Since then I have been back to Cambridge to read the seven volumes of Reginald Skelton's Discovery Journals, and his sledging diaries, more times than I can keep track of but every time something new catches my attention. The archivist, Bob Headland, apologised for the terrible noise of the construction work, which he feared would frustrate any attempt to concentrate, but all I could hear was the sound of the Discovery's bows scrunching through the pack ice and the howl of the Antarctic wind as the ship fought to hold her own in the teeth of storm force Southerly squalls off Coulman Island. Directly outside the window in front of my desk was the building site which was to become the bright, airy Shackleton Memorial Library. By then into my fifties, seated in the library at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge, I began reading the Antarctic journals of Reginald Skelton, not yet out of his twenties, who had been chosen as Scott's chief engineer on the Discovery Expedition. Forty two years after his death we had, in a sense, changed places and I was getting the full story. I was only ten when he died in 1956 and he never, as far as I can remember, told me anything about his time in the Antarctic. My memories of my grandfather are of an old, but still fit and upright, man who had a deep gravelly voice and chuckled a lot.
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