Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Seeing Ran and Ginny together in their last two days you’d think they’d only been married a week, instead of thirty-four years. It hurt badly to watch a true marriage being ripped apart.

  I started life without Ginny. At Greenlands, the urn containing her ashes was buried in a garden beside the earlier graves of all the dogs she had owned and Fingal, her cat. Set in a glade of trees she had planted and overlooking the hills and fields where her cattle still grazed, it is my most special place.

  On weekdays I busied myself in the office, where Gina and Jill and Joyce were kind and understanding, and on the farm, where Neil and Ruth continued to deal with the cattle and the sheep. Jean tidied the house three times a week, as she always had, and often left a saucepan of rice mixed with sweetcorn, which became my staple diet. At night, alone, I would wander around the cows, especially Ginny’s favourites, talking to them and at times crying aloud. Three months after Ginny died I could bear things no more. I was becoming morose, inactive and full of self-pity. I knew I must break out of my own cage of misery and I remembered the Everest climb invitation I had received a year before from Sibusiso Vilane in Swaziland, the first black person ever to summit Everest. I needed a sharp jolt and what could provide one better than facing my greatest, lifelong fear – vertigo. If I went with Sibu to Everest that would surely drag me out of the dark void of my current existence. The highest mountain on earth would surely test my irrational terror of heights.

  I wrote to Sibu. He was delighted and accepted the fact that I would first have to learn how to climb. He suggested doing so through a UK mountain tours company called Jagged Globe. I called them at once, but their boss, Simon Lowe, explained they could not take anybody and everybody up Everest and, with due respect, I was ‘sixty, cardiac-challenged and missing some digits’. He drove to Greenlands later that week and suggested that I join two of Jagged Globe’s mountaineering courses. First there was a ten-day Alpine peaks instructional tour to see if I could cope with the basics of snow and ice climbing. Then, if I received a reasonable report from the Alps guide, I should progress to their Ecuador Volcanoes tour, involving climbs up to 20,000 feet, which would introduce me to the effects of high altitude on my system. This was especially important because of my cardiac history.

  Since none of the relevant Alpine or Ecuadorean mountains needed actual technical climbing skills, I assumed that no big drops would be involved.

  Many years ago Ginny and I had gone to the Alps with Monty Don, the gardener, and other friends, including Simon Gault and Geoff Newman. We had walked up Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau with a guide and had a good time. So I invited Simon and Geoff to join me on the Jagged Globe Alpine fortnight. Both accepted. There were fifteen students on the course, mostly men at least thirty years younger than us, but we all passed the guides’ report easily enough. The basic skills we learned involved use of ice-axes and crampons and long snowy trudges. But no actual climbing.

  Back home my sister, Susan, ten years older than me, was ill with mesothelioma or asbestosis. Her husband of over forty years, John Scott, called me, and I joined him and my two nieces, Beelie and Neesh, at the Wiltshire hospital where Sue had been assigned to the cancer ward. She died three months after Ginny, and I lost another wonderful, caring member of the family. My last remaining sister, Gill, and I went to see our mother in the Sussex rest home. Usually we visited her once every month on different dates. She had been getting increasingly forgetful and confused, which was just as well in a way since the news of Celia’s death, then Ginny’s and now Susan’s never really sank in. She kept asking us how they all were long after we had gently told her that they had died.

  After her ninetieth birthday party in July 2002, my mother slowly became less interested in the world outside her own little room. Early in 2003 she had a stroke. The last time I took her outside the home, on one of my monthly visits, was soon after Ginny’s death in the spring of 2004. Thereafter we stayed in her room or sat holding hands and saying little on a bench in the garden outside her room. Her best and oldest friend from Lodsworth, Betty Simmonds, visited her every week, as did Judy Tarring, who had once been her professional carer.

  In August, when I returned from the Alps, my sister Gill warned me that our mother was fading away and unable to leave her bed. We took it in turns to visit her daily. I stayed in a bed and breakfast near the home and one evening arrived in her room after dark. The nurse said she had been sleeping most of that day. I found her fast asleep and sat by her bed, whispering that I loved her and that she was the best mother in the world. Which she was. Her breathing was shallow. I am not sure if she heard me or not. I fell asleep on the carpet beside her bed and woke some time later towards midnight. I have no idea what woke me, but I held her hand and some minutes later she stopped breathing.

  Gill and I followed our mother’s wishes and made sure her grave was beside those of her many old friends and fellow parishioners in the village of Lodsworth. Within a stone’s throw of our old house, the graveyard overlooked the fields and woods and the River Lod where I had spent so many happy teenage holidays with my sisters and with Ginny.

  I tried to lift my head above the deep ache of Ginny’s death and tell myself that she would be wanting me to attack life again, to ‘get on with it’, to ‘be dangerous’: all her little catch phrases. I still keep a short pencilled note she left me about six months before she died. I can’t remember the exact context, but it reads:

  My poor, mad, bad, darling man, I didn’t realise you were giving a lecture there. PLEASE stay the night with Charles or John. You’ll be so tired – and dangerous to drive home. Everything will be OK here and you’ll be back on Saturday for a lovely evening. I love you so much and hate to be so worried about you and see you so tired. Please be good.

  Your Ginny.

  She often, remembering her father’s description of me before we married, called me ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. I found boxes of all the notes and letters she had sent me down the years since long before we married. I read them all again when alone in our bedroom. Then I filed them in boxes and sent them to Abby for safe-keeping because, at the time, I felt and wished that I would die.

  Sometimes I would say to myself that everybody will sooner or later lose or be lost by their loved ones, but life has to go on. I would argue to myself that every one of the billions of people who have ever lived has been sad to some degree at some time. I remembered walking with Ginny and Anton and Jill Bowring down the 1.5-kilometre-long death tunnels of the Paris catacombs. We passed by six million neatly stacked skulls. Each and every one had had, during their brief lifespan, the chance to spend time in sadness or in joy. I thought, too, of how lucky I was to have known such love and to have been with Ginny during the last months when she needed me. Now, with Ginny gone, and my mother, and Susan, and Celia, in so short a time, I was still alive, if only just, cardiac-wise, so I must get on with life. Not vegetate for even a moment.

  I took on as much work as I could and averaged four conference lectures a week. I loved Greenlands, but the sadness and loneliness returned each time I went back. Ginny had told me many times over the years that, should she die before me, I was to remarry as soon as possible. I had said the same to her. She had also told me that I was to sell her sheep and cattle only to people with whom she had done previous business. Over that summer I sold the majority of the sheep and cows to individuals from Ginny’s contact list. A friend and neighbour who had bought many of her cattle took over the rest of the herd and continues to run them, many at Greenlands, to this day.

  I flew to Quito in Ecuador and met Jagged Globe’s chief guide there. For a week he took our group up minor volcanoes which overlooked the polluted pall of Quito. Then we moved further afield to tackle the two ‘big ones’. Cotopaxi is 19,000 feet above sea-level, and the effects of the altitude slowed me down alarmingly. But we reached the top and, being by then the only remaining ‘student’ on the course, I travelled in guide Pepe Landazuri’s
car for the four-hour drive south-west from Quito to Mount Chimborazo. I was aware that, if I summitted this last volcano, I would be cleared for Everest with Jagged Globe the following year. We spent the early part of the night in the Carrel Hut at 4,800 metres and immediately below the volcano’s steep ascent route. Pepe regaled me with strong coffee and stories of the hut’s ghosts. One of his own experiences included a night when a guide friend of his, with a famous Norwegian climber client, briefly met him in the hut but went on up soon after midnight. The next day, some hours after the two men should have come back down, Pepe phoned the local rescue team and went with them to the summit, where they found both men lying dead near the crater rim. The Norwegian’s head had a neat round burn hole drilled in it by a lightning strike. His ice-axe and crampons were mere molten metal and the bolt had passed down the frozen rope to kill the guide for good measure.

  ‘Never climb,’ Pepe warned me, ‘if you have any reason to think there may be an electric storm coming. If you are caught in the open, never lie down. Just kneel with your head low and your hands on the ground. Avoid shallow depressions in the ground, all forms of water or damp ground where you can, and, if it has a metal frame, keep out of your tent. Many people die on our volcanoes from lightning strikes.’

  He also warned me that we had to cross a highly dangerous rockfall zone on our imminent climb, so we must ascend in the darkness and reach the summit by a predetermined turnround time. If we had not reached the top by that time, we must turn around or risk death by rockfall on the return journey, since the heat of the sun always loosened the rocks. We left the hut at 3.00 a.m.

  Pepe climbed slowly but surely over the next ten hours. I lagged behind feeling the altitude and, despite having taken pills, my head throbbed with a dull persistent ache. The Cinderella-hour of Pepe’s turnround time arrived when we were an hour from the top, but he was lenient and let me slog on tortoise-like and breathing heavily to the summit itself. I felt nauseous and my heartbeat was well over the 130 beats per minute that Gianni Angelini had warned me to respect. But, once we had descended 1,000 feet, I recovered and thereafter speeded up to cross the rockfall region whilst the cliff faces above were still in shadow.

  A week later Pepe’s report reached Jagged Globe’s UK office, and Simon Lowe officially accepted me for their projected 2005 attempt on Everest via the Tibetan north side.

  At that time everything seemed fine with my health, but I had earlier agreed a week’s climb on Kilimanjaro with Simon Gault and a friend, Nick Holder, who had been on the Norway and Nile expeditions in the 1960s. A Masai guide took us along the Lemosho trail for four days, climbing slowly to acclimatise. If we tried to quicken the pace, he would sensibly intone, ‘Poley, poley’, meaning ‘Slow down’, but on the last night he speeded up in competition with another group under a rival guide. At one point, not long before dawn, I asked if we could halt briefly so I could take off my fleece. This was not popular. Seemingly I was the only one finding the pace too fast. This was strange since I was normally fitter and faster than Simon. The last 500 feet were unpleasant. My chest grew ever tighter, as though squeezed by an invisible sumo wrestler, and the resulting constriction made my breathing difficult just when I needed maximum lung power.

  Simon taunted my slowness in a good-natured way, as was his wont. We had done a great many walks together since first meeting at school forty years before, so I tried hard to keep up with him. I reached the summit ridge, but only just. I was incoherent and could hardly walk straight. Our guide, worried, tried to say I should go back down at once. He knew of my cardiac history from the client forms we had had to sign. I refused, hardly knowing what was going on except that the true summit was further along the rim of the crater. Some time later we arrived there and I rested with my head held low between my knees. Only when we had descended some 500 feet to about 5,486 metres (18,000 feet) did the feeling, by then like a tight band wrapped around my chest, disappear and I immediately felt normal. We walked back down to the base camp in good time where other guides were swapping gossip about their groups. Ours translated for us that two clients from separate groups had died of heart attacks that night on the mountain.

  Back in London I had an ECG which recorded no new cardiac damage, so I thought no more about the incident. The British Heart Foundation took on my Everest project as a charity-raising tool, calling it the Ran Fiennes Healthy Hearts Appeal. The aim was to raise £2 million specifically for a new scanner unit for children with heart trouble at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.

  I gave a talk after a fund-raising dinner for twelve well-heeled businessmen in a North Yorkshire castle, and the host, Paul Sykes, a fiery Yorkshireman, asked if I was planning any more expeditions. I told him about Everest, and he agreed to sponsor the project financially as he approved of the plan and the charity aim. He had a long history of donating to charities, he liked to keep fit, and we were the same age. Paul was fiercely opposed to the EU and Brussels government, and largely funded the campaign against the single currency and the UK Independence Party election success. He would leave the climbing to me, but would do his best to keep the Heart Foundation working hard to reach our target figure of £2 million.

  Late in the winter of 2004 I found myself high up on the Empire State Building, having given a talk at a New York conference. I tried to look down but, in seconds, felt the familiar nausea, the quickly rising terror of vertigo, and had to look away immediately to recover my composure. Vertigo is, I knew, an irrational problem, a mental sickness that is purely psychological. Some people are born afflicted by a deep-seated fear of wide open spaces, and that is just as unreasonable. I did not like living in the knowledge that, aged sixty, I had still not outgrown this problem, but I felt confident that if I could climb the highest mountain in the world, I would gain sufficient self-confidence to lose all fear of lesser heights.

  18

  Almost

  The Ecuador volcanoes and Kilimanjaro were reasonable teasers for Everest but did not help my overall aerobic fitness, so I entered one or two team races in 2004 including, with Steven Seaton from Runner’s World, the North Pole Marathon in the Arctic spring that year. This was organised by the Irishman, Richard Donovan, the first person to run a marathon at both Poles, and took place at 89.5° North on a floating Russian ice station. The temperature was –28°C and the surface was firm and icy. Due to the usual moving canals of open water between floes, the course consisted of a five-kilometre circuit to be completed eight and a half times.

  Entries for the marathon from all over the world were restricted to sixteen, since the two Russian helicopters Donovan had hired each had a capacity for eight passengers. Many of the other runners had very respectable marathon records. Steven and I set out together wearing snowshoes, but after two laps Steven removed his and dropped behind. I gradually moved up the field over the next three hours until, with two laps to go, I was lying second. The leader was a tall, thin American, Sean Burch, martial arts expert and mountaineer, who went on to claim a world speed record, climbing Kilimanjaro in 5 hours 28 minutes.

  I tried hard to catch him but failed, and finished a good thirteen minutes behind him in just under four hours. Having run the twenty-six miles with my legs forced apart by the snowshoes, my groin muscles took several weeks to stop aching.

  The UK media portrayed the race in a way which must have muddled the minds of quite a few young readers because, in a Yellow Pages/Daily Mail survey a few months later, only 30 per cent of the young adults questioned recognised Robert Falcon Scott as the first British explorer to reach the South Pole, with 28 per cent wrongly crediting me. Similarly, only 29 per cent correctly named Sir Francis Drake as the first Britisher to sail round the world, with 36 per cent naming Dame Ellen MacArthur. However, 80 per cent answered correctly when asked the names of the recent winners of Big Brother and other celebrity television shows. (I was invited to participate in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here in a jungle setting somewhere. I said no with alacr
ity for various reasons, including horror at the thought of having to lunch on live maggots.)

  A year to the day after Ginny’s death, her sister Abby and I sat together at Greenlands on the hill where Ginny’s headstone stands. We remembered our times together with her.

  At a lecture I had given to the Chester branch of the Royal Geographical Society the previous summer I had met one of their members, Louise Millington, and had since taken her out when she was not busy with the horse transporting company she had built up based from her Cheshire home. She was thirty-six years old, full of life, mercurial, had a ten-year-old son Alexander, and she jolted me out of my miserable state. We agreed to marry in March 2005 and honeymoon at the Everest Base Camp in Tibet.

  Abby, Ginny’s closest relative, said to the press:

  Ran has been a much-loved member of our family for nearly fifty years and always will be. He and Ginny had an exceptionally happy marriage and were in love with each other for all their adult lives. Ran was devastated by Ginny’s illness and death and he has had a desperately long, lonely year without her. To see him happy again with Louise is wonderful. He still grieves for Ginny and nothing will change or diminish his feelings for my sister. But Ginny wouldn’t want Ran to be sad or lonely. She urged him to marry again and everyone in the family is one hundred per cent supportive of his decision. We all wish Ran and Louise every happiness.