Then we headed west, to Meagaidh – remind me where we slept. Smith’s Gully was a breeze. You barely paused to put a screw in, you were always so confident (Fluff thought too confident), and you moaned about the party in front holding us up. Luckily, if you recall we didn’t have a map and compass, the skies were clear and we slid like lunatics down toward the car park. Slotted back into the Fiesta, we boated round bends toward Glen Coe. On Raven’s Direct you did it again, teetering up slabs on millimetre spikes of metal, almost doing the splits in the verglassed chimney on the top pitch. I felt like I was learning from you – but wait a minute, we were beginners together. I didn’t reveal my impression. I took the piss out of you, too. But you didn’t like that and you’d snap at me. When you came back and I’d drunk a bottle of your beer you got angry and didn’t know how to react. After sulking and making me feel like I didn’t care, you made me pay for it, and ever since I got the feeling you thought I didn’t respect you. I did. We did. But if we’d shown it, you might have got big-headed. As it was you went for things as if tomorrow might not arrive, trying to prove to the world that you could do it. And afterwards trying to remain modest. Sometimes not even telling what you’d done. But you knew we’d find out. You might disagree, but anyway, do you remember what we climbed next? We soloed all those gullies on Aonach Dubh, but they were too easy and we got bored like only young blind men do. So we stopped below the summit and built a snow fertility symbol big enough to be seen from the Clachaig. Well, it made us laugh. You were the rudest person I ever knew.
On the Ben we did Point Five and The Curtain ’cos we’d seen them in Cold Climbs. It didn’t matter if the ice was good or bad, you just went for it, and so did I. Well, compared to rock climbing these ice axe handles were like jugs. We didn’t think about what kind of crud the picks were stuck in. And hell! we could hang on all day. Sliding down Number Five Gully they scowled at us as we flew past roped together and screaming. I came to a stop and you slid into me crampons first and made my leg bleed.
Driving back home, I don’t need reminding. Between Glasgow and Carlisle, going fast, surrounded by thundering, spraying lorries, ‘I’ve Got the Power’ playing loud on the stereo combating the noise from the engine. And the windscreen blows out. We had no cash or any way of fixing it so we just kept going. It was night-time and blizzarding on the motorway and we got into our sleeping bags, Fluff with his feet poking out the bottom to work the pedals. And we had to wear mittens, balaclavas, and shades to keep the stinging snow out of our eyes. I don’t know what the hitchhiker must have thought with his thumb out below the street lamp as we, like the PLO without a cause, imprinted against the windows, waved through the front of the car and shouted “No room, mate.” We had to turn the music up even louder trying to get a ton out of the Fiesta pelting over Dunmail Raise. And when the doors sprang open we fell out into the street, unable to stand, we were so chilled. But we were pleased with ourselves. And now I’m glad that I made that trip with you.
And then, less hazy in our memory, there was Eigg. Mid-summer. We went to free the Sgurr, and to be fair you did lead a scary pitch (and I took another fall, flying with that block which squashed my thumb), but we soon gave up and decided to regress. We went mad like children. You showed off your public school athleticism in the inter-island soccer match, we laughed, drunk, as we rowed around in circles, on millpond morning water in our ‘borrowed’ rowing boat. You danced the fling with schoolgirls at the village hall ceilidh. The sun seemed to shine all night and we stripped and swam at 4 am – the night those islanders turned up on a tractor loaded with ale and we carried on, scared that it all might end soon. But the one picture that I keep with me, a photo in my mental pocket, is of you coming back across the little sandy bay pulling that trunk of silver driftwood behind you in a washed-up pram, coming out of the sun like a perfect recollection. We sat at a dining table made of sand and ate the finest food from the island post office. That driftwood, just like a wild horse’s head, which you went to such lengths to hump across the island and onto the boat home, is now in George’s house. He’s the keeper and he cherishes it. And when any of us goes round there, we touch it and it transports us to Eigg and a time when we lost our heads.
Dingle, Ireland. George, Glenn and me were sat in Tom Long’s bar when the phone rang, drinking Irish coffee.
“Its for you, Paul,” says Liam, and I walk over.
“Hello … Hi, Zoe … What d’you mean?” I shook. “OK, I’ll tell the others.”
The room had changed when I looked up, grown bigger and the angles were wrong. She’d just told me you were dead. Soloing on Snowdon. I told the others and Liam poured us three stiff ones. And three more. Then Liam had the idea to take us out in his boat, to see the dolphin. He said that dolphins had been used as a kind of therapy for ill or sad people, and when it surfaced right by us and looked at us, the moment felt important. There was this creature, free in all this space. Like you now, maybe.
We danced all night like we were dancing for you and we laughed uncontrollably as we carried Glenn, me at his hands and George at his feet along the harbour in the morning sun. We leaned against a flagpole and joked about you, called you the lighthouse; Ed Stone – Eddy Stone Automatic – the lights flash but nobody’s home. You’d have got grumpy if we’d said that to your face.
I didn’t think about you because of a whole confusion of reasons. Little disagreements left unsaid, you being in on some of my most cherished memories (I fell in love on Eigg). But – the painful but – in you I saw mirrored some of my recklessness, and others’. It’s what gets you up things, past those moments of pinpoint contact. Isn’t it?
CHAPTER FIVE
ON THE BIG STONE
“It’ll never go. Yer don’t stand a cat in ’ell’s chance,” said the old-timer and Johnny and I ignored him, as we sat in Pete’s looking at the photos of The Scoop in Hard Rock. Much to Johnny’s bewilderment I’d never done a route in Hard Rock, so I was psyched up. Ken Wilson’s photos looked terrifying, Doug Scott with EBs and jeans on, looking gripped with the rope being blown out horizontally behind him, and the big colour photo of the giant tilted corners in the evening sunlight with the climbers looking like tiny stick people under those black overhangs. And the words didn’t add to the optimism – particularly the bit about “over-hanging bands of loose schist”. I had spent my Giro and had no money. Pete had just given me a chip butty out of pity but I was depressed. I wanted to go but knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it. Johnny said he was bored with us lot never having enough cash and offered to pay for me. So I grinned and with no time for negativity we jumped in the van and headed for Scotland. We got as far as Llandudno when I realised that in my eagerness, I had omitted to bring my rucksack.
The ride went quickly as driving with the Dawes always does. Up the M6 we motored with The B52’s playing loud and the windscreen-wipers working hard to maintain some kind of visibility through the torrential rain. In Glasgow we tried to get our friend Face into the van and sweep him off to the outer isles but he was having none of it. He had just got a job at the Hoover factory and couldn’t risk getting sacked. He refused to take us to his local Motherwell pub ’cos he said that if Johnny opened his mouth with his posh southern accent we’d be beaten up straight away. Along Loch Lomond the Dawes actually got ‘the Hovis’ (as the silly, top-heavy van was affectionately known) onto two wheels as he went for a drastic overtaking manoeuvre. I think I upset him a little when, never having driven myself and failing to grasp the concept of road danger, I didn’t get at all fazed. At Fort William we stopped to buy provisions – three big cabbages, a bottle of cold pressed olive oil, a bottle of white wine vinegar, a sack of petit pois and a packet of panty pads (excellent for sticking onto the rock and soaking up trickles onto the crux smear). We also bought Moskill, Repel, Attack and Jungle Formula. We couldn’t fail. Before we left I rolled up a malt loaf into a big turd shape and laid it out on the aisle floor. It gave us a laugh watching the shoppers disgu
stedly steering their trolleys around the offending dollop. It was even funnier to see their faces as Johnny stooped down, picked it up and munched it.
I hadn’t visited Skye since my mother brought me there as a small child but I remembered the shapes of the Red Cuillin, like velvet cushions, and the way the patches of light shifted across them west to east. And I remembered her smoking cigarettes and I being shocked (she never did that) to keep the midges away. I couldn’t remember anything else, though. We gave a ride to an enormous musical hitchhiker, all the way from Canada, on her way to play at the Skye folk festival. We had to help her squeeze in through the side door and the Hovis listed badly all the way to Portree. As he drove, Johnny would glance at me occasionally and grin with a lurid expression on his face.
Waiting at the outpost of Uig for the Tarbert ferry, I managed to squirt a jet of Jungle Formula into my eye. The warning label said keep away from plastics and skin and my eye felt as though it were melting. Passers-by stopped and pointed at the scrawny youth moaning and trying to drown himself in a muddy puddle in the street whilst Johnny guffawed with sympathy. On the boat, and now nearing our objective, the rains began again but this was beginning to feel like a real adventure, the likes of which I had never been on. At Tarbert we cowered in doorways, hiding from the rain. The sky was so dark it felt like dusk, though it was only midday. After some enquiries we found a man, Big John Macleod, who would take us on his tractor to the start of the walk-in at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle. With our huge bags we rattled slowly along a bleak lochside, past a deserted whaling station and the most remote schoolhouse in Britain. We climbed down from the trailer dripping wet and shivering and handed Big John a tenner. Johnny and I struggled to glance sideways at each other through the horizontal rain when he informed us dourly that it was “clearing up”. Sadly, on a later trip when we tried to hire Big John again we were told that he had succumbed to the ‘island fever’ and had taken a shotgun on himself.
During a lull in the tempest we began our walk-in. After what seemed like hours of sprinting and collapsing with a large rucksack on back and front and large cabbages in our hands (very good training) we reached a dam and, wrapping ourselves up in the tent fly, bivvied exhausted. We were awakened by rain on our cocoon. I poked my head out into the morning and to my horror discovered that it was a rain of midges and not just rain. We panicked which is the best thing to do in a midge attack and, shouldering our four packs, ran away. To help keep the rain off we made cabbage-leaf hats which one could munch when hunger took hold and, after a few hours of stumbling around, we (kind of) saw it.
The bottom half of the mighty Strone2 looked like the underside of some great beer gut. A steep rock-strewn hillside led up to the cliff and where the two met there was a wide band of loose-looking shale. Water poured out of the cloud that kept the secrets of the upper part of the mountain. The waterfalls exploded into spray hundreds of feet in front of the overhanging wall. It was falling from the lip of the face and seemed to clarify the distorted perspective that the cliff presented. I tottered into the valley with the hillside on my back.
After pitching our tent in what was to become the biggest water puddle in the surrounding area, excited, we raced up to attempt the first pitch before it went dark. The rock was quite unsound and the ancient RURP for protection disconcerting. Johnny led and after some trouble clambered onto a small ledge belay. It had been hard and more than a little dangerous but we had made a start on a climb we had been dreaming of for a long time. Down below our unhygienic lifestyle and diet of salad and sheep shit wasn’t doing much to keep our recently acquired streaming colds at bay. Then the midge paranoia began and we stayed awake half the night exterminating each invader as it forced its way through the tent zip. When the morning came the space between the inner and outer tent was thick with the evil little buggers. We were prisoners. To make our escape we first drenched ourselves in Jungle Formula, though we knew that they went crazy for the stuff (they like to lick it off before biting you), then we lit yards of mosquito coils and, quickly opening and shutting the airlock, hurled the pieces into the bell. After a while we could pull our stockings over our heads and make a run for it.
After forcing down a pan of glutinous gruel we headed back up the hillside to continue our adventure. The day was clearer and I shivered as I tilted my head back to see the whole height of the crag. It was easier to face away from the rock and look up at the face out above my head. Corners staggered up the overhang, slashes on a sheet of dark material. Could they be linked? Higher on the face one corner was soaking wet and water drizzled out of the bottom of it and we felt it like pinpricks, wet on our faces. I knew we’d never get up that. The next couple of pitches went more steadily, a short technical groove and a long beautiful corner. The rock was immaculate and we could find no placements for our ice screws which we had brought for the schist. We shouted and waved at two men fishing on Loch Ulladale, the only others we were to see that week. On returning to our dining cave that evening we were warmed to find two trout lying there. “Bugger vegetarianism, pass me the penknife.”
With the ropes now fixed up to the huge wet corner we had hit an impasse. The way on looked downright offensive. There was so much slime oozing out of the cracks that it wasn’t even worth trying. The only feasible alternative was a ridiculous-looking forty-foot groove/roof thing running out over the glen. I spent the day hanging in slings while Johnny aided and cleaned the first pitch of our alternative free route. Eventually, that tedious but necessary job done, we could slide back down for more cold salad. The next day Johnny’s enthusiasm got him up the pitch quickly after some sequence difficulties at the start. The flying groove pitch got us to a lovely sofa of a belay ledge back on The Scoop – to where Doug Scott pendulumed on the first ascent. I wasted the rest of the day trying to follow the original line up a technical arête and over desperate bulges, the loch below my heels. That feeling grabbed me again. That same feeling as when I first went to the Verdon at sixteen. The space, the updraught, the freedom. This is why I go climbing. It’s easy to lose sight when you get fuelled by ambition. With the updraught came the sound of ruffling feathers and the golden eagle was below my heels now. Like I could have stepped off onto its back and ridden away. I climbed to below that infamous bolt and came down. “It might go, but not this week.”
Before zipping off down the, by now, very spacy abseils we scoped out the possibility of a traverse left from where we could perhaps get back up and right. Again we had no choice. Being just a couple of rock rats, we struggled with our jumars on the fixed lines and all the while the midges followed us up the cliff. We even took to climbing with burning mosquito coils tucked in our hats. They say that things as small as midges aren’t capable of conscious thought. But these! They made secret plans of torment. There was method in their torture. It rained continuously but the Strone, overhanging more than a whole rope-length, kept us dry and always gave us new hope when our free passage was barred.
The leftwards traverse was a joy. A useless peg under a loose block led to strenuous slapping across a sloping shelf and a hanging blade belay. Johnny swung through and took us up an easier face pitch to a stance below the final capping roof. Oh dear, we sighed, it looked blank and impossible. But to the right the overhang was stepped with a slanting wall running through it. There appeared to be no protection but there was a smattering of pinches and small edges. It was my lead but I backed off after placing a titanium angle in a hole. In a situation like this, lonely and homesick and faced with a terrifying lead, Johnny could be counted on to dispense with caution and just be downright irresponsible. It would be quicker if he led and, not being too proud to realise this, I handed over the rope-ends. The mood had now become very sombre and few directions were vocalised as Johnny lurched across the overhang, pinching and struggling to keep his feet in contact with the lichenous rock. On the lip, pumping, he fiddled a slider into a little slot and slowly, quietly sat on it. The last gear, the angle, was at the back of the roof.
As he fiddled with the gear on his harness the slider shifted. “Aaaah, don’t rip, don’t rip.” Then, as he was futily trying to place a blade in a blank seam, the piece stripped and Johnny plummeted. He disappeared under a band of overhangs and began a long pendulum. I held the ropes tight and watched with horror as they slid along the sharp lip, spraying a cloud of nylon fluff into the air. As one rope snapped, the blade tinkled on the rocks 700 feet below. Johnny prusiked up and, silent and worried, we did the space abseil and tried to get our heads together.
After a solemn discussion we both agreed things were getting a little out of hand. Johnny was shaken up and felt unsure about going back up. All this fear to be stopped ten feet from easy ground. We had to come up with a plan. We were halfway through our last cabbage and our head colds were intensifying.
Early next day Johnny ran up to the top of the crag and began rappeling, with me below shouting directions – “Left a bit, right a bit.” A brief peek was all he needed to see he was only a couple of moves from easy ground, so off we jumared excitedly, dropping all the fixed line behind us. Committed now, Johnny began the pitch, went for the run-out and wobbled up to the last Scoop belay. We both whooped with delight. I led through up to the last easy pitch on perfect gabbro and we had a summit roll-up with the last of our tobacco. After the descent we buried lots of our equipment under rocks as we began enthusiastically making plans for our return, when we would attempt the other unbelievable lines (on return we never managed to find our cache). We ran down to Amhuinnsuidhe where we gorged on food from the remote post office that was ten years past its sell-by date and used the phone at the grand castle to call up Big John for a rescue. In the castle the gillies and watchers told us about Gerrard Poncho, the Belgian business tycoon, who ‘owned’ Strone Ulladale and charged £200 per bullet to shoot a mighty stag. In my pride I thought “He doesn’t own the Strone right now. We do. And the eagles.”
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