Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I laid my sleep kit down one side of the tent. Our territory was divided by a pot box, a food box
and a geophysics box, and on top of these stood a primus, a tilley lamp, a radio, a compact disc
Walkman, a James Clavell novel and a tube of Extra Strong mints. An open tin of peaches with
feathers stuck to the lid was wedged between Keith's airbed and the primus, as well as a tin half
full of Dutch camping butter (1988) and numerous discarded wrappers of Cadbury's Milk Chocol-
ate. It was clear that the acquisition of a tent-mate was not the best thing that had ever happened
to Keith. On the first night, he stayed in the weatherhaven until everyone else had retired to their
tents, delaying the moment at which he was obliged to join me.
'Hello,' I said as I heard him fighting his way through the tent flaps.
'Hello,' he replied, in a kind of disappointed way, as if he had nourished hopes that I might have
dematerialised. I had hatched a cunning plan, however. I could see from the tent that Keith was a
gadget man. He had installed - for example - a digital thermometer which took the temperature
inside and outside of the tent at the same time. The only way to deal with a gadget man is to feign
interest in his equipment.
'This is useful,' I lied, pointing at the double display on the thermometer. 'How does it work,
exactly?'
Keith cleared his throat. I had won.
The reason Keith had enjoyed a tent to himself before my arrival soon became clear. He could
have snored for England. I didn't mind. Being able to sleep anywhere at any time and in any cir-
cumstances was part of the job description, as far as I was concerned. When Keith was awake I
enjoyed his company, once he thawed out a bit. And he made me tea in the morning.
'Here's breakfast,' he used to say, handing me half a bar of Cadbury's. If it was windy, we had
to shout at one another. On the second day I was granted earphone rights to the cd player, and I
dipped in and out of Keith's extensive and catholic collection. Getting dressed was hellish though,
and made harder by the gloating presence of the thermometer, which informed us irrefutably that
outside it was minus twenty-five. I began plotting its destruction. On really bad days, when the
plane carrying the radar equipment couldn't fly, some people never left their tent, except to go to
the toilet, and even this was an ordeal as it involved sliding down an ice chute into an underground
ice chamber and climbing on to an empty fuel drum.
While trapped inside for days, everyone ran out of topics and started reading the backs of food
cartons. People said that in the field they had learnt how to mix up the porridge oats in Dutch and
Swahili. There was a long established tradition of this. Gunnar Anderssen, marooned at Hope Bay
in 1902, wrote that his party had no books, and to delight the eye with the printed word they got
out their tins of condensed milk and read the labels. On the whole, we couldn't really enjoy any-
thing much at Ski Hi, or even do any serious thinking. Existing, as opposed to freezing, seemed to
take up all our energy.
We rarely took off our windies, the fluorescent orange ventile over-the-head windcheaters and
enormous trousers worn by Scott and every subsequent Briton in Antarctica. They suited what was
often referred to in the weatherhaven as 'the Antarctic experience'. The boys used the adjective
'gnarly' all the time: it meant living what they perceived to be the 'authentic' way in Antarctica,
eschewing the comforts of base for the derring-do they associated with the old days. Almost all the
