Icebreaker - Terra Incognita - page 117

south twice with Scott, and was chosen for the final haul to the Pole despite disgracing himself in
New Zealand where he had got so drunk that, while trying to lurch back aboard Terra Nova , he had
missed the ship altogether and plunged into the water. He was the first to die on the trek back from
the Pole, and since he was the only team member drawn from the ranks of the 'men' as opposed to
officers, the unsavoury notion that he lacked the moral fibre of the superior classes was whispered
in gilded corridors back at home. In the making of the myth, Taff has been conveninently man-
oeuvred into a corner, and he is barely remembered outside his native Rhossily. He was not rep-
resented on a set of twenty-five cigarette cards depicting Antarctic characters and scenes issued by
John Player & Sons, though the other Evans got two cards and the manufacturers even deigned to
include a mug-shot of Amundsen. One of Taff's rare appearances as anything but the Fifth Man is
in Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys , a novel published in 1991. Hanging on the end of a rope
with Scott in the Discovery days, Taff clings to the formalities of rank. 'Being down a crevasse
together', he maintains, 'is no excuse for stepping out of line.' When I asked Bainbridge why she
gave Evans an erection at that point she produced scientific evidence that, when suspended down
crevasses, men do get erections. That may be true, but I didn't believe for a moment that she had
flung in the detail for technical authenticity. It served to distinguish the working-class Evans from
the four toffs - and besides, she couldn't resist the joke.
∗
Back at McMurdo I had to pack for my flight to Christchurch the next day. I couldn't believe I was
leaving. I felt exhausted, depressed, miserable and demoralised, and I had a week's hard travelling
off the ice before I got to the British base on other side of the continent. I received a note from
Seismic Man, written on graph paper. He said he wasn't going to make it back to McMurdo from
CWA before I left. 'So long, Woo,' the note ended.
I had planned great things for my last night, but in the end I walked to Hut Point and looked at
the mountains one last time. The thought that I wouldn't see them again almost broke my heart.
The next day, I took the pictures off the office wall and the W-002 sign off the door, peeled the
stickers from the ice axe and the taped label from the goggles, ripped the velcroed name off the
parka, unstuck the coloured tape from the neoprene waterbottle and pulled the badge off the yazoo
cap. I packed the microcentrifuge earrings, as no one would understand them off the ice.
The flight to Christchurch was delayed six times. Twenty of us were scheduled to leave, and the
scientists spent all day playing patience in the Crary. I thought of T. S. Eliot when Auden asked
him why he played patience so much. He reflected for a moment and said, 'Well, I suppose it's
the nearest thing to being dead.' The rest of us trailed around like the Ungone, commuting up
and down to the Movement Control Center. I tried to count the number of people I had hugged
goodbye. At midnight, Art De Vries, the fish biologist, brought me sashimi cut from the cheeks of
his mawsoni fish. He gave me the earbones, to make into earrings. People lay on my office floor.
David the Russian came in to present me with a ring made from the tusk of a north Siberian mam-
moth.
'Are you ready to go?' he asked, fiddling with a fresh packet of cigarettes. 'I mean, ready with
your emotions?'