Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it.
A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four years. The spur is the fast-approaching 100th anniversary of Oates’s death — the least I can do is pay him the courtesy of getting it read by then. Inevitably called I Am Just Going Outside, Michael Smith’s book has proved to be a corker. One of the many things I never knew about Oates was that he was from Gestingthorpe, an Essex village just over the border from my home in Suffolk. As a tribute to the famous walker, and in a post-Christmas fit of energy, I decide to journey there by foot. My partner asks the same question she asks about many of my enterprises: ‘Why?’ But the dog seems happy enough, so off we set.
The walk, of course, puts me in the same position as Oates himself. OK, it’s a couple of degrees above freezing, and he had to contend with 40 below (the temperature, incidentally, at which Celsius and Fahrenheit meet). And I’m doing about six miles, rather than 1,800. And I’ve got an Ordnance Survey map. And a smartphone. And a partner who’s coming to collect me at the end in a nicely-heated car, quite possibly bearing pastries from Waitrose (if my hints have been heeded). But apart from that — exactly the same.
As with all the best biographies it’s the little details that stick in the mind. Walking along I think about the care Oates took of the Scott expedition horses; he had a lifelong love of the animals, often feeling more comfortable in their presence than that of humans. I remember the fact that he died on his birthday. Knowing the end was near, he’d gone to sleep the previous night hoping not to wake up. When even that final wish was denied, he took matters into his own hands. Uttering the famous words about how long he expected to be, he climbed over his colleagues’ legs and left the tent. The final detail which refuses to leave my mind is that Oates didn’t bother putting his boots on. He went to his death wearing his socks.
At Gestingthorpe I find the church where a brass plaque commemorates the village’s most famous son. Across the road is Over Hall, the family home where his mother continued to live for another 25 years until her own death. Every week of that quarter-century she came to the church to polish the plaque. As I follow the footpath that leads around the back (long path — very big house) Jo calls.
‘Are you there yet?’
‘Yeah. It’s quite moving, thinking about him growing up here. Leaving. Never getting to see it again. I’m glad I walked here, rather than just drove it.’
Jo does the sigh she sometimes does, the sigh that says ‘men and their projects’. She doesn’t understand that we need these things to get excited about — maps, route-planning, taking inspiration from heroes we read about and would secretly quite like to be (though obviously without the tortured and lonely death), in a slightly childish ‘look how this tennis racket turns me into Jimmy Page’ way. (All right, totally childish.)
And then, waiting for Jo to come and pick me up, I go back inside the church for another look at the plaque. And I think of Oates’s mother polishing it, asking herself (even if she’d never asked her son) why he wanted to go and do something as stupid and pointless as walking all the way to the South Pole.
And I start to ask myself if maybe women haven’t got a point after all.
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