There was a kind of self-expatriation in the way he lived by himself in the cottage under the edge of the moor. It had concentrated his forces so that he hadn’t much need for anyone. In the end, though, this tended to alienate the other climbers. You saw he was interested in them only because their share of the petrol money would lower the cost of a day out in a car whose fuel economy was already a legend. His evasiveness galled people; his self-sufficiency was revealed as a statement of policy rather than a way of life. I remember him sitting on a bench outside the cafe at Stoney Middleton because he felt sick. That was before I climbed regularly with him. It was a freezing cold day in April and he thought he had some virus that was going round at work. ‘I can’t seem to get warm somehow,’ he complained. He had been complaining all morning. I made him have a cup of tea and in the end persuaded him to come inside and drink it. Out of the window we could see snow falling through the sunlight.
‘It’ll be like this for a month now,’ Sankey told me. ‘The weather.’ I asked him if he’d like to give up for the day and go home and he said, ‘You might as well feel ill out here, kid, as at home on your own.’ When I repeated this to Bob Almanac later he laughed and suggested,
‘Ask yourself who paid for the tea.’
I thought this revealed more about him than it did about Sankey.
‘Come on, Bob,’ I said. ‘Be fair.’
Sankey decided he wanted to get out to a place called Whitestonecliffe, or White Mare Crag, near Sutton Bank in the Hambledon Hills, one of several shaky teeth in that gum where it curves east above the Yorkshire Plain.
It was a hot day. We were in running shorts, with Sankey’s dusty old ropes draped round our necks; I had bought us a lot of soft drinks. ‘Water’s cheaper,’ Sankey advised me. (He kept his in a dented aluminium bottle which he had used in the Alps to carry cooking fuel and which nobody else would drink out of.)
‘I haven’t been here for a year or two.’
From the scenic car-park, with its waste bins full of wine bottles and Peau Douce disposable nappies, he found a sunny little path through some woods, narrowed by colonies of dog rose and bramble, filled with the dozy hum of insects so that it seemed like the path that runs along the bottom of some secluded, overgrown town back garden, then suddenly opening right up on the edge of the escarpment so that you felt as if you were flying. One step sideways and you could have drifted out over Gormire Lake, a Victorian brooch oval and dark in the drenching sunshine, while below you the A170 stretched just like a bored cat before flinging itself up the huge earthwork of the Clevelands.
‘They found a woman’s body here,’ Sankey told me seriously. ‘It were in a dry-cleaning bag.’ He considered this. ‘Aye, a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag, that were it. She were in her thirties, so they said. Just behind the car-park as was.’
The cliff is quite a tall one. Steep soil-creep terraces overgrown with willow-herb lead down to its base, where sections have fallen away over the years to produce its substantial roofs and overhangs like a motorway flyover among rumours of corrupt contracting – poor materials, backhanders, bankruptcy. The rock is a kind of crumbling yellow cement stuffed with pebbles, adulterated with sand, propped up here and there by paving slabs of harder stuff bedded so that you can slot them in and out. In some places it has a spurious warm honey colour in the sun; elsewhere it looks like the cheese it is.
‘You’re usually all right,’ said Sankey, ‘if you keep to the cracks. The rock round them seems a bit more reliable.’
He claimed he had been on it regularly with two or three Yorkshire teams while it was still an aid-climbing venue, adding quickly that to climb there was more of a Cleveland tradition: ‘It were lads from Cleveland did most on it. Some of them were free-climbing here even in the Sixties.’ While I sat there reluctantly uncoiling the rope he pointed out a system of cracks which slipped between the biggest overhangs. ‘I remember it as quite easy, this one. Technically, I mean. What makes it interesting is it’s just that bit loose.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ll have no trouble. You’re not the sort to go grabbing stuff and swinging about on it. Thing is, it’s technically easy but just slightly loose you see, so you’ve to treat it with a bit of respect.’ He looked up hopefully. ‘I’m almost certain it followed these cracks. There might be an aid move or two left on it.’
I watched him through the overhangs and out of sight. After that there was only the movement of the rope, the steady patter of small stones and sand like rain on dry leaves in a summer shower. Heat blew back off the rock. Harvest machinery clacked and groaned in the distance; closer to, insects were buzzing and blundering about among the boulders. ‘How does it look?’ I shouted to Sankey. No answer. I could hear his breath going in and out like coal being shovelled; he sounded a long way up. If I sat back and strained my neck I could just see him: the angle of the rock was such that he disappeared again almost immediately. I felt thirsty but I couldn’t get the Tizer open without letting go of the rope. In the end I wiped the cold tin over my cheeks and neck instead, and this made me think suddenly of a post office in some village somewhere – Ingleton or Trewellard or Porthmadoc – where in a corner of the small refrigerator among the ice creams there are always a few packs of Birds Eye beefburgers frozen into a lump with a sundae in a plastic tub shaped like a goblet. The colours of the sundae have dulled with frost, and it is hard to eat; they separate the beefburgers for you with a bread knife. ‘Watch the rope,’ said Sankey irritably.
The block he was pulling on had begun to tilt. Before he could get his weight off it, it came out. He floated into view fifty or sixty feet above, his runners ripping one by one as his weight came on them – you could see the puffs of dust like little explosions as they smashed the crack apart.
At first his back was towards me, and he was clutching the block: it was squarish, about twenty inches on a side, and he had his arms wrapped tightly round it as if it contained a portable television he had just bought. But then it seemed to detach itself from him, very slowly; while just as slowly he turned over, spreading his arms like a swimmer under water, until I could see the expression on his face. It was neither panicky nor blank, but some indecipherable, almost comical combination of both. Quite suddenly the block accelerated back to the speed of ordinary events, tore through a tree five or ten feet from where I was standing, and was catapulted outwards tumbling over and over through the air.
Surprised by the violence of this I fell down. At the same time the rope ran out through the Sticht plate as if I had caught some enormous fish, and there was Sankey dangling upside down not very far from my head, gaping like a failed Peter Pan, with that passive unreadable expression fading from his eyes.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘Ha ha.’
The block went on bouncing down the slopes below Whitestonecliffe. We listened to it for a long time the way people must listen in the aftermath of an explosion, as it rolled and thumped about among the trees, bursting through cool tunnels of foliage and setting up slides of smaller stones, leaving a trail of scarred hawthorn branches and ploughed-up dirt. Eventually it stopped.
‘Fucking hell,’ Sankey repeated. ‘Eh?’
Bunches of leaves were still drifting down out of the tree.
‘Only one of these ropes is holding you,’ I said. ‘And I’ve burned myself.’
Before the belay plate locked, several feet of rope had whipped through my left hand. It hurt, but when I made myself unclench it all I could find was a stiff, melted-looking patch in the middle of the palm, one or two small blisters on the top and second joints of each finger.
‘It’s not as bad as I thought,’ I admitted.
Something sly and amused flickered for a moment in the corner of Sankey’s eye.
‘It never is,’ he said, ‘is it? Never as bad as you think.’
He turned himself upright on the rope with a quick wriggling motion and swung back on to the route. ‘I’ll get going then,’ he said. �
�If you’re OK.’ Immediately he began to climb again as if nothing had happened.
‘Christ, Sankey!’
I had no option but to follow. I saw that I would have to move quickly through a region of creaking flakes – they had been pasted on with the cheapest cement – where the climb overhung gently but persistently so that your weight was always on your arms. Holds fell off as soon as I touched them. Every time the rope moved I expected it to fetch more loose stuff out on my head: and I felt dazed, awkward, reluctant to climb, as if this had already happened. ‘Take in, Sankey. Fucking hell, take in!’ A cluster of aid moves turned up at about sixty feet. Just out of reach above a bulge studded with bent, rusty pegs, was a bleached wooden wedge, hammered into a crack some time in the early Sixties. Nobody had done this sort of climbing seriously since then. I got some slings off my harness – they fluttered round me uncontrollably for a moment, blue and fluorescent green, in the hot wind – stood in them and made a wild lunge for the wedge. One of the old pegs broke and I found myself hanging in a tangle of 3000kg tape, with my left hand trapped behind a snaplink by my own bodyweight and nothing but clear air beneath me all the way down to Gormire Lake, which I could see very small and sharp-cut in the sun like a view in a colour slide. Sand smoked away from the underside of the bulge; bits of rubble fell out of it and went spinning down.
‘You bastard,’ I said.
I fastened everything into the highest peg, jerked into a standing position in the slings, and snatched for the wedge. Once: twice: again. Again. Even when I reached it I found I couldn’t release my trapped hand. The whole system had locked into place: it was impossible to lift myself off it, and the strength was going out of my arm. I began to understand the cynicism of Sankey’s ‘You’re not the sort to go grabbing stuff and swinging about on it.’ The climb couldn’t be done in any other way. That was its paradox. That was where its value lay.
‘Oh fuck!’ I shouted up at him. ‘I hate this!’
During the struggle my blisters had burst and some thick dark red blood oozed out of them. It was the only blood we saw in the whole incident, though Sankey had fallen twenty feet or more before the Sticht plate engaged. All his runners had been nuts placed in poor rock, or in situ channel pegs rusted to a gesture. He couldn’t remember how many of them had failed before something held him. He had a reputation for being cautious but during the time I was with him he repeatedly climbed himself into similar situations. His only fear was that he would take a long fall on the old waistbelt. ‘I don’t know which would be worst, if it broke or if it didn’t!’
On the way home from Whitestonecliffe it was hard to talk fast enough. I can’t now remember what we said. Our sense of relief ran on into such an incoherent jumble we hardly knew which of us was speaking anyway. ‘You should have seen your face!’ (‘I thought I were dead.’) ‘Fucking great branch ripping right off! Five inches thick!’ ‘The runners just popped.’ (‘I thought I’d had it then!’) ‘I knew what you thought, fucking hell I thought you were dead then!’ ‘Fucking hell.’ And so on until we were laughing and shouting at the tops of our voices at one another while the yellow Reliant wobbled down the A170 at fifty miles an hour. Every so often, as if to emphasise how pleased and excited he was, not just by the narrowness of his escape but by its circumstances too, Sankey gripped the steering wheel harder and, like a racing driver he must have seen in some old film when he was a boy, made a great play of pumping his elbows, rolling his shoulders and squirming about in his seat. He urged the three-wheeler on with his buttocks, and it rocked from one carriageway to the other.
‘Fancy an ice cream, kid?’
‘Do I!’
In a little shop near York, Sankey put the back of his hand against the caked ice inside the refrigerator then touched it to his face. ‘And a bag of Alien Spacers, please.’ Two women in white summer dresses came in and, eyeing his torn vest, pushed past him to the counter. I saw their perfume envelop him. The next morning my fingers were perfectly all right; but my left knee was stiff all day. I couldn’t remember banging my knee, but then you never do. When I looked at it there was no bruise.
If you mentioned some incident like that to Sankey a week or two later he would look at you vaguely for a moment – as if he couldn’t quite place it but felt that would be too abrupt an admission to make – then say, ‘Oh aye, kid, that were a right gripper.’
He gave his shy smile, his eyes sliding away from you so that he seemed to be looking at you from the whites.
‘It were a gripper right enough.’
In fact his memory was good. He had an almost supernatural fund of experience. But climbs and techniques, falls and difficulties, overlapped for him like a pile of colour transparencies, each one lighted so that only a detail stood out, a line of holds leading up to a crack, three fingers locked sideways into a limestone pocket and then shifted suddenly so that he could pull upwards on them, a new way of tying an old knot. A gritstone corner in Yorkshire would suddenly have superimposed on it some of the dynamics of a boulder problem he had done in Joshua Tree in 1972.
‘Half the time he doesn’t know where he is any more,’ Normal would complain.
But Sankey knew exactly that: the climb, the moves necessary to complete it or survive it, existed for him solely as an excuse, as a phantom of his own sense of absolute personal orientation. The times I climbed with him his only piece of advice was this:
‘You never get away with a fall, kid. It always has some effect on you.’
Mick from the pipeworks shrugged this off.
‘He’d have more chance if he didn’t wear that fucking old waistbelt,’ was all Mick would say. And when I told him, ‘Sankey didn’t seem to be all that certain which route we were on at Whitestonecliffe,’ he answered, ‘Oh he knew where he was all right. Only a lunatic would have gone there with him in the first place.’
He looked at me in disgust.
‘He’s trying to strip the last few aid-points off that fucker before the Cleveland lads get it. He wants his name in the magazines.’
‘You never know what to make of Sankey,’ I said, ‘do you?’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Mick and I didn’t have much in common (although once, when he saw me writing in my notebook, he said almost sympathetically, as if he knew and understood the pressures of obsession, ‘Do you have to put down everywhere you’ve bin, then?’), but he had given up his sweeping job in disgust at last, so I could sometimes go climbing with him during the week when Sankey was at work. He did his best with me, but lost his temper easily. We often ended up at Stoney Middleton, where the walls and white ruined-looking pinnacles of the cliff went up ivy-covered over some cottage gardens and an empty garage forecourt.
‘It’s a great spot,’ Normal once told me, with uncharacteristic irony.
Limestone dust from the big quarry workings on the other side of the A623 sifted down invisibly all day to be sublimated as a whitish filth on the rose trellises and parked cars. It choked the stream. Further up Middleton Dale, near the Eyam turn, a virus disease had attacked the leaves of the younger trees and turned them black. In late summer the fireweed silk looked like fibreglass waste. Winter revealed poached, aimless-looking tracks beneath the crag, fringed with withered nettles. It was already a popular venue for the Sheffield climbers eager to practise techniques learned in Europe, though they hadn’t yet taken to wearing Lycra tights and surfing T-shirts. To make them feel at home, heavy vehicles rumbled past twenty yards away, and in the packed black soil you could find broken glass, charred tin cans and hundreds of fragments of pottery.
The first time we went Mick had been laid off with a popped tendon. Because of this he didn’t want to do anything hard, he said, so we started at Carl’s Wark, two walls varying in height from forty to eighty feet, hinged at a vertical corner and divided up by cracks and bedding planes like the handful of lines on a Constructivist canvas. There is a hole in the ground beneath one of them, out of which a cold wind will issue s
uddenly on the hottest day. Conversely, in the winter warm air comes out of these cave systems and melts the snow. Groups of local cavers with ten pounds of gelignite in the back of a Bedford van scour the dale for new entrances, prepared to bomb their way in. They are short, with thick beards, and in the Rose and Crown, Eyam, keep themselves to themselves, poring all evening over the crossword puzzle in the Yorkshire Post.
Mick had no sooner started up a climb called Carl’s Wark Crack when two figures dressed in muddy wet-suits wriggled up into the light from this hole, blinking. It seemed to take them a long time. Black and cumbersome, striped at each seam with bright yellow tape, they looked as juicy as caterpillars. ‘Then Alex dropped the ammunition box,’ we heard one of them say as they forced themselves out. ‘Ah ha ha ha.’ He didn’t sound local. When he raised his arms his rubber elbow patches flapped untidily.
‘The stupid divot,’ his friend said.
‘Ah ha ha.’
Weaving a little as if dazed they pushed their way through the scaly undergrowth towards the road.
‘They must be mad,’ said Mick with a shiver. He hated to be shut in. ‘It’s dark, it’s freezing down there, and it fucking stinks.’
He glanced down into the hole, which was directly beneath him, then quickly away.
‘They ought to have more sense,’ he said.
He wasn’t doing well. Popular limestone routes take a tremendous polish simply from being touched, like the stones of some shrine. The rock of even a newish climb looks like sweat-stained marble, blackened at crucial points with friction rubber, caked with chalk. Where it would accept them, Mick had worked his slippery hands into the crack. To keep them there he had to change feet constantly, twisting his body one way or the other as balance demanded, gaining an inch or two at a time. This didn’t suit his normal style of climbing, in which every move was informed by a barely suppressed fury – a kind of pouncing across the rock from hold to hold.
‘Oh fuck I can’t remember how to do this,’ he said.
Climbers: A Novel Page 13