Cherry (36 page)

The critics loved it. The
Bookman
said it was ‘one of the most thrilling and absorbing narratives in modern literature, and makes Byrd’s journey by airplane to the Pole seem no more harassing than a train trip from Albany to Troy. It is as packed with suspense as a mystery story, as tragic as a Russian novel . . .’ The man at the
Nation
judged it one of the most interesting books he had ever read, and the long, glowing piece in the
New York Times Book Review
praised Cherry’s ‘remarkable descriptive powers’, claimed that not a paragraph was laboured and asked its readers, ‘Where shall the like of it be read for sheer strength, clarity and beauty of phrase in the literature of polar exploration?’ There were caveats. The
New York World
found the book thrilling and ‘very splendid’, but was annoyed by Cherry’s claim that Scott ‘cared nothing about being first’ at the Pole. ‘Why English writers,’ the reviewer concluded testily, ‘should be so set on proving this one point is something of an enigma.’ The
Saturday Review of Literature
welcomed the book as a ‘fine, thrilling’ literary record that had ‘long been regarded as a classic’, but objected to Cherry’s blanket statement about the miseries of polar exploration, pointing out that Eskimos got on all right and so had a lot of other explorers. But the plum review was by H. L. Mencken in the American Mercury. The influential, Baltimore-born Mencken, a beer and cigar man, was famed for his fierce satires on philistines of all kinds, especially if they played golf (he was also a rabid Kipling fan). According to his chum Edmund Wilson, he was ‘our greatest practising literary journalist’. Revealing his European roots by hailing Cherry’s use of irony, Mencken praised
The Worst Journey
without equivocation. ‘[It] is very well-written,’ he decided, ‘and makes capital reading. He is plainly far more intelligent than most explorers. He has a gorgeous story to tell, and he tells it without heroics and with enough quiet waggishness to make it very unusual.’ Mencken seized the opportunity to puncture a few myths. The scientific value of polar exploration, he argued, was greatly exaggerated.

The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. But just as an American businessman, having amassed a fortune, always tries to make it appear that he never had any desire for money, but only wanted to set up an orphan asylum or get time to study golf, so a Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. I daresay Admiral Byrd will be doing it before these lines get into print.

Glowing notices notwithstanding, within three years
The Worst Journey
was again unavailable in the United States. ‘They [Americans],’ Cherry concluded, ‘seem difficult people to deal with.’ He had sent Doran twentyfive boxed sets of review copies free of charge and was never shown a single review. Dial had not bothered to communicate with him, and Constable told him that the firm had sold some of its edition in the UK, which was outside its copyright territory. Though keen for his book to be read in America, Cherry could never take his New York publishers seriously. He had inherited from his father, who spent his life buttressing the Empire, the belief that the Englishman was superior to the foreigner, and he could not accept that an American might be able to publish and sell his book with the smallest degree of efficiency. Much later, after US copyright law was modified at the Havana Convention, he encouraged Allen Lane to import the legal limit of 1,500 copies of the Penguin edition into the States (‘I don’t want to be a lost cause’); but he never established a satisfactory working arrangement with a foreign firm. Americans in general, he felt, were unreliable, a view shared by most of the Conservative Party at that time, and he endorsed his hero Kipling’s opinion of the country as ‘one big, uneasy refugee camp’. Unsurprisingly, he was consistently dismissive of American endeavour in the Antarctic. He received new polar titles by post from a bookshop where he kept an account (the postman had a hook instead of a hand at the end of one arm, and he hung the book parcels from the hook as he bicycled up the drive). When an account of Byrd’s expedition swung its way up to the front door it came in for an especially savage beating. ‘Bow wow’, Cherry noted in the margin of a purple passage, and he judged the Admiral’s comment, ‘What a disheartening sight is the Fokker’, to be ‘more bow wow’. The claim that ‘Seldom have men undertaken so difficult a trail journey for purely scientific investigation’ provoked an indignant ‘Rot!’

One of Cherry’s former shipmates was still deeply involved with the Antarctic. For more than a decade Frank ‘Deb’ Debenham, now a lecturer at Cambridge, had devoted much of his considerable energy to a polar research institute he had founded in 1920 as a memorial to Scott and his party. It was a project conceived one stormy afternoon on the ice when Deb was trapped in Shackleton’s hut by a blizzard. ‘Exploring the many boxes and cupboards inside the hut,’ he recalled years later, ‘I came upon some blue-lined foolscap in Shackleton’s cubicle, so heavy in quality and smooth of surface that it positively invited me to write. Accordingly I spent the morning writing down on this noble stationery an outline of the idea.’ After the war he had campaigned sturdily to secure cash from the fund raised in honour of the polar party, and despite difficult periods when little money was forthcoming, he never lost faith in the project. For the first five years his institute was housed in an attic loaned by the university at the Sedgwick Museum. Deb had pressed Cherry to endow a memorial to Bill (‘The most minor member of the expedition would couple Bill and Cherry together in their minds’). Cherry perceived the whole project as a gift to the government, and as the government was the enemy of the landowner, he refused. But the friendly institute was a congenial refuge. It had a growing collection of memorabilia as well as a first-rate polar library, and it quickly became a meeting point for all those with an interest in the Arctic and the Antarctic. When it moved to larger premises at Lensfield House in 1927 Cherry often motored over to take Deb and his assistant, Miss W. ‘Francis’ Drake, out for gammon steaks at the University Arms. He was still pursuing his apprenticeship as a water-colourist, and in later years spent many hours in front of the Wilson landscapes hung on the institute’s walls, making copies in his artist’s sketchbook. ‘How they bring it all back,’ he wrote. ‘Better than all the photographs in the world.’
⁴⁹

Back at Lamer, he had acquired several of Wilson’s paintings for himself and he hung them on the drawing-room wall. Other purchases included a ten-foot-square unframed oil of a dog tethered to a red post. It was in the hall next to the frowning ancestors, the crowd of them towering over a pair of Emperor penguins in a glass case. Cherry also bought another Epstein, this time a bust. In his literary tastes, he was less adventurous. Always a reader, he remained loyal to Trollope, Jane Austen, Kipling, Conrad and Galsworthy. Among new writers he read only those who were old at heart, like P. G. Wodehouse (of course) and Agatha Christie. He was never exposed to avant-garde literature and the great works of the modern movement in the way he had been exposed to Rodin (yet both
The Waste Land
and
Ulysses
were published in the same year as
The Worst Journey
); and he was never curious enough to try them for himself. But he did read widely. Besides fiction, he immersed himself in philosophy and religious theory, and kept up with the classics. When he was depressed he sat in the library and sought help from the volumes ranked behind the glass cases. Although he had lost his own faith many years before, he was drawn to the teachings of the Christian mystics. ‘All is not lost,’ he underlined in a chapter of Thomas à Kempis, ‘even though again and again thou feel thyself broken or well-nigh spent.’ It was only institutionalised religion that repelled him. He did not deny the existence of the transcendental; he reached out to it, and the spiritual dimension was as real to him as the oaks in the park. In a sense, his vision was pantheistic. He admired Spinoza’s concept of the ‘intellectual love of God’, and recognised that the sacred should be honoured. He believed, like Bill (and Spinoza), that man attained perfect happiness by goodness and piety, and that virtue was its own reward.

In February 1929 Atch suddenly died on a navy ship on his way home from India, and was buried at sea. He had never fully recovered from the horrific incident in Dover Harbour just over a decade earlier in which he had been burned and partially blinded. After the death of his wife in 1928, he had had a breakdown. He told Cherry that he was going to leave the service and, incarcerated in a naval hospital, expressed the hope that he might soon join his dead wife. One of his sisters wrote to Cherry in despair, asking him to help: she was afraid her brother was going to drink himself to death. It was a curious reversal of roles. But Atch rallied. Within the year he had been promoted, married his first wife’s cousin, moved to Glasgow and sailed to India with the navy. Everything had seemed so promising; now, just months after his recovery, Atch was dead. Cherry was deeply moved. Eight years later he published a tribute to his friend in the preface to a new edition of
The Worst Journey
. ‘His voice has been with me often since those days,’ he wrote after revealing what a ‘rock’ Atch had been in the last terrible year in the Antarctic. ‘That gruffish deep affectionate monosyllabic way he used to talk to you when he knew you were ill and perhaps feeling pretty rotten. Not but that he was abrupt at times. It was of the manner of the man to be so; it was his pose. The funny thing was that he could not prevent the tenderness poking through, despite himself.’ He ended his testimonial by expressing regret that Atch’s death had passed almost unnoticed. ‘I am glad,’ he recorded, ‘to have this opportunity to witness something of what we owe him.’

That last February of the twenties was bitter. At Lamer, just as a black frost killed the winter oats and turned the cornfields to yellow charlock, Cherry met George Seaver, an intelligent polar enthusiast who was planning to write a biography of Wilson. They had been introduced by Ory, who was quick to reassure Cherry that although Seaver was a priest, he was ‘not of the usual type’. Seaver wanted to discuss the expedition, and so Cherry invited him to luncheon.

Four years younger than Cherry and born, like Wilson, in Cheltenham, Seaver had served in the war and then spent five years as a commissioner in Northern Rhodesia. A bachelor living with his elderly father, he was a gentle, thoughtful and exceptionally well-read man with a finely tuned understanding of the vagaries of human nature. Ory had warned him in advance of Cherry’s Voltairesque dislike of clergymen; but Seaver was game for a challenge. (He was not very keen on parsons himself. ‘I sympathise with you in the Church’s efforts to relieve you of some money, and hope you may frustrate them. The Church has got quite enough money as it is.’)

When Seaver’s taxi drew up outside the porch at Lamer the long arms of the sweet chestnuts were bare and spindly in the pale wintry light and the wind was tormenting the yew hedge in the walled garden. Having been shown in by the housekeeper, the reverend waited in the drawing room, which already smelt faintly of boiled greens, and warmed his feet in front of a deep coal fire. Cherry was in the garage, fiddling under the bonnet of the Vauxhall (an electric heater had failed, and the car was iced up). Eventually he appeared, tense and rigid, apologising for the delay and rubbing his hands. But for once, Cherry relaxed. He had much in common with Seaver. Both were old-fashioned sceptics. Both loathed what Seaver robustly called ‘those post-war productions that masquerade as works of art and reflect the malaise of a diseased sensibility’. Epstein was one thing; but to men of their generation the rise of truly radical avant-garde art movements symbolised the destruction of settled pre-war values, and modernism was regarded, like the war itself, as a perilous destructive force.

Over a plate of stewed rabbit, brown potatoes, sprouts and gravy Cherry opened up to the sympathetic Seaver’s questions about the expedition. Besides reeling off factual details about sledges and rations, he ruminated frankly over less tangible issues. It had been a mistake to take five men to the Pole instead of four; the polar party ‘finally starved’ as a result of ‘lack of vitamins’;
⁵⁰
Taff Evans had collapsed mentally first, before his physical decline. Seaver noted that his host seemed troubled. ‘I often wonder,’ Cherry said, when the maid had cleared away the milk-pudding plates and left a silver jug of dark coffee, ‘whether if I had plugged on from One Ton after that Blizzard, killing dogs for food as necessary, I might have reached them.’ Seaver pointed out gently that the distances and dates showed that this would have been impossible. Cherry was unconvinced. Long spells of illness since those days had made a wreck of him, he said, puffing thoughtfully on a Russian Gold cigarette. ‘But surely you are the same man that went on the winter journey?’ Seaver asked. ‘Am I?’ asked Cherry in return. ‘I wonder.’ ‘But he was,’ Seaver wrote privately. ‘The heroic spirit was still there, though its over-taxed earthly vehicle could no longer respond to it as it did in youth.’

Cherry continued to meet or correspond with GBS several times a week, despite Shaw’s raving evangelism for Soviet Communism. In May 1930 GBS had sent bulletins from his hotel in Buxton, Derbyshire, on Charlotte’s latest illness, scarlet fever. ‘The doctor says,’ he revealed, ‘the streptococcus is not virulent enough to infect anyone over the age of five. I am more concerned with what happens over the age of seventy.’ When everyone was well, Cherry was invited to performances of Shaw’s plays in London. At a lunch party at the Shaws’ flat he was introduced to Amy Johnson, who had recently hogged the headlines when she became the first woman to make a solo flight from Britain to Australia. More excitingly for Cherry, he met Charlie Chaplin, whom he greatly admired. Chaplin was in town for the British première of his smash hit
City Lights
– still silent, despite the arrival of the talkies.