Read Online Cherry by Sara Wheeler - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sara Wheeler
Tags: nonfiction
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became a well-known Fleet Street journalist. 7 The pair stayed in touch, and Mais, like Cherry a great nature lover, enjoyed going to stay at Lamer. More extrovert than his friend, Mais adored Oxford. ‘In my time at any rate,’ he wrote, ‘life at “the House” was very much a country house existence. Our every want was instantly catered for. We had but to shout for our scout, and immediately the courteous, almost P. G. Wodehouse-like valet-butler would appear to attend to our wishes and see them carried out.’ Apsley did not join the Union or indulge in the stew of political societies at Oxford. Union hacks dogmatising in their robust Johnsonian manner were anathema to him, and so were dazzling characters such as the aesthete Philip Sassoon and the toffs vomiting out of their windows after a session with their dining clubs. The High Tory conservatism of his father and his father’s father ran through him like woodgrain.
As for work: Apsley floundered in oceans of Ovid and seas of Sallust. Increasingly, he felt that he wasn’t cut out to be a classicist, and after grinding through his first-year exams he flung aside his Homer and switched to Modern History, a subject deemed suitable for students who were not quite up to Latin and Greek.
When he went home in the holidays, he found that little had changed except the elder girls’ skirts, which were shorter. In the early mornings he jumped his horse, Harebell, over the estate’s high hedges, and afterwards he sat in the kitchen under the row of copper pots eating bread and honey. But further afield, things really were changing. At the end of 1905 Balfour resigned as prime minister, and the following year he watched the general election from the sidelines, knowing his style of paternalism was doomed: the Liberals triumphed in an anti-Tory landslide unparalleled until 1945. A decade of Tory hegemony was over, and the General shuddered, along with the rest of the country’s landowners. Furthermore, another enemy had entered the field. The Labour Representation Committee, the party’s forerunner, was formed in 1900; by 1905, Labour candidates had trebled their share of the vote.
Another event in the closing weeks of 1905 was discussed avidly in the junior common rooms by young men with a taste for adventure. It did not have the seismic effect of a prime-ministerial resignation, but it was widely reported in the British press none the less. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had pioneered a route through the North-West Passage. Ever since Elizabeth I stood at her window to wave farewell to Martin Frobisher as he sailed from Greenwich in 1576, mariners and adventurers had sought to find a way from the Atlantic through to the Pacific. Confounded by ice and the jigsaw of an unmapped archipelago, none had succeeded. In Frobisher’s day the goal had ultimately been commercial: the sea-route offered a short cut to the wealth of Cathay away from the baleful influence of Spain and Portugal. By the nineteenth century the dogged expeditioners were inspired by the reward of national and personal prestige. The Admiralty despatched a series of British naval ships to the high latitudes, culminating in Sir John Franklin’s grisly 1845 endeavour. American expeditions joined the race, their stories enthralling the public waiting comfortably at home. Although a Briton, Commander Robert McClure, led the first transit of the elusive Passage, he did it in stages, in two ships and on a sledge. The dauntless Amundsen was the first man to sail through the North-West Passage in a single ship.
Apsley had read widely on the subject of exploration, and had recently devoured a copy of Robert Falcon Scott’s
The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’
, the story of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. He immediately recognised the significance of Amundsen’s feat in the Arctic. But he had no idea that even the North-West Passage would not mark the Norwegian’s greatest
As for work: Apsley floundered in oceans of Ovid and seas of Sallust. Increasingly, he felt that he wasn’t cut out to be a classicist, and after grinding through his first-year exams he flung aside his Homer and switched to Modern History, a subject deemed suitable for students who were not quite up to Latin and Greek.
When he went home in the holidays, he found that little had changed except the elder girls’ skirts, which were shorter. In the early mornings he jumped his horse, Harebell, over the estate’s high hedges, and afterwards he sat in the kitchen under the row of copper pots eating bread and honey. But further afield, things really were changing. At the end of 1905 Balfour resigned as prime minister, and the following year he watched the general election from the sidelines, knowing his style of paternalism was doomed: the Liberals triumphed in an anti-Tory landslide unparalleled until 1945. A decade of Tory hegemony was over, and the General shuddered, along with the rest of the country’s landowners. Furthermore, another enemy had entered the field. The Labour Representation Committee, the party’s forerunner, was formed in 1900; by 1905, Labour candidates had trebled their share of the vote.
Another event in the closing weeks of 1905 was discussed avidly in the junior common rooms by young men with a taste for adventure. It did not have the seismic effect of a prime-ministerial resignation, but it was widely reported in the British press none the less. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had pioneered a route through the North-West Passage. Ever since Elizabeth I stood at her window to wave farewell to Martin Frobisher as he sailed from Greenwich in 1576, mariners and adventurers had sought to find a way from the Atlantic through to the Pacific. Confounded by ice and the jigsaw of an unmapped archipelago, none had succeeded. In Frobisher’s day the goal had ultimately been commercial: the sea-route offered a short cut to the wealth of Cathay away from the baleful influence of Spain and Portugal. By the nineteenth century the dogged expeditioners were inspired by the reward of national and personal prestige. The Admiralty despatched a series of British naval ships to the high latitudes, culminating in Sir John Franklin’s grisly 1845 endeavour. American expeditions joined the race, their stories enthralling the public waiting comfortably at home. Although a Briton, Commander Robert McClure, led the first transit of the elusive Passage, he did it in stages, in two ships and on a sledge. The dauntless Amundsen was the first man to sail through the North-West Passage in a single ship.
Apsley had read widely on the subject of exploration, and had recently devoured a copy of Robert Falcon Scott’s
The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’
, the story of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. He immediately recognised the significance of Amundsen’s feat in the Arctic. But he had no idea that even the North-West Passage would not mark the Norwegian’s greatest
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