The Next Horizon

by Chris Bonington

  Immediately on our return I was involved in making a commentary to Vic Bray’s film of the Central Tower. Don and I had taken no film at all on our push for the summit, and Vic had been down in the valley; we were therefore desperately short of climbing footage, and so the BBC hinted that perhaps we might try to ‘find’ some film of the summit assault – good, close-up material of pitons being bashed in, hands going on to holds, and so on. Time was short, money shorter, and so we decided to shoot the necessary sequences near Don’s home.

  ‘I know just the place,’ he said.

  Our ‘Potted Paine’ was in a quarry high above a Yorkshire valley, near the village of Heptonstall. Below us, the chimneys of the mills jutted like granite needles out of the smog. The rock itself was steep enough, though it was stained black by centuries of pollution and the texture was coarser than that of granite. Most embarrassing were the initials and messages carved into the rock. Vic had his work cut out to avoid filming either the factories in the background or the graffiti on the quarry wall – even so, there crept into the corner of one of the sequences used in the film to depict our summit assault, a rough-hewn heart inscribed ‘Kate loves John’.

  To bolster our lack of film still further, the BBC built a ten-foot-high replica of the Tower, round which I had to peer as I made my commentary direct to camera. It was the first time I had ever been in front of a TV camera, and I was so nervous I could barely keep the quaver out of my voice as I read the script from the autocue.

  While I was in London I met a long-lost cousin who was something – I’m not sure what – in television. He was quite a bit older than myself, very sophisticated, and had all kinds of important connections. My appetite for filming had been whetted, and I mentioned to him a scheme that was in my mind.

  ‘How about making a film on the North Wall of the Eiger – a documentary of a complete ascent?’

  My cousin knew just the man to finance such a venture, a man who had various television interests in the former Commonwealth. I went to a sumptuous office off Sloane Street, and was immediately in a strange world – it seemed almost straight out of a TV spy thriller. I was very much at sea as we talked of a £50,000 budget, production companies, and so on. But I went ahead and invited various climbing friends to join the bonanza – Whillans, Clough, Patey, MacInnes and several others. We were all going to spend the summer below the Eiger, playing at film stars. It seemed too good to be true – it was. I was handed over to an assistant, who handed me on to someone else, and from buoyant enthusiasm they became more and more cautious, until eventually the entire scheme fizzled out. This was a period of enjoying an ephemeral little glitter, of being a minor celebrity – something that had never happened to me before. I was eager to snatch at every opportunity to get myself established as a writer, film-maker, what-have-you, in an effort to find a clearly defined career.

  Making a living around climbing was nothing new, even in 1962. Frank Smythe had done it successfully before the war, through his writing, photography and lecturing. Edward Whymper could, perhaps, be described as the first climbing journalist, though of course his income was primarily based on his profession as proprietor of a wood-engraving firm. In the post-war period, Alf Gregory and some of the other Everest climbers had made a fair amount of money by lecturing, but there was still a strong feeling of amateurism in the sport. I was often asked at lectures, ‘Are you using the fee to finance your next expedition?’ as if there were almost something slightly nasty about using the fee as part of one’s income.

  We had still not decided where to live. Wendy, at this stage, was uncommitted to any one area, provided that it was deep in the country. We had had six months together in a furnished room in Hampstead before going to Patagonia, and that was enough for her of London living. I felt the same, and obviously wanted to live in a mountain area. Originally, we had planned to settle in Wales, with the hope that I could get into the University College of North Wales at Bangor, but this seemed no longer necessary.

  I was attracted to the Lake District, partly perhaps because I had done comparatively little climbing there, but also because it has a quality of beauty lacking in Wales. Snowdonia has a grandeur that is difficult to match anywhere south of the Border, but it is a beauty that is somehow alien to man. The farms and cottages suggest harsh austerity, unsoftened by hedgerows or gardens. Somehow, they don’t seem to belong. The Lakes, on the other hand, are altogether softer, and more varied in their appeal. Each valley has its own special character. Man has succeeded in becoming an integral part of the country, with the cottages and houses blending into the hills as if they were an essential part of the landscape. There are more trees in the valleys, hedgerows intermingle with stone walls, and even on the open fell, there is a lighter, warmer quality.

  And so we settled for the Lakes, loaded our brand-new Minivan with our few possessions – sleeping bags, Wendy’s guitar and paints, my climbing gear – and drove north. We were under the happy illusion that we should be able to find a charming country cottage for about £1 per week. We were soon disillusioned. The summer season was nearly upon us and holiday cottages were at a premium. Even a two-roomed cottage could cost as much as £10 per week.

  We stayed with friends in Keswick and started hunting. After a week, we had looked at a dozen cottages, had chased after several long-odds tips, had even applied for a council house in Mungrisdale, though, not surprisingly, failed to get it.

  We were beginning to give up hope of finding something that we could afford, and were even thinking of looking for a cottage in the Peak District, when we called in at the Royal Oak, in Ambleside, one Sunday lunchtime to have a drink. I began talking to the barman, and it emerged that he was a climber. After working through the normal climbing gossip of mutual friends, we mentioned that we were looking for somewhere to live.

  ‘If you’re really desperate, I know a place near here,’ he said. ‘I stayed in it myself last winter. It’s a single room over a garage on a farm. It’s pretty rough, but at least it’s a roof over your heads.’

  This was to be the first time I had met Mick Burke, and it was to be another two years before we met again. At this stage, he was just one of the lads who had chucked up regular jobs to live in the hills with the minimum of work and the maximum of climbing. He came from Wigan, had started as an insurance clerk, but had quickly tired of a routine nine-to-five job, and had spent the previous year around Ambleside, doing a bit of labouring, or working the bar in the Royal Oak when he felt in need of a rest.

  We left without further delay, and drove to Loughrigg Farm to see if the room was still vacant. The farmer warned us – ‘It’s a bit rough, you know.’

  It was. An outdoor staircase led up from the farmyard to a small balcony. A peeling wooden door opened into a fair-sized room, lit by a couple of windows. The walls were of bare plaster, brown with dirt, and traced with a network of cracks. The floor was covered with rotting linoleum, which had long lost its colour, and the room was furnished with a few pieces of battered furniture that had probably been rescued from a refuse dump. The nearest water was from a tap in the yard and the sanitary facilities were limited to an earth closet, most primitive and smelly of all toilets, placed at the back of a pigsty. Set in the backstreets of a city it would have been unbelievably sordid, but here, in the heart of some of the most beautiful country either of us had ever lived in, it didn’t seem to matter.

  Loughrigg is on the southern edge of the Lake District, nestling amongst the broken foothills that spill down from the Langdale Pikes. From the balcony outside the door we could gaze across the farmyard, over the spring green grass of a field, dotted with clusters of Scots pine and larch, to the still waters of Loughrigg Tarn. A scattering of elm, still bare of leaves, ringed the lake, and beyond it, breaking up the fields and part-concealing other farm houses, grey-barked spinneys’ arms intertwined, merged with the darkling green of spruce forest. This, in turn, mingled with the open fell leading up to the Langdale Pikes, picked out by the
waning snows.

  We lived in Loughrigg for three months, and were able to watch the explosion of colour, of every shade of green, that takes place each spring in this part of the Lake District. I did comparatively little climbing, in part surfeited by our expedition to Patagonia. I was still working on my project to film the North Wall of the Eiger. When that fell through, I thought up a more modest scheme, with the hardy Scot, Hamish MacInnes, to make a low-budget film of the North Wall of the Matterhorn. This was to fill the summer of 1963.

  In the meantime, we continued a desultory search for a more comfortable home, and eventually stumbled on one through the good offices of Heaton Cooper, the Lakeland artist. We had never met the Heaton Coopers, but a mutual friend had told them about us. They called on our garret one afternoon when we were out, and left a note inviting us round for coffee.

  Several other people were there, and soon the conversation turned to finding somewhere for the Boningtons to live. Fenwick Patterson, another artist, who had abandoned the rat-race and settled in Coniston, thought he knew where we might find a furnished house. In a few days this led us to Woodland – to me, and happily to the vast majority of Lakeland visitors, an unknown corner of the Lake District. It is down in the south-west corner of the Lakes, between Coniston and Broughton-in-Furness. The road runs beneath Coniston Old Man, barely wide enough to take two cars, between a mixture of dry stone walls and hedgerows. You pass Torver, and on either side is the open fell – in no way mountainous, but with mysterious little hills clad in bracken – and then, round a bend, past a farm, you come to the signpost to Woodland, down a steep little tree-clad hill. It’s off the road, an oasis of green in the midst of the russet browns of bracken-clad hills. A newly-grown fir forest jostles with coppices of fine old deciduous trees, a few houses and farms spread on either side of the lane; you reach a signpost marked Woodland Hall, a makeshift cattlegrid, a rough, potholed drive; continue through a wood of young birch, past an artificial lake, full of weed, willows brushing the surface of the water: everything is overgrown, wild, attractive, up to the Hall itself.

  We’re after the Lodge. It’s owned by the Dicksons, seed farmers from Essex, who have made their money from market gardening, and have now succumbed to the romance of the Lakes. They have bought the Hall, its attendant farm, and the Lodge, a cluster of buildings clinging just below the crest of a low ridge that bounds Woodland on its western flank. The Lodge is T-shaped, with the base of the T dug into the bank. In the front are two rooms on either side of the hall, and all look out on to Blow Knot Fell, a hump of hill that has an endearing beauty which grows on you as you look at it through the seasons; through the deep browns of autumn to spring, to the light, glistening green of the new sprouting bracken that dulls so very fast as the bracken grows, and which, even at full maturity, when it is a drab grey-green, ripples in the wind to make the hill seem live, capable of responding to the love it evokes.

  And Woodland did evoke love – Wendy’s and my love for each other, and our love for the place itself. It was a backwater, hidden away from tourists, standing back from the bigger hills of the Lakes and looking across at them. The northern horizon is dominated by Coniston Old Man, framed in trees from the cottage, a graceful, near-symmetrical cone, unbalanced by the sweep of the ridge that embraces Low Water and hides Dow Crag in its grasp. From the top of the ridge, just below the houses, you can look across a marshy valley to another ridge, lower, field-clad, which guards the secret little valley of Broughton Mills. Beyond it, slightly higher, a third wave-like ridge, breaking here and there with rocky surf, guards the Duddon Valley. And then you look down the valley to the Duddon estuary – brown sands and mud flats only covered at high tide. At night there’s an angry glow at the end of the estuary from Millom Ironworks – ugly perhaps from close up, but from a distance, strangely beautiful.

  But we hadn’t yet been accepted as tenants. We walk up to the door of the big house where we meet Ivor and Beeny Dickson – the Pattersons have warned them of our arrival. Ivor is a big, rather sleepy man who has learned to stay silent and allow the constant flow of his wife’s talk to continue, unheeded, past him; and Beeny, as we came to know her, is small, birdlike, with endless energy and a great capacity to be interested in the affairs of others. She had been planning to rent the Lodge as a holiday let, but on the promise of at least a year’s stay, to include the winter, she agreed to let us have it for £3 a week, fully furnished. We had been paying £5 a week for a single room in London.

  And so we moved into Woodland Lodge. It had become increasingly important to find a firm base, for we were fairly certain that Wendy was pregnant. We had already had one false alarm on the boat back from South America, when she had missed a period. This had seemed appalling in the limbo we were in at that time, with no knowledge of where we were going to live, or what I was going to do. Wendy certainly did not want a child at this stage; she wanted a few more years of freedom, to develop her own work as an artist and, more to the point, to see something of the world. I, on the other hand, had mixed emotions. When I viewed the prospect of parenthood logically, it appalled me, but whenever I was drunk a deep-rooted desire to procreate took hold of me.

  We were both superbly ignorant of the complexities of pregnancy, but Wendy took a series of ultra-hot baths and went in for violent exercise, on the off chance that this might cause a natural miscarriage. To our vast relief, she had her next period just after getting back to England, and in celebrating our narrow escape, using the laxest of lax rhythm methods, she conceived in earnest.

  Now that we were established in the Lake District, parenthood became an easier idea to accept. We were quickly resigned, and then excited, at the prospect. Wendy was due to give birth around Christmas, 1963, and we decided that she should come out to the Alps for the summer, while we made our film on the Matterhorn. I succeeded in getting a small advance, and our film stock, from the BBC. Meanwhile, Hamish got everything else organised. I had known Hamish, off and on, over a period of ten years. On my first trip to Scotland, at the age of seventeen, I had met him and had been taken up a series of winter climbs. At this stage I had never climbed on snow and ice, and I was employed as a portable belay. We made the first winter ascent of Raven’s Gully (described in I Chose to Climb), and a couple of other routes.

  Our paths had then split, mine into the army, while Hamish, always the lone individualist, had temporarily emigrated to New Zealand; had set out to climb Everest with another hard Scot, John Cunningham, and had then returned to Britain.

  In 1957 we had climbed together again in equally bizarre circumstances. It was to be my first Alpine season, and Hamish had talked me into making an attempt on the North Wall of the Eiger. Fortunately for me, we did not get very far up the Wall before I found an excuse for retreat. It was a matter of out of the frying-pan into the fire, for he then persuaded me to try the other great North Wall of the Alps – the North Wall of the Grandes Jorasses. This attempt also ended in fiasco, when Hamish fell into a crevasse in the pitch dark.

  The following year we climbed together once again, and ended up by making the first British ascent of the South-west Pillar of the Dru. This was the first time that I had met Don Whillans. Our present project was very different from these early adventures – then, we had been climbing for fun, now we were trying to make a film. In a way, this was to be my introduction to the problems associated with making a living out of the mountains.

  Wendy and I drove out to the Alps in our Minivan, stopping at Chamonix on the way. The weather was perfect, and I was sorely tempted to snatch a climb before starting work in Zermatt – we were due to meet Hamish the following day – but my sense of duty won, and I thrust the temptation aside. Hamish was waiting for us in Zermatt and had already done some superb ground work. He had enlisted the support of the head of the local tourist office and, as a result, we had unrestricted free-access to all the telepheriques, subsidised accommodation in a chalet in the village, and a special concession for hut fees.

/>   We had everything – but the weather. It broke a few days after we reached Zermatt, and never really improved throughout the summer. Hamish filmed goats, cows, tourists and the familiar local life of Zermatt. Ian Clough arrived to take part as one of the ‘stars’ – I being the other – and we all sat and ate and drank through the long, wet summer.

  The only climb I did was an ascent of the Matterhorn by the Hornli Ridge, climbing solo with Hamish, jostling with the long queue which trailed its way to the top of the most famous mountain peak in Europe. On a good day up to 300 people have been to the summit – the majority of them tourists, who are hustled to the top by the local guides, and then raced down to enable the guide to get some rest before taking up the next pair. That summer the fee for an ascent of the Matterhorn was £14, and so in theory the guide could make a fair amount by shuttling clients from the Hornli Hut to the summit, getting back to the hut at midday, having an afternoon rest, meeting the next client and setting out at two o’clock the following morning. The amount he made, though, depended entirely on the weather, and during 1963 the guides must have had a lean time, for even the Hornli Ridge was out of condition for most of the summer.

  The profession of guiding has changed a great deal in the last fifty years. In the old days, the local guide was very much the leader of the party, invested with the respect of his clients who, in their turn, were experienced mountaineers. In recent years, however, particularly since the war, the vast majority of climbers have ventured into the hills without guides. A few outstanding mountaineers, such as Walter Bonatti, Gaston Rébuffat, René Desmaison and Michel Darbellay, the Swiss climber who made the first solo ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger, have managed to preserve a select clientele of wealthy amateurs, who are also competent mountaineers, but the vast majority of guides are now dependent on the casual tourist, who would like to be taken to the top of a well-known mountain – Mont Blanc from Chamonix, the Matterhorn from Zermatt. As a result, both the status and ability of guides have declined. A man who spends most of his mountaineering career hauling clients up the Hornli Ridge of the Matterhorn, can gain only limited experience, and this must inevitably diminish the level of his prowess on the hills.