As it happened, I don’t think Cherry took it amiss. He was half delirious with exhaustion, his frost-bitten fingers bulging like plums. When Bill reached the top and apologised for his outburst, gripping Cherry’s gloves in his own, Cherry all but fainted at the pressure. ‘My fault,’ he gasped, as though he was a papist. ‘My most grievous fault.’
We took the five eggs back in our mitts. Both of Cherry’s smashed on the way, for he fell so often. Earlier, the wind had got up, and now it grew worse, covering our tracks. Before long it was blowing force four and we floundered about, first in one direction, then another, sometimes doubling backwards in an effort to find the igloo. Cirrus cloud whirled across the north stars and there was a haze of fog to the south.
I’ve read stories in which weary travellers, lost in the mists on some rugged moor, come at last to a comfortable inn at the wayside, the landlord waiting with hot grog, the fire roaring in the hearth, clean sheets spread across goose feather mattresses. Our particular inn, when we did finally stumble across it, let in the wind and the snowdrift, yet we thought it the most hospitable place on earth.
It took two hours to get the blubber stove lit; just as it began to burn more strongly a blob of boiling fat spat into Bill’s eye. He reckoned his sight had gone and thrust his arm against his mouth to stifle his groans. It was well-nigh unbearable not being able to do anything for him beyond uttering platitudes and watching him suffer.
Cherry was a tower of strength. Going outside, he plugged up as many of the gaps in the walls as he could find. His fingers were now easier, he said, and he put it down to the oil in the broken eggs in his mitts.
When we’d eaten and were a little warmer we discussed our situation. I was all for making another descent to the rookery, yet I knew it was out of the question – Cherry and Bill were almost at the end of their tether, we had one tin of oil left for the return journey, and our clothing was in rags. Bill said we ought to rest up, wait for calmer weather and then make a run for home. ‘We’ve reached rock-bottom,’ he said faintly, pressing a wad of cotton rag dunked in cold tea to his injured eye. ‘Things must improve.’
That night I dreamt I was on that other ghastly run, the St Paul’s Journeys, an initiation torture devised for new cadets on the Worcester. The victim had to sprint the length of the lower deck and back, and then to his hammock under the top hammocks of the older chaps who hit him with boots, rope, knotted towels, anything that hurt. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest as I ran and the shouts of those bully-boys above me. All my youthful enthusiasm and ideals had melted away, replaced by cunning and an animal necessity to go to ground. Then it became very quiet – the other fellows vanished, and there was nobody but me standing there, eyes wide with terror. A sob burst from me – or so I thought. I woke instantly, to a terrible suffocating silence. The next moment I heard a second, greater sob, a fearsome gulp of sound fit to swallow the universe.
Scrambling out of my bag I opened the igloo door, at which the world suddenly cracked wide open, the wind shrieking about my ears, a solid wall of black snow crushing me to my knees. As if under water I dog-paddled those few yards to the tent, came up against the provision boxes, felt for that neat row of finneskö, that canvas sack containing a copy of Bleak House and the poems of Tennyson, the tin of sweets I’d brought to celebrate Bill’s birthday. I crawled back, calling for Cherry, and twice I was flung on my face by the force of the wind. ‘The tent’s gone,’ I shouted.
Cherry and I laboured for what seemed like years transferring the gear to the igloo. All but crazy from the pain of his eye, Bill could do no more than lie in the doorway and blindly shovel the drift from the entrance.
I don’t know what the other two were thinking while we sank into hell. I know there were two halves of me, one which raced ahead working out ways of getting back to Cape Evans by means of digging holes in the ice and using the ground sheet as a covering, and the other which longed to curl up in the igloo and acknowledge we were done for.
It wasn’t that I’d given up hope, rather that the loss of the tent and the inhuman fury of the hurricane tearing at the canvas roof, so that it rattled as though we were under continuous rifle-fire, had the same hallucinatory effect as the auroral display of our outward journey and drove me into dreams. I relived the moment when I opened the igloo door and heard that mighty crack of the elements, and sometimes I saw a giant chick emerge from a giant egg, and sometimes I watched a cork pulled from a cobwebbed bottle labelled ‘Emergency’, its plume of escaped vapour whirling up and up until it fashioned itself into the shape of a turbaned genie whose blue eyes flashed bolts of lightning. Over and over, as though words could drown the roar of that awful wind, I murmured those lines of Tennyson:
Oh that ’twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.
And I had such regrets, for I’d never known an untrue love, let alone one of the other sort, and the only arms that had ever tenderly held me were those of my mother.
By degrees, I pulled myself together. I think at the beginning we sang to keep our spirits up: hymns, ballads, bits of Evensong. Cherry gallantly tried to warble ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’, but when it came to the line, ‘Darling I am growing older’ his voice trailed away at the realisation there was every possibility such a process was beyond his expectations. I remembered the requirements deemed necessary for the Gold Medal for cadets, and duly bawled them out: ‘A cheerful submission to superiors, self-respect and independence of character, kindness and protection to the weak, readiness to forgive offence, desire to conciliate the differences of others, and, above all, fearless devotion to duty and unflinching truthfulness.’ At this, triggered by some secret memory of his own, Cherry clutched my arm and began to laugh. Then the roof went. The topmost rocks of the walls fell in upon us, together with a blanket of drift.
The fact that we were almost into our sleeping bags saved us, that and the ridge above us which in some measure deflected the wind howling towards the Ross Sea. Cherry dived forward to help Bill, who shouted, ‘See to yourself!’ and Cherry still persisting, ‘Please, Cherry, please.’ All the urgency and worry in the world was in his voice, for he held himself responsible for our ghastly dilemma.
Somehow we burrowed deeper into those wretched bags, pulling them over and round until we lay on that wild mountainside cocooned in ragged shrouds, nothing between us and the hidden stars but that swirling, maddening blizzard.
I think we dozed a good bit; the temperature had risen with the storm, and we were kept almost snug by the snow that fell upon us. Every now and then I kicked out at Cherry to see if he still lived, and all of us heaved up at intervals to jerk the drift away. We didn’t eat for two days and two nights, apart from handfuls of snow to ease our raw throats and a boiled sweet apiece in honour of Bill’s birthday.
On the Monday there was a lull in the storm. Though it was still blowing we could talk without shouting. We asked each other how we felt … Pretty well, thank you, all things considered; if Bill’s eye was better … Oh, yes, much better, thank you; if Cherry’s hands were on the mend … Thank you, yes … The swelling is much reduced. None of us enquired how we were going to survive.
The wind further abating, we got out of our bags and searched for the tent. I don’t think any of us really thought we’d find it, but we went through the motions. We were lucky in that all our gear was intact, save for two pieces of the cooker and a pair of Cherry’s socks which had been snatched from his finneskö. At last Bill said we must cook ourselves a meal, though it was a curious fact we had little desire for food; our bodies had taken such a beating and we were so diminished from lack of sleep that eating seemed too great an effort. We struggled through the preparations, stretching the ground sheet over us and somehow huddling beneath it, lighting the primus, holding the broken cooker in our hands, waiting an age for the snow to melt. Then, the pemmican beginning to heat and the sm
ell rising, our appetites returned and we gobbled that meaty mess seasoned with penguin feathers, dirt, burnt blubber and reindeer hairs, and voted it the best dinner we’d ever had.
I went out afterwards to look again for the tent, though I imagined by now it had blown half-way to New Zealand. There was a small glow of light on the horizon, but the sky to the south was heaped with black clouds and I feared another blizzard would soon be on top of us. I was clambering sideways, slithering down the slope below the ridge, when I lost my footing and rolled clear to the bottom, and there, furled like an umbrella, lay the tent.
‘Nothing will convince me this is all down to chance,’ I told Bill. ‘I really believe we’ve been saved for a purpose.’
‘We still have the journey back,’ he reminded.
‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘There’s something else God has in store for us, something glorious. I’m sure of it.’
‘You may be right,’ he said, staring at me gravely, his one good eye so filled with concern I turned my head away.
That night we packed the sledges ready for an early start. Cherry’s come a long way since he boarded the Terra Nova unable to say boo to a goose, and we had quite a fierce argument over the gear. Everything we carried was so swollen with frozen moisture that the weights had trebled, and he was for leaving most of it behind. Bill wouldn’t hear of it; he said the Owner would never forgive him if we failed to return without every last item. Later, Cherry confided that when the tent blew away he made up his mind to ask Bill for the morphia and put an end to it all. ‘My dear chap,’ I said, ‘he would never have agreed.’
‘I believe I did ask him,’ he said, ‘but he couldn’t hear me on account of the wind and you yelling that gibberish about devotion to duty.’
For six days the weather did its worst. Time and again we were forced to make camp as yet another blizzard raged about us. And by now our bags were in such a deplorable condition – we’d stopped bothering to roll them up and simply lashed them, coffin-shaped, onto the sledges – it hardly mattered whether we were in or out of them. As for sleeping, we got most rest on the march, falling into blissful dozes interrupted by our bumping into each other, at which we woke and comically cried out, ‘So sorry! Good morning, is everything all right?’ We wasted a lot of our conscious hours working out how many years of our life we would give for a long, warm sleep. Cherry thought two, and subsequently changed it to five, but that was when his bag split down the middle.
On the 28th the temperature was –47, and a crimson glow spread across the Barrier Edge. We wouldn’t see the sun for another month but already the light was lasting longer and sometimes the sky turned blue. On the 29th, which was my birthday, though I didn’t let on, we came in sight of Castle Rock. Cherry whooped with joy, and a piece of his front tooth spat into the snow. The cold had killed off the nerves in his jaw, and whenever he shouted his splintered teeth sprayed out like crumbs.
Two days later we were within five miles of Cape Evans. Over breakfast, a mug of hot water thickened with biscuit and a blob of butter, Bill said, ‘I want to thank you for what you’ve done. I couldn’t have found two better companions, and what is more, I never shall.’
Neither Cherry nor I could reply; our hearts were too full for words.
It may be that the purpose of the worst journey in the world had been to collect eggs which might prove a scientific theory, but we’d unravelled a far greater mystery on the way – the missing link between God and man is brotherly love.
Bill said we shouldn’t go into the hut, not immediately; we ought to put up the tent and sleep outside. I had thought someone might be on the lookout for us, but there was no one in sight; even the dogs ignored our approach. We could hear Handel’s Water Music on the gramophone. We stood there, trying to shift the harnesses from ourselves, moving like sleep-walkers.
Then the door opened. ‘Good God!’ somebody called, and caught in a triangle of blinding light we froze, three men encased in ice.
Capt. Lawrence Edward (Titus) Oates
March 1912
I didn’t take my sock off because the size of my foot unnerved me. When I last took a peek it was pretty colourful, blotched with red and purple, the skin right up to the ankle shining with that same sort of sweet glaze one sees on rotten meat. Two of my toes were black. I was afraid to remove my sock for fear my toes came with it and we’d all sniff their stink above the smell of that stew in the saucepan. I wish to God I’d listened to Ponting when he said we ought to bring a pistol on with us.
A quarter of an hour ago I begged Bill for a drop of brandy. He refused, giving the tommy-rot excuse it would do my shrunken stomach no good. ‘Please believe me, my dear Oates,’ he said. ‘I’m only thinking of what’s best for you.’
He and Bowers still waste an inordinate amount of energy worrying about the welfare of others, whereas my world is no longer large enough to contain anyone but myself. I was trying to get my other boot off and Bill was squatting on his haunches at the cooker, stirring away at the hoosh.
‘Do you reckon a man without feet could still ride to hounds?’ I asked, and he had the grace to look discomfited. If I hadn’t felt so damnably feeble I’d have snatched the bottle from his medical box and to blazes with his permission.
I caught Scott looking at me. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes, but a moment later he said, ‘For pity’s sake, Bill, do as he asks.’
It was a miserly enough measure, yet the effect was immediate. Such a huge smile tugged at my mouth my lips cracked afresh and I could taste the trickling blood.
‘Get some food into him,’ Bill urged, and selfless old Birdie tried to feed me with a spoon.
‘I will lay down my life for Bill,’ I said, or something to that effect. I felt absolutely liberated, like a stone hurled into the depths, leaping not falling into that shining abyss where the piebald pony waited …
We shot the remaining ponies when we reached the foot of the Glacier early in December. We were all pretty down in the mouth about it, though poor Bowers showed it the most, his horse being the strongest of the lot. For my part, I was thankful Scott had changed his mind yet again and abandoned his damfool notion to take them up the Glacier. They’d suffered enough; the surfaces had been uniformly terrible, and towards the end we’d had to lash them onwards. I think we all felt the inflicting of such cruelty harmed us almost as much as the wretched beasts who bore it.
Bill congratulated me on having got them thus far. ‘After all,’ he observed, ‘they were hardly the best animals money could buy.’ He never spoke a truer word. The motors, for which not enough spares had been brought and which now lie under drift on the ice somewhere between Hut Point and Corner Camp had cost £1000 apiece, the dogs thirty shillings and the ponies a fiver – and I reckon that was a good few bob more than they were worth. Scott thanked me too, if a little stiffly.
We named the depot where we buried them Shambles Camp, which was an apt enough name for it, and not just on account of the ponies. What with our late start, the almost immediate failure of the motors, our inexpertise on skis, ‘unexpected’ weather conditions and Scott’s mistrust of dogs, our journey so far had been a catalogue of disasters and miscalculations. Scott puts it down to ‘poor luck’.
I’ve never known such a man for making mistakes and shifting the blame onto others. If it hadn’t always been so damned cold I think one or two of us might have got heated enough to forget he was Leader and resorted to fisticuffs. It was pretty shameful the way he laid into Bowers when the hypsometer got broken. Birdie was frightfully cast down at being given a drubbing in front of the seamen.
‘It would seem to me,’ I said to Scott, ‘that it’s something of an oversight we’re not carrying a spare one.’
He didn’t go for me; nor had he, not since Birdie, Cherry and Crean nearly perished on the sea-ice. He turned on his heel and went muttering off to get words of sympathy from old Bill. In the end I don’t know what the fuss was about. We didn’t need an instrument to te
ll us what altitude we’d reached on the Glacier; any fool could tell for himself when he was a quarter way up, then half, and so on.
Another time he got himself into a frightful fizz over the fact that Shackleton had apparently travelled on blue ice, whereas we floundered in drift. There was also that business of his not wanting me to shoot Jehu, not until we’d travelled another twenty miles or so. The animal was dying on its feet, but I was forbidden to despatch it until we’d passed the point at which Shackleton shot his first pony. One would have thought we were racing Shackleton rather than Amundsen.
On New Year’s Eve, by which time we had slogged, heaved and crawled some 9000 feet up the Beardmore Glacier, we took a half day’s halt for the sledges to be adjusted. Once we reached the summit Birdie assured me it was little more than a hundred and fifty miles to the Pole. I took his word for it. In my opinion, without him we could have been moving sideways, or even backwards, he being the only one who appears to have any sense of direction.
Scott still hadn’t told us which three he intended to take with him on the final run. Even Bill didn’t know, though he said Scott had asked him which of the three seamen he considered the fittest, Taff Evans, Lashly or Crean. Bill had told him he’d put his money on Lashly.
Birdie was convinced he wouldn’t be chosen; he’s very naive and simply didn’t see that Scott would be in Queer Street without him. Quite apart from his doing the work of three men, he’s the only competent astronomical navigator among us, and if he’d been left behind it wouldn’t have been so much a question of reaching the Pole as finding it. For my part, I neither expected nor wished to be included. My feet were in a sorry state and I was none too happy about my leg.
It had been Scott’s intention to make another march before nightfall, but the work on the sledges took longer than expected. Petty Officer Evans was practically rebuilding them, so we had time on our hands. We sat in the tent drinking tea, and for some reason I was seized with a dreadful bout of homesickness. It was Bill’s fault really, rambling on about those bluebell woods he’s so fond of. I was only half paying attention to the conversation, because my leg was giving me gyp. I had the oddest sensation my old thigh wound was coming apart, so much so I was pretty frightened of touching the skin in case it was gaping open. When I did get up the courage there was nothing under my fingers save that puckered scar. It was rougher than usual and there were one or two pustules, but we all had those. We hadn’t washed for weeks, or changed our clothes, and the hellhole we were in before we reached the Glacier – Scott dubbed it the Slough of Despond – when for four days we were tent-bound in a blizzard and the temperature rose so high we lay waterlogged in our bags, had wrinkled us like washerwomen. The pain in my leg was a blessing in one way – it stopped me thinking of my wretched feet. I suppose it was the remembrance of my time in hospital, my return to England, the delayed twenty-first birthday party in the grounds of Gestingthorpe that pitched me into thoughts of home.
The Birthday Boys Page 14