Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ling in a dell as we reached the brow of the hill, and out beyond it thousands of Adélies were
standing in front of a panoramic view of the Transantarctics.
A pair of penguins had nested on top of a spoke from the Arrol-Johnstone car Shackleton took
south, the first motor vehicle in Antarctica, and the carcass of a dog, well picked over by skuas,
had frozen to the floor of the dog-house. I unlocked the door, and entered the tiny vestibule. The
hut was smaller than Scott's, about thirty feet by twenty, and as everything was arranged around a
central space it seemed more open.
Like the other huts, it had been built in London, then taken down and shipped south in pieces.
The walls were made of smooth wooden planks, and the room was sparsely furnished with pack-
ing cases, a low table and, at the opposite end to the entrance, a hefty cast-iron stove connected to
the roof by a bulky metal flue. A set of sledge runners hung from the rafters, and an assortment
of pots, pans and lamps from the rickety shelves behind the stove. A door in the corner next to
the entrance led to a small, windowless storeroom. In 1916 Ernest Joyce spent three months there
studying penguins, and he, or someone, had scrawled in big letters on the crates at one end of the
hut
Joyce's Skinning Academy
.
'Aren't you going to sing the National Anthem, dear?' drawled Ann, nodding in the direction of
a framed portrait of the King and Queen hanging in the middle of a side wall. Without waiting for
a reply she stopped in front of a row of tins on a shelf behind the stove.
'What's Irish Brawn?' she asked.
'It's like a loaf of bread, but made from jellied pig's head,' I said.
'Eat that a lot over there, do you?'
'Not every day,' I said.
They had pinned postcards around the hut - a painting of an Elizabethan yeoman, and B. D.
Sigmund's 'The Bells of Ouseley'. I too carried a dozen familiar images around with me on my
travels. I usually propped them up wherever I happened to be sleeping. They reminded me who
I was, I suppose, like the creased photographs businessmen carry in their wallets. Mine were not
rosy-cheeked children but images that had moved me over the years, now comforting and familiar
landmarks in the daily blur of visual stimulation. Most of them depicted some kind of universal
human theme, like Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus' or Stanley Spencer's 'Resurrection',
1
but one of
them was Manet's boring old 'Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase'.
'I could live here,' said Ann, setting up her tripod in a corner.
'Especially if he was here,' I said. 'I'd like to have been picked for his team.'
'What, more than Scott's?' she said, feigning horror.
'Much more,' I replied. I was sitting at the head of the low table in the middle of the room.
'Smile!' Ann said before letting off a puff of light.
Back in Britain, on a wet afternoon in August, I had met Shackleton's greatest living apostle. He
had invited me to his home on Blackheath in south-east London, and I had been obliged to push
my way through dripping branches to find his house. When I got there, he had forgotten I was
coming. His name was Harding Dunnett, he was in his eighties, and he described himself as 'a bit
of an ancient mariner, these days'. Like Shackleton, he went to Dulwich College, and as a school-
boy he could remember seeing the
James Caird
arrive in 1924, by then resembling an old rowing
