in the role. His waistline had thickened, his skin was a matt grey and he began to shamble. Still only in his late fifties, he behaved like an old man, and looked like one too, though his hair, distinguished now with grey wings, remained thick and full for many years. In his dealings with Raymond he was markedly less in control, and when the publisher suggested another edition, Cherry wrote wanly, ‘I have thought it over carefully and feel that it is best to leave it. I am sorry.’

  He went down to London each week to be treated at a Harley Street practice with radiant heat massage, another course of injections and physiotherapy from a woman who kept bees on the roof. After an especially bad bout of arthritis he took to carrying a hot-water bottle around with him, and this was soon followed by an inflatable rubber ring which enabled him to sit without discomfort.

  They were not permitted to stay at the Berkeley for more than a week, as wartime regulations forbade it, so Cherry decided to rent a flat near Harley Street, despite the fact that most people were trying to move out of London, not into it. On a damp and sooty autumn afternoon in 1942 he and Angela looked at several possibilities in the nine-storey Dorset House in Gloucester Place, on the southern edge of Regent’s Park and the northern edge of the West End. A colossal structure built on an acre of the Portman estate, Dorset House was like a liner sailing magisterially north, its geometric, blocky façade and banked curves the epitome of thirties chic. The main entrance was dominated by two large carved stone reliefs called Eating and Washing, which depicted stylised figures engaged in those domestic activities. They were the work of Eric Gill, one of the finest English craftsmen of the twentieth century. The Dorset House board of directors had vetoed Gill’s other two suggestions, Sleeping and Drinking, on the grounds that the images might be morally suspect.

  Small, modern flats were in fashion in the thirties. A survey in the Financial Times which featured Dorset House began, ‘The large private house in the West End has seen its day’, and went on to assert that these flats reflected ‘a new mode of living’. Built by the famous property man Claude Leigh and opened in 1935, Dorset House had been marketed as ‘London’s most up-to-date block’. The 185 flats were aimed at wealthy types who had better things to do than eat in, and as a result they all had poky little kitchens. ‘Optional Service will solve all your servant and entertaining problems’, ran the advertisements. Despite a trace of snobbery over its unfortunate location north of the park (Hyde, of course), Dorset House still attracted theatrical people and minor members of the royal family. One day a year or two later, as Cherry and Angela waited on a couch in the hall for Shaw to arrive, King George and Queen Elizabeth marched in. Cherry leapt to his feet, shoving his rubber ring down into the couch. The royal couple sailed past and entered the lift, on their way to dinner with a cousin who lived on the ninth floor.

  The vast building was empty. Because of its multitudinous wings and winglets it did not have miles of institutional corridors smelling of Jeyes cleaning fluid. It was a friendly place, with attractive modern features such as central heating and letter chutes in which tenants could deposit their mail. The Cherry-Garrards chose No. 23 East, a sixth-floor, one-bedroom flat underneath Bertrand Russell, his third wife Patricia Spence, known as ‘Peter’, and their small son Conrad. It was going at the controlled rent of £220 a year. The small living room had two sets of floor-to-ceiling bay windows, one set looking out onto Gloucester Place, then a two-way street. Outside, an ornamental balcony with green metal railings overlooked the roof terrace of the first-floor flats, Dorset Square and the increasingly skeletal London skyline beyond. The other windows faced Melcombe Street and the grey rooftops to the north, including that of the Alliance Française, under which the exiled de Gaulle was making his wartime broadcasts.

  Like a cruise ship, the building was self-contained. The ground floor was encircled by small shops that included a newsagent, a fishmonger, a chemist and a grocer with a dairy to which milk was delivered by pony and cart. On the other side of Gill’s figures, porters sat in a cubby-hole adjacent to a spacious art deco entrance hall lined with couches, and glass double doors opened onto a restaurant with murals of rural scenes under which a bridge club met on Thursdays. Cherry liked it all very much. At last he had another little hut, without any responsibilities.

  So they started a new life in London in a harsh year on the home front. Cherry’s Winchester contemporary Stafford Cripps, recently promoted to the War Cabinet, banned motoring for pleasure. A limit of five shillings was imposed on restaurant meals (though this was frequently evaded), sporting events were curtailed, soap was rationed to a bar a month and the icing of cakes was forbidden. But the hotels, swarming with American soldiers, still held dances, and Londoners queued outside cinemas to watch Casablanca or Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve. Cherry perked up. On Saturday afternoons he went to the Athenaeum and sat among the purple faces and salt-and-pepper suits. In the unaccustomed darkness of the blackout he and Angela walked gingerly through the quiet West End streets to literary events with Harold and Vera Raymond, and on Sunday afternoons they went to concerts at the Wigmore Hall. They watched the restricted wartime cricket at Lord’s, just a few minutes’ walk from Dorset House, and took the tube to Wimbledon for the odd tennis match: ‘He loved showing me things he had seen alone before he met me,’ Angela remembered. ‘It was fun being married to him. Between his illnesses he really enjoyed life. He could be such a happy person.’ With Pussy and Jasper Harker, their most faithful visitors, they strolled up Gloucester Place and, slipping through the circle of white stuccoed Nash terraces, into Regent’s Park and over the footbridge to the rose bushes of Queen Mary’s Garden. There, all through the war, they watched short-trousered boys playing at rescuing their mothers from burning houses. In the evenings they sat by the Bertrand Russells under the restaurant’s friezes, eating tinned sausages and swimmy vegetables followed by dry pastry tarts with ersatz cream.

  Angela went to Soho on the underground, the tunnelled walls of the stations plastered with imitation Cubist advertisements, and queued for the dark coffee Cherry liked. GBS walked across town for tea when he came out of hiding in Ayot; the porters loved to see his loping figure at their cubby-hole. When there was no butter to be found, which was often, Angela made him macaroons from unrationed peanut butter, and they soon became a leitmotif with GBS, permanently on the lookout for a target for his merciless jokes, although he always ate the macaroons. The three of them sat around the wireless to hear the latest news from the front. The reports had become part of the fabric of their lives, and so had Tommy Handley’s breathless slapstick ITMA (It’s That Man Again).

  They spent increasingly long periods in London, returning rarely to Lamer, where the estate staff thought they must have gone quite mad. Jim Hyde had taken over from his father as gardener and handyman, and he went down to London by train to deliver fruit, vegetables and pheasants to flat 23. Angela missed Lamer. She would casually mention that the rhododendron that flowered like a crinoline must be in bloom, or wonder if the woodpecker was loitering by the summer house, trying to tempt Cherry back to Hertfordshire. It seldom worked.

  When the sirens went off they heard the clicking footsteps of the woman in the flat opposite as she fled to Baker Street tube station in her high heels, but they sat it out. A few small incendiary bombs fell on the roof, though they caused only a small amount of dama
ge. Dorset House was a steel-framed building promoted for its safety (‘WARTIME WORRIES SOLVED’), and Cherry was quite unconcerned about the planes that throbbed overhead. He was much too preoccupied by his injections and, at a more profound level, by the inner battlefield. That held greater terrors than all the bombs in the world. What else would have induced him to move to the capital at a time when every other free man in the country was doing all he could to get out of it? He picked his way to Harley Street among shards of glass and clouds of brick dust, past Queen Anne houses with the walls ripped off that boldly displayed their private life to a distracted world. The row of cottages opposite Dorset House had been bombed in the Blitz, and the workmen setting up a water supply in the ruins found a cat living in the rubbly sockets. Lazarus, as he was named, would cross Gloucester Place and stroll into Dorset House to mew outside the doors of the flats. He soon became the tyrant of No. 23. At night, sprawled on the carpet, he made protesting noises when the gas fire became too hot for him, and Angela was obliged to get up and turn it down.

  The difficulties of wartime travelling gave Cherry the perfect excuse to avoid family events. Of his five sisters he saw least of Edith, who continued to flit between churches, handing out money and accosting strangers to ask if they had been saved. The second eldest of the sisters, Elsie, a devoted employee of the Church Army, was at least staunchly Anglican. To general astonishment, when she was well into her fifties she announced that she was to be married. Like Lassie thirty years before her, she wed a vicar (Peter Ashton gave her away), and she settled down with her Fred to a happy old age in a cottage in Bramley in Surrey, he doing the cooking and she the gardening. Cherry was surprised to discover that he liked his new brother-in-law.

  The five sisters had turned out to be remarkably unenthusiastic reproducers, only managing four children between them. Cherry took little interest even in those four, at least until they had ceased to be children. Although he enjoyed seeing Lassie, and sometimes, when he could get to Surrey, Elsie and Fred, on the whole he was more interested in his health than in his siblings. He didn’t try to cover it up, and the family no longer expected him to turn up at weddings or funerals. Angela went to them all in his place. She was a more active member of his family than he had ever been.

  As for old friends: Cherry had seen little of Kathleen in the two decades that followed publication of The Worst Journey. Its frank portrait of Scott still rankled, and she told anyone who would listen that Cherry had only been taken on the expedition because of his subscription. The feline diarist and architectural historian James Lees-Milne was one of those who did not believe her. She told him, while she was on the subject, that Cherry had been ‘a poor creature, an ugly youth’, and that it was she who had introduced him to GBS. Shackleton was rotten, Wilson a prig, Ory drab, Ponting just out for money.59 Now, in the early forties, Cherry ran into her by accident. He and Angela were having tea at the Berkeley during a rare meeting with Edith, at that time an enthusiastic Baptist. As the piano tinkled and the china clinked and the fans wafted the smell of golden syrup around the large room, Kathleen entered with her husband and one of her sons. ‘Now, Cherry, don’t pretend you don’t know me,’ she hooted. Cherry, flustered and terrified that Edith was about to leap up and ask Kathleen if she were saved, stood to shake hands. ‘This must be Wayland,’ he stammered. (Wayland was Kathleen’s son by her second marriage.) ‘It’s Peter,’ replied Kathleen with a glare.

  Kathleen died two years after the war ended. In many ways she was a heroine. She had an enviable ability to grasp the good in her life and rise above her sorrows. She asked to have the words ‘Kathleen. No happier woman ever lived’ engraved on her tombstone. What could be more heroic? Her biographer wrote of her that, ‘She took hold of her life with rare glee, and raced through it without shame, without fear and with scarcely a backward look.’ It would be difficult to imagine a better description of what Cherry was not. She continued to irritate him from beyond the grave when Seaver revealed her view that ‘Bill had very little character’. It was bitter to hear such things.

  In September 1943 Charlotte died. A postcard arrived from GBS to say that her last hours were happy, and the end ‘not what I had feared’. A few days later he walked over to Dorset House in the autumn drizzle, ate a large tea, this time with jam, which he said he never got, and told them all about it. She had been in great pain for some time, but the day before she died the furrows disappeared from above her eyes and she looked quite young again – like the woman he had met in 1896. He told her she was perfectly beautiful, and although he could not understand what she said, she was ‘quite happy’. She died in the night.

  Not long afterwards, Angela’s father died too. Cherry avoided the funeral, and Angela had the good sense not to try to talk him into it. From then on she had to negotiate maternal visits, though Cherry was polite to his mother-in-law to the point of oriental inscrutability. At least at Dorset House they could put her in one of the serviced guest rooms where breakfast was provided. But they had to spend Christmas at Lamer with Clara. Cherry was still implacably opposed to the festivities. He wouldn’t have a tree and never bought anyone a present, including Angela, though he loved the stocking she gave him. (He never gave her a birthday gift either; he never even remembered it was her birthday. But he didn’t remember his own birthday.) She accepted his foibles and learned to love the lovable bits of him. It was a lonely life for her, in many ways, but not a bleak one. ‘We were very happy,’ she remembered. ‘It was one of those things that grew. I was very lucky. Cherry was a romantic at heart.’ He had quickly become dependent on her. When she was ill, he noted in his small engagement diary, ‘A. has flu. I had a great deal of work to do.’ He, too, learned to adapt, though he did very much less adapting than she did. He had at least abandoned the strict financial demarcation he had imposed in the first year or two of their marriage. Under those early rules Angela had been obliged to pay for half of every journey they made. When she took Cherry’s book of coupons to London to shop for his socks and pyjamas, she paid for Allen’s taxi rides from the station. She had even paid for her own telephone calls. Cherry was not mean, but he had a fear of being fleeced that was part of a larger, unformed paranoia. He had never understood how difficult it was for Angela to play the role of lady of the manor on two hundred a year.

  The war continued. Dead Americans rotting under distant palm trees; mass hangings in Ukrainian village squares; the hollow-eyed ghetto in Warsaw; blindfolded resistance fighters queuing to be shot; gangrenous Tommies writhing in the desert sand; distended merchant seamen floating eyeless in the Atlantic; angular mountains of bones in the camps; motionless children, everywhere; Stalingrad. It was difficult for the living to stay sane. Tilbury, head gardener at Lamer for more than thirty years, lost his two sons. Deb’s eldest son, Barry, was killed flying over the Mediterranean. Cherry remembered all three running through the Lamer elms, brandishing sticks and capturing butterflies. In the summer of 1943 the tide turned for the Allies, but the weariness at home was bone-deep.

  Cherry had good days, even good weeks and months. But his illnesses never quite disappeared in those years, and the dark periods hovered above him like clouds heavy with rain. When they came low, he lived in their shadow. With his remaining friends from the Terra Nova he talked obsessively about the expedition, but at other times he was too involved in his interior world to speak about it at all, even when he had an eager audience. Bertrand Russell’s small son Conrad was consistently disconcerted at his famous neighbour’s refusal to talk about the Antarctic. By handing over responsibility to Angela for the daily practicalities of his life, and releasing himself from the grind of running his estate, Cherry had exposed a whole layer of emotional experience that had been more or less submerged. The irony was that the peaceful relief of his happy marriage allowed his anxieties to take hold.

  Early in 1944 a rumour spread through Wheathampstead that an heir was to be born at Lamer. The war-weary villagers were hungry for cheery
news as one gloomy year toppled into the next, but there was to be no baby at the big house. Cherry had no affinity with children; more significantly, he was too enmeshed in the present (and the past) to care about the future, and too fearful of what lay in the shadows. His imagination was already buckling with exhaustion: he could not conjure the joy a child might bring. His attitude hardened when Pussy and Jasper experienced the agony of a stillborn baby. He and Angela saw more of the Harkers than anyone, and had watched with horror as the once swan-like Pussy sank into ill-health. She had a kidney removed, looked permanently ravaged and finally had a stroke during dinner at Dorset House. She died a few days later.

  Cherry was ill himself: a new kind of bronchial trouble had joined the litany of his complaints. On top of everything else he found it difficult to sleep. Doodle-bugs and rockets were not designed to alleviate insomnia. The low drone of the pilotless doodle-bugs and the hanging silence as they fell dominated the summer, and once again the station platforms were crowded with whey-faced Londoners evacuating to the country. Once again, too, Cherry and Angela set their jaws firm, even when fresh terror arrived in September in the shape of V-2 rockets that made a peculiar tearing sound as they hurtled vertically to ground. The air in Gloucester Place was permanently tinged with the bitter smell of magnesium and charred wood, and on his daily outings to Harley Street or the West End Cherry stepped round craters layered with silvery ash.

  Shortly before peace was at last declared, Ory died in a nursing home in Hampstead. She had been ill for several years. Cherry had never lost touch with her; she was always protective of him, as Bill had been. She had led a full and active life, returning often to New Zealand, which she knew so well. During the First World War she had been awarded a CBE for her voluntary work with the New Zealand Red Cross. The cool, aloof Ory had never remarried. Her few close friends thought it would have been out of the question: ‘the loss of him clung to her’. Although she enjoyed hearing news of the surviving Antarcticans, she saw little of them. A deeply private person, she was determined not to allow future generations of polar enthusiasts to pick over her relationship with Bill. As a result, she burnt most of his letters. She had lost her faith, and no longer believed they were to meet again. Before she died she left instructions that the green leather volume of Tennyson’s In Memoriam which Cherry had lent Bill, and which he had found on his hard body, should be returned to its first owner. Cherry was deeply moved to see it again, the faded marker between the same cracked pages. He wrote to The Times, so that the return of the book should be noted, and the letter was published.