Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
money, and his father had written 'gentleman' in the Paternal Occupation box on the infant's birth
certificate. As a young man Titus was Lord of the Manor at Gestingthorpe in Essex, and the whole
village celebrated feudal-style when he returned from the Boer War a wounded hero. He was re-
served, measured and a cheerful pessimist, the archetypal Action Man whose only pin-up above
his bunk was a portrait of Napoleon. In many ways he was the polar opposite of Scott. He received
a toy gun for Christmas in the south, and went around shooting people with it
for the rest of the
evening
, asking them to fall down when hit. His creed was 'Down with Science, Sentiment and the
Fair Sex', and he once confided to Wilson that his mother was the only woman he had ever loved.
He was a popular officer. I read a pile of letters sent to his mother after the news had broken.
One said, 'Dear old Titus took my brother's place when he died in the Transvaal and I loved Titus
as a brother and now he is gone. What it must mean to you God alone knows.' Indeed. She burnt
his diaries, though his sister, alerted to the imminent conflagration, stayed up all night to copy out
as many of the handwritten pages as she could.
He was a stereotypical upper-class twit, in many ways, and twits were no different then than
they are now. Despite that, I liked him. His no-nonsense approach appealed to me, and so did his
fierce opposition to prevarication or cant.
∗
I packed up the contents of the weatherhaven while Jose and Too Tall set about dismantling it from
the outside. Fortunately the wind had dropped, but it was bitterly cold.
'Why didn't the beakers do this themselves?' asked Too Tall irritably. 'Next time they'll be ask-
ing us to wipe their butts.'
By the time we had finished loading the gear on to the trailer it was six o'clock in the morning.
We squatted in a banana sledge we had forgotten to pack up, and opened three cartons of orange
juice and a large bag of trail-mix.
As we rearranged our own gear in the back of the Tucker afterwards I noticed that fuel had
leaked all over my sleeping bag, not for the first time or the last. I wasn't the only one in Antarctica
who smelt like an oil rig.
I drove for the first three hours on the way back to camp. It was a mesmerising occupation, and
as I wandered into a reverie or stared blankly out at the ice sheet, the needle crept up on the rev.
counter dial.
'Less gas!' Too Tall would then say, delivering a karate chop on my shoulder from the bench in
the back. The monotony was broken by the appearance of a bottle of bourbon. José set up a Walk-
man with a pair of speakers.
'We need tortured blues,' said Too Tall. He was right. It was the perfect accompaniment to the
inescapable monotony of the landscape and the hypnotic rhythm of the Tucker.
I got accused of picking all the cashews out of the trail-mix, a crime of which I was indeed
guilty. Everyone started talking.
'Are you married?' José asked me.
'No,' I said. 'Are you?'
'No.' There was a pause, which something was waiting to fill.
