The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  In the sky overhead a snowy albatross flies in a figure eight directly over the ship, its shadow crossing and recrossing me. And suddenly I have to tell him.

  I have to say about Titus—how he was there! How he helped! How he carried the pain! How he fetched me out of there! How he pulled me through as surely as he hauled a sled over the Beardmore Glacier ninety years ago! Sucking in breath enough to speak has the strangest effect, for although it’s as cold as hoarfrost, it seems to thaw the clod of ice behind my eyes. Tears stream down my face and drip onto the penguins on my borrowed sweatshirt. And the words pour out of me, about Titus. Oh, he was a gentleman, quite a gentleman, and always a gentleman!

  “You see? She’s out of her gourd! Just like her uncle! Round the bend! Cracked!” It’s Sigurd, his big-bandaged hand held up in front of his chest like a boxing glove, in his mouth a gum shield of sores and blistering. “You can’t believe a word she says! Talks to herself. Hears voices. She’s mad!”

  Mike stands up, placing himself between me and Sigurd, who is brandishing Fright like a weapon. He doesn’t say anything, just stands and deters Sigurd from coming any closer; stands and waits until Sigurd, like a wolf faced down by firelight, turns and skulks away.

  “Poor chap,” says Mike. Everyone aboard the Battleship Potemkin pities Sigurd for the loss of his father, the ordeal he has been through, his troubled state of mind. They just don’t know what to do about him. Whereas me . . .

  “It was the same with Shackleton!” exclaims Mike, sitting down again as if nothing has happened, thrusting handkerchiefs at me from almost all his pockets. His face is bright with delight. I was expecting a soothing pat on the head; a “Yes, yes, dear, now get some sleep.” But he is eager to hear more about my mysterious companion, eager to agree that such things can and do happen. “I read it about Shackleton! He and another man rowed all the way from Elephant Island to South Georgia—but landed the wrong side! They had to walk all the way across it—two of them! Exhausted! Lost! Half dead from rowing a thousand miles. They both said afterward they could sense a third person was with them! Incredible! When I read that, I thought, ‘Oh yeah!’ but with you saying that . . . Incredible!”

  At least he doesn’t think I’m mad. He doesn’t understand how it is—was—between Titus and me, but at least he doesn’t think I’m mad. He doesn’t know quite how incredible, nor shall I tell him, but I’ve just realized something, and it’s roaring around my head like a swarm of bees.

  “Mike,” I say. “Is it true Scott’s tent isn’t on the Barrier anymore?”

  “His huts are. You went there . . . No! We never got there, did we? Next time. I’ll have to take you next—”

  “Not the huts. The tent where he died. His body. Wilson. Bowers. The death tent.”

  “The search party buried them where they were, if that’s what you mean,” says Mike. “Didn’t take the bodies home. Just collapsed the tent and built an ice cairn over them.”

  “Yes, I know that! But the cairn . . . the death tent . . . Is it true the Ice Shelf emptied it into the sea years ago? Tell me. It’s really important. Tell me!”

  It must seem an odd question coming from someone who has only just rediscovered the power of speech; an odd piece of knowledge to need in a hurry.

  “Don’t think anyone knows, for sure,” says Mike cautiously. “Some people say twenty-five years ago. Some say ten years from now. Some people think it’s getting there about now. No way of knowing for sure.”

  Exactly! There is—there was—no way of knowing. And I didn’t know! I didn’t! Everything else I knew—deep down—must have. Titus was of my making! Everything Titus ever said to me could only have come from inside me. Things I’ve read. Things I imagined.

  But I didn’t know about the Ice Shelf moving! I never knew that the bodies of Scott and Wilson and Birdie and Oates were being shoved along by a great tide of ice! I thought the Ross Shelf would always be holding them!

  Communion bread between its flat white palms of ice.

  So how could Titus ever have said that to me? That figure beside me? The one who leaned across me? The one whose face brushed mine? How could he possibly have told me something I truly didn’t know? Oh, Titus! Tell me what it means! Tell me what to make of it! Tell me what to think?

  “When we get home—after you’re better, I mean,” says Mike, cutting across this extraordinary, bewildering thought, “I suppose you wouldn’t like to . . . you know—I mean, say if you wouldn’t, but just if you might like to . . . meet up. Do something. Go out. Somewhere. Something. Make a trip?”

  Boom. Boom. Boom. I stretch up in my chair, to see what isthmus of ice we are forcing a sea path through. But we are in open water, so the noise can’t be coming from the ship’s bows. It must be coming from somewhere inside.

  “I’m fourteen,” I say.

  Mike is mortified. “Oh, God! I’m sorry! Fourteen? I thought you must be much older. The way you handled yourself, I mean. And looked . . . not now, I don’t mean, but before . . . Wow! God, I’m sorry! Fourteen! God! All the men at Aurora were trying to pluck up the nerve to ask you out. Fourteen! Sorry. Sorry, sorry. Forget I spoke. Fourteen! You look older.”

  The tiny kernel of an iceberg—once the size of Everest but melted now to the size of a book—bobs in the ocean, making the green ice inside it wink and blink. A school of fish breaks surface like a fusillade of shots fired in salute over a grave. Then, inside my head, a familiar voice.

  “And the third band of iron broke, and the princess could blink her eyes and move her hands and was entirely free to speak.”

  Oh, Titus! It’s so good to see you. So unbelievably good. Thank you.

  “Don’t mention it, Sym.”

  Blushing, embarrassed by his mistake, Mike is gathering up his belongings, offering to leave me in peace. He hastily re-covers my feet. But that’s all right, because the dassie is well and truly awake now. Mike trips over a leg of the chair and heads off in full retreat.

  “Oh, Mike!” I call after him, so that he turns in the companionway and bangs his head on a lifeboat. “Keep in touch, won’t you?” I say. “I’m planning on being older in a year or two.”

  Postscript

  Scott of the Antarctic

  When Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out for the South Pole in 1911, it was not his first attempt to reach it. He had tried unsuccessfully in 1904. This was to be primarily a scientific expedition, commissioned by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, but the surprise arrival in Antarctica of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, intent on claiming the honor for Norway of being first to the Pole, enraged Scott, who believed that England had a moral right to it. Though no one said as much, a race had begun.

  Scott’s expedition plan involved dogs, ponies, motor sledges, and manpower. The man he chose to take charge of the ponies was not Royal Navy, like the rest, but an Army officer, Captain Lawrence Oates. Unfortunately, Oates was not allowed to choose the ponies and was horrified by the shabby animals put in his care. He took a strong and immediate dislike to Scott, though he won the affectionate respect of everyone (including Scott) with his quiet, laconic, anarchic nature. They called him “The Soldier,” or “Napoleon” (whose picture he pinned to his bunk), or “Farmer Hayseed” (because he so delighted in looking scruffy). Or Titus (after a hot-headed troublemaker of the seventeenth century, Titus Oates). Despite an old leg wound, which had left him with a limp (and a commendation for the Victoria Cross), he was immensely fit and relished hard work.

  The plan involved two expeditions. During the first summer they would set up a series of food dumps at intervals all the way across the Ross Ice Shelf to the Transantarctic Mountains, then hurry back to base at Hut Point and sit out the Polar winter. As soon as spring arrived, they would set off across the Shelf, via their supply dumps, and climb the Beardmore Glacier to the Polar Plateau and the South Pole.

  On the first expedition the motor sleds broke down almost at once, and the ponies were a liability. In trying to re
lieve their suffering, Scott made the fatal decision to off-load provisions early and turn back. Oates strongly objected, saying that “One Ton” food dump needed to be farther out on the Shelf. He was overruled.

  Amundsen’s journey went, in his own words, “like a dream.” This was no lucky accident: He had immense experience, skill, and wisdom. He used dog teams to pull the sleds, and when the loads grew lighter and fewer dogs were needed, he killed the weakest and fed their meat to the strong. That is simply how such journeys are made in the Arctic Circle. He also got lucky—found a glacier just where he needed one in order to get up to the Plateau, and enjoyed “good” weather (a relative term in Antarctica, of course). Amundsen reached the geographic South Pole on December 14, 1911. It did not delight him: He had really wanted to conquer the North Pole, but someone had beaten him to it.

  Meanwhile Scott, too, was marching. A big company set out, but stage by stage, as planned, the support party peeled off and turned back, leaving just a chosen core of the fit and fortunate few to attempt the last leg. But the British met with filthy weather, fell behind schedule, used up supplies too fast. Oates’s ponies died one by one . . . but got them to the Mountains, which had been their purpose. An attempt on the Pole was still possible. The worst that could happen, to Scott’s way of thinking, was that they would find the Norwegian had got there first.

  It was not the worst thing that could happen.

  Five men made up the final “Pole Party.” No dogs: Scott disliked them and saw more grandeur in the idea of men hauling the sleds themselves across the Plateau. Captain Oates was already more exhausted than he cared to admit, but rejoiced in being chosen as one of the five, because he thought his regiment might be pleased. Scott, Dr. Bill, Taff Evans, “Birdie” Bowers, and “Soldier” dragged two sleds over two hundred miles of Polar Plateau—only to find Amundsen had impaled all their dreams on a Norwegian flag. There was nothing to do but turn around and head back, knowing their supplies were dangerously low.

  It should have been possible. A close-run thing, but possible. But the temperature dropped, the weather worsened: Winter came early that year. On reduced rations, Taff Evans—a great bear of a man—was literally starving. He had terrible frostbite, too. Nearing the Ross Ice Shelf, he probably fell and banged his head. Within days he collapsed and died. Four men struggled onward, outwardly confident, inwardly racked with anxiety, grimly hoping for the best. Gradually everyone realized that The Soldier, too, was done for.

  The last entry in Oates’s diary records digging up the remains of a dead pony in the hope of something to eat. “Dug up Christopher’s head for food, but it was rotten.” After that, his hands were too frostbitten to write. His feet had long since been destroyed by the cold. It cost him agonies to walk, even to exist. He knew he was holding up his comrades, wasting precious time, lessening their chances. But he failed to die.

  On 16 March, his thirty-second birthday, he woke and struggled out of his sleeping bag. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he told his companions, and crawled out into a blizzard to die.

  Dr. Wilson, writing a note to Oates’s mother, tucking it inside his diary, said, “I have never seen or heard of such courage as he showed from first to last . . . never a word or a sign of complaint or of the pain.”

  Three stumbled on toward One Ton Depot. If Scott had listened to Oates about where it needed to be, they would have reached it. As it was, a blizzard pinned them down eleven miles short. They sat in their tent and waited—waited, starved, and froze to death, racked with scurvy and frostbite. Their bodies were found the following spring and entombed then and there under a cairn of ice.

  Captain Oates’s body was never found.

  Many Thanks

  “A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

  —Kafka

  It was this quotation that led to this book. So I suppose I must be indebted, firstly, to Franz Kafka. He was actually talking about reading—saying we should read only books that hammer into us some dazzling truth. But it is a perfect word picture, too, of why authors write books.

  My thanks go also to:

  The Antarctic Center, Christchurch, New Zealand, especially Roger Harris;

  Ranulph Fiennes for his graphic descriptions, bravery, and decided opinions;

  The Kelly Tarlton Center, Auckland, New Zealand;

  Sue Limb for turning her own childhood obsession into a brilliant biography, Captain Oates, Soldier and Explorer;

  The Oates Museum at Selborne, Hampshire, England;

  everyone at Oxford University Press;

  Francis Spufford, whose beautiful book I May Be Some Time includes my favorite account of Scott’s last Antarctic journey;

  the girls of St. Gabriel’s School for confiding how and when they use imaginings;

  Craig Vear, composer of Antarctica, who shared his firsthand experience of a place where I have never actually been, and who really did play music on the ice leaves;

  all those involved in the making of The Last Place on Earth (Central Independent Television 1994 Carlton DVD), based on the book by Roland Huntford—contentious but enthralling television; in particular the actor who played Oates and was my template for Titus: Richard Morant, an entirely sweet-natured man—unlike the captain, I suspect, for all he was so loved and admired by those who knew him.

  Speaking of whom: I just hope that by some fluke of Time, Space, or Divine Grace, Lawrence Edward Grace Oates is aware that the nose of his memorial in Eton College has been rubbed shiny by generations of boys touching it for good luck—and of how many people, writers included, have carried his story among life’s crevasses and frozen reaches, like an ice axe.

  Bonus Material

  How This Book Came About

  Advice for Aspiring Writers

  Researching Antarctica

  Making People

  The Facts and the Fiction

  An Interview with Geraldine McCaughrean

  How This Book Came About

  This book began life being called Walking Over the Sea—good title, eh? The setting was the Arctic—the Bering Strait, in fact, which lies between the US and Russia and sometimes freezes solid enough for people to walk from one continent to the other.

  But Walking Over the Sea would not come to life. Writing a book is like building a bonfire; sometimes the wood is just too green or too wet to kindle. The character of Uncle Victor was much the same as he ended up in The White Darkness, but the heroine Sym had no one to talk to, no confidant. As soon as the idea of Captain Lawrence Oates came to me, the bonfire burst into flame, and I was away. I shifted ground to the other end of the world, quickly read all the books on the Antarctic and Captain Oates I could get my hands on, and started work. I remember that I wrote the first page on an airplane on my way to New Zealand. Sym was no longer a character I needed to invent; she was me, I realized—well, me stirred in with a pinch of my daughter and a sprinkling of the girls in my daughter’s class.

  During my youth I was forever unrequitedly in love with somebody or other. And as I wrote I began to remember just how wonderful that was.

  Suddenly my story was up close and personal. I was fourteen, fifteen again and walking the glass bridge of my imagination over the yawning gulf of my teenage years. Maybe that’s why I love this book best of all: because I remembered how it felt to be young. Only this time round I wasn’t so terrified, slow-witted, green, or helpless.

  Advice for Aspiring Writers

  Go away! It’s mine, all mine! I don’t want bright young minds, overspilling with good ideas and writing talent, elbowing me out of the best job in the world! Go away! Become a vet! Learn plumbing! Stop it! Not fair!

  However, if you feel you really must write . . .

  Save all those books you began to write but didn’t have the stamina to finish. Ironically, the younger you are, the better your ideas; the older you get, the better you get at your craft but the harder it is to come up with fresh ideas. So never throw away
your early writing efforts just because they didn’t go anywhere or you notice they are not very well written.

  If you do something for long enough, you can’t fail to get better at it. But if you are offered advice and help along the way, grab it. Some of the writing sites on the internet (eg. www.writing.com; www.fanfic.com) are excellent. You can post your stories and poems there for other people to read. Whether you are a particular fan of fantasy or science fiction or even Pirates of the Caribbean, there is a whole section given over to that kind of story. The sites are visited by like-minded people who are ready to read your stories and give an honest opinion. You may get “flamed” once in a while, which is hard, but you will get an audience for your writing and can make some good friends. Writing is like doing your hair: it always helps to have someone tell you how it looks from the back.

  Read! In particular, listen to audio books; you will absorb the ability to hear when a sentence has a pleasing shape and music to it.

  Eavesdrop on buses and at the shops; it will help you write better dialogue . . . and it might even suggest stories.

  As for style—adjectives, adverbs, similes, and so on—follow the well-tried dictum, “If in doubt, leave it out.”

  Write something every day. Jack London said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

  Will you go on writing always, even if no one ever publishes you? Because you just can’t help it? Then congratulations; you are already a writer. Nothing can stop you and you will never get discouraged.

  Researching Antarctica

  I never go to any of the places I write about. But I do find out everything I can about them. The closest I got to Antarctica was New Zealand, where I visited a brilliant Antarctic center, rode in a Hägglund, experienced an artificial squall, and saw a reproduction of Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Hut Point.