Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Just as his chronic arthritis had been a manifestation of his debilitating depression, his energetic pursuit of his hobby was a symptom of his rebuilt self-esteem. But book-collecting ran counter to the claustrophobic culture of shortages and dock strikes. The London Olympics of 1948, the first for twelve years, became known as the austerity games, though in fact the adjective was applied to every aspect of British life in the pinched and colourless post-war years, the birth of the welfare state notwithstanding. Clothes rationing was about to be abolished after eight years, but Britain was broke, and soon the sugar ration was reduced again and sweets (much loved by Cherry, along with good chocolate and ice-cream) were brought back onto the ration books only three months after restrictions were lifted. In September 1949 Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer and prince of austerity, devalued the pound by thirty per cent. Whale meat, which people were already eating in the form of fresh steaks, appeared in tins, as if Spam had not been testing enough.

  Money, as always, helped lighten the grey, and with Lamer sold and most of his investments holding up well, Cherry had more cash than at any other time in his life. Following the general trend to take up what had been left off in 1939, he and Angela booked a cabin on one of the first post-war cruises to Athens. Always content at sea, Cherry again prowled the deck with his sketch book in his pocket, rising before the sun and tracking the stars after it disappeared again. When they disembarked they had their picture taken at an ancient amphitheatre, both smiling in the diaphanous Greek sunshine, he enthroned in a stone priest’s seat, she standing in a full-skirted cotton frock with a nipped-in waist and an Audrey Hepburn headscarf tied under her chin.

  In 1948 Sir Michael Balcon’s and Charles Frend’s Technicolor feature film Scott of the Antarctic was shown in London by royal command, with John Mills in the title role. Mills was already well established on the large screen as the star of numerous war films, and the story of the expedition was presented as a noble fable of class integration. Soon audiences up and down the country were marvelling at this iconic display of British heroism, a commodity that was in perilously short supply in the constipated late forties. While the feature was in production Cherry was asked to sign a form permitting the film-makers to change his character into anything they liked, and he replied by giving the studio bosses a good telling-off. Most of the ‘survivors’, as the press called them, were initially opposed to the project. ‘Besides a general aversion to the idea of yet more money being made out of the tragedy,’ Deb wrote, ‘the one common dread among us was that the story would be tampered with to suit the ends of Drama, a fear which found its extreme expression in wondering how the film people were going to introduce glamorous blondes into a polar hut.’ But Deb was won over, as most of them were, and some of the men even went onto the set at Ealing Studios and met the actors playing them. After watching the film at the command performance they crowded into the smoky foyer of the West End cinema as the flashbulbs popped and cast their votes in favour of Frend’s interpretation. Cherry stayed away, implacable.64 He never saw the film, though hostilities did not extend to the actors – he subsequently sat next to John Mills at dinner at Deb and Dorothy’s. It was a pity that he couldn’t allow himself to share in something that had given the others so much pleasure.

  Cherry never saw a piece written by Frend after he had shot the film, citing as his formative influence The Worst Journey in the World . ‘The more I read [of The Worst Journey],’ wrote the director, ‘the more I felt that a film could be made of Scott’s last expedition.’ So Cherry couldn’t really complain. He had started it.

  He was still obsessed, despite the passing years, and returned to the old Antarctic questions with renewed zeal, seizing every opportunity to interrogate his weary former shipmates (‘Try and throw your mind back . . .’). Deb, Silas and an increasingly deaf Sunny Jim bore the brunt of it, though Silas retired back to Canada and saw little of Cherry from 1949 onwards. Once again Cherry dwelt on Scott’s decision to take the dogs on further than he had planned, and on the repercussions of that decision. ‘Of course, it is this dog biscuit which is the crux of the whole problem,’ he wrote in the margin of his Antarctic journal in 1948. Once again, as he absorbed himself in the past, his anger and resentment towards Scott swelled. ‘Here was Scott,’ he wrote in one of his well-thumbed expedition volumes, with a tremendous urge to carry out his depôt and polar journeys. He depended on ponies and manhauling. What was it in Scott which prevented him from having good ponies and good manhaulers? Somewhere it is his own weakness. Why was he so easily persuaded by Kathleen and Teddy Evans? His bad ponies and bad manhaulers led to inevitable strains on himself and others. The polar party died and he left us in the power of Kathleen Scott and Teddy Evans and tragedy after tragedy has followed for forty years.

  This was an exaggerated version of reality. Cherry’s tendency to explain his own behaviour in terms of external events, and other people’s in terms of their personalities, was a self-deluding habit that trapped him in a painful negative loop. Underneath the barrage of explanations his self-recrimination was Johnsonian in its magnitude; but this he could not put into words. Perhaps if he had been able to do so, he could have saved himself.

  He decided to write a frank postscript to a new hardback library edition of The Worst Journey, a kind of ironic meditation that would reveal facts he had been obliged to leave out of the other versions. The single-volume paperback was selling well, but Cherry wanted to put certain things on record between hard covers. ‘It may be historically important,’ he told Allen Lane at Penguin. After years of silence he contacted Harold Raymond at Chatto, and was advised to make his own application for paper, which was still in short supply, although Chatto were again to handle distribution. When eventually he succeeded in getting the paper in his own name, he wrote triumphantly to Raymond, ‘I am now a publisher and can meet you on equal terms.’

  He wrote the postscript in the small back room on the sixth floor of Dorset House, looking out over the gleaming slate roofs, sooty chimney-stacks and muggy London fogs. The hum of engines floated up from Gloucester Place, still punctuated by the cry of the dairyman’s boy as he brought the horse to the kerb. Cherry’s essay included new information about Scott’s orders to Meares, quoted within a painstaking but measured reappraisal of the crucial sledging journeys towards the end of the 1911/12 austral summer. Cherry had also found a solution to his dilemma over where to place the blame for the disaster. Scott was not at fault (‘in this sort of life orders have to be elastic’); it was the lack of vitamins that did it. ‘I feel more and more,’ he wrote, ‘that a ration free of, or seriously deficient in, vitamins played a leading part in this tragedy.’ Atch had given him the idea, and Reynell had endorsed it. As an explanation it attracted Cherry as it exonerated everyone from responsibility: vitamins had not been discovered when the Terra Nova sailed. His public reassessment of Scott was positive and considered (‘he viewed life as the struggle which it is’). It was followed by a hymn to Wilson and his ‘forgetfulness of self’, an ideal that Cherry deeply admired, though his own tragedy was that he was unable to participate in its wonder. He longed to cast off selfhood, as Wilson had, but his inner burdens weighed too heavily. It is impossible to understand the true nature of Cherry’s neuroses, and to feel how hard they pressed down; but from what he did reveal of his torments, it is clear that he did remarkably well to travel with them as far as he did.

  Above all, he used the postscript to praise Wilson’s belief in the importance of ‘the response of the spirit’. ‘Wilson was working in a world which, I believe, was losing its ancient faiths without having much to put in their place. The rumblings of the storms to come reached us from the outside world when the ship came down.’ In a violent, angry and tired world, he continued, ‘Wilson sets a standard of faith and work . . . We have missed him ever since he died. But you must find him: his voice, it is a quiet voice, is for those who listen . . . and he will live, in many hearts.’

&nb
sp; The postscript is a confused essay which adds little to the general reader’s understanding of what had unfolded. It wanders amiably away from the Pole to consider the regrettable dismantling of the empire and to wonder at the noble fighting spirit that saw England through two wars (‘a winter journey indeed’). Seaver called it ‘a somewhat tortuous document’; it was certainly eccentric. But Cherry’s passionate and sane appeal for the responsible use of knowledge rings true. Writing as atomic clouds rose on distant islands and hydrogen bombs took shape in labs on two continents, he noted, ‘We cannot stop knowledge: we must use it well or perish . . . Those who guide the world now may think they are doing quite well: so perhaps did the dodo. Man, having destroyed the whales, may end up by destroying himself.’ It was a prescient suggestion.

  In the end he hauled himself above his obsessions and the clutter of the days and years and found that he could still touch his ideals. He cleared his mind, picked up his pen and wrote down what mattered – to him, and to anyone with half a heart. ‘To me, and perhaps to you, the interest in this story is the men, and it is the spirit of the men, “the response of the spirit”, which is interesting rather than what they did or failed to do: except in a superficial sense they never failed. That is how I see it, and I knew them pretty well.’

  The Cherry-Garrards continued to enjoy Eastbourne, though not at the Grand. The hotel was a popular conference venue, and, even worse, the plain-speaking Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin, took holidays there until shortly before his death in the wet spring of 1951. Cherry was irritated when the public rooms swarmed with Labour Party officials and their wives and security men, and resented eating (as he perceived it) food left over by the roly-poly Bevin and his party. The rock-quarried Foreign Secretary was not only a Labour minister but a solid union man to boot. Cherry snorted at him, and at Britain’s socialist experiment and nationalisation programme. Like many of his class he felt that the vaunted ‘new equality’ discriminated against him; that, of course, was the point of it. In protest he moved from the Grand to the gabled brick and pebble-dash Hydro, a hotel at the far end of the front. On high ground and surrounded by a garden, the smaller, family-run Hydro became a second home to Cherry and Angela, and throughout the early fifties they decamped there for four or five weeks at a time, settling into a routine that revolved around concerts under the turquoise doughnut domes of the bandstand and grilled sole in the highceilinged dining room. Cherry loved pottering round the South Downs with his deerstalker and birding notebook, the latter stored in a cloth envelope that had been part of his Antarctic kit. The quintessential Englishness of the landscape appealed to him: purple hollyhocks in the garden of the thatched Clergy House at Alfriston, yellow wagtails dipping over the Pevensey marshes and the smell of drying grass at haymaking. He studied the birds that bobbed in the reeds of the chalky wetlands and hovered in the wrinkled air over the wheatfields. (‘Mottled on top of head and back. Lot of white in tail when spread. Nest exactly like a chaffinch. Chack-chack-chack.’) The landscape was so emblematic that during the war a painting of the Downs had appeared on morale-boosting posters above the slogan, Your Britain, Fight for It Now. But in 1950 a colder war crept over Beachy Head when a convoy of lorries trundled towards it loaded with materials for an underground radar bunker opposite the winking lighthouse. As Cherry had written, ‘We cannot stop knowledge.’ Shaw missed them; he complained that since they had left, there was only one couple in the village he could talk to. He remained a keen correspondent, and colluded enthusiastically in the quest to acquire rare books. When he put part of his own library up for sale at Sotheby’s Cherry snapped up several volumes, including a valuable Dante and the rather less valuable 1937 Oxford Companion to English Literature which he took with him on a visit to Ayot. ‘I never opened this book,’ GBS wrote on the flyleaf in a shaky hand, ‘and am astonished to find that I ever possessed it. Companions are no use to me. But it is a pleasant surprise to find that it has passed on to so valued a friend as Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’ When Angela had an operation for varicose veins in the spring of 1950 Cherry seized on the opportunity to return to their favourite topic. ‘The nursing home,’ he wrote to Shaw in disbelief, ‘said to be the best in London, was like the Crimea before Florence Nightingale went out.’

  Five months later, Shaw died. In his ninetieth year he had cited Cherry in a letter to The Freethinker. He had found in his young neighbour an example of the evolutionary appetite for power and knowledge that characterised the ‘Life Force’, the atheist’s substitute for the soul. (‘The squire abandons his comfortable country house, and undertakes “the worst journey in the world” to gather an egg or two of the Emperor penguin because it is a missing link in genetic theory.’) This, he claimed in triumph, was surely evidence that a godless world was not a world without meaning or purpose. It was an encouraging thought, and a touching epitaph to a true friendship.

  In the same year, Cherry’s third sister, Mildred, died. She was followed ten days later by Isabel, Reggie’s widow, who was found dead at the age of eighty-seven at 11 Green Street, the elegant Mayfair house that had been a refuge to Cherry in his youth. She and Cherry had kept close; he thought she had ‘quite the best brain of any woman whom I have met’. She had seen, all too painfully, her husband’s depressive tendencies replicate themselves in his younger cousin. ‘Poor boy,’ she commented on Cherry before his marriage. ‘I wish he could have a happier outlook on life.’ She left him her collection of Wilson’s pencil drawings and water-colours, and Scott’s letters to Reggie. The house was turned into offices.

  His losses did not drag him down, at least externally. He rejoiced heartily when Attlee’s government fell and the 77-year-old Churchill was returned as head of the ‘New Look’ Tory party. It was at the end of that year – perhaps to celebrate – that Cherry designed his own block-printed Christmas card from a sketch he had made of an Emperor in front of a smoking Erebus. He sent it out inscribed with a verse that rivalled Shaw’s in its appallingness (‘I come to you by Cherry drawn/To wish you joy this Christmas morn’). It was part of Shaw’s legacy.

  Cherry still felt close to the Antarctic, and he was pleased when two members of Expéditions Polaires Françaises wrote to ask if they might present him with an egg from an Emperor colony they had reached by tractor. When the pair turned up Cherry and Angela took them to the Trocadero restaurant for dinner (whale meat was served) and were duly presented with the egg in a green box. But when he heard the Frenchmen’s stories Cherry did not wish that he had been able to do it their way. He agreed with Deb, who wrote in 1959 that present explorers ‘won’t believe it when one assures them that we were contented to be without wireless and aeroplanes and tractors, and that the only thing we could really envy them for is their ability to carry plenty of fuel so as to dry clothes in the tent and get better sleep’.

  The Cherry-Garrards visited Wheathampstead occasionally in the middle fifties, despite the hole left by Shaw. Anti-aircraft posts still stood in the cornfields, banked with split sandbags. They avoided Lamer. The news of it was too terrible. Cayzer had instructed the Portmeirion architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis to remodel the dilapidated house. But in those grim post-war years property owners were required to obtain permission before spending more than £100 on improvements, and Cayzer was unable to procure any of the licences he needed. He quickly sold Lamer on to Grenville Hill, an unpopular local insurance broker and a former tenant of Cherry’s. Hill began to strip the estate of its assets, selling off the remaining outlying properties and plots of land and generally annoying everyone. After attempting to sell the house itself for conversion into a ‘school, country club or institution’, in 1949 he demolished most of it (licences not being required for that) and flogged everything saleable, including chimney-pieces. He began to build an ugly new property on the site using parts of the old exterior walls and some of the oak beams. Before he finished, he went bankrupt. Then died. The unfinished new house and 600 acres were purchased in 1953 by George Seabrook, the
son of the man Cherry had taken to the High Court. Seabrook farmed the land and thinned the woods Cherry had planted, then he sold the house to Fred Drake, who was no relation to the earlier Drakes who had married into the Garrard family. It was no longer Lamer; but an experienced eye could still see Repton’s lines, and his sweet chestnuts still flowered in July.65

  It was still a bleak time to be living in London. Most useful things remained in short supply, and the white stuccoed terraces circling Regent’s Park were peeling after years of neglect. Edmund Wilson observed: ‘There is about London a certain flavor of Soviet Moscow.’ In 1952, Angela and Cherry fled to the Mediterranean three times.

  In the new year he had congestion of the lungs. The smog in the capital didn’t help. The previous December had brought the worst pea-souper in living memory, and Dorset House had disappeared in a murky gulp, with visibility on Gloucester Place down to five yards. A performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells had to be called off when smog crept indoors and the audience could no longer see the stage. Now Cherry went off to the Hydro to recuperate, and in June he and Angela escaped the rain which unseasonably soaked the crowds on the day Elizabeth II was crowned by sailing off to Venice. While they were at sea the thrilling news came over the ship’s wireless that the third Pole had been conquered: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Everest. Cherry was immensely moved. Tenzing described the wind on the last reaches of the South Col as ‘roaring like a thousand tigers’. Like the Antarcticans, the climbers on Everest had a vision of another world. (‘I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this,’ Cherry had written at Cape Crozier. ‘I wondered why it did not carry away the earth.’) Less than five years after his triumph, Hillary and a small party became the first men since Scott to reach the South Pole overland. It was no longer quite such an awful place: the Americans had built a scientific station there, and the Stars and Stripes was flapping merrily on the hard ice. As a young man Hillary had been inspired by The Worst Journey (‘I read it time and again,’ he wrote in his autobiography). On his own Antarctic expedition he and his British partner Vivian ‘Bunny’ Fuchs used orange tracked vehicles (one of which was named ‘Rock’n’Roll’) that were descendants of the motors Scott had taken south. Four men, led by Hillary, also drove tractors to Cape Crozier and found the remains of the stone ‘igloo’ that had saved Cherry, Bill and Birdie. They dug out some of Bill’s pencil drawings, as well as the blubber stove and other relics, ‘chafed by nearly half a century of wind and drift but . . . in excellent condition’. A second party found the Emperor colony, still thriving.