I knew then it was hopeless. I couldn’t be part of their expedition. If I can’t put up with them for a couple of hours, how could I stand a whole year? I’d end up killing someone.
Jack, what the hell are you doing? What the hell are you doing?
As I headed home, the fog on the Embankment was terrible. Buses and taxicabs creeping past, muffled cries of paper boys. Street lamps just murky yellow pools, illuminating nothing. God, I hate fog. The stink, the streaming eyes. The taste of it in your throat, like bile.
There was a crowd on the pavement, so I stopped. They were watching a body being pulled from the river. Someone said it must be another poor devil who couldn’t find work.
Leaning over the parapet, I saw three men on a barge hauling a bundle of sodden clothes on to the deck. I made out a wet round head, and a forearm which one of the gaffs had ripped open. The flesh was ragged and grey, like torn rubber.
I wasn’t horrified, I’ve seen a dead body before. I was curious. And as I stared at the black water I
wondered how many others had died in it, and why doesn’t it have more ghosts?
You’d have thought that brush with mortality would have put things in perspective, but it didn’t. I was still seething when I reached the tube station. In fact I was so angry that I overshot my stop and had to get out at Morden and backtrack to Tooting.
The fog was thicker in Tooting. It always is. As I groped my way up my road, I felt like the last one left alive.
The stairs to the third floor smelt of boiled cabbage and Jeyes’ Fluid. It was so cold I could see my breath.
My room wasn’t any better, but I had my anger to keep me warm. I grabbed my journal and spewed it all out. To hell with them, I’m not going.
That was a while ago.
My room is freezing. The gas jet casts a watery glimmer that shudders whenever a tram thunders past. I’ve got no coal, two cigarettes, and twopence half-penny to last till payday. I’m so hungry my stomach’s given up rumbling because it knows there isn’t any point.
I’m sitting on my bed with my overcoat on. It smells of fog. And of the journey I’ve taken twice a day, six days a week, for seven years with all the other grey people. And of Marshall Gifford, where they call me ‘College’ because I’ve got a degree, and where for three
pounds a week I track shipments of paper to places I’ll never see.
I’m twenty-eight years old and I hate my life. I never have the time or the energy to work out how to change it. On Sundays I trail round a museum to keep warm, or lose myself in a library book, or fiddle with the wireless. But Monday’s already looming. And always I’ve got this panicky feeling inside, because I know I’m getting nowhere, just keeping myself alive.
Tacked above the mantelpiece is a picture called ‘A Polar Scene’ that I cut out from the
Illustrated London News
. A vast, snowy land and a black sea dotted with icebergs. A tent, a sledge and some husky dogs. Two men in Shackleton gear standing over the carcass of a polar bear.
That picture is nine years old. Nine years ago I cut it out and tacked it above the mantelpiece. I was in my second year at UCL, and I still had dreams. I was going to be a scientist, and go on expeditions, and discover the origins of the universe. Or the secrets of the atom. I wasn’t quite sure which.
That’s when it hit me: just now, staring at ‘A Polar Scene’. I thought of the body in the river and I said to myself, Jack, you
idiot
. This is the only chance you’ll ever get. If you turn it down, what’s the point of going on? Another year at Marshall Gifford and they’ll be fishing
you
out of the Thames.
It’s five in the morning and the milk floats are rattling past under my window. I’ve been up all night and I feel amazing. Cold, hungry, light-headed. But amazing.
I keep seeing old man Gifford’s face. ‘But Miller, this is madness! In a few years you could be Export Supervisor!’
He’s right, it is mad. Chuck in a secure job at a time like this? A
safe
job, too. If there is another war, I’d be excused combat.
But I can’t think about that now. By the time I get back, there probably
will
be another war, so I can go off and fight. Or if there isn’t, I’ll go to Spain and fight.
It’s odd. I think war is coming, but I can’t feel much about it. All I feel is relief that Father isn’t alive to see it. He’ll never know that he fought the War to End All Wars for nothing.
And as I said, it doesn’t seem
real
. For this one year, I’m going to get away from my life. I’m going to see the midnight sun, and polar bears, and seals sliding off icebergs into green water. I’m going to the Arctic.
It’s six months till we sail for Norway. I’ve spent the whole night planning. Working out how soon I can hand in my notice and still survive till July. Going through the Army & Navy Price List, marking up kit. I’ve drafted a fitness plan and a reading list, because it
occurs to me that I don’t actually know very much about Spitsbergen. Only that it’s a clutch of islands halfway between Norway and the Pole, a bit bigger than Ireland, and mostly covered in ice.
When I started this journal, I was convinced I wouldn’t be going on the expedition. Now I’m writing because I need to record the exact moment when I decided to do this. The body in the river. If it hadn’t been for that poor bastard, I wouldn’t be going.
So thank you, nameless corpse, and I hope you’re at peace now, wherever you are.
I am going to the Arctic
.
That picture above the mantelpiece, I’ve just noticed. There’s a seal in the foreground. All these years and I thought it was a wave, but actually it’s a seal. I can make out its round, wet head emerging from the water. Looking at me.
I think I’ll take that as a good omen.
I didn’t want to write anything more until we reached Norway, for fear of tempting fate. I was convinced that something would happen to scupper the expedition. It nearly did.
Two days before we were due to set off, Teddy Wintringham’s father died. He left a manor in Sussex, ‘some village property’, a tangle of trusts and a clutch of dependants. The heir was ‘most frightfully cut up’ (about the expedition, not his father), but although he felt ‘absolutely ghastly’ about it, it simply wouldn’t do for him to be gone a year, so he had to scratch.
The others actually talked about cancelling. Would it be ‘responsible’ to go without a medico? I had a job keeping my temper. To hell with ‘responsible’; we’re young, fit men! Besides, if anyone gets sick, there’s a
doctor at Longyearbyen – and that’s only, what, two days away from camp.
It turns out that Hugo and Gus agreed with me, because when we took a vote, only tub-of-lard Algie voted against. And since he’s the last person to stick his neck out, he backed down as soon as he realised he was outnumbered.
Afterwards, I went back to my room and threw up. Then I got out my map of Spitsbergen. The map calls it ‘Svalbard’ because that’s its new name, but everyone uses the old one, which is also the name of the biggest island. That’s where we’re going. I’ve marked our base camp in red. There, in the far north-east corner, on the tip of that promontory. Gruhuken. Gru-huken. I think ‘huken’ means hook, or headland. Not sure about ‘Gru’.
There’s nothing there. Just a name on the map. I love that. And I love the fact that none of the three previous expeditions ever camped there. I want it to be ours.
Everyone was nervous on the train to Newcastle. Lots of hearty jokes from the ’varsity that I couldn’t follow. Gus tried to explain them, but it only made me feel more of an outsider. In the end he gave up, and I went back to staring out of the window.
We had an awful crossing in the mail packet to Bergen and up the Norwegian coast, and Algie and
Hugo were seasick. Hugo vomited neatly, like a cat, but fat Algie spattered all over our luggage. Gus mopped up after him without complaint; apparently they’ve been best friends since prep school. Thank God I’ve got a cast-iron stomach, so at least I didn’t have to worry about being sick. But every night as I rolled in my berth, I dreamed I was back at Marshall Gifford. Every morning I woke up soaked in sweat, and had to tell myself it wasn’t true.
And now here we are at Tromsø. Tromsø, where Amundsen took off in his flying boat nine years ago and was never seen again. Tromsø: three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. My first encounter with the midnight sun.
Only there isn’t any. The gentle, penetrating mizzle hasn’t let up in days. Tromsø is a nice little fishing town: wooden houses painted red, yellow and blue, like a child’s building blocks, and I’m told that it’s backed by beautiful snowy mountains. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen them.
But I don’t care. I love everything about this place, because it isn’t London. Because I’m free. I love the clamour of the gulls and the sea slapping at the harbour walls. I love the salty air and the smell of tar. Above all, I love this soft, watery, never-ending light. Hugo says this is probably how Catholics imagine purgatory, and maybe he’s right. There’s no dawn and
no dusk. Time has no meaning. We’ve left the real world, and entered a land of dreams.
Of course, the gulls mew day and night, as they can’t tell the difference, but I don’t even mind that. I’m writing this with the curtains open on the strange, pearly ‘night’ that is no night. I can’t sleep. The expedition is really happening. Everything we do,
everything
, only makes it more real.
I was right about Gus being a
Boy’s Own
hero. He doesn’t have that square jaw or those clear blue eyes for nothing; he takes being Expedition Leader seriously. The funny thing is, I don’t find that annoying; maybe because I get the sense that the expedition matters almost as much to him as it does to me.
Months ago, he engaged the British vice consul here as our agent. He’s called Armstrong and he’s been busy. He’s chartered a ship to take us to Gruhuken. He’s bought coal, boats and building materials for our cabin, and had them dropped on the coast, to be picked up later. He’s bought a sledge and a team of dogs, and got us permission from the Norwegian Government to overwinter. He’s even engaged rooms for us at the Grand Hotel – which is actually quite grand.
He’s also been urging us to have a word with our skipper, Mr Eriksson, who’s got some sort of problem with Gruhuken. Apparently he doesn’t think it’s
‘right’ for a camp. I’m glad to say that none of us is inclined to discuss the matter with Mr Eriksson, thank you very much, and Gus has quietly made him aware of that. We chose Gruhuken after weeks of poring over the surveys from the previous expeditions. It’s not for some Norwegian sealer to mess up our plans. As long as he gets us there by August, so that we can set up the second camp on the icecap before the winter, he can consider his job done.
The amounts of money we’re spending, it’s frightening!
In London, Hugo was in charge of drumming up finance, and I must say he’s done a good job. He has an almost lawyerly ability to persuade people, and he’s cadged discounts from firms hoping for endorsements, and talked the War Office into donating my wireless equipment for free. Everything else is coming out of the Expedition Fund, which is made up of grants from the University Exploration Club, the Royal Geographical Society, and ‘individual subscribers’ (I suspect aunts); total: £3,000. Gus says we have to ‘be careful’, which is why we’re buying most things in Norway, as it’s so much cheaper there; but ‘being careful’ doesn’t mean the same to him as it does to me.
In Newcastle we bought what we wouldn’t be able to get in Norway: egg powder, Fry’s eating chocolate, and – since Norway is ‘dry’ – spirits, tobacco and cigarettes. That’s when I learned that the rich have different priorities. Third-class passages to Norway; then a crate of Oxford marmalade, and two bottles of champagne for Christmas.
In Tromsø, we’ve been like children let loose in a sweetshop. Mountains of jam, tea, coffee, flour, yeast, sugar and cocoa; tinned fruits, dried vegetables, butter (
not
margarine; I don’t think the others have ever tasted it), and crates of something called ‘pemmican’, which is a kind of preserved meat: one grade for us, another for the dogs.
And our kit! Long silk underclothing (
silk!
), woollen stockings, mittens, mufflers and sweaters; kapok waistcoats, corduroys and waterproof Shackleton trousers; ‘
anoraks
’ (a kind of wind jacket with the hood attached), rubber boots, horsehide gauntlets and balaclava helmets. For the coldest weather, we’ve bought leather boots made by the Lapps, well tarred, and turned up at the toe. You buy them much too big, so you can stuff them with straw when the time comes.
Hugo got the outfitter to take a photo of us in our winter gear. We look like real explorers. Algie’s as round as an Eskimo; Hugo and I are both thin and dark, as if we’ve spent months on hard rations; and Gus
could be Scandinavian, maybe Amundsen’s younger brother.
But it was buying the rest of our equipment that really brought home to me what we’ll be taking on. Tents, sleeping bags, ammunition,
reindeer hides
(as groundsheets, apparently). Above all, a formidable pile of paraffin lamps, headlamps and electric torches. It’s hard to believe now, in this endless daylight, but there’ll come a time when it’s always dark. Thinking of that gives me a queer flutter in my stomach. In a way, I can’t wait. I want to see if I can take it.