Cherry by Sara Wheeler

Author:Sara Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307430786
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

After a glorious rail journey on his own up through Harbin to Siberia and across central Russia, Cherry arrived home on 10 May to find The Times sprouting with stories about the escalating crisis among the great powers, and the news that in the National Gallery a suffragette had slashed Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ with a meat cleaver. He had enjoyed his adventure immensely. Atch had been sorry to see him go: ‘I have missed you a very great deal,’ he wrote from Shanghai later in the month. Atch was not the only one missing Cherry. His letters contained greetings from a woman called Maidie. ‘She asked me to say,’ wrote Atch, ‘she was always thinking about Chewwy-Gawward.’

Meanwhile, Cherry broke up with his English girlfriend. Nothing is known of the cause of the rupture, but judging from the consolatory words despatched from Shanghai by Atch, Cherry was badly shocked. ‘Some day you will meet Miss Right,’ Atch offered lamely. Cherry cheered himself up with plans for another trip to Shanghai. The search for human patients had been abandoned, and Atch and Leiper, still quarrelling, were now looking for infected dogs.34

At the beginning of June Cherry went down to London to meet Lyons at the Army and Navy Club. He asked directly what his authority would be as the writer of the official narrative, and was assured that he would have a free hand. On that happy understanding, Cherry issued Lyons with a list of requests to various people for information about their work on the expedition. It included enquiries about photographic gear to Ponting, who, when Lyons forwarded the questions, immediately replied that he was too busy to answer.

Hospital work was abandoned – for good, as it turned out – as Cherry threw himself into research for the book. He was soon drowning in material. He spent many days in London, and started going round to firms who had supplied the expedition with equipment and food. At the beginning of July he broke off to take the train over to Cheltenham. There he joined thousands of people watching Sir Clements Markham unveil a memorial to Wilson. Sculpted by Kathleen (who modelled Bill’s bottom half on Cherry’s corduroy trousers, which she had borrowed), it was an imposing larger-than-life bronze depicting Bill in his sledging harness.

Cherry saw a lot of Kathleen in 1914, despite his developing wariness. She refused to play the part of the distraught and housebound widow. Her first priority was her five-year-old son Peter, but from time to time she still disappeared on her exotic travels: at the beginning of the year she went to the Sahara alone. Her social life was fearsomely active. She had luncheon and dinner engagements almost every day, often squeezing in a tea party too, and Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, regularly turned up at her house for a confidential talk. Besides all that she remained devoted to her sculpture, and was rarely short of commissions. She sculpted Kris, Cherry’s Antarctic dog, despite the fact that he refused to lie down.

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