I scrambled down the cliff front, to the foot of the stack.
‘You don’t need a rope,’ Tom shouted over the crash of the breaking seas. ‘This first pitch is a piece of duff.’
I started up. It was the first time I had actually done any rock-climbing since I had been on the Eiger Direct – months before, in the winter. Although it was easy, I was frightened of the looseness of the rock, of the seas smashing into the base of the stack to one side, of the hard ground below. Poking my head over a flat step, I suddenly confronted a small, very indignant fulmar chick – a little bundle of down with a yellow beak. It squawked a couple of times and then, with unnerving accuracy, ejected from its mouth a gob of foul, slimy sick, that landed squarely between my eyes. The shock very nearly toppled me over, and I cursed the chick for its insolence yet somehow, at the same time, feeling a certain respect for its courage. I stepped carefully over it to reach Tom sitting on his perch. He was sharing it with another fulmar chick, but was astute enough to position himself just out of range of the gobs of vomit which the angry little bird ejected at him at regular intervals. The mother bird swooped and dived, just out of range, indignant at this invasion of her privacy.
‘You might as well get all the pegs out,’ said Tom. ‘You’re the expert in technical climbing, and I’m sure you’d do it a lot quicker than I would.’
‘Wish I could,’ I replied; ‘but remember I’ve got to get the pictures. I’ll jumar up, just above you, and photograph you as you climb up, and take all the pegs. It’ll look fantastic. Just think of it – you’ll be immortalised.’
And so Tom, grumbling, followed up behind Rusty, while I swung out on the rope Rusty had dropped from above, and jumared up past him, photographing his struggles with étrier, pitons and rope. Tom’s forte was fast, free climbing with the very minimum of clutter of modern aids. He was totally unmechanical, delightfully unmethodical, and could guarantee getting any rope system into an inextricable tangle. Two sweating and cursing hours later we were all on a small ledge about 150 feet above sea level. But the day was already nearly spent.
‘We could bivouac,’ suggested Rusty. ‘It’s only a few hours of darkness.’
‘I don’t mind – what do you think, Tom?’
‘You must be mad – a hundred and fifty feet off the deck, with a good bed and a bottle of whisky half an hour’s walk away! I’m off down. I’ll happily give you a call in the morning.’
The flesh is weak, and the determination of Rusty and myself quickly waned at the prospect of spending a night sitting on a small ledge while Tom was back in his bed. We all retreated to Rackwick Bay, returning to the third day of our siege next morning. The climbing was taking longer than the North Wall of the Eiger!
We made an early start and it was now agreed that Tom should take over the lead, since the next section was peculiarly suited to his special talents. The angle had eased slightly to less than vertical, but the rock had softened to a consistency that was little firmer than hardened mud. There were no cracks for pitons, something that didn’t really matter, since Tom could rarely be bothered to use them, and the rock was covered in a light mould. He swarmed up with reassuring speed, and a mere two hours later we were all assembled below the final pitch to the top – a splendid clear-cut open corner.
‘It’s my turn to have a lead,’ I stated firmly, and started up. In some ways it was both the pleasantest and the easiest pitch on the entire climb. The rock had suddenly become firm and reassuring to the touch, there were big holds, and in a matter of minutes I was standing on the top of the Old Man of Hoy. We raised a cairn on the summit, lit a bonfire, and then waved to the solitary spectator standing on the cliff top opposite.
It had been an idyllic three days, far removed from the normal British climbing scene, yet having its own peculiar charm. The climb had given all the satisfaction of having reached a virgin summit as spectacular as any of the Chamonix Aiguilles.
A year later we returned, in very different circumstances, to take part in the BBC live broadcast of a multiple ascent of the Old Man. It was to be by far their most ambitious venture in this field, involving six climbers making three different routes up the Old Man. Two climbing camera-teams were used, and tons of equipment, and gantries had to be erected on the cliffs opposite, and even on the stack itself.
It was like a military operation, with an army assault craft carrying all the gear, together with a large tractor, into Rackwick Bay, whilst a platoon of the Scots Guards coped with the catering and the shifting of the gear. This was the advance guard for a whole host of BBC personnel to put on the climbing spectacular.
Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis were to make a new route on the South Face of the Old Man, while Peter Crew and Dougal Haston, representatives of the new generation of technical climbers, were going to hammer their way up the South-East Arete. Tom Patey and I, the traditionalists, were to repeat our original route. We were to be the one sure factor in the proceedings, since the others were to attempt new routes on sight and, as a result, their speed of progress or even their success, could not be guaranteed.
The invasion of Hoy took place about ten days before the broadcast, but the BBC, ever careful of their budget, did not want more of the stars around than was absolutely necessary, and so Ian McNaught-Davis, Tom Patey and I were due to arrive only a few days before the transmission. In the meantime, we decided to snatch a couple of days’ climbing in the North-West Highlands, near Tom’s home, before joining the big circus. We could be sure of an interesting time with the Patey. Mac picked me up at Carlisle on a Friday evening, and we drove through the night to Ullapool, Patey’s eyrie, where Tom ran one of the biggest medical practices, in terms of area-cover, in the whole of Britain. We arrived there, bleary-eyed, in time for breakfast, and Tom was already full of plans – almost before we had managed to get across the threshold.
‘I thought we might polish off the stack of Handa,’ Tom suggested. ‘It’s not as spectacular as the Old Man of Hoy, but no one’s actually climbed it, though I’ve heard that an intrepid egg collector managed to get there at the beginning of the century by having a rope trailed across the top.’
Having eaten a leisurely breakfast, we drove to Tarbet, a tiny hamlet that nestles at the bottom of a valley cradled between craggy, heather-clad hills. The far western seaboard of North-West Scotland has a special, wild beauty of its own. The mountains are isolated and very, very ancient in geological terms, well worn and hoary, standing in their solitude like hermits who have sought the wilderness. Tarbet was a row of little two-storeyed houses at the end of a narrow, single-track road, ending in the sea with a single jetty. It was a sheltered spot, guarded to landward by the low hills, and to the seaward side by the rolling bulk of Handa Island, which was uninhabited and preserved as a bird sanctuary.
‘The stack’s the other side,’ Tom told us. ‘We’ll get out there by boat.’ We called on Donald MacLeod, the Handa boatman responsible for taking parties of bird watchers out to the island. The bulk of his income, however, came from lobster fishing in the treacherous seas around Handa. Tragically, only two years later, he and his son, Christopher, were to be lost at sea, one wild, wintry day.
‘Och, Christopher’ll take you out to Handa,’ he told us. ‘You’ll be wanting to climb the stack, will you? I don’t think you’ll be doing that – it’s sheer on every side, and there’s nowhere to land.’
But Tom was not a man to be put off by any warning. We embarked in the MacLeod’s boat, a solidly built rowing boat, powered by an outboard motor. Even so, it seemed very puny for anyone to think of using it to venture out on the open sea in the winter storms. As we chugged round the point of land which sheltered Tarbet, even on this comparatively calm day, the boat quickly began bucking in the swell which perpetually sweeps down through the Minch.
On we sailed, around the Isle of Handa, past the teeth of reefs marked white by the swirl of the seas, and on which sat a host of gulls, which took off, plummeting and diving as we passed
them. The cliffs began to build in height: sheer, dark sandstone, dropping straight into the sea, every ledge stained white from the excreta of the thousands of gulls which made Handa their home. And then – the stack itself; at first it seemed to merge with the cliffs of the main island, for it was very unlike the Old Man of Hoy. This was no shapely obelisk, but a massive keep, standing clean-cut from the sea, filling a small bay formed by the line of the main cliffs. It might have been part of the island itself, but on closer inspection, you could see that there was a gash between island and stack, a narrow passage-way filled with foaming seas and flanked by sheer cliffs. At its bottom it was around twenty feet wide.
‘Do you want to go through the gap?’ asked Christopher.
I would have declined, happily. I have always been nervous of the sea, but the Patey was made of sterner stuff. Aye, let’s have a look; we might be able to find somewhere to get a footing on the thing.’
And so we swung through the gorge, white waters swirling to either side, and the walls black, dripping with water, stained with white streaks, stretching up, threatening, and obviously unassailable.
We cruised round the stack, trying to find a chink in its defences. The gulls seemed to pose the greatest problem. Even if we managed to make a landing, every ledge, every possible hold, was filled with slippery, stinking excreta.
‘You’ll never get up that,’ I pronounced.
‘Ah, but you’ll never achieve anything if you don’t have a try,’ replied Patey, the true pioneer. ‘Do you think you could land us on that little ledge over there?’
‘I’ll have a go,’ said Christopher, as game and adventurous in his own medium – the sea – as we could ever be on the rocks.
We edged our way into the base of the stack, rocking crazily as we came in close. Patey took a prodigious leap on to a seaweed-covered rock, scrabbled in the weed with the waves lapping at his feet, and then pulled up on to a narrow ledge, just above the water-line. A fulmar ejected a stream of vomit at him, a dozen others went into the attack, but Patey was not to be deterred.
‘Come on across – it’s great over here, I think there might be a line we could get up just over to the right.’
I’m afraid Mac and I were made from a weaker mould, and so declined the invitation. Tom returned to the boat, but certainly was not prepared to admit defeat.
‘If we can’t climb it, we’d better try putting a rope across it,’ he suggested, and we were duly landed on the island to walk over the close-cropped, springy turf, to the top of the cliff overlooking the stack of Handa. Soon we had three 150-foot ropes tied together, and by taking either end and dragging them on along the cliffs flanking the stack, we were able to drape them over its flat summit. Anchoring the rope to a couple of large boulders, we were all set to go or, to be more accurate, we were all set for Tom to go – for Mac and I had already made our own personal decisions that under no circumstances were we prepared to trust ourselves to such a dubious lifeline. The stack is about 200-feet high, and the gap between it and the cliff-top, over which we had draped the rope, was at least fifty feet. It was all set for the perfect Tyrolean traverse, as Tom launched forth, clipped on to the rope with a karabiner, with a jumar clamp to use as a handle in order to pull himself across. Inevitably, he got the ropes into a tangle, and by the time he reached the mid-point, he had tied himself into a nearly inextricable knot.
‘Are you going to stay there all night, Tom?’
‘We’ll come back for you after the broadcast, if you like.’
Tom muttered and cursed, eventually disentangled himself on his high trapeze and slowly pulled himself across to the stack of Handa, to become the second man ever to stand on its summit. One couldn’t help wondering how that fisherman of former times had reached this point – had he used a thick old hawser; had he just pulled himself across hand over hand?
Tom let out a yodel on the summit and tried to entice us across – alas, to no avail – and then he returned to solid land. So ended a delightful little adventure – one of the hundred I had with Tom. There was always that light-hearted, carefree quality about anything you did with Tom – however serious the undertaking might have been. Perhaps it was due to his total lack of competitiveness, the sheer, boundless scale of his search for adventure for its own joyous sake. Tragically, he was killed abseiling from one of the stacks he so enjoyed discovering. In his death I, and all his many other friends, lost a source and inspiration to discovery that we shall never be able to replace.
Lagging behind the others as we walked back to the boat, I sat and gazed over the strip of waters that separated Handa from the mainland. In a way the land was an extension of the sea, a wild, stormy sea, petrified into stillness, the white caps, tips of rocks jutting through the heather, and peat hags of the foothills – the oft-repeated gleam of waters and the mountains – Suilven, Canisp, Quinag, jutting like rocky islands out of the storm-wracked seas. At that moment, I loved the hills and the sea and the sky, almost dreaded the next day when we were to go on to Hoy, with all the hurly-burly of the preparation for the big happening, the climbers and all the other people involved. I shrank from it as I had often done as a small boy when invited to a children’s party, shy and a little frightened by exposure to so many people, yet knowing full well that, once involved, I should lose these inhibitions and enjoy myself.
And so to Hoy; the big circus – and it was tremendous fun. Dougal Haston and Pete Crew were hammering their way up the South-East Arête. It was obviously going to take such a long time that it was essential they got at least part-way up it before the start of the actual broadcast. Hamish MacInnes was in his element, as one of the climbing cameramen and consultant engineer for the erection of all the platforms needed for the big live-cameras and the complex set of pulleys required for lowering them into place. Joe Brown, relaxed as ever, had climbed the Old Man by our original route at the start of the proceedings, taking only an hour on the steep overhanging crack where Rusty had spent more than eight!
‘It’s not too difficult,’ he reassured me. ‘You can climb it free all the way.’
One of the features of the programme was that we were going to try to make the climb as spontaneous as possible by not rehearsing every move. As far as Joe was concerned, his climb would be a genuine new route. It was essential, however, that I should be able to guarantee climbing quickly on our route, so that if the other two parties became stuck for any reason, the cameras would be able to swing on to Patey and me, in the assurance that we, at least, should be showing some signs of action.
I was determined, therefore, to rehearse that long, overhanging crack. The fact that Joe found it easy did nothing to reassure me. I had no illusions about our disparate rock-climbing abilities – what he found easy, I might find bloody desperate!
Happily, in this case I did not. Secure in the knowledge that Joe had climbed it free, I approached the crack aggressively and to my amazement, in spite of its bristling overhangs, the holds slotted into place, so that I managed to get to the top in about half an hour. It was truly wonderful, sensational climbing.
I was less happy about my final role in the spectacular. Someone – I’m not sure who – had had the brainwave that the broadcast should end with an abseil, all the way down from the top of the Old Man of Hoy to the ground – 450 feet, in a single plunge, for the top actually overhung the bottom.
Coming in late to the meeting at which this was discussed turned out to be a definite mistake, for the team had, in my absence, voted me into the job.
‘But the descendeur’ll get so hot that the rope might melt if I stop on the way down,’ I protested.
‘Simple,’ said Joe. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘But what if I do? – it could jam or something.’
‘It’s all right, Chris,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ve got just the thing – a special friction brake which will absorb the heat, and won’t melt the rope.’
He produced a slightly Heath Robinson-looking device, made of alloy, with an a
sbestos cam built into it. This, he assured me, would absorb all the heat. I was not convinced.
‘Have you tried it out?’
‘Och aye. I did a two-hundred foot free abseil on it the other day.’
‘But this is four-hundred and fifty feet!’
‘Won’t make much difference. Give it a try, anyway.’
‘I don’t want to do it more than once – I’ll wait for the actual thing.’ In fact, I did try it on a 150-foot abseil from part-way up the Old Man. By the time I got to the end of the rope, there was a frightening smell of burning nylon. I was not reassured.
The day of the broadcast arrived. The action was to be spread over the two days of the Whitsun holiday, with a bivouac thrown in for good measure. In addition, we had a spectacular pendule by Tom Patey, as he swung out from the base of the overhanging rock, to jumar up the rope to join me at the top of the pitch, accompanied by the racy repartee of MacNaught-Davis and even an attack by the odd fulmar. It was good climbing, in spite of the element of circus, and it undoubtedly made superb television. There were crises, when radios wouldn’t work, when one of the climbing camera teams very nearly failed to get their gear into position in time, until finally, right at the end, when all six climbers had managed to finish their three separate routes on schedule and preparations were being made for the grand finale in the sunset – with Bonington abseiling into fame from the top of the Old Man of Hoy – my nerve failed!
‘Would you do it, Joe?’
‘No.’
‘All I’ve got to do is jam a bit of clothing in the descendeur, and I’ll melt the bloody rope. Could I have a top rope?’
‘No good. You’ll spin for certain, and the two ropes’ll wind round each other. You’ll be jammed up for certain that way.’
The Next Horizon Page 27