When Nights Were Cold Read Online Free Page A

reading journals and puffing on a clay pipe. Sometimes he rode up and down the streets in a hansom and stared out of the window, trying to find something to cheer him up, but he rarely came upon anything he liked because he did not like anything much any more except for being at home. When his lungs weren’t bad and he could pass an evening without coughing too much, he would attend lectures at the Royal Geographical Society in Burlington Gardens. Sometimes our family physician, Dr Sowerby, would come to see him and stay for dinner or drinks and they would smoke their pipes and complain about the stupidity of politicians, suffragists and omnibus drivers.
    On other nights he would read geographical journals by the fireside late into the night, turning the pages with stiff flicks of his fourth finger and sometimes, when he forgot himself, the tip of his nose. He liked to read about the journeys to the coldest ends of the world – the Alps, the Poles, Himalayan summits – places, he said, where Heaven and Earth touched and anything was possible.
    Catherine and Father were quiet now. I crept back to my room and opened the curtain. The street was empty. I could see over the rooftops of Dulwich and Sydenham. Just a mile or two away was Ernest Shackleton’s childhood home. He had been to the Antarctic with Captain Scott but came home early because he’d fallen ill, a bit like Father. I strained my eyes to see if I could make out the roof of a house that might be his, but all the houses in all the streets looked the same.
    I put my finger into the condensation on the window and wrote my name. Surely, I thought, if my father could travel through the tropics and into the Arctic Circle, if my neighbour could reach the Antarctic and walk on ice, if Frank Black was going to Oxford, Catherine and I could at least get out of Dulwich.

Chapter Three
    We opened the tent flaps and screwed up our eyes to survey the scene. The cracks were vertical, black gashes in the snow. From a distance they resembled people and I stared for some time to be sure that they didn’t move. I pulled my hood around my face and squinted harder. The sun hummed in a blue sky but the good weather would not last.
    We had slept well the previous night, but the snowfall had shifted the landscape. When we began to move, frostbite gnawed our feet, yet we still had miles to travel. My skis slipped forward, one and then the other, and I was off. I was slicing through the soft whiteness, bridging crevasses, dodging plugs of snow and passing safely across the land. I was headed south.
    â€˜Grace, put out your light. I’m not made of money.’
    I rolled over in bed. Father was such a gloomy cheeseparer. He wouldn’t even let me have a new dress and all my old ones were too short now. We lived in a big house with servants but there was never money to spend.
    Where was I?
    My sleeping bag.
    My tent.
    Blubber burning on the primus stove.
    Ponies and dogs.
    A motor car.
    A motor car?
    It began to melt. I was almost asleep.
    â€˜Your light, Grace.’
    â€˜Mm. Yes, in a minute.’
    When was this? Later. 1908. Ernest Shackleton had left New Zealand for his next attempt to reach the Pole. Father and I read about it in the newspapers. This time he was the leader of the expedition, which I was pleased about but, still, I worried for him. I had seen a diagram showing the layout of the Nimrod and I could not see how it could be large enough for all that it was said to carry. There were ponies, men, dogs added in at the last minute in New Zealand, vast stocks of food, animal fodder, scientific equipment, all sorts of daily supplies, and a motor car (possibly two motor cars). It seemed to me that the ship would need to be several times larger than it was. I often lay awake fretting that it would sink, that the men and ponies would freeze to death in the sea.
    I pictured Ernest on the flooded, rolling deck, his face filmy and his hair wild in icy