The Beckoning Silence

by Simpson, Joe

  Sally Field proved to be a delightful woman, charming, genuine and completely unpretentious; not my idea of a film star at all. We signed the deal at Paramount Studios. The famous Hollywood-based entertainment paper Variety had a photograph of Cruise on the cover with the headline ‘Cruise into the Void’, and a statement from Martin Shafer of Castle Rock Entertainment announced that Tom Cruise would be the lead actor. It was a strangely disorientating experience, leaving me in a state of surprised disbelief and with the nagging worry that I was once again out of control.

  I had never set out to be an author and the idea of a movie being made about me was even more bizarre. The great success of the book had left me feeling oddly insecure. As a climber I had always judged myself against my peers and those heroes of mine that I, secretly and vainly, hoped to emulate. In doing so I had always looked up at the climbers so much better than me and judged my worth by their standards. I never once thought to judge myself by how much better than others I might be. I was keenly aware that I was well known within the climbing world and yet, seen in terms of my own climbing prowess, I deserved none of it. I understood that it was my writing that was being appreciated, but the problem was that I saw myself as a mountaineer.

  At home I was surrounded by climbers of world class. The achievements of rock climbers like Jerry Moffat, Ben Moon, Paul Pritchard and Johnny Dawes and mountaineers such as Al Rouse, Rab Carrington, Jon Tinker, Mick Fowler and Brendan Murphy soon put anything that I had managed to climb into a clear perspective. At trade shows or film festivals I met some of the world’s most talented climbers and it only served to deepen the feeling that I was an impostor. Signing the film deal compounded these confused emotions. Having said that, I signed the contract with alacrity.

  I spent three days in Los Angeles with the screen writer and by the time I flew home I had considerable doubts about what sort of film was going to be produced. The screen writer didn’t seem to have a sense of the essence of the story, the psychological trauma of two people alone in a remote wilderness. His grasp of mountaineering techniques seemed even more tenuous, despite our visits to various climbing shops and my patient explanation of how crampons, axes and ropes were used. I did mention the core problem that Zinneman had pointed out and was rather taken aback when his solution was to provide Simon and me with radios. I thought he was missing the point somewhat.

  It was made abundantly clear that the film was seen as a star vehicle for Cruise and this left me in little doubt that any attempt to remain faithful to the story would be short-lived. With a few rare exceptions most of the major movies produced in Hollywood in recent years seemed to have little or no character development, vague and often pointless plotting, and were driven solely by action, with quality writing rarely evident. Truth and the facts of history were routinely treated with cavalier contempt. The few Hollywood climbing movies that I had seen had done nothing to boost my confidence. K2 was stereotyped, over-emotional pap. Sylvester Stallone’s action climbing thriller, Cliff Hanger, was hilarious idiocy. Hollywood’s most recent offering, the improbable stunt-driven movie Vertical Limits, was such embarrassingly nationalistic schmaltz that I walked out. It wasn’t even laughable.

  Perhaps I should have been more principled about the deal and ignored the large sums of money on offer. I tend to think that the people who accuse others of ‘selling out’ are usually the ones who have never themselves been offered guaranteed financial security. Flying home in an preoccupied state of mind I thought of Groucho Marx. ‘These are my principles,’ he said. ‘If you don’t like them I have others.’

  For the next nine hours I tried to drink the first class galley dry and speculated on who would play Simon – Nicole Kidman, probably.

  The film deal, moving house and the new challenge of corporate speaking had marked something of a turning point in my life. I should have been very happy. I had the freedom to climb water ice and rock faces and mountain walls whenever I chose and somehow make a living out of it. I did far more now than I ever used to do. I enjoyed paragliding in the Peak District hills fifteen minutes from my home and planned to fly on sites all around the world. I nursed plans to climb on the towering granite walls of El Capitan in Yosemite and to paraglide in Nepal with the white sails of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri as a backdrop.

  Because of climbing, writing and speaking I had a life full of adventure and travel and excitement. In the course of these ventures I have met wonderful people of all races and creeds and colours and had my mind broadened and my sense of the world changed utterly. Above all I have made many friends all over the world and experienced things with them that have changed my life immeasurably. I have seen how strong we can be, and how frail. I have watched friends put their lives on the line to save mine and it has humbled me and left me forever in their debt.

  I enjoy the anxious jeopardy of public speaking and it was flattering as well as humbling to realise that some people at least seemed to derive pleasure and inspiration from what I said. It put a lot of things into perspective. There had always been a sense that I was out of control, that I had just rolled along life’s road and got lucky breaks all the way along. I had never planned any of it.

  My unease started in the winter of 1998. I had returned from a holiday climbing on the overhanging rock walls of stalactite-draped limestone islands in Koh Phi Phi, a rock island in the Andaman Sea in southern Thailand. As usual there was a mass of letters and junk mail on the front-room floor and I bundled it together and put it on the kitchen table. The return journey had been complicated by tension with Iraq and I felt tired and jet-lagged from the seventeen-hour flight back from Thailand. I blearily sorted through the envelopes as I drank a strong black coffee. A letter stood out from the pile, marked as it was by the red stamp of ‘Curtis Brown’. I knew that it was from Vivienne and quickly slit open the envelope, wondering what it might be about.

  When I placed the letter slowly back on the table a few minutes later something had irrevocably changed in my life. Ma had died while I had been away. No one had been able to contact me. In desperation my sister, Sarah, had asked Vivienne if she knew how to reach me and told her the news about Ma. Unaware that no one had managed to tell me Vivienne had written a beautiful, gentle, caring letter of condolence. I was in shock. I knew that Ma had been ill. She had been going into hospital for a routine investigation and she had assured me it was not serious and that there was no need to cancel the Thailand holiday. I suspected she had known far more than she was telling me.

  I stood up and fetched the phone through and rang Sarah, hoping there had been some sort of communication breakdown.

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ Sarah said softly and went on to explain what had happened and I sat there numb and mute. ‘We’ve all been waiting for you,’ she added. ‘We didn’t know where you were so everything has been delayed.’

  I felt terrible and guilty – it was bad enough that I hadn’t been there with Ma when she died. ‘The funeral? When is it?’

  ‘Tuesday. Four days’ time. Come home soon, Joe, we’d love to see you.’ And that was it. Ma was gone.

  Ma was an extraordinarily devout woman. She was born in Listowel, Kerry, Ireland and her Catholic faith was the linch pin of her life. She was also a very strong and determined fighter. She had put down her surviving throat cancer in the mid 1970s, when everyone had felt sure she was dying, to her faith in God. She had told me that one day when she was very bad an Irish nurse in the Royal Marsden hospital in London had rebuked her for giving up. As a good Catholic she was not allowed to relinquish life: that was God’s choice and Ma should start praying. Ma prayed and she lived. It was clear-cut to her. The prayers had been answered. Privately I thought it was because she was tenacious and stubborn, but she wouldn’t have it.

  So, when I was sixteen, I found it very difficult to tell Ma that I no longer believed in God. It was harder still to be convinced that I was right. I wasn’t certain that in the face of death I would be steadfast in my atheism. In Peru in 198
5, when I knew that the game was up and I was dying and it led to nothing, no paradise, just eternal emptiness, I never once thought to turn back to the God of my childhood. If for one moment I had thought that some omniscient being might be looking down upon me and offer a helping hand I would have stopped moving instantly, got rid of the pain and the effort and waited to be helped. And I would have died. In fact it was probably one of the most powerful and saddest things that I learned in those awful days in Peru. For me there was no God.

  I respected Ma’s faith immensely. Indeed, I was jealous of it. I wished I had something that strong. Although I no longer believed, it had been a source of quiet comfort to know that Ma was praying for me. I would take all the help I could get. And then she was gone. I wondered how things would be from now on.

  Sometimes, as in Bolivia after surviving the avalanche, I look at the stars and I wonder whether she is wandering among them. Had she found the place that she had prayed so hard for? Just as mountains can make you feel insignificant and vulnerable, the stars, so vividly clear at high altitude, can make you realise how inconsequential your existence is. On some nights it can unnerve me looking up at myriad diamonds in a velvet black sky. The whole set of beliefs, the philosophy by which I try to live my life and understand my world, begins to fall apart.

  I wonder about the probability of surviving in the mountains and then I look at the stars, at an infinity of other worlds, and I realise that it really doesn’t matter that much. There are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. We are unimaginably ignorant and in the context of space and time we are an utter irrelevance. It is a chilling thought if you have no God to prop you up, to offer something other than this bleak enormity, to explain the meaninglessness. We are no more than the blinking of an eye between two eternities.

  Without the comfort of a religion to fall back on I’m left grasping at vague ideas of what I am, and why I am here, and whatever set of beliefs I cobble together I never seem to be quite as secure as I once was.

  It seemed to me that if I could escape the need to know the future and free myself from the constraints of the past, acting in and only for the present, then I could achieve an absolute freedom. It seemed most true in those strange, ghostly moments on mountains when I edged along the slender line between life and death. It made a sort of sense; it amounted to a fragile, almost comprehensible, rationale.

  I no longer hold to a religion, a theology or any system by which I can understand my world. Without beliefs I try simply to accept a spiritual sense of the world as life passes by. It is an overwhelming combination of all that I’ve experienced, felt, seen and cannot explain. It stays with me and refuses to depart, and it drives me again and again back to a place in which I am never certain; a place that is alluring because it will not be defined. It is intangible and must simply be lived. Perhaps that is why I loved the mountains. They allowed me, however briefly, to escape, to act without the need to ask questions.

  I once read that for a mountaineer ‘… hardship and great effort hardly matters since the life of a mountain climber is an introduction to death, and when death comes or is about to come, the climber is at least partially satisfied.’ Then again, I don’t recall satisfaction being my reaction to lying in the bottom of a crevasse with a shattered knee.

  The paradox and incongruity lie in the fact that we willingly choose such risks when we so much want to stay alive. Why? Perhaps it all boils down to sensation – what we feel is all we really know; all we can accurately say we are. Yet others may not feel the same way. This isolates us. We hope that others also experience the same things because it keeps us sane and allows us to build a construct within which to live.

  Whatever ideas or beliefs I had collected together in my life were shattered when Ma died. Did I love her? I never thought of her as being any more than my mother. She was Ma. Like the foundation of a house she was always there, always the same – and I did not have to think of her until she was gone and there were so many questions unanswered.

  When Vivienne had said in her letter that losing a parent was a ‘rite of passage’ I didn’t really understand what she meant – it irked me. I felt she was right but I did not know how. As the years have passed I get a sense of it now. Leaving on my own journey, alone, an adult drifting through the last half of his life, it begins to dawn on me, this sense of life closing in. Ma had said I was selfish in her last letter and how right she was. It came after a classic family row, like so many others in the past, when passions had risen too high and words were spoken that shouldn’t even have been thought. Like so many rifts it would be short-lived and soon forgiven, and it was – just in time – but it was her last letter to me and left an indelibly sad impression. I had replied angrily, for we had argued bitterly that last Christmas, but my anger was because she was right, as always, and it cut me to the quick. We made up with flowers but I will regret it for ever, that and the fact that I was not there when she died.

  As I stood at the front pew of the church I felt dislocated and disorientated looking down on Ma’s coffin as the priest gave the blessing for the dead in words which seemed pointless and inane to me. As I bent with my brothers to lift her onto our shoulders tears splashed onto the polished wooden lid and I kept my head down and slightly bowed, hoping that I would regain some self-control. As we stepped into the sunlight I was amazed at how immensely heavy she seemed to be for such a slight old lady.

  7 Because it’s there

  The following spring I was at my desk working on a review of Peter and Leni Gillman’s biography of George Mallory. I remembered the news flash on the radio announcing that an expedition had found Mallory’s body high on the north side of Everest. It had been exciting and intriguing news. Later I would see the published photographs and feel dismayed and disgusted. I was already fairly sickened at the knowledge of recent appalling behaviour on Everest.

  When the gruesome photographs of Mallory’s frozen body were sold around the world something inside me became hardened and cynical and died; a passion was extinguished. Climbing wasn’t the same any more and it never would be. I felt betrayed.

  When Conrad Anker found George Mallory’s body frozen into the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest’s north face on 1 May 1999 it was an extraordinary discovery. The search expedition had hoped to solve the mystery of Mallory and Irvine. Had they reached the summit? Was there photographic proof frozen within the Kodak vestpocket camera that Mallory or Irvine had been carrying? It must have been an intensely moving moment to be sitting there beside the body of one of the most famous mountaineers in history, on the verge of solving one of the great mysteries of mountaineering.

  A careful and respectful search of the body was all that was required. Unfortunately, there was no camera. From the position of the body, the injuries revealed and the snapped rope at Mallory’s waist it was now pretty safe to conclude that the two men didn’t reach the summit but died in a fall while retreating in the dark. That was all we needed to know. We didn’t need the photographs or the tasteless descriptions of what the birds had done to his body. I wondered if the searchers had ever stopped to think for a moment about what they were actually doing as they went through his belongings and then buried the body under a cairn of rocks and read a prayer over the fresh grave.

  Conrad Anker had lost close friends in the mountains, as we all have. Some could fairly be regarded as the finest climbers of their generation, modern Mallorys in effect. I imagine Conrad Anker would be appalled if, in years to come, the frozen, battered bodies of his friends were found and picked over, photographed, and had their possessions removed.

  In 1997 Paul Nunn was part of a British expedition to the west face of Latok II in the Karakoram. One of their team, Don Morrison, was killed falling un-roped into a crevasse. Some ten years later Paul Nunn returned to the region on another expedition to Latok. At the edge of the glacier expedition members were surprised to find the remains of their friend, Don Morri
son, extruded from the glacier. They were confident that the shattered body parts were those of their friend because they had managed to identify his harness. Carefully collecting as much as they could, they chose a site safe from further movements of the glacier and buried him with a sense of sadness at renewed memories and pleasure that they had been able to do this last dignified service for their friend. They didn’t take photographs of him.

  An Ecuadorian friend of mine lost his brother in an avalanche on Antisana. He knew the glacier was fast-moving and when his estimated time elapsed he returned repeatedly and searched the glacier edge for several years until at last he found his brother. They collected the pitiful remains and buried them in a poignant, dignified service. I came across this man’s carefully tended grave site on the high open paramo near the edge of the glacier. White stones formed a star shape around the grave, wild plants flowered beautifully around the simple headstone, and looming into the sky above the grave were the striking ice-laced slopes of Antisana. It was a moment for quiet reflection and respect; a time for a private admonishment that it could so very easily have been me.

  I glanced at the book on my desk. There was a photograph on the back cover of Mallory in army uniform, no doubt on leave from the trenches of the Western Front. He had a thin pencil moustache contrasting oddly with his smooth, child-like skin. His eyes stared directly from the photograph, clear, bright, questing. In the background his wife, Ruth, looked out from the page with the same startlingly open gaze as her beloved husband.

  I looked at the photograph and all I could see was that awful image of his body, with the alabaster white back, and the broken leg and hob-nail boot. I thought of what the goraks, the Nepalese ravens, had done to him and wished the expedition had never published the cursed photograph. It hadn’t just been offensive and tasteless. It had ruined a memory.