Land of the Long Day

20 – The End Cometh!

With arrival of Cranfield and the Beaver at Skelton Depot our four months of calm and seclusion came to an abrupt and complete end. For up to a month at a time our independence of the outside world had been complete, we had heard no opinions but our own, and yielded no man's will, we did not even have to step aside for the pedestrians, we had neither received bills in the mail nor run out of bread, it had been four months with a complete absence of stress, noise or unwanted people.
Cranfield destroyed all that at one blow, unwillingly perhaps, but completely. He brought orders from Our Leader, half our dogs were to be shot and not brought home, "They were no longer needed!"
Our dogs! The sledge meter for this journey alone stood at 1350 miles, altogether we must have done over 2,000, the old doggies had stood by us in fairest calm and foulest blizzard, through thick and thin, in times of full and plenty and times of short commons. With 1,200 lbs aboard and soft snow they never complained, they dug in paws and heaved like true soldiers, sharp sea‑ice might cut their paws, they licked them free of blood and went on without so much as a resentful look, they were better men than I ever was, Gunga Din!
Reason went out the tent doorway and I flatly refused, at that moment I would have shot Hillary himself with little hesitation, there being no legal jurisdiction in that unclaimed land. Only a tractor‑driver could have given such a stupid order without even considering the psychological effect it might have on us. I made a last desperate appeal to Richard to ignore any such stupidity and sledge home, we had the supplies and would only take a week.
"For God's sake, man!" I cried, "It's only a couple of hundred miserable miles!" I had some quite insane idea of passing by the Base and evil people and retreating up the coast living on seal. But Brookes with his military mind refused to merely defer an inevitable reckoning, and to him as a Navy man, orders were orders. Blind obedience does not in my eyes constitute a good officer and I damned him for his stand. Just recently, forty years later, he wrote asking my pardon for "letting you down, when you wanted to sledge home". There was nothing to forgive, the guilt lay elsewhere.
I must have been fairly oozing contempt and outrage but when Cranfield offered him the rifle, Richard stood frozen and irresolute.
"No!" he said in a strangled voice, "No! I can't!"
"OK, then I'll do it," said Cranfield and vanished towards the dog lines. To this day I cannot explain why I never stopped him. I could have done a dozen things, I could have taken the rifle off him and clouted him across the ear with the butt. I could have said "I'd rather do it myself!" taken the rifle and thrown the bolt away in the snow, I could have sprayed lead into his bloody aeroplane, I could have ‑‑. But I didn't. Perhaps the last eighteen weeks had been more stressful than we imagined, perhaps, like the Greenlanders that Howarth describes in "The Sledge Patrol" we had become so unused to dealing with violence and confrontation that we could not handle it when it suddenly reappeared. Perhaps it was the sinking feeling that we were back in the whole rotten world.
As shots rang out I simply collapsed in a sick heap on my sleeping bag, Hillary was a swine and always had been, Brookes was a piker and an unimaginative moron who could only "obey orders", Cranfield was an insensitive sod with the soul of an air‑filter! In desperation I scribbled some lines of doggerel poetry in a field book of which I only remember a few:

A dog is a man's best friend, 'tis said,
I've heard so again and again,
But never, you'll note, and I say it with pain,
That a dog's best friend is Man!

Cranfield reappeared, and again I did nothing. I am, I hope, the mildest of men, but until then, I had taken it for granted that I could at least take some sort of action when it was needed. I have at times quite casually knocked a man down for swearing at me, another for not obeying orders, another because he seemed to need it, I have pulled a gun on a man because I didn't like the look of his face, with no more second thoughts than one would have on pulling out a handkerchief, I have fired shots at men for no other reason than the fact that they were firing at us. And here, with the bodies of our faithful companions reddening the snow, I did nothing. I have never felt proud of myself since, when the crunch came I failed, and it leaves the same kind of sense of shame that men experienced afterwards having tamely surrendered in war just because they were in a difficult situation. I could easily have sledged home alone, it would have been an enjoyable experience, and who would have stopped me? No six men that I know! (though, when it came to the point, I am sure Richard would have come as well), all it needed was a positive lead from me. And I did nothing!
Ken Blaiklock had led the way for the Crossing Party from the Weddell Sea coast with his dogs, Ken having spent some seven winters in the Antarctic. They arrived at the Pole thin and emaciated after the strain of keeping ahead of the fast‑moving Sno‑cats. The dogs were flown out by the Americans from the Pole to Scott Base at great expense, ‑ and immediately shot on Hillary's orders. Blaiklock was in a similar state of shock, but like me he did nothing! In the dourest of silence our belongings were thrown in the plane, the sledges clamped on the bomb racks under the wings and the remaining nine dogs put in the back. I sat amongst them in sick isolation with an arm round Fido, another round Dismal, slightly comforted by the presence of these old stalwarts but not daring to look for other familiar fur patches. I had already seen that Sis was gone, dear, gallant fluffy little Sis.
We droned around Mount Discovery in the stinking aeroplane, engine howling, with the heater warming the place to the point where blubber stains in the dogs fur thawed and the stench grew unsupportable, the dogs panted and the windows frosted over. Fido broke loose and draped his massive head over Cranfield's shoulder.
"Out! Fido, you old sod!" said Bill, struggling in vain and polishing frost off the windscreen with a glove. "How am I supposed to fly this bloody aeroplane?"
He navigated us home through a hole in the frost only inches across, but to me whether we crashed or arrived seemed of little concern. Finally came the thumps and rumble as skis touched snow and we taxied to a halt only a couple of hundred yards below Scott Base at the control huts. Bill opened the door, dogs cascaded out, I threw down sleeping bags and gear and wearily, wearily and stiffly climbed down. We had dashed past only yards from this same point four months before when we set out full of hope and excitement, I had thought often of returning the same way, dashing up with light sleds, dogs yelping, waving to the men, pats for the dogs, handshakes and congratulations but instead, we had, exactly nothing.
There must have been a cameraman there because British Petroleum have a film which shows two very hirsute men and some very hirsute dogs tumbling out, but it didn't register. Richard and I stood stupidly, now what? We had come back from many journeys but never this way. John Claydon appeared smiling broadly,
"By Jove you've done a wonderful trip!" he said, and put out a hand, and I gazed at it numbly.
In a daze we spanned the remaining dogs and went through the ritual, fed them, and walked tiredly up the hill over the tide crack as we had done a thousand times, but before it had always been with a sense of pride in what we had done and of pleasure in being home, now neither us nor our dogs were wanted any longer nor was it any longer our home! We dropped our stained sleeping bags off in the sledging hut and took off anoraks already becoming odiferous in the warmth and lumbered along the covered way to the Mess Hut. I pushed back the heavy doors and there was a blast of light and sound and smells of stale food. The room was full of total strangers with the dour expressionless faces that our countrymen exhibit to those unknown and we had not seen a strange face in a year but none of them so much as glanced at us. I picked up the kettle on the diesel stove, and, as usual, it was nearly empty. Somehow, that familiar fact was comforting, a touch of sanity remained.
"Christ!" I said, automatically, "Can't you blokes even keep a bloody kettle full?" I stepped into the kitchen sink, there was no Buck, only a heavily‑built man in a whitish singlet. I filled the kettle and silently made two cups of cocoa from the galley stove and passed one to Richard. I longed for the quiet and cold of the tent, the heat was oppressive and the presence of so many strangers was terrifying. I forced myself to sit down but what I wanted to do was to walk back out into the clean outdoors we had lived in so long. Finally one spoke;
"You blokes have a good trip?"
I thought awhile, sipping cocoa.
"Not too bad," I said at last. "Not bad, I suppose!"

Dinner was served soon after and we sat in silence and found it no easier to eat than our standard pemmican sludge, all enjoyment of food seemed to have gone, I don't believe that ever again have I felt so totally depressed. I made an effort to talk to some stranger,
"You know we climbed Huggins?" I said not being able to imagine anything else to say.
"Oh?' said he in a totally uninterested tone, "What's that?".
"One of the hills over there." I said and the conversation died.
We found unoccupied bunks and spent an unhappy night and, over the next few days, wound down. We washed off the accumulated grime of 129 days, found, somewhere, our kitbags of spare gear and put on clean and oddly strange clothes. All of the party except the aircrew had already gone home on various ships.
Sir E passed by, "Oh, are you back?" said he and passed on and I did not so much as knock him down. Bunny Fuchs and party were expected within a week, having given up all pretence of doing "Scientific " work and were intent on making the crossing at all costs in under a hundred days. They did few more seismic soundings after the Pole and none after Plateau Depot so it was left to Dr A. Crary and a USARP party to sound the Skelton Glacier and find it was a fiord with three thousand feet of ice, resting, as we suspected, on another two thousand feet of seawater.
Year after year "Bert" Crary was to criss‑cross the whole continent with Sno‑cat parties doing seismic soundings, until, along with similar work done by the Russians, the depth and volume of the entire Polar Ice Sheet was known, but who, outside a chosen few, know of Crary? I would have welcomed Jim Bates and his inevitable comments on the "great Scientific Expedition !"
We met the next year's wintering party, there was Murray Robb, the engineer, an ex‑marine man and fisherman from The High Country and Timaru. I came to know him as one of the finest men I was ever to meet. Then there was Blue, a ginger‑headed Army sergeant down to test Brengun Carriers in the snow, Buzz Burrows, another engineer; Chappie, a slightly nutty goon who was an RNZAF technician. Then there were two physiologists, Griff Pugh who had been on Everest with Sir E, and Jim Adams who I believe was in the British Army. They made my life miserable by testing our resistance to cold. They put our hands in freezing mixtures in a calorimeter and wrote down temperatures.
"Now," Pugh would say. "Would you describe it as a dull pain, a sharp pain or an agonizing pain?" The only sensible response would have been to bend the whole contraption round his head but we were still not our usual independent selves and could be taken advantage of. Pugh and Adams even talked me into a short trip with the dogs to test a new tent and propane cooker. Richard had retreated into an impervious shell and spoke to no one, the expedition was at an end and he wanted no more. I had to remeasure some snow stakes beyond the pressure but protested it was not practical to sledge with three.
"How fast do you travel ?" asked Pugh, and when I said "At a fast trot " he claimed "I can langlauf as fast as that !" Pugh had in fact been a British Olympic ski representative away back but after the first three miles he found difficulty in keeping up and we had to stop. He hooked a pole over the handle bars and made the dogs pull him which was an unfair load. The trip was not a success, the dogs were bored and so was I, the zest had gone out of the whole game. Pugh was fussy and pedantic in the tent and insisted on everything being laid out his way and I thought it odd that a man of his experience had not learned to be more unobtrusive. I liked Adams much better.
The crunch came on our return to Base, when Pugh kept coming up and muttering about how he wanted to do some physiological experiments on a seal.
"Well," said I. "As long as you pick out an old bull, we can always use it for dog‑tucker. There are plenty down by the pressure!" He came up alongside again, "About this seal..." and I saw light.
"Oh, ho!" says I, "You want me to kill it for you, is that it?"
"Well, yes!" said Griff. We wandered down and I picked out an old bull and despatched him, like Trotsky, with an iceaxe. Pugh cut a small incision in the hide and pushed in a thermometer for a few seconds and studied it.
"Right!" he said. "That's all, lets go!" I was more than a little outraged. "Do you mean to bloody tell me," says I. "That you wanted a half ton seal killed just so you could find out its bloody blood temperature?"
"Well," said Pugh. "I wasn't quite sure ..."
"Keep your asinine bloody little Pommy friend away from me," I stormed at Our Leader, "Or I'll do for the little bastard !"
Sir E does not have many friends but those he has he will not have criticised and he intimated that if Pugh wanted to kill every seal in the bay, that was OK with him. A certain degree of coolness was predictably springing up between Adams and Pugh and Sir E immediately cut Adams from his circle of acquaintances. The stupidities and arrogance of physiologists and biologists never ceases to astound me, like Reischek who marvelled over the number of rare stitchbirds remaining on Little Barrier and proceed to collect dozens as specimens. Later there was a case on Deception Island, where, after an eruption, penguins were found to be getting their feet cooked in boiling water round the sea edge. Some biological lemon was sent down to kill and collect pairs of birds for study, and he not only collected two Adelies, two Rockhoppers, two Chinstraps, two Gentoos and two King Penguins, but also two of a species so rare that only six were known to exist!

The Admiral stirred his scotch‑on‑the‑rocks with a straw in pensive mood. (As well as being an Admiral, he was also CINPAC, who had ordered the ships to sail parallel courses to locate the Indo‑Pacific Rise.)
"Y'know, Bernie," he rumbled. "There's one thing I really do envy ya. Where the hell do you find men these days like some you got?"
"Like who, for example?"
"Like that Robb guy. You know, big hard‑lookin' feller!"
"Oh, Murray Robb? Yes, old Murray is a pretty good chap. What you would call a "Westerner", he came from a big cattle ranch, typical High Country lad."
"Typical, hell!" muttered the Admiral in some disbelief. "Did you hear what happened over at McMurdo the other day? Seems he walked into a hut full of SeaBees and Marines and one of them had a transistor radio tuned into one of your guys on a phone‑patch to his girl-friend back home. Y'all know how 'tis, this guy was gettin' a bit sentimental and that hut‑full off jackasses was laffin' fit to bust, and' your man Rob didn't like it one little bit.
""Turn that Goddam set off!" he says. Well, our feller was stoopid enough to say somethin' rude. They tell me there was just two cracks, the second when that damn leatherneck hit the boards, and he stayed there! Robb just reached out and turned that set off. Click!
""Any of you blokes want to turn it on again?" he asks, an' they tell me you could hear a pin drop! What a guy! Christ! I woulda given a year's pay to have seen it! There was about forty men there and he just faced them all down!"
"He did have the moral advantage," said I, lightly.
"Moral advantage, hell!" snarled The Admiral. "He just had guts, plain old‑fashioned guts ! Do you realise I might have to fight a war with that bunch of panty‑waists ? God! Gimme another drink, I need it!"
I heard an aftermath to this episode from another source. It seems Murray was not content to deal out summary justice, he sought out Commander Flynn, the U.S. Naval OC at McMurdo.
"Look, Commander," he said. "I don't like findin' your boys listenin' to ours when they are talkin' back home on the radio." Flynn was a cheerful, rotund Irishman, well liked by all with good reason.
"I'll agree with that, Murray, " he said. "But you know how 'tis, they have their own radios in their huts and there is no way we can police them. Mind you," he added, possibly noticing Murray had a skinned set of knuckles. "If I see one of our guys round tomorrow with a black eye, I'm not going to do anything about that, either!"
The Admiral was wrong, as long as the U.S. Navy has men in it like, Cmdr Flynn, John Cadwallader, or the SeeBee Dick Bowers, they have little to worry about!

More tractors had come down to replace the ones left at the Pole by Sir E and The Old Firm, only the Half‑track and the other Weasel remaining of the ones we knew, and the Weasel was out of action having been dropped into a meltwater pool by Wally Tarr. I drained the mixture of oil and water from the sump and got it going, working with spanner again under some stupid piece of machinery was better than sitting about moping and depressed in an agony of self‑criticism. All that I had to show for two year's work was to discover I was a hopeless indecisive wimp, and that was hard to live with, nor did the inevitable self-comparison with Robb's action make it any easier.
The "Endeavour" was back and at the ice‑edge, waiting to take the crossing party back to New Zealand as well as Sir Ed and the air‑group. I took Claydon down to the ship in the Weasel and we climbed over the bow by a rickety ladder. We were offered drinks by Kirkwood and the officers aboard and I have always claimed since that it was on "Endeavour" I learned to drink gin, their Navy rum being unspeakable and obviously akin to Newfie "Screech" which is made from the residue of rum barrels with raisins and stiffened with a few cans of pure "alky".
Claydon and I climbed down over the bow again and there stood a great massive Emperor penguin.
"You know," said Claydon with a gravity which must have owed something to the gin, "I think he would really like to meet our chaps at the Base, they might have a lot in common, we should make introductions!" Now an Emperor is a heavy bird and I have seen one knock a 120lb husky silly with a blow from a flipper. Claydon stalked behind and then with a dive which suggested he once played first five eights for Air Force, took him in a rugby tackle. There was a bag in the back of the weasel and we stuffed the Emperor in, taking some stunning blows from the flippers.
Then, probably due to the recent immersion in water, the Weasel refused to start, I walked up to the Yank‑Camp and borrowed another for a tow and away we went Claydon driving ours in front. The Emperor thrashed about and I saw a flipper come free and Claydon took a clout across the ear that might have laid low a lesser man! We arrived at Base and our Emperor was released in the Mess Hall and stood quite unperturbed, ducking his head and looking about. Most of the new men had never seen one and crowded about while Claydon solemnly made introductions.
Sir E appeared, "Who brought that damned bird in here?" and I slipped away, leaving John to explain!
At midnight, the phone, which was now laid on to MacTown, rang.
"The airstrip is going out to sea!" said an American voice. "If you two guys want an airflight back home, be over here in half an hour! It'll be the last plane for the year!"
Someone, I think it was Chappie, a new Airforce erk, drove us over to McMurdo, over our airfield and up over The Gap. It was one of those completely insane nights, though it was long past Midsummer's Eve. There was a party in progress as we left, unnoticed, and out on the airfield a lone figure dressed in a vivid, zigzag‑pattern jersey, sat alone in the vastness of snow, playing a nocturne on a piano. Don't ask me to explain, I never could and I was there! Chappie dropped us at the Heloport at McMurdo (in reality, a few chain of flat, packed rubble) and departed on some unconfided business.
Our half‑track Fergie chuffed quietly by, on it was John Claydon puffing a cigar, dressed in a shaggy bearskin coat. He doffed a top hat and bowed.
"Lovely evening!" he called and passed on. Had the March Hare hopped by I would not have even blinked. Then there came the howl of an overstressed V8 engine and a Bren-gun Carrier hurtled into view down Mainstreet, broadsided the corner in a shower of mud and snow on shrieking tracks, and bucketed off touching ground at every third bump; Blue was collecting bets as to who had the fastest vehicle in McMurdo!
Later I heard an American See Bee walked up to Blue and plunked down a stack of green backs.
"That says I got me a vehicle that can beat that tank of yours!" said he.
"Done!" says Blue.
The course was laid out from MacTown to Scott Base, through The Gap and over our airfield. I suppose a Bren-gun carrier can hit about 50 and Blue came bucketing through the gap like a bull gone mad and had switched his engine off at Scott Base before the American vehicle had appeared at the Gap, more than a mile away. I think it was merely a Weasel. They did have some light tanks, one was called an "Ontos" which mounted 6 recoiless rifles, three aside, but it suffered the common problem of ice building up inside the tracks until they broke.
Americans could not understand why he was called "Blue", and our explanation that it was because he had red hair did not seem to help.

To the west a giant Globemaster cargo plane sat on a dirty ice runway, but separated from us by a slowly widening lane of water, calm and dark. There was a splashing as a seal hauled itself out on the floe. Beyond were the great mountains, silhouetted against the evening sky, to the left Huggins, not so inviolate as it been for the last million years or so, in the centre, Lister, monarch of the range, which we were not to climb for another four years.
An American helicopter windmilled in from the airstrip and we were bundled aboard. You know the kind of dream you have when a policeman is about to arrest you and the face dissolves and you suddenly see it is your wife? Well, it was just like that. The pilot of the chopper, clad in a close‑fitting exotic uniform and a pale blue Bone Dome turned and stared into the passenger compartment. The face wore an RAF‑style moustache.
"Bet you didn't expect to see me!" cackled a familiar voice.
"Cranfield!" I said faintly. "What the hell are you up to?"
"I'm your bloody pilot tonight boy, har, har! Do up your seat belts, your ruddy plane is drifting out to sea!" We racketted and gyrated and vibrated our way over the black still water to the ice runway, etched with thaw pits around every oil spill. I idly kicked a seal which was approaching in far too familiar a manner. We filed aboard with fifty others, the Loadmaster ticking off names, but by some oversight, while Richard's name was on the manifest, mine was not.
"Tell me," said the Loadmaster, earnestly. "Are you really supposed to be on this flight? How long have you been down?" I struggled to make a reply.
"Two years," I said finally, "Two years and thousands of bloody miles!

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