Amanda Barry was rummaging for something in her mother’s loft when she came across her father’s trunk. Delving beneath the old blankets, she uncovered a trove of photographs, letters and journals that would set her on his trail, all the way to the Antarctic.
Barry’s father, George, had died suddenly after a heart attack when she was nine. Her mother had kept alive the sense of him; his pipes and cigarettes were still in a drawer of the sideboard. Like her four older siblings, Barry owned a photograph, taken at Port Lockroy in Antarctica, where in 1948 he was base leader. “He always wanted to go back,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, Dad, I’m going to go. For you and for me.’”
