Free When Nights Were Cold by Susanna Jones Page A

for nothing when there are more important things to care about. None of you has ever been anywhere or done anything and you probably never will. You make far too much noise about things of which you know nothing.’
    â€˜How do you know what we have all done?’ Locke’s voice rose above all others in the dining hall and the place fell quiet. There were glances from high table, some of interest and some of disapproval. Locke blushed. When talk resumed and bubbled up around the hall, we continued our argument in low voices.
    â€˜Have you fought in wars?’ asked Parr. ‘Are you going to fight wars?’
    â€˜Our vote might prevent wars happening.’ Morgan waved her fork. ‘And we might find treatments for injuries and diseases. We are at the beginning and we can’t say what we shall achieve.’
    Parr shook her head with a smile and gazed into the distance. She generally did this when she disapproved of the conversation. She didn’t speak again that evening. I watched as she sipped her coffee, glancing sometimes at the door, eyebrows slightly raised.
    I wanted to say to her, ‘But I don’t believe you.’ She seemed to oppose us only because she could not bear to agree with us. Parr suffered my friends and me as though we were a penance she must endure. Her ideas were wrong – I was sure of that – but I admired her strength. I was sorry that she had lost her parents, but I could see the advantages in having no family and a lot of money.
    Lightning snapped over the turrets and rain battered the window panes. The sea was high and crashed against the red-brick walls. I drew back the curtain and, instead of the sea, there was Queen Victoria, battered and darkened, on her plinth at the centre of the north quad. I sprawled on my bedroom floor and took a fresh pencil. More lightning. I waited for the thunder.
    In my pocket book I had drawn a cross-section diagram of the Nimrod and, while it would have been onerous and beyond my skills to attempt to put everything required on board, I put representative crosses, circles and so on to make up the various people, objects and animals. Around it I sketched the Antarctic landscape and marked on it the known islands, mountains, inlets and bays. I added the huts and depots. I followed the routes with dotted lines and marked the places where the explorers had turned back.
    In my sketchbook I worked on drawings of ice and snow. I took my impressions from the photographs I’d seen at the exhibition, from my imagination and from books and journals I had read. To try to feel it for myself, I spent free afternoons in the college picture gallery, staring at a painting of a shipwreck in the Arctic Circle, where polar bears crunched on the skeletons of sailors.
    We took drawing lessons in the gallery and were allowed to copy parts of the great paintings in pencil, so I worked, not at recreating detail, but towards evoking some sense of the harrowing atmosphere, the bleak outcome which horrified and attracted me. I kept the sketches hidden in my wardrobe.
    â€˜But it is no use,’ I said to a dot for a pony on the sketch. ‘I can’t know anything at all until I go there myself.’
    And when would that be? I curled up in my chair and opened letters that I had not had time to look at during the day. There was a short, polite letter from my sister telling me that we had a new carpet at home and that the garden was looking very pretty in the morning frost. She said that, although Father still refused to write a letter to me himself, he liked to read mine over her shoulder. I had letters from old schoolfriends, one of whom had just married a school teacher and was living in Herne Hill. She hoped that I would visit her next time I went home.
    I wonder, I thought, if I ever shall. Home was remote now, another continent, and sometimes I wasn’t certain that I could remember the way back. I opened my pocket book to a fresh