So as hands tire and blood sugar levels drop in the twilight, the climbers home back to Llanberis, to eat badly and rush for last orders. In the Padarn they’re all drinking – the farmers, the girls from the chemist and the Co-op, the hairdressers and the builders, the walkers and the climbers. That builder I’ve seen doing one-arm pull-ups on a door frame at a party and laughing at the supposed climbers who couldn’t get near it. And there’s big Tommy forcing his weight against the bar, as if trying to stop it toppling over, as he sinks his pints. Gabwt’s standing on a chair shouting “Hash for cash” with his Nunchakas in his hands, terrifying those who don’t know him, as merrymakers sneak out to the Broccoli Garden for some extra stimulation. That’s Dewi playing pool. He killed the vicar with the end of a snapped off pool cue that looked very much like the one he’s holding now. Once he was beating Bobby at a game when Bobby remarked without thinking, “Bloodyhell, Dewi, you’re a killer with a pool cue!” We all stepped back and waited for the explosion, but he mustn’t have heard ’cos he just missed the black and sat down. Those climbers over there are standing cool and not talking about routes and moves, even though they want to. I ask Johnny for the numbers on some route or other up the Pass. “Three, five, two, eight, one,” he says and makes me feel about this small. But me, Carlos and Gwion are buzzing. We downed a load of our spirits before coming in ’cos we haven’t any cash to buy drinks. Those Giros only seem to last a day or so and then you’re skint for a fortnight until you post your next slip in. Tonight’s dinner was a rotting cauliflower that we got from the Co-op for 10p, boiled up with five strands of pasta and a stock cube which we found in the bottom of the cupboard. We called it cauliflower surprise. But Carlos has usually got some scam or petty crime worked out to keep us in food and other stuff. Never mind. Tonight people will be queueing to buy vodka and gin and tomorrow we can eat full sets in Pete’s. As last orders is screamed out Kenny the Turk erupts in a fury and starts spinning a cast iron table around his head. The crowd sweeps backwards in a wave and tries to paste itself to the nicotine-stained walls of the room. The guy who has fallen out of his wheelchair in the crush pulls out a baseball bat and lashes out at anybody who tries to help him. For a moment things are completely out of control until Ash the barman, five ten and thin as a rake, gets in there and calms the Middle-Eastern stand-up comic’s temper. Just another night in the Pad really.
Out in the street drunks mumble to themselves, dossers look for dosses and the partiers want to know where ‘the scene’ is. So it’s off to some terraced house under an orange street lamp to try and prolong the day, wishing sleep would never have to come. The house is throbbing with the beat and those inside are giggling and dancing and you can tell, by the look in their eyes, that some people will be up all night. But if you eat those ’shrooms you won’t get to Gogarth tomorrow, you’ll sit around and waste your day away. Next to some hot knives on the stove we swap our stories of bricking it miles out, or talk of the moves on some slate horror and how you should try it like this or like that next time. But some of the others are bored by your keenness and wish you would shut up and you suddenly feel self-conscious as the herbs take effect. You realise you’ve overdone it and are incapable of speech, and the girl you’ve wanted to work up the courage to ask is talking with that other guy. So you leave for home without saying your goodnights, tripping over your own feet as you head down the hill. In the dark house you get into your pit, lie on your back and drift off, your head swimming, dreaming about tomorrow.
CHAPTER THREE
LOST IN THE
BROCCOLI GARDEN
It was a vile day and the gigantic breakers from the Irish sea were surging halfway up the 400-foot wall, drenching the cliff top with spray. I came away with vivid impressions of dripping, disintegrating granite set at a thought-provoking angle.
— Tom Patey commenting on Gogarth’s Red Walls,
Climbers’ Club Journal, 1966
It was in 1986 that the hard climbers returned to Gogarth, and in that year an insular band of the young and not-so-young subjected the ‘Mother of all rock’ to a bombardment of frightening and characterful new routes. That same year my intense relationship with the Red Walls began.
There are two Red Walls, a left one and a right one. High, vertiginous, wedge-shaped sheets of ancient quartzite, separated by a knife-edge promontory. The oldest rock in Britain some say. The right-hand wall became public property in 1966 when its first ascent went out on television, live. The show was called Cliffhangers and involved the likes of Joe Brown, Ian McNaught-Davis, Royal Robbins and Tom Patey. This wall is a contorted and sensuously confusing place to be. Parallel shallow dykes of sandy, horned grovelling nearly always lead the climber into a cul-de-sac and the shape of the wall is perspectively deceiving, luring you over the edge when you stop at the tourist viewpoint.
The left-hand wall is different. A crimson headboard to the sea bed. From a distance the upper two-thirds appear featureless and ill at ease atop the lower third, a warped and undercut wave of a soft grey chalky substance. To be on the wall is to be on a vertical desert of pocketed rock, and as a desert, seething with hidden life. Sea slaters and springtails disperse in all directions from behind the odd loose hold and the face is also host to some huge spiders (likened to my prematurely aged digits). Rare flora also abounds; round comfortable cushions of green cling to the wall which is also one of the few haunts of the Mad Sea Broccoli.
I’d only been to Gogarth once before, when I’d waltzed up Positron, stopping occasionally to gaze into the exposure. I’d laughed and shook my head in disbelief all the way. Then, looking for an enjoyable climb to finish the day on, Gwion Hughes and I rapped into the Red Walls for the first time. After being puked on by an ugly ball of fluff, we crouched at the bottom of the route Mein Kampf. Uninspiringly, the first pitch looked quite horrific, but looks can be deceiving. They weren’t. It was a loose and awful climb to the belay ledge and then it was my turn to puke through a mixture of the smell and the terror. We escaped up the wall’s namesake and vowed never to return. That night in the Padarn, over calming beers, one of the older guys revealed to us that Mein Kampf hadn’t been repeated after seven years. So that was it, we were back there the next day, climbing a little direct variation too. For me it was love at second sight.
When sprawled out in comfort on the belay ledge of Left-Hand Red Wall it’s hard to miss the hanging flake of Schittlegruber1. I was gobsmacked to learn that no one had climbed that flake so I rapped in and inspected it. I found an overhanging scoop with only a meagre scattering of holds leading up to the jagged shield of the flake. The scoop looked hard and difficult to protect and, once again, looks weren’t deceiving. The climb, with Nick Harms, went OK, I was taking well to this type of climbing, and the line came to be one of the classic hard routes of the island. It was repeated quickly, for Gogarth, by Yorkshire men Dave Green and Clive Davis who likened it to Gordale Scar’s Mossdale Trip, a famous tottering pile of limestone. I wondered whether this was complimentary or not.
The wall drew me further in, to the central sweep right of the Heart of Gold. Rappeling down and discovering continuous lines of pockets and seams, it was like unwrapping a surprise parcel. And once I’d torn it open it was just the gift I’d been waiting for. In 280 feet I managed to find one peg placement, a poor downward-pointing knife-blade, which would have to serve as a belay. With Moose (Mike Thomas) I descended to the foot of the route. I set off on a tramline of sandy pockets in the grey wave. The first protection came after fifty feet of overhanging pocket-picking, taking care not to snap off the brittle edges. It was a briefcase-sized block detached on five sides and attached on its smallest end. Once looped it had to be laybacked and manteled. The bloated bodies of the Monster Alien Spiders wait for prey at the roof. I pull by and gain a foot-cramping rest on a hanging porcelain slab a little higher. I arrange a clutch of shallow protection in the blind seams in front of my face and begin what looks like three bodylengths of wicked dink-pulling.
I gained height in convulsions. Classical music I’d heard in some car advertisement droned through my brain. I stopped being scared and, after an age of schizophrenic debate, I convinced myself that I could not fall off. I then began to look at myself rather than the rock. It was as though my body climbed while I gazed on … Peg. Stop. A threadbare stance in the middle of this Broccoli Garden.
I wasn’t experiencing the anticipated satisfaction of completing such a frightening pitch. It was the numbness. And it was also that I was hanging on a tied off knife-blade with one small foot-hold. There were some tiny slots that would take RPs, there and here, but I’d used all four of mine on the pitch below. “Please don’t fall off, Moose,” I shouted down, but not too loudly so as not to worry him about the state of the belay. He didn’t come off and we filled every imagined nut placement optimism could provide. Expecting the next pitch to be OK, I tried to send the Moose up it, but every time an RP popped out of the belay and we dropped another heart-stopping inch, our nervous disorders got worse. After a valiant attempt he refused. I led up and, quivering, pulled off the boulder problem, a slap for a tiny edge a bodylength above a nut in a wobbly block. I flopped over the rim trounced, with the buzz of an arsonist (I remembered the burning moors). Sitting on top and trying to calm down with ice-creams, we wondered if the runners or the belay would have held what would have been a long free fall. I attempted to question why I went for those moves when I could have backed off, reversed down, but no one answered. (Did I ever pause to ponder as the hospital curtains turned to yellow?)
A murky September day. The sea mist, the diffused flashing of the South Stack lighthouse. The distant subterranean boom of the North Stack foghorn. A melancholy mood. The dull lapping of the waves reverberates around the huge Gothic archway at the very base of the wall. Having just failed an on-sight attempt on the shale corner at the back of the arch, which we dubbed Television Set Groove, I passed two limp rope-ends to Johnny (Dawes). Silently he tied in and set off up the actual arête of the arch. I dodged the falling blocks for over an hour. To us the impact of the rocks made loud crashes but the fog would eat up any sound we made, swallow our cries for help. Did anyone know we were down here? Then a large part of the arête came off and I instinctively locked off the brake plate, waiting for the exploding gear placements. He screamed and began to fall, I saw it, but then he caught hold of the rock again and continued upwards, up the grey wave. After swinging around a short roof and pulling off more quartz rockery blocks, Johnny found a Friend belay in a wide crack. The crack went up to an apex and then back down to the lip of a giant roof further to the right. I struggled up the arête and approached the belay.
Johnny stared at me with an expressionless face. Something was wrong. It took a while to place it, and then I sniffed. It was the smell, the smell of fresh soil coming from inside the crack. We looked at each other still in silence. The crack formed one side of a bus-sized block which had recently slipped. The block was the roof. It wasn’t supported from below, only from above by, perhaps, some kind of vacuum suction. Johnny’s only belay was constructed of three shifting Friends in the crack. With hardly a word I set off on the next unprotected traverse pitch. I edged sideways with loose spikes for my hands and dinnerplates for my feet, right on the lip, which kept snapping off. I glanced back at Johnny, just a loop of slack rope between us. If I fell would the centrifugal force be enough to bring the stance down? My head begins to swim with fear so I concentrate on the mosaic of bubbles and ridges just beyond the end of my nose and keep on blindly feeling to my right. Eight feet from the corner now where the promontory meets the wall and the loneliness begins to shake me. Boom, flash, boom, flash go the other inhabitants of Gogarth. The fulmars and guillemots seem strangely quiet. After a seeming eternity on one small muscle-cramping foothold, Gwion and Trevor appeared on the ramp. They broke the cathedral-like atmosphere with their chatting and laughter and this cheered me across to the last jump move into the corner. One, two, three … No, I can’t. Yes, you can. I can’t. You can. An internal pantomime raged in my head. One, two, three … Yes, gotcha! I clung onto the grass tufts of the slabby side of the promontory. It was all over. Come to Mother, we like to think, stood as a monument to on-sight climbing for five more months, before the roof collapsed of its own accord.
The next month I was back again, this time with Trevor Hodgson. I stole a fine direct on the second pitch of Heart of Gold and followed Carlos, as he was then known, up a short, hard direct start to Cannibal. But these were only to be fillers in before a new episode began.
In my search for unclimbed rock I began to visualise an almost imperceptible line between Heart of Gold and The Enchanted Broccoli Garden. It was a line marked by its lack of flakes, cracks and corners and would follow small edges and pockets from one tiny seam to the next. The first pitch had a small roof to be surmounted and the holds were hidden under wet tufts of grass. I climbed, ice axe in hand, cleaning as I traversed the initial overhang. Two king spiders watched me place a peg. This time they made me feel good. I took a fall whilst leaping across the overhang. The peg moves but holds. The thought crosses my mind that the spiders have smiled and granted me one fall. Next time up brings the Heart of Gold stance, once rumoured to be iffy but now recognised as bombproof in comparison with its neighbour. Nick, my partner for the day, refused to follow me so we left. Four months later an exceptionally bitter January day found Gwion and me sliding back down to the belay to attempt the next two pitches. Pudding and debauchery weighed heavily on my stomach and conscience, as I contemplated the accumulation of Christmas calories. The middle pitch only took a few minutes because there was no gear to slow me down, just clip the belay and go for the layback. And there I was again at the dreaded Broccoli Belay. Silently, I sighed with relief when Gwion shouted over that he was bailing out.
It seemed to be becoming increasingly difficult to find rope-holders for my escapades, so I jumped at the chance when Bob Drury offered his services. It was the last day of January and on the first day of February the seasonal bird ban came into effect. The rock had trickles of water but it had to be today or not at all. We slid over the edge from a world of coach tours and ice-creams back into the tilted desert. Two opposite universes separated by a right-angle. At the hanging stance Bob was intent on clipping into the abseil rope but I threw it well out of his reach. I began to regret my decision as I repeatedly almost came off whilst attempting to rock over onto a slimy nipple. Three times I contrived to scrape back down barndoor laybacks to the minimal sanctuary of the Broccoli Belay and re-psych. I squeaked the inside edge of my left boot and climbed up to the nipple on my outside edge. That gave me just enough stick and I rocked over; the only consolation a Rock One in soft red rock. The face above is steep and carpeted. I brush the hairy lichen from the rock with my hand and it floats into my eye. There is no more protection. I begin to shake, then I go beyond shaking and once again my mind enters that realm of depersonalisation. I move away from the rock and come back with a crash at the end of all the difficulties, retching, about to puke. Sitting on top of this Super Calabrese, watching the clouds billowing out on the Irish Sea and, beyond, the Wicklow Mountains silhouetted by the setting sun, which then begins to play a trick on us and lifts the mountains so that they are floating on shimering stilts, I am numb and unaware of what I have done. It never really attained a relevance.
I climbed some more routes on the Red Walls, but the big lines had gone. There is something sad about a cliff becoming worked out – for me it’s a sign to move on. But there were still a couple of blanks in the guidebook that I wanted to fill. At last I found a keen partner in Pete Johnstone and we took residence in South Stack bogs in the winter of ’88. Over a couple of freezing days we climbed Outside the Asylum, because we were alone in an insane world, and Salem, named after a famous Welsh painting depicting worldly vanity – a woman comes into chapel late so that the congregation will notice her new shawl, and in the folds of the shawl is the face of the Devil. The folds and
contortions of the rock reminded me of that shawl.
I don’t often go back there now, but I do remember a daydream – of becoming entangled in one of those viscid webs, cocooned, to be excised as a Monster Alien Spider, to face my existence, shuffling silently, watching and soloing on that red wall.
1 A pun on Schicklgruber – Hitler’s family name.
CHAPTER FOUR
A PIECE OF
DRIFTWOOD
Do you want to know why I didn’t think about you on all those other climbs? When really I should have been laughing and joking about all the good times there were. Berating you for being such a fool. Or even wishing that we could still be huddled by the dirty fireplace, under a blanket, in that freezing house we shared through that winter. Rock 3 Terrace. I think we’ll have to go back a little way. To a starting point, if you like. Perhaps I should begin with our first Scottish winter trip.
We hacked it up to Ambleside in your very knackered Mini to get Fluff. Do you remember? I could never drive and you always cursed me. After a night at the Charlotte Mason disco, in that barn, where we didn’t cop off ’cos we were too scruffy and drunk, we switched to Fluff’s knackered Ford Fiesta and hit the M6. We slept, the three of us, sat up in our seats like crash test dummies, fermenting in our pits, with snow settling on the windscreen. Next morning in the posh Aviemore café they frowned at us and wouldn’t give us a top-up of hot water. Not the right kind of clientele. So we set off late to the Northern Corries and you led a route, which one I don’t recall, that neither Fluff nor I could follow. You held us both on the rope and took the piss, as you liked to do. We maintained that it was only because you’d hacked off all the ice but, really, we knew.
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