Terra Incognita (34 page)

Alexander Island was roughly mapped as far back as 1821 by members of Bellingshausen's Russian Antarctic Expedition, who named it after Tsar Alexander I, their patron. A British team surveyed the Fossil Camp site in 1948 and renamed it Fossil Bluff, and BAS scientists have been working on Alexander Island ever since. The focus of their investigations was primarily the relationship between glacier climate and atmospheric climate. In the middle of February I asked if I could hitch a ride to the small Bluff camp on a fuel flight. Nobody raised any objection, which was a relief, as I was becoming increasingly desperate to get off base – for two weeks I had been hanging around there without much to do. I had no idea how long I would be able to stay at the Bluff, but I couldn't have cared less about that. Someone would presumably tell me when I had to leave.

Alexander Island is separated from continental Palmer Land by George VI Sound, which, when I flew over it, was streaked with blue melt pools. We landed on the edge of the island next to a line of black drums. A couple of men hooded in fluorescent orange ventile were waiting to refuel the aircraft, and after we had waved the pilot on his way south I rode the mile to the Bluff itself in a sledge. The hut, now occupied only in summer, was established in 1961. It had recently acquired a smart wooden veranda on which flapped the obligatory Union Jack – upside down, as usual.

We went in to the smell of burning jam tarts and a lively row over who had forgotten to take them out of the oven. A man with a beard like Rasputin's was defending himself on the basis that he had been discussing an important matter on the radio. Steve Rumble, an electrician and winter base commander who had been on the ice for twenty-seven months, kept his Walkman clamped to his head and remained supine on his bunk. Hans Cutter, a German geodesist inevitably known as Herr Cutter, sat at the table looking baffled at the sudden inflamed talk of tarts, especially as it had coincided with my arrival. The fourth temporary resident at the Bluff, Ian, was standing in the middle of the hut in his apron, grasping the tray of smouldering ex-tarts. He was the outgoing doctor at Rothera, and an endearingly eccentric character with firm opinions and a wild glint in his eye. I had met him on base before he left for the Bluff – he was one of the few who came up to shake hands when I arrived. Although he spoke Home Counties English, I think he was Scottish, as I had seen photographs of him skiing in a kilt.

The population of the Bluff was transitory. The hut was used as a staging-post for science parties on their way further south, a holiday cottage and a place to send people if they were getting in the way on base. Ben, the veteran dog-handler from Sheffield, had flown in with me, and shortly after we arrived a science party of two turned up after seventy-two days on the Uranus, a glacier which had provided many hundreds of punning jokes for generations of Rothera Beards. Graham was a tall glaciology post-graduate from Belfast with ginger hair. He was studying how light was reflected in the snow pack. This affected heat absorption, and yielded data which could be used to assess the rate of global warming. His much shorter field assistant was a chunky mountaineer from south London called Duncan. They both said they weren't sure if they could sleep between walls after seventy-two nights in a tent. Having eaten field rations for so long, they were astonished to find real mushrooms in the spaghetti sauce. They held pieces up on forks, just to look at them. In the evening we drank wine the winterers had made from raisins and sultanas. It tasted of cooking sherry, but they had decanted it into Chateau Lafite bottles.

The hut, which for years had been known as Bluebell Cottage, was about fifteen feet by twenty-five, with a small partitioned sink area and an arched wooden ceiling. Built in at one end were two sets of bunks with metal legs and no ladders. There was a wooden table, a dresser strewn with magazines and books, the latter including
The Bluffer's Guide to Seduction
and
The Beauty of Cars
, and a noticeboard upon which someone had pinned a register of fuel drums, a black-and-white photograph of a killer whale, a clutch of cartoons and a Moral Fibre Meter, the latter inaugurated in honour of a pilot who issued regular tirades against the flaccidity of modern youth. One corner was filled with communications equipment, and this area was known as the radio shack. A few pictures of women had been ripped from magazines and stuck to the wall, and pots and pans dangled from beams. The room was dominated by a drip-oil Aga upon which an antediluvian kettle sat in permanent residence, growling menacingly. Off the entrance, a slender room called Arkwright's was jumbled with tools and bags and cases of beer, and on the other side of the hut, in a room crammed with snowshoes, crampons, ropes, karrimats, a soda syphon, nuts and bolts and an old wooden sign saying ‘No Dumping', there was a portable toilet.

I slept in the food store, a blue wooden hut on the slope behind Bluebell Cottage. A small window at one end cast an orange rhomboid on the opposite wall in the early morning. At night – by mid-February as long as an autumnal northern night – I had to read by torchlight. The room was stacked with ziplocks of split peas, boxes of suet, shiny metal cubes of sugar packed in July 1985, a large cardboard box containing khaki foil packs of the ubiquitous ‘Biscuits, Brown' eaten by British Antarcticans since the dawn of time, and a surplus of sardines. On the floor boxes of shampoo had collapsed on to crates of leaking tile cleaner. The door wouldn't shut from the inside, so I was obliged to tie myself in.

I emptied my p-bag on to the floor. This object was shaped like a golf caddy and contained an airbed, two karrimats, a sheepskin underblanket, a bivvy bag and a sleeping bag with two liners. As I inflated my airbed between the shelves I couldn't help thinking guiltily of what Wilfred Thesiger said to Eric Newby and Hugh Carless when he saw them inflating their airbeds in Nuristan in 1956. It is the last line of Newby's
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger.

Bluebell Cottage was the only hut on an island the size of Wales (the size of England if you counted the ice shelves attached to it) and it had hardly changed since 1961. I knew that for I had seen photographs of Beards hunched in the radio shack or grinning over a saucepan. Drune, the mountain directly behind the hut, and Pyramid, the ziggurat next to it, were usually striated with snow. It was always more attractive around the hut when it snowed; a light covering over the scree and moraine broke up the brown. On the other side of King George VI Sound the Batterbee Mountains and Ryder Glacier changed colour as the light faded and glowed like old stained glass in the great cathedrals around the time of evensong.

At the Bluff, Ian taught me to chart the speed and direction of the wind, the cloud type and extent of cover, the height of the cloud base and the air pressure at sea level. He was a good teacher, and seemed pleased to have something to do. He had come to the end of his year's tour of duty as a doctor, and his replacement was already installed at Rothera. Everyone at Bluebell Cottage had finished whatever it was they had been doing in Antarctica. They were waiting to go home, and it was more agreeable to sit it out at the Bluff than at Rothera – not least due to the absence of a base commander.

My newly acquired skills meant I could take my turn at weather observations and relay the data back to Rothera over the radio. Often we had to do this hourly, if aircraft were trying to come in. They often brought more avtur, the aviation fuel used by BAS, as the Bluff functioned as a service station for planes transporting scientists further south. It was a fuel-intensive business, as the Otters bringing drums of fuel had to refill their own tanks before returning to Rothera.

Ian taught me how to test the forty-five-gallon drums of avtur for water contamination, and how to fill up the tanks when a plane arrived. In addition, we occupied ourselves for a couple of hours each day at the drum dump, a pit into which trash had been deposited in a less environmentally aware age. The work involved digging debris out of the ice and piling it into empty fuel drums. When these drums were full, the Otters ferried them back to Rothera.

While I was working on the dump one day with Graham, the tall Belfast glaciologist, he said irritably, ‘No wonder they call them the good old days. They chucked all their bloody rubbish straight down where they stood.'

Graham had a strong northern Irish accent, for which he came under constant fire from the others, but no account of teasing could provoke him. One day at the dump he decided to requisition the unclaimed portion of Antarctica for Ulster.

‘Storming,' he said as he contemplated this idea. He was affable, lively and spontaneous, and kept a tin whistle in his pocket. Duncan, the field assistant from South London who had spent seventy-two days on the Uranus with Graham and his whistle, was more reserved and less cheerful. I noticed that he made a quick exit from Bluebell Cottage whenever Graham's hand approached the pocket containing his whistle.

I stayed at the Bluff for two weeks, and each day walked along a thin path across the scree at the foot of Drune towards the Eros Glacier. It ran alongside a frozen inlet, and beyond the windscoop on the opposite side the glacier fell to a ledge over a pearly blue cavern. On the way back I used to lie on the scree and contemplate the Eros, and watch the rose pink glow of sunset die over the Batterbees on the other side of the streaky Sound.

As further evidence of Scottishness, Ian had his bagpipes sent over on a passing Otter. He needed constant stimulation, and displayed none of the pubbish characteristics of the other BAS men. I got the impression that he had not particularly enjoyed the winter as a result. He stood on the veranda playing ‘Amazing Grace'. It was not a great success, due to cold drones.

‘Let me have a go,' said Graham, who was game for anything. Ian handed the pipes over, and Graham expended a great deal of energy producing no sound at all.

‘Why don't I blow,' said Ben, who, as a marathon runner, had a reliable pair of lungs, ‘and you hold the bagpipes and press the buttons?'

After a good deal of jostling on the veranda, a single reedy note wheezed out of the pipes. It had a dying fall.

‘Where's all the breath
going
?' said Ben.

Graham gave up, and fetched his tin whistle. Perhaps it was the first time bagpipes and a tin whistle have ever been heard together in Antarctica.

‘And I hope the last,' said Duncan when I mentioned this.

The manfood boxes that had sustained Graham and Duncan in the field were packed in 1986. Everything was years past its sell-by date in Antarctica. When it was all over and I got home, I was shocked to see sell-by dates in the future, as if it worked the other way round, and that meant you weren't supposed to eat the goods. But it didn't seem to matter – we were never ill. Some things were less appetising than they might have been. Upon contact with heat the tinned spaghetti disintegrated, as it had been thawed and refrozen so many times. In one field camp I saw a tub of Parmesan cheese bearing the printed label
Matured ten months
. Underneath, someone had written,
FROZEN TEN YEARS
.

Still, care parcels arrived sometimes from Al, the medal-winning Rothera cook, and one day a joint of beef was tossed out of a refuelling Otter. Ian cooked it, with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings. He was an excellent cook. Besides two loaves a day, he churned out pies and scones, and one morning he produced Danish pastries. After we had eaten the beef, he was bored, so he cut the obliging Graham's hair.

‘We could play Trivial Pursuit after this,' said Graham brightly.

Nobody said anything. We were bored with Trivial Pursuit. Like everything else at the Bluff, the game in the hut was an early model, and it was an American version to boot, the orange questions asking us who joined the National Hockey League in 1983. Ian would shout wild guesses to these arcane questions, which irritated Rasputin, when we managed to coax him out of the radio shack. He favoured a more intellectual approach to the game.

Rasputin was a highly skilled surveyor on secondment from the Ordnance Survey, the government mapping department. He had been in the south for five weeks, taking photographs of Antarctica in order to go back to Cambridge and produce detailed maps of small areas. In the hut he held forth on the importance of maps in society with missionary zeal, and talked eloquently about the cultural absence of what he referred to as ‘map awareness'. After I had been at the Bluff for a week I realised that I had never seen him with a camera in his hand.

‘Where is your camera?' I asked him, expecting him to whip it out of his pocket.

‘It's mounted in the back of a Twin Otter,' he said huffily. ‘It weighs more than 200 pounds, you know – it's not a bloody Box Brownie.'

Three days later, Rasputin went back to Rothera on an Otter, as he was supposed to be taking the next flight to the Falklands. While we sat on the veranda waiting for the plane, he looked south and sighed.

‘Look at that,' he said ruefully. ‘Nothing between us and the Pole except 1,250 miles of empty ice. So much to map – so little time.'

I moved into the old generator shed where he had been sleeping. It was a lean-to on the side of the cottage with a tiny wooden door. Like Alice, I had to crouch down to get through it. The shed had a kind of wooden shelf which served as a bed, with a sliding hatch next to it, so I used to lie with the hatch open and look out over the Sound and Georgian Cliffs, listening to the bergs calve and the ice crack. It was as if the landscape were alive, just as Coleridge described – though he had never seen anything like it: