by Paul Watkins
I envied them sometimes. For them, the past was not a thing to be overcome but instead to be endlessly reinhabited. The past was a known quantity. For Higgins and Houseman, it was the safest place to be.
For me, however, the past was like a maze from which I had yet to escape.
Whatever our approach to the madness this had caused in us, St. Vernon’s provided a niche in the world where it was all right to be crazy. In fact, it was even expected of us by the students. There was nothing more boring to them than a quiet, conservative teacher, mild-manneredly trotting out his lessons day after day. The teachers they would remember were the ones who ranted and waved their arms about and drew unintelligible scrawls on the blackboard to illustrate their equally unintelligible trains of thought. But these men loved the subjects they taught, with the madness of those who cannot understand why everyone else is not enchanted with algebra or the anatomy of locusts or the last hemlock-drugged words of Socrates. We knew those were the ones they would remember, because we remembered them ourselves.
My father, I suspected, was one of those quiet men.
“But I like being a teacher,” I said.
“Of course.” He shrugged off my words. “But a man with a medal can do as he pleases.”
At the mention of this topic, which he always brought up with a lightness in his voice as if it had never occurred to him before, I sighed and fumbled in my pocket for my tobacco tin. My thumb passed over the rubbed-down letters—EMERGENCY RATION—as I took out the box to roll myself a smoke. That medal was one of his favorite topics of discussion. Having brought me up on a steady diet of lectures stressing all I could do for my country, he now regaled me with stories of what my country should now be doing for me. Tucked away in his garden with his temperamental runner beans, this all made sense to him.
The medal was the Military Cross, which I was awarded in 1945 after an assault on a German stronghold during that same mountaineering disaster which had marked the end of my climbing career. I gave my father the medal to look after and he kept it on the mantelpiece, displayed in its velvet-lined box. The cross itself was shiny silver and flared out at the ends. Crowns were emblazoned at each end and the cypher of King George, GV, was in the center and 9.9.44 engraved on the back. The ribbon for the cross was white with a purple stripe running down the middle.
A combination of bad eyesight, flat feet, and weak spine had kept my father out of serving in the Great War. Of his many friends in the village, most of whom had either volunteered or been conscripted, many had not returned. Half of them, I had heard, had died in a single attack on Polygon Wood in the third battle of Ypres. They had been reduced, in less time than anyone would have thought possible, to a handful of anecdotes and moss-filled names on the war memorial. It seemed to me that my father had fixed upon this medal as a justification not only of my participation in the Second World War but also for his lack of participation in the first one.
My unwillingness to discuss with him the circumstances under which I was awarded the medal only increased the gulf between us.
“Summer’s almost here.” I changed the subject, leaning forward to grasp the mug of tea that he held out to me as he emerged from the kitchen. After the death of my mother, he had dispensed with the niceties of china. Now he drank out of brown enameled mugs and ate off blue-and-white-speckled enameled plates.
He sank down with a sigh onto his chair and nodded at the rosebuds, each one clasped in its green skin as if by hands drawn together in prayer. “I love the roses,” he said.
My father had been growing roses for as long as I could recall, and he had always tended them with a gentleness reserved for them alone.
Sometimes, when I came home on holiday, I would wait until my father had gone to sleep and I would go out and pee all over those precious roses, because he seemed to love those flowers more than he loved me.
“This is the time of year I used to dread when I was teaching,” he said.
“Dread?” I wrapped my hands around my mug of tea and felt the heat radiate through my palms. “But why? It’s gorgeous here.”
“I know. That’s the trouble. Once the warm weather arrives, the young women start dressing in their”—he flapped his hand, scattering biscuit crumbs—“their pretty clothes. And then the young men stop paying attention to anything except the young women. And how can you keep their attention when all the smells of summer are blowing in through the open windows? How can I even keep my own attention going?” He punctuated all this with slurps of tea and nibbles at his biscuit. “Taking a walk before dinner?” he asked.
“Yes.” I set down my tea mug on the garden wall and stood.
“I thought you might.”
I decided to walk up the hill and watch the sun go down. Hundreds of times I had trudged this path, which wound its way along the edge of town, past a golf course and up to a round-topped mound of earth where, before the days of telephones and telegraphs, signals could be sent by flashing lights between here and the eastern mountains of Wales, which were called the Brecon Beacons.
My father used to make this walk almost every day, in the company of a bull mastiff he’d named Trouble. He had bought the dog a few years after the death of my mother, and quickly became a doting servant to the beast. Even if he didn’t feel like walking, he had to take the dog out and run it around or it would have torn the house to pieces. The sight of my father being pulled up the road by the huge animal, with its apricot-colored fur and fierce black face, and the sound of my father trying to control his pet with shouts of “Trouble! Trouble!” provided the town with one of its more enduring comedies.
When, after ten years of tyrannical rule, Trouble made his last trip to the vet’s, my father stopped his daily walks. Now he rarely strayed beyond the street on which he lived.
By the time I had reached the top of the hill, I was soaked with sweat that pasted my shirt to my back. I stood beside the waist-high concrete block that marked the summit and looked out over the valleys beyond. It was dusk. The evening air was heavy with the smell of approaching rain. Mist was rising from the hollows, and the Severn River glinted in the distance. The time-blunted mountains of Wales stood ranked against the horizon, each one a different shade of smoky blue or violet.
Before I went away to school, my father used to bring me up here on Sunday evenings, with no regard for the weather. Sometimes we’d arrive at the top and see nothing but rain and fog. But other times, those distant hills would blaze under the banners of sunset. At that time, I gave no thought to climbing them. From where I stood, such a thing appeared impossible. Their vastness frightened me and yet it drew me to them. Later, I would learn that the mountains of southern Wales were barely ripples in the ground compared to the stone giants of the Alps. But back then, the way they reached into the sky seemed beyond all measuring. It was not until twelve years later, in my second year of university, that I first climbed one of those Welsh hills.
Inspired by Carton’s lecture, both Stanley and I had signed up for a mountaineering trip to the Brecon Beacons sponsored by my Oxford college outing club.
For three days, we tramped above the tree line, through bogs where sheep skulls bleached among the reeds and over crags of lichen-painted rock. We slept wrapped in horse blankets with our boots for pillows while the night wind strummed the guy lines of our canvas tent. I didn’t realize how the experience had changed me until I got back to Oxford. In the week that followed, I was restless. Oxford seemed more crowded than ever and I, who had never been out of step with the frenzied pace of academic life, suddenly felt as if I had become a stranger there. Agitation hovered over me like the beating of huge wings. It caught me by surprise to realize it was my time in the mountains which had done this to me. The clarity of thought which came from climbing, from being in a world not clogged by the gridwork of roads and playing fields and days, whose hours were not marked by the tolling clock of Tom Tower, was something I no longer wished to live without.
For Stanley, the
dangerous straightforwardness of what it meant to walk where no path showed the way gave him a sense of purpose he had never experienced before. Without the hindrance of rules designed to make him into the kind of team player he would never be, he obeyed instead the life-or-death laws of the mountains.
For Stanley, as it was for me, the world had finally begun to make sense.
From then on, we went on as many mountaineering trips as we could: to the Derbyshire Peak District, to the Highlands of Scotland and the Lake District. It was not long before we were determined to explore the higher elevations of the world. In those days, for a mountaineer of limited means, all roads pointed to the Alps. In the summer of 1936, as soon as the semester ended, we grouped together with four other students: Armstrong, Whistler, Forbes, and Sugden, each of whom had done some previous climbing on their own. All of us headed for Chamonix. Nobody had much in the way of savings. We traveled as cheaply as we could, sleeping on our rucksacks in the baggage car as the train made its slow and jolting way down through France.
At Chamonix, we camped in the shadow of Mont Blanc, mesmerized by the Mer de Glace glacier and the red granite spires of the Chamonix Aiguilles. With my five companions, I climbed the Aiguille du Plan, the Aiguille du Gouter, and Mont Maudit. By the time we returned to England in late August, we had all been changed forever. From then on, when we were not climbing, we were thinking about climbing.
During the school year, I was a student of history, Latin, and French. But every day I spent beyond the classroom I taught myself the languages of rock and cloud and ice.
We did everything we could to earn enough money to take part in expeditions.
Armstrong tutored Latin at a boys’ school. He had the face of a bloodhound: a jowly frown and patient, friendly eyes. His movements were slow and methodical, as if he had all the time in the world to spend with fidgety students almost half his age. His pupils must have known from the moment they caught sight of Armstrong, outfitted as he always was in heavy tweeds and corduroy, that they could never break him down the way they might have done with other teachers.
Whistler worked in the Ashmolean Library. His sole task was to locate books which had been placed in the wrong locations, retrieving volumes which had been lost sometimes for more than a century. Whistler was perfectly suited for this work, due to his almost unbearable fastidiousness. When we were climbing and the contents of our rucksacks generally became tangled masses of dirty clothes, biscuit crumbs, and carabiners, only Whistler’s remained as it had when we had started out: each piece of equipment in its place, each type of clothing stored in its own specially labeled canvas bag. For Whistler, spending his afternoons among lost books was an almost holy task. He would emerge into the squid-ink black of an Oxford winter night and join us at the Bull’s Cellar for a drink, dust in his spiky red hair and his freckled face wearing an expression of triumph normally reserved for the carved stone faces of kings in Westminster Cathedral.
Sugden, meanwhile, fixed punts for a Cherwell River boathouse. It was a job which, by his own reckoning, any fool could do. This was not true, of course, and we all knew it, but it was typical of Sugden to make light of his achievements, if only to hear us contradict him, which we were of course obliged to do. Repairing the punts required the exact planing of curved hull strips, the removal and refitting of nails without causing damage to the wood, as well as waxing and polishing. All of these tasks Sugden attacked with such ferocity that he was left to himself by the boathouse owners, who trusted his work and feared his temper in almost equal measure.
Forbes resorted to mending nets at the cricket practice fields, where he gained a reputation for climbing the large nets like a spider, a sailor’s twining needle in one hand and a jackknife clamped between his teeth. Of all my climbing friends, I knew Forbes the least. But none of us knew him, really. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and always faintly smiling, as if the laughter of some recently shared joke was just fading from his lips. But even this smile seemed like a kind of camouflage to keep the world at bay. His hair, once a mop of curly blond, was thinning prematurely and so he usually wore a hat with a long brim, which only added to his anonymity. Without ever being unfriendly, he seemed to need us less than the rest of us needed one another. Even Sugden and Stanley, locked in a rivalry which was driven more by instinct than by anything they could explain, had formed a bond of mutual animosity. Forbes had no bonds, at least none we could name. In this way, he was perhaps better suited for climbing than we were. There is a kind of loneliness up in the mountains which can be cherished only in small doses by those who do not wish to be driven mad by it. Forbes carried that loneliness in him long before he ever set eyes on the jagged spires of the Alps. What drew him to the mountains was some strange familiarity, something he seemed to know about them which would always be a mystery to us.
Stanley, for his part, didn’t have to work, but was obliged to beg his father for an increase in his monthly stipend.
And me, I sold a pint of blood a month for six months in order to buy a new tent. I became like one of those people who live only to hunt, and for whom the year is divided not into weeks and months but into the seasons for hunting various animals. For me, as for the others, there was a time for climbing mountains, a time to earn money for getting to the mountains, a time for refurbishing my gear, a time for testing ropes, a time for getting in shape, and a time for reading about mountaineering. Everything else seemed somehow irrelevant.
Only those who do not climb mountains ask why people climb them. For those who climb, the answer is both obvious and almost impossible to explain. Perhaps the simplest answer is that life is infinitely simplified when you are climbing. The everyday concerns of livelihood, of social standing, of overdue bills and futureless romances all fall away before the vast and overwhelming absolute of the mountain. Aside from an ice ax, a few carabiner loops, and a length of rope, there is nothing to rely on but yourself and those with whom you climb. On the precipice not only of the world but of your own existence, you look back with a mixture of pity and contempt at those who fuss away their time on the wheel of the working day.
“But it doesn’t accomplish anything,” my father would say. “Not for the common good, I mean. What you stand to lose is completely out of proportion to what you have to gain.” And he was right. I didn’t know how long I could just keep mountaineering and have everything else exist as a means to do more mountaineering. But my knowing he was right didn’t change how I felt about it. Obsession, since this was what it had become, did not require the cumbersome baggage of reason.
For the first two summers, the six of us made our way back to Chamonix. We climbed the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Blanc, the Petit Dru, and the Grands Charmoz.
We formed what seemed to me a perfect team, each with his own talent which benefited the group as a whole.
Whistler could fix anything, especially the fiddly stoves and camera equipment we brought with us.
Forbes was our cook, piously minding the soup kettle and the rationing of food.
Armstrong spoke the languages of the Alps, not only French and German but Italian as well. And when these failed, he spoke in Latin. Without him, on our first trip down, we would probably have misunderstood the directions offered to us by a variety of train conductors, and would have ended up on the other side of Europe.
Sugden was our most aggressive climber. The few times we were forced by weather or an impassable route to turn back, he took it as a personal insult. There was no doubt in my mind that if it had not been for the moderating effect of the rest of the group, Sugden would have killed himself simply in refusing to accept defeat. He was absolutely without fear, and so intolerant of fear in others that there were times when, if it had not been for Stanley, we might have pressed ahead with climbs which we should more sensibly have abandoned.
The only one of us who regularly stood up to Sugden was Stanley. Whereas the rest of us did our best to avoid argument, Stanley seemed to revel in it. What anno
yed Sugden most about these confrontations on the mountainsides was that Stanley was quite simply a better mountain climber than anyone else in the group. With his natural agility, it was taken for granted that Stanley would be in the lead when we came up against stretches of any serious technical difficulty. So when the route ahead began to look unclimbable and Stanley started making noises about turning back, the rest of us knew that this time the mountain had beaten us.
Sugden, who hated giving in to anything, hated even more that Stanley’s judgment in these matters carried more weight than his own.
Once we climbed above the tree line, it was always left to me to make the final choice. This role had evolved without any debate or argument. The very lack of argument was perhaps the thing that decided it. Neither Whistler, Forbes, nor Armstrong had any wish to lead. They shared among themselves a certain quietness of character which did not jibe with taking charge.
Stanley didn’t care for leading either, except when it came to the actual climbing. He disliked giving orders almost as much as he disliked taking them from anyone else.
Sugden would gladly have led us, but most probably to unmarked graves on some unclimbable peak, simply because the concept of turning back was so repugnant to him. So he could not lead, because the rest of us would not have followed him. Sugden knew he was wrong for the job, although his pride would never have allowed him to admit it. Nevertheless, he seemed constantly on the alert for any opportunity to exert control over the rest of us.
So it fell to me to make decisions when decisions had to be made. Up on the mountainside, someone had to choose what route we took, when we stopped to rest, where we camped, and, ultimately, when neither Sugden and Stanley could agree, if reaching the summit was worth the risk involved.
Among the three who could have taken charge, it was no great boast to say I was the only choice. Despite the fact that this role came to me more or less by default, much as the teaching did later on, I found to my surprise that I was suited for it. It was one of the more helpful realizations of my life to learn that, just because something had come along unexpectedly, that did not mean it was any less important than the plans I’d worked out in advance. In preparing for our mountaineering trips, I discovered that I had a seemingly inexhaustible energy for sorting out the little details which drove people like Stanley to distraction. And, unlike Forbes and the other non-leaders of our group, I did not mind the burden of decision making. Finally, when difficult choices had to be made, I found I could think clearly and calmly, while Sugden spat and swore and raged at the mountains which beat us, as if they had done it on purpose.