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men became coarser and more consciously macho in the field. It was as if they had reverted to a
basic level of mental existence as well as a physical one. Fancying yourself as a bit of a polar hero
is harmless enough, but so much cultural baggage came along with it. They were committed to a
grim type of schoolboy humour. When a field assistant shat in his overalls by mistake, he recoun-
ted what had happened over the radio and it became the story of the day on base; terribly funny,
everyone agreed. If someone left a camera around, you could be sure it would be used for a few
shots of someone else with a cigar up his bum, to edify the owner's mother when the film was sent
home to be developed. When the air unit left for the season they scrawled a final message on the
operations board: 'Shaggin' in the U.K.' A man who had recenty left the ice after two-and-a-half
years sent down a photograph of himself in flagrante . Before the ship arrived to take us out, a list
went up asking if anyone required vegetarian food on board: someone wrote ' Fuck Off ' next to his
name. And so it went on. As Jennie Darlington wrote in the fifties, 'It was like living in a male
locker room.'
Why such a brittle mask? I wondered. The British attitude had evolved from a culture in which
no one grew up. In their emotional lives, the officers of Scott's day and the generation which fol-
lowed lived in a prep school world in which boys died heroically in each other's arms while the
whole school sobbed. How many times had I heard the latterday men of the Antarctic express-
ing regrets for the demise of the days when boys could be boys and girls weren't there? Alastair
Fothergill, the man who had spent a lot of time in the south producing his award-winning Life in
the Freezer television series, was very perceptive on this subject. 'The Antarctic brings out na-
tional characteristics, it really does. The British attitude - though it's changing - is still rooted in
a very outdated vision of the explorer.' As I sat opposite him in his overheated office at the BBC
Natural History Unit in Bristol, Fothergill had continued, 'It's inevitably a very male place. For a
long time it was a playground. It's about keeping people out, and that's a male thing. I get a bit
sick when they moan about the tourists.'
The irony was that, despite the collective fantasy of macho polar endeavour, both Vasco and
Neil, among the few who viewed it with an objective eye, said that they found camping in Scot-
land tougher than in Antarctica. It rained more in Scotland, the tents were smaller, the grass was
damper, there were midges, you had to look further for water and, hell - food and fuel were unlim-
ited on the ice. As for Scott himself, I felt sure he would have been on my side. That was a further
irony, given that the majority of my companions identified with him. As an early biographer wrote,
'In some ways, Scott's sensibility was more like a woman's than a man's.'
I got into the habit of 'doing the weather'. This involved marching out on to the ice sheet and hav-
ing a good look around. When the pilots wanted hourlies, it was tempting to poke your head out
of the weatherhaven for ten seconds and hazard a few guesses, working on the assumption that
nothing much had changed since last time. I felt feeble even thinking about doing this until I saw
everyone else at it. It even had a name: Giving Tent Weather.
As for the inner weather, once again I was struggling to cope with the pressures of being an
outsider. The refreshing interlude at the Bluff notwithstanding, the background hostility I was ex-
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