by Sara Wheeler
Shortly after their return to London Cherry and Angela decided to take a more ambitious trip to Australia in the autumn. They were full of plans. Then quite suddenly, he broke down again. The familiar symptoms queued for recognition: dramatic weight loss, lack of interest in the outside world and a crushing listlessness which extended to a partial inability to move. It was a heavy blow to Angela. Seven years had gone by since the last breakdown, and they had been such happy ones, with no indication that another collapse was lurking.
He was incapacitated for months, and the Australian holiday was cancelled. The therapeutic sessions seven years previously had not resolved the fundamental conflict playing itself out in Cherry’s psyche. But despite the painful absence of Reynell, the breakdown was not terminal. By the end of the year Cherry was beginning to emerge from the tunnel. Once again Angela counted the number of steps he took each day, and the cold winter weeks were marked by small triumphs as he tottered to the end of the corridor, then down to the foyer, and finally all the way to the frosty lawns of Regent’s Park, where they watched out for the first crocus or a new family of mallards on the lake. He continued to be plagued with neuralgia and other physical ailments, obsessively consulting a dermatologist about a persistent rash and an eminent ear, nose and throat specialist about problems with his sinuses. His sensitivity to noise worsened; the growl of motors had become louder when traffic lights were installed on Gloucester Place directly under their sixth-floor windows, and workmen hammering down the corridors brought on a stomach upset. But by the late spring of 1954 he was well enough to return to the Mediterranean, sending a special Fortnum’s deck-chair to the ship ahead of time. Although he rarely disembarked, the long cruise did him good, and at the end of it they both felt confident about rebooking the Australian cruise for the autumn.
The six-month ‘ordinary run’ to Australia and back included a hugely long extra leg across the Pacific and down the coast of North America. But first, to get to Western Australia, the sparkling Orient Line ship Oronsay followed the route Cherry had taken on the Ormuz forty-five years earlier, when a passenger on another liner in the Suez Canal had shouted over to ask who had won the Derby. From Fremantle she proceeded round to the east coast. Angela was busy organising her husband’s medicines (‘I was haunted by his prescriptions’), and if the ship’s doctor couldn’t oblige, excursions were often arranged around the location of the pharmacy. In Auckland Cherry was pleased to see a copy of The Worst Journey displayed in a bookshop window. For the rest of the holiday he rarely went ashore, preferring to remain on deck, observing the teeming wharves through his field glasses or simply sitting in a deck-chair, a cup of tea in his hand. Angela usually disembarked on her own (‘Don’t be long’), and she fell in love with Suva in Fiji, returning to the cabin with pungent armfuls of tropical fruit. But at the next stop, Honolulu, uniformed men came on board to sniff out foreign foodstuffs (Hawaii was not yet an American state, but it had long been annexed, and American officials had a firm grip on the islands) and most of the fruit had to be thrown overboard. The Oronsay continued across to a bitterly cold Vancouver, and by 9 December she was off San Francisco. Cherry recognised the rocks beyond the harbour where he had watched seals playing in 1910, a young man full of hope, returning home to sign up for the adventure of a lifetime. On the way back, they went to all the same places in reverse order, meeting up in Sydney with Griffith Taylor and his wife Doris. Griff had recently retired to the Sydney suburb of Seaforth after a distinguished and often controversial career as a geographer. The ‘halo of good fellowship’ that Cherry had described so warmly in The Worst Journey was still hovering over his head.
The shops filled up with newer and better things as the decade wore on, and to Cherry’s delight ice-cream trolleys reappeared in Regent’s Park. But the growing affluence of the fifties was shadowed by poor industrial relations, and one of Sir Anthony Eden’s first acts as prime minister when Churchill at last retired was to declare a state of emergency after 60,000 dockers came out on strike. The country was becoming a bewildering place for a man imbued in his youth with the spirit of the Victorian age. ‘He was still trying to live up to his father’s ideals,’ Angela remembered. Day after day The Times reported the dying spasms of imperialism alongside startling accounts of a young American singer called Elvis Presley, and the West End streets that radiated south from Gloucester Place began to look increasingly unfamiliar, peopled with Teddy boys, angry young men and women wearing tight jeans. Cherry had little contact with these baffling changes. Several months after the cruise, he once again broke down.
Back came the heavy numbness and the sense that his body was filled with cold liquid lead. But just when the prognosis was at its most gloomy, his sinus specialist recommended a new doctor called Gordon Mathias. He was a Welshman with an Antarctic link, having trained at the London Hospital under the auspices of a sponsorship programme set up by Wilson’s sisters, and he had known both Ory and Isabel Smith. The connection created an immediate bond between doctor and patient, and it enabled Cherry to open up. Mathias specialised in psychiatry, and besides offering therapeutic sessions in which he encouraged Cherry to talk, he suggested a course of electroplexy, now known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in the UK and electro-shock therapy (EST) in the United States, of which he was a pioneering practitioner.
Cherry had already taken barbiturates to little or no effect, and by this stage, lost in his private darkness, he was willing to try anything. ECT had been practised in Europe since the late thirties. It has had a controversial history and continues to stimulate fear, but correctly deployed, it has relieved many thousands of depressive mood disorders. Cherry’s sessions duly took place at Dorset House, closely monitored by Mathias and an anaesthetist. Cherry was put under for the duration of a therapeutic seizure that was caused by the application of electrodes on either side of his head. The effect was immediate. Cherry felt better after the first treatment and continued to improve as the course progressed until he was completely well.
Once again, Angela had her husband back. Years later, she reflected simply, ‘There were two Cherrys, you see.’ This was true throughout Cherry’s life, and he acknowledged it in his 1951 postscript. ‘Know yourself,’ he wrote. ‘Accept yourself: be yourself. That seems a good rule. But which self ? Even the simplest of us are complicated enough.’ As he turned into an old man he found it increasingly difficult to engage in the present. Like Robert Graves’ cabbage-white butterfly, he had never quite mastered the art of flying straight, but lurched ‘here and here by guess/And God and hope and hopelessness’. Externally, his life had been haphazard (whose isn’t?). Internally, he had fought his private wars and come out just about all right, true to an ideal or two, and still believing in ‘the response of the spirit’, despite everything.
In the spring of 1958 the Gothic chapel hidden among the beech trees at Denford was demolished. Five years previously the vicar of Hungerford, by default responsible, had tracked Cherry down through the pages of Who’s Who and asked what he wanted to do about the building: his grandfather, grandmother, uncle and aunt were after all buried beneath it. But the contact fizzled out, and after a small local controversy in which the Georgian Group attempted to save the pinnacled chapel (Betjeman described it as ‘charming and lacelike’), it was pulled down and the bodies forgotten.66 It was a lugubrious finale for the Cherrys of Denford.
Their representative on earth had turned seventy more or less in sound mental health, but he was becoming frail, and was now permanently obsessed with noise. He insisted on moving into the Berkeley for months at a time, taking one of the quieter rooms overlooking the well at the back. Angela would return to Dorset House to wash their smalls and cook Cherry’s favourite food, which she ferried back to the hotel in covered basins. It was an unnatural life, but she had to go along with it, as she had gone along with so much. He did not think of her needs. It was a personal failure.
There were pleasurable outings. A car and driver would be summ
oned to the hotel to take them over to Kew Gardens or up to Ken Wood on Hampstead Heath, where the neo-classical villa had a handsome Adam south front that was reminiscent of Lamer (Repton’s hand was visible there, too). On a good day they took a boat down the Thames and had a picnic, or walked along the towpath at Putney. But these were secluded years.
The world spun away from Cherry. In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and a month later they shot a dog into orbit. Cherry had always felt that space was the next frontier, after the Antarctic. ‘We shall visit the moon now before very long,’ he had once written. ‘Perhaps within the next thousand years.’ In 1959 the unmanned Lunik 2 crash-landed on the moon, and only ten years after that Neil Armstrong wobbled about on its craterous surface. Cherry was out of step with the times, as usual, but The Worst Journey continued to win all hearts, and requests for translation rights still arrived from distant corners of the world, thirty-seven years after first publication. It was a source of deep satisfaction to him. The Antarctic had both redeemed and destroyed his life. Redeemed, because it produced The Worst Journey, a superlative piece of art that vaults above the human experience which gave it form. Destroyed, because it fatally engaged his anxieties. His life was proof that emotion has its own chronology.
In the middle of May 1959 they had a peaceful, happy day at Ken Wood. The daffodils were blazing on the landscaped slopes in front of the house and the first summer sunshine glanced off the ponds puddled next to the trees. Two days later Cherry slipped over in the Berkeley and broke his arm. An X-ray machine was brought to the hotel, and Mathias, wanting a second opinion, called in the specialist Sir Horace Evans. But on 18 May Cherry died of congestive heart failure and bronchopneumonia. He was seventy-three. ‘Men do not fear death,’ he once wrote. ‘They fear the pain of dying.’ There had been no pain at the end, and nothing to fear.
He was buried in St Helen’s churchyard, with his secrets.
Guide to Notes
All books published in London, unless otherwise indicated.
Correspondence, diaries and unpublished material are held at the Scott Polar Research Institute, unless otherwise indicated.
Notes
Introduction
God in his Heaven Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Century , 1938, p. 153.
was losing its ancient Postscript to WJ, 1951, p. 599.
To me, and perhaps . . . It is a story ibid., pp. 602–3.
Chapter 1: Ancestral Voices
All Scott’s orders had Annotated journal. The comment appears alongside entries for December 1911 & April 1912. In all subsequent notes, the location of the comment is indicated in square brackets. Researchers should note that this material, stored at SPRI, is restricted access.
Those first days of WJ, p. 110.
Can we ever forget Draft material, WJ.
In this sort of Postscript, p. 589.
If you knew him WJ, p. 207.
My relief was so Annotated journal [May 1912].
it was [is] a grave Journal, 12 November 1912.
If we had travelled . . . But we never dreamed ibid. , ‘Written on the Barrier after finding the remains of the Southern Party’, n.d.
I am almost afraid ibid., 12 November 1912.
We did not forget WJ, p. 302.
If you march your ibid., p. 598.
The sepoys have kicked AC to Charlotte Cherry, 18 July 1857, family collection. I am grateful to John Gott for making this material available to me.
Send this please to AC to Charlotte Cherry, 7 January 1858, family collection.
I don’t think you AC to Charlotte Cherry, 5 February 1858, family collection.
I can fancy you AC to Charlotte Cherry, 16 July 1858, family collection.
Mind you give me . . . It seems to be AC to George Cherry, n.d., family collection.
during an interval in AC to Charlotte Cherry, 7 January 1858, family collection.
I thank you exceedingly AC to George Cherry, n.d., family collection.
All the morning I AC to George Cherry, 1 May 1878, family collection.
If you have to AC to Alfred Welby, 29 March 1879, family collection.
What a fearful mistake AC to George Cherry, 9 February 1879, family collection.
Between you and me AC to Alfred Welby, Easter Sunday 1879, family collection.
Bedford For an account of the period, see C. D. Linnell, ‘Late Victorian Bedford’, Bedfordshire Magazine VII (1959–60).
dresses of braided cream Newbury Weekly News, 12 February 1885.
In nearly all serious Bedfordshire Mercury, 24 April 1908.
one of those men Harriet Loyd-Lindsay, Lady Wantage, Lord Wantage VC KCB: A Memoir by his Wife, 1908, p. 164.
LADDIES BEST LOVE BABYS and all other childhood notes Family collection.
I belong to the E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy , 1951, p. 67.
Chapter 2: Lamer
the balcony opening out Carola Oman, Ayot Rectory, 1965, p. 157.
Dearest Mother, The hounds and all other childhood letters Family collection.
We knew him best Wheathampstead Church Magazine XXIV (December 1907).
The young master did Mary Amy Coburn, George and Henry , Wheathampstead, 1992, p. 47.
Lo, all our pomp Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’, 1897.
For five years at Arnold Toynbee, Experiences, Oxford, 1969, p. 6.
Except in the Army . . . we were hardly aware ibid. , p. 11.
Under the system then D. N. Pritt, From Right to Left , 1965, p. 254.
In other colleges the S. P. B. Mais, All the Days of My Life, 1937, p. 29.
It may be of John Jolliffe, Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters, 1980, p. 29.
Show me a researcher Ronald Clark, Tizard, 1965, p. 12.
content to live like ibid.
Nothing anywhere seemed as Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street, 1913, p. 542.
many who had been Stephen McKenna, While I Remember , 1921, p. 61.
a dark, lean, rather . . . Otherwise he was remarkable Evening Standard, 6 December 1922.
it was practically impossible Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 1974, p. 121.
a life of familiarity Raymond Asquith to Margot Asquith, [n.d.] October 1897, in Jolliffe, p. 33.
How dense the barbaric Leonard Woolf, Sowing, 1960, p. 82.
In my time at Mais, p. 32.
How long, O Lord New Statesman, 8 July 1922.
Father said he would ACG to AF, 29 October 1906, Hertford.
Sir Lander has just ACG to AF, 1 November 1906, Hertford.
showed promise Oxford University Boat Club records.
being very short in ibid.
I was very sorry ACG to Henry Hobbs, 10 May 1907, private collection.
I am very very ACG to Henry Hobbs, 17 May 1907, private collection.
The seeds of his Herts Advertiser, 15 November 1907.
In ever loving memory Coburn, p. 49.
as if it cannot ibid.
I had thought of ibid., p. 50.
As a proof of St Albans Times, 10 November 1907.
Chapter 3: Untrodden Fields
new and untrodden fields Winston Churchill, speech in Dundee, 10 October 1908; published in The Times.
It was not a Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey I: The Unknown Years, 1967, pp. 33–4.
that fool of a Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, [n.d.] January 1905, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf: The Flight of the Mind , eds. Nigel Nicolson & Joanne Trautmann, 1975, p. 171.
From now onward till EW to RS, 18 April 1910.
I have seen him John Fraser, in George Seaver, Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, 1933, p. 20.
and something must be Seaver, Wilson, p. 170. Many of Seaver’s primary sources were later destroyed by Wilson’s widow. Seaver uses no notes, and should be treated with caution, as he was fond of conflating sources. Where Seaver is quoted as the source of correspondence, the letter is presumed destroyed.
to let nothing stand Address by George Se
aver at the opening of Edward Wilson Memorial House, London, 5 July 1952. Transcript in private collection.
Without a love for Seaver, Wilson, p. 124.
My dear Billy . . . it ES to EW, 12 February 1907, in ibid., p. 174.
