23 – Recovery in Hospital

I lay for three months in hospital in Christchurch with ample time to reflect on sins of omission and commission. Jim Lowery lay in the next bed, going through an appalling series of operations in which both his feet were amputated because of frostbite, and his broken jaw wired up all of which made my own frostbitten toes and broken spine seem trivial.
In the first weeks many visitors came, the Governor General, Lord Cobham, various very senior Airforce and Naval officers, top civil servants and politicians, The Admiral dropped in with a gaggle of naval brass, “Goddam it, Bernie, I hate like hell to see a man like you in here, just get out of it real soon will ya?”
Dr Phil Smith, the head of the U.S. Antarctic Research program came by, and his condolences were genuine. Within two years, thanks to him, I was back in the Antarctic and my career went on. Professor Linc Washburn who had wintered many times in the Arctic and who was on a year’s sabbatical in Christchurch not only invited Tania to stay with them but loaned her a Landrover to drive round in. Paul Emile Victor came in, as I lay stiff and staring at the ceiling.
You know, Bernhardt,” he said, “you ‘ave the record for survival in both Arctic and Antarctic. No one else ‘as ever survived a hundred foot fall into a crevasse, let alone with six tons of machinery on top of them!” I thought it a dubious honour myself.
My uncovered feet at the end of the bed turned purple and black, the gashes in my face slowly healed but I could not roll over without help. The nurses in the hospital were silly little giggling girls quite unable to move me, unlike the Navy Orderlies in the US Naval hospital at McMurdo where I had spent a day or two. Not perhaps big on hygiene, but with real sympathy. “Wanna move over do ya?” they would growl dropping cigar ash over the blankets, “No strain a’tall.’ and they would lift me up like a sack of potatoes. When I first arrived at Christchurch General six nurses struggled to do the same thing without effect until one of them slipped a hand in under the plaster cast and pushed on a mass of splintered bone. Believe me, I moved! And quite without further aid.
Slowly memories came back, of emerging from the tent into the bright Polar sun to find a Snocat rumbling over and Tom Couzens and Jim Lowery preparing to leave. Where were they going? Oh, just over to that rock over there to complete the gravimetric traverse. You know that’s at least five miles away? Oh, think so? It is difficult putting the brakes on keen young men and I had been preaching caution enough times that I was beginning to get impatient looks. I looked about from the roof of a Sno-cat.
We were in a bay perhaps ten miles across and ice, marked with occasional black rock flowed in from the south, west and north-west. About 15 miles north was the great Barne Glacier, to the southwest perhaps thirty miles away was flat-topped Albert Markham, partly hidden in cloud. The ice we stood on was undoubtedly aground, not part of the ice-shelf. It seemed flat and we had not seen a single crevasse. There was no major ice-flow coming off the land to cause crevassing nor could I see any suspicious humps and hollows. Couzens and Lowery stood looking at me with ill-disguised impatience, they wanted to get onto their first mainland rock, as I had all those years before.
With hindsight I should have said “Turn that machine off and stay in the camp until we have done a recce with the dogs! Instead
“All right!” I said with some reluctance, “But I’ll come with you to see what the rock is too!” and I picked up a day pack with hammer and notebook and we roared off. Now I had once sworn I would never ride in one of the Sno-cats, especially after seeing the horrific pictures taken by the Crossing Party of this same machine suspended over gaping chasms. The ground pressure was reputed to less than that of a man on skis, but the machine still weighed six tons. Never break your own rules. Then I had long ago decided that the Cats would stay out on the level shelf and only the dog sleds move up into the mountains, and though the way seemed flat enough, the snow was surprisingly deep, a least a foot of loose stuff which can hide a great deal of what lies beneath.
I almost asked Couzens to let me drive, but reflected that the machine was his responsibility and did not want to put him in the awkward position of having to obey an order that he might do only reluctantly. We laughed and joked in a carefree way and then suddenly appeared to be precipitated into another dimension. We were falling, upside down, iron clanging off walls of ice. I had the slightest impression of seeing the right front drive pontoon shoot up in the air, of a roll to the right and a crunch of snow against the sno-cat body and a long fall. I had time to think, “Must be a crevasse !“ and then, “If we survive this one, we will be lucky !“ and then came a monumental crash.
It was about 10 o'clock in the morning. I came to, pinned upside down in a cramped fashion in a tiny space between the seats and instrument panel. What had been the Cat roof was flattened to within a foot of so of the seats. My knees were in my face but I was able to wriggle into a more comfortable position.
“Now, think sensibly” I thought. “The others will come, sooner or later, don’t get frostbite, try to get out.” My balaclava had come off and my ears were already painful. I could not get a hand up but was able to wriggle it back over my ears, so I still have them. Lucky, that. I kicked at the crumpled door of the Cat, it seemed totally unyielding and in fact was hard against an ice wall and the jolt sent waves of pain up my mashed-up spine.
There was a groan and Lowery came to. He was pinned in more tightly than me but Couzens did not move and it later appeared he was killed instantly by the steering wheel. Above my head on the drivers side, light filtered in and ice gleamed a few feet away.
“If I can get out,” I assured Lowery, “I’ll get an ice-axe out of the back and cut us out of this damned thing.” Sheer braggadocio, the gear shift had me trapped and in any case I was not to walk again for many months. Snow began to sifter down, the heat from the engine faded, the cold crept in as the hours passed.
“They’ll never find us !“ said Lowery at one point, but I made cheerful noises. “They won’t come tonight,” I had to admit. “Not with this snow. They’ll think we have stopped waiting for it to clear. But they’ll get up at eight tomorrow and if its clear, Murray will come looking! Till then keep wiggling your toes !“
“What if it doesn’t clear?
“Well, in that case, we’re dead!”
“I suppose we could pray,” he said at one point.
“Why?” said I, shortly.
“Well, its kind of the traditional thing to do.”
My scientific background was not that easily put aside.
“Look,” I said. “Whether we are rescued or not is already decided. If we had a weather map we could see it. If this snow passes over, Murray will be here at eight, and it doesn’t clear we’ve had it. Simple isn’t it?”
“I don’t think I can last that long “ said Lowery weakly and indeed after eighteen hours or so he began lapsing into unconsciousness and finally admitted he could no longer feel his feet.
After about twenty hours I suddenly came to, realising that I had dozed off for fifteen minutes and I had no feeling below the knees. I cursed myself for this weakness and kicked and wriggled toes for half an hour but the feeling never came back. We had on canvas mukluks with a half-inch felt lining but one generates little warmth lying still.
I found the horn button on the dash and amazingly there was still power, though the batteries were leaking acid over our clothes, but my SOS’s echoed up the ice walls and probably could not be heard a hundred yards away.
It was eight am on the following morning when I hear a rumble which could only be an approaching Sno-cat and I tooted on the horn which was heard from above. A long pause and a voice called down “Are you blokes alright?”
“Jim and I are, Tom’s dead!” I called back.
There was a long silence, then a voice I recognised as Captain Hunt, in a voice devoid of any emotion. “Will you confirm Couzens is dead ?“
“He hasn’t moved for twenty-four hours !“ I shouted, somewhat impatiently. “We are pinned in, you’ll need tools to cut us out and ropes to winch us out. Get on with it !“ Lowery had sunk to a point where his life expectancy was measured in a handful of hours and many a man has died in the very act of rescue.
Then another long delay, it proved Murray Robb had to return to camp to get climbing ropes, shovels chipped away a ramp and snow lumps clattered down. Then the sound of footsteps and slouching along the floor of the crevasses came, why, Charles Wise of course, looking as unconcerned as if he was picking up the morning milk. His bearded face peered in.
“G’day, Charlie!” I said ironically.
“How y’ doin’?” he said affably. “Have a nice night?” he looked about for something to sit on, and Couzens’ frozen body was lying half out of the door. Charlie shrugged and sat-on it.
“You could plck a better seat!” I said, grimly.
“Aw, I doubt he minds,” said our deliverer. “And, look after the livin’ first is me mottoe!” He produced some tools and began unscrewing the door. “Soon have y’ out. Yeah, we sort of wondered why y’ were takin’ so long’ but the vis was bad, so we thought, “Oh, well, they’re just holin’ up till it clears”. Yeah, lucky the snow cleared off!”
“Just get us out, Charlie!” said I, in the knowledge that all brave talk aside, I didn’t have many hours left in me either.
“Yeah!” said Charlie, unconcerned, spanner clanking on metal.”Had some fun on th’ radio while Murray was off gettin’ the ropes. Couldn’t raise Base, we missed th’ mornin’ sked, an’ McMurdo must have had th’ gain turned way down as usual, but I talked to the seismic traverse party goin’ up th’ Skelton, they’re in real bad crevasse country too, fact they tell me they had a pontoon down a hole at the moment I was talkin’ to them. They talked to a Herc flyin’ inta th’ Pole an’ they called McMurdo and asked them to, for Chrissakes turn their Gain up a bit, so I told them th’ story. They got a chopper on th’ way a ready.”
He pulled out a last stud and the gearshift lever came out. “Gotcha!” said Charlie. He took me by the shoulders. “Yell if it hurts !“ and pulled me out of our prison of the last 24 hours.
My sleeping bag had been thrown down and he stuffed me in though my feet felt like blocks of wood. For an hour I leaned against an icewall in comparative comfort as Lowery, who was undoubtedly in much worse shape was got out and winched up between the ice-walls in a stretcher.
The green-blue walls to the crevasse were only about 10 feet apart and I could see scores gouged by our tracks on the way down. Had we met it at right angles, we probably would have passed over.
Finally it was my turn, and as I was being lashed in a strange flickering caused me to look up and a helicopter passed over the small rectangular patch of blue through which we had fallen. On the surface, anxious bearded faces gathered round.
“Where’s Murray?” I demanded harshly. It seemed I should make one last effort, and soon his hard lantern-jawed face was staring down.
“You take over and carry on the work “ I directed. “I’ll be back as soon as I am OK. Get Tom out and bury him here under a snow mound, got it? He’ll be in good company round here.”
“Alright!” he said briefly, and I gather he did, but some bureaucrat over-ruled my order and had Tom’s body flown home in a rubber bag, an utterly gruesome thing to do.
The sky was now clear and blue and as they lifted me in the stretcher I made one last violent effort to sit up. It was impossible, but I raised my head enough to see, a few miles away, the blue and black barred massif of Albert Markham. Well, I had at least seen the mountain we had striven so hard to reach and I fell back exhausted.
In the chopper a doctor gave an injection of morphine, and I lay in pleasant euphoria as the sun streamed in and the blades flickered round and in a few hours was carried back over the route we had taken weeks to cover. By the time we arrived at McMurdo it was wearing off and I seemed to be enclosed in an envelope of numbing pain. Also I was ravenously hungry but the doctor decreed no food, I might have internal damage.
“Garbage!” said I, and caught the eye of Dick Walcott, a geologist recently arrived down and who later took my place in the field party. “Dick, for the love of mike, get me something to eat !“
I was still lying in the open on the stretcher waiting for the vehicle when he returned with a can of fruit salad which he fed me on a plastic spoon. I remember it yet, thank you Dick!
In the small Navy hospital they wrapped me in a plaster cast and I lay sleeplessly all the next night. A young man from near Boston came to see me, and with rare insight quietly sat talking for hours of his home, family and boyhood in New England. It made the long sleepless hours infinitely more bearable. The Admiral ordered the Super Connie to be flown down from Christchurch especially for us and the young doctor who was to winter at the Pole station came back to Christchurch with us, along with a competent orderly. We had nothing but kindness at their hands.
When the Connie touched down in Christchurch I was carried into a waiting ambulance and Tania was there and firmly moved in. Geoff Markham, the Superintendent of the Antarctic Division also my boss, peered in the rear door.
“Sorry about the gravimeter, Geoff” I said weakly, “I guess it will be rather bent!”
“That’s only a matter of ten thousand quid”, he said, gallantly. “It’s you we are worried about!”
The worst moment of all came next day when a grey haired woman with a fine sensitive face came and quietly wept at my bed side.
I could only pat her hand. “He was a fine young man,” I could only say awkwardly. “The Best. For some reason they are always the ones taken early.”
“Poor Tom,” she said. “He was my only son, you know, but he would have wanted to die that way, he was always so brave.”
The Ward Sister stared down at me in some disfavour. “You are more trouble to me than all the rest of the ward put together,” she said. “Now the Prime Minister wants to see you, out of visiting hours too!”
It was Sir Walter Nash, who had been Minister of Finance in the First Labour Government. He told me some funny stories of the time when Sir Ed and George Lowe had been invited to the coronation after climbing Everest, and how George was being evasive about coming but he tracked him down by recognising the sound of Big Ben on the telephone and knowing he was in a hotel by the river. Nash quoted the times of every event to the nearest 30 seconds and obviously had a remarkable mind for detail.
As months passed the field crew came back from the Antarctic and Murray Rob and Co came by. They had some further narrow squeaks, being airlifted into a high area near Mt Clements Markham. Flying back down the valley in our old TAE Beaver, the pilot, Flt.Lt. Jeff Rules encountered cloud and was told on the radio that the murk had closed in both down on the Barrier and also at the Beardmore strip. Old pilots to this day shake their heads over his decision, not to return to the camp at the head of the glacier, but to try to fly down through the murk. They dipped into it but flew into an ice dome in the centre of the valley. The Beaver was wrecked but both Rule and his co-pilot were thrown clear through the windscreen.
The Americans attempted a rescue in a ski-equipped DC-3 but found it too steep to land. When it was realised they could neither land nor outclimb the terrain, they hit the panic button and fired a dozen JATO bottles, each of about l000Ib thrust. As the pilot told me when he reported the incident:
“I tell ya, I could see our shadow on the snow in front, and it still wasn’t gettin’ any smaller!”
Then our junior flyboy, Bill Cranfield entered the lists in our underpowered little Auster. He refuelled at the Beardmore fuel dump, landed on the slopes of the ice-dome and flew the stranded airmen out one at a time. In war time one gets DSOs and other little worthless badges for that sort of effort but I am glad to say that Cranfield was awarded the Air Force Cross in recognition for one of the most gallant and daring rescues ever carried out by air. Even Cranfield himself admitted “It was a bit bloody dicy!”
The field team after mapping the area were flown out to Base and Robb and Dick Goldsmith were lifted by Otter back to Couzen’s Bay to recover the single sno-cat which had been left there. A plane was supposed to come and spot crevasses for them from the air. Finally Dick Goldsmith, that quiet unobtrusive fellow, said,
“To hell, Murray, why don’t we just go?”
“Right on, Chum!” said Robb. They prodded and flagged a route back to the Barrier and with Goldsmith leaning out the turret spotting, they hooked up all four sledges with all the fuel and drove 600 miles home. It is the longest journey done by a single vehicle on any icecap and I was proud of them. So it was an adventurous year and we were perhaps lucky to escape with one death, two maimed, and losing one Cat and one aeroplane ( and one gravity-meter!).
The wreckage of the Beaver remained, the Beaver all equipped with skis and painted with ‘TAE” markings in Wigram Museum along with the Auster, is a replica as is a second “Warbirds” “TAE Beaver” seen flying from Ardmore. Sometimes I climb in her cockpit and the mind drifts back to the days when she reeked of husky and unwashed gear. Sometimes in the air I even take the control column and marvel what a steady old plane the Beaver is in the air, though perhaps the addition of skis might change that.
Commander Lennox King (known as LK) who had taken over as Base Commander. Like the P.M. and Lord Cobham, LK had written a nice letter of consolation to Tania which she may still have.
“He is a remarkable man, your husband,” he wrote. “Though totally incapacitated, he was still full of plans and concern for his men .... etc” not all of it true but it helps when one’s nearest and dearest has been suddenly reduced to a being as mobile as a log of wood.
I was under the care of a well known surgeon, and surgeons in genera! want to practise their trade. One night my American doctor came out from the Pole station on the last flight of the year and slipped in to see me, dressed mainly in long-johns and mukluks. He looked over my toes.
“They’re doing just fine.” he said. “They may look awful, but underneath they’re healing up well, just don’t let those surgeons near them.’
It was only a few days later the surgeon flicked my toes with careless fingers. “These aren’t going to be much use to you,” he said. “We’ll take them off tomorrow!”
“You will not,” said I.
“What do you think you know about it?” he flared.
“More than you,” said I, and he stamped off in a rage shouting to the Ward Sister “I won’t have these damned physicians coming in here and interfering with my patients!”
The Ward Sister came back, very apologetically. “Mr Maclntyre is really quite a nice man, “ she said. “But he’s had a lot of problems and his wife has just left him!”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said bitterly.
The whole hospital was incredibly depressing, the ward was mostly filled with chronically-ill geriatric cases who made the night live with croaks and groans, the nurses buzzed about, far too busy to pass the time of day. One was lifted up like an ornament once a day, dusted and put down again. Once I made some remark about this to Annie Ballin, who was a school friend of Tania’s, and was then Resident Psychologist at Canterbury University and who also has a law degree and I caught the smile on her face. Annie, of course, contracted syringomyelia at the age of fourteen and has been in a wheel chair ever since. For the first few years her problem was undiagnosed and doctors decided she was hysterical and showered her with abuse to make her “snap out of it!” One gave her a push to make her sit up straight and broke a rib. “I do not hold it against him!” said Annie once, “But if the Devil prods him periodically with a hot trident in the afterlife, I can only say that he will deserve it!”
It made my own episode seem fairly trivial. Jim went through a bad period of depression, his recovery was much slower than mine and both feet were amputated. One night a nurse with unusual sense of insight came back and sat with him for half an hour. “Who was that nice girl that came into see you today Jim? She looked quite interested I thought. Come on tell me or I’ll tickle you!” and unbelievably she had him laughing. Now that is what nursing is about!
One day I decided enough was enough especially after receiving a letter from the bureaucrats asking rather querulously how much longer I was going to remain in Hospital as they were forced to pay me a salary until I was discharged. There was just the faintest suggestion that I was malingering and reacted in my usual childish way and announced I would leave. Tania brought the car to the door and I stood up, swaying.
The Ward Sister brought a wheel chair.
“I will walk!” I announced with a singular lack of realism.
“We’ll just wheel you to the door,” the Ward Sister said, tactfully. “It’s something we always do for our patients.” A rather fortunate custom as I doubt I could have made four yards. We stayed a night with Guyon and Sally Warren and I walked from the car to their door.
“For God’s sake, man!” said Guyon fielding me as I swayed on my wooden feet, reaching for the nearest wall, “Come and lie down!”
We returned to Dunedin and I did occasional work on my Doctorate but even sitting at a bench for an hour looking down a microscope was as much as I could do. I had to learn to walk again, as with no feeling below the ankles it was hard to know when one was in contact with the ground. And then all the muscle had gone out of my legs and I essayed short runs, feeling as though I was composed of glass and was wearing swim fins. Months passed and I built a l6ft runabout as amusement, I could still sit and screw in screws. Our Landlord in Forth St., Bob Glenn, was a professional builder and he and his wife were incredibly helpful. Glenn let me block up his workshop with my vessel on castors and never complained, he ran lumber through his planer and gave advice. My paint job was not very good and children scored it with knives. Bob sighed, “Strip it off!” he said and repainted it himself, very professionally.
We towed the boat around Wanaka, Hawea, Wakatipu, Manapouri, Te Anau and Otago Harbour and though I still walked like a puppet and my back gave out whenever I bent over, we still reminisce of those days of exploring our lakes and rivers. I tried bathing with feet wrapped in plastic bags but found I had to get into the water backwards as one could not feel the rocks on the bottom.
When the winter came I made another discovery. Stuffed into ski-boots, it doesn’t matter if you have feeling or not one can still ski and oddly enough my balance was not affected. It was obvious that in many ways my life was over, never again would I be one of that exclusive world club of mountaineers and explorers but while I might never be an Olympic skier, I could be quite good.
About six months after the accident I went back into hospital and Mr Aldrett pruned off the bits of bone etc sticking out the ends of my toes. I had been going to the physiotherapy pool to swim for exercise and some of the nurses used to also swim there. As they were administering the anaesthetic I recognised a pair of eyes looking over a mask, and as usual my warped sense of humour surfaced.
“Nurse Cameron!” I slurred. “I almost didn’t recognise you. You know this is the first time I have seen you with clothes on!” I could hear Aldrett snicker.
What could be seen of her face turned puce.
“No, I have usually had a swim-suit on haven’t I?” she gritted.
“Well, goodbye!” said I. “Do you know, you have never said goodbye without kissing me before have you?” Aldrett snickered some more.
“No!” said the poor girl, even more grittily, “I suppose that is because I have never said ‘goodbye’ before, have I?”
“I know,” I said, “But look at the chances we missed, don’t you think....!”
I carried on in this style and heard Nurse Cameron say in desperation to the anaethesiologist “For God’s sake, put him under!” Oh, well! What is life without a bit of a joke?
In later years we lived in Canberra where they made me an honorary member of the Canberra Alpine Club and I found to my surprise how really good the snow can be in Perisher Valley and Thredbo. Then to Canada for twelve years and every winter weekend at Avila, Mont Tremblant, Mount Orford or Lake Placid. After a couple of years the nerves had regrown, and even with some small pieces of toes removed, the feet function quite well. I am missing some nerves round the middle and would never win prizes at weight lifting but can do most things.
My mountaineering from that day on was confined to “An easy day for a Lady” excursions, but we had some interesting scrambles, rock climbs in the Grand Tetons, snow climbs in the Canadian Rockies, on volcanoes of Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico, Pacaya, Orizaba, Popocatatapetl. The last is 18,000 feet high though only a symmetrical cone, one of the party collapsed with oedema of the lung, but we dragged him down. Then walks in the Himalayas, the Alps, Norway, on Skye. Then back in New Zealand and our own Alps, the Olivines, the Darrans.
Thirty-odd years later, in 1989, I was back at Scott Base or rather, the new Pram Point Hotel. I was supposed to fly by helicopter to the Dry Valleys but helos were few and for a whole week one could do little but hop on a ski-doo and run along to the Castle Rock ski tow, (where we used to take the dogs on practice hill climbs) and run up and down. One soon gets a bit of style back.
“How long you bin skiin’, Man?” asked a ski-instructor I was sharing the slopes with.
“Oh, forty years or so!” I laughed.
“Hell!” said he.”lf Ah kin ski like you do in another thirty years, Boy, will Ah be happy!”

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