Call of the White Read online

  Likewise, India’s place in history as the country whose independence had prompted the formation of the Commonwealth in the first place made it a clear candidate for being included in an expedition to mark the event. India is an enthusiastic mountaineering nation and has a long association with Antarctica, having operated research stations on the continent since 1983. An association with Antarctica similarly prompted me to involve New Zealand. New Zealanders consider Antarctica to be their own backyard, and many were astounded by the fact that whoever joined this expedition would be the first New Zealand woman to ski to the South Pole. Most assumed that the record had been claimed years ago.

  Looking at Asia, Brunei Darussalam stands out within the Commonwealth as one of only three absolute monarchies (the others being Swaziland and Tonga). It would also be the only Muslim country to be represented on the expedition. Its near neighbour, Singapore, is a small but wealthy city-state that is carefully multicultural, representing the incredible diversity of the Commonwealth.

  Finally, my attention switched to Europe. There are two Commonwealth countries within Europe apart from the UK: Malta and Cyprus. For its size, culture and complex political history, I chose Cyprus. I now had the complete composition of my team. The countries involved would be Brunei Darussalam, Cyprus, Ghana, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK.

  I wasn’t surprised to arrive home from Norway to find a very thin letter on my doormat stamped with the logo of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. My heart sank. It was a thin business envelope with no more than one sheet of paper inside. Experience has taught me that thin letters indicate a negative reply: positive replies come with information leaflets and papers to sign. Putting the envelope to one side I fought my disappointment. I had suspected that this would be the outcome but even so, it was a blow to have confirmation. I’d have to find another way to make my project happen but, right then, I was physically and emotionally drained from a month instructing others and didn’t feel able to shrug off a setback just yet. All afternoon I pottered around my flat unpacking, doing washing, gazing out of the window and reinserting myself into my life after weeks of being away. That evening, glass of wine in hand, I finally sat in my front room and steeled myself for the rejection inside the envelope. I’d had all afternoon to get used to the idea. I unfolded the letter and read the first line.

  ‘I am very pleased to inform you that you have been selected for the award of a 2008 Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship; I offer my warm congratulations.’

  I had to read the letter again to make sure I’d understood. I read it a third time before it sank in. I dropped the letter and skipped stupidly around the room, laughing at the unnecessary agony I’d been putting myself through for hours – so much for experience! As quick as the laughter (and the skipping), came another thought and a slowly rising panic from the pit of my stomach. Now I had to turn this big idea into a reality. The trust’s panel of four had believed in me and with that belief came the pressure to deliver. The volume of work to be done filled my head and I started scribbling down a colossal to-do list that just kept getting longer. As the size of the project became clear, I felt my confidence begin to waver. I wanted to get to work straight away, worried that otherwise I’d never have the courage to begin. But there was a delay: I was due to spend the next ten weeks on back-to-back expeditions in remote locations without the means to access the Internet or the free time to spend planning the project. I put my to-do list away, knowing that it would be mid May before I would have a chance to look at it again.

  It wasn’t unusual for me to disappear to far-flung, and usually frozen, destinations for weeks at a time. If I were able to travel back through time and appear to an 18-year-old me for long enough to describe to her what her life would be like in a dozen or so years, I often wonder what she would make of it. I worked hard at school, and I was good at it, but I never really had any strong preference for one subject over another. When it came to A levels, I hated deciding what subjects to study; it felt like I was narrowing down my options. Choosing a subject to read at university was even worse. I remember sitting in the small careers room at school flicking through a book of degree subjects arranged in alphabetical order. I started at the back and worked my way forward. I’d nearly finished the book before I got to astrophysics – the physics of the stars, understanding the rules of the universe, learning what is beyond our own existence. It was the only subject that I could imagine would hold my attention for the next three years. I went to University College London in the centre of the capital. It was a fantastic place to be a student but, as the years rolled by, the pressure grew to decide on a career, a direction.

  Finding myself back in a careers office, I explored the possibilities. I loved the astronomy I was learning but, as I neared graduation, it was becoming clear that I was reaching my intellectual limit in aspects of the subject. As my lectures delved deeper into cosmology and quantum mechanics, my brain felt warped. It was time to bow out. I needed a new focus.

  For several years I had been vaguely aware of the British Antarctic Survey but I had assumed that to be sent to Antarctica you would need to be a serious scientist – to have a PhD at the very least – so I was surprised, and excited, as I read through their adverts asking for graduates to fill assistant roles. With conviction, I knew that I had found the new direction I had been looking for.

  After graduation I spent two and a half years, without a break, at Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula with the British Antarctic Survey. Rothera is the largest British base on the continent but it is still relatively small. The station itself covers an area barely a kilometre square, containing a few dozen buildings of all shapes and sizes, and houses a transient population of 85 in the summer season that shrinks to a permanent crew of just 20 during the seven-month winters. I was in charge of ozone and climate monitoring on the base but it was the place that fascinated me more than the science. At times it was hard to be cut off from the rest of the world with a random group of people, some of whom I periodically neither liked nor understood, but I never once lost my complete awe of the landscape that surrounded us. It was such a privilege not to simply visit Antarctica but to actually live there and have the chance to get to know the continent and all its sublime faces, both wonderful and terrifying at the same time.

  I learned a completely new set of skills in Antarctica, from the abstract to the practical. I learned how to deal with the cold; how to be respectful but not scared of it. I learned how to refuel planes, how to talk clearly on the radio, how to get a reluctant skidoo started without flooding the engine and, most importantly, I learned about people. I saw leaders and teams; I witnessed groups form and fall apart. I saw personalities that thrived in the centre of things and those that pulled themselves away. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the experience was to give me the best foundation possible for putting together and leading teams of my own.

  I returned from Antarctica firmly bitten by the polar bug. I lacked any clear ambition and yet I felt sure that, this time, I wasn’t going to find the answer in a careers office. I hopped from one project to the next, grabbing any opportunities that were offered. I took a job at the Royal Geographical Society, organising expeditions for large groups of 16- to 19-year-olds, and convinced two of my colleagues to take part in a race with me across the Canadian Arctic. We became the first ever all-female team to complete the 500-kilometre event, finishing in a respectable sixth position out of 16 teams. A year later I put together my own expedition, forming the first team of British women to cross the Greenland ice sheet. We made the 560-kilometre crossing in just 16 days, instead of the usual 30 or so, and when we reached the far coast, we made the unusual move of turning around and skiing back again; taking just 15 days to complete the return crossing.

  Since then, I’ve combined organising my own expeditions with working as a cold-weather instructor, including training other novices to compete in the annual race across the Arctic. It’
s a hand-to-mouth existence that is surprisingly stressful at times. Despite shying away from a traditional office job, I still find myself glued to a laptop for days at a time completing mundane administration work and, although I spend time in some amazing places, between expeditions I can easily go an entire week without seeing another soul. And then there are the finances: sometimes I would do anything just to have the peace of mind of knowing there was a pay day at the end of each month and to know how much is going to arrive. Many times I’ve scanned the newspapers, ready to give it all up for a regular job, but somehow I just can’t seem to visualise myself doing anything else.

  I returned from the Arctic in mid May knowing that I had a daunting task ahead of me. I was due to depart on my journey to select an expedition team in mid August, which left me just three months to create a website, generate enough publicity to attract hundreds of applications, devise some kind of selection procedure, find free venues in seven countries for the candidate interviews and arrange high-level support from each of the countries as well as from the Commonwealth. It was a list, and a task, capable of deflating the most potent enthusiasm. I began by setting up a website. I wrote a rather hopeful email to a web design company and was delighted, if not a little surprised, to receive a phone call from them the very next day. Simon Meek was one of two designers that ran the company and my email had struck a chord with him. ‘I’d love to go to Antarctica but I know I never will,’ he explained. His reaction to the project would become a familiar one: Antarctica is an emotive place; so much so that people who have never been there and who never intend to visit, still hold it very close to their souls. Its very existence seems to make people feel better, to give some kind of comfort. It’s as if we think the world can’t be all that bad if somewhere like Antarctica exists. Antarctica itself became the project’s very first patron, allowing the expedition to benefit from its reflected glow. Simon offered to create a website completely free of charge.

  Preparing the content for the web pages was the first time that the plans for the expedition, in its entirety, moved from within my head onto paper. I started thinking about the application form that would appear on the website. What questions did I want to ask? I was clear in my mind about the sort of person I wanted on my team. I was determined to make the expedition open to as many women as possible. It would have been easier to seek applications from experienced travellers, adventurers, athletes and skiers, people that already had some of the skills and experience needed for polar travel but I felt taking that approach would have been missing a huge opportunity. I wanted to create a team of ordinary women so that anyone who read about the expedition would be able to identify with at least one of those involved and to know that, if they wanted to, they could just as easily do something as ambitious and outrageous as skiing to the South Pole.

  I saw the expedition as an opportunity to test this belief but I also had to be realistic. There were practical considerations as well. Firstly, everyone needed to speak English because it was hard enough to communicate with a team above the roar of an Antarctic blizzard and the muffle of three layers of face-covering without adding a foreign language to the mix. This wasn’t as prohibitive a restriction as it sounded. Most Commonwealth countries still use English as an official language, so for many applicants it would be their first language, or at least a language that they used on a regular basis. Secondly, everyone needed good access to the Internet because, in the months leading up to the expedition, constant communication was going to be vital and this couldn’t be done realistically, and cost-effectively, without the Internet. I needed women with motivations strong enough to see them through all the inevitable setbacks and I felt confident that I would know as soon as I read the sentiments of someone I wanted on my team. Eventually, I settled on a format for the application form. It would demand just five answers:

  Explain why you want to be involved in the expedition.

  Outline your outdoor sport or adventurous activity experience, if any.

  What additional skills will you bring to the team?

  How would you describe yourself?

  Is there anything that you would like to add to your application?

  Consciously, there was no requirement for information on a person’s age or appearance on the form and I had kept the questions deliberately open to give applicants the freedom and opportunity to write whatever they felt they wanted to say. Simon sent me a test application through the website as a trial run. Bizarrely, this would turn out not to be the only application I would receive from a man.

  On 30 June 2008, the website was ready to be launched. All that was left to do was the very first blog entry, which would set the tone of the whole endeavour by introducing me, the expedition and the ideals behind the project. I knew what I wanted to convey, all I needed were the words. I sat for hours in front of a blinking cursor, occasionally typing frantically for a few minutes, before deleting the lot. Finally, I had something I was happy with, but I was still unsure.

  There is only one person I go to for reassurance about problems like this: Paul Deegan. Paul is a three-time Everest mountaineer, expedition leader and award-winning travel writer. The first time I ever called him, I was a 26-year-old wannabe author who had just quit her job in order to prepare for a race across the Arctic. Despite my lack of credentials, Paul spent an hour on the phone with me talking over my plans, offering advice and building my confidence. Not once did he express any doubt that I would achieve exactly what I had set out to do. He asked tough questions, challenged my thinking and cut through my self-indulgent waffling without mercy but, in the five years I’ve been talking to him since that first call, he has always taken me and my ideas seriously and has never once skimped on his time.

  Paul’s response to my drafted blog was swift. ‘This kind of soul-bearing is what I’d expect to read in a book about the expedition, not on the expedition blog,’ he typed back. ‘This is not what potential applicants need to hear.’ He was absolutely right of course – Paul invariably is – but it was advice that I took on board in a much wider context. In heading up a project like this, I had to understand what people expected of me. No matter how I felt about myself, I had to present the attributes that would be anticipated in a leader of such a large project. That is not to say that I set out to misrepresent myself, but in order to have confidence in the project, people needed to have confidence in me. I deleted what I had written and started again:

  What difference can eight people skiing across an icy, uninhabited continent make to the world?

  I believe that the answer is: plenty.

  Only eight women from a Commonwealth of nations that represents more than two billion people will physically make the journey to the South Pole, but many thousands more will join the team in spirit, lending support, willing them forward and following their progress across Antarctica.

  If the people with whom we share our experiences are inspired to follow their own dreams or make just one change for the better in their lives, then the Commonwealth Women’s Antarctic Expedition becomes much more than just an adventure, it becomes a force for change – and that is the exciting part.

  Our expedition won’t solve world famine or global poverty, it won’t reverse global warming or prevent climate change, but it might alter the way people think, shift attitudes or plant the seed of an idea – and who knows what that seed will grow into?

  When I interview candidates for the Commonwealth Women’s Antarctic Expedition, I won’t be looking for the most athletic, the most accomplished or the most widely travelled – I will be looking for women who inspire me, women who are reaching beyond the expectations of others and following their own path.

  Are you who I am looking for?

  Perhaps you have never thought of travelling to Antarctica before. Or maybe it has always been an ambition that you never got around to doing anything about. Either way, something about this opportunity has caught your imagination and now all you have to do is fill in th
e online application form.

  I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps, on New Year’s Day 2010, we will be standing together at the centre of Antarctica, at the South Pole.

  I saved the post, pressed a button and there it was: the entire site was on the web and available for anyone to see. It was a strange moment. I felt weirdly vulnerable, as if I’d just allowed the world to look at my secrets. A part of me wanted to pull it all back and keep it all to myself, safe from criticism and scorn; but the larger part of me was thrilled that the whole world could now read about my plans. In fact, they didn’t feel like my plans anymore. They were now a beast of their own, a separate independent entity. It was out there. Several times I searched for the site from other people’s computers, both horrified and thrilled when the familiar pages popped up in front of me.

  It was exciting to think that anyone, at any time, could browse the website; but I needed to let people know that it was there. I wrote a press release and sent it to the big media channels and newspapers in each of the eight targeted countries. Trawling the Internet for newsroom email addresses, I sent hundreds of messages and would expectantly open my inbox every morning to see if there had been any applications, only to find it empty. The only reply I received was from a national radio station in Cyprus who wanted to interview me over the phone on a morning talk show. A few days later I waited on hold for my turn to go on air with the radio live into my ear. ‘She’s as cold as ice!’ belted out the chorus of the song they were playing. It was a long interview with plenty of opportunity to explain all about the expedition, the type of teammate I was looking for and how listeners could apply. The interview worked; the next morning I opened up my inbox to find four new messages, all from women wanting to join the expedition. I squealed like a child: I had my first applications! I opened the message at the top of the list: