The shed in the corner of the garden is a small damp festering woodpile. Its only redeeming feature is the space in the middle. This is stuffed with watering cans and high chairs and at least two defunct breadmakers.
The floor bows and as I gaze, utterly defeated, around it I know intrinsically that there is no object of worth inside. Everything, as they say, must go.
Britain’s climate is not kind to garden sheds. It aids decay: warm and wet, it invites microorganisms in and bids them get those miniscule feet scuttling around the woodwork, and ensure decay within a season.
There is one shed, in another part of the world, which has a great deal less chance of disintegration: because it lives in a place where micro-organisms fear to tread: at the South Pole.
It is a little larger than my shed, but it was made in England before being transported to the ends of the earth. It is 15 metres long and 7.6 metres wide, and it bore the lives of 25 men through an antarctic winter.
It had a little insulation: seaweed, sewn into a quilt, was sandwiched between the two-layered walls. The roof was a sandwich of three layers of wood interspersed by the same wadding.
Many of its men were doomed, and it’s leader, Robert Falcon Scott’s days, were numbered.
For this shed stored the provisions for the British Antarctic Exhibition of 1910-1913. The subject has had an airing in the UK this week as one of its TV presenters, Ben Fogle, retraced the path to the shed with a past in a BBC TV documentary.
We know a great deal about the shed: Scott’s diaries are extensive, but we also owe a debt to a survivor of the exhibition , one Aspley Cherry-Garrard.
Published in 1922, just nine years after the expedition, ‘The Worst Journey In The World” is a wonderful, prosaic, frank account of the expedition which has filled our fairy tales for a century.
Cherry-Garrard writes: “If you can picture our house nestling below this small hill, on a long stretch of black sand, with many tonnes of provision cases ranged in neat blocks in front of it and the sea lapping the ice-foot below, you will have some idea of our immediate vicinity.”
When Fogle looks at the shed, it is as they left it: filled with provisions and scientific instruments and the paraphernalia of humans living in close quarters with one another. Even packets of Sunlight Soap a century old.
A very singular hut indeed.
Ice exploration makes a ripping yarn: so much so that a peerless film director and one of the great science fiction writers of our day chose it as the backdrop for the pinnacle of one of the strangest and most iconic stories of our time.
But this time, the ice floats: it forms the glittering rings of the planet Saturn. The humble shed has become a spaceship, travelling to the outer reaches of a universe about which we still know little enough to fantasise.
2001: A Space Odyssey has an odd quality to it. Perhaps it was because it was a book written specifically to provide a commentary to Stanley Kubrick’s strange film. The book’s author, Arthur C Clarke, remained holed up in a hotel with Kubrick for weeks, writing the story which would drive the screenplay.
It is another story of exploration in one of the most barren habitats of which we can conceive. Instead of an ice desert, Clarke chooses first the moon, then space, and finally Saturn’s rings: it is planetary action on a breathtaking scale.
But just as Cherry-Garrard has moments when he is taken aback by the barren paradise of the South Pole, Clarke’s lone survivor of a groundbreaking space expedition, Bowman, witnesses something no other man has seen: a splendour on a universal scale.
Setting out alone, and travelling to a lonely paradise: it’s a vocation few of us would choose.
One of Shakespeare’s great father figures did not choose it, however. It was thrust upon him by a turncoat brother.
He deposed Prospero from his throne and set him adrift in a boat: and not alone, but with his three-year old daughter.
They reached their island, and there Propsero’s path diverges from the paths of the other two we have talked of, Scott and Bowman.
For he refuses to be at the mercy of the elements, a passive participant in something vast. No: Prospero takes steps to control the forces he encounters.
He tames Sycorax the Witch and engages Ariel in his service. He learns and uses enchantments until at last it seems he can indeed conjure up a great tempest which brings his enemies to his shores for judgement.
He is all-powerful.
And he is a figment of a great playwright’s imagination.
Right at the end, in his epilogue, rather than charter a great enchanted galleon to bear him home, he runs out of puff. The audience must get him back home, he tells them. He is nothing without them.
Because that kind of power over the vast wildernesses and elements of our world is a fairy tale, says Shakespeare. Remember it was all just a spider’s web of fantasy wrought with words.
Of our three heroes, two are lovely ideas, the creations of writers in search of the epic.
Scott, and his men including Cherry-Garrard, did it for real.
And the shed’s there to prove it.
Pic courtesy of http://www.fixthathut.co.uk
Links not working today: but Project Gutenberg has a copy of Cherry-Garard’s book. You can find it at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363
Kate Shrewsday 
Wonderful history lesson. I have always loved the story of the initial expeditions to the South Pole. The North Pole too, for that matter. That’s a trip that I love seeing photos of, but I’m quite certain, other than a day visit in the summertime, or a quick trip to catch the aurora australis (SP) or the aurora borealis (NP – although I have seen them once – ione evening while we lived in upstate new York).
The 1922 book is well worth a read if you love this stuff, Paula. So incredibly evocative but written with quite a sparse simplicity. And it’s in the public domain- link at bottom of page 🙂
a chilly subject indeed. the polar explorers losing fingers and toes if they were lucky and their lives if not always make me feel despair at the people who are brave enough to take on the unknown.
oddly enough though i love science fiction 2001 never grabbed my attention. It felt forced, an artifice for some purpose i did not understand.
good luck with your shed, i suspect it’s just as well i don’t live in a house with a garden shed or it would end up being declared a health hazard and blown up by the authorities (to the delight of local children I’m sure)
ps – it’s lovely to have you back, i just hope they can completely fix your eye(s)
Thanks Sidey, they’ll fix it, even if not as quickly as I would like…
I have hated 2001 for years. It was listening to Clarke’s story that finally changed my mind. He has such a gentle, perceptive way of looking at things . He doesn’t deliver quickly though. He works best as he unfolds, I think. An exploration in writing. As for the film: it leaves me cold…
i’ve onlyseen the film, must realy get the book. some of his other stuff ai have loved
Let me know what you think if you try it 🙂
Is that the book that describes Lawrence Oates’ walking away from the rest of the party? The story was in my senior English literature text. It’s haunted me ever since.
That’s Scott’s diary I think, Kathy. He describes Oates, who thought he was going to die during the night, waking up and finding he was still alive; and informing the company he was going out, and might be some time. If you have flash there’s a rather wonderful facsimile link here at the British Library. I’ll root around for online copies…
Lovely how your mind wanders from congested garden sheds to Antarctic expeditions to Space exploration and back again. 😀
It was a bit of an odyssey today, wasn’t it, Nancy 😀
As always, you connected these stories in such remarkable ways, Kate. I’ll come back and check the link again later, hoping it is up and running.
One of my best friend’s brother is an explorer. He and his wife wintered over in the Arctic Circle. Alvah Simon. His book was captivating with thrills and loneliness and danger and I wondered why anyone would do this, but, having met Alvah, who is a really good man, I admire his courage and sense of adventure and your post today reminded me of him.
I’d love to read his story, Penny. Some people just seem called to this kind of adventurous life, don’t they? Me, I prefer my shed.
I meant to thank you for reminding me of Sherlock, aka Benedict Cumberbatch, from your response the other day. Isn’t it the greatest name for an actor, and teacher, no less. I had no idea he taught in Tibet, but, I just love him as a modern day Sherlock. Thanks for bringing me up-to-date.
No problems, Penny 🙂 I cold go on about him for hours. If you can get To The Ends Of The Earth it’s just fabulous.
I have an ongoing fascination with the polar exhibition.
2001 left me cold 😉
LOL wouldn;t you love to see The Hut? If they air the Fogle documentary it’s well worth a look: it’s on iPlayer here but I don’t think that’s available abroad is it? Details here at the Natural History Museum.
Try here: (links in comments often works if they don’t in posts, for some reason)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363
Useful tip as usual, friend 🙂 Thank you.
http://www.fixthathut.co.uk/pages/fix_that_hut_homepage/default.aspx
A journey from back garden to space and to Antarctica which I greatly enjoyed, after surviving the awful hazards of the split infinitive! 🙂
I do hope your Narcissism clears quickly – oh, no, wait a minute, it was ‘I’ problems he had.
Boldly going anywhere is a tough assignment for the grammarian, Col 😀
‘I’ problems…..must pass that one on…
It doesn’t give you any ‘I dears’? 🙂
Where did you get that photo of my living room?
LOL Phil would love yours, Tilly!
Fascinating word-smithing as usual, Kate.
You have no idea how happy I am to having sorted out the email problem and to once again receive updates of your daily digests. Life is good again 🙂
Hello Liz 🙂 Nice to know you’re out there…thanks for subscribing again. Hope the book is doing fine. Is it on Kindle yet? We’re dying to have a look…