John Harlin was a year younger than me, with a reputation for extreme commitment and obsessive ambition. I met him in the summer of 1965, at his home in the Swiss mountain town of Leysin, introduced by Tom Patey. We had driven over with Wendy and Conrad to find Rusty Baillie, a Rhodesian climber who had made the second British ascent of the Matterhorn’s north face, with Dougal Haston. Rusty and I met soon after when I arrived in Zermatt to work with Hamish MacInnes on our Matterhorn film. He seemed like the sort of man for a direct route on the Eiger.
At the time, I regarded John as a competitor rather than an ally. The idea of a direct line on the Eiger had been linked with his name from the start. He had climbed the original route shortly before Ian Clough and me, making the first American ascent, and his thoughts immediately turned to the challenge. John had camped under the face in the summer of 1963, but the weather was terrible that season. He had, however, got to know two Italians, Roberto Sorgato and Ignazio Piussi, my rival on the Frêney pillar, and they became the nucleus for another abortive attempt in the winter of 1964. John tried again that summer with French alpinists René Desmaison, whom we had also met on the Frêney pillar, and André Bertrand. They were stormed off from the top of the Second Icefield. The profile of this ‘last’ great problem was rising fast.
The Eiger was the natural stage for someone like John; he revelled in its public profile. He was known, with some cynicism, as the ‘Blond God’ thanks to his Tarzan-like physique, rugged looks and shock of hair, but he had a mixed reputation. Sorgato considered him ‘arrogant and presumptuous’, and while he was undoubtedly an athlete, ‘he didn’t really have the habits, practice and understanding of mountains that every good mountaineer should have’. He inspired students at the school he worked at in Leysin, but others found him overbearing, even controlling. The American Larry Ware, introduced to climbing by Harlin, said: ‘He was very selfish. But most ambitious and successful people are.’ I’m sure people said the same about me.
When John opened the door, I understood his nickname: the thick biceps and thatch of blond hair. He ushered us into a spacious, minimally furnished living room whose walls were hung with brooding abstract paintings, which I later learned were his own work. John saw himself as very much the Renaissance man, a sort of warrior-poet-climber. He had served with the United States Air Force, but after spending a year sleeping near his fighter-bomber, armed with nuclear weapons, he told his commanding officer he was no longer prepared to drop his bombs on his designated target: the historic city of Prague.
My reservations quickly fell away. I found him outgoing, frank and immensely enthusiastic and we swiftly went from rivals to teammates, with Rusty of course. John invited us to camp in the small quarry behind his house; there was a freshwater tap, we could take occasional baths inside the house. ‘Conrad certainly laps it up,’ I wrote to my mother. ‘He’s outside all day and is getting a good tan.’ Up the road was the Club Vagabond, the now legendary social centre for the English-speaking community and thousands of travellers and climbers who moved through Leysin with the seasons. The prospect of the Eiger Direct gave me a renewed sense of purpose, bringing to an end the mood of drift, even despair, that had settled over me the previous winter.
Back from the Alps that autumn, my worries still circled. My mother had acted as a sounding board for my writing; I’d sent her early chapters and paid attention to her suggestions. Now I was writing to her with a sense of desperation. Getting back into the book was ‘hell’, I wrote to her, underlining the word several times. A month later I wrote: ‘Book goes slow and hard: God knows what Gollancz will do.’ My mother was also at a turning point in her life, leaving advertising to take up a teaching career. I found myself telling her: ‘I have just about decided to go to teacher training college next year.’
The start of 1965 was perhaps the hardest time. Gathering for Hogmanay in Scotland I felt disconnected from the excitement of my friends. The book was only half finished but a year over deadline and I’d just finished another long lecture tour talking about past glories with no real vision of where future ones might be found. Albert Smith, the first professional mountaineer, climbed Mont Blanc in 1851 and spent the rest of his life talking about it until he collapsed from exhaustion. I didn’t want the same fate. Wendy, who wasn’t prone to the same black moods, tried to persuade me not to take things so seriously; we were living life on our own terms, even if it wasn’t what my mother judged to be the safe option.
The party on New Year’s Eve was just north of Glasgow at the home of Mary Stewart, a friend of Tom’s who shared his rare ability to make things happen. An American vet who had arrived for post-graduate studies and fallen in love with the hills, her weather-beaten face shone with warmth and kindness. She lived in bohemian chaos with her five children, dogs and numberless other animals and I remember her in old Levi’s and bare feet, a frontierswoman with a mane of copper hair. She became a great friend to both of us.
That night I found myself watching John Cleare, a climbing friend and professional photographer, dancing with his striking blonde girlfriend; he seemed the very symbol of the success and self-confidence eluding me. Here was a man with a real skill and a career that was going somewhere. It never occurred to me that this shell of self-confidence might conceal the same doubts and fears I was experiencing but the grind of the last few weeks had made me lose perspective. Before midnight I had retreated to bed, Wendy following me up, upset, tearful, confused about the darkness of my mood.
We woke to bright sunshine and a hard frost; no depression could survive that stimulus. Piling into the car we drove north, leaving Conrad for the first time in the care of others, meeting up with Tom and sharing in another of his madcap forty-eight hours that ended with a gang of us narrowly escaping disaster having lost our way while following Tom down in the dark from Creag Meaghaidh. Wendy and Maggie Boysen, waiting in the valley for us to return, found themselves becoming increasingly anxious as the hours passed. It was undoubtedly an irresponsible way to start the year. Yet somehow those two days marked a turning point. I had been naïve to imagine that my new life as a writer, photographer and lecturer would happen quickly and easily; the necessary skills had to be learned, a head of steam built up. Becoming a good climber had taken time and commitment; the same was true of my new job.
I didn’t have a phone at Woodland Hall Lodge, so anyone who wanted me had to send a telegram asking me to call them. I would then drive half a mile to the nearest phone box. Almost as soon as we got home from Scotland a telegram arrived asking me to call a television producer called Brian Kelly. Brian, known as ‘Ned’, would go on to work for the BBC’s Natural History Unit, working with David Attenborough on landmark series like Life on Earth, as well as coming to Everest with us in 1975. I was immensely excited: there had already been a few climbing television films made and I’d found myself envying those who were asked to participate. The mainstream media was finally discovering climbing and the potential for a freelance communicator like me was vast.
When I called Ned, he explained he wanted to make a documentary of one of my climbs in the Avon Gorge, close to Brunel’s famous suspension bridge. I didn’t do a huge number of new routes in Britain, but Avon was one place where I did make a contribution. This was during my time at Sandhurst, Avon being the best climbing centre within easy range. The biggest challenge was the Main Wall, Avon’s most dramatic and frightening cliff, unclimbed until we came along. After several weekends making tentative attempts to get off the ground, I’d finally committed myself to a loose and very steep wall. We named it Macavity, after T. S. Eliot’s cat, which ‘breaks the law of gravity’ and is never caught for his crimes.
Despite my fondness for Avon, it didn’t seem a good location to me. The cliff, being an old quarry, didn’t have the architectural appeal of other crags. I thought instead of Cheddar Gorge winding down to its village in the Mendips. Full of tourists in summer, the best time to climb was midweek in winter. I arranged a reconnaissance with Tony Greenbank, phoning John Cleare to come down from London to take some pictures, while we looked for a line that would make for a spectacular route. We didn’t have trouble finding one. A light sprinkling of snow dusted the ground, turning the gorge into a stark, monochrome study. The three of us stood nervously under the tallest part of the cliff, some 400 feet high, and wreathed in ivy. At its right-hand end was a prominent groove that had already been climbed to the halfway mark before escaping right. This was called Sceptre. The true challenge went straight up into a steep crack before moving left under an overhang and then up another groove and crack to the top.
‘It’s bloody steep,’ John said. ‘Do you think you’re on good form?’
‘Bloody sure I’m not,’ I told him. It was January, I hadn’t rock climbed since the autumn and the ledges were covered in snow. Next day, under Ned’s watchful eye, we made a brave attempt. I was amazed to climb the first difficult section free but when I moved left towards an overhanging prow I could feel the fear rising in my chest. There was a crack on its nearside, and I banged in a peg underneath it, using this to swing across and feel round to the far side, where I discovered the crack continued.
‘There’s a crack going right round; it’s detached from the rock,’ I shouted to John, slowly freezing on his stance.
‘Looks pretty solid to me,’ he shouted back. With dazzling clarity, I had a vision of myself falling through space with a ton of rock in my hands. Reluctant to commit and with only half an hour of light left, we retreated to fight another day, convinced the route would go. For the next few days, too busy to climb, we lived in fear that climbing wunderkind Pete Crew, rumoured to be interested in ‘our’ route, would snatch it before we could return. Meeting again under the steep wall, we couldn’t see any evidence our route had been done in our absence but could only be sure once we were on it.
There seemed little point repeating the pitches we’d already climbed, so we abseiled to the small stance just before the large detached flake, which we dubbed the Shield. Feeling fresh and with the whole day ahead of me, it didn’t seem so imposing. Tony had taken over belaying duties; his charm, as a second, was his enthusiastic flattery. Any leader would feel his ego swelling with Tony calling out encouragement. As he followed me round the Shield he said: ‘Great, man, great. You must be feeling terrific about leading that.’
Flushed with pride, I contemplated the big groove above me, craning my neck to see two overhangs, one at thirty feet, the other at sixty. I couldn’t believe it would go free, but it did. Wafting up on the hot air of Tony’s praise, I found myself looking straight down between my outstretched legs to the ground 300 feet below, where a group of tourists stood slack-jawed watching our progress. The overhangs went more easily than I dared hope and we were soon on the top. We called the route Coronation Street, since the film we later made of it was for ITV, and its neighbour was Sceptre. It has proved immensely popular, no longer of the highest standard but still imposing. Perhaps the highest accolade was Joe Brown doing it twice.
Buoyed by my film fee, I could look forward to a more productive season in the Alps. The book was finally finished and I had the next instalment of my advance as well. Then Tom Patey called to say he’d been invited to the École Nationale in Chamonix as part of an international climbing meet, all expenses paid. Joe couldn’t come, so would I take his place? The cuisine at the École lived up to its reputation; the meet itself was a cross between Noah’s Ark, with the climbers two by two, and the Tower of Babel. We tried a new route on the remote south side of Mont Blanc, and completed one on the Aiguille du Midi. We also climbed with the great Lionel Terray in the Vercors, just a few weeks before his tragic death there. Then, after a final sumptuous feast with the very best champagne, we left for Leysin and our encounter with John Harlin.
There was plenty to occupy us as we waited for the right conditions on the Eiger. Rusty and I went to Courmayeur for another attempt on the Brouillard pillar, the route I’d tried with Tom on the south face of Mont Blanc. On our first try we failed to bring enough pitons. On the second we failed to bring our bag of food, each thinking the other had it, but stuck to our plan and came within fifty feet of the top before bad weather forced us to retreat; carrying on over the top of Mont Blanc would have been suicide. We spent a miserable night on a sloping ledge, high on the face, bolts of lightning and violent cracks of thunder shaking the peak.
Wendy and Rusty’s girlfriend Pat were relieved to see us when we finally got back to Leysin, several days overdue. Pat was now pregnant with their first child and the two were planning to marry soon. There was a ceremony at the local church where I acted as best man but their honeymoon was interrupted by the return of good weather; Rusty and I, this time with John Harlin and the Scottish climber Brian Robertson, went back to Courmayeur to complete the pillar on Mont Blanc. I learned a lot climbing with John; he was not technically the most proficient, but I liked the steady rhythm of his movement and the confidence of his decisions.
Our difficulty was financing the Eiger. John Cleare had been in Leysin that summer and talked it over with Chris Brasher at the BBC. Chris was not just a famous Olympian, he was also a committed climber, the man behind many of the outside broadcasts that introduced the public to climbing in that era. Yet he was sceptical. The logistics were awkward, the outcome too uncertain. My contribution was to contact John Anstey, editor of Weekend Telegraph, one of the new weekend magazine supplements. John wanted adventure stories as part of the magazine’s staple, alongside serious pieces from Vietnam or Northern Ireland. The Daily Telegraph had supported the great explorers of the nineteenth century, and they could now do the same, but in colour.
It’s hard to conceive of how much money was washing around Fleet Street in those days; the Weekend Telegraph didn’t have a budget, it just spent what it needed. I’d done a small piece for John to go with an image from the Alps and feeling I had my foot in the door, approached him for backing. John Anstey offered the expedition £1,500, around £20,000 in today’s money, sharing the cost with the Sunday Telegraph. He also agreed to leave the deal in place when we postponed the attempt until the New Year.
In late September, we drove home, not to Woodland Hall Lodge, but to a new home at Kirkland, below Ennerdale in the western Lakes. We wanted somewhere unfurnished we could make our own, even if it was still rented. The owner hadn’t really wanted a family, but we moved into Bank End Cottage just before shooting began for Coronation Street. At first we cooked on a camping stove and slept on the floor, but over the months we picked up furniture at sales or inherited pieces from friends and family. Conrad was now eighteen months old and emerging as a rare character, both adventurous and sensitive to others. ‘He has a passionate curiosity,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘and is in every drawer. Every day I lose more of my most precious possessions, but he’s great fun.’
Conrad’s wonder at the discoveries we made around our new home added to my own: on a wild and windy day I wrapped him up warm in his papoose and walked up Murton Fell as clouds scudded across the sea to break on the hills around us. Ennerdale’s water was torn with flecks of white as the wind roared into our faces. Warming ourselves in front of the coal fire, sipping tea, Conrad’s cheeks pink from the cold, his eyes glittered with excitement. Wendy was happy too, her singing career picking up momentum and her guitar playing getting better and better.
Restored to this contented equilibrium, I began to reflect on the wisdom of John’s plans for the Eiger. It felt like I’d been enchanted, given up my own judgement in favour of a fantastical scheme. I hadn’t climbed in the Alps in winter and had lots of questions. John had talked breezily about a ten-day spell of good weather in January, but forecasting wasn’t remotely as good then as it is now. What if you got halfway up the face and the weather broke? It’s hard for a young climber now to appreciate how poor our clothing was compared to modern high-performance fabrics, which function well when wet. Death could come quickly, and it paid to be cautious. Rusty had withdrawn, uncertain how seriously to take John’s plans. I knew John had approached others, like Don Whillans, and been rebuffed.
Then, in November, a journalist called Peter Gillman rang us on our new phone. Not long graduated from Oxford, Peter had been working for Weekend Telegraph since that July; he had done some climbing and was an avid hill walker and so was a natural fit for the Eiger story. He wanted to know if he could come and talk to me about it. Hanging up the phone all my doubts surfaced and, more importantly, I told Wendy about them. Ordinarily she accepted any climbing project I might cook up, but if I told her I wasn’t confident then she was, quite reasonably, less stoical. Looking back, I can see that I faced a classic dilemma for the professional adventurer, balancing the integrity of what I wanted to do as a mountaineer with the demands of a newspaper editor. It was so easy to tip the balance too far in the direction of your paymaster. Better to offer them your dreams on your terms, and let them decide whether to accept. I had built up a good climbing relationship with John Harlin on the Brouillard pillar; his narcissism was less appealing and in the absence of a concrete plan positively dangerous. I could hardly talk to Peter Gillman with all this in my head, so I cancelled the interview and wrote to John pulling out of the climb.
Almost immediately I wondered what I’d done. Here was the next big thing in world alpinism and I had just stepped back from it, a potential disaster for someone whose only tangible asset was his climbing ability. Was I past it? Was I going soft? Then I got a letter from John Anstey asking if I would photograph the climb for the magazine. The magazine’s photo editor Alex Low would be there at the start, but John wanted shots from the mountain, especially the summit. Suddenly, everything changed. This was the chance I had been waiting for, the opportunity to exploit my mountaineering skills in something creative. John arranged for me to fly out to Switzerland as soon as Harlin started.
Other opportunities now presented themselves. Chris Brasher, who had masterminded the BBC’s adventurous outside broadcasts, had seen the film of Coronation Street and wanted me involved in the next one, not only for the film, but in finding the right location. We agreed to meet on Anglesey in early February, but my van, prematurely aged from the lecture circuit, broke down on the way. By the time we tracked down the BBC team, they had moved on to the Pen y Gwryd Hotel. We’d hardly been introduced when I was called to the phone. John Harlin was about to start. By the following evening I was in Kleine Scheidegg, below the Eiger.
I doubted very much if the team had left; the sky had a light scum of high grey cloud and the forecast was poor. I found John in the team’s lair, an attic of the hotel’s outbuildings, offered at a discount by our host, Fritz von Almen. John was cooler towards me than he had been in the summer, unsurprisingly given my loyalties were now split. I was the middleman, the conduit for the Telegraph. With John was Layton Kor, a big, slightly awkward cowboy, six foot tall and a master aid climber, completely attuned to the latest techniques in Yosemite. Layton was also a rather innocent soul, lured to Switzerland after seeing one of John’s lectures in the States, surprised that not everyone in Europe spoke English. He proved his worth on the Eiger with the hardest rock leads.
John’s other teammate was Dougal Haston, who, unbeknown to me, had featured in an earlier version of the enterprise. They had fallen out but then settled their differences when I resigned. Dougal and I had met but barely knew each other. He cut a striking figure, always elegantly turned out: Dougal knew the impact of a neckerchief. Yet the cast of his features precluded accusations of pretension. He watched you with hooded eyes, his long face enigmatic and serious, a mixture of high asceticism and lupine menace. Many found him arrogant, and he was, although I suspect it was more that he knew what he wanted and generally did it. The previous spring, driving drunk and without a full licence late one night in Glencoe, he had run down and killed a young student called James Orr and served a short prison sentence in Glasgow’s Barlinnie jail.
The accident was not a subject Dougal spoke about but it undoubtedly changed his life for the better; he was much more focused afterwards. I’m not sure anyone ever got to know him, not fully. He was too opaque, too controlled. Yet over the course of the Eiger Direct we became friends and I learned how to handle him. He could be wholly indolent if he felt there was nothing to his advantage by making an effort, but once he fixed on something, nothing would stop him. At heart, he was an intellectual, a philosophy student who saw the world in those terms, an interesting contrast to Layton, who worked as a bricklayer.
The forecast had worsened as I arrived in Switzerland, but I was happy enough, in the pay of the Weekend Telegraph, with a comfortable hotel room and some of the best skiing in Europe on my doorstep. Yet my misgivings returned. There was a gulf between John’s grand pronouncements and the practical planning and execution required for a climb like this. John had collected an impressive amount of food and equipment but it seemed a lot to carry up the face, especially as he was still contemplating a continuous push. Getting this lot up the first lower-angled part of the wall would be exhausting and take time. To get round this, John proposed to use the train to ferry gear to the tunnel window and cache it there. It made me wonder: if you were prepared to do that, why not start from the window yourself, or else fix some ropes?
The weather remained poor, days drifted into weeks. We did some practice climbs and drank in the hotel bar. We photographed John posing on the ski slopes until, trying to balance on one leg, he caught an edge and dislocated his shoulder. The team retreated to Leysin to lick their wounds, while I held the fort. A couple of mornings later, having breakfast, one of the waiters called over to me that someone had started up the face. A glance through the hotel’s powerful binoculars confirmed it. John had mentioned there was a large German team preparing an attempt but we didn’t take it too seriously. Who needed such a large team? Where would they all sleep? As it turned out, they were more prepared and experienced than we knew.
I called John, but he seemed rather non-committal, telling me to keep an eye on them while the team returned. I skied over to the face, wondering what kind of reception I might get. Coming close enough to use my camera, I found out. They started throwing snowballs at me. They had their own media deals too. It was clear what their approach was. They were fixing ropes, essentially sieging the face, allowing them to stay on the face and be resupplied as necessary. They seemed systematic and effective. That night I reported back to John all I had seen. The situation was clear enough: a race was underway.
Next day Layton and Dougal set out for the face, following the line of German ropes, even using them at times, to the rock band, where Layton set to work, applying his immense skill to the difficult aid climbing required. On the ground Layton seemed awkward and rather gangly. Hanging from the face, he was attuned and entirely at home. Even so, the climb was desperately hard and he spent the whole afternoon making thirty feet of progress. That night the weather broke and the pair were engulfed in powder avalanches inside their bivouac tent. The inside became fetid and thick with condensation, soaking their clothes so at dawn they fled down to the valley. The Eiger was winning.
So too were the Germans. They realized the logical approach was to dig a snow cave under the rock band. This would offer much more comfort and security. It could be blowing a gale outside, but inside you would barely know it. Clearly, we were going to have to adapt our tactics to something similar but that meant a bigger team, at least at the start. Once we got higher, the climbers could cut loose from their umbilical cord and go for the top. I could support them while they were low on the face and get better pictures for the Weekend Telegraph.
And so, eight days after the storm, Layton, Dougal and I set out for the face. Dougal belayed Layton on our line, which was more direct but harder, while I dug a snow cave. After a few minutes, I realized it would take an eternity with an ice axe and since the Germans had dug theirs with a shovel, I might be able to borrow it. We had already reached agreement over the fixed ropes; they had fixed the first 1,500 feet but we’d done the next 500, which were more difficult. For now our routes diverged, but that didn’t mean we had to be enemies. I emerged from my tiny burrow and climbed across to their sizeable palace. I heard the purr of a petrol stove and smelt the delicious aroma of fresh coffee.
‘Guten Tag,’ I said, poking my head in the entrance. There was only one of them inside, lying in a sleeping bag on a foam mat. ‘Do you think I could borrow your shovel?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you bring one up yourselves?’ I didn’t know it at the time, but this was Peter Haag, co-leader of the Germans, who had a rather impish sense of humour. We went back and forth for a while, him claiming he needed authority, me making speeches about the fellowship of mountaineers, and I stomped back to our miserable little hole and started digging furiously with my ice axe. After five minutes, I heard a little cough behind me and there behind me was Peter Haag, with a wicked grin on his face, offering the shovel.
‘Come and have some coffee and cognac when you’re done,’ he said. His co-leader, Jörg Lehne, was not so happy-go-lucky, but as the weeks passed and the Eiger took its toll, both groups came to respect each other.
That afternoon I watched as Layton made fast progress on what was obviously desperate ground. I was impressed. At no stage did he feel the need to drill a bolt, something the Germans did several times on their easier line. I took some pictures and then got back to work on the cave. As the afternoon wore on the weather grew worse and snow began to fall. Almost immediately the spindrift avalanches started; the climbers retreated but as Dougal abseiled under the weight of falling snow, his rope jammed and he was left upside down, stuck a hundred feet above the cave. Alerted by their cries, I put my head out.
‘I think I’ll have to cut myself free,’ Dougal announced, very matter-of-fact. ‘Can you get a knife?’ I had to borrow one of those off the Germans as well.
The state of our ropes was a constant worry. Over the next few weeks we made slow progress up the face, constantly battling the weather, and all the while our seven-millimetre fixed lines were rubbing against the rock. John had taught us how to use the new Jumar clamps the summer before in Leysin, but it felt alarming as the ropes sagged under our weight. Where they crossed an edge they were prone to fraying. At least the ropes meant we could bale out when things got bad, back to the hotel with its crowd of excited journalists and gawping tourists. It wasn’t a wilderness experience, but I quite liked the juxtaposition and revelled in my new job. When Dougal’s girlfriend Joy, who had been taking my exposed film to Zürich, crashed our hire car for the second time, I persuaded Wendy to come out to take her place, leaving Conrad with friends. Her presence made the tension of those weeks bearable, even though we saw little of each other. Each time I came down she had to head off with the photos.
My participation in the climb oscillated between total involvement and observer status, and it wasn’t always a happy arrangement. There was a tense moment in the snow cave at the top of the Flat Iron when I excused myself from going back into the night, down the ropes, to fetch the stove. I was the photographer, it wasn’t my responsibility, but after Dougal disappeared into the dark, I felt John’s gaze, and my own shame. I didn’t feel like an observer.
In mid March I went back on the face with Layton to tackle the central pillar that led up to the White Spider and the upper face. John was sick and Dougal needed rest. This was a critical section of the climb; the other two felt confident we had picked the best line but Layton had to climb a fiendishly awkward rock pitch to reach a steep ice gully. As we arrived at the top of the fixed ropes, Jörg called across to me.
‘The bottom of the pillar looks very difficult. I don’t think it’s possible.’
He needn’t have worried. Layton was in his element, choosing the right piton, hammering it in, stepping up, doing everything exactly, like a master craftsman. That style of climbing takes time but I don’t think any of us, German or British, could have managed as he did. Yet when it came to the ice pitch above, he faltered. Layton was a genius on rock, but had only limited ice experience. It took him ages to place an ice screw and he kept getting tangled in his crampons. If he fell, I doubted the screw would hold and my belay didn’t look too secure. Time was passing and it would be dark before he got up.
‘Do you want me to have a go?’ I hadn’t intended to lead anything on the route; I was just the photographer helping out. Yet here I was, crossing the line.
‘Okay, this just isn’t my scene.’
The pitch was steep, as steep as any ice I’d ever climbed before. I reached the top of a little gully and I paused to take stock. The angle was about seventy degrees, and with 1960s ice axes that meant patiently cutting handholds as well as steps. The ice was also punctuated with rocks, a sure sign it was in reality a thin white skin on the rock below. I had to work gently, precisely, because if that skin came away I would be riding a toboggan all the way to the meadows 5,000 feet below.
The higher I got, the thinner the ice became, until it was an inch thick and lifted away from the smooth rock beneath. The only protection was that distant ice screw Layton had placed. I might as well have been climbing solo. Finally I reached a gangway of white snow that was thicker and more reliable. I could have kicked up this in my crampons but my nerves were exhausted so I patiently cut steps a little further until I could reach a stance and bang in a peg. A great bubbling wave of joy ran through me. We had climbed the crux of the pillar; the way to the White Spider was open.
The Germans on the other hand ground to a halt. That evening, just above the Flat Iron, I passed the German snow cave. Jörg Lehne was sitting in the entrance looking discouraged. Their line had proved a dead end, as we suspected it would. He asked if they could use our ropes; there was another way, he said, but it would take time. I doubted this other way existed, but I was happy enough. Next morning, as we were preparing to go up, Jörg appeared at our cave, anxious to share an idea.
‘We should like to see this competition end. Would it not be a good idea if today Karl climbed with Layton?’
Given how things unfolded, I’ve often wondered if I accepted his suggestion too readily. It made sense to me. We all now respected, even liked each other. The notion of separate routes had always been a little daft. Besides, I wanted to get back to taking pictures. And so I agreed, on the proviso that so did John. It wasn’t my place to offer any guarantees. At our next radio call I put the idea to him. In a way, I manoeuvred him into it. Had I continued with Layton and dropped a rope for the Germans, there would have been no question that we had helped them. But I was tired of the politics. I was absorbed in the creative excitement I felt for the job at hand, getting a pictorial record of the final climb to the summit.
So Layton went back up with Karl Golikow, among the strongest of the Germans. I climbed up their ropes for photographs and then abseiled down the face and skied back to Kleine Scheidegg. Two days later, on 22 March, having conferred on the weather and anxious that the Germans were suddenly racing for the top, Dougal and John set out from the snow hole at Death Bivouac to reach the White Spider. Dougal made it but, as Peter Gillman watched through the telescope at Kleine Scheidegg, he saw a figure dressed in red fall through his field of vision, the body stretched out and turning. As the shock of what he had seen spread, Fritz von Almen took his place at the telescope and scanned the face for clues. Could it just have been a rucksack that fell? The only way to find out was to go up there and look.
Layton and I skied in silence, dreading what we might find. I came to some gear scattered in the snow, the contents of a rucksack and felt a wave of relief I knew wasn’t justified. Above us I saw something else in the snow. It was John, lying spreadeagled on his back, arms outstretched, his features undamaged, even after his 5,000-foot fall. It would have made an incredible photograph, but I wasn’t remotely tempted. There was a strange, terrible beauty to the juxtaposition between this broken man and the vast, gloomy face behind him. I forced myself to check for a heartbeat, pointless really, and then we sat in the snow and cried.