The Ice Museum (7 page)

By Arne's standards, Nansen lived in benighted immaturity, seeking to claw a path across the indifferent wilderness, to perch his flag on a piece of ice. But Nansen also lived in the golden age that Arne was mourning, ‘when we had so much light, you could see the stars, and children were there under the heaven of stars. You didn't get smaller, by that, you got greater by that, by being together with the stars—you were greater by being together with the stars.'

‘So have people lost this experience?' I was asking.

Arne never answered a question directly. It made him slightly gnomic, with his head cocked to one side and a slight smile curling his lips.

‘I want to tell you about mountains,' he said. ‘I have seen a lot of mountains. In the mountains you have a basic sense of upward, ascent. And this is positive,' he was adding. ‘ “Ascent” is a positive word. Up and up. A great increase. And so on. So you have feelings there which are satisfied without you knowing it. You see, there is the sky. The bigness of mountains, that's one thing, and then you have the greatness. There are some mountains in western Norway which are just as great as Mount Everest. But they are not so big, but that is not the essence of mountains, it's not the bigness, it's the up, the getting higher, and the broadening of the outlook, seeing vast areas.'

When this wizened philosopher could still climb, he refused to reach the tops of mountains, renouncing the quest for domination over the natural world, he claimed. A sense of the smallness of the self, the vastness of nature, he seemed to be saying, was somehow revitalizing, a healthy experience to have from time to time. Arne thought that the only goal of his submission was to find unity with nature, and he started to tell a story about when he climbed a series of peaks, across the Mediterranean.

‘I started getting to the summit of each mountain, but after about thirty summits, I could go just because of the beauty and the greatness. And even though the summit was only ten metres from me, I would not take those ten metres, to include that summit also in my list of summits. I would just go where it was great to go. I was getting more mature. Going for days and days and days, I got more mature. What is really here? What's the greatness, what's the greatness? What's the greatness in my experience of these mountains? And then of course the summits were not counted any longer, at all.'

Arne was winding up, his words no longer falling into sentences, instead he was sounding a little like a hippie Beckett—‘When you have something like this, you know this is—I will be in this, yes I am at this moment, no more, you are—what I do now—breathing deeply, breathing deeply, and feel this different relation to time; something gets away from you—time-bound no longer—it's just timelessness. You get a little feeling of timelessness. Slower, slower, take time, take time.' Like Krapp's last tape, he was concluding, a tone of determined finality to his voice.

‘I invite people to be more aware of the sense of timelessness,' he said. Then he stopped talking, and smiled at me.

It seemed to be a hint that I should disappear, and I stood up. ‘And now we must hug,' he said. ‘For three seconds only. To fully engage with each other.'

He put his arms around me, and counted to three loudly. Then I was moved quickly onto the steps of the house. He smiled, and waved, his wave like a child's, emphatic and staged. Then he shut the door.

There will come a time, Nansen had thought, when the goal that was the Arctic wilderness will have been explored, and there will be nothing left to find. But our longing for a simple life will be unsatisfied; we will continue to search for silent places. Even as everyone set off on their wilderness holidays, Arne and the prophets were telling them it was doomed. Wherever they went, they would find traces of humanity and signs of future destruction. It made for a forbidding doctrine. It was nostalgic; it preferred things as they were a hundred years ago. Nansen had seen the beginning of the descent, Arne was saying; nature was now measurable, the furthest north was barren and hostile but somehow less mysterious. But there was a guarded optimism to Arne's talk. He refused to believe it was over; he shied away from sounding the final mournful chord. Even as he talked of a wake for the wilderness, Arne was preaching the consolations of emptiness. He couldn't let go of the dream of Thule, even as he said the northern wilderness was endangered.

I walked along the snow-mountain, with the lights of the city like distant fires lining the fjord. The trees were hissing and the wind felt harsher than before. The sun was sinking towards the horizon. The snow coated my feet, and the darkness in the forest made me hurry towards the incandescent platform. I stumbled under the bridge, running to beat the sunset, as the air grew colder.

 
 
Because I grew up in the countryside, in a verdant part of Britain, my early memories were entwined with the seasonal change of the fields, the fires which purged them after the harvest, the smoke lingering along the streets, the sound of tractors sowing new seeds, the corn turning golden and then being harvested. Before I understood anything about time, I was aware that things recurred, that there was a pace to nature, a particular sort of process, immutable, reassuring in its regularity. I knew that as leaves fell from the trees combine harvesters would churn through the fields; I knew that an acrid taste in the morning meant that winter was coming. The cornfields were at the end of my street; it was a walk of a few minutes to the first line of trees, with the fields stretching beyond, immense to a child. There was a dust track through the fields called the Donkey Track, with a stream running alongside, and I used to run along there with friends, dimly aware of the colours of the crops, the foliage of the hedgerows, the sound of the birds. We made dens in the streams, piling up hay to dam the water; rummaging around by the sides of the streams we would find field mice, quantities of baby rabbits, curled in small huddles. Because I was young, it seems when I remember that the skies were a particularly brilliant shade of blue, the summers particularly hot, the evenings particularly long, the shadows still lengthening along the garden when I was summoned to bed, my bedroom a dim orange as I put my head under the pillows to sleep.

My village was hardly a rustic idyll. It was more of a rustic commuter belt, a strip of suburbia disguised as villages and fields. The village feigned pastoral autonomy; there was a commune, which grew vegetables, and every year an Albion Fayre was set up on the fields around the village—stalls selling rosehip wine and home-baked cakes, to the soundtrack of Steeleye Span. People had boats on trailers parked in their drives through the winter, which they towed away to marinas for the summer. The daily momentum went towards London; each morning people stepped into their cars and commuted away, down the A12, arriving in the evening again. It was a compromise, too subtle for a child to understand. I saw only the winding lanes and the green banks of trees, the yellow ripeness of the corn, the blueness of the sky against the vivid fields. I knew nothing about the commuting files to London, cars moving bumper to bumper, hold-ups and jams, the tailbacks from Kelvedon to Capel St. Mary. I walked with my grandmother around the village as she pointed out the flowers in the hedgerows and made me listen to the different songs of birds.

I can't remember when I first understood that there were worlds outside my village, places which moved to a pace of their own, irrespective of the seasons. My other set of grandparents lived on the Wirral, which supplied a holiday experience of somewhere else. These grandparents lived on a street opposite a bank of factories, in an interwar house. I remember staring through my grandparents' kitchen window at a line of railings separating their road from the factory grounds. A broken umbrella had been hung on the railings, like a black rook, fluttering in the wind and the rain. The wind had blown piles of litter against the railings: cigarette packets with their shiny foil papers, crisp packets softened by rain, and lines of cans and bottles. My grandmother and I would sometimes take the bus into Birkenhead, sitting on the top floor staring at the traffic. There were days when we took the ferry to Liverpool, watching the churning wake and the gulls behind the boat. Liverpool would appear ahead, and I remember my grandparents telling me about the Liver Birds looking across the city, turned green by the weather.

I associated the Wirral with my grandparents specifically, as if it was their land, a land run under their rules, as distinct from those of my parents. This was why the houses were grey, and the umbrella rook hung from the railings, and why the factory had a gas container, shaped like an immense golf ball, which my grandfather said would take the whole of Merseyside with it should it ever explode. When I saw the golf ball, and the corrugated iron of the factory buildings, I knew I was near my grandparents' house, and these decaying pieces of industrialism became a part of their world, serving only as signposts to their home, the final stage of a long journey. Everything in their house was novel: the shape and feel of the beds, the creak of the stairs, the smell of dust on the bars of the electric fire, the cupboard under the stairs, where my grandfather kept a World War Two flying suit. The cigarette lighter hidden under a model of Dick Turpin. The tins of barley sugars and mint imperials. The miniature forklift truck on a stand, which had been presented to my grandfather when he retired. The garage with the trapdoor, which opened onto steps going down to a shelter they had built during the war, tunnelled out under the garden. The urban environment was the exotic landscape of my grandparents' lives, and of my mother's past.

When I was ten, my parents moved to the Midlands, to a market town near Nottingham. It was the first time I remember disliking the view around me, noticing its plainness. The lines of interwar housing seemed limitless—buildings with ugly brick archways, hedges pruned into shapes, ornamental jugs and stools. The houses were crushed together, separated by brutal little walls, overgrown fir trees which looked like the fringes of graveyards. The surrounding countryside was undulating and forested, but I was too young to know what lay beyond the grey streets of our part of town. There was something tacky and bland about our house; the ceiling of my bedroom was covered with polystyrene, occasionally chunks would fall onto my bed, and I would cut them into shapes, the roof of the living room was flat, and fell to pieces one day. The garden was organized in neat rows, a fifties' patio, rows of rhubarb plants, apple trees. I survived the transition, writing it out in a diary, quietly defiant: It is A.W.F.U.L., I wrote, a dozen times, across an entire day. The woods were too far away and I was never allowed to walk there. The only area worth spending time in, I had decided, was a field behind our house, a patch of grass which my brother and I shared with football teams on Saturdays, burly blokes shouting as they churned into the mud, sparse crowds cheering from the sidelines. One night, after staying for dinner at a friend's house, I took a shortcut across the field, back to my parents' house. The field was dark, muddy and uneven underfoot, and the stars were vivid in the sky. I stood for a while in the centre, furthest from the patches of light, looking at the shadows of the darkened grass, the ditches appearing as chasms in the darkness, the trees rustling gently. I was intrigued by the unfamiliar look of the field, the empty darkness, the quietness of the evening.

Because I never lived in the countryside again, I retained an image of the small Suffolk village, decked in the rich remembered colours of childhood, with the endlessly running soundtrack of the birdsong at dawn, the whirring of farmyard machinery. These memories were inevitably mingled with nostalgia, for the vivid sensations of early childhood, the blueness of the sky, bright yellow cornfields, the dim twilight of the winter evenings, when the streetlights became pale red at three in the afternoon. I idealized my childhood in the countryside, imagining it like a secret garden, remaining beautifully tended, should I ever return. In childhood, in the countryside, I had been free. At midnight when the house was quiet, I often thought of the village as I remembered it, the languid pace of the evenings, the slow rising of the sun across the fields.

THE UNCANNY

AND WHEN THE MORN SHALL SPREAD WITH DAWNING DAY
 
HER PURPLE LOOM, AND SHOOT HER EARLY RAY,
YOU'LL THULE AND TH'ORCADIAN ISLES DESCRY
 
WHICH SCATTER'D O'ER THE OCEAN'S BOSOM LIE.

 
“KING ARTHUR,” SIR RICHARD BLACKMORE (1650-1729)

 
 
I flew back to London, and the next morning I was on the way to Scotland. Even at the time Nansen sailed north, even in Arne's Golden Age, there was a holiday industry in remote and empty Thules. The British travellers of the nineteenth century worked their way along the British coast, heading first for Shetland, a former Thule, and then onwards to Iceland, another former Thule. There were fleets of tourist ships ploughing through the seas towards the north, taking their occupants away from their more cluttered countries. London lay under a thick coating of coal pollution, but the northern lands were pristine retreats for the city-sore. Richard Burton, British explorer, translator of the
Arabian Nights
, sailed along the British coast in 1872, carrying the idea of Thule like hand luggage. In the 1870s, William Morris—Socialist reformer and designer of tasteful patterns, who loved the Sagas—took the same route to the north. Anthony Trollope, author of baroque yarns, had sailed in a society horde, keeping to the main sights.