Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
plastic seals. People were videoing the videos. They had even erected a replica of Scott's hut in
which a piano occasionally broke spontaneously into the national anthem. The whole place en-
dorsed the old imperial notion that this was part of Kiwi culture too, a particularly obsolete idea in
the muggy, sub-tropical north island. Ed Hillary, though, had made a nice introductory film about
Antarctica which played on a continuous loop, and he ended by saying, 'It belongs to you.' I liked
that.
I flew to LA, and thence to London. A sales rep from a computer company attached himself to
me for the whole journey. He was wearing an Armani suit, and his face possessed none of those
small wrinkles produced by thought. I last saw him next to the luggage carousel at Heathrow, the
Armani looking as though he'd had a fight in it.
'Nice to be back on Terra Cotta,' he said.
I spent two days in London, feeling like a visitor in my own life. When I turned up for mass
at St Mark's on Regent's Park Canal, always one of my first ports of call, I was shocked to find
a cardboard arrow pinned to the locked doors. It was pointing to the stone steps which led to the
crypt. When I got down there, a dozen people squeezed into Sunday School chairs were gathered
round a trestle table, bare save for a plain wooden cross. Mass had not yet begun.
I stood in the narrow doorway, baffled.
'My dear,' said Father Tom as he strode towards me, arms outstretched. 'You won't have heard.'
A gang had broken into our church the night before Remembrance Sunday and piled everything
they could find into three enormous bonfires, which they lit, presumably warming their hands as
they stood around enjoying the conflagration. The building had been virtually gutted, although the
stained-glass window of St Mark wearing dashing purple slippers had not been fatally damaged.
It was next to the Lady Chapel, and in it St Mark was writing in a large book, though he had been
distracted (presumably by St Peter in the adjacent window) and had twisted away from his work
as if eager to see what was going on. Besides the slippers, he was wearing a sumptuous emerald
robe. I had grown very fond of the image.
'How was the South Pole?' asked Father Tom brightly.
It seemed very far off.
The next day my father drove me to the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
'Where's the entrance?' he asked as we crawled along outside.
'How should I know?' I snapped. This brief re-entry into the real world had made me disorient-
ated and irritable. Since leaving McMurdo I had felt as if I existed only in suspended animation.
'Sorry, dad,' I said weakly.
After a good deal of hanging around I flew to Ascension Island on a TriStar, the cover of the
in-flight magazine in front of me depicting a customer descending by parachute. By mistake, the
pilot referred to 'the camera crew' rather than 'the cabin crew' over the loudspeaker; you couldn't
help wondering what was on his mind. The air force refuels its TriStars at Ascension en route to
the Falkland Islands, and from there a British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 was to convey me back
to Antarctica. I discovered that two other people on the plane were heading for Rothera, the main
British station on the Antarctic Peninsula. They were both employees of Tilbury Douglas, the
construction company contracted to carry out rebuilding works for the British Antarctic Survey
