A female in the frozen wastes

WHEN Beryl Bainbridge delivered a lecture to the Captain Scott Society in Cardiff, she wasn't allowed to use the lavatory. When she lit up a lag, someone slapped her hand. The English travel writer, Sara Wheeler, could count herself; lucky, then, when the all male club refused her membership application. One fewer postcard to send to armchair experts when she made it to Antarctica herself.

It took her two years to plan, having resolved to run further south than Tierra del Fuego during a sojourn in South America. Infatuated by the "big white", and by that limitless "space of the imagination", she engaged the support of the American National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey. She read voraciously: everything from Amundsen to Scott and back. The people lighting her way had one thing in common. They were all men.

But then women's presence in claim staking scientific expeditions to the dry desert had been pretty limited since the first female to set foot there - the Norwegian, Caroline Mikkelsen - in 1935. "Problems will arise should it ever happen that women are admitted to base complement," Sir Vivien Fuchs predicted pompously in his book, Of Ice and Men. Rear Admiral George Dufek, an early US commander of ice operations, was a little more honest. "I think the presence of women would wreck the illusion of the frontiersman - the illusion of being a hero," he said.

Sara Wheeler coped - with pee bottles, ice breaks, idiosyncratic scientists and bitter, relentless winds. In fact, as she moved across the continent, camping out with various international scientific expeditions, she was for the most part happily unaware of gender differences until she found herself among some compatriots in the Falkland islands. A participant in the British Antarctic Survey attempted to explain why a colleague had cracked a pretty feeble joke about women's periods. "It does mean a lot to them, keeping it male", he said of his mates. "They don't want the complication of a female in such a pristine place."

It was an Irishman, Sir Ernest Shackleton, who seems to have been a constant source of inspiration - even if he was but a spirit on a continent where nothing really dies. Like Amyr Klink, the Brazilian polar sailor who regards Shackleton as the greatest adventurer, because he failed at most things but never lost a life, Wheeler was struck by Shackleton's example. Klink spent a year recently thinking about Shackleton's transantarctic ship, Endurance, on his own yacht in the pack ice in Dorian Bay. Wheeler pitched her tent on sea bergs on New Year, slept in Captain Scott's bunk, visited Shackleton's hut. At a time when the world has shrunk and there are no real wildernesses, both writers are fascinated by the landscape of the mind.

Her account of life among the "frozen chosen" - as one priest described his polar parish - is at times hilariously frank. She learned how to forecast weather, make bread and butter pudding, and apply 100 different remedies for the dreaded cabin fever. Some of her scientific hosts may be less than enamoured of her accounts of their serious research. But she "was certainly interested in learning more about 18 different types of waste.

She did her own research: her text is peppered with quotes from those who have gone, physically or metaphorically, before. She can be forgiven for classifying Edward Bransfield as British. The Corkman was the first European to identify Antarctica; for pragmatic reasons, Britain was anxious to claim him as its own.

If psychology is Wheeler's forte, motivation is a constant theme - not only what moved the Scotts and Shackletons and Amundsens, but the personal quest that late 20th century, frozen bearded disciples embark upon. Asked during a radio interview about her fear during her own solo South American trip, she confesses embarrassment at having to say that she had never been frightened, "not even at the worst moment".

What she could never quite say was that no experience up a Chilean mountain could arouse such terror as that sparked off by events closer to home: a friend with AIDS; an old man unable to afford to buy tea bags in a supermarket; and those consequent "nomadic thoughts" that lead to depression, loss of hope, despair.