Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'It's amazing that it's still tacky,' I said, 'even after the iron freeze of an Antarctic winter.'
'It must have smelt gross when the hut was heated,' Lucia said. 'I don't know how they stood it.
Look at those hockey sticks hanging on the wall. I've not noticed them before. That's an idea. We
could have had a game of hockey.'
'Do you think two people can play on their own?' I said, fingering the spokes of a crumbling
bicycle hooked on the wall of the passageway between the stable and the main part of the hut.
'Sure they can!' she said. 'At Wooville they can, anyway.'
'Yikes,' I said.
Standing in the kitchen in the main part of the hut, I realised how much the place had come to
seem like home. We could have shut our eyes and reeled off the contents of the shelves, from the
red Dutch cheeses that looked like cannonballs, their metal shells corroded, up to the set of tiny
fluted metal pastry moulds.
'You know, I've always wondered', Lucia said, pointing up to a shelf above the officers' bunks,
'why they brought that trilby hat down here.'
'Maybe it was for dressing up - I mean for plays or little cabaret sketches,' I offered. 'They used
to dress up a lot.'
'Do English men often dress up in costume, then?' she asked, looking puzzled.
'It's a class thing, I suppose - it was a kind of male upper-class ritual.' I immediately regretted
saying this, as Lucia was fascinated by the class system and had often interrogated me on the sub-
ject. I had tried to paint her a comprehensible picture, and was irritably aware of my inability to do
so. Sure enough, I had reminded her of unfinished business.
'Now,' she said, 'during the night I was thinking of what you said about “tea” meaning two dif-
ferent things according to which class you come from. You said that “tea” means the evening meal
in working-class circles, and a mid-afternoon cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts
off or one of those things you toast -'
'A crumpet,' I interrupted.
'That's it, a mid-afternoon cup of tea, dainty sandwiches and a crumpet in upper-class circles.
When I come to see you in England' - visiting one another in our respective countries was now a
popular topic - 'if I meet someone on the sidewalk who invites me for tea, how will I know the
time to go and what I'll be fed? Will I have to say, “Excuse me, are you upper-class or working-
class?” in order to find out?'
'Well no, you can tell by the accent . . .' I began, wishing I'd never introduced her to the concept.
'Well, I can't, can I? What's your accent?'
'Sort of middle,' I said miserably.
She threw me a vexed look and then, sensing that I couldn't be bothered to talk about it any
more, she began getting out her pastels. I realised how much I was going to miss her.
It was too dark in the hut to paint properly, so once she had laid out her tools on Scott's desk,
Lucia went outside and shovelled the snow away from the windows. The hut sprang to life like
a mosaic sluiced with water. Scott's bunk was tucked in the left-hand corner at the end furthest
from the door, shielded by a seven-foot-high wooden partition separating his quarters from those
of the officers. The non-commissioned men slept at the other end of the hut, nearest the door. Half
