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‘You’ll only ever go once’, they warn, the refrain once, once, once taking on an alarming ring, like a medical condition. Even before you went there they all said, this is a once in a lifetime chance. Apart from secret US military bases, it remains the one place on earth you cannot buy a ticket to. But you will not be allowed back, because you’ve had your shot at it, and there are others queueing to go behind you, and access to the continent is so restricted. Over and over again, you will dream of the Antarctic.

Your dreams become populated by vast lozenges of ice that turn into icebreakers, or which house red planes, like frozen aircraft hangars. Nothing is ever quite as real, urgent, as compelling, as it was there. That, by venturing into the frozen vortex, the beguiling frozen underworld of the planet, you risk being haunted forever. People tell me this over and over again, that, once you have been to the Antarctic, the world never looks the same again. ‘Once you’ve known it, it never leaves you.’

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And in the Antarctic, we had such an important job to do, with the science, with maintaining Britain’s historic claim on the continent.’ As Rob speaks, his eyes shine, the russet outdoorsman shine in his skin deepens. I wanted to be outside, always – in the snow, on the sea, in the air.

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Plus no-one lives in Antarctica how can you write a novel about a place which has only the thinnest of human histories?īut I am scared of reneging on my pledge, of failing the grandiose allure of metaphor (what separates fiction from non-fictional forms of writing, ultimately), scared of wasting taxpayer’s money, so I go about my project with an anthropologist’s rigour, conducting ethnographic interviews and taping them on my mini-disc. I had read enough about the Antarctic to know this was a literary Mission Impossible – the Antarctic is the venue for the greatest expeditionary literature ever written, and fiction can rarely compete with the sheer experiential velocity of fact. I have been sent to the Antarctic on a fellowship, in part because in my proposal I made the rash claim that I would write a novel set in the contemporary Antarctic. Then along comes the writer with her tape recorder. He seems happy to talk about the old days, perhaps because no-one has asked him for so long.

He is a mine of information about the Antarctic, and the Arctic too – as it turns out he is a champion dog-musher and lived in Alaska for years. In the end Rob doesn’t play the role of bigot well.

There was a peace in this, a kind of glory.’ He gives me a valedictory though not mean-spirited look which says: you had to be there. ‘We had it good in the gold days dogs and ourselves. ‘I’ve had several people tell me they think women in the Antarctic are a good thing, they bring a civilising influence, that the communities are more emotionally stable.’ ‘From what I hear the mixed communities manage a similar spirit,’ I say. In my winters we were as one – ‘ he raises his hand, his fingers intertwined, a gesture of solidarity I suppose. ‘Men start competing for women, and then it’s not so easy to be a community. ‘Because it upsets the balance, the equilibrium we had,’ he goes on. My refusal to be instantly scandalised redoubles his resolve. ‘I don’t approve of it, really, women in the Antarctic.’ Rob keeps a poker face but I sense he is fishing for outrage. I ask Rob about the old days when there were dogs, not skidoos, and the Antarctic was officially off-limits to women. In the saloon I interview Rob, an old-timer and the base commander at Port Lockroy, where we will arrive in two days and where he will leave the ship. We pass Elephant and Clarence Islands, where Shackleton’s men were stranded for a winter after the disintegration of the Endurance.

The light shifts within itself, as if a dull strobe light were broadcasting from deep within it, a darkening and lightening: grey, blue, chalk, silver. From midnight until early morning we sail through a sombre barren twilight. Dark is being retracted from our skies at a rate so fast we barely have time to adjust before we realise there is no night at all. Our ship, the RRS James Clark Ross, is now only 240 nautical miles from the top of the Antarctic peninsula. Icebergs assail each other, they grind and groan. As we sail into a shifting matrix of sea-ice everything is in motion. Névé: Loose granular ice in transition from snow to glacier iceĮach day we see more and more ice. On the centenary of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, Jean McNeil chronicles her own voyage to Antarctica.

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