Extracts from a Diary #112 "Gone With the Wind-Chill" (Amelia at Songmark Academy)

Being the Eighteenth part (Golly!) of the diary of Amelia Bourne-Phipps,
in her third year at Spontoon’s Songmark Aeronautical Boarding School for Young Ladies.
The dear girls are off on a jolly field trip; the Aleutian Islands in mid-winter.
Presumably their Tutors have a warped sense of humour…

Monday 2nd December, 1936

(Transcribed from waterproof field notebooks, much later)
Dear Diary: all this Autumn we have been watching wild sea-birds passing Spontoon bound for warmer climes, leaving the Arctic and not heading North till Spring. They certainly had the right idea.

    Everything started off well, with nine hours’ sleep in our now rather unfamiliar beds, which did feel rather strange after weeks outdoors. I must say, when I first sat down on a Songmark bed in September 1934, I was sure it was a mistake and there was a mattress still to be added! Maria’s comments were mercifully in Italian, but they were quite heartfelt. She had more to get used to after all; I had come from the rather bleak but jolly St. Winifred’s school and she had become used to top hotels with feather mattresses and room service. She is used to sleeping on bare ground or tarmac now, like the rest of us. I must say, our Tutors have a useful way of economising. Anything we complain about, be it the food, the accommodation or the weather, they do not spend our tuition money on improving. They take it away and give us something much worse, until we better appreciate the original. Li Han calls this “Grandmotherly kindliness.”

    I was quite right; they did give us a hearty breakfast. The condemned fur generally gets one before being taken out to be hung, or probably frozen in our case. A full “Flight Breakfast” with ham and eggs in fact, with about a bucket per dorm of breadfruit mash to fill in any gaps. Even Madeleine X cleaned her plate, and she hates breadfruit mash more than I ever disliked poi. I could see everyone getting more nervous all the time as they ate. When our Tutors seem to be gratuitously generous to us like this it only means they have calculated exactly what we will need and are providing it, like calculating an aircraft’s fuel consumption. If an aircraft was intelligent, it would probably dread having its fuel tanks filled to the load limit, knowing there was some desperately long mission ahead its navigator was not letting on about.

    Ada Cronstein naturally passes on the bacon, but swaps it for any spare eggs and most of us are very happy to oblige, the Spontoon farming system being what it is. Actual meat is rare! None of us in the year are vegetarian; even those with ancestry pointing that way had families who could afford to bring us up with some meat in the diet – but then, we are a rather richer section of society than the average to be able to afford Songmark fees. In the first-year we have that swan maiden Inga Ledasdottir from Vanierge, who presumably is no great admirer of people eating other avians’ eggs.

    One final kit check and we were off – the junior years waving us au revoir, though from Red Dorm it was more like wishfully thinking “goodbye.” If anything happens to us they become the seniors two terms early! And there is a lot that can happen in the Arctic, by all accounts. I remember us waving the third-years off to the Arctic last year, and I remember what they looked like on their return. As we trooped out carrying our equipment, everyone was running through mental lists of just how warmly they had built their clothing and shelters; too late now if anyone was planning final improvements. Of course everything had passed inspection already; early in her first year a Songmark girl learns that however tired one may be at the end of the day, there is always enough time to re-wax one’s boots and sew on that missing pocket button. Our Tutors teach that very comprehensively.

    Off to the air terminal! As the first-years waved us farewell I found myself humming that poem by Mr. Kipling, the one that Father’s butler and ex-regimental Sergeant-Major McCardle used to keep quoting;

    “The new recruit is silly. ‘E thinks o’ suicide.
    E’s lost ‘is gutter-devil, ‘E hasn’t got ‘is pride
    But day by day they kicks ‘im, which ‘elps ‘im on a bit
    Till ‘E turns out one mornin’ with a full and proper kit
    Getting’ shut o’ dirtiness, getting’ shut o’ mess
    Getting’ shut of doing things, “rather more-or-less.”

Our tutors manage without kicking us, to be sure, but the sentiments seem very familiar. If anyone has left anything “rather more-or-less” on this trip, they have only themselves to blame and nobody will be providing much help or sympathy. We have all looked up what we can about our destination, desolate islands in the sea called “The Mother of Storms” by the locals, and we are about as insulated and waterproofed as we can manage. Modified leather Sidcot flying suits are the order of the day; after all, an open cockpit at altitude and sea level in the Aleutians have a lot in common as regards expected temperature and wind speed.

    Songmark’s library is very low on entertainment, but heavy on things one needs to know. It is quite comprehensive too – although nobody has admitted to having ever read it, there is a very well-thumbed copy of “Modern feminine hygiene and safer motherhood” on the shelves, along with all the first aid and expedition guides. Still, goodbye for awhile to sitting down to read in a dry room while the rain hammers down outside in the darkness; we will be out in it very comprehensively!

    Our aircraft was the familiar Lockheed Lamprey, which indeed is one of the few Spontoon resident flying boats that can comfortably carry a whole Songmark year complete with tutors and equipment. Last time we used it everyone complained about there being no view out of the cargo hold (our Tutors sit “upstairs” with the pilot) but now everyone just made as comfortable nests as could be arranged from the equipment, and settled down to relax in the relative warmth. We were warned it is a ten hour flight to the first landfall, and certainly the trip will be the last comfort we can expect. Being crammed in a rather ill-lit aircraft hold with eighteen other furs and all their kit is hardly the sort of comfort a five-star hotel puts on the brochures, but none of us were inclined to disbelieve it. If this is comfort, we are making the most of it.

    Miss Devinski and Miss Wildford are the tutors along for the Aleutians; Jasbir whispers she overheard Miss Blande saying she was getting too old for these trips. After all, she did last year's equivalent and they say resilience is one of the first things to suffer with age. She has no problems with demonstrating her prowess on the firing range, and indeed has no lack of gentlemen admirers of her other charms. Possibly she will be spending the December evenings with more pleasant company than a wet bivouac shelter and a class of third-years.

    Miss Devinski naturally put us through a full “Customs Search” before boarding; she found and confiscated the flat hip flask Molly had concealed in the small of her back. Actually, once onboard Molly whispered that had been an expendable decoy filled with cheap pineapple brandy; she has specially modified her water-bottle so that only the top pint is a container with water in it. The compartment in the lower end is accessed by unscrewing the bolt that holds the felt insulating cover on, and is full of something more saleable. Molly comments that she will be accepting I.O.U's this trip (apart from our emergency gold coins nobody is carrying much money as there seems little prospect of spending it) and looks forward to doing business based on supply and demand. The bar will not be open till she thinks the market is high enough, she adds. Definitely not on the first day, if even the first week.

    (Later) Eight or ten hours is an awfully long time to spend in a freighter aircraft piled up like cargo, especially one with no windows. Strictly speaking there is a loader's window near the front but that place is hotly contested and I will be waiting till other folk are tired out before making an attempt at it. At least on my trip to the Gilbert and Sullivan Islands, it was a well-appointed passenger aircraft with a proper lavatory and not the makeshift arrangements we have. I have done my best to break Molly and Helen of calling it a restroom or a bathroom, by always asking them where the bath is or the beds to rest in. It is an uphill struggle. It took me three years to persuade them that buildings start on the ground floor, not the first floor. Apart from that, everyone is in waterproof suits that have been gone over again and again with wax, dubbin and rubber solution till they gleam. The scent in the crowded cargo hold is scarcely that of a fashionable boutique. Jasbir’s dorm won the coin toss to get the last go at the third-year hot bath before we left, and indeed it is something we are liable to miss before long.

    I remember what our friend Noota told us about her home islands; she has graduated and been gone more than two years now, and we have hardly heard from her since. Our Tutors sometimes pin up postcards from successful graduates as they keep us inspired with what they are doing around the world - at least, some of them. Helen points out that anyone proving an abject failure will probably not be writing to tell about it. We have heard nothing from our senior Zara in the Albanian South Indies, though that may be due to her lack of opportunity to post a card if she is shuttling between uninhabited islands. I wonder just how she did fail her third-year? It would be something to know how to avoid.

    The Aleutians are a place where aircraft need to be lashed down as soon as the prop stops spinning, by all accounts – and ships use quadruple mooring cables the minute they hit port, even if it is one of the few calm afternoons of the year. The local storms are called “wirriways” or something like it, which resemble tornadoes in effect but are more likely to sneak up on one as they can strike through cloud cover. Noota told us about the sad case of her uncle who froze to death in a blizzard going the fifty yards from the house to the barn. He was only found in Spring, lying a quarter of a mile away having been totally disorientated – and he was born on the islands. And to think in England the newspapers call it a “blizzard” when we have six inches of snow.

One thing we had a chance to do was to catch up on each other’s Sunday adventures. Maria had a lot to say about the “Parade of Nations” on Meeting Island that she attended to represent her country along with many Songmark girls such as Reet from Estonia and Morag from Scottish Darien; of course a nation the size of Spontoon does not have consulates of every country in the world. Some of the embassies sent over “approved” parties of representatives, who set up their stalls and carried on bickering with their neighbours as an accurate scale model of the world. Just as classically pups and kits played Cowboys and Indians, the youth of many nations now grow up playing Bolsheviks and Blackshirts – at least they do in Vostok, Italy, Starling’s Russia and New Haven. The difference presumably is the side that is supposed to win.

Maria says there were several representatives from Austria, a nation whose leadership her uncle is cultivating. Their leader Doctor Dogfuss is proving a durable leader having survived numerous assassination attempts, notably by the Germans (so Maria says.) Austria, Hungary and Romania seem to have similarly inclined leaderships that “Il Puce” is doing his best to bring together in a common pact. If his “Arch of Steel” project comes to fruition there will be quite a power-block all the way from North Africa through the Alps to the Black Sea.

    She also had a lot to say about the Czecho-Slovak leader, the tubby and genial Mr. J. Hasek from Prague who has ruled benevolently for the past decade. She is quite baffled by it; his “Party Of Peaceful And Moderate Progress Within The Bounds Of The Law” is hardly something she predicted would have held up against the Reds on one side and the various jolly stern corporatist types that are their neighbours. Apparently the policy of providing free beer at the elections, no matter who folk voted for, works even better than one might have thought. Then, he is certainly a respected scientist in his field, being the founder of the Cynological Institute which discovered things about animals unknown except possibly on Cranium Island. Nobody else believed him, but now he is President he can declare anything to be true and enforce it, however bogus. Belle Lapinssen says one of her home states in the last century declared by law that the mathematical value of Pi was exactly three, and no engineers were allowed to complain about it. One hopes the aircraft’s engines were not designed and built there.

    I had heard from Jasbir about that Parade of Nations, with Maria going snout-to-snout against Liberty Morgenstern in a debate. Our Trotskyite half-coyote lost the argument and made the mistake of trying to regain points in a public brawl – not something it was wise of her to try with Maria. She was lucky Maria did not make the experiment of breaking her in bits to see which half actually is coyote.

    (Later) I can feel us descending, and see flakes of snow on the loading bay window. The first snow we have seen since January in Vostok, and we are further North than that now. Time to put the notebooks away and get the woolly gloves on!


Tuesday 3rd December, 1936

Well, here we are. We arrived last night, or more accurately just at last light, on one of the very few places with a seaplane jetty – “Dutch Harbour” according to the navigator. The place is no Casino Island, to be sure – our first impression was a cluster of limpets on the hillside, the houses being mainly smoothly curved roofs that are criss-crossed with steel cables braced to boulders or rock bolts. Seeing that some of the cables were broken gave us a clue as to what the storms are like here. The landscape is bleak and treeless, looking like some bits of Scotland I have seen; hill slopes vanishing into the mist that makes Spontoon even in Winter seem truly tropical. The Lockheed Lamprey was refuelling even as we were unpacking, and by the time we were off the jetty it had turned round and departed, taking advantage of the break in the storms. Aircraft and ships have been known to get stuck here for a week in the storms, if indeed they are not pounded to scrap.

    Our first view of the islands was about twenty yards of jetty; fortunately we just found a clear spot in the weather before the next cloud bank rolled in. Miss Devinski had briefed us to stick together – if a Songmark third-year is likely to get lost in the fog or blown away in the wind it must be severe indeed.

    Though none of us were expecting luxuries, our first night was decent enough – there is no hotel (not that we would expect to use it) but our Tutors had arranged us to stay in a sort of combined warehouse and bunk-room. It seems that apart from water and fish there is very little in terms of resources to be found around the island chain and almost everything has to be brought in. Certainly the Authorities seem to trust us with their year’s supply of lumber; the storage rooms were packed with everything from plywood sheets to bundles of stove kindling. Then, it is December and no more supply ships are expected till Spring – if the locals need anything this Winter they have to already have it in stock.

    While Miss Wildford and Miss Devinski went out to arrange transport for tomorrow, the rest of us managed to make ourselves comfortable. A lot of stretching and exercises first helped keep us warm and shake the kinks out of legs and tails after the long and cramped trip. It is very much as one hears old soldiers reminiscing; we rapidly found the toilet, a place to eat and a place to sleep, and declared all right with the world. It was rather drafty, but looking up at the stout cedar roof over our heads we were very glad to be out of the weather for one last night.

    Although we are not expected to put our equipment out for inspection like in our dorms, everyone was taking the time for one last re-packing and such. Apart from our Sidcot suits, the four of us have modified parachute harnesses worn over the top like those climbing shorts that have stood us in good stead, in case we have to haul each other up things or out of things. It is scarcely high fashion, but listening to the wind howling outside we hardly care. This is not a good part of the world to be wearing the Countess Rachorska’s elegant creations! I believe Beryl has a silk dress packed on the grounds that it weighs almost nothing, and one never knows who one is going to meet. I would agree, but even in the first year we are taught that a lot of the weight of the average pack is items taken along “because they weigh nothing.”

    Miss Wildford came in with a hurricane lantern around eight, looking keen and brisk despite the snow clinging to her fur. Our transport has been arranged (weather permitting) for tomorrow, and we will be scattered amongst the smaller uninhabited islands. After which we are decidedly on our own, to sink or swim until we are picked up at the end (again, weather permitting.) One thing these islands are not short of is weather. One wonders how Noota’s family could afford to send her to Songmark, as the only thing these islands have in abundance nobody wants.

    Although we were surrounded by firewood, for safety there was no stove in the main warehouse; fortunately there was one in the “office”, which was immediately pressed into service. We had brought with us from Spontoon some hotel catering sized cans of food, which were on the stove top about as soon as the first match was struck. Definitely warming, and the first gallon did not last us long between us. As third-years we had planned our own food supplies, and this time I doubt our Tutors have a ready supply of Maconochie to help out if we make a mess of our calculations. The soup was calculated to be our first meal, in that it is heavy stuff and we would not be carrying it very far from the aircraft.

    Some rapid improvisation with the island’s plywood supply built us a group mattress that was at least marginally softer than the stone floor, and not quite as cold. One learns to make the best of things. Everything that could be piled over us was pressed into service, with even our packs (sturdy Canadian style wood and rawhide affairs) built up as an extra wall against the drafts. The warehouse keeps its contents dry and snow-free, but it is zero starts out of ten on the usual hotel scale. The softest things to lie on are each other; not that a third-year girl is the tenderest object around even dressed in a padded suit. Still, it is better than we will probably manage later on, and we made the most of it!

    After a decidedly long and chilly night (there is about seven hours of daylight on a good day in December, and in December the Aleutians have no good days) we put the warehouse back the way we found it and found out more details of our trip. Miss Devinski and Miss Wildford had slept in the office by the stove; rank hath its privileges after all. Outside there was a break in the weather and we could see the distinctly chilly mountain slopes mostly snow-covered except where the wind had blown it off the rocks. It does not look like the Aleutians will ever have much of a tourist industry unless wind-blown fur becomes a fashion to replace sun-bleached.

    Nobody goes outside much this time of year if they can help it, and last night we had seen almost nobody around but some muffled figures hurrying between buildings. In the brief sunshine we were introduced to Captain Anuninjac, a short and definitely round rodent of some species that I hardly recognised. He looked rather like those Arctic marmots that I met on Vostok, though with everyone so bundled-up there was little fur exposed to judge by. The Captain has a vessel that cannot hold us all at once (internally, that is – there would be room if we all stood on deck but that is not really an option. Spontoon central waters in Touristy Season, this is not.) So we will have to make three trips, and let the return voyage take care of itself. As Captain Anuninjac told us, there is little point in making firm plans for travelling in this part of the world as conditions can blow any plans to tatters like a wet map in the storm.

    Madeleine X muttered “l’homme propose, le Dieu depose”, which is about the first sensible thing I have heard out of her. Still, after all she is a Songmark third-year.

    It was our luck to be in the first load out, with Prudence’s dorm. Our bad luck in that our testing started first, but our good luck in that at least we did not have to wait around freezing our tails off waiting. Everyone triple-checked each other’s supplies and equipment then we were all aboard and heading out of the harbour as fast as the engines could shove us. The shore is the dangerous bit after all; as the saying goes, sailors don’t fear the deep seas nearly as much as the hard bits around the edges.

    The waters around the dock were calm enough but as soon as we got into the open seas, the boat pitched most alarmingly – in fact the only reassuring sight was the Captain looking quite unconcerned as if it was a perfectly normal day. We got the first use out of our climbing rigging, with Helen having to belay herself to the side of the boat to be predictably sick. She was not the only one, Belle and Carmen were decidedly unwell – and it was rather like doing a difficult climb, securing themselves step by step across the very slick and pitching deck. Every step of the way they had to be belayed to at least two points, a difficult thing to do in a hurry.

    Two hours of slow progress found us in the lee of an island perhaps a mile across, rising treeless and windswept to perhaps six hundred feet in the middle. Our hearts sank as Miss Devinski indicated this was our stop – and as there was no habitation there was no dock or even a decent beach to land on. Saying our farewells to our Tutors and Prudence’s dorm, we grimly grabbed our supplies and went over the side. We had decided not to wear the Sidcot suits but to tow them in our supplies bundles – so in just our oilskins and mesh vests we took a dip in the waters fresh from the Bering Sea.

    Dear Diary: we thought the Spontoon waters were cold enough in Winter, and indeed they are. This was painful! Fortunately it was only about sixty yards to the shore and the sea was calm – but the water almost paralysed us and by the time we got ashore I was gasping in shock.

    Despite everything, the first thing we did on landing was to get out of our soaked clothes and try to break the record for grooming the salt water out of each other’s fur in the slight shelter of a black crag just above the tide line. I had remembered our first ever survival swim ashore, two years ago on Main Island – and the Sidcot suits are heavy and padded unlike the flight suits we wore then which made such clumsy bathing costumes. Although they would have kept us warmer for the swim to shore, they would have been almost impossible to dry out with a couple of gallons of the Bering Sea in them.

    Helen was in a particularly bad way, having lost her breakfast. Molly winced slightly, then handed her the deceptive water-flask having unsealed the end holding the brandy. She shamefacedly commented that her schemes of selling it rather foundered when she realised we were all going to be on separate islands and she was hardly going to charge us. There goes her market.

    Anyway, in half an hour we were no more than damp, dressed in the Sidcot suits (happily kept dry in oilcloth bags like the rest of the supplies) and had a reviving snack of dried pineapple inside us. Our supplies are lashed to the pack-frames, and being mostly canned they survived the swim unscathed. Still, there is little enough for the four of us in this climate, and food is going to be tight. As will our belts be by the end of this. “Frozen Arctic Waists”, indeed.

    Exploring the island only took about four hours; in a depressingly short time we had summed up what was available to sustain us for a fortnight. True, we did not search every rock but having seen one ten-acre expanse of muskeg swamp (frozen on the top, swampy underneath) there is little to be gained from doing more than noting and mapping the next dozen such. The island was almost blown free of snow, being rarely more than knee-deep except for around the crags of black volcanic rock. We hopefully searched for the entrance to lava tubes, but found none. That would have been too easy, I suppose.

    Despite the howling wind, we took advantage of a brief clear spell to scramble up to the top of the central hill. There is another much bigger island about two miles away, which looks more promising – but it is utterly outside swimming range in these waters and we have not seen much driftwood around for raft-building.

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