Don Whillans was watching me peeling potatoes, sitting outside our tent at Alpiglen, under the north wall of the Eiger.
‘The trouble is, Chris, you’re too greedy. You’ll always crack before I do.’
Which of us did the cooking was a regular test of willpower, one I usually lost. We’d been living like this for two weeks, watching the face, waiting for conditions to improve. A day of stormy weather and heavy snow would knock our hopes back, the clouds would lift, optimism would soar, only for storm clouds to gather again as we were sorting our gear. It was monotonous, but I could feel the strength coming back after Nuptse and the long drive home.
I’d met Don in Chamonix after 7,000 miles of dusty roads, flies and punctures, all the way from Kathmandu. He had hitchhiked from Manchester in three days with a rucksack as tall as himself, determined to head straight to the Eiger. Doing an easier climb just to get fit wasn’t part of his philosophy. I persuaded him to join me on a training climb on the Aiguille de l’M before heading to Switzerland, just to see how unfit I was. After getting stuck halfway up the wall, legs shaking, body heavy and useless, I had a clearer idea.
‘You’re climbing like a bloody nana,’ Don shouted up.
At the top I told him I didn’t think I’d ever been so unfit.
‘You’ll be all right. When Joe got back from Kangchenjunga he was nearly as bad. You can do your training on the face. By the time you get to the top you’ll be fit – or dead!’
As the days ticked by, my resources dwindled. John Streetly had kindly offered to loan me twenty pounds, which boosted the ten quid I had left after Nuptse. ‘It’ll get yer used to civvy street,’ Don said. ‘You don’t know how soft you’ve had it in the army.’ But after weeks of eating potatoes fried, curried or boiled, I suggested we hitch to Lucerne to take up an offer I’d had to visit the Swiss climber Max Eiselin. ‘He might be good for a decent meal.’
It took for ever to get a lift to Interlaken but once there a Volkswagen pulled up beside us before we could even raise a thumb.
‘Do you want a lift?’ the driver said. She was young, attractive, apparently unattached and from her accent, American. I manoeuvred myself into the passenger seat while Don sulked in the back with the rucksacks. ‘I’m not going far, I’m afraid. Where do you want to get to?’
‘Lucerne,’ I said. ‘But let’s have a coffee before we press on.’
Thoughts of Lucerne went out of the window. Anne was tall and dark-haired, with a strength and warmth in her face that I found immediately attractive. From our first exchanges in the car I felt at ease in her company. She was in Europe studying French and having failed to persuade her to come to Lucerne, Don and I dossed outside her youth hostel under the stars. Next day we all swam in the Thunersee and then Anne returned to Geneva, dropping us back in Grindelwald with a promise to return.
A few days later we started up the face, climbing unroped up the easy ground at the bottom, the ledges covered in snow so we had to wear crampons. I felt none of the fear I’d experienced with Hamish five years before, knowing better what was ahead and having more faith in my own ability. I also had complete faith in Don. He left his sack at the foot of the Difficult Crack and spent an hour fighting his way up what was in effect a vertical skating rink. The Hinterstoisser Traverse was a near-vertical wall of snow.
‘I wonder how long it’ll take to clear.’
‘It’ll be some days yet, if at all,’ Don said. ‘Let’s get back before the stones start coming down.’
Abseiling down we met four Polish climbers who had moved into our campsite a few days before. We’d rather kept our distance until now, but sharing the experience of the wall brought us together. One of the Poles had dropped his rucksack and so he and his partner came down with us. That afternoon in the Hotel des Alpes, enjoying a rare beer to celebrate our safe return, we were summoned to the telephone.
‘Were you on the Eiger this morning?’ There was no preamble, just someone shouting down the line. ‘I’m from the Daily Mail.’
Next morning a Swiss freelance turned up in the cleanest climbing breeches I’d ever seen. ‘Soft as shit,’ Don concluded. It was my first experience of the media obsession the Eiger provoked.
‘They all seem to want to get a story for nothing,’ Don observed. ‘I wonder how much they make out of it.’
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t make something of it ourselves,’ I told him. ‘The papers will make a story up even if we don’t tell them anything, and God knows we need the money.’ We were down to our last six pounds.
‘Well, let’s climb it first, then we can think about selling stories.’
That morning the Poles who had stayed on the wall returned to camp in a pathetic state, clothes sodden and equipment in disarray. We became friendly, to the immediate benefit of our diet. They were good cooks and had plentiful supplies from home. But after another fortnight, growing fat on Polish ham, the weather was no better.
‘I think we’re wasting our time here,’ Don said. ‘Do you know anything about that Central Pillar of Frêney?’ I knew that it was in a remote position high on Mont Blanc and that Robin Smith had tried it a few years before. ‘I fancy doing a good new route,’ Don continued. ‘It faces south so should come into condition quickly.’ The Poles left as well. Two of them headed for the Matterhorn, another went home but Jan Długosz, who spoke the best English, asked if he could join us. Anne drove us to France in the Volkswagen.
The Central Pillar of Frêney had long been an obsession of the great Walter Bonatti and had a fearsome reputation. Earlier that summer, four of a party of seven he was leading perished in a bitter storm as they tried to retreat. We only knew the barest details of this terrible disaster. That anyone had survived it was largely thanks to Bonatti’s great skill and his intimate knowledge of the mountain. Since then, another two Frenchmen had tried, and we went to see one of them, an instructor at the École Nationale called Pierre Julien. ‘I know him quite well,’ Jan told us. ‘Why don’t we ask him to join us?’ We needed a fourth, and at the very least we might get some information. Julien told us he was too busy to come, but told us about the route, particularly the challenge above his high point.
‘There are some cracks out to the left,’ he warned us. ‘You’ll need some big wedges.’ Walking back to the campsite we ran into Ian Clough, an English climber we knew who had just arrived from the Dolomites. Ian was from Baildon in Yorkshire and started his climbing life on the gritstone edges near his home. Like me, he had served in the RAF with the idea of joining their mountain rescue team. He had just done the first British ascent of a hard route on the Cima Ovest but you’d hardly know it. Ian was the most modest man I ever had the good luck to climb with; so many leading climbers have big egos, but Ian wasn’t one of them. He seemed the perfect person to join us.
Several days later we caught the last cable car to the top of the Aiguille du Midi. Just as the doors were closing, three heavily laden climbers pushed their way on. I immediately recognized Pierre Julien. Jan muttered that the other two were René Desmaison and Yves Pollet-Villard, leading French alpinists.
‘I don’t think there’s any doubt where they’re going,’ Don said. Julien threaded his way through the crush to speak to us.
‘You go to Frêney?’
‘Perhaps. And you?’
‘Perhaps.’
At the top station, they took the small télécabine across the Vallée Blanche to the Torino hut. None of us could understand why. It took them in the wrong direction.
‘They’ve probably got a helicopter,’ Don said. Julien had used one on his previous attempt, despite criticism that this was cheating. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ We set off towards the col and its little bivouac hut.
The hut was heaving when we got there so we stayed outside to cook dinner. I couldn’t help glancing across to the Grand Pilier d’Angle, the huge granite buttress that shoulders the bulk of Mont Blanc. You couldn’t see our pillar but I could trace our route up to the Col de Peuterey. As I watched, a puff of smoke erupted high on the buttress and then mushroomed into a brown torrent of rocks that crashed into the glacier below, filling the cirque with an earsplitting roar. The smell of sulphur reached us at the hut from a mile away. We would have to walk under this buttress in the dead of night. It felt like an omen.
None of us slept, we just lay there, wedged into the overcrowded sleeping platform of the hut. Finally it was time to go; we made coffee, shouldered our rucksacks and stepped out into the night. The sky was a deep black, glistening with stars, but it seemed warm to me. Don brushed aside my suggestion we switch routes.
‘It’s as settled as it ever will be.’
Once we left the familiar track to the Brenva face and committed ourselves to reaching the Col de Peuterey, gateway to the Frêney pillar, I began to relax. Don chopped his way up an awkward bulge of ice at the bottom of the couloir and then we climbed more quickly, each of us in our own pool of light. Four hours after setting out from the hut, we were on the col.
‘There’s no point going to the foot of the pillar before it’s in the sun,’ Don reasoned. ‘Let’s have a brew.’ We crouched around the stove as sunlight crept down the pillar and Ian spotted a pair of climbers coming up behind us. We needed to get moving. Crossing the top of the Frêney glacier, we worked our way across the bergschrund, and began climbing. The rock was solid and warm to the touch, an almost sensual pleasure to climb as we picked a route up a series of cracks. Looking back down to the col, the two climbers were putting up a tent for the night and had been joined by two more pairs, presumably the French among them.
We were now 1,500 feet up the pillar, at the foot of its most striking feature, the smooth, 400-foot tower known as the chandelle or candle. Resting against the pillar was a pedestal of granite some fifty feet high. Bonatti and his group had sat out the storm on top of it and we found some sad relics of their ordeal: an empty gas cylinder, a cooking pot and some wooden wedges. Don used some of them forcing his way up to the overhang that we knew would form the crux section.
‘I reckon this is as far as the others got,’ he called down, before edging his way leftwards and then disappearing round a corner. The rope lay still in my hand for twenty minutes and then he reappeared. ‘Bugger all round here.’ He worked his way back rightwards until he was directly above me, spreadeagled across an overhanging prow, inching upwards imperceptibly. I longed for him to come down so I could put on my duvet and settle in for the night. It was bitterly cold.
‘I think it’ll go,’ Don shouted and then threaded the ropes through his last piton to abseil down. It was typical of Ian to spend the night brewing up. Our legs grew stiff with cold but being so high the morning sun was quickly on us. Using Don’s pegs from the night before, I soon reached a belay under the overhangs, looking straight down at the glacier 3,000 feet below. Don disappeared round the corner, leaning towards a corner on tension from the rope, pushing a tiny piton into a crack. He tapped it with his hammer but a glancing blow sent it spinning into the void. He tried again with another, and this one rang true. He was up.
Don suggested I stop a little below him and belay in a more comfortable spot. Then he climbed up to the roof, which jutted straight out for twelve feet and split on one side by a chimney. Don was struggling to get a peg into a crack in front of his nose, but he wasn’t able to take his hands off the rock. Fifty feet above, his feet were skating off the rock.
‘I’m coming off, Chris!’ He fought on for a moment, and then arrived in a mass of flailing limbs, hanging upside down and looking into my face. I watched a flurry of banknotes and cigarettes drifting in space towards the glacier below.
‘I’ve lost me ’at,’ Don said. The loss of our cash worried me more.
‘Are you all right?’
By way of reply, he lit a cigarette from his spare pack, hands trembling. Tired of standing in the cold, I offered to have a go. I had no illusions: if Don couldn’t climb it free then I certainly couldn’t. But I thought I might be able to engineer some aid. By now, the French team had caught us so I shouted down to Ian to ask if the new arrivals had anything.
‘They say we can have some gear in a minute. They want to look at the other side first.’
Time dragged on. ‘Have they made up their bloody minds yet?’
‘They say we’re on the wrong line. They need all the gear for themselves.’
‘In that case, bugger them.’ I managed to haul up some more slings, excavated some stones from the back of the crack, wedged them sideways, clipped slings round them and stood up in my étriers. From my new vantage point I could bang in a good peg. The chimney now narrowed into a slit and I had to arch myself out over a void that ended thousands of feet below and swing up on small handholds, heart in mouth, climbing with desperate speed. I reached a ledge and yelled with excitement: we were there. Don followed and took up a better stance just above me. Ian and Jan were still on the ledge where we’d bivouacked.
‘You’d better prusik up on the rope,’ Don shouted down. As they prepared to leave, Desmaison offered Ian some pegs and asked if he would tie off their rope above the overhang so they could follow in the morning. We found a small sloping ledge that just about took all four of us, but I no longer cared. We had done it. Next morning we climbed the last two pitches as two aircraft circled overhead taking pictures. Near the summit, a reporter jumped out of a helicopter to wait for us as we plodded up. He’d brought a flagon of red wine and some tins of fruit juice. Slightly tipsy, we set off on the long descent to Chamonix.
We met the French climbers for a celebratory champagne lunch, but I was already thinking of the next climb. I had four days left before starting at Van den Bergh’s and the weather was perfect. Surely we had enough time for another route? But that would mean flying home, and I didn’t have the fare. The French magazine Paris Match wanted our pictures, so I sold those on behalf of the team; Le Dauphiné also wanted an interview. It was obvious that for the right story there were deals to be done. That night I met a friendly Australian reporter for the Daily Mail called Desmond Zwar and over a bottle of wine agreed that in return for an exclusive they would meet our expenses and fly me home.
Time was critical, so next morning Anne drove us to Grindelwald. By late afternoon we were back in Alpiglen. The Mail’s photographer knew his business and wheedled us into a fierce embrace. ‘Can’t you make it a bit more personal than that? Let’s have a bit of real passion.’ The story ran under the headline ‘A kiss before the Eiger’, but the attempt was a bust. Don and I raced up to the Swallow’s Nest bivouac feeling on top form but it was a warm night and the face was rotten with loose stones. Don, always attuned to the mood of mountains, knew the game was up, but I tried to persuade him to go a little further, under pressure from our newspaper deal.
‘That’s how half the accidents occur on the Eiger,’ he said, ‘with people pushing on just a bit further. We can come back next year.’
As I prepared to leave for home, fate intervened again. A tourist rushed up to us saying he had seen a climber fall from the Eiger. Not quite believing him, we thought we’d better go back to check. A self-important tourist was standing over a body shrouded with a blanket, which he lifted with a flourish to reveal what a long fall can do to a human. I saw in his excitement the voyeurism of the Eiger. At that moment I could have thumped him.
Several hours later, in a deserted airport lounge, I hugged Anne for the last time. We arranged to meet for Christmas in Paris but somehow it felt like a final goodbye. Five hours later I was standing outside a huge office block, scrubbed and shaved, dressed in a dark suit, watching a flood of men and women pouring into the building.
Quite what I was thinking when I became a management trainee I’m not sure. Part of it was the shadow of my upbringing. My mother certainly saw the value of a secure position. She was still working successfully as a copywriter for a top London agency and would use me occasionally in campaigns. I suppose the image of a bold young executive fresh from the mountains climbing the corporate ladder appealed to me at some level. But I had hated office work in the army and nothing changed about that in civilian life.
I spent six months as a trainee hearing innumerable lectures about other people’s jobs and then was given one of my own, as a sales rep. Grocers relied on me to assess their margarine needs but somehow I always got it wrong. When shopkeepers discovered they had fifty surplus boxes of margarine, or ran out in the middle of the week, they were understandably angry. I managed to lose a dozen accounts in my first six months without managing to sign any new ones. By the end of my margarine career, I had whittled down my Friday visits to three clients. It did make getting away climbing easier.
That New Year of 1962 I was due to give a lecture and, late as always, stumbled into my compartment as the train began pulling out. My slides went everywhere, and a girl leaped up to help me. We got chatting, and I discovered she lived just round the corner from me on England Road. She and her flatmates were having a party on Twelfth Night and invited me along. She didn’t mention that she had a friend who was looking for some adventure in her life and thought I might fit the bill. Her friend, Wendy Marchant, was small and dark and wore a little black dress; we sat and talked as though we had known each other for years. When we danced, she held me close; there was something kittenish about her, very sexy. I immediately felt I didn’t want to be out of her company.
I discovered Wendy really did want more adventure in her life. Her father Les had been a Baptist minister, but had become disillusioned with organized religion and now worked as an illustrator. Her upbringing had been far from conventional but it was full of love and emotional security. At the age of twelve, at school in Brighton, she’d told her best friend she was going to marry an outdoor type: ‘no nine to five person for me’. The idea I would spend the rest of my life selling margarine was no less appalling to Wendy than it was to me. Like her dad, she worked as an artist illustrating children’s books, but she wanted to experience more of the world.
When her friend told her that an outdoor type was coming to the party, she had imagined a Canadian lumberjack, so my appearance, rosy-cheeked and boyish despite being twenty-eight, took an adjustment. I think what she responded to most was my enthusiasm and joy in life. I might have lacked the rugged looks – I doubt it was a coincidence that I grew a beard once I left Van den Bergh’s, which I’ve never been without since – but those qualities I had in abundance. After that first night we were inextricably bound to each other: we married that May.
Wendy and I arrived at the register office together, a little late as I had rushed round my shops that morning. Mum and Dad were there, the first time they’d been together since 1946, when Mum had told him their marriage was definitely over; Wendy’s parents, Les and Lily; my aunt and uncle, and two friends, Billy Wilkinson and Eric Vola, but no best man.
Having fallen in love, it was natural I should want to share my other passion. Soon after Wendy and I became engaged I took her climbing in the Peak District at a friendly gritstone crag called Froggatt Edge. She was keen but a little apprehensive as I tied a rope around her waist.
‘Now, this route is only a Diff,’ I told her.
‘What’s a Diff?’
‘Difficult.’
‘Couldn’t we start with something easy?’
‘Difficult is easy: I know it sounds contradictory. But anything easier than this would be a walk. We’ll soon have you doing Very Severe.’
I bounced up the climb, reassuring her how easy she’d find it, but when it came to her turn she was tense and hugged the rock, as beginners often do. I’d found the climbing so easy I’d gone off route to make it harder; as a consequence the rope was running to one side and when I glanced at my belay, it didn’t look as good as it ought to have been.
‘For God’s sake, don’t slip: I’m not sure I can hold you.’
That was enough for Wendy. Quite reasonably, she panicked and lunged across the slab to grab my foot; with a big effort I managed to haul her onto the top of the cliff, but I’d blown it. It was the last time she ever went climbing. Yet she loved the wild and was happy to come with me, even if she just sat at the bottom. More importantly, she developed her own interests independent of me and then shared them, just as I did with her. That exchange would become part of the bedrock of our marriage.
Although she could be quite shy, once Wendy committed to something she pursued it as deeply as she could. As a child, her passion had been horses; she managed to find an ex-stunt pony that she could ride for free. Her parents nurtured this innate open-mindedness and curiosity; her father Les was equally curious and loved discussing alternative ways of seeing, encouraging me to look at the world afresh. Her mother Lily wrote short stories on her typewriter on the living-room table, which was covered in artwork. There was a huge sofa by the fire where they’d sing folk songs in the evening.
We tried to recreate a little of that life, taking a six-month lease on a furnished room in Hampstead from an elderly Austrian woman who glared in disapproval through the French windows at the chaos inside, the washing in front of the gas fire, Wendy bent over her drawings at the table, works in progress on the floor, every available space crammed with our possessions. ‘They do not care,’ she would complain, stomping up the stairs. ‘They make my room untidy. They live like animals.’
I suppose it was ironic that marrying Wendy gave me the confidence to give up my job and take that first step into the insecure unknown. But she saw in me a profound lack of fulfilment, of frustration. I needed to be doing the thing that made me happy, which was climbing. I had to find a way to live my passion more fully. The previous autumn I’d been invited on an expedition to Patagonia, at the tip of South America, but in the first flush of my new career I’d turned it down. Now I asked for time off to go, knowing full well what the reaction would be. It duly arrived: ‘Put as plainly as possible, the time has come for you to make up your mind whether you leave mountaineering or Van den Bergh’s.’
There was no point waiting; if I was quitting then I should quit now. I already had plans to go back on the Eiger. I also had a good idea of the media’s interest and the contacts to exploit it. There were plenty in the Alpine Club who looked down on this sort of thing but selling the story gave me the chance. Telling stories was in my genes. My father, after all, was a journalist; after a spell on The Times he edited Power News, house magazine of the nationalized electricity industry. My mother was a thwarted novelist. At heart, I loved telling stories. I signed a deal with the Daily Express and they came to photograph us setting out for Alpiglen on Don’s bike.
By the end of July, I was at the bottom of the Eiger’s Second Icefield, staring across its vast, stone-pocked expanse of grey ice, as Don quickly followed up the steps I’d cut. A stone whistled down from above, emphasizing our exposure. Conditions were no better than the year before, but this time we had pushed on a little further. The top of the Eiger had disappeared behind wet grey clouds. Stones zipped down with a high-velocity rip that made us want to be anywhere else. I said I thought a storm was coming.
‘Aye, let’s push off down,’ Don said.
As we turned we saw two climbers coming towards us, shouting in German: they were Swiss guides. We shouted back in English.
‘Two of your comrades are in trouble,’ came the reply. ‘Will you help us to rescue them?’
We turned back up the slope but had no idea who they were or what had happened; all we knew was that one was injured. We started across the icefield, cutting huge steps as we went, knowing we might be coming back this way with an injured man. Don said he could see someone, hundreds of feet away, and called up to him. The figure seemed not to notice, a distant blob of red against the sombre grey of dull ice, but he stopped on a small spur of rock thirty feet nearer to us.
We continued, listening to the falling rocks, but then there was a different sound, a sort of ‘whoosh’ that filled the face. I looked up and saw a man sliding down the ice and then catapult into space below. I laid my forehead against the ice and swore loudly and repeatedly as the shock washed over me. Was this the injured man? Or the figure in red? We hurried on, feeling horribly exposed, the Swiss guides long since vanished. One last rope length and I was only a few feet from him. As I turned to ask Don to move across a little, the climber spoke.
‘It’s all right, I can come over to you.’
I had never met Brian Nally before, but knew of him. With Tom Carruthers he’d made the first British ascent of the Matterhorn’s north face. I did know his dead partner Barry Brewster, an intense but brilliant rock climber, just twenty-two years old. Nally told us Brewster had suffered a huge fall and been badly injured; he had watched over him until he died in the night. Nally appeared unaffected by his ordeal. His rope was badly tangled around his neck, but otherwise he seemed together.
‘Are you going to the top? Can I tie on to you?’
My nerves were already stretched and his question made me snap.
‘We’ve come to get you down, you bloody fool.’
‘But why not go on up, now that you’ve come so far?’
‘Your friend is dead. Do you realize that?’
Only then did the penny drop. Nally was in shock. My anger was wholly misplaced. He was like an automaton: he did what you asked but seemed incapable of thinking for himself. I stood there for twenty minutes untangling his rope while Don waited. Finally we could start down, the ice now running with water, the sound of falling stones almost continuous. As we reached its end, the storm broke and we were engulfed in a hailstorm, all three of us hanging from the same ice screw as the wind tore against our sodden clothing. Then, almost as suddenly, it stopped.
Don now demonstrated his genius once again. Now soaked through, we had to get off the mountain as fast as we could. As we abseiled down the Ice Hose, he calculated that this was the source of a stream he had seen from below. If we abseiled straight down, we wouldn’t need to reverse the Hinterstoisser traverse and so reach the railway tunnel more quickly. It was an inspired piece of route-finding. If Anderl Hinterstoisser had known about it in 1936, he would not have frozen to death.
The press were agog at Brian Nally’s fate. Two Swiss journalists hired a special train to fetch him down. Still in shock, he had his account bullied out of him. The newspapers cast him as a hapless victim and in a later edition of the White Spider, Heinrich Harrer suggested he and Brewster were not sufficiently competent. It was grotesquely unfair; both men had earned the right to be there. To make matters worse, he was presented with a huge rescue bill from the Swiss authorities. Their role was confined to collecting Brewster’s body. Brian Nally became friends with Don, but developed an animus against me, suggesting that on the face I had asked him what newspaper he was with. It simply didn’t happen. The situation was so extreme that any discussion of that sort would have been ridiculous. Even so, in the gossipy world of British mountaineering the story gained currency; it dogged me for years.
Both of us felt disgusted by what we had seen.
‘I’ve had enough of the Eiger for this season,’ he said that night in our hotel room. We escaped to Innsbruck, climbing rock routes in the Kaisergebirge and the Karwendel. By the end of August we were out of money. Wendy and Don’s wife Audrey had to hitchhike home while we took the bike. On the way we stopped off in Switzerland, at the superb granite peaks of the Bregaglia, and in six hours dashed up the north face of the Piz Badile, once a serious climb but meat and drink to British climbers, even in the early 1960s.
Feeling strong and fit, and seeing how great conditions were in Chamonix, I tried to persuade Don to stay on, but once he made a decision he rarely havered.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we haven’t got any gear.’ This was true: we’d given most of it to the girls to carry home. But I was reluctant to go home without having achieved something significant. Then I ran into Ian Clough, like Don also preparing to leave. It didn’t take much to convince him to stay for one more route. I rushed around the few climbers left in town to borrow the gear I needed and next morning we set out for the Grandes Jorasses to try the famous Walker Spur.
That night we bivouacked a hundred feet up the route, one of several parties spending the night out, all enticed by the perfect conditions. We spent the next morning overtaking them, as one would on a busy main road, waiting for breaks in the traffic. Several times we ran into people I knew. It was like being in Wales. Then a dark cloud crept across the summit and the other parties began abseiling off. Ian and I didn’t even discuss it. We just motored on, the cloud lapping around us, sure the weather would hold, in absolute harmony. With Don I deferred to his greater skill and wisdom but with Ian I felt like an equal. The route just flowed by, climbing at its addictive best. It was so good that when we reached the summit, rather than just go down, I persuaded Ian to traverse the length of the Grandes Jorasses, a huge outing ending at the Torino Hut.
Even then, my climbing fever hadn’t left me. Lying in bed next morning, weary from our immense effort, I nudged Ian.
‘Wake up – I’ve just had an idea.’ He rolled over and ignored me. ‘It’s important. How about going for the Eiger?’
‘Fuck off, tell me about it later,’ he said and snuggled back down. Two hours later I tried again. He yawned. ‘Might as well have a go, I’ve always wanted to do it but never had the right partner.’
Thirty-six hours later we were in Alpiglen sorting out our gear but my confidence was fraying. The weather seemed dicier than forecast and I was missing Wendy. There were bad omens everywhere, but I had fired up Ian now. As we scrambled up the first rocks I noticed bloodstains, a scrap of flesh and bone, but kept quiet in case I spooked him. He did precisely the same.
We stopped on a good ledge protected by an overhang below the Difficult Crack, the standard bivy spot where I had stopped with Hamish in 1957. It was almost dark when we noticed another party climbing towards us.
‘Who are you?’ Ian shouted down. The man in front replied in German but his companion called out in broad Scots.
‘And who the hell do you think you are?’
It was Tom Carruthers, Brian Nally’s partner on the Matterhorn the year before. His partner had sprained his ankle and so he had teamed up with his companion, an Austrian called Anton Moderegger. It seemed crazy to me: neither could understand what the other was saying.
We ate heartily and slept well, too well in fact, because it was dawn when we woke. Sounds of activity came from around the corner where Tom and Anton had spent the night.
‘Come on, Ian,’ I said. ‘We want to be sure of getting away first.’
The Difficult Crack was free of ice and I swarmed up it. The Hinterstoisser too was in perfect condition.
‘If we don’t get up it this time, we never shall,’ I told Ian.
‘Don’t count your luck too soon,’ he muttered.
Yet our good fortune continued. The face held much less ice and where before we had laboriously cut steps we now rock-climbed quickly. At the Second Icefield I chose to go straight up, mostly on our front points, and traversed quickly along its crest, where it had come away from the rock above. Then, as though paying for our fast progress, we made a mistake, going off route and wasting an hour. That familiar sense of anxiety the Eiger provoked crept over us. Above was the Flat Iron, easy enough but horribly exposed to stone fall. We found the twisted piton Brian Nally had relied on to hold Barry Brewster’s fall.
Looking down from the top of the Flat Iron, we were shocked to see the other two still at the far end of the Second Icefield. Instead of going straight up as we had, they were moving diagonally.
‘If they don’t hurry up they’re going to reach the Flat Iron when the stones start.’
We shouted instructions but they were too far away to hear: two tiny ants on a sweep of grey ice. Their predicament made us feel the danger of our own situation and we pushed on with the climb. Ian cut steps up the steep Third Icefield but then we reached the Ramp, the narrow rock gully stretching leftwards up the face. We felt relieved with rock all around us, so much less exposed than the ice below. I bridged up a chimney, back against one wall, feet against another. It had been cold below but this work soon warmed us up. Ian got the tough pitch, chipping a thin skin of ice off the handholds, slow, painstaking work to reach the top of the Ramp. Somewhere up there was the start of the Traverse of the Gods, leading into the centre of the face to the icefield dubbed the White Spider.
There was a shout from above. Outlined against the cloud was a figure to our right. Were they in trouble? A rescue would be almost impossible. They were Swiss and grinned happily when we reached them. They didn’t seem the kind of people you’d expected to meet on the north wall of the Eiger and were moving dreadfully slowly, having only managed 300 feet that day. It seemed too early to stop for a bivouac but that’s what they were doing. I felt obliged to offer them our help but they seemed content.
‘We are tired. We shall stay here and go on tomorrow.’
We crossed the rubble-strewn ledges of the traverse, clinging to the steep wall above, listening to the mournful tune of the cow horn at Kleine Scheidegg and the rattle of the railway far below. The sounds only emphasized our isolation. Nothing could help us here. At the end of the traverse I stuck my head round the corner to look up the White Spider but was greeted with the shriek of a falling stone. The afternoon bombardment had begun. We might have reached the top that day, but the risk wasn’t worth it.
Our bivouac was not as comfortable as the night before but our clothes were dry and there was enough snow for drinks. We dozed and the night didn’t drag as it often does. Next morning we raced to the top of the Spider but then lost our way in the Exit Cracks. The line we were on was so easy I became suspicious, and launched up an evil-looking groove almost bereft of cracks. At one point I had to bridge round a loose flake of rock, the rope dropping cleanly down to Ian sixty feet below, feet pasted to rock that was covered with a film of ice.
‘You got your hard pitch,’ he said, gasping for breath as he followed. ‘Are you sure that was on the route? There should have been pegs on it.’ It soon became apparent we’d come too far right. I’d been right first time. At least the climbing now felt like child’s play; we took the rope off and raced towards the summit icefield. Looking down, I noticed the immense gulf below our feet, dropping away to the woods and valley thousands of feet below.
‘I reckon we could do with the rope,’ Ian said. I agreed wholeheartedly. We went to the top cautiously, full of gratitude for our good fortune. I have never been on a climb with such a grim atmosphere, partly from my own dark experiences, but also from its very structure, an amphitheatre that focuses all your fears. On the summit, in sunshine, we munched dried fruit and basked in feelings of joy and relief. Two hours later we were back in Kleine Scheidegg. Entering the hotel, the proprietor, Fritz von Almen, called us into his office.
‘Could you tell me the names of the two climbers who were behind you?’ We told him and asked him why, even though we could guess. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you. They are dead.’
Tom Carruthers and Anton Moderegger had been caught out, he said, somewhere between where we had seen them and the top of the Flat Iron. I wondered if they couldn’t just be out of sight, perhaps in the Ramp?
‘No, I’m afraid not. I searched the lower part of the face with my telescope and was able to pick out their bodies.’
Even in the perfect conditions we’d enjoyed, the Eiger had made its claim.