The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Smithson was a believer in entropy, the natural movement of all things from order to disorder. Were he alive today – he died in 1973, his plane crashing after it banked too sharply as he was surveying a site for a new work in Texas – would he be surprised by how much the jetty has already changed? The shards of glass in Smithson’s Map remind me of the fragments of ice with which Kay tried to spell out ‘eternity’ in the Snow Queen’s castle, but rather than laying them flat to make letters, he piles them up like a treasure hoard.

  An island held up by its own silica shore; mountains that must fight against falling. Only when I see Smithson’s sketches do I become aware of the tension of the material in the gallery, caught between stasis and collapse. A transparent evocation of an island that is no longer visible. Strange that it should be a lake diminished by drought and a disordered pile of debris on display in a former biscuit factory, rather than the ice caps themselves, that should bring home to me the relationship between two subjects that have obsessed me, ice and books. Smithson’s works reveal both the lure of cultural storehouses and their limitations. Spiral Jetty is more eloquent in its mutation under natural forces, than the controlled, static Map. This beautiful, turbulent heap of glass – a record of something already lost, with the potential for reproduction in unlimited locations – makes me think of the moon landings that had so recently occurred when the work was made, and humanity’s dream of building colonies on other planets. However transitory our lives are, we see ourselves as poised between states: between frozen ice and fluid water, between past histories and the future homes for which we are still searching.

  Islands may sink, and the seas may rise above them, but they can still provide the ground on which to anchor new islands. Average sea level rise is calculated by NASA at 3.41 millimetres per year, due to the expansion of water as it warms and the melting of the polar ice caps. If this trend continues New York, Miami, Washington and other US coastal cities will suffer the loss of iconic properties. Countries like the Netherlands, Bangladesh and the Philippines will lose significant amounts of land. The populations of some island nations are already becoming climate refugees. In recent years, the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands (a Pacific island nation which includes Bikini Atoll), finding their homes no longer habitable, have begun to resettle in Arkansas. In a statement to the United Nations in 2015 Prime Minister Gaston Browne of the Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda placed the blame on ‘the excesses of larger and more powerful countries, who will not bend from their abuse of the world’s atmosphere, even at the risk of eliminating other societies, some older than their own’.

  As an alternative to such tragic and irreversible displacement, some countries are adopting new technologies and imagining future floating cities. The question is no longer how to prevent the sea overwhelming the land, but how to best enable life upon the water – initially as an extension of existing territory, but eventually as an alternative for it. The Dutch are using their maritime experience to address the question of what to do when the water defence systems that protect the Netherlands become obsolete. Engineers from the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands led by Olaf Waals have designed tessellating panels on which new cities could be built. These floating triangles of different sizes are resistant to the force of storms; they can be anchored to the sea bed or moored to the shore. At present there are only a few such panels in existence – just enough to fill the Institute’s testing basin. One day this concept will be applied to make a huge, flexible island that can support a city-sized settlement of homes, farms, parks and libraries.

  One of the travellers whom Robert Boyle quotes in his New Experiments and Observations on Cold is his friend John Evelyn. Writing from Italy during the 1640s, Evelyn told Boyle that he had seen ‘snow Pits . . . sunk in the most solitary and cool’d places’, often in the shade of mountains or trees. To preserve the snow which they brought down from the peaks on donkeys, the farmers ‘beat it to a hard cake of an icy consistence, which is near one foot thick, upon this they make a layer of straw, and on that snow, beaten as before, and so continue a bed of straw and a bed of snow till the pit be full to the brim.’ Evelyn brought this knowledge back to England with him, and the fashion for ‘Conservatories of Snow’ soon spread, with an ice-house being built for the king on the side of Castle Hill at Greenwich. It might have seemed like a new trend to the aristocracy who adopted it, but the ice-house was an ancient invention: the first on record was built in Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago. A cuneiform text from Mari, beside the river Euphrates, mentions an ice-house four reeds long and two reeds deep, and lined with tamarisk boughs.

  After Boyle’s time, a triumvirate of ice-houses were built at the estate of Lismore Castle in Waterford, where the scientist was born in 1627. Two deep pits were dug beside the road that leads to the Blackwater River by Edmund Foley, founder of the Blackwater Fishery. The third ice-house stands on the crest of the hill in what is now Lismore’s Millennium Park. I had been staying with a travel writer who was briefly at home, and was taking her dogs for a run when I discovered the ice-houses. The structures were in the process of being restored, thanks to the efforts of Lismore Tidy Towns Committee. When the dogs and I returned to the fireside, muddy and damp, Dervla told me the pits would have been used to store fish caught in the river between Youghal and Cappoquin. Some winters the Blackwater flooded and froze over the Inches, the levels opposite the castle. The stretch was used as an ice rink by children, until fishermen came and broke the ice, tore up the sheets spiked with grass blades, and hauled them a mile up the cliff to the pits. I was surprised to find a holy water source, St Carthage’s Well, trickling from the rock alongside the ice-houses. As the river ice was elevated the sacred water ran downhill.

  Once common by rivers, at major ports and in country estates across Europe and America, ice-houses slowly slipped out of use. The warming climate at the end of the nineteenth century diminished their efficiency, and besides, electric refrigeration was becoming available. By the 1930s many people were unaware that ice-houses had existed, and all the ice-houses were empty – or at least, they did not contain ice.

  One of the first things I do when I get back to Oxford is to renew my Bodleian library card. A new library has sprung up on the corner of Broad Street during the years I’ve been travelling. Behind a glass façade, the ground floor provides a gallery space for visitors to explore the collection’s highlights. The library stacks above also have walls of glass, so that readers on the balcony can be observed by those drinking coffee in the atrium below. The Ice-houses of Britain is the kind of volume library watchers might be impressed by: a labour of many years’ research, it totals five hundred pages. It is bound in dark green cloth, the colour of my old school uniform. What a casual observer can’t see is that it is compiled with such enthusiasm that, reading it, I feel as though I’m in the company of the Famous Five.

  Campaigns to preserve ice-houses such as those in Lismore rest on scholarship like this. In 1980 Sylvia Beamon and Susan Roaf began to compile a gazetteer of all the ice-houses in Britain. It was a formidable task. They sent out hundreds of letters and surveys to local authorities, archaeological and historical groups, libraries, museums and individual estates. The hunt was a collaborative effort. The authors warned their correspondents that ‘searching for ice-houses in out of the way places, struggling through nettles and brambles and dense shrubbery to reach crumbling buildings is often no pleasure’. The quest for an ice-house may be foiled by changes to county borders; the difficulty of accessing private land; even the fact that bats use ruins to hibernate, and it is illegal to disturb them.

  At times, the hunters must have despaired of finding any ice-houses intact. Perry’s warehouse in Bristol, where tonnes of imported ice were stored for supply to fishmongers and restaurants and hotels, burnt down in May 1895. (While this may seem paradoxical, it was a common problem as most ice-houses were lined with straw.) The bursar of Clarendon School in Bedfordshire wrote to say that the
ir ice-house had been ‘dynamited by a local farmer in 1973’; in Brockenhurst, Hampshire: ‘The ice-house was filled in during the 1970s, at which time there was no roof’; the ice-house at Park Hospital, Moggerhanger was ‘boarded up in the early 1970s to prevent vandalism’; and even at Waddesdon Manor: ‘The ice-house could not be investigated due to its dangerous condition. The entrance is sealed . . .’ The commonest responses were equally disheartening: ‘It is not known if the ice-house still exists’ or ‘No information available.’

  Ice-houses can be hard to identify because a variety of designs were employed. They could be dome- or globeshaped pits, and the chambers circular-, rectangular- and tunnel-shaped, according to the Niven-Robertson classification system of 1953. In grand locations, they may have been disguised as small Greek or Roman temples; in suburban spaces they were just another place to keep things in and, once ice was no longer needed, soon filled with junk or were adapted for other purposes. Russell’s in Watford, a former dower house which had been converted into a retirement home, reported: ‘The ice-house, having outlived its original purpose, is now a boiler room.’ The owners of Wydcombe Manor House, on the Isle of Wight, responded to say they had found an ‘unidentified structure’: a six-foot deep barrelshaped brick pit ‘the general opinion is that it is not an ice-house, but is more likely to have been a cesspit or a slurry pit’. It is not surprising that the Niven-Robertson system includes a category for ‘doubtful structures’ – buildings which may have been created as ice-houses, but this is unconfirmed.

  As I wait to return the book, two members of staff are complaining about the cold. One librarian is due to begin a shift at the entrance to the old library, and the older one advises wrapping up well. ‘The builders got a job lot of workwear in. One of the coats was XXL, too big for anyone to use. So they passed it on to us. Most people who put it on, it trails down the floor,’ she says. ‘You can take it with you if you like.’

  ‘But isn’t it bright fluorescent?’ asks the young one.

  ‘Well yes, but either the staff are going to glow or we need the place warmed up. There is a minimum temperature for Health and Safety, you know! Who do they think they are, making us sit below the bare minimum for a whole hour? Not a whiff of heating. You’re just sat there, not moving. The doors keep opening and closing and then you get the tour groups who hold the doors open. It’s not about it being a little bit under, it’s degrees and degrees under. Of course he said we look ridiculous in the jacket. “What’s the problem?” I says to him. “Do you want the readers not to know how cold we are?” ’

  There is no sign of the conversation ending, so I lay the volume quietly down on the desk beside them and leave. I’m perturbed to think that all the while I have been reading about cold, the temperatures the librarians work in have never once crossed my mind.

  Susan Roaf, one of the gazetteers, moved on from studying ice-house construction to become an expert on low carbon building design. She is responsible for the Oxford Ecohouse, built in 1995 – the first home installed with a photovoltaic cell roof in Britain. On initiating the project, Roaf was told by the government that her designs would not work because Britain did not have enough sunshine. The Ecohouse has proved them wrong, becoming a model for sustainable design. It is easy to spot from the road, its cells laid out neatly side by side over the dark tiles, although the roof is not as striking as Oxford’s other suburban landmark, known by locals as the Shark House.

  I’m visiting an estate agent in search of a place to rent, when I spot the Shark House in their brochure. Simon tells me that 2 New High Street has been available for some time. Many people are curious, he says, but everyone he’s shown round the modest Victorian terrace so far has decided they do not want to live with a shark. The creature appears to have nose-dived from the sky, smashing head-first through the roof, only to be pulled up short by its pectoral fins; the tail towers above the chimneypots. On the night Bill Heine bought the house in 1986, he heard fighter jets fly overhead from RAF Upper Heyford, destined for Tripoli. Not long afterwards he commissioned the 7-metre-long fibreglass sculpture from the artist John Buckley and installed it on 9 August, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, to remind passers-by that the unexpected can always happen, that the world can change in a moment. The idea that a deep-water shark might end up in a terrace at one of the furthest points from the sea in the British Isles seems less outrageous as time passes. Roaf, in contrast to Heine, is working to discover ways in which we can prepare for an uncertain future by adapting our cities for climate change; the course of her career from studying the ice-stores of the past to creating eco-houses for the future, reflects how concerns are changing too.

  Eco- is such a common prefix that it is easy to forget the meaning those three letters contain. Its etymology lies in the Ancient Greek οἶκος (‘house’ or ‘home’) – a word which also underlies ‘economy’: the effective management of our own resources.

  The storage company that had sponsored my first trip to Greenland by providing a free locker in its Tottenham warehouse had not sent me a single invoice during the seven years I’d been travelling, but I couldn’t rely on their goodwill (or forgetfulness) forever. One day at the close of the year, once I had found a place to live, I took the 341 bus to Angel Road. I made my way through the draughty corridors of the warehouse to my unit, the lights flicking off behind me automatically after a disconcerting delay. I unlock the padlock. Thank goodness I’d managed not to lose the key.

  Cardboard boxes are stacked up to the iron mesh at the top of the storage unit, which is shaped like a telephone kiosk. I prise one box out of the pile, then another, and peel back the tape with which I’d hurriedly sealed them. I haven’t set eyes on the contents since I packed up my bedsit. Plastic bags have disintegrated like autumn leaves around the objects they once held. Why did I have so many candlesticks? My blue teapot has fallen and smashed, despite being wrapped in several jumpers. Like blocks of ice in an ice-house, the books have survived best.

  I pull the first layer of boxes out into the corridor and make my way deeper into the space. A friend is coming with a van in under an hour. There’s not much time – I will need to contain my curiosity until I get the boxes home.

  The potential of all these boxes of books strikes me once I’ve got them up the stairs. I’ve lived without the familiar volumes so long. As I pull them back into the light, I realize how many stories I’d forgotten. I had carried a few shadowy tales around in the chambers of my memory. Now my tiny flat was transformed into a palace with infinite rooms: records of different pasts, and dreams of many possible futures.

  I’d collected more books on my travels, of course. Among them was a copy of the Greenlandic–English Dictionary, the same old edition I’d consulted in Upernavik Museum. Before I shelved it I was unable to resist opening it once more. I was careful of its flaking spine, its delicate paper wrappers which had received too much wear in the last few years. I recalled my conversations with Grethe about its contents, and wondered again at both her keenness to teach me her language and her wariness of writing it down. I came to the page on which ilisiveeruppaa was defined: ‘to put something in a safe place but be unable to find it again’. The term had once seemed to encapsulate my own doubts about the value of a paper legacy, as well as the reservations the museum had about collecting written work.

  Perhaps because I was looking at the dictionary in a comfortable armchair, rather than at a desk in a polar museum, something in the tone of the English definition now struck me as discordant. I knew the dictionary was unreliable: a previous owner had made several corrections in the margins in a shaky hand. I valued the book despite or even because of its possible inaccuracies. I decide to check the meaning of ilisiveeruppaa in an online dictionary, recently launched by Greenland’s Language Secretariat. And then I realize the danger of learning language from a book, itself in translation and nearly a century old, for the modern definition was very different – or so I thought at first: ‘To
bury in a grave or a coffin’.

  Either the original author was wrong, or the meaning had shifted. Or could both senses be correct? Is the grave a safe place to leave words? And is something placed in a coffin really lost? What if the burial place were not a grave but an icy pile of stones, a cairn, an ice-house – a place in which a message might rest until the right person came to find it. I thought of the objects buried under the ice around Upernavik, awaiting discovery as global temperatures warmed. It would not be long now before those stories were revealed. The disappearing ice was contained in our story, now.