Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lake in Cameroon which emitted gases so poisonous that hundreds died. I sat on my bunk and burst
into tears.
Later, Stu reappeared. 'Do you need anything?' he asked.
'No, I'm fine,' I lied. 'But thanks - thanks for asking.'
'On Saturday nights we have a bit of a special dinner - table-cloths and lots of courses, that sort
of thing. We get kind of dressed up.' He thought for a moment. 'Why not come and meet everyone
at the bar at seven-thirty?'
'Great,' I said, the tone of my voice indicating that I did not believe it to be great at all. 'Thanks.'
'No worries,' said Stu cheerily. 'See you later.'
'Getting kind of dressed up' was a challenging concept. At half-past seven I made the best of a
clean shirt and a half-clean pair of jeans, and sallied forth. There were about thirty-five people in
the bar when I got there, and they were all talking loudly or guffawing with laughter. About eight
of them were wearing ties. I introduced myself to a man in a sports jacket that was too small for
him, but he immediately turned his back on me. Through careful observation, in the manner of a
secret service agent, I gathered that purchasing a drink involved entering a tick in a column next
to one's name on a special chart which was being tossed around chummily from hand to hand. I
looked over a shoulder at this chart.
'I don't expect your name will be there,' said the Beard who had given me a lift. But it was.
The meal was delicious. I sat next to a field assistant.
'What exactly does a field assistant do?' I asked him.
'Babysit the scientists,' he said.
It was difficult to make yourself heard over the permanent dull roar of badinage that character-
ised social events at Rothera. They practised a kind of chain-joking. A brief food fight broke out
during the cheese course. Here were British men doing what they did best - reverting to childhood
and behaving like gits. I had become an expert on this type of behaviour at university, having been
sheltered from it at my old-fashioned girls' school. (Growing up in an ordinary working-class en-
vironment, I had also been sheltered from the horrors of the class jungle. I didn't realise people
came off separate shelves until I went to Oxford.) At the end of my second week as a student, a
formal dinner was held for freshmen in my college. When the first bread roll whizzed through the
air, I thought it was a ball that had escaped from the cricket pitch next door. I was just wondering
how they could be playing cricket in the dark when a wrapped pat of butter glanced off my tutor's
shoulder and plopped into my brown windsor soup.
∗
The next morning, before anyone else got up, I had a look round the base. Labs, the radio room, the
doctor's surgery, the boot room . . . Antarctic bases were starting to look awfully familiar. Rothera
was about the same size as Scott Base and Terra Nova Bay, and it was about one twentieth of
the size of McMurdo. The building was still, and silent, like a museum after closing time. I ran
the palm of my hand over a smooth white wall. Then I heard a woman laughing faintly. I stood
very still, trying to detect where this promising sound came from. Slowly, I padded along a nar-
row corridor until I was standing outside an unmarked door. A woman was talking very softly. I
