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over. I watched a sooty albatross hovering over the stern. It was just as the explorers back at home
had told me it would be - as if I had come back from another planet. A terrible grief flooded over
my heart as if someone I loved very much had died.
On 1 April we arrived at East Cove in the Falklands, and woke up to see gently modulating
hills, rays of sunshine piercing the clouds like a Blake painting and miles of dun-coloured grass.
The Bransfield moored alongside a pontoon to refuel and a notice went up in the mess advising
us that shore leave was not granted, and that in order to avoid being shot we should remain on
board. A cormorant perched on a container on deck. The sun was shining on the port as we finally
approached. Stanley still looked like Toytown - neat little coloured boxes with bright roofs nest-
ling among dark green bushy foliage, with the cemetery at one end. Shackleton wrote in 1916 of
Stanley: 'The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one
end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the
graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.' Beyond it the
camp 1 stretched out flat, to the south. We languished on the monkey deck, and the people who had
been on the ice for thirty months looked hunted.
A small boat ploughed to and fro as we waited. Our mail came up, and we fed on it obscenely
in the bar while the builders shouted football results. Jeremy, the Patron of my expedition, wanted
to know more about Incinolet toilets, details of which had been included in my last letter. He was
troubled by the distinction between solids and liquids, and was anxious to know what one did about
diarrhoea. I privately vowed never to send a child of mine to public school.
In the evening we went ashore, and Steve, the man who had given me the doggy t-shirt at La-
goon, and who had not lived in a cash economy for two-and-a-half years, forgot to take any money.
We visited all the pubs. The Globe had whitewashed walls and a brick-red corrugated-iron roof. It
was a hotel once, patronised by seamen glad to be on land, as we were, a spit-and-sawdust place
with a pool table and Nazareth playing on the jukebox. At the end of the evening everyone went
off to Deano's, but I couldn't face it. I liked going home on to a ship.
Cargo began the next morning, and I spent the day in Stanley. From open windows bursts of the
Forces radio station took me halfway home. I walked up to the museum along Ross Road West,
beyond the memorial to the Battle of the Falklands in 1914, when Sturdee routed von Spee, and
past skeletal hulls poking out of the grey water like icebergs. The Falklands attracted shipwrecks
like a siren, and their presence rooted the islands in their past. The mizzen mast from HMS Great
Britain was lying on the shore. The ship limped into the Falklands in 1886, having been driven
back from Cape Horn, and remained afloat for fifty years, when it was beached at Sparrow Cove.
In 1970 the vessel was salvaged and returned to Bristol, where Brunel had designed it. I can re-
member walking in a crocodile from school to watch it coming triumphantly home up the Avon.
At that end of town the odd horse and sheep grazed in quiet gardens and washing flapped en-
ergetically from drooping lines, diminutive fragments of colour in the vast southern sky. The mu-
seum was in Britannia House, a wooden chalet with heart-carved shutters and a jumble of rusty
canons in the garden. Inside, they had an 1895 symphonium. It was a coin-operated jukebox from
the Globe Hotel in a big polished wood case, like a wide grandfather clock, and its vertical silver
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