Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Yep. The guys at the Berg Field Center gave us this rough map of what the sea ice is looking
like this year - in so far as anyone has seen much of it, which they haven't really, this early in the
season. We're marking any new cracks.'
'Hey, look at this!' said Lucia, peering over the Beard's shoulder. 'Wooville's made it on to the
map!' I went to look at the man's clipboard. Someone had inscribed
Wooville
on the map next to a
tiny black triangle representing our hut, and it was followed, in parentheses, by our radio call sign,
which was the Artheads.
1
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Ice was everywhere in those days, like sand in the desert, though it was never uncomfortable. I
would not have wished to be elsewhere. Shackleton wrote a poem called 'Two Ways', and I tried
to remember it so I could stick it on the wall of the Clinic.
You may love the calm and peaceful days,
And the glorious tropic nights . . .
But all the delight of the summer seas,
And the sun's westing gold
Are nought to me for I know a sea
With a glamour and glory untold . . .
Of course, we never washed while we were in camp. We did have a fair supply of clothes,
however. I was reading Nansen's
Farthest North
at the time.
'Listen to this,' I said to Lucia, who was lying on the table and sticking needles into her arms.
'In Franz Josef Land, Nansen and Johansen turned their shirts inside out once a month instead of
washing them. We could try that.'
'You always want to do what the old guys did,' she said, 'despite the fact that they had such a
miserable time. We can go back to McMurdo and use the washing machines.'
'What about the “dry washing” system then?' I persisted. 'Loads of the polar explorers adopted
that.'
'What does it involve?' Lucia asked patiently, wiggling a needle.
'It's quite simple,' I said. 'You put away dirty clothes until the ones you're wearing are even
dirtier, then the old ones seem clean, so you can change them round.'
She started laughing, so I decided to keep this gripping subject to myself. I was especially keen
on other people's ingenuity. Admiral Byrd used to wash a different third of his body each night,
and I had heard an engineer on station explaining how to make a pair of underpants last a month.
(Switch them back to front for a week, then turn them inside out and do a week each way round.)
Outside, Wooville had created its own landscape of windscoops and drifts, and inside it looked
increasingly like home, scattered with the ratty pages of a typescript, balls of tissues tinted with
blue watercolours, and wodges of photocopied diaries. We established inter-hut communications
on our VHFs.
'Dinner is about to be served,' Lucia's voice would crackle over the radio. 'All residents of
Wooville proceed to the Dining Wing.' After three weeks I solved the intractable camp problem
