Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I slept in the food store, a blue wooden hut on the slope behind Bluebell Cottage. A small win-
dow at one end cast an orange rhomboid on the opposite wall in the early morning. At night -
by mid-February as long as an autumnal northern night - I had to read by torchlight. The room
was stacked with ziplocks of split peas, boxes of suet, shiny metal cubes of sugar packed in July
1985, a large cardboard box containing khaki foil packs of the ubiquitous 'Biscuits, Brown' eaten
by British Antarcticans since the dawn of time, and a surplus of sardines. On the floor boxes of
shampoo had collapsed on to crates of leaking tile cleaner. The door wouldn't shut from the inside,
so I was obliged to tie myself in.
I emptied my p-bag on to the floor. This object was shaped like a golf caddy and contained an
airbed, two karrimats, a sheepskin underblanket, a bivvy bag and a sleeping bag with two liners. As
I inflated my airbed between the shelves I couldn't help thinking guiltily of what Wilfred Thesiger
said to Eric Newby and Hugh Carless when he saw them inflating their airbeds in Nuristan in 1956.
It is the last line of Newby's
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
. 'God, you must be a couple of pan-
sies,' said Thesiger.
Bluebell Cottage was the only hut on an island the size of Wales (the size of England if you
counted the ice shelves attached to it) and it had hardly changed since 1961. I knew that for I had
seen photographs of Beards hunched in the radio shack or grinning over a saucepan. Drune, the
mountain directly behind the hut, and Pyramid, the ziggurat next to it, were usually striated with
snow. It was always more attractive around the hut when it snowed; a light covering over the scree
and moraine broke up the brown. On the other side of King George VI Sound the Batterbee Moun-
tains and Ryder Glacier changed colour as the light faded and glowed like old stained glass in the
great cathedrals around the time of evensong.
At the Bluff, Ian taught me to chart the speed and direction of the wind, the cloud type and
extent of cover, the height of the cloud base and the air pressure at sea level. He was a good teach-
er, and seemed pleased to have something to do. He had come to the end of his year's tour of duty
as a doctor, and his replacement was already installed at Rothera. Everyone at Bluebell Cottage
had finished whatever it was they had been doing in Antarctica. They were waiting to go home,
and it was more agreeable to sit it out at the Bluff than at Rothera - not least due to the absence of
a base commander.
My newly acquired skills meant I could take my turn at weather observations and relay the data
back to Rothera over the radio. Often we had to do this hourly, if aircraft were trying to come in.
They often brought more avtur, the aviation fuel used by BAS, as the Bluff functioned as a service
station for planes transporting scientists further south. It was a fuel-intensive business, as the Ot-
ters bringing drums of fuel had to refill their own tanks before returning to Rothera.
Ian taught me how to test the forty-five-gallon drums of avtur for water contamination, and how
to fill up the tanks when a plane arrived. In addition, we occupied ourselves for a couple of hours
each day at the drum dump, a pit into which trash had been deposited in a less environmentally
aware age. The work involved digging debris out of the ice and piling it into empty fuel drums.
When these drums were full, the Otters ferried them back to Rothera.
