There was an element of the ludicrous in our struggles with the elements: here were seven experienced mountaineers, defeated time and time again, not by the technical difficulty of a steep mountain but by a mixture of wind and rain. Perhaps if we had shown greater stoicism in the face of discomfort, we could have achieved more, but somehow I doubt it. There is a sapping power to the force of continuous wind that can only be borne for a limited time.
But we were still determined to stay in range of the Tower, and the following morning started trying to construct a new shelter, this time a hut with dry stone walls roofed with the tarpaulin. By the end of the day we had a hovel with barely sufficient headroom to sit up. The tarpaulin roof thrashed over us in the wind, slowly tearing itself to bits on the rocky walls. Before the first night was out holes had appeared in it and every time a gust hit us it threatened to take off. I dozed intermittently through the night, planning my retreat to the dubious shelter of the boulder, and wondering if we should ever be able to get to grips with Big Ned. We had vested in our objective a definite personality, regarding him with a mixture of hostility, yet at times affection; we had the same kind of relationship with the Central Tower that a primitive tribe might have with an implacable forest god, who could destroy them at any moment, yet who was also responsible for their wellbeing.
But that morning the god was kind, and the sky cleared; though serried streamers of cloud marching across it, high over the Central Tower, were a sure sign that more bad weather was on its way. We resolved, anyway, to go up to Camp III and at least sort it out and stock it with some more food. As we plodded up the long boulder slopes, the clouds came scudding in, round the walls of the Fortress. The air was full of fine racing snowflakes. But I wanted to press on, up to the Notch, in spite of the weather. I was convinced that we needed to try to climb in these bad conditions to make any progress at all, so that when, at last, the weather did improve, we should be sufficiently high on the Tower to make an immediate summit bid.
Camp III proved to be a depressing place. Half-eaten food was floating in pools of water on the floor of the collapsed tent; everything was wet and soggy. We put up the tent and had a brew. I suggested rather tentatively that we went up and had a try at climbing, and John, keen to get to grips with the mountain, was agreeable.
By the time we reached the Notch, a full gale was howling through it, hammering our senses and making every movement a painful effort. It was strange looking down through the Notch to see gently rolling pampas, bathed in sunlight. Down there it was warm and dry; the others were probably lying in the sun; Wendy, perhaps, was painting, while here on the Notch, life and our own efforts seemed very puny against the force of the elements. But once I was in harness, and at the foot of the crack, submerged in concentration, all was forgotten.
Clip in étrier, step up, look round for a place for the next peg, hammer it in. Hell, my gloves are in the way; take them off; my hands are quite warm. Concentration – nothing in the world except the rock, all brown and rich, and the crack. Holds now; feel them; can I pull up on them? Yes. Where should I put my foot? Over there – use an étrier to help; I stick my foot out, but the étrier is swinging in the wind at 90 degrees to me. Cock my foot up above my head and field the étrier; step up. Then an awkward hand jam; it hurts like hell, but I’m up a bit more. Time for another peg; the crack is opening up inside, so that only half an inch of rock is in contact with the peg; but it holds my weight. And so, up and up and up, timeless, oblivious of cold and wind, of Streetley stamping with cold down below. At last I pull on to a ledge. To me, it had seemed only a few minutes, but it had been one and a half hours and I had completed only eighty feet of climbing.
‘Do you want to come up, John?’ I shouted.
‘I’m bloody frozen down here. I don’t think I could move if I tried,’ he replied.
‘Okay, I’ll come down. Can you tie those ladders to the rope?’
We had brought out some electron caving ladders and these seemed ideal for the steep bottom step. Today we should have used jumar clamps to climb the rope, but in 1962 these aids were almost unknown. It was nearly dark by the time we had rigged the ladder, and I had returned to the Notch. We were tired and cold, yet we felt jubilant at our tiny success. We had at least climbed a single pitch on Big Ned after four weeks’ struggle with the weather.
But the weather was winning. That night we tried to sleep at Camp III, and spent most of it watching the seams of the tent stretch and contract as they were battered by the wind. In the morning we fled downhill, and pushed straight back to Base. For the time being, the weather had won. Our tents would not stand up to the wind, and even the boulder camp on the glacier was untenable. There seemed nothing for it but to wait for a spell of fine weather at Base Camp. And anyway, it was the 20th December, only a week to Christmas.
– CHAPTER TWO –
CHRISTMAS IN PATAGONIA
Christmas in Patagonia meant roast mutton, quantities of booze and a friendly visit by the Neilsons from Cerro Guido. We had been at Base Camp for over a week and the big saucer-like clouds that cruised over the Paine Massif were a sure sign that it was windy as ever in the mountains. The team sank into a restless inertia. Don, John Streetley and I made a foray to attempt to climb the Cuernos, an attractive peak about eight miles down Lake Nordenskjold, the huge glacier-fed lake that lay alongside the Paine range. A rainy bivouac in the woods cooled our ardour, however, and we returned to Base Camp.
It was a restless, disturbing period for me. Wendy and I had planned to wander up through the Americas after the expedition, spending the money I had made from climbing the North Wall of the Eiger. It had seemed an attractive scheme, but now my basic caution and need for stability began to affect me. I longed for solid roots, was worried about getting stuck into a new career and writing the book which had been commissioned just before I left England. I decided, therefore, to go back with the others rather than spend another six months travelling. Wendy was bitterly disappointed, for in many ways she is more adventurous than I. She is the product of a home that had always been unstable financially, yet had remained a close-knit unit. Her father, Leslie, is an amazing man with a free-ranging intelligence, spirit of inquiry and basic strength, that has enabled him to emerge through a series of personal crises that would have overwhelmed a lesser person. Like mine, his father pulled out when he was still young, leaving his mother to bring up four children in Birkenhead. He left school at the age of sixteen to join the art department of Newnes, where he showed special promise as a cartoonist. He would probably have followed a steadily developing career in the magazine world, but then, at the age of eighteen, he was caught by evangelism. This eventually led him into the Baptist ministry. But he had ideas that were years ahead of their time, especially for his parishioners in Buckinghamshire. He tried to apply a psychological interpretation to their problems; I should imagine his sermons went straight over their heads, for he has a philosophical bent, constantly inquiring about the nature of his own belief and that of others, trying to get to the roots of a problem, rather than skating over the surface in the way that I suspect most of his churchgoers would have preferred. Eventually, he fell out with his parishioners and fellow churchmen. Disillusioned, shaken in his beliefs, he left the church and faced the problem of making a new career with practically no qualifications. He started working as a medical artist and then progressed to illustrating children’s books and magazines.
He had married shortly before going into the church and had two children, Neville and Wendy. Money had always been short, with disaster looming just around the corner, but Les somehow managed to give the two children a good education and a stable home life. Wendy went to Brighton High School and then on to Art College, where she stayed for only three years, just getting her intermediate certificate before leaving to earn some immediate money, like her father, as a freelance illustrator.
In many ways she had a lonely childhood, isolated by lack of money, which made her different from
most other children at school. This gave her a superficial shyness, yet hidden beneath it was a real strength that enabled her to do without the conventional props of economic security.
I, on the other hand, had had a childhood that was relatively secure financially, but very much less stable emotionally. My parents’ marriage had broken up before I was a year old and my mother had been left, without any help from my father, to bring me up at a time when jobs were hard to get and salaries for women painfully low. Fortunately, as an advertising copywriter, she managed to achieve a reasonable earning capacity and compared to Wendy’s family we were positively wealthy. But the fact remained, she was very much on her own in a thrusting, unstable profession. Because she had to go out to work I was brought up, until the age of five, by my grandmother. Then, on the outbreak of war in 1939, with the scare of bombing, I was sent to boarding school. I was there till 1942, when I was brought back to London and lived alternately with my mother and my grandmother. They were strange, lonely years, for my mother had few friends and there were none of the conventional family contacts with other family groups. I had plenty of love but at times there was a tussle for possession between my mother and grandmother. I suspect this left me with the feeling of insecurity and a need for family existence that made service life very attractive, and tempted me to prolong my National Service into a regular commitment. When I became disillusioned with the army, I had needed another big organisation to jump into and had secured a management traineeship with Unilever. It was largely meeting Wendy, and her contempt for traditional security, that gave me the courage to abandon a conventional career and plunge into the unknown; but a conflict between my desire for security and love of freedom remained. In addition, I don’t think I was ready for wandering in the sense that Wendy was. I had little perception or awareness outside the narrow field of climbing; my entire ambition and concentration was focused on the Central Tower of Paine and my own part in the expedition, to the exclusion of almost everything else. My senses were alive to the feel of the wind and sun, the empty beauty of the pampas, the architecture of the mountains, the mystery of dark pools and tangled glades in the forest below the Paine. But it got no further than my immediate senses. I absorbed the beauty and atmosphere of the place but was lacking in curiosity; I learnt little of the life of Pedro or the gauchos who worked on the estancia. I was too tied up in the climb and my own problems to be able to gain much from a sightseeing adventure through the Americas.
It was a hard time for Wendy. She was so close to everything she had dreamt of doing, yet was unable to fulfil her dreams. The expedition was a man’s world; so was the estancia, and she had become an unwilling appendage. If Elaine had not had a child with her, the two girls could probably have gone off exploring on their own, becoming independent of the expedition, but in the circumstances this could not be.
Just after Christmas the situation changed once again. We were told that Juan Radic, the owner of the estancia, was bringing his wife and family up from Punta Arenas, which meant that the girls had to move from the farmhouse. Much later, I learnt from Derek Walker that this was only an excuse; in fact Juan and Pedro had become tired of having someone else’s small child running riot in the house, and did not really appreciate the girls’ housekeeping. Meals were seldom on time and they weren’t served the vast quantities of food to which they were accustomed. Another irritant must have been the presence of Barrie and me when we were resting at Base Camp. I always felt uncomfortable invading the privacy of their house, but naturally wanted to sleep with Wendy.
There was considerable opposition to the girls staying at Base Camp from the very start. This was largely because it had been understood back in England that Barrie had made arrangements for them to stay in an estancia for the entire trip, and therefore the others, quite naturally, had a feeling of being misled. Not having women or wives of their own with them, one could hardly blame them for resenting the ones who had. The communal mess tent had a feeling of a London Club in its male exclusivity, and I could hardly blame them for wanting to retain it. Wendy and I set up camp in a little two-man tent about a hundred yards from the other tents. I was torn between two emotions: one part of me wanting to immerse myself in the expedition, to be part of the tribe, and the other part enjoying my love for Wendy. At the time I wrote:
An expedition is very much a living, single unit. I find it myself in many ways, and I think Wendy feels it. An awful lot of you goes into the expedition and the mountain you climb. I hope to God it does not mean that I am just not passionate because the depth of my love for her is total and complete, and yet I feel I can’t give her everything; somehow, at times my sexual passion seems to be drained, I think – I hope – by the efforts of the expedition, my own channelling of enthusiasm.
This was when I was tired after our return from the Cuernos, and worried about my relationship with the rest of the expedition because of the girls’ presence in Base Camp, yet in the constant pendulum of emotion that I have always been prey to, the next day, refreshed, I wrote:
We woke up to hear rain pattering on the tent and a distant roar of wind. Although the sun spread a dappled pattern of leaves on the roof of the tent, I felt that the weather had changed once again. It had, and got progressively worse during day.
But Wendy and I spent a delightful morning, in fact a whole delightful day, just loving each other with a great, warm, fresh, light-hearted love. It’s strange, all the aspects of love that you plumb; light-hearted, bubbling, idiotic love that is all coloured and playful; deep love that goes right into your emotions; doubtful love, when you just want to be loved, but can’t imagine anyone loving you.
I think that on this trip we’ve gone through a big range of loving, and of doubts about the present and future, but never doubts of our own love for each other. I know that every day that goes by, my own love, and the confidence that I have in that love, gets stronger and yet each day I feel that I have reached an absolute optimum of loving.
We had known each other for less than a year, had been married for only six months, and were still in that tentative, finding-out stage of a relationship. In spite of the pressures caused by my own split loyalties, the general feeling of resentment against the girls, and Wendy’s sense of lost opportunity, we had some wonderful times together during that fortnight, as we wandered down by the slate-grey waters of Lake Nordenskjold, making love in the soft grass of the pampas, confident that no one would pass our way, and overlooked only by a condor, soaring high above our impassioned limbs.
In face of the continuous bad weather the team seemed to have lost much of its single-minded push to lay siege to the Central Tower. Don was planning to make another attempt on the Cuernos with Derek Walker, though I was surprised that he was prepared to miss a chance of fine weather on the Central Tower. The rest of us were planning to return to the foot of the Tower yet again, to try to build a storm-proof camp where we could wait out the weather. But there was little sense of urgency, or even real unity, in the team at this stage – and then something happened to shake the team out of its fast-growing apathy.
We had known all along that an Italian expedition was on its way to climb in our area, but somehow, until they actually arrived, we never took the threat seriously. On the 28th December, the day that Don and Derek were due to set out on their mini-expedition, we heard that they had reached the Estancia Guido, and the following day they pitched camp about half a mile from ourselves. Derek and Don immediately cancelled their plans, and that afternoon we went over to size up our potential rivals. They were an impressive-looking bunch, slightly older than we were, very neat in matching sweaters and breeches that gave them an almost military air. They gave an impression of disciplined single-mindedness, very different from one that any stranger would have gained from our own motley group.
They greeted us with wary courtesy, and a spate of introductions followed. There were seven of them altogether; their leader, Gian Carlo Frigieri, was grey-haired and could have been in
his late forties; a non-playing captain, I suspected. Their star was undoubtedly Amando Aste, dark-haired, rather sullen, who obviously resented our presence in the mountains they had come to climb. He had a reputation for hard solo climbing in the Dolomites, with many well-known routes to his credit. It was undoubtedly a strong team – on average experience probably a good deal stronger than ours.
Unfortunately, they could speak little English, and we no Italian. Barrie produced a postcard of the Towers and pointed to the Central Tower.
‘This is our Tower. We have climbed high on it with much fixed rope in place.’ He pointed to a spot considerably higher than our real high point, a puny eighty feet above the col. They did not seem very impressed; Amando Aste scowled even more fiercely and muttered something in Italian.
Barrie tried once again. ‘South Tower very good, just as steep as Central.’ It looked good in the photograph, if anything more slender than the Central Tower, but it had been taken face on and did not show that the Tower comprised a long, comparatively easy-angled knife-edge ridge. The Italians were not impressed; they had obviously seen photographs of both Towers from more revealing angles.
Before leaving we invited them round for a drink that night and then returned to our camp for a council of war. As we talked, I could sense the growing unity of purpose caused by this threat of competition.
The Next Horizon Page 3