My literary friends, surprised as I was at the way my life had been hi-jacked by climbing, asked if this was not a form of escape, its excitement being a distraction from more real problems. At the time I shrugged; they hadn’t known what it was like. To climb is to know it’s the real thing. I was going to Everest and I didn’t care much why. What mattered now was a gradual physical and mental focusing – yes, a narrowing if you like – on the adventure ahead. Ask the big questions later when I had time to catch up with myself. Always later, sometime later …
Dave Bricknell, the Pilkington Company Secretary, who had now definitely obtained leave to come on the Expedition, came up to Glencoe for his initiation into climbing. On his first route he suffered the agonies of hot-aches through wearing inadequate gloves, and quietly passed out on a belay stance halfway up. Mal heard a rattle and looked down to see only Dave’s feet resting on the ledge – the rest of him had slipped away and he was peacefully hanging upside down. Mal descended, put him on his feet again, and finished the route with an extremely embarrassed Dave struggling to make sense of it all through a confusion of axes, ropes, slings and gear.
The second day he went out with Mal and Liz. Halfway up, Liz heard ‘Shit!’ drift down from Dave who was seconding Mal up above her. ‘What is it, Dave?’ she shouted up, concerned. ‘I think I’m beginning to enjoy this!’ came the reply.
Dave was fitting in. ‘The Right Stuff – not half bad for a Company Secretary’ was Mal’s verdict. ‘Only trouble is he’s too fit and doesn’t drink enough. We’ll have to handicap him. Going climbing with a hangover and four hours’ sleep is the best rehearsal for altitude.’ Dave, who was beginning to adjust to the style of these shuffling dossers he’d fallen among, promised to try to put this good advice into practise. He made no effort to conceal his excitement at the adventure he’d been caught up in. I could easily empathize with him; the first trip is like no other.
‘The North-East Ridge is a typical modern mountaineering route – very bold, very brave, very stupid,’ Jon asserts in the Clachaig Bar. ‘Great!’
‘What’s our chance of climbing it?’ Dave asks.
‘At the moment I’d give us an 80 per cent chance of doing the Pinnacles, 30–35 per cent for the Summit,’ Mal replies.
Jon, ‘I’d say we’ve nil chance of doing it, and it’s odds on someone will croak.’
That’s their natures. Mal’s commitment and belief are absolute, they have to be. Not a ‘go out and see’ but ‘we will do it’. At the same time, a detached part of him is quite objective and realistic – he wouldn’t still be alive otherwise. Whereas Jon says we’ll go on till we drop, expecting us to drop.
Mal stretches out his legs, relaxed for once. He and Jon have had a good day. ‘I don’t expect to die young,’ he observes into his pint. Jon turns to me.
‘How do you think you’ll die, Andy?’ This is not a question demanding an answer, but Jon’s characteristic testing-out. ‘The statistics say 1.3 people should snuff it on this trip, and you’ve got as good a chance of croaking as anybody else. More, I should say.’ And he leans back and laughs, eyes alight with mischief and something between malice and affection.
I’d thought about it. Everyone had in their own way weighed up the risk and the hardship and the separations before reaffirming their commitment to going to Everest. It had been something of a shock when Pilkington’s came in and I realized this was really going to happen. This expedition was going to be much harder, more demanding and probably more dangerous than Mustagh, making that affair seem like a holiday jaunt. There I’d carried to 5,600 and it had taken more out of me than I’d ever imagined was there in the first place. This time Malcolm’s sports plan was for me to carry to 7,000 metres if possible, on to the crest of the North-East Ridge. I’d seen the photos in The Unclimbed Ridge, particularly the steep exposed traverse above their first snow cave, and carried them in the back of my mind ever since. From Bonington’s account, the weather at times would be desperate, light-years out with my experience. If anything at all went wrong up there, I’d be in serious trouble.
So you think it all through again, consider your life as it is, with its problems and satisfactions and hopes and regrets, realize how very much you want to live and yet discover deep down a certain fatalism that verges on indifference. You weigh quality against quantity of experience. And in the end, because that is the way you have become, you decide yes it is worth it, yes of course you will go and give it your best shot and accept the outcome.
Then your life becomes as simple as it’s ever going to be.
‘I suppose you do it for the money,’ my dentist says hopefully as he probes inside my mouth. In my choking laughter his pick digs into my tongue and draws blood.
Walking back to the Clachaig after a day on the hill, Mal tells me he has phases of nightmares when he wakes up soaking with sweat but no memory of why. The only one he can remember is of being trapped in an airliner falling out of the sky from 30,000 feet, knowing it’s going to deck out, that he is falling and going to die and there’s nothing he can do, looking over at Liz to say goodbye …
‘Suppose it shows there must be a lot down there. Bit worrying that.’
I nod and we talk about dreams and the anxieties one tries to suppress. It’s the first time he’s opened up with me for a while, being so preoccupied with the Expedition, and I know it’s something he does very rarely, except maybe with Liz. He’s like most good climbers in that respect: emotions are to be rigorously controlled; fear, anxiety and doubt are there to be overcome. That battle with oneself is at the heart of climbing. It’s appropriate in that situation, but restrictive and unhealthy in everyday life, I suggest. ‘I’m interested more and more in uncontrolling,’ I say.
‘With the state of your private life, that’s just as well!’ Mal laughs.
‘Yes, well … Better to ride wild horses than try to drag them to the ground.’
This is definitely not a climbers’ conversation, though it’s only possible because of the time we’ve spent together in the hills.
‘When I was 14 I discovered I could will myself not to feel anything I didn’t want to,’ he says casually.
‘Was that when you took up climbing?’
‘Soon after … It became a habit. Only recently I’ve come to think it’s maybe not such a good way to live. And living only for climbing is like abseiling off one pin – if that pulls, you’ve got nothing left. By the time you get to climbing in the Himalayas you’ve forgotten why you started in the first place.’
We trudge down the road in silence through the gathering dark. The air smells of snow and moor, a three-quarter moon is rising yellow over Bidean. Ahead of us are lights where the world of warmth, laughter and climbing talk awaits us. These moments linger in the mind as significant pauses, as milestones in the Expedition we’re already on.
In Aberdeen Andy Nisbet gets a phone call from an insurance broker. ‘I hear you’re going to Everest soon – have you ever thought of taking out life insurance?’ Andy laughs, declines politely, puts the phone down.
Jon presses me persistently to tell him how much my recent Scottish Arts Council Bursary is worth. Eventually I say, ‘Look, I’m not telling you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s private.’
‘I thought climbing was private,’ he retorts. Must have been saving that one up for a while. I nod, concede the point. ‘It used to be – though all those pre-war Everest trips had newspaper contracts. And books. If you can think of any other way of paying for this trip, let me know.’
We have another media session, this time in Glencoe.
It’s good for us to be together again, for most of us know only two or three others in the team and just dealing with the media gives us a kind of solidarity.