Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ald Smith, and he converted it into a tiny shooting lodge. Wilson and Scott went to see Smith in
London in 1905 to ask him to publish Scott's
Voyage of the Discovery
, which he did. They all
became friends, and when Wilson was commissioned to write a report on grouse disease by the
Department of Agriculture, Smith lent him the bungalow. Wilson spent months there, and wrote in
his diaries about long walks when he saw snipes and corncrakes, curlews and peewits, tawny owls
and golden plover and greenfinches feeding on dandelion seed. Scott used to visit, and once, when
they went stalking, he let a deer pass unharmed 'because it was so pretty'.
The glen was called Glen Prosen, and in 1917 Smith's widow commissioned a monument to
Scott and Wilson and their dead companions. By the time I got there the bungalow had become
a bed-and-breakfast, so I slept in a back room, like them, and watched the lights of Kirriemuir
twinkling from the balcony beyond the row of birches and the two plane trees where the shepherd
had tethered his cow. The monument was fashioned out of red sandstone, and the inscription read,
'For the journey is done and the summit attained and the barriers fall.'
∗
Circuit training took place in a cargo hold. The teacher shouted 'Come on lads,' adding as an af-
terthought, 'Come on Sara.' The smell of diesel put me off, besides which it was very noisy, and
the hold looked like a Heath Robinson design for a Victorian canning factory. People were becom-
ing bored. The bar, in which we read and re-read a six-month-old copy of
Hello!
magazine, was
always unevenly dotted with men, like churchgoers at a poorly attended matins. In the mess, meals
were despatched in less than half an hour, though the menus were models of imaginative ingenu-
ity. They were typed up each day, as in an old-fashioned hotel on the coast, and featured items
such as Cold Cuts, which was a euphemism for Spam. Cheese and Biscuits followed Dessert on
the menu as regularly as petrels followed feeding whales, but never once did they make an appear-
ance. Grilled Fresh Herring was announced one day, marking quite an event in maritime history;
presumably the cook had let a line down over the side.
At night, when the water darkened, we became particularly desperate. At the end of March the
nights are long in the Southern Ocean. The videos screened were so appalling that the best attended
was
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Al, the medal-winning cook from the north of England,
threw a drinks party in his cabin. It was a characteristically generous gesture. Gin was scarce on
the
Bransfield
.
'In the old days, at Stonington.' Ben told us, perched on the edge of Al's bunk and gripping his
mug of gin as the ship did a little roll, 'we had so much gin that we used it to clean the windows.'
We had several more room parties after that, and people began finding vodka and tonics in their
tooth mugs in the morning. Later, someone had the idea of sundowners on deck, and we gathered
round half-frozen wineboxes in our balaclavas and parkas. Sometimes we hadn't seen the sun all
day, though if we were lucky it found a porthole in the clouds just before it disappeared, and the
vertical faces of the bergs shone briefly with a virulent salmon light.
Then suddenly, when I woke up one morning and drew back the curtain, it was all gone. I ran
up to the monkey deck and looked around. It was a clear and sunny day, the water was grey but
sparkling and the blank horizon stretched for 360 degrees around us, flat and featureless. It was all
