That summer saw the start of my real interest in photography. Up to this time I had always taken a camera with me on my climbs, but had been little more than a holiday snap shooter. Hamish was very interested in photography, and had his own firm ideas on the ideal camera – a massive, old, folding 2¼-inch square Zeiss Ikon which, inevitably, he had picked up at bargain price in a sale. Fired by his enthusiasm, I sank all our savings in a second-hand Hasselblad, which Hamish assured me was a fantastic bargain. It couldn’t have been more unsuitable for climbing. It is the Rolls-Royce of 2¼-inch square cameras – a single lens reflex camera, shaped like an oblong box, with interchangeable lenses and backs, to enable one to shoot different types of film without having to finish the spool.
It was bulky, heavy, and even the lens alone was worth about £100. In the hands of someone as unmechanical as myself, it was doomed to a hammering. But for the rest of that summer in Zermatt, I wandered round the foothills above the village taking chocolate-box pictures of mountains framed by trees, or reflected in little lakes. In doing so, I became more visually aware.
By early September, all the climbers had packed up and gone home, the snow was creeping down towards the valley, and an early winter seemed to have arrived. We returned to England.
A wasted summer? In a way, yes; but I had learned a great deal. Wendy, now six months pregnant, was beginning to bulge, and we could feel the movement of her babe in the womb. We were both becoming increasingly excited by our looming parenthood. In the past, I had always had a feeling of anti-climax at returning to England – there had been nothing there for me – but now, with Wendy, the prospect of returning to our little lodge at Woodland was immensely attractive. We were tired of the ordered prettiness of Switzerland. On the way back we stopped for only a day in London, and then hammered towards the Lakes. In the next two years I was to learn the way to Woodland all too well, as I drove, tired, rather depressed after frenetic lecture tours. But I came to know the landmarks of the return, and always felt a rising excitement as I got closer and closer.
The home stretch started at Leven’s Bridge, at the turning off the A6, on to the Barrow and Ulverston Road, round the southern part of the Lake District. The next marker was Newby Bridge, at the foot of Windermere – wooded hills, rocks breaking through – and then the dye works at Backbarrow. The road narrows and winds through the works itself – everything stained blue – and then on the right an old iron works which must be one of the oldest, and certainly the most decrepit, in England, with rusty machinery that blends into the landscape. I’m getting excited now, in spite of tiredness; swing round the bends, up the long straight, across the head of the Cartmell Estuary, take a short cut on to the Broughton Road, up narrow lanes, round blind corners, and then back to the main road – now narrower, like the upper reaches of a great river – up to Broughton Fell, swing right on the moorland road to Woodland – we’re nearly home – I feel a warm love of the place – could almost stop the car to get out and feel the turf at the side of the road. The fells are bracken-covered and the road winds across, unfettered by walls or hedge, over a final rise, and there’s Woodland beneath – the Hall and Lodge a squat, grey mass of buildings, clinging to the crest of a low ridge; beyond, in rolling waves, the hills of the Southern Lake District. This isn’t grand, awe-inspiring country, but neither is it pretty. There is a secret intimacy about its little valleys, tree-clad, winding their way into craggy fells.
We race down the hill, the engine, raucous, noisy, past the corrugated iron bungalow where we bought all our eggs, and then up the winding tree-covered drive to the Lodge.
The Lodge wasn’t a handsome house; the kitchen was incredibly damp, the rooms were box-like, with ceilings that were too high for their small size, and the sheets on our bed always felt a bit damp – but it didn’t matter, for the setting of the place was perfect. We both came to love the changing colours and tones of the bracken-clad hill opposite.
Back at Woodland, it was time for me to start writing my book – but there were also lectures to give, for we had now spent the advance, and were flat broke. Through the autumn and winter I made frequent forays to the south, lecturing about the Eiger until I knew the lecture parrot-fashion. It was lonely, depressing work, for I frequently spent several days, even weeks, away from home, living from my van, staying at a different place each night.
I felt very vulnerable, uncertain of the future, aware that my only asset was an ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger. My activities of the summer heightened these worries, for we had really failed in my first creative venture – we had not produced a film for the BBC. I had little idea of film technique, and my dreams of directing Hamish, who was the cameraman, had proved abortive – Hamish is eminently undirectable. He knew a lot more about filming than I, anyway, and knew exactly what he wanted to do.
We were becoming entrenched at Woodland, building up a circle of friends who, like us, had withdrawn from the conventional career game. There was Tony Greenbank, tall, lank, immensely enthusiastic about every scheme and project. He was my age, had been a librarian, but had always had an ambition to write. It was much harder for him to get started than it had been for me, for he was just an average climber, who got a great deal of enjoyment from his sport, but was in no way a celebrity.
He abandoned his job as a librarian and went to Eskdale Outward Bound School as an instructor, with the intention of using it as a tool to get established as a freelance writer. He was already married, which made his step still bolder. He soon became unpopular with some of his fellow instructors, who resented the fact that he was making money on the side by contributing articles to regional papers such as the Yorkshire Evening Post. It was this constantly recurring resentment of professionalism, and particularly of contributing to the media, and hence to the popularisation of climbing, that I had encountered. I suspect that there was often an element of jealousy in it – that you were making money out of something that was just a pastime for the majority. In Tony’s case, his fellow instructors’ resentment could hardly be based on grounds of professionalism, since they were also making a living out of climbing; I suspect it was a combination of straight jealousy, aligned with resentment of someone publicising their own private world.
Tony took a correspondence course in writing, and then resolved to give up his job at the Outward Bound School and work full-time as a freelance writer once he had reached a self-imposed target of annual earnings. It said much for his determination and sheer hard work that he reached this target in two years, whilst working at a job that was both physically exacting and time-consuming. He then bought a caravan in his native Yorkshire Dales, had his first child there, and somehow still managed to churn out his work. When I first met him in 1963, he had progressed to a small cottage at Arnside, near Kirkby Lonsdale, on the fringe of the Lake District.
Another aspirant writer we came to know was David Johnstone. Very different from Tony, he was small and slight, with a shock of dark hair and delicate features. He was an adept at judo. While Tony had few intellectual pretensions and was essentially a popular writer, David wanted to be a serious writer, and had already written several plays and a novel, sadly, all rejected.
He was the son of the local optician in Ulverston, had been sent to Rossall, a public school near Blackpool, and on leaving it had decided to devote his life to writing. For a time he had survived in London, writing during the day and busking with his violin in the evening – this was before the time when it became fashionable for hippies to pick up a living folk-singing in the passages of Underground stations.
He met his wife-to-be, Caroline, a big voluptuous girl, while flitting on the outskirts of the deb scene, and once they had married they took off to Northern Italy, where for a time they lived an idyllic life under the hot sun, with David writing and Caroline earning a little money by teaching English. Eventually, they were forced to return to England, and when we came to Woodland were living in a caravan near Coniston. Shortly after we arrived we were
offered a farmhouse high on a hillside near the foot of the Duddon Valley. We were content with Woodland and so told David about it, and he moved in with his newborn child. They furnished the house from the pickings of a single auction sale, for the magnificent sum of £25. He needed much greater courage than I. He had no publicity to help him, was trying to establish himself as a serious playwright, and fought in the face of repeated rejection by publishers and theatres. He had to earn a living somehow, and so took a job in forestry – back-breaking, hard work, for a minimal wage. He lost this job when the foreman found him asleep in a ditch; and then, after a period on the dole, he found work in the tannery at Millom, hauling maggot-ridden hides and plunging them in the steaming curing-baths. There was no question of writing any longer – just one of brutish survival, of being penniless, desperately tired every night, and somehow trying to maintain a prickly pride in the face of seeming defeat.
Things at last improved when he managed to get the job of Duddon roadman. The pay was £10 a week, barely enough for food and rent, but he was comparatively free, could start the day when he wanted, and wander the roads with his broom and shovel, thinking his own thoughts.
On a fine day I often tempted him from the path of duty, and we would go off climbing on Wallabarrow Crag, nestling amongst trees in the bed of the Duddon, or disport ourselves on the Duddon School of Bouldering – a little array of crags I had discovered near the road.
And so 1963 slipped into 1964. The changing year was marked by the arrival of Conrad, our first child. He was born in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, 1963. I had wanted to be with Wendy at the birth, but had been confronted by the solid conservatism of a small local maternity home.
‘No one’s ever asked for anything like that,’ said the iron-willed matron. ‘We haven’t got the facilities, and anyway you’ve got to think of the feelings of the midwife.’
I wasn’t going to stop there, and phoned the chief gynaecologist of the area.
‘My dear chap, I’ve nothing at all against the husband being with his wife for the birth – it’s a personal matter and, I must say, as far as I’m concerned, I think it’s best to let the wife get on with it on her own. I’ve four kids, and I’ve never been with her – but that’s purely a matter of choice. I’d be delighted for you to be with your wife throughout, but I’m afraid we just haven’t got the facilities and, in her interests, I’ve got to say “No”.’
I didn’t have a leg to stand on; they allowed me to stay with Wendy during her initial contractions, but as soon as she went into the second phase she was wheeled into the delivery room and they tried to show me the door. I was probably unnecessarily stubborn, but I insisted on staying at the home. Wendy had a long and painful delivery, perhaps aggravated by the tension caused by the reliance she had placed in having me with her. She spent long hours awake through the night, a lot of the time on her own, unattended, while I spent the same long hours sitting upstairs waiting, helpless – it was all so unnecessary, since she needed me and I could have helped her and the midwife, but we were confronted by the solid prejudice of tradition.
In the later stages I could hear her crying out in pain, gasping and groaning. Had I been with her it would not have been frightening, since I would have been working with her, reassuring her and helping her in what small way I could; but sitting in an empty, cold little room, I could only imagine the worst. I became convinced that Wendy was dying, and, for about the first time in my life, actually knelt down and prayed, from my own absolute helplessness. At the same time I felt a tinge of shame, that I was only doing this as an emotional last resort, for I cannot claim to be a Christian and, if anything, am agnostic. There seems much that we cannot explain in purely physical and scientific terms; there might well be some kind of spiritual force, but it seems sheer wishful thinking to believe that this force is particularly concerned with mankind’s wellbeing – there is so much suffering in the world, so much ill done in the name of good, so much crime that does seem to pay. But that night, faced with the fear of losing Wendy, I was snatching at straws and went through an emotional hell, until at long last, at five o’clock in the morning, her raking gasps ceased and were replaced by the persistent raucous cry of a newborn child.
I was allowed down to see her, pale, exhausted, but wonderfully tranquil, and our tiny babe, freshly washed and incredibly ugly. After bandying a lot of names about, we settled on Conrad.
Once she returned to Woodland, life went on very much as before. We got around a lot, carrying the baby in his pram-top in the back of the van, on occasion leaving him in the van when we went to a pub. I had my lectures through the winter, and Wendy accompanied me to some of them. I also skirmished with the book and, as winter changed to spring, snatched every fine day to go climbing.
In many ways it was an idyllic life. Work pressures were few, since I only had the book to write and had not yet succeeded in getting established as a photo-journalist. Once the lecture season was over, I had long periods at home. In the evenings we played canasta, and at weekends, when friends arrived, endless games of Risk, a splendid game of world conquest. Wendy learned to drive and then became interested in folk singing. She already played the guitar and had a pure, haunting voice with an extraordinary emotionalism in it. After practising for some time, she screwed up her courage to sing at a folk-song club in Keswick, run by Paul Ross, a well-known Lakeland climber, with whom I had made the first British ascent of the South-West Pillar of the Dru back in 1958.
Those years of 1963 to 1965 were, in some ways, a limbo period. I had reached a peak in my Alpine career, with the ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger, and was now casting round to try to find the next step forward in my life. As far as climbing went, I had reached a plateau. I had attained a high level of competence in general mountaineering, but to push beyond this level needed a greater degree of organisation and a greater awareness of technical developments, especially those taking place on the West Coast of America in the Yosemite National Park.
That summer of 1964, I hoped to achieve the same level of satisfaction and excitement that Ian Clough and I had achieved in 1962, but I was destined to be disappointed.
– CHAPTER FIVE –
ALPINE SUMMER
May 1964. I had barely got halfway through my book and was already six months over deadline, but the Alpine season was pressing close and, after the previous year’s fiasco, my dreams turned increasingly to getting some good climbing. But what to climb – and with whom? Because of the pressures exerted by my commitment to the book, and my own lack of organisation, I had left everything up in the air.
Then I had a phone call from Tom Patey. ‘Would you like to come to the Alps with Joe and me? We’ve got some good new routes lined up; if you’re interested in coming I’ll let you know where they are.’
‘But who’d I be climbing with? A party of three’s no good.’
‘I’ve just the right man. His name is Robin Ford; I climbed with him last week in the Cairngorms.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t done much on the English scene, but he’s got what it takes to make a great alpinist – you’ll have your job cut out to keep up with him. Anyway, have you got anyone better in mind?’
I hadn’t; and so it was settled that I should climb with Tom Patey and Joe Brown that summer. I had only climbed with Joe once before, back in 1962. I was still working in London at the time, had come up to North Wales to climb with Don Roscoe, one of the original Rock and Ice members. When I had arrived he told me that he was unavoidably engaged but that Joe, who was working at White Hall, the Derbyshire outdoor activities centre, was up for the weekend and looking for a partner. I had never met him and was intrigued at the thought of climbing with the living legend of British mountaineering.
Joe was keen to finish a new route he had started the previous weekend on Castell Cidwm, a steep little crag on the south side of Snowdon above Llyn Cwellyn. We walked up to the crag, Joe was ag
reeable but not talkative; I was slightly on edge. I thought I was climbing well at the time, had made early ascents of many of Joe’s routes, and had often liked to think that I was in the same class as he, as a rock-climber. I have always been intensely competitive and could not resist wondering how my climbing would compare with his.
‘Do you want to have a go first?’ said Joe ‘I had to turn back last week; you might have a bit more luck. You’ll need a lot of chockstones.’
This was in the pre-nut era, when, to protect themselves, climbers still relied on what the rock offered – rock spikes for slings (often only nylon line with a breaking strain of a bare 1,000 lb.) or chockstones jammed in cracks. Joe was probably one of the earliest, and certainly one of the most sophisticated exponents of the inserted chockstone – you carried a pocketful of stones with you and jammed them in the crack. It was a fiddling, intriguing business, demanding a fair level of skill.
The year 1962 was when someone – I’m not sure who – had the idea of stringing bolt-nuts of different sizes on to a sling and using these in place of chockstones. Since then, these nuts have been refined into a series of shapes, tailor-made for their purpose. In many ways, I suspect that this was a retrograde step, for it enabled the climber to gain protection from running belays in places where protection would have been impossible with inserted chockstones or the traditional flake runner. One of the attractions, indeed reasons, for climbing, is the element of risk involved, of pitting one’s own judgement against the mountain, with a fall as the price of a mistake. In its purest sense, the solo climber is getting the most out of the sport since he is staking his life on his judgement. Without companions or rope, he has a good chance of being killed in a fall. The majority of us, however, prefer to hedge our bets, climbing with a companion, using a rope and then contriving running belays to reduce the distance we fall if we do come off. The problem is in deciding just how far we should reduce this risk before losing a vital element in the sport.
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