Snow Widows
Katherine Macinnes (William Collins, £25)
IT is hard to comprehend in this age of whizzy communication that Kathleen Scott did not discover that her husband Robert had perished in a tent in the Antarctic until nearly 12 months after his death. When she received the shocking news, she was sailing to New Zealand to meet him, more worried about his disappointment at being beaten to the South pole by ‘the Norskies’.
Conservationist Oriana Wilson, whose husband, Bill (Edward), died alongside Scott, was working in New Zealand and under the impression she was meeting his ship when she saw a poster blaring ‘Antarctic tragedy’. At about the time Caroline Oates’s only son, Lawrence, was famously stumbling
out into the blizzard (‘I am just going outside and may be some time’), she was at a London theatre. Lt Birdie Bowers’s mother, Emily, a headmistress, watched Ponting’s film of her grinning son, unaware he was dead. Lois Evans, widow of the irrepressible, practical Welshman, Taff, had money worries and had already sold his medals.
Katherine Macinnes has spent 10 years researching this wellwritten book about five women bereaved by the fatal expedition, the catalyst for which was the wait for her own husband to return from Everest (he did). It is structured as a breathless parallel narrative, flipping from the Antarctica horrors to the worried women keeping calm and carrying on. Inevitably, the tragic events at the South Pole are far more mesmerising, despite being a familiar story.
The forceful Kathleen, a talented sculptress who refused to be sad, and Oriana, a collector at the Natural History Museum, live on through numerous documents, but far less is known about the other three (Taff’s letters did not survive and Lois was largely ignored), which means a certain amount of novelistic scenesetting has been deployed. This can grate, but it’s movingly done, not least the image of the dignified Caroline opening her son’s diaries to read Bowers’s heartbreaking final addition: ‘Your son died … like a man and a soldier without a word of regret except that he hadn’t written to you at the last.’