DOUG: On the Friday before leaving for Tibet Alex MacIntyre and I signed a contract to write a book about our forthcoming expedition. On the Saturday we boarded the plane, secure in the knowledge that, with the publisher’s advance on royalties, we had finally raised the funds for our estimated budget.
Here is the book, but first a brief explanation as this is, in some ways, an unusual expedition account. We had decided that the book should include contributions from all members of the team – Roger Baxter-Jones, Paul Braithwaite, Elaine Brook and Nick Prescott, but with Alex and myself writing the bulk of it. I opted to write something about the people who have lived around Shishapangma and the travellers, missionaries and mountaineers who have been in the vicinity of our mountain. Alex would write an account of the actual doings of our group, on the journey and on the mountain itself. On our return Alex gathered together his extensive diaries of the trip with several taped interviews with members of the team and went off to his little farmhouse on the flanks of Kinder Scout, just above the village of Hayfield in Derbyshire. More or less continuously, for two months, he wrote his account of our two-and-a-half-month trip.
This expedition was a hard one. We were for ever worried about an escalating budget, frustrated by red tape in Peking and again in Lhasa, exhausted by the journey across the plateau in an open truck which proceeded in its own dust cloud – in fact we could hardly relax at all until the last yakman had turned his back on us at Base Camp. The team itself was an interesting mixture of people with, at one extreme, Alex – ambitiously directing his energies to ever-steeper Himalayan Faces with Tibet, for him, very much a secondary consideration – and, at the other, Elaine – whose reason for coming with us was to see Tibet and to spend time with the inhabitants, and with no ambition to climb high. The rest of us fell into place between.
It is incredible really that there are not more times of tension and displays of negative emotion on expeditions, considering that members spend two and a half months very much in one another’s company, unable to walk away from any conflicts that may ensue and with no distractions to take the heat off. And as regards the mountaineering, as Alex joked, we would be hard-pressed to write an article for Mountain magazine because on summit day everything went so well.
At 28 years of age Alex was either the young upstart of the expedition or a breath of fresh energy; whichever he was, or was perceived to have been, he held strong views and, with his lawyer’s logic and intelligence and his basic honesty, he could put them over well. It is no surprise that Alex has written provocatively – and deliberately so, to provoke the rest of us into adding our own comments.
Briefly, when Alex had completed his first draft of the manuscript he left for Nepal, where he lost his life on the huge South Face of Annapurna. Elaine’s commentary was written before he died. Nick and Roger added theirs afterwards. I remember feeling indignation and injured pride at some of his statements and at first I hoped to persuade him to alter some of what he had said. But the more I read and the more I thought deeply of what he had written, the more I understood and the more I liked it. This was fortunate because, with his passing, it is now impossible to alter his text, apart from editing by Alex’s friend Terry Mooney and by Mark Barty – King of Granada Publishing. My own comments are substantially those I noted immediately after first reading Alex’s account and although, with different feelings for him now, my love and respect have moderated what I wrote earlier, I have tried not to eulogize; he would have hated that.