Terra Incognita (39 page)

In the late nineteenth century deep-sea trawling took off in the north of Britain in the wake of whaling. My grandfather knew a trawlerman from Grimsby whose eight sons had all become trawler skippers. I remember hearing this man talk about ‘the wondrous freedom of trawling, when time didn't exist'. I was a child then, and he made it sound like the most magical occupation in the world – I wrote in a schoolbook that when I grew up I wanted to be a trawlerman. Now it reminded me of what the old Antarctic explorers wrote in their diaries. None of them could submit to the nine-to-five.

Lying on my bunk as we ploughed up the side of the peninsula, I read the last of the books I had brought south. Fearful that I was going to finish it before the journey ended, I went through it very slowly. It was a volume of Edward Wilson's diaries, and in it I discovered that Scotland had another connection with Antarctica. Scott and Wilson had planned their last journey south on the rose-covered veranda of a bungalow near the mouth of one of the lovely glens of the Angus. Originally a shepherd's stone cottage, it was bought in 1902 by a London publisher called Reginald Smith, and he converted it into a tiny shooting lodge. Wilson and Scott went to see Smith in London in 1905 to ask him to publish Scott's
Voyage of the Discovery
, which he did. They all became friends, and when Wilson was commissioned to write a report on grouse disease by the Department of Agriculture, Smith lent him the bungalow. Wilson spent months there, and wrote in his diaries about long walks when he saw snipes and corncrakes, curlews and peewits, tawny owls and golden plover and greenfinches feeding on dandelion seed. Scott used to visit, and once, when they went stalking, he let a deer pass unharmed ‘because it was so pretty'.

The glen was called Glen Prosen, and in 1917 Smith's widow commissioned a monument to Scott and Wilson and their dead companions. By the time I got there the bungalow had become a bed-and-breakfast, so I slept in a back room, like them, and watched the lights of Kirriemuir twinkling from the balcony beyond the row of birches and the two plane trees where the shepherd had tethered his cow. The monument was fashioned out of red sandstone, and the inscription read, ‘For the journey is done and the summit attained and the barriers fall.'

∗

Circuit training took place in a cargo hold. The teacher shouted ‘Come on lads,' adding as an afterthought, ‘Come on Sara.' The smell of diesel put me off, besides which it was very noisy, and the hold looked like a Heath Robinson design for a Victorian canning factory. People were becoming bored. The bar, in which we read and re-read a six-month-old copy of
Hello!
magazine, was always unevenly dotted with men, like churchgoers at a poorly attended matins. In the mess, meals were despatched in less than half an hour, though the menus were models of imaginative ingenuity. They were typed up each day, as in an old-fashioned hotel on the coast, and featured items such as Cold Cuts, which was a euphemism for Spam. Cheese and Biscuits followed Dessert on the menu as regularly as petrels followed feeding whales, but never once did they make an appearance. Grilled Fresh Herring was announced one day, marking quite an event in maritime history; presumably the cook had let a line down over the side.

At night, when the water darkened, we became particularly desperate. At the end of March the nights are long in the Southern Ocean. The videos screened were so appalling that the best attended was
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Al, the medal-winning cook from the north of England, threw a drinks party in his cabin. It was a characteristically generous gesture. Gin was scarce on the
Bransfield
.

‘In the old days, at Stonington.' Ben told us, perched on the edge of Al's bunk and gripping his mug of gin as the ship did a little roll, ‘we had so much gin that we used it to clean the windows.' We had several more room parties after that, and people began finding vodka and tonics in their tooth mugs in the morning. Later, someone had the idea of sundowners on deck, and we gathered round half-frozen wineboxes in our balaclavas and parkas. Sometimes we hadn't seen the sun all day, though if we were lucky it found a porthole in the clouds just before it disappeared, and the vertical faces of the bergs shone briefly with a virulent salmon light.

Then suddenly, when I woke up one morning and drew back the curtain, it was all gone. I ran up to the monkey deck and looked around. It was a clear and sunny day, the water was grey but sparkling and the blank horizon stretched for 360 degrees around us, flat and featureless. It was all over. I watched a sooty albatross hovering over the stern. It was just as the explorers back at home had told me it would be – as if I had come back from another planet. A terrible grief flooded over my heart as if someone I loved very much had died.

On 1 April we arrived at East Cove in the Falklands, and woke up to see gently modulating hills, rays of sunshine piercing the clouds like a Blake painting and miles of dun-coloured grass. The
Bransfield
moored alongside a pontoon to refuel and a notice went up in the mess advising us that shore leave was not granted, and that in order to avoid being shot we should remain on board. A cormorant perched on a container on deck. The sun was shining on the port as we finally approached. Stanley still looked like Toytown – neat little coloured boxes with bright roofs nestling among dark green bushy foliage, with the cemetery at one end. Shackleton wrote in 1916 of Stanley: ‘The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.' Beyond it the camp
¹
stretched out flat, to the south. We languished on the monkey deck, and the people who had been on the ice for thirty months looked hunted.

A small boat ploughed to and fro as we waited. Our mail came up, and we fed on it obscenely in the bar while the builders shouted football results. Jeremy, the Patron of my expedition, wanted to know more about Incinolet toilets, details of which had been included in my last letter. He was troubled by the distinction between solids and liquids, and was anxious to know what one did about diarrhoea. I privately vowed never to send a child of mine to public school.

In the evening we went ashore, and Steve, the man who had given me the doggy t-shirt at Lagoon, and who had not lived in a cash economy for two-and-a-half years, forgot to take any money. We visited all the pubs. The Globe had whitewashed walls and a brick-red corrugated-iron roof. It was a hotel once, patronised by seamen glad to be on land, as we were, a spit-and-sawdust place with a pool table and Nazareth playing on the jukebox. At the end of the evening everyone went off to Deano's, but I couldn't face it. I liked going home on to a ship.

Cargo began the next morning, and I spent the day in Stanley. From open windows bursts of the Forces radio station took me halfway home. I walked up to the museum along Ross Road West, beyond the memorial to the Battle of the Falklands in 1914, when Sturdee routed von Spee, and past skeletal hulls poking out of the grey water like icebergs. The Falklands attracted shipwrecks like a siren, and their presence rooted the islands in their past. The mizzen mast from HMS
Great Britain
was lying on the shore. The ship limped into the Falklands in 1886, having been driven back from Cape Horn, and remained afloat for fifty years, when it was beached at Sparrow Cove. In 1970 the vessel was salvaged and returned to Bristol, where Brunel had designed it. I can remember walking in a crocodile from school to watch it coming triumphantly home up the Avon.

At that end of town the odd horse and sheep grazed in quiet gardens and washing flapped energetically from drooping lines, diminutive fragments of colour in the vast southern sky. The museum was in Britannia House, a wooden chalet with heart-carved shutters and a jumble of rusty canons in the garden. Inside, they had an 1895 symphonium. It was a coin-operated jukebox from the Globe Hotel in a big polished wood case, like a wide grandfather clock, and its vertical silver record was playing the duet ‘When we were married' from
The Belle of New York
. While I was standing in front of this object the curator of the museum introduced himself.

‘Regard the museum as yours!' he said cheerfully, flinging his arms out to indicate the extent of his domain. Around the corner, a sepia photograph of a man in a rocking chair next to a blazing fire was captioned, ‘About eighty years ago there was a time to relax in the Falklands'.

Later, I went swimming. I couldn't wait to swim; I had missed it so much. No one was in the water except a handful of BAS men from the ship, lounging like seals. We were all thrilled to be splashing about. On the way back I tried to buy fruit in the main shop, but they didn't have a single piece.

We spent a few days in the Falklands, waiting for a TriStar and living on the
Bransfield
. I walked through the low shrubs and Yorkshire Fog grass, and when upland geese rose out of the undergrowth and flew away from me and steamer ducks careering over the rocks flapped their redundant wings irritably, I thought once again of solitary days in Tierra del Fuego, a lifetime ago. I went to Yorke Bay; the dunes were wired off with signs saying ‘D
ANGER
! M
INES
', but the rolling sand made me think of hot places. At least there were still penguins. Over towards Gypsy Cove stripy magellanic penguins brayed and peered out of their earth burrows. When I stooped to look in at them, they fidgeted, twisting their heads from side to side. I thought with a pang of the fearlessness of the Adélies and emperors. I was so frightened of it all slipping away from me. I followed a Falklands thrush to the end of the bay, looked down and saw more penguins swimming in the clear green water far below. Then I walked slowly back to my ship as a soft white fog fell, and the other boats were calling to each other like partridges in the evening when the mist lies low on the winter field.

∗

The alarm ripped through the ship at five o'clock one gloomy morning, and we ran around with our kitbags and bundled into a coach on the dark and glistening tarmac quay after hasty goodbyes to those who were sailing on to Montevideo. One of them, a man who had ignored me during my entire stay at Rothera, loomed out of the crowd, pressed his hand to mine, drew close to my face and said, ‘It's from the Eternity Range.' He disappeared back into the darkness, and I opened my fist. It was a seashell.

It was a long trip to Mount Pleasant airport, and the diminutive Glaswegian chippie fell asleep on my shoulder. The coach was flooded with sunshine, and outside the windows the island looked resplendent. By the evening we were in Ascension, where it was twenty-seven degrees Celsius. After a lengthy delay another long haul took us to the English meadows of Brize Norton. The in-flight magazine still bore a photograph of a happy customer descending by parachute.

I wondered what was going to happen to the still, small voice when I flung myself back into the cacophony of civilisation. I wasn't afraid of permanently losing sight of the certainty and calm I had found – but it was going to have to fight off a lot of competition once I had the nuts and bolts of urban life to worry about.

This flight was supposed to define the end, the termination of a long physical journey and the beginning of a mental one. But nothing ended. It was all one continuous journey which never ended. I thought of a sentence Darwin wrote in his
Beagle
journal: ‘Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our journey homewards; but now I find it, all such resting-places for the imagination are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch.'

After all, the geographical questions may have been answered, but the metaphysical ones remain, and the most foreign territory will always lie within.

PART THREE

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There are so few temptations. Mentally, man there is invulnerable. He is so remote from the human struggle, the economic uncertainties of existence, from politics and wars, he realises that they mean just nothing at all.

Louis Bernacchi, veteran Antarctic explorer

I
ARRIVED
back in London at the beginning of April. All the plants on my roof terrace were dead, but the spring sun was shining weakly through the tame northern clouds. As I began to pick up the threads of my life, the Frank Hurley quotation I had stuck on the kitchen wall loomed increasingly large in my imagination. ‘After life in the vastness of a vacant continent,' it said, ‘civilisation seemed disappointingly narrow, cramped, superficial and empty.'