Cherry (42 page)

The five sisters had turned out to be remarkably unenthusiastic reproducers, only managing four children between them. Cherry took little interest even in those four, at least until they had ceased to be children. Although he enjoyed seeing Lassie, and sometimes, when he could get to Surrey, Elsie and Fred, on the whole he was more interested in his health than in his siblings. He didn’t try to cover it up, and the family no longer expected him to turn up at weddings or funerals. Angela went to them all in his place. She was a more active member of his family than he had ever been.

As for old friends: Cherry had seen little of Kathleen in the two decades that followed publication of
The Worst Journey
. Its frank portrait of Scott still rankled, and she told anyone who would listen that Cherry had only been taken on the expedition because of his subscription. The feline diarist and architectural historian James Lees-Milne was one of those who did not believe her. She told him, while she was on the subject, that Cherry had been ‘a poor creature, an ugly youth’, and that it was she who had introduced him to GBS. Shackleton was rotten, Wilson a prig, Ory drab, Ponting just out for money.
⁵⁹
Now, in the early forties, Cherry ran into her by accident. He and Angela were having tea at the Berkeley during a rare meeting with Edith, at that time an enthusiastic Baptist. As the piano tinkled and the china clinked and the fans wafted the smell of golden syrup around the large room, Kathleen entered with her husband and one of her sons. ‘Now, Cherry, don’t pretend you don’t know me,’ she hooted. Cherry, flustered and terrified that Edith was about to leap up and ask Kathleen if she were saved, stood to shake hands. ‘This must be Wayland,’ he stammered. (Wayland was Kathleen’s son by her second marriage.) ‘It’s Peter,’ replied Kathleen with a glare.

Kathleen died two years after the war ended. In many ways she was a heroine. She had an enviable ability to grasp the good in her life and rise above her sorrows. She asked to have the words ‘Kathleen. No happier woman ever lived’ engraved on her tombstone. What could be more heroic? Her biographer wrote of her that, ‘She took hold of her life with rare glee, and raced through it without shame, without fear and with scarcely a backward look.’ It would be difficult to imagine a better description of what Cherry was not. She continued to irritate him from beyond the grave when Seaver revealed her view that ‘Bill had very little character’. It was bitter to hear such things.

In September 1943 Charlotte died. A postcard arrived from GBS to say that her last hours were happy, and the end ‘not what I had feared’. A few days later he walked over to Dorset House in the autumn drizzle, ate a large tea, this time with jam, which he said he never got, and told them all about it. She had been in great pain for some time, but the day before she died the furrows disappeared from above her eyes and she looked quite young again – like the woman he had met in 1896. He told her she was perfectly beautiful, and although he could not understand what she said, she was ‘quite happy’. She died in the night.

Not long afterwards, Angela’s father died too. Cherry avoided the funeral, and Angela had the good sense not to try to talk him into it. From then on she had to negotiate maternal visits, though Cherry was polite to his mother-in-law to the point of oriental inscrutability. At least at Dorset House they could put her in one of the serviced guest rooms where breakfast was provided. But they had to spend Christmas at Lamer with Clara. Cherry was still implacably opposed to the festivities. He wouldn’t have a tree and never bought anyone a present, including Angela, though he loved the stocking she gave him. (He never gave her a birthday gift either; he never even remembered it was her birthday. But he didn’t remember his own birthday.) She accepted his foibles and learned to love the lovable bits of him. It was a lonely life for her, in many ways, but not a bleak one. ‘We were very happy,’ she remembered. ‘It was one of those things that grew. I was very lucky. Cherry was a romantic at heart.’ He had quickly become dependent on her. When she was ill, he noted in his small engagement diary, ‘A. has flu. I had a great deal of work to do.’ He, too, learned to adapt, though he did very much less adapting than she did. He had at least abandoned the strict financial demarcation he had imposed in the first year or two of their marriage. Under those early rules Angela had been obliged to pay for half of every journey they made. When she took Cherry’s book of coupons to London to shop for his socks and pyjamas, she paid for Allen’s taxi rides from the station. She had even paid for her own telephone calls. Cherry was not mean, but he had a fear of being fleeced that was part of a larger, unformed paranoia. He had never understood how difficult it was for Angela to play the role of lady of the manor on two hundred a year.

The war continued. Dead Americans rotting under distant palm trees; mass hangings in Ukrainian village squares; the hollow-eyed ghetto in Warsaw; blindfolded resistance fighters queuing to be shot; gangrenous Tommies writhing in the desert sand; distended merchant seamen floating eyeless in the Atlantic; angular mountains of bones in the camps; motionless children, everywhere; Stalingrad. It was difficult for the living to stay sane. Tilbury, head gardener at Lamer for more than thirty years, lost his two sons. Deb’s eldest son, Barry, was killed flying over the Mediterranean. Cherry remembered all three running through the Lamer elms, brandishing sticks and capturing butterflies. In the summer of 1943 the tide turned for the Allies, but the weariness at home was bone-deep.

Cherry had good days, even good weeks and months. But his illnesses never quite disappeared in those years, and the dark periods hovered above him like clouds heavy with rain. When they came low, he lived in their shadow. With his remaining friends from the
Terra Nova
he talked obsessively about the expedition, but at other times he was too involved in his interior world to speak about it at all, even when he had an eager audience. Bertrand Russell’s small son Conrad was consistently disconcerted at his famous neighbour’s refusal to talk about the Antarctic. By handing over responsibility to Angela for the daily practicalities of his life, and releasing himself from the grind of running his estate, Cherry had exposed a whole layer of emotional experience that had been more or less submerged. The irony was that the peaceful relief of his happy marriage allowed his anxieties to take hold.

Early in 1944 a rumour spread through Wheathampstead that an heir was to be born at Lamer. The war-weary villagers were hungry for cheery news as one gloomy year toppled into the next, but there was to be no baby at the big house. Cherry had no affinity with children; more significantly, he was too enmeshed in the present (and the past) to care about the future, and too fearful of what lay in the shadows. His imagination was already buckling with exhaustion: he could not conjure the joy a child might bring. His attitude hardened when Pussy and Jasper experienced the agony of a stillborn baby. He and Angela saw more of the Harkers than anyone, and had watched with horror as the once swan-like Pussy sank into ill-health. She had a kidney removed, looked permanently ravaged and finally had a stroke during dinner at Dorset House. She died a few days later.

Cherry was ill himself: a new kind of bronchial trouble had joined the litany of his complaints. On top of everything else he found it difficult to sleep. Doodle-bugs and rockets were not designed to alleviate insomnia. The low drone of the pilotless doodle-bugs and the hanging silence as they fell dominated the summer, and once again the station platforms were crowded with whey-faced Londoners evacuating to the country. Once again, too, Cherry and Angela set their jaws firm, even when fresh terror arrived in September in the shape of V-2 rockets that made a peculiar tearing sound as they hurtled vertically to ground. The air in Gloucester Place was permanently tinged with the bitter smell of magnesium and charred wood, and on his daily outings to Harley Street or the West End Cherry stepped round craters layered with silvery ash.

Shortly before peace was at last declared, Ory died in a nursing home in Hampstead. She had been ill for several years. Cherry had never lost touch with her; she was always protective of him, as Bill had been. She had led a full and active life, returning often to New Zealand, which she knew so well. During the First World War she had been awarded a CBE for her voluntary work with the New Zealand Red Cross. The cool, aloof Ory had never remarried. Her few close friends thought it would have been out of the question: ‘the loss of him clung to her’. Although she enjoyed hearing news of the surviving Antarcticans, she saw little of them. A deeply private person, she was determined not to allow future generations of polar enthusiasts to pick over her relationship with Bill. As a result, she burnt most of his letters. She had lost her faith, and no longer believed they were to meet again. Before she died she left instructions that the green leather volume of Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
which Cherry had lent Bill, and which he had found on his hard body, should be returned to its first owner. Cherry was deeply moved to see it again, the faded marker between the same cracked pages. He wrote to
The Times
, so that the return of the book should be noted, and the letter was published.

The week after VE Day Cherry and Angela joined record crowds at Lord’s for an unofficial ‘Victory’ test match, swept along in the foamy tidal wave of national relief. Like most places in the capital, Dorset House altered dramatically in the summer of 1945. Fresh tenants arrived and the art deco entrance hall was crowded with light grey chalk-striped demob suits. Cherry and Angela, now virtually permanent residents, were bursting out of No. 23, so when the flat next door came up they rented that too, and began making them into one. Like everyone else who voted Tory, Cherry was aghast at the Labour landslide that followed the outbreak of peace. He did not rush to the Post Office to withdraw his savings, but he retreated further into demoralised isolation. When he turned sixty London was still in the pincers of wartime austerity: in February 1946 it was announced that there was only one week’s coal left. Later in the year bread was rationed, which it had never been during the war, and even the small loaves that were doled out were made with reduced wheat. The Ministry of Food issued a recipe for squirrel pie.

On 25 June 1946 Cherry woke in such pain that he tugged up the sheet and stayed in bed. He had been complaining of rheumatism and indeterminate aching for several weeks, and had been reluctant to leave the flat, claiming that it would be too painful for him to stand up. On 29 June, in the morning, Angela went into his bedroom to wake him as usual, pleased to see that he was enjoying a sound sleep. But he was not asleep. He was unconscious. His regular doctor was hastily summoned, and he in turn called in Dr John Forest Smith, who at first announced that Cherry must have accidentally taken an overdose. To ascertain just how unconscious he was, Forest Smith lit a cigarette and burnt the tip of his left ear. The absence of response led to a diagnosis of ‘cataleptic stroke’. Two days later Cherry began to move, and on 3 July he regained full consciousness. Thereafter he remained virtually immobilised for a year, locked into a private world of distant despair.

This was complete nervous breakdown. The golden purpose of the brief weeks slogging over the ice ridges to Cape Crozier had dimmed and vanished as Cherry spiralled down through the decades. In the Antarctic he had lived so close to what he called ‘the bedrock of existence’ that the complicated, crowded and corrupt world he occupied at home seemed to him now to be worth nothing at all.

He had been displaying classic symptoms of severe depression intermittently for years: self-absorption, loss of interest in the outside world and general joylessness, accompanied by a range of physical illnesses. Profound depression frequently manifests itself in ostensibly unconnected physical complaints, and severe cases are known to extend to the semi-paralysis experienced by the disintegrating Cherry in the summer of 1946.

Depression is not a bad case of the blues. It is a frightening, disabling pathological condition, and in the 1940s it came with a hefty stigma attached. Was the aetiology of Cherry’s illness a question of his genes, of biological changes in the brain, or of what psychiatrists now call life events? The untidy answer is that it was probably a combination of all three.

His genetic inheritance predisposed him to depression. Peggy had a breakdown; Reggie, his cousin, had intermittently suffered from the disease for many years, and ultimately took his own life. But genes offer only a partial explanation. Changes in brain chemistry can be a major factor in an individual’s vulnerability to depression, as the success of modern drugs has confirmed. These changes can be linked to external events, and in Cherry’s case it seems likely that what happened in the Antarctic activated a biological process which culminated in breakdown. In other words, his depression was in some part reactive. Loss is the most significant of the grim roster of depressogenic life events; it has been called the touchstone of depression. Cherry’s failure to adapt to the loss of Bill, and his unformed sense of guilt that he could have prevented his death, guided him down the dark path to breakdown. The decades in between were years of accumulating strain. The disease had progressed from its unfocused stirrings in the Antarctic, through the disabling years of ulcerative colitis (a recognised psychosomatic disorder) and inexorably onwards to the psychotic period of Lamer five years before total collapse.

Almost a decade after Cherry’s breakdown his friend and former shipmate Sir Raymond Priestley, recently retired as vice-chancellor of Birmingham University, delivered a lecture on ‘The Polar Expedition as a Psychological Study’. He spoke of ‘the trail of broken men that polar exploration has always left in its wake’, citing factors such as the difficulties of readjusting to normal life and the stark contrast between a long period of isolation and intense public attention. ‘Polar madness’, he said, was a characteristic symptom of exploration work, usually (but not always) after the expedition had returned to civilisation. ‘There are many cases of polar madness of which the world does not hear,’ he suggested darkly. Priestley was much too discreet to name names, but he could have been thinking of Amundsen’s and Nansen’s colleague Hjalmar Johansen, who shot himself; Abbott, the wrestler who broke down on the way home after his experiences with Campbell on Inexpressible Island; or indeed Cherry himself, though no other explorer had taken quite so long to go mad.