Ginny’s farm activities were profitable, though not hugely so. She did much of the work herself, including calf-delivery, basic husbandry, mucking out, feeding and field maintenance. She was self-taught as she had been in the fields of polar base leading and radio communications. To augment our income I worked for a number of lecture agencies who hired me as speaker for business conferences, dinners and awards ceremonies all over the world.
I had started to lecture about travel back in the early seventies for £18 per talk, mostly in London town halls to audiences of ladies with hats and hearing aids. As many as two or three dozen would turn up but as Ginny, who handled the slide show projector at the back, noted, ‘They don’t listen to you, Ran. I think they only turn up for the company and the free council cuppas.’ By 1994 audiences at some of the events exceeded a thousand and, even after paying the lecture agency’s 20 per cent plus 40 per cent to the Inland Revenue, we were able to live well enough and go skiing for a fortnight every December when the lecture season was over.
Ginny made many friends among the people who bought the Black Dog puppies that she bred from the original Arctic Black Dog – one was Monty Don, who later became a famous gardener. We spent a weekend with his family helping to clear some scrub on his property. Taking a rest, I observed, as though in slow motion, Ginny cutting down a fairly large tree. I watched as it fell and saw Monty, right in its path, bending over to start a chainsaw. I tried to scream a last-second warning but it was too late; the tree hit Monty right across the back of his neck and knocked him flat. Both Ginny and I were sure he was dead. But somehow he wasn’t, and he survived to become the Percy Thrower of the 21st century.
We had a good circle of friends, mostly from previous expeditions, my old regiments, or our school days, and we kept in close touch with our families. Ginny’s father had died finally approving of our being married, her mother Janet and my own mother still lived in West Sussex and were good friends. My three sisters were all married, respectively to an Army colonel, an American surgeon and a Yorkshire-based farmer, so I had plenty of nephews and nieces who often stayed with us on Exmoor. Ginny’s brother Charles had for years exported British-made goods to Asia and the Middle East, so we formed an export company together. I located suitable UK manufacturers, many of which had at some point sponsored our expeditions, and Charles found foreign buyers. We took a small percentage of the resulting sales contracts. Ginny’s only sister, Abby, who had helped us with the Transglobe Expedition, moved to Liverpool and started her own publishing business there.
In March 1994 Ginny booked a surprise holiday for my fiftieth birthday. I was still ignorant of our destination when we followed the transit signs at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. The Scandinavian Airlines loudspeaker finally gave the game away – Iceland. We hired a Land Rover and spent a second honeymoon touring that weird and wonderful island of sagas, geysers and moonscapes. We had known and loved each other for four decades, we had no children and I knew that, without Ginny, there would be no point to my life.
Back home I had suffered financially due to the Lloyds insurance crash and, more ominously, I had noted an alarming drop in the number of contracts for conference presentations booked for 1995. Since this business had become 90 per cent of our income, I consulted Jeremy Lee, the acknowledged doyen of conference speakers. His advice was simple. You are, as in the movie business, only as good as your next project. At the time Maggie Thatcher had just dropped her speaker’s fee to £20,000 but was still in great demand, as was ex-England Rugby captain Will Carling at £8,000. Conference agencies want celebrities, and if you have done nothing for a while, your chances of being chosen decrease with alarming speed. There was only one answer: another expedition, and in order to get the necessary sponsorship, it must have attendant media coverage, which in turn meant that its aim must be to complete a ‘first’.
I had less than happy memories of the most recent Antarctic trip, so I would have favoured the Arctic for any future polar project. But in the autumn of 1995 I heard from Morag and Flo Howell in Aberdeen that the gossip grapevine in Norway was buzzing again. Not Erling Kagge this time, but his colleague Børge Ousland was planning an attempt to cross Antarctica solo and unsupported in the 1996–97 travel season. Ousland’s rationale was clear. All the great polar challenges, north and south, had already been achieved by groups of two or more. All that was left was for an individual to try unaided.
Solo travel had never appealed to me. Half the fun of an expedition is the planning of it and, as with old soldiers, the shared memories afterwards. Also, since I make a living through books and talks about the expeditions, I need good photographs and film, which are difficult to get when by myself. On the plus side, however, a lone traveller can experience fewer frustrations caused by rivalry, discontent and, as with Mike and me, differences of pace.
The Howells warned me that Børge Ousland was an even better skier than Erling Kagge. This was the equivalent of a footballer even more skilled than Pele. Proof of this was not long in coming when, in the spring of 1996, Ousland reached the South Pole unsupported in a staggeringly quick forty-four days. Mike and I had taken sixty-eight days to reach the Pole during our 1993 crossing.
I discussed with Ginny the idea of competing with Ousland for the solo Antarctica crossing laurels. She shrugged and observed, ‘You’re not very fit.’
This was true. If I was to enter such a race, I had eleven months in which to train hard, for Ousland would start his solo crossing attempt in October 1996. At thirty-four years of age he was at the peak of his ability. At fifty-two I was getting rusty round the edges, but Mike Stroud had the answer – the Eco-Challenge race.
‘It lasts for seven days and nights,’ he told me, ‘and I am entering a team. You need to be super-fit to stand any chance of even finishing the 500-mile course. Join my team.’
Mike explained that Eco-Challenge races occurred only once a year and involved athletes from all over the world. Teams from elite special forces units, physical training instructors from American universities, marathon-runners and orienteering clubs enter every year. Some are sponsored by Nike, Reebok and the like, who pay team members $10,000 each if they win, so the competition is fierce. Participants are usually selected for their supreme fitness and capacity for great endurance. The average age of the contestants is twenty-five. I agreed to sign on.
Mike had decided that his five-person team’s make-up would buck the age trend. His idea was to have an age range stretching over five decades, in order to prove that endurance is not the prerogative of the young. Rebecca Stevens, Britain’s first woman up Everest, was in her thirties. Mike was himself forty-one, I was fifty-two, Chris Brasher – the man who with Chris Chataway had paced Roger Bannister’s first four-minute mile – was in his sixties, and Mike’s father, Vic Stroud, a retired businessman and keen fell-walker, was seventy-one. In the end Chris Brasher had to withdraw, to be replaced by David Smith, a forty-four-year-old cardiologist from Exeter.
On day one at 5.00 a.m. in a high mountain pasture near Whistler Mountain in Jasper, British Columbia, seventy-four five-person teams charged away to the echo of the starting gun’s signal reverberating through the forests all about us. On every side the broken silhouette of the Rockies reared above us until it was obscured by the dust cloud generated by 370 competitors.
Each team had two mountain ponies for the first twenty-six miles. Vic and Rebecca rode our stocky steeds and the rest of us ran. Then at a checkpoint, we wrapped up our gear in polythene bags and leaped into a raging river, the only way forward. Vic was swept away, and for several agonising moments we feared he would drown, until Mike rescued him. For four days we slogged up and down high mountains, through tangled undergrowth in forests, along streambeds, over crevassed glaciers and down cliffsides. Mike’s face was so swollen from hornet bites that he could hardly see; Vic’s backside remained badly blistered from the initial pony ride.
By day three we had moved from fifty-sixth position to forty-ninth.
People from younger, tougher teams were dropping out. Next came the river section. The five of us crammed into two canoes and paddled hard day and night without pausing to rest, through some of the most beautiful scenery in North America. At the next checkpoint we exchanged the canoes for mountain bikes and, still unrested, pushed on all night and for most of the next day, suffering several falls in the process. Our final position was twenty-ninth.
The event and the previous months of training for it had successfully dragged me back to a reasonable level of fitness, but the solo Antarctic crossing attempt would need a lot more than physical abilities. I needed a support team, nutritional and medical advice, a communications network and the sort of media coverage that would persuade somebody to sponsor the whole project with at least a quarter of a million pounds.
As always before those journeys which Ginny could not join, she was a tower of strength and sound advice, based on her own wide polar experience. She would check my preparations with meticulous care and home in on key items I might have forgotten. She was never keen on my leaving her for an expedition, but she never tried to dissuade me from going. This time she was more worried than usual because I was going solo. I felt guilty and selfish and tried to salve my conscience by repeating to myself that when we married Ginny had been fully aware of how I intended to make a living.
Flo Howell was by 1995 a senior employee of Philips Petroleum in the North Sea oil fields and so was not able to take time off for this Antarctic trip. But he agreed instead to man his own radio station in the garden of his Aberdeen home and keep in contact with Morag who would base herself again at Patriot Hills and attempt to keep in daily contact with me as I crept across the Antarctic icecap. Morag had meanwhile been finding out more about Børge Ousland. The secret of his phenomenal speed, Morag said, was his adept use of the very latest hi-tech wind-chute.
‘You mean a kite?’ I asked.
‘You’d better get one yourself,’ Morag nodded, ‘and learn how to use it fast.’
I found a kite-maker in South Wales and practised flying it at home on windy Exmoor. At first the string lines became frequently and hopelessly tangled with bushes and heather but I persevered until I had mastered the rudiments of keeping the kite aloft whenever the wind was reasonably strong. Even mild gusts pulled me off my feet and, had I been on skis manhauling a heavy sledge, would surely have pulled me over ice or compact snow at a goodly speed. I was impressed. But my arms were quickly sore, as were muscles in my shoulders and back whose existence I had not previously suspected. I called Brian Welsby of Be-Well Foods in Lincoln who had provided my expeditions with high-nutrition rations for sixteen years. He agreed to devise a complex carbohydrate diet for me to eat for the eleven months prior to the journey. He would also put together, with Mike’s advice, special rations for the trip itself, very similar to those Mike and I had eaten in 1993.
As for my sore muscles, which in reality indicated an actual lack of muscles, Brian introduced me to my first ever fitness trainer, Jonathan Beevers, a member of the British Olympic sailing squad’s training team at the recent Olympic Games in Atlanta which won more sailing medals than any other nation. I called Jonathan Adolf, for he was a hard taskmaster. In the month before the expedition a single day’s programme included a brisk walk with seven-pound weights in each hand carried for two and a half hours, repeated weight exercises in a gym for one hour, pulling lorry tyres cross-country for two hours and a run for one hour and ten minutes.
I sorted out an ongoing, and sometimes incapacitating, back problem by seeing a Harley Street specialist, Bernard Watkin, for deep injections of dextrose, glycerine and phenol solution into the ligaments of my lower back on either side of the spine. This was followed up with a dire exercise regime laid down by Mary Bromiley, our next-door neighbour and famous horse physio, who advised the New Zealand Olympic equine team. She had helped Bernard Watkin keep my back from crippling me over the previous two decades. For manhauling mega-sledgeloads a working spine is fairly critical.
So is a financial sponsor to underwrite an expedition, but past experience had taught me never to waste time seeking one out until I could promise maximum media coverage of the event as a whole and said sponsor’s corporate logo in particular. Astute PR reps will often turn their noses up and advise their directors accordingly if I merely promise ‘a documentary film and general news reports’. Adventure documentaries, they observe, are statistically watched by a mere 1.5 million viewers at best, and general news reports can never be assumed in advance since they will be easily eclipsed by any ‘heavier’ news such as ministerial scandal or murder. In 1996 both ITN and The Times signed up to cover my solo Antarctica crossing bid, and I came across our sponsor quite by chance.
Ginny’s Japanese vacuum cleaner broke down after years of sucking up the considerable output of long black hairs shed by her many Black Dogs and the fallout from her own boots and overalls on her daily return from the cattle shed. She bade me get her a new machine from the retailer in Porlock, our nearest shopping town.
‘The Panasonics are still okay,’ I was advised by the salesman, ‘but would you like to try this new marque, the Dyson, which is bagless? It’s been getting rave reviews.’ Ever a sucker for clever sales angles, I paid the extra amount for the ultra-modern-looking, bagless model and, unpacking it at home, glanced at the brochure which was stuck to the box. Details of the bagless idea’s inventor, James Dyson, were given, stressing that he was British. I phoned him and he agreed to meet up on Exmoor. We went for a run together to Dunkery Beacon and, a fortnight later, he wrote, ‘I did enjoy our run and enclose some good running socks. I can also confirm I would be delighted and excited to sponsor your crossing attempt to the tune of £275,000.’ He later stipulated that the charity we should work with should be Breakthrough, which concentrated on funding research into finding a cure for breast cancer. Both his parents had died young of cancer, and Breakthrough needed £3 million to start a special clinic at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, the first such in Europe.
Unlike my previous sponsors, James Dyson took a personal interest in the project. As the Telegraph noted, he was clearly ‘not a man to throw his money away on a whim’. His research engineers helped with various sledge-haulage gear designs and his graphics boss, a keen parachutist, helped my kite training on the Dyson factory’s football ground. This was less than a success. A gust of wind lifted my instructor in the air, he let go, the kite took off for the main road and got run over by a Volvo. Stupidly, I failed to follow up kite-work beyond the basic principles. This was to prove a costly omission. By the time I was ready to go, I had spent eleven months becoming what one newspaper described as ‘the fittest 52-year-old in Britain, albeit with defective vision, arthritic hips, lower back pain and chronic piles’, but I had only spent a few days attempting to master the complex art of kiting.
Mike Stroud gave me a well thought out container of medicaments, tailor-made for the crossing attempt. He also advised me on exactly what rations I should ask Brian Welsby to provide, aiming at 5,600 calories per day as a result of his analysis of our previous expedition work. Mike was now the senior lecturer on nutrition at Southampton University and the most experienced specialist in survival nutrition in Britain. He also agreed to be spokesman for the expedition, fielding all polar queries from the media.
In the course of my two years at home I had been busy writing books and one of my last obligations before setting off for Antarctica was to complete a nationwide promotion tour for my latest title. The Sett was the biography of a Welsh accountant whose wife had been murdered. Unfortunately, the man partly responsible for her murder had himself been shot and killed by a man, then in gaol, who had become my friend in the course of my researching the book. I started to receive threats by telephone and the police advised twenty-four-hour security for Ginny. It could not have happened at a worse moment. James Dyson kindly lent us two ex-Paras whose job was normally to spot and apprehend industrial spies at the Dyson factory. They
took turns to patrol our farm and slept there in my absence. As for the book which had landed us in this trouble, The Times compared it to Hemingway and it reached number four in their bestseller list. But I was grateful for the brace of ex-Paras all the same.
At the Dyson press conference at Heathrow I was told Børge Ousland was not the only man after the crossing record. The top polar Pole, Marek Kaminski, at six foot five even taller than Ousland, had been on many a fine expedition, including solo to the South Pole the previous year. Of the two, I feared Ousland more, probably due to my long-fought rivalry with the Norwegians. Like football team managers before a match, I thought it diplomatic to play down my own chances, so, when asked what I thought of Ousland, I replied, ‘He’s very impressive. Tall and well built. When I stand near him I feel small, like a worm.’
Ousland’s pre-race tactics, however, were those of a boxer psyching his opponent. He told the press, ‘Fiennes’s competitors are much, much stronger.’
12
Solo South
An American once wrote that ‘nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory’, and on my way back to Antarctica, as long latent memories of gangrene and crutch-rot wormed their way back into my mind, I had to agree with him. Horrid times and subsequent self-promises never to do it again had so often been eclipsed by rose-coloured recollections of journeys past. Now I was at it again. And yet, had I stayed home and watched the news, I would surely have forever regretted letting somebody else grab one of the last remaining polar records without even giving it a go myself.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 19