Cold Wars

by Andy Kirkpatrick

  But then there seemed to be a problem.

  The metal latch lifted on the door but there was no blast of icy cold blowing through the hut. In fact, there was nothing at all.

  I heard the Slovenians speak quietly to each other, then the sound of pushing, a little grunting, and a soft thud, as though one of them was bouncing off the door.

  I opened my eyes. In the dark the sound grew louder and more urgent.

  ‘Ian, are you awake?’ I whispered.

  ‘Erm, yes.’

  The Slovenian voices sounded more panicked and one of them started kicking the door as I flicked on my headtorch and shone it at them.

  The door seemed to be jammed shut.

  Both of them were now taking turns kicking at it, one of them looking quite worried and claustrophobic.

  ‘The stupid door opens outwards,’ I said. ‘Maybe it snowed in the night, or the wind has blown snow over the door.’ They had probably guessed this already.

  Ian and I got up and stood beside them as they kicked and shoved at the door, like workmen watching someone dig a hole. A tiny gap appeared, snow trickling through. It became apparent that the door was blocked from top to bottom in packed snow. We seemed to have somehow become entombed in the hut.

  Only the shoddiest of French hut builders would build a hut with a door that opened outwards. Perhaps it was simply a joke.

  It took over an hour to get the door to open enough to allow one of the Slovenians to squeeze out and dig the entrance clear, at which point we decided that it was better to leave at the same time, rather than risk being trapped in here again, gearing up and following them out into the night.

  It was pitch black and cold as we skinned up towards the Petites Jorasses, watching the headtorches of the Slovenians turn to pinpricks as they skinned up to their own objective, all four of us wrapped up in our own worlds, the night-time glacier like some twilight alien world.

  We knew very little about Omega, only that it had yet to have a second ascent, and Jules Cartwright had his eye on it, which was good enough for us. I guessed he’d probably tried it before and kept it a secret, as for every hard route climbed there are generally dozens of failures and near misses. A few years ago I’d failed on the Lesueur route on the Petit Dru, and two years later Jules climbed it with Matt Dickinson. So often when you climb a hard route it’s on the shoulders of all those who’ve tried before, even if it’s simply to prove you’re better than them.

  The slope steepened and we zigzagged left and right, left and right, up to the bergschrund, arriving while it was still dark, the cold really biting at our sweaty bodies once we stopped. We stood panting, then unclipped our skis and began walking up the last bit, towards the start of the route. The wall above us a big black space before a black sky.

  As soon as our head torches reached the wall we both looked up.

  Right from the off it looked improbable: hard, overhung, devoid of ice.

  Maybe Kenton had been right about conditions.

  Maybe he was being helpful.

  ‘Maybe we could aid up the side?’ I suggested, shining my torch up a line of grubby looking flakes.

  ‘Mmmm,’ hummed Ian. ‘I’m not convinced’. When Ian was unconvinced it was time to call it a day.

  We stood there getting cold, neither of us saying anything, just shining our headtorches at this small bit of a mountain.

  ‘I think I’ve lost my hunger Andy,’ said Ian, taking off his pack and sitting on it. ‘I just can’t be arsed.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said, taking off my rucksack and sitting down beside him. ‘I can’t get Ella crying out of my head. Every time I do anything I keep thinking that I have to get home to her, that she means more to me than this.’

  I switched on my phone, to see if I had any messages. It beeped.

  ‘DAD HOPE UR ENJOYING CLIMBING THOES MOUNTAINS LOVE ELLA’

  I showed it to Ian.

  ‘Maybe you’re falling out of love with climbing,’ said Ian, switching off his headtorch to save the battery as the sky towards Chamonix turned red, and the rising sun lit up the spires of the Aiguilles, one by one.

  ‘I really hope so,’ I said.

  EIGHT

  Xmas

  On Boxing Day we drove over to Hull. It was damp and grey, one of those journeys when everyone else seems to have stayed at home. I wished I had too, my belly stuffed and the top of my trousers still unbuttoned.

  We passed the same old signposts, apparently unchanged from the journeys I took as a kid up and down this same stretch of road. Even the distances were familiar: Hull 57, Hull 23, Hull 16. The world back then seemed impossibly huge, a journey of one hour almost too much to bear. Driving from Hull to Scarborough in my mum’s boyfriend’s car felt transatlantic. You forget this when you grow up, when driving eight hours to Scotland is nothing. You forget it’s more than boredom, being trapped in a car. When a child says, ‘Are we there yet?’ it’s the desperation of someone wanting to surface for air.

  Doncaster. Scunthorpe. Goole. Drifting along the motorway towards the slow Humber. Then I see it up ahead – the bridge. It’s a sign we’re almost there, but also a welcome in its own right, the mightiest bridge in the kingdom of Humberside, if not the world, highlight of any journey down the poor end of the M62 and as beautiful as the Golden Gate, only joining two places no one wants to go.

  The bridge opened on my tenth birthday, in 1981, a rarity in 1980s northern England as something to be proud of. The whole city turned out when the Queen came for the official opening that summer. I know my memory of that day – all flags and bunting – is false, more newsreel than reality, but I still remember with total clarity the feeling of awe at seeing the bridge’s massive span held by the two giant towers on either side of the estuary, like two colossal tuning forks, setting the tone for a future that never quite materialised.

  When people ask why I climb big walls, I know that part of the answer is held in that ten-year-old child’s mind, warped by the bridge’s scale and beauty. I still feel it – every time – as I pass under the bridge, seeing its towers tilting up and over me, and then just for a second, glimpsing the span, end to end, across the river, seeing its vanishing point before it’s gone.

  Encountering such a structure, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were entering a modern city of glass and concrete, but architecturally things pretty much start and end at the bridge. The Luftwaffe destroyed almost everything that would now be deemed historic, and Hull’s town planners destroyed anything that might have been deemed classically modern, going instead for classically grim. Still, it was home. I pulled off the main road and threaded my way through the back streets, the only signs of life being kids playing out on new Christmas bikes.

  I hate Christmas. I’m not sure why, but I rank it close to the top of my events hate list, just behind weddings and funerals, the latter slightly more tolerable for their generally shorter length. Being told at six that Father Christmas wasn’t real may be the reason why I went off the festive season. I was put straight by my mum, after I bluffed that I didn’t believe in Santa, when I did. We all want to believe in things we know can’t exist, that defy our growing rationality, to keep the magic alive. But I’ve never quite worked out why I was told that Santa didn’t exist when God did, along with ghosts, UFOs and sea monsters.

  The tooth fairy did turn out to be a construct of adults, as I discovered after stealing tooth money from under my brother’s pillow, a crime I guessed would be undetectable. I assumed the absence of cash would be blamed on a sloppy 1970s fairy, no doubt on strike like everyone else at the time. Of course my mum knew better, and although I was gullible enough to believe in fairies, it didn’t stretch so far as to believe one would grass me up. I often wonder if my lack of faith is due to having my childish illusions dispelled so early.

  I drove down the familiar streets, past parks where I’d played, corners where I’d hung out, and walls that I’d fallen from.

  ‘Dad, where’s your
old house?’ Ella would ask on these trips home.

  ‘Knocked down,’ I would reply. It was like a ritual.

  ‘Dad, where’s your old school?’ she would ask.

  ‘Do you mean my primary or secondary school?’

  ‘Either,’ she’d reply.

  ‘My primary school got knocked down, and I went to two secondary schools. The first got knocked down while I was there, and the second got knocked down after I left.’

  ‘Do they like knocking things down in Hull dad?’

  I once had a dream where I was back in my old school Villa Place, a pre-war building surrounded by post-war flats, the latter looking older than the former, a social experiment done on the cheap. In the dream I was being taken around the school by a teacher, through the hall, into the library, to my old classroom, the teacher so proud at how well I’d done. I felt proud too, a self-made man returning, perhaps not as a millionaire, but aware of what that child had done, how far he had travelled. And then I woke up, and remembered it was now only dust and landfill.

  The pace of life is even slower in Hull than Sheffield, and you could feel it as we drew nearer to my mum’s house, set on a small council estate bolted on to a nice part of the city. The people weren’t rushing as if they knew the world turned without their help. It seems the further north you go, the calmer things become, the nation’s lifeblood growing thicker the further from the centre it is pumped. Someone once told me that the 1960s didn’t arrive in Hull until the 1990s but even in this new century I wasn’t so sure things had moved on that much yet.

  I turned the corner, just past the bus stop, and was home, my brother Robin emptying his car as we pulled up, his kids running around excited at the start of a rare family reunion.

  ‘Right kids, we’re here. Everyone out,’ I said.

  Robin’s kids are called Kyle and Kiely, which sometimes makes people laugh, seeming funny in a rhyming sort of way. But then so are Ella and Ewen, names that are short and easy to spell, handy when you’re not good at spelling. Robin’s two were the same age as mine, his kids blonde and well turned out, looking newly bathed, while mine were dark and always well worn in. Although cousins they hardly ever saw each other, Robin being based down in the south of England.

  ‘Hello, Rob,’ I said, getting out of the car and shaking his hand, like a real man, never quite sure what to do in such circumstances, knowing that our meeting really warranted a hug. Robin, although two years younger than me, had always been more like ‘a real man’, whereas I was just pretending. He had the sensible gene I was missing, always had proper jobs, listened to sensible music, dressed in clothes you had to iron and had worked hard to get into the RAF.

  ‘Your two have grown,’ he said, as both sets of kids shyly hid behind our legs.

  ‘Say hello to your cousins,’ I said, trying to force them out front. ‘Have a good Christmas Rob?’

  ‘I wasn’t in Iraq or Pakistan, so yes, it was great.’

  ‘I guess instead of a war on terror, it’s a war on terrors,’ I said, grabbing Ella and Ewen by their arms and giving them a little shake.’

  ‘Don’t get me started.’

  Standing there in the street he looked much older than last time I’d seen him, much older than me, a little harried, a little strung out, overworked and red-eyed. He had the look of a man under pressure.

  I often felt uncomfortable around Robin, partly because he was sensible, a proper man, and partly because I felt a little guilty for being so horrible to him when we were young. I inflicted a million little tortures on him, starting by pushing an aquarium on to him when he was four years old, and working on from there. If I told you that he’d tried to stab me with a knife twice, and that I would have deserved it if he had, that would sum up our relationship. Decades later he still refused to accept my apologies for what I assumed were minor events in our childhood: me pushing him into the docks; locking him in a burning building; dropping him from the roof of an aircraft hangar. The normal stuff I assume most brothers do to each other.

  One of my favourite stories, where I didn’t technically inflict any pain, involved chopping Robin’s head off. We were in woods just outside Hull, on a day trip with Mum and her boyfriend. Robin and I slipped away, and finding a big pile of leaves next to a busy road, I hit upon a clever plan. I admit I was a morbid child, no doubt due to living in a house where the last occupant had hung himself on the stairs. My ruse was to bury Robin in the leaves so just his head poked out, while I would bury my head a short distance away, so just my body stuck out. The overall impression, to a mother who would soon be anxiously searching for her missing children, was obvious.

  The problem was Robin took his role as decapitated head too far, and began screaming like a girl. This alarmed our mum and her maternal instincts went out of control. Blind with panic, she and her boyfriend rushed through the woods towards the sound, running headlong through nettles and brambles, only to step into a scene of total horror, her son’s severed head laying beside his body and still screaming. Cars sped past, their drivers peering at us open-mouthed.

  My mum almost fainted.

  Needless – or headless – to say, Robin got the blame on account of his screaming, and got a whack around the head just to check it was in fact still well attached.

  How we laughed – twenty years later.

  ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea,’ said Robin.

  My mum was stood in the kitchen, caught off-guard by our arrival, her small terraced house going from silent to chaotic as everyone rushed in. She worked as a care worker, one of the toughest jobs you could have, both physically and mentally. But although over fifty, she had the build of a woman strong enough to cope with most things.

  Coping is what she was best at.

  I gave her a hug, and grabbed her shoulders. ‘Oh, Mum, you’re so strong. You should get yourself a job as a builder.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh you daft ‘a’peth. Get off me.’

  I never understood what an ‘a’peth was.

  ‘Come here my little darlings,’ she said, the kids coming up for a hug.

  ‘Can we open our presents, Grandma?’ asked Ella.

  She always told us that she’d hate being called grandma, but hearing it from a loving grandchild there was no word sweeter.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on while the kids open their presents,’ she said.

  After lunch we went to Little Switzerland, an old chalk quarry beside the Humber Bridge that had been turned into a wooded park. Robin and I had climbed there as kids, abseiling down the steep – and loose – quarry walls in homemade harnesses constructed from webbing, the rope tied to the safety railings at the top. The thought of it now made me shudder. We once brought a friend of mine to the quarry to teach him how to climb. He was a refugee from Lebanon, and after we set up a top rope, just by passing the rope around a tree at the top, I said, ‘Okay, off you go.’

  He was a strong lad, but instead of climbing up the rock, he just grabbed the rope and went up it hand over hand. At first we shouted for him to let go and then shouted for him to hang on when he got so high that he’d kill himself if he fell. Unable to take in the rope, we shouted at him to keep going. He made it though. Like I said, he was a strong lad.

  ‘Remember climbing up there when we were kids?’ I said to Robin, looking up at a gully that would have made Silvo Karo shudder. ‘How did we ever survive childhood?’

  ‘How did I ever survive being your brother?’ he replied.

  We walked along talking as the kids played.

  ‘I’m off to Pakistan again next week,’ said Robin, ‘flying missions into Afghanistan.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Between the Pakistani military and the Taliban? Yes, it’s pretty dicey. Surface-to-air missiles, rockets and mortars when you land, suicide bombers when you’re not in the aircraft, and that’s not to mention people shitting in your water supply in the hotel’.

  ‘Nice.’

>   ‘Can you give Tammy a ring every now and then to check she is okay? I don’t know if I’ll be able to contact her while I’m away. Not to sound melodramatic but my will is at work. Whatever there is goes to her and the kids.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be okay, you’re only an air stewardess in a green uniform,’ I said. There didn’t seem much else to say.

  We walked on a bit further.

  ‘But really Rob, what are your chances of getting killed?’

  ‘At the moment? Moderate to good. What about about you?’

  ‘I’m pretty safe,’ I said, the tables turned, ‘I don’t take any risks’. Robin raised his eyebrows. ‘I hardly ever go climbing these days anyway, so maybe I’m saving up my luck.’

  ‘Do you ever think about giving it up?’ he asked.

  ‘All the time,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘All the time.’

  Ella and Kyle found a swing hanging from a tree, both taking turns to push.

  ‘The boss called a squadron briefing the other day,’ said Robin, as we took turns. ‘He told us we were going to replace some of the 47 and 70 Squadron crews as they need some rest. He stood in front of this big roll of honour, a big wooden plaque that goes from floor to ceiling showing all the 30 Squadron personnel that have lost their lives. I started reading the names again, hoping no one would get added. It was a rousing speech, telling us what a marvellous opportunity it was for us to use the skills we’ve gained through our training and go into a hostile environment in the footsteps of our sister squadrons and in the best tradition of 30 Squadron and the Royal Air Force. I asked the boss if he was coming with us. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Fuck that,” smiled and walked off.’

  ‘It can’t be that dangerous, can it?’ I asked, thinking what threat could there be when you’re in a Hercules transport plane, the Taliban having no aircraft, not even kites.

  ‘The C47 is very slow, and a big target taking off and landing, and the Taliban have a lot of machine guns, rockets and missiles, so pretty dangerous. They can shoot us in the air, landing or taking off’.