You must read The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean

I hadn't heard of Geraldine McCaughrean, apart from the fact that she had been chosen by Great Ormond Street Hospital to write the sequel to Peter Pan - Peter Pan In Scarlet, which I'm planning to read one day.
However, Vikki Gemmell left a comment on my blog about Captain Oates, saying that she'd been given The White Darkness, about a girl who had Captain Oates in her head giving her advice, but Vikki had never finished it. That intrigued me, and being a fan of Oates myself, ever since I heard at the age of seven that he walked outside his tent in Antarctica so his fellow explorers wouldn't be hampered by his injuries, never to be seen again, I had to read it.
This book, published in 2005, was a worthy winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award, but it is a book that would appeal to adults as well as children.
It's about Sym who's kidnapped by Uncle Victor and taken on a South Pole expedition, not to retrace Scott and Oates's journey, but to find a hole which he believes leads to worlds which exist within the world's crust. Yes, he is bonkers, but it is only as the story unfolds that Sym realises this and things fall into place. Whilst all the time, Captain Oates talks to her, helping as much as he can, but only with reference to his life which ended in 1912.
Geraldine's storytelling is superb. Her knowledge of everything from Antarctic exploration to the Bronte sisters is amazing. I wish that I had half her knowledge!
The White Darkness refers to the fact that with all the snow and mist at the South Pole, you might as well be in the dark, because you can't see anything around you. This reminded me of the Antony Gormley exhibition at The Hayward Gallery which  I visited in 2007 where he had installed a large glass cube that you could enter, filled with tiny water droplets, finer than a cloud, called Blind Light. People entered and disappeared within two paces: dark shadows progressively sinking into the cloud. I actually used this idea in writing Gipsy Moth when Ben's plane crashes in the "white inpenetrable fog".


The White Darkness is available on Amazon, have you read it yet?

Captain Scott - March 30th 1912, Possibly The Day That He Died

According to Steve Parker in Scott's Last Expedition  
March 30th 1912 was probably the date that Scott, Wilson and Bowers died on their return from the South Pole, only eleven miles from salvation. However, as the last entry in his diary was on March 29th, that has been taken as the date that is considered to be correct. Therefore, a memorial service was held in St Paul's Cathedral yesterday, but it wasn't considered important enough to be on the six o'clock news.  Why was this?
The reason is probably that although Scott reached the Pole, he and his men perished on the way home. Much has been written about the mistakes that were made: unsuitable horses, experimental motor sledges, lack of food for the dogs and taking five men on the last push to the Pole, when there was only food and rations for four.
Nevertheless, I feel that Scott should be celebrated. No, they didn't return home, but the expedition was as risky as the Apollo missions over fifty years later: out of touch with civilization, like the astronauts, with no way of rescuing them. Today, there is a large scientific community at the South Pole with studies started by Scott and his expeditions, and  helicopters and snowmobiles to rescue any injured scientists or adventurers at the ready.

Today, I celebrated Scott, Oates and the rest of the polar expedition by visiting The Oates Collection at Gilbert White's House in Selborne, Hampshire, which tells the story of his tragic life and death. The highlights for me were the letters that he wrote to his mother, and the only book he took to read, a biography of Napoleon, his hero.
Also today, I finished Death On The Ice by Robert Ryan. This is a novel about Captain Scott, which also tells of the life of Captain Oates, and Tryggve Gran, the Norwegian skiing advisor in Scott's team. It was a great read, and I learned a lot about the expedition which helped me to understand the exhibition today. Some of the passages are as vivid as a Hollywood film, for example when they have to rescue the horses from the pack ice where they are being attacked by killer whales.
The search team erected a wooden cross in 1913 to Scott and his men, with an inscription from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'
I think that Captain Scott and his polar expedition did that, don't you?

Captain Oates Night - March 16th 2012

Tonight is Captain Oates Night.
It is one hundred years since he took that self-sacrificing walk into the blizzard, telling Captain Scott on the return from the South Pole when they had been beaten by Amundsen and his Norwegian party, that he was just going outside and may be some time.
You may have read in my previous blog how much this affected me as a seven year old writing a diary in junior school to celebrate 50 years since Scott's expedition.
I have now been reading Death On The Ice by Robert Ryan. I thought at first that I was too late as Scott arrived at the pole on January 17th 1912, but of course, it took two months to get back to the point where Oates decided to leave the others because of his frostbite, and from then on Scott, Wilson and Bowers carried on for just two weeks more, dying on March 30th 1912.
It was such a sad end to an attempt to conquer one of the last remaining unmapped places on earth.
Oates body was never found, but a cairn of stones was erected with the inscription:

 'Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates, of the Inniskilling Dragoons. In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard, to try and save his comrades, beset by hardships.'