A Victim of the Aurora Read online

  It wasn’t sledging and depot-laying that worried me. ‘Sir, I think I ought to take 50 per cent. I’m sure you agree.’ It felt blasphemous to argue with a great Englishman, yet I had a sort of marketplace stubbornness from being a farmer’s son.

  ‘Oh look,’ Sir Dexter growled. ‘The world’s full of artists.’

  ‘I’m sure most of them would take fifty per cent. I’m sure Mr Henneker is taking fifty per cent.’

  Sir Eugene laughed. ‘You shouldn’t use that name against me. I mentioned the names of Mr Henneker and Mr Sullivan to show you we were employing the top talent.’

  ‘I have to say, Sir Eugene, I would have asked for fifty per cent anyhow.’

  ‘Sir Dexter,’ said Stewart, ‘would you consider fifty per cent if Mr Piers forgoes his wages?’

  At last Sir Dexter grunted. An affirmative grunt. Stewart turned to me.

  ‘Mr Piers? All found. Free food. Free shelter. I want paintings which will stand prominently on the stairwells of this nation, I want the essence of Antarctica set down. We won’t expect you to work yourself into the ground.’

  I was actually tearful, in front of Stewart and the harsh old man. ‘I’m grateful to accept. I’m honoured …’

  ‘I think you’ll do a lot of water colours,’ said the polar knight. ‘You’ll find oils sluggish in those temperatures.’

  That was how I was recruited. I suppose it was the same for most of us, captivated by Lady Stewart, cajoled by Sir Eugene Stewart, bullied by Sir Dexter. Not that we all needed cajoling. Three thousand members of the Edwardian middle classes lined up to apply for positions on Sir Eugene’s staff.

  Like most of the expedition’s younger men I presumed that Sir Eugene’s suavity derived from his genius and Sir Dexter’s snarling arose from mediocrity. Henneker eroded some of this innocence.

  It was the morning we left the Thames. The expeditionary ship, a third-hand Norwegian whaler renamed McMurdo for the sake of the journey, was moored in the river at Rotherhithe and the Bishop of Southwark came off from the shore in a barge to bless it. After the blessing there was, strangely enough, a champagne breakfast on board. All the executives and officers of the expedition brought their mothers, wives and girls. Byram Hoosick the American, for example, had brought his mother. The press said of Mrs Hoosick that she was a notorious chaser of royalty and had once thrown herself at King Edward’s feet as he walked down a hotel corridor in Biarritz. I had always imagined her a massive New World woman, entirely jamming the King’s corridor with an ample body, while half a dozen royal equerries struggled at her various extremities to clear her away. I saw now that she was a frail, short, sick-looking woman, speaking quietly at Byram’s elbow. My mother, down from the country in a lacy summer dress, would make far more noise at the champagne breakfast than Mrs Hoosick.

  We were all crowded on the small quarter-deck. The main deck below us was piled with a lumpy cargo of oil and paraffin drums, coal sacks, lumber and scientific gear. The cartwheel hat had come back into fashion that year, even Lady Stewart was wearing one this morning, and I remember that quarter-deck as a delightful clutter of hat-brims and flowers and osprey feathers and oriflammes.

  Although the ponies and dogs would not be loaded until New Zealand, I was amazed how low the McMurdo sat in the water.

  ‘I don’t like this ship, Anthony,’ my mother told me. ‘It’s nearly awash now.’

  ‘Some ships look like that,’ I told her. ‘Look, don’t be superstitious.’

  On the way to Westminster from Kensington that morning we’d passed a great number of houses that had straw laid down in the street in front of them to quieten the wheels of passing traffic. In those days, straw in the road meant someone indoors was sick. My mother had seen all this morning’s straw as an omen.

  Now, on the quarter-deck, we found ourselves in a group hard up against the railings. Here Henneker, Sir Dexter and a man called Lord Stonehurst were the luminaries. Stonehurst was Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

  ‘It lies low in the water,’ my mother said in a gap in the talk.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Madam,’ said Sir Dexter.

  ‘This ship,’ said my mother. ‘It lies down in the water a lot.’

  ‘My dear lady.’ Henneker leaned over her. He was tall and dark and worldly in his light flannel suit, whereas Sir Dexter and Stonehurst were dressed too heavily for the morning in dark, thick, official-looking clothing. ‘The McMurdo wouldn’t sit half so low if his Lordship here had not so kindly permitted us to load it to the gunn’ls.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Mr Henneker,’ said my mother. ‘You make it sound like a plot …’

  Henneker gestured with his hands to silence her. She was fascinated – they were more or less the same age. ‘You see, if this ship were registered in the normal way, with anyone but the Royal Yacht Squadron, it would have to have a Plimsoll line. And, if it had a Plimsoll line, we wouldn’t be allowed to load aboard half the things we need in the Antarctic.’

  By the railings Lord Stonehurst was coughing and seemed angry. He half-turned to walk away from us, but decided he had to stay.

  Mrs Dryden, a small pretty woman and the wife of the chief scientist, muttered at Henneker.

  ‘Why do you have to raise issues like this, Mr Henneker?’

  ‘Professional bias, Ma’am,’ Henneker told her mysteriously and with a bow.

  Lord Stonehurst growled. ‘The Royal Yacht Squadron agreed to register the McMurdo purely so that we could be associated with a great British enterprise.’

  But my mother wasn’t stopped. ‘If they load it below where the Plimsoll ought to be,’ she observed, ‘they won’t get to Antarctica at all.’

  Henneker said, ‘There are some who claim that polar heroes should enjoy all the safeguards that ordinary seamen sail under. Others however think the sea will overlook our little omissions on account of our holy cause.’

  ‘Infamous, infamous!’ Lord Stonehurst was growling.

  I got my mother away from Henneker and spent an hour reassuring her. I wished I had a girl there to say a painful goodbye to, someone to part from sharply, deeply, less stupidly.

  As it turned out the McMurdo did nearly founder. Twice. Once off Spain and once in the Southern Ocean. In the Southern Ocean, for example, the pumps clogged with balls of coal dust and oil and I served with the bucket brigade who emptied the engine-room, one end of the line working naked and waist-deep in warm water, the other on deck and freezing in polar clothing. I remember thinking, dazed and amazed, that the exalted kinship of McMurdo and the Royal Yacht Squadron was merely a ruse to avoid certain Admiralty regulations.

  2

  If your quaint fancy is to read the classic books of Antarctic exploration you would notice how the authors – usually the expeditionary leaders – go to so much trouble to praise their staff. There has never been, they seem to say, a happier band of brothers landed on the ice.

  On Mid-winter’s Day, the year I remember so keenly, at the deepest point of the Antarctic darkness, Stewart made a speech that was typical of this genre.

  ‘First we faced storm,’ he said, ‘the fiercest the Southern Ocean could provide. As the storm eased we found ourselves confronted with the worst pack-ice in human record and battered at it until we found a clear passage. It was during those days I saw the kind of colleagues I had.

  ‘When we came into McMurdo Sound and put out our ice anchors, we made up for the lateness of the season by unloading our stores and fabricating our hut all within a fortnight. Then, despite the lateness of the season, we laid depots to a distance of two hundred miles across the ice-shelf. So that, as we celebrate here, the supplies which will be the basis of our success next summer, the pemmican, biscuit, oil and tea, are waiting cached in the ice within sight of the great glaciers we must climb to approach the Pole. No other group of men I could possibly have chosen in England or any other nation on earth could have done more, performed so superlatively. I salute you …’

  The plum
pudding had been eaten when this was said. The boxes of cigars had been broken out and port and Benedictine were being passed about as we all listened to the visionary, the polar knight, and believed him. As Par-axel Beck would often say, ‘We work bloody bloody hard, Tony.’

  In fact we were frankly proud of ourselves. You don’t have to be told that in those days people weren’t always examining their motives in volunteering for such projects as the Stewart expedition. If we were asked why we had offered ourselves for at least a year and a half of isolation far more intense than the isolation of astronauts in command modules, we would have said we were doing it because we loved adventure or because it was a manly thing to do. They would have been the orthodox replies for that age. We didn’t question whether our withdrawal to Antarctica meant we were insecure in the real world, or frightened of women, or latent homosexuals. So we believed in duty and believed as well that what we were doing was sane and not suspect. The fact was that we were tough and efficient – most of us – and deserved some praise from Sir Eugene Stewart. Yet élites are very hard to achieve, since those who seek them have one way or another suspended their belief in original sin.

  It had been a good party. After the entrées of fried seal liver and galantine of penguin we ate roast beef and dumplings and there was much wine. The hut was hung with sledding flags and naval pennants, and beneath them the speeches and the arguments took place. The arguments were diverse – on politics and rock formations, initiated by my friend Barry Fields, a red-haired Australian; on the superlative qualities of Scandinavian girls, sentimentally initiated by Par-axel Beck; on the relative value of ponies and dogs in polar conditions, initiated and carried on by Captain Mead, the pony man, and Harry Webb, the dog expert from Northern Quebec. Isaac Goodman, Waldo Warwick, Harry Kittery argued about the geological history of the continent – Goodman was already thinking in terms of continental drift. Eugene Stewart and John Troy debated Germany’s naval intentions, Paul Gabriel and I questioned the impact of photography on painting; Dryden and Hoosick were probably talking about fish, art or Italy; the Rev. Brian Quincy and Norman Coote listened to Henneker tell scandalous stories about peers, actresses, industrialists and courtesans. And, at a point near the door to the sailors’ quarters (the expedition was run on a naval basis and the petty officers and ABs had separate living space), Peter Sullivan, the maker of early movies, held a flash above a tripod-mounted camera and called on us to hold our positions.

  After the speeches – I’ve already referred to Stewart’s – everyone brought out his especial luxury, the item he had brought with him in his pack to celebrate this deepest point of the polar year. Beck had a bottle of Schnapps. As he poured the first glass he said, ‘My friends, I am certain of it that if I offered you all a glass it would do no one much good and that I would only be a hypocritic which Christianity forbids me to be. Therefore I will drink this personally myself and toast the each of you once at a time.’ Which he then went on to do. Red-headed Barry Fields had a half-dozen bottles of his native Australia’s heavy beer. He brought a dozen to Antarctica with him, concealed in the ponies’ fodder, but half a dozen of them exploded when the contents froze. He once confessed to me that he knew little of cold climates and had never seen snow until he came to England a year before the expedition left the Thames. Now he offered Stewart one of the bottles, but Stewart declined. Henneker had Highland malt whisky and the Rev. Quincy three Filipino cigars. Hoosick, who did not drink, produced peanut brittle and Kittery put some liqueur chocolates on the table. And so it went.

  Then ‘the men’ – as Stewart called his sailors – came through the door into our quarters. Everyone toasted the cook, Walter O’Reilly, who was awarded a chair by the stove and sat in it smiling, a pint of bitter in his hand. The pony handler Nikolai performed a dance and sang some wistful Siberian sledding song. Petty officers Henson, Wallace and Jones staged a comic performance during which they impersonated everyone – Stewart, Dryden, Beck, Hoosick, Henneker, Quincy – the lot of us. Wallace and Jones were lost in their roles but I remember that Henson was brilliant, that I went red in the cheeks when he did his characterization of me.

  Next, a sailors’ choir sang a sentimental song about the King.

  ‘There’ll be no wo’ar

  As long as there’s a King like good King Edward,

  There’ll be no wo’ar

  For ’e ’ates that sort of thing,

  Mothers need not worry,

  As long as we’ve a King like good King Edward.

  Peace with ’onour

  Is his motter,

  So God save the King.’

  We didn’t know the King and the age had died in our absence just the month before, the King fading into coma from bronchitis caught when the proprietor of the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre in Paris turned the heating up too high.

  Lieutenant John Troy stood up on his chair. His blockhouse shape wavered there; he had a parrot-like grin beneath his long nose. ‘No better time, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘to introduce to you the definitive version of the John Troy his colleagues began cat-calling him, ‘that you all carry nose protector. You might remember,’ he continued when about with you an extremity called the nose, that you have all been ice-bitten on that extremity and that I then had to suffer the indelicate sight of grown men staggering about the hut with their noses half-sloughed off. You might remember that conventional nose protectors didn’t work because your breath froze them and so things were as bad as ever. My nose-piece, however, combines a sensible conical profile with a triangular shape.’

  Then he put on his windproof jacket and buttoned the nose-piece to it. It looked ridiculous, and everyone began to laugh at his bemused eyes, one either side of the apex of windproof nose cloth.

  You could see his hurt ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I was going to run up three dozen of these. But …’

  Some of us stopped laughing but others went on, as if punishing him in a small way for mentioning the cutting winds while we were feeling so well-fed, brotherly and immortal in the hut’s warm core.

  I noticed now that Par-axel Beck was asleep in his place at table. None of us had drunk liquor in any quantity since the ship landed us, so that there was a sharp vinous gleam in the eyes around the table.

  Men drifted from the table to argue at closer range. I saw Henneker sitting on my bunk with Paul Gabriel. Paul had his glasses in his hands and wore the blind, bemused look of all very short-sighted people when their spectacles are off. Henneker was reading him a letter or something similar, some piece of documentation from one of the scandalous stories he’d been telling that night. They were both dark men, Henneker tall and piratic, Paul wedgelike and, liquored, reminding one of some dark young Irishman or a Welsh miner. Henneker spoke quickly, quietly, smiling crookedly, and Paul seemed to be in that unpleasant state when you’re trying to make up your mind whether to be sick or to fall asleep.

  The arguments grew louder. Barry Fields burned his hand on the stove while playing indoor soccer with the American, Hoosick. Through it all, Stewart sat smoking and with his head inclined as if he could learn something from all of this too. He watched Coote, the tractorman, and Isaac Goodman tote Beck to his bunk and pull his inner shoes from his feet.

  Alec Dryden, a married man, thirty-eight years old, had offered to be night watchman that night and make notes of the aurora in the appropriate auroral record book. Only he was left sitting at table at eleven o’clock when Petty Officer Percy Mulroy went to the acetylene hut at the rear of the men’s quarters and cut off the gas supply to the lamps. The last drunks collided, laughed and rebounded to their bunks. I asked Paul Gabriel, prone in the upper bunk, if he needed any help. He said no, he was very tired.

  Alec Dryden cranked the gramophone and pointed its red enamel trumpet across the littered dinner table. His favourite record ‘Night Hymn at Sea’, sung by Clara Butt and Kennerly Rumford, wheezed out across the hut.

  I heard Victor Henneker, in the bunk beside mine, mutter, ‘C
lara Butt is a dismal old tart’ and begin to sing softly a song of Gaby Deslys’.

  ‘All the boys just come and stare …

  Sur le plage, sur le plage

  Men are full of persiflage.

  When I take my bain de mer

  All the boys just come and stare …’

  Lost in images of Gaby Deslys’ rich little body, I closed my eyes.

  Then Dryden had the night to himself. On the hour he left the hut by the laboratory door to view the great prismatic veils of green and gold and blue that hung vertically from the stars. There were means of making observations from Waldo Warwick’s meteorology-room if the weather was too bitter, but that night of Henneker’s penultimate sleep was clear and still, and the temperature a mere –38 degrees F.

  I didn’t sleep well. Not by Antarctic standards anyhow, for sleep there – when it comes – is deep and long. I was awake at 7 a.m. I could hear faint sounds of the cook, Walter O’Reilly, clanging his pans next door. I was awake when AB Russell Stigworth came in quiet as a church warden at 7.30, broom in hand. He swept the floor four times a day and washed the mess traps and tidied, a thin-faced little man who prided himself on his work and grew radiant when Stewart and Dryden or any of us praised him for it.

  He spent so much time on these duties I wondered if he had seen or absorbed the auroras or been awed by the ice shelf or the mountains across the sound with the moonlight on them. What would he tell his grandchildren of his Antarctic experience? I suppose he could always tell them Sir Eugene Stewart had called him a fine hand with a broom. I studied Stigworth out of one eye as he shunted his broom through the debris of the mid-winter feast, extracted Beck’s Schnapps bottle from the floor and put it in his hessian bag of rubbish.