Life Raft - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 107

remember. I found the thought of such a cold, empty continent
instantly and irresistibly thrilling. At school as a teenager
when working towards my first raft of qualifications, I was
given the option to provide a topic for a significant part of
my geography coursework and Antarctica was my immediate
choice. Later, curiosity about such an extreme environment led
me to seek out my first polar adventure, a youth expedition to
Greenland. Later still, when looking for a job as a graduate,
I sought out any career opportunity that would allow me to
see this almost unimaginable land at the bottom of the world
for myself. Looking back on my life so far, Antarctica, and
the desire to know it, seems to be a constant thread running
through everything, giving shape to the whole. To date, it's hard
to think of any place, person or object which has captured my
enthusiasm and energies so thoroughly and instinctively.
I grew up in the south east of England, where winters were
normally grey, drizzling affairs; but occasionally it would
snow, transforming the familiar woods and fields around my
childhood home into an unfamiliar middle-earth of blanketed
topography and muted sounds. Dressed in Wellington boots
and brightly coloured gloves, my sister and I would go exploring
in this new world, discovering marshy ponds turned into
skating-rinks, dripping water transformed into stalactites of
ice, snow-laden trees forming tunnels into secret places and the
invisible life of the countryside exposed as tracks in the newly
laid carpet of white. Snow meant days off school, snowball
fights, sledging and warming fingers that thrummed with cold
on mugs of sweet hot drinks in front of the fire at home. Our
house was a little way out of the nearest town, set back from
the main road without any immediate neighbours. A heavy fall
of snow would sometimes temporarily cut us off, something