by Sara Wheeler
The week after VE Day Cherry and Angela joined record crowds at Lord’s for an unofficial ‘Victory’ test match, swept along in the foamy tidal wave of national relief. Like most places in the capital, Dorset House altered dramatically in the summer of 1945. Fresh tenants arrived and the art deco entrance hall was crowded with light grey chalk-striped demob suits. Cherry and Angela, now virtually permanent residents, were bursting out of No. 23, so when the flat next door came up they rented that too, and began making them into one. Like everyone else who voted Tory, Cherry was aghast at the Labour landslide that followed the outbreak of peace. He did not rush to the Post Office to withdraw his savings, but he retreated further into demoralised isolation. When he turned sixty London was still in the pincers of wartime austerity: in February 1946 it was announced that there was only one week’s coal left. Later in the year bread was rationed, which it had never been during the war, and even the small loaves that were doled out were made with reduced wheat. The Ministry of Food issued a recipe for squirrel pie.
On 25 June 1946 Cherry woke in such pain that he tugged up the sheet and stayed in bed. He had been complaining of rheumatism and indeterminate aching for several weeks, and had been reluctant to leave the flat, claiming that it would be too painful for him to stand up. On 29 June, in the morning, Angela went into his bedroom to wake him as usual, pleased to see that he was enjoying a sound sleep. But he was not asleep. He was unconscious. His regular doctor was hastily summoned, and he in turn called in Dr John Forest Smith, who at first announced that Cherry must have accidentally taken an overdose. To ascertain just how unconscious he was, Forest Smith lit a cigarette and burnt the tip of his left ear. The absence of response led to a diagnosis of ‘cataleptic stroke’. Two days later Cherry began to move, and on 3 July he regained full consciousness. Thereafter he remained virtually immobilised for a year, locked into a private world of distant despair.
This was complete nervous breakdown. The golden purpose of the brief weeks slogging over the ice ridges to Cape Crozier had dimmed and vanished as Cherry spiralled down through the decades. In the Antarctic he had lived so close to what he called ‘the bedrock of existence’ that the complicated, crowded and corrupt world he occupied at home seemed to him now to be worth nothing at all.
He had been displaying classic symptoms of severe depression intermittently for years: self-absorption, loss of interest in the outside world and general joylessness, accompanied by a range of physical illnesses. Profound depression frequently manifests itself in ostensibly unconnected physical complaints, and severe cases are known to extend to the semi-paralysis experienced by the disintegrating Cherry in the summer of 1946.
Depression is not a bad case of the blues. It is a frightening, disabling pathological condition, and in the 1940s it came with a hefty stigma attached. Was the aetiology of Cherry’s illness a question of his genes, of biological changes in the brain, or of what psychiatrists now call life events? The untidy answer is that it was probably a combination of all three.
His genetic inheritance predisposed him to depression. Peggy had a breakdown; Reggie, his cousin, had intermittently suffered from the disease for many years, and ultimately took his own life. But genes offer only a partial explanation. Changes in brain chemistry can be a major factor in an individual’s vulnerability to depression, as the success of modern drugs has confirmed. These changes can be linked to external events, and in Cherry’s case it seems likely that what happened in the Antarctic activated a biological process which culminated in breakdown. In other words, his depression was in some part reactive. Loss is the most significant of the grim roster of depressogenic life events; it has been called the touchstone of depression. Cherry’s failure to adapt to the loss of Bill, and his unformed sense of guilt that he could have prevented his death, guided him down the dark path to breakdown. The decades in between were years of accumulating strain. The disease had progressed from its unfocused stirrings in the Antarctic, through the disabling years of ulcerative colitis (a recognised psychosomatic disorder) and inexorably onwards to the psychotic period of Lamer five years before total collapse.
Almost a decade after Cherry’s breakdown his friend and former shipmate Sir Raymond Priestley, recently retired as vice-chancellor of Birmingham University, delivered a lecture on ‘The Polar Expedition as a Psychological Study’. He spoke of ‘the trail of broken men that polar exploration has always left in its wake’, citing factors such as the difficulties of readjusting to normal life and the stark contrast between a long period of isolation and intense public attention. ‘Polar madness’, he said, was a characteristic symptom of exploration work, usually (but not always) after the expedition had returned to civilisation. ‘There are many cases of polar madness of which the world does not hear,’ he suggested darkly. Priestley was much too discreet to name names, but he could have been thinking of Amundsen’s and Nansen’s colleague Hjalmar Johansen, who shot himself; Abbott, the wrestler who broke down on the way home after his experiences with Campbell on Inexpressible Island; or indeed Cherry himself, though no other explorer had taken quite so long to go mad.
For Angela, there was no question of hospitalisation. Cherry had a horror of hospitals. A day nurse and a night nurse were engaged instead, though Peter Ashton launched a renewed campaign for incarceration. For months Cherry barely improved. He was permanently numb, as if he had been filled to the brim with cold liquid lead. Suspended between dread and alienation, his mood beyond the reach of the mediating intellect, he found it almost impossible to achieve any kind of mental focus. He lost several stones in weight and looked shabby and buffeted, his shoulders stooped and his eyes pouched. When he stood at the window and saw ordinary men and women strolling up Gloucester Place, he turned to Angela and said, ‘Aren’t some people lucky? They can go to the park.’
He was reluctant to let her out of his sight. She had to telephone the loyal Jasper and ask him to sit with Cherry when she needed to shop or take the laundry to the blanchisserie in Mayfair. Peggy also came, and so did Isabel, Reggie’s widow, who would arrive early wearing a large hat and take Angela for a drive round the park. But she had little respite. Two days before her thirtieth birthday, they heard on the wireless that Geoffrey de Havilland’s aircraft had exploded during a test flight. His obituary in The Times described him as one of the best demonstration pilots in the Empire.
Cherry had entered a dark world in which the dominant emotion was anxiety, and he focused it on his physical ailments. The bodily symptoms of a depressed patient are not imagined: they are as real as broken bones, and Cherry’s went on and on. The link between mental and physical illness is one of the murkier areas of medicine.60 Cherry was reluctant to acknowledge that his physical problems had anything to do with his state of mind, even when all of them improved at the same time. Few severely depressed people can make the connection. A generation on, the American author William Styron also experienced catastrophic nervous breakdown at the relatively advanced age of sixty. He wrote powerfully about the tortures of depression-induced hypochondria. ‘It is easy,’ Styron thought, ‘to see how this condition [preoccupation with bodily ills] is part of the psyche’s apparatus of defence: unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mind announces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its perhaps correctable defects – not the precious and irreplaceable mind – that is going haywire.’61
Cut off now almost entirely from the world beyond Dorset House, Cherry became hypersensitive to noise. When the Bertrand Russells played music in their flat Cherry sent Angela upstairs to tell them to stop. Quailing at the prospect of issuing orders to one of the towering intellects of the Western world, she havered. ‘I’d do it for you,’ Cherry persisted innocently, as if that situation would have been remotely comparable. During the winter of 1946/7, the coldest in both their lifetimes, black ice closed Baker Street for weeks, and traffic was diverted up Gloucester Place, hiking the decibel level. Falling temperatures and fuel shortages
proved a devastating combination for London that winter, and both the big freeze and the power crisis dragged on into March. Transport strikes made everything worse. Further austerity measures were introduced as Britain counted the cost of the war, television broadcasting was suspended for a month to conserve fuel, and everyone ate corned beef.
Cherry was beyond the reach of his multitudinous doctors, his small band of loyal friends, and his wife. Six months into his illness his long-serving arthritis specialist recommended yet another doctor, a distinguished Harley Street neurologist called Rupert Reynell. Cherry was prejudiced against psychiatrists, afraid of the stigma their attentions attracted. But though the genial, Australian-born Reynell was in practice a psychiatrist, his neurological label made him acceptable.
The staple pharmacological remedies for depression were still bromides, paraldehyde, barbiturates and amphetamines, all unsatisfactory in different ways. Instead of dishing out pills, Reynell talked to Cherry and encouraged him to talk back. For many months, in sessions at the flat, Cherry talked about his Antarctic experiences in minute detail. Reynell hazarded medical opinions (it was he who diagnosed Dimitri as suffering from ‘hysterical hemiplegia’, for example). More often, he tossed in general comments. ‘Of course, she was an artist and she may have had a twist,’ he offered vaguely on Kathleen. As Cherry worked through his preoccupations Reynell tried to alter his thought processes and teach him new ways of thinking. Today it would be called cognitive therapy.
Quite literally, Reynell got him on his feet. He showed Cherry that he could rebuild his self-esteem, take control of his mind and restore his grip on reality. But Cherry’s recovery did not come in time for him to see his mother again. Evelyn died in Godalming on a freezing December day in 1946 at the age of eighty-nine. Angela went to the funeral at St Helen’s alone. ‘Cherry v. upset,’ she noted in her diary. He mourned in some far-off private place, his pain silent and unfathomable.
Then, in 1947, triumphs piled up. First, Angela got him into the hall. By February his arthritis was improving, though he began to get painful muscular spasms if he tried to do anything with his hands. By May he was able to write a short note thanking Hugh Farrer for his work on his stock portfolio. Soon Angela got him into the street, where he shuffled falteringly up and down past Gill’s eating and washing figures accompanied by the languid Lazarus, who eyed the smoking nostrils of the pony delivering the milk. Then she got him to lift his foot onto a kerb, and then into a taxi. By September he was walking twenty steps almost every day; he even made it to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to sign some papers (first making sure that the right kind of chair was available). His treatment, he said, ‘was almost like a miracle’. The mists had dissolved.
14
A Winter Journey Indeed
In July 1947, as Repton’s sweet chestnuts bloomed over the park, Sir Nicholas Cayzer, chairman of the Clan Line shipping firm, purchased Lamer for £45,000. The outdoor staff watched in bewilderment as a procession of removal men sweated on the gravel, bent under dark portraits in gilt frames, glazed cases of stuffed eagles and four-poster beds with fluted mahogany pillars.
Reynell believed that if Cherry were to stay well, he must cast off all responsibilities: he had therefore recommended the sale of Lamer. Cherry had accepted the suggestion calmly. He spoke of letting Lamer go with regret, as if someone else was making him do it. ‘He did love Lamer desperately,’ Angela reflected. ‘But he also wanted to get away from things.’ The literal shedding of responsibility mirrored an emotional equivalent, and somewhere in his psychic life the sale symbolised the renunciation of his past, a casting aside of the influence and expectations of his father and, more significantly, of the burden of his neuroses.
Angela was horrified. Who wouldn’t be, faced with the prospect of exchanging a lovely country house for a city shoebox? Shaw, now ninety-one, tried manfully to help her through it. ‘You will outlive Cherry,’ he wrote to her in August, ‘and he could not leave you with a white elephant like Lamer instead of a gilt-edged annuity.’ Shaw was putting a gloss on it. Lamer was not a white elephant; not to Angela. She was only thirty, and still hoped to overcome her husband’s resistance to children. But she had been boxed in. ‘Reynell was a miracle worker,’ she concluded ruefully. ‘How could I contradict him?’
Cherry never returned to Lamer. The furniture was auctioned without delay and the books put into the London salerooms. Six Chippendale armchairs with figured silk velvet seats went to a manufacturing tycoon in St Albans for £130. Local people who bought old mahogany pieces were astonished to find, when they got the booty home, that the drawers were stuffed with family documents. Angela tried to secrete away the most treasured items, knowing that Cherry would regret their loss. She saved the Wilson watercolours, and sneaked some of the furniture into the Harrods depository on the Thames, where it duly rotted. A polar sledge and cooker were hastily donated to Deb’s institute. Esptein’s Louise, a fine bust, was sold at auction for £110, but the sculptor’s long-fingered Christ rose from its packing case and was not sold, despite a peripatetic jaunt back to Epstein’s studio and a mooted sale at the Leicester Galleries.62
Reynell recommended a break in Eastbourne, the quiet Sussex resort renowned for its sunshine and sheltered from the prevailing southwesterlies by the chalky bulk of Beachy Head. In the autumn Cherry and Angela dutifully swayed down to the south coast on the Southern Railway, newly nationalised by Attlee’s Labour government. Following Reynell’s suggestion, they booked into a suite at the Grand Hotel, a splendid old monster on the seafront that harked back to the Victorian era.
Just sixty-five miles from France, Eastbourne was still emerging from the tunnel of war. Rolls of Dannert wire lolled alongside the bathing huts, anti-tank concrete blocks called Dragon’s Teeth lay beached on the grassy verges of the backstreets, and from his hotel window Cherry watched the old Martello tower disgorging weapons. He felt really well. Armed with notebook and binoculars, he and Angela took the little bus that climbed out of Eastbourne and dipped up and down the hollows of the South Downs along narrow roads shadowed by oak and beech. It was good birding country, and after lamb sandwiches and shandy in Alfriston they walked along the banks of the winding Cuckmere as it bent towards the shallow blue trapezium of sea at the Haven. At night, after dinner in their sitting room, they even foxtrotted round the Grand’s chandeliered ballroom. Angela had her husband back.
‘You really are a most satisfactory patient,’ wrote Reynell on receipt of a jolly note from Eastbourne. ‘I wish that all were as self-helpful. Sixty is generally considered too old for psychological treatment, but you have been a brilliant and heartening exception. Now I know that all that is necessary in such cases is that they shall have been trained in the Antarctic; have been on the “Worst Journey”; shall be very intelligent and still receptive, and lastly and very important, that they shall have a wife who is, amongst other things, courageous, cheerful and above all, selfless. ‘Having ensured the above trifles, I will know that the rest is easy.’
‘He has recovered his health rather miraculously,’ GBS wrote after his former neighbours turned up unannounced in the unseasonably warm March of 1948. Cherry had put on weight and was thriving. That year he bounced off to Epsom and Henley with a picnic stowed in the boot of a hired car, watched scullers training on the Thames at Mortlake, and spent lazy days at Bramley with gardening Elsie and cooking Fred. ‘The depressions lasted months,’ Angela recalled when she looked back on those years, ‘but they don’t seem much now.’ When Penguin proposed a single-volume, unabridged paperback of The Worst Journey, Cherry encouraged the project with zest. More than 165,000 copies of the two-volume edition had been sold, and in the summer Penguin duly ordered a first printing of 100,000 double-deckers.
When Reynell died suddenly of cancer Angela feared Cherry would relapse. But he didn’t. He was very happy. Sometimes, as she watched him bending to smell a rose in Queen Mary’s Gardens, she saw the tiny scar on the tip of his left ear where Dr Forest Sm
ith had burnt him. He never even knew he had it.
Returned to the familiar territory of his right mind, he decided that he didn’t want to lose his books after all, so he went down to the Hodgson’s saleroom in Chancery Lane and bought some of them back. He also began appearing at the Hodgson’s office asking for books to be removed from sale just as the catalogues describing them were half-way through production. (On recapturing his 1713 edition of Paradise Regained, he inscribed the title page, ‘This is the Lamer copy saved by me.’) The rescue operation stimulated a serious interest in book-collecting, and Cherry’s raincoated form became a familiar landmark at the back of the salerooms on New Bond Street and Chancery Lane. Overhanging spires of volumes soon dominated even the large two-in-one flat, and he had to have a special library built in what had been the dining room – though the rarest volumes went straight into the vaults of Hoare’s bank. The jewel of his collection, acquired at Sotheby’s, was a flawless fourteenth-century missal from Paris, probably written for the private chapel of a member of the French royal family.63 In 1952 he was guest of honour at the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association dinner at the Mayfair Hotel. He gave a magisterial speech, ranging from the subject of reading and writing in the Antarctic to the value of books in general. ‘I think they are ultimately important,’ he told the audience, ‘as a record of conflict, between wisdom and human folly, between good and sheer human infamy, between light and darkness; and because the best of them include truth and beauty . . . The best stories are not what people do, but why they do it.’ In his saner moments Cherry saw that his greatest achievement had been to write a book unlike any other that did reveal the truth and beauty he sought so earnestly. Many adventurers write books, but Cherry’s transformation of a journey that was almost superhuman into a book that approached poetic genius was unique. Thirty years later a guest at the booksellers’ dinner recalled ‘the generosity, clarity and conviction of all that he said’.
