A Victim of the Aurora (3 page)

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, ‘Clara 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.

At 8 a.m. I heard the men next door rousing and, soon after, a faint whinny from the stables as Alexandrei arrived to feed the ponies their morning hay. They slept standing all night, those ponies. The floor of the stable was too cold for them to lie on, but Warren Mead said they were comfortable and had a locking joint in their knees that took the weight off their hoofs. It was the way they slept in Siberia, said Mead, since the time they were foals.

A little later I heard the dogs greet Nikolai. They occupied a slight incline to the north of the hut, most of them leashed to two thin cables. They too were from Siberia and were all post dogs used to deliver mail, or else the offspring of post dogs. When blizzards came they sat and let the dry snow cover them and, so insulated, slept the time away. When Nikolai came to them each morning with their frozen seal meat they applauded him madly. Some of their howling was like that of ordinary dogs, but they could also sing better than a coyote, and keen better than a wolf.

Next I heard the thud of the men lifting slabs of snow, cut with coal shovels out of the ice embankment behind the hut, into the snow-burner.

Every morning ‘the strongmen' – the haulers and sledders like POs Mulroy, Wallace and Jones, had to melt down a day's supply in a blubber-fed burner near the acetylene tanks. The water dripped slowly from the burner into a (somehow never full) tank in the galley area and from it Bernard Mulroy issued us our daily ration.

At 8.30 I saw Eugene Stewart emerge from his curtained compartment and cross to the stove, rubbing his hands gently, like some old monk to whom even the cold is a gift. Stigworth the sweeper brought in two bowls of snow and put them on a table near the darkroom. Alec Dryden and Troy stood up naked and rubbed the snow all over their bodies. Their pale hindquarters glistened and quivered.

This was a workday. I was in no mood for it. But I got up anyway. Everyone else in the line of five bunks on our side of the hut seemed stertorously asleep. They had only another few minutes to sleep off their drunks.

I confess with embarrassment to what worried me. You have to understand that in those days the attitude to homosexuality was one of breathless abomination. ‘Sodomy was accursed,' says a historian of the era, and the law and public opinion destroyed the sodomite. No homosexual should be let anywhere near children or public office. In 1908, the German Emperor had dismissed his oldest and closest friend, Philip von Eulenberg, because of a homosexual scandal.

I was a child of my age and suffered from all its frantic prejudices.

I was now afraid, that morning of June 23rd in Antarctica, that Henneker might be trying to seduce Paul Gabriel. I am embarrassed to have to relate the diffuse and ridiculous origins of this suspicion. But I must.

The last port of call all those classic Antarctic expeditions made before they vanished into the ice was Lyttelton in the South Island of New Zealand. It was a beautiful little haven with high ridges above its bowl of harbour, and over the ridge and in the plain was the city of Christchurch.

When we docked in Lyttelton all the best families of Christchurch vied to have us in their homes. Some of us wanted to be free agents and raise whatever hell those Southern cities offered. But Stewart insisted we take the invitations, and John Troy was delighted, because it meant a saving on stores.

Paul Gabriel and I found ourselves guests in the home of a Christchurch wool merchant. He and his wife drank nothing at dinner and their three teenage daughters were not permitted to add anything to the conversation except requests for salt or Worcestershire sauce. The wool merchant spoke of ‘home' – that is, England – so fervently that you wondered why he lived so far from it.

His father had been a factory hand in Nottingham, and he delighted in passing on to us horror-stories of the Nottingham slums.

‘So in a way,' said Paul, ‘Britain so deprived your forbears of a decent income that your father was forced to come to the South Pacific to find one?'

‘I wouldn't go that far,' said the merchant.

He had once entertained a cousin of the Prince of Wales, he told us, and our names went on some honour roll of distinguished visitors from ‘home' he kept in his billiard-room. Even Paul Gabriel, who was a pleasant boy and could suffer anyone gladly, thought the man was a bore.

Late on our second afternoon there, Barry Fields arrived by cab, asked to see us, and was shown into a front parlour. Then we were fetched by a maid, who took us in to Barry and withdrew.

‘Hell,' Barry said. ‘What is this? A bloody doll's house?'

‘It's worse,' I told him. ‘It's a morgue.'

‘Bloody colonials,' he said.

‘You're one yourself,' said Paul.

‘No, I'm not. I'm a socialist and have no country.'

He always said that when he was cornered. In fact, he went into conservative politics in Australia before he was thirty-five years old.

‘The place I'm staying,' he told us, ‘is very humane, a pretty wife, pretty daughters, their old man very liberal with the good things that come from bottles. And the son is a secret heller and had the good taste to give me the address of a first-rate seraglio. He says even the Governor-General of New Zealand uses it when he's in town. I thought it would be only civilized to invite you two to visit the place with me.'