Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I was appointed nightwatchman for my last three days at Rothera. It was a duty shared among
all the support staff, to prevent the base from burning down, among other things. On the first night
I was suffering from excruciating period pains, and at dinner someone had told me that my face
looked like a bowl of porridge.
'It's because I have severe menstrual cramps,' I announced loudly.
Silence descended, and I immediately felt better. I didn't want to be an honorary man, and I was
fed up with carrying used tampons around in a plastic bag in my pocket, trying to find somewhere
to abandon them. It was tempting to play people at their own game and stow these bags under their
pillows.
Nightwatch began with a midnight patrol. I was convinced that I was going to be responsible
for the total destruction of base, and then everyone would be able to announce triumphantly that
both writers and women were superfluous to requirements in Antarctica, and that the combination
of the two was nothing short of deadly. At half-past twelve I found myself wedged between two
small huts, shining my torch into the dial of the ice-core freezer. I was especially terrified of melt-
ing the ice cores. I had heard many stories about it happening, producing what they called the most
expensive ice cubes in the history of the world. This dial read ten below. 'Shouldn't it be twenty?'
I thought. 'Or am I being paranoid?' A wrong decision would either mean having my head bitten
off for unnecessarily waking a slumbering electrician, or melting hundreds of thousands of pounds
worth of ice cores. I went to wake the hapless electrician. I was very pleased that I did, as the
freezer was off, but it made me frightened about what might happen next.
In the hangar I told myself cheerily that Antarctica was the world's last refuge from fear, but
the dangers lurking in the shadows of a high, empty, unlit concrete building had been inculcated
too effectively into my psyche. Every two hours I checked the generator and the reverse-osmosis
plant, and at three o'clock I climbed the hill behind base to take a weather observation. At five-
thirty I turned on the coffee urn and the pastry ovens and began the waking-up routine. This in-
volved creeping into pitrooms and shaking slumbering male bodies by the tautly-muscled shoulder.
It should have been a highlight, but somehow it never lived up to expectations.
I got to know the base better during those quiet, dark nights. Rothera was a warren of nooks
and hidden corners. I found places where I hadn't been before, and finally poked my head into the
sauna, which I had never dared to visit during the day. It was an old fridge heated by a spiral coil
in a cast-iron bucket. A torn copy of
Motorcycling World
lay on the floor.
On my last night, the one before the ship left, three people partied all night, so I had company
on watch. At six in the morning we drove down to the ship in the enormous Delta truck, its lights
flashing, and fell out of the high cab on to the wharf. It seemed a good way to end.
∗
I found my cabin, and slept through the journey to Horseshoe, where we collected the clean-up
team. In three days the grease ice had thickened into pancake. When we got back to Rothera the
crew threw a party on board for the winterers. At five o'clock the captain gave the word, the horn
sounded and after a flurry of awkward embraces the fifteen winterers, who wouldn't see another
