THE FIRST WINTER 195 
Lunch itself was a pleasant meatless meal, consisting of 
unlimited bread and butter with plenty of jam or cheese, 
tea or cocoa, the latter being undoubtedly a most useful 
drink in a cold country. Many controversies raged over 
the rival merits of teaand cocoa. Some of us made for our- 
selves buttered toast at the galley fire; 1 must myself con- 
fess to a weakness for Welsh Rarebit, and others followed 
my example on cheese days in making messes of which we 
were not a little proud. Scott sat at the head of the table, 
that is at the east end, but otherwise we all took our places 
haphazard from meal to meal as our conversation, or want 
of it, merited, or as our arrival found a vacant chair. Thus 
if you felt talkative you might always find a listener in 
Debenham; if inclined to listen yourself it was only neces- 
sary to sit near Taylor or Nelson; if, on the other hand, 
you just wanted to be quiet, Atkinson or Oates would, prob- 
ably, give you a congenial atmosphere. 
There was never any want of conversation, largely due 
to the fact that no conversation was expected: we most of 
us know the horrible blankness which comes over our 
minds when we realize that because we are eating we are 
also supposed to talk, whether we have anything to say or 
not. It was also due to the more primitive reason that ina 
company of specialists, whose travels extended over most 
parts of the earth, and whose subjects overlapped and 
interlocked at so many points, topics of conversation were 
not only numerous but full of possibilities of expansion. 
Add to this that from the nature of our work we were 
probably people of an inquisitive turn of mind and wanted 
to get to the bottom of the subjects which presented them- 
selves, and you may expect to find, as was in fact the case, 
an atmosphere of pleasant and quite interesting conversa- 
tion which sometimes degenerated into heated and noisy 
argument. 
_ The business of eating over, pipes were lit without 
further formality. I mention pipes only because while 
we had a most bountiful supply of tobacco, the kindly 
‘present of Mr. Wills, our supply of cigarettes from the 
‘Same source was purposely limited and only a small quan- 
