Concluding that there would never be a ‘right time’ to tell my grandad, I’d decided to bite the bullet and announce my pregnancy. In light of losing Gran I was sure the news couldn’t make him feel too much worse, but all the same I wasn’t expecting a pat on the back and a ‘Well done, dear.’
Steeling myself, I entered Grandad’s kitchen.
‘What?’ he spat, in disbelief. ‘Tell me, are there going to be five different fathers waiting at the park for their children in another five years’ time?’ His words cut me down, and this time there was no Gran to hide behind. But I refused to skulk off. He’ll come round.
I visited my grandfather most days, helping out around the house, making dinner and going on the supermarket run. And of an evening I’d return to take the dog out. Often I’d walk into the living room to find him sitting in dim light with a whisky by his side, gazing up at a black and white photograph of his four young children. ‘I like to look at my little family, sitting there together on the sofa, all smiles,’ he’d say. I sensed his sorrow, and knew he missed both Mum and Gran.
At the end of the millennium year Leon was born by caesarean section. At the same time, the prediction my grandfather had made – that the relationship with the baby’s father was destined for failure – was about to come true. On New Year’s Eve, when I should have been celebrating the latest addition to my little family, I discovered that Charlie was seeing someone else.
My grandad, who had come to visit, found me bent double and weeping at the top of the communal stairwell.
‘What on earth is the matter, Sarah?’ he asked.
‘I’ve hurt myself,’ I answered. That was partly true. I’d been outside to fetch some coal, and the exertion of carrying its weight so soon after my operation had been too much. But we both knew that wasn’t why I was crying.
‘You shouldn’t be lifting heavy things. Let me,’ he said, taking the buckets of coal, ‘and then you can tell me what’s really wrong.’ In a reversal of roles, my octogenarian grandfather ended up looking after me.
My grandfather had been my last source of support when I was feeling vulnerable. Now, with all of them gone, I often felt as if I had no one to turn to. At least on the mountains I could count on my walking companions. Out with Marty, I felt much more confident than I would have done on my own in this wilderness. I knew that any problems the mountain threw at us we would solve together.
Taking a bearing at the col, Marty and I tackled the Corbett, which stood between us and the first Munro. At its summit we followed the twisting, bumpy ridge and as we reached its end I spied a massive drop to the next narrow col between the Corbett and Munro, and rising behind that was a forbidding and seemingly sheer wall of rock.
Mists engulfed us and it was difficult to see much other than the immediate vertical crags. We picked up a path, only for it to lose itself in the wall. We wasted a lot of time trying to find a way up the broken cliffs, but contouring the mountain westwards we found a mossy breach in the hill’s defences and began to pull ourselves up. Great clumps of loose earth came away in our hands and underneath our feet the terrain slipped away, forcing us to move quickly up crags and gullies. Wind and rain were making the going more challenging, but Marty’s banter kept me distracted till we finally topped out. It had taken us five and a half hours – too long. But, after walking around the west side of a high lochan and up a neatly tapering ridge, we were at the summit.
‘Man, cheesecake mountain was hard earned,’ I panted.
‘Cheesecake?’ Marty said, his chin retracting into his neck and his nose wrinkling.
‘Yeah. Cheesecake. I can never pronounce this mountain’s Gaelic name, cheesecake is close enough!’
‘Ha, yeah. Cheesecake. It was a beast,’ Marty agreed. ‘Listen; if we don’t hit the second Munro within the next forty-five minutes I think we should turn round. Time’s not on our side,’ he said. I reluctantly agreed. Keeping on the move, we stepped up the pace.
The route to Lurg Mhor was easier, and, covering ground on a good path, we made its top in the timescale we’d agreed. Marty stuffed his face while I managed only one bite of my roll. My appetite had deserted me, but I didn’t think twice about it. It was only as we were retracing our steps and I began to feel sick that I realised I hadn’t eaten much all day – Marty had arrived early that morning, and in the sudden rush to get out I had completely forgotten to grab anything for breakfast. I’d already started our day feeling physically drained and by the time we were back at the first summit I was consciously battling against waves of nausea brought on by fatigue. I said nothing. The lochan we’d passed earlier was now sunlit, and to the west were dazzling views over other sparkling high lochs. Down-climbing the rocky wall came easily as we picked up a path east of the lochan, and as Marty whistled I felt a second wind and started to feel brighter.
At quarter past five we were back at the summit of the Corbett. We came down at first on a path but then over rough ground to what we assumed was the col. Neither of us checked the map. We dropped down some more. Dark cloud thickened overhead. And at half past five we realised something was wrong. We’d come off the Corbett too soon. Checking the map, we agreed to keep contouring around and down, but discovered we were walking towards broken cliffs whose drops were big enough to cause serious injury if we were to go over the edge. Light was disappearing fast and the terrain underfoot was difficult: slippery rocks were separated by squelchy bog and heathery mounds as we detoured to avoid the dangers of the crags. It began to rain steadily again and I knew then that we were in for a long night. We slid and stumbled our way across the rough ground, and Marty took a couple of hard falls onto rock, but we finally made the bealach (the pass between the hills) and in pitch-blackness walked out on the stalkers’ path. Small but noisy rivers now gushed across the path everywhere and suddenly I felt the bulk of those surrounding black mountainous bodies closing in, squashing me. My head went light and I fell to the ground.
‘Holy shit. You okay?’ Marty’s voice echoed over me.
‘Don’t feel so good,’ I whispered, sticking my head between my knees.
‘Here take this, it’ll help,’ he said, pulling a bottle from his bag and then me to my feet. There was no choice but to keep walking. ‘Back in my navy days,’ Marty said, pausing dramatically, ‘we danced the sailors’ hornpipe.’
He blethered a whole heap of crap to take my mind off what we were doing, and as he talked the rain stopped. The clouds broke up to reveal the Milky Way stretching across the heavens, and more and more points of light appeared above our heads. A beautiful end to our fourteen-hour day.
Shortly before midnight, after an hour’s drive to the nearest fast-food stop, Marty quizzed me as he stuffed fries into his mouth.
‘How you feeling now?’
‘In pain!’ I answered truthfully, ‘but it’s my own fault.’ Every bit of my mouth was agony as I mashed a small bite of burger between my molars – the hangover from my illness on the mountain. ‘I should have forced some food down earlier, I didn’t realise I was running on empty,’ I groaned. ‘I won’t make that mistake again.’
I’d become used to learning from my blunders out on the mountains. There had been an element of uncalculated fright in most of my recent outings. But I’d found overcoming each stressful situation emboldening and addictive. I enjoyed the challenges and being pushed out of my comfort zone. I still hadn’t reached the limits and that was exciting, because it meant there was more to come. There was no feeling like it: to experience my own vulnerability and master it. But despite my determination not to make any more mistakes, the mountains were about to teach me the most important lessons of my life, and I was heading for a fall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Slippery Slopes
Near Fersit, January 2012
It was the last day of January 2012 when Ollie and I arrived at Fersit, a remote hamlet between the Cairngorm National Park and Fort William. Clouds were gathering ominously. Bitter cold hit my fa
ce as I got out of the car and something nagged inside as I looked in the direction of Stob Coire Sgriodain and Chno Dearg, the mountains we were going to climb.
Ascending a gentle gradient across moorland of heathers and grasses, I stopped momentarily to take a photograph of a small stream whose tiny waterfall was rendered motionless by winter’s spell. Continuing for more than an hour over rough ground, we reached the foot of a steep, craggy nose. We decided to climb up one of its snow-filled gullies. Off I went up the glistening-white chute, my crampons biting into the icy terrain with a reassuring crunch. Twenty feet ahead I was feeling smug as I stopped and looked back at my flailing companion.
‘You really ought to invest in crampons, Ollie,’ I shouted as I took his photograph, while thinking up some smart-ass comments to tag onto the pictures.
‘I’m going to aim for the rockier bit; I’ll see you up there,’ he called.
Traversing across the steep slope, I realised not all points on my crampons were making contact with the snow; I was like a car taking a corner on two wheels and my weight wasn’t being distributed effectively. The nagging feeling returned. With my next step the crampon on my left foot bit in, but without enough purchase, and as I raised my right foot, whoosh! I was on my backside and sliding fast. I couldn’t self-arrest because my ice axe was lying in the boot of the car.
‘OLLIE, OLLIE!’ I yelled.
And then I did what I knew I shouldn’t do. I used my foot as a brake. The metal spikes bit in and stuck fast, but momentum and gravity continued to propel my body forwards. My body flipped over and, with a mouthful of freezing snow, I eventually came to a grinding halt. My ankle felt useless, hot and traumatised.
‘Have you got your mobile? You need to call for help,’ I said as Ollie approached.
‘Do you want to see if we can get you to flatter ground?’
‘There’s no way I can move. I think it’s broken . . . I’ll try.’ But the foot did nothing at my command. ‘You definitely need to make the call,’ I groaned.
Putting on my down jacket, I also wrapped myself as best I could in my orange bothy bag and lay on my tilted frozen bed, propped up by my elbows for support. Scared I would start sliding again, I concentrated my efforts on not losing grip.
‘If I’d kept going and hit my head I could be dead,’ I said, as I looked at the rocks below.
‘Aye, how many lives is that you’ve got left now?’
‘Do you know what I’m most mad about . . . no more hillwalking for me for at least six months. I’m such an idiot.’
There was nothing I could do but wait for the helicopter and try to find strength in the face of a difficult situation – as I had done before.
Gran was gone. With his old routine abandoned, time was my grandad’s own. He’d spent his entire life looking after his family, so I said nothing when I saw that he had started on the whisky a little earlier in the day. If anything was giving me cause for concern it was his frailty.
He had always had a slight frame. Poking fun, we’d call him a skinny freak. But during the course of his life my grandfather had suffered a great deal of physical hardship. I remember sitting at the dinner table as a kid when he announced, and not without surprise himself, that the ulcers he had been going back and forth to hospital about for the past ten years had actually been stomach cancer. He said that when the doctors gave him the all-clear that day they told him they hadn’t expected him to survive six months and called him a miracle.
After my mother died Grandad told me a story that gave me a rare glimpse into his past. ‘I was on campaign in Tobruk, in North Africa, during the Second World War when we were captured and transported on an awful ship from Egypt to Italy. On the first day we were given one square biscuit each and a little water, the second day half a biscuit and the third day even less. All of us were cramped in the bottom of the ship. And when we arrived at the prisoner-of-war camp in Italy we were starved for months on end,’ he said. ‘That’s why it annoys me when people say they are starving. Most of them don’t have a clue what that is.’ He referred to those times as ‘the sad days’.
Skin and bone he was, but mentally my grandfather had always been strong and sharp as a tack – I reckoned it was all down to his army training and the daily ritual of his crossword. Friends referred to him as ‘Gentleman Jim’, and those who had received his epistles often said his command of the English language was almost Churchillian. He was a man who chose his words wisely. And in times of crisis those words were heartfelt and always in the right tone. But now, with each passing week and month he was losing a bit more of his mental faculty. He didn’t fuss, and candidly blamed old age for absent-mindedness. But it was the transition from small, innocuous things, like not being able to finish the crossword to being found wandering around near the river when he had forgotten his way home that raised serious misgivings. The doctor diagnosed dementia.
Between us, my aunt and I did our best to care for my grandad, and I continued to walk the dog. An increasingly unenthusiastic Poppy would greet me with a half-hearted wag of her tail when I called to take her out, preferring, more often than not, to lie prostrate at the threshold of Grandad’s room, her large, sandy bulk impossible to budge. Like Gran, she too went off her food and, an old girl herself, it wasn’t long before she had to be put to sleep.
Seasons changed. Winter approached. A few nasty slips on frosty pavements resulted in my grandad being carted off to hospital in an ambulance, blood gushing from his head or his hands. But the colder weather brought other health troubles. One afternoon when I called to the house, Grandad was asleep in bed. Wine gums he’d been sucking had dribbled from his mouth and now stuck like medals to the sleeve and shoulder of his shirt. His lungs were rattling and he sounded in a bad way, so I called the doctor out; he suspected pneumonia. An ambulance came once again. At hospital Grandad hallucinated a lot; he thought he could see soldiers marching over a hill and a little boy crying, but when he tried to comfort the child the boy slipped further away. I wondered if he was the little boy. Pulling through the worst of the illness, he looked at me as he lay half propped up in the hospital bed.
‘Why didn’t you just let me go?’ he said. Tears pricked my eyes.
‘Because I love you so much,’ my voice cracked. I felt guilty and selfish, and I hurt enormously.
My grandad now needed round-the-clock care and so arrangements were made for him to move into a nearby nursing home – the last place he’d wanted to end up. I felt I’d let him down: by making him live, and then because of his incarceration. I went to see him almost every day and would read to him from the Rubaiyat. Even if he didn’t take it in, I found solace in its verses – just as my mother had intended.
Another cold January passed and Aunty Penny and I continued to pay regular visits to the nursing home, but Grandad hadn’t been doing so well. One day a member of staff called to ask me to come over. ‘I’m sorry, but he won’t pull through this time,’ the doctor said.
His words had the same effect as if he’d taken his fist and punched it straight through my guts. I arranged for the boys to stay with their paternal grandparents, packed a toothbrush and some clothes, and later that evening I returned to the nursing home. The boys and I had the rest of our lives together. Right now my place was with my grandad. He was my last connection to my past, to my mother. I loved him so much I couldn’t bear to leave his side, and so I slept on the floor by his bed for four nights – and I slept better in the home than I had at the flat. I didn’t need to worry about the phone ringing with bad news; and I was protected from the wild running of my imagination, because I was there. During the day, carers popped in to change Grandad’s clothes and he would silently and obediently comply when asked to turn on his side, sit up or raise his arms. He can still follow orders, I thought, smiling wryly.
On the fourth evening there was a change about the air in his room. I was apprehensive. Light shone from the overhead lamp as the room grew dismal. The gloom felt funereal. Anxiety t
ugged inside my chest. What was that familiar odour? It took a while to place, but then it came to me. Mum smelt of it and now it’s here too. It was the sickly, sweet smell of death. Kneeling by his bedside, I held his old hand as his chest rattled and his lungs laboured for air, growing weaker, giving in.
Daylight stretched its fingers through a gap in the curtains, having long since chased night’s darkness away. ‘Not long now,’ I whispered. Exhausted and emotional, I found myself suddenly startled by silence. I held my breath, straining to hear anything. Raising my eyes, I surveyed my grandad’s face. He had gone. Whimpering and tearful, I cradled his hand to my face. For minutes all was quiet until, without warning, came a horrifying gasp for air. My grandad’s neck and head reached back into the pillow and his mouth opened. My heart beat out of its chest. I felt confusion and panic. Is he alive? I felt embarrassed that I’d been crying. What if he knew you thought he was dead? Holding my breath again I waited for him to exhale . . . it didn’t come.
Only moments later, the clatter of the door handle pushing open resounded in my ears and two members of staff bustled in.
‘Is it okay to get your grandad’s sheets changed now?’
‘No!’ came my crumbling reply, ‘it’s not okay. It’s too late.’
Early February found me standing at my grandfather’s graveside, chilly and dejected as his coffin was lowered into the ground. All the people who had played their part in putting me on the planet were gone. I felt lost in the world; fearful and undone, entrenched in insecurity, totally and utterly alone. I wondered what the point of life was when it seemed so loaded with misery.
Words my grandad had once written to me in a letter, when I’d left home for the first time, echoed in my head, We must all learn the hard lesson that the clock cannot be turned back. Once a path has been chosen, we’ve got to follow it, even although the going is rough at times. But I know you are tough enough and brave enough to do just that.
Just Another Mountain Page 14