Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
wearing a blue plaid BAS-style flannel shirt. He was in his eighties and still handsome, with clear,
china-blue eyes and an efflorescence of nut-brown eyebrows, and when his face creased into a
smile he was irresistible.
As a young man his tutor at Cambridge was James Wordie, Scott's chief of scientific staff. Fuchs
spent many seasons in the Antarctic, and in 1950 the Falkland Islands Dependencies Scientific
Bureau was founded under his direction. During the 1955-8 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Ex-
pedition, which he led, with Sir Edmund Hillary in command of the New Zealand support party,
Fuchs crossed the continent for the first time, using dogs and tractors. Together they wrote a book
about it, and in spite of the sno-cats and the radio telephone and the electric sewing machine they
seemed to mark the end of an unbroken line which Scott started when he sailed down the Thames
aboard
Discovery
.
At one lapidary moment in the Fuchs-Hillary account the authors are invited aboard a visiting
ship, and the captain sends a smaller vessel over to fetch them. Faced with a twenty-foot ladder up
to the deck, a sailor asks Hillary if he can manage the climb.
Fuchs was committed to the memory of the dogs. 'I remember very well,' he said, 'back at Ston-
ington in the forties a chap got annoyed and said, “Well, I'm going outside to have a word with
the dogs.” Then he'd come back in and the whole argument had disappeared. I spent years driving
dogs and then I became a tractor man, perforce; though I don't think a dog man ever becomes a
real tractor man.'
When I returned from the ice a magazine ran a competition requesting readers to submit their
all-time favourite newspaper headlines. Several people with long memories had sent in '
DR FUCHS
OFF TO SOUTH ICE
', but only one had saved the cutting from the same newspaper which recorded
a subsequent visit Sir Vivien had made. The sub-editor, following the hallowed principle that if it
works once it can work a second time, had settled on '
DR FUCHS OFF AGAIN
'.
∗
Relief began on Monday morning. We had been divided into four teams, and mine spent the morn-
ing in navy boilersuits and hard hats unloading boxes on the 'tween deck. In the afternoon, we put
the goods away on base. Everyone's eyes lit up when they saw crates of oranges. During the after-
noon we sat on the step in the sunshine, waiting for fresh loads and taking it in turns to fetch pots
of tea and plates of flapjacks.
Mealtimes were changed to bring us in sync with the ship. We had tea at five, then returned to
our duties for a further two hours. It was my birthday on the second day of Relief, and after this
last shift I was drinking tea in the dining room when Al emerged from the kitchen carrying a pink-
and-white cake designed to look like a book and iced with the words
Into The Unknown: Happy
Birthday Sara
, with my name down the spine and a bookmark protruding from the top.
For the last two days we unloaded fuel drums while the winterers took it in turns to visit the
was thickening every day: in Antarctica the freeze and thaw of the sea replaced the rise and fall of
sap. When the sun emerged, the dull matt grey water lit up like a face breaking into a smile.
