Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dead you can get. Well,
chacun á son góut
. I could understand the appeal of answering the ques-
tion, 'Can it be done?' If you did it, no one could ever ask the question again. It was yours. All the
journeys made by the almost-deads were treks through monomania. They were undertakings of the
mind. Yet writing a topic was like that, so perhaps we were doing the same thing, only in different
ways.
∗
The Race around the World was the most enduring Christmas tradition at the South Pole, and it
began at four o'clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. The two-mile course involved three cir-
cuits around the Pole. They had rigged up a starting line and engaged a couple of timekeepers, and
participants could complete the course however they liked. One skied, one sat on a sledge towed
by a snowmobile, someone else rode a hobby horse and a bunch of committed drinkers were driv-
en round on the back of a dozer. The most imaginative competitor had taken the rowing machine
from the weights room, loaded it on to a sledge and was towed round the course, rowing all the
way.
I jogged around and developed a violent headache which, aggravated by the altitude, slid seam-
lessly into migraine. I was obliged to sneak off to the medical facility under the dome and lie down.
The doctor was a descendant of Otto Sverdrup, the distinguished Arctic explorer and the captain
of Nansen's
Fram
on the
Farthest North
journey. Her name was Eileen, and she put me on oxygen
for two hours.
I was marooned in a large consulting room hung with posters of Neil Armstrong wobbling about
on the moon. In the radiography room alongside it, Eileen had kept the unwieldy equipment from
the sixties, in case the new set broke. My mother is a radiographer, and as a small child I used to
go to work with her in school holidays. The smell of the chemicals, the labels (
'Stop Bath'
) and
the wire racks on the walls for hanging up the X-rays to dry - well, they took me back. It seemed
odd that my childhood should catch up with me at the South Pole.
In 1961 a Soviet doctor at an Antarctic station had removed his own appendix. 'I've trained the
others to do mine,' said Eileen, as if she were talking about having her hair cut. 'I'd have a spinal
anaesthetic so I could talk them through it.' She had also done a short dentistry course.
'The low temperatures make people's fillings and crowns fall out,' she said. 'The glue dries out,
you see.' You had to use your initiative. Forty years ago a Swedish doctor took out a man's eye. He
had never seen an eye operation before, but he was coached by wireless by an ophthalmic surgeon
in Sweden.
Nann came to visit me. She was furious that her husband had failed to send her a Christmas
present. Before she left, I asked her to fetch my Walkman and two particular cassettes from the
Jamesway. I had been storing up a treat in the event of a miserable moment, and I decided its time
had come.
'What are they?' Nann asked when she returned, watching me rip the cellophane off the cas-
settes.
'They're a talking book,' I said. 'The diary of a man called Alan Bennett. He's a living institu-
tion in England.'
