OHYAT: It Gets Worse

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY

Bill, Birdie, and Cherry are holed up in their stone hut on a hill near Cape Crozier, in a blizzard with hurricane-force winds, which is filling their hut with snow and abusing their canvas roof. Their tent has blown away, their blubber stove has fallen apart, they have essentially one can of oil left on which to get back (it took them nearly five to get out there), and they haven't slept properly in ages.

The thing most worrying them at present was the roof: it was firmly secured all the way around, but in its incessant flapping it seemed to have been stretching, which of course only made the flapping worse. They were all trying to secure it somehow but there was only so much they could do ...

And then it went.

Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind. I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.

The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came in.

Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a terrible lot of drift. Bill also—but he was better off: I was already half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned over until his mouth was against my ear. "Please, Cherry," he said, and his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was he who had brought us to this ghastly end.

The next I knew was Bowers' head across Bill's body. "We're all right," he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.

( Thus impiously I set out to die ... )

If we did not find the tent (and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.

And to cap it all off, it was Bill's birthday. He was 39.

HAPPY LAST BIRTHDAY, UNCLE BILL!