On the face of it the real world seems so ordinary, normal, simple even. There are the trees and their leaves, grass, plants and animals, insects, the earth itself, clouds and rain, stone and sky. So it would seem with the lives we have; we eat, we defecate, we sleep, we breathe, we move, we reproduce. Why should there be anything fantastical beyond this natural world? Why shouldn’t mankind have stuck with hunting, growing things and protecting himself from his neighbours? After all that’s what all the other creatures do. On the face of it everything’s so normal. It should be normal, but then again it’s not. Reality in fact is not the slightest bit normal. The universe stretches to infinity in every direction, crowded with an infinite number of galaxies each containing such vast numbers of stars and solar systems that our stretched minds find it hard to cope. In the other direction our scientists tell us that everything is made of invisibly small spinning objects whose vast numbers are even more difficult to comprehend. Abnoreality is a very big thing indeed.
Well, even if reality is composed of an incomprehensible collection of scattered matter, that could be soaked up by sanity, provided it all followed a set of logical rules, but there do appear to be some pretty strange things going on behind the scenes. Life has designed some staggeringly clever things which for my money cannot just be passed off by theories of natural selection. At an atomic level DNA shows an intelligent manipulation of matter. This process of eggs and sperm coming together in a variety of inventive ways; that’s not just luck, and sorry, but I don’t believe that a billion creatures flung themselves off cliffs flapping their appendages until one day two of them rose into the air and started breeding as seagulls. Behind a front of normality, which we grow up to so readily accept, there are stranger forces at work.
Not just in the matter of creation, or the creation of matter, but in how the past, present and future are connected, how we as people are joined in inexplicably odd ways, how fate has a hand in normality, how every now and then there are solid markers to tell us we are going in the right direction, or not, as the case may be. How occasionally there are outrageous experiences which occur to dumbfound our conditioned selves. Telepathy, astral travel, levitation, communication with the afterlife, faith healing, visions of the future to name but one or two talents our motley race chances on from time to time. Even through our ‘science’ we have almost inadvertently discovered we can speak to each other by the use of fashionable handsets, freeze time on celluloid, send moving pictures at the speed of light, look in detail at the insides of our bodies, and catapult metal objects to the far reaches of our solar system and beyond.
So why should we expect things to be ‘normal’, they patently are not, and we have every right to expect extraordinary forces to be working on a plan for our lives. Had I been asking these questions in Mediaeval times I no doubt would have believed God had the answers. Now all I see is a host of arrogant religions claiming ownership of the patents to the infinite, and fighting each other for the right to exist. A whiff of the absolute no doubt touches the mental nostrils of every culture but the existence of one God to rule them all; I doubt it. All the religions have got it wrong and mankind will continue his search for appropriate questions to discover the ultimate truths of the universe. All the tools we have in our individual search for perfection are the subtle power of words, and emotions to set them free. Will exemplary characters emerge wielding words to provide the all powerful answers in the end? Possibly. In any case forget normality; we are now a far cry from the simple, normal life of breeding and farming.
And it seems to me that humankind is never happier than when things are not normal. We spend most of our time in a world of fantasy of one sort or another. We devour anything that is fiction, and chase the ends of imaginary rainbows in the hope of finding a pot of gold that will convey us into some consumer paradise. In our ordinary lives we dream of impossible sexual situations, success that would elevate us to a point of veneration, and personal acts of bravery or charity that would automatically earn us the respect we imagine we deserve. Our television is ninety percent fantasy ten percent poorly presented fact, the biggest blockbuster films are of magical heroes quashing quadruped aliens or vanquishing evil wizards. Barely a moment goes by when we are not absorbed by either our personal fantasies or the fantastical world of others. Even in our sleep when you would think that everyday normality would prevail, we experience detailed phantasmagorical worlds of the bizarre that our waking selves would be incapable of inventing. Not content with the birds and the bees we are continuously tampering with reality, poking it, prodding it, whipping up its potential in the hope we can slow the decay of our houses of flesh, or create the perfect being. The fact is that reality is boring if taken on face value, and mankind slavers for excitement. Mankind feeds on fantasy. We are utterly obsessed by it and our spirits crave more and more.
I think fantasy hits its peak when we are young, especially when hormones and adrenalin have right of way in our veins. The young have blind confidence in their abilities and a sense of indestructibility and close their eyes to the obvious, that big mountains are very dangerous places.
So it was for me, and it was not until long after I started to fulfil my own fantasies of exploring the Himalaya that I was to discover that there especially, not everything is what it seems.
My first climbing memory is of a gnarled old oak tree that grew on the village green right opposite the manor house that we had rented as a family in Kirtlington, Oxfordshire. The village lads would often climb up and into the tree which was so old it was hollow inside. Dad drove some six inch nails into the trunk to help me get up. I must have been only four at the time. The second climbing memory is not so happy.
We had moved to the nearby village of Chesterton and this time had rented the servants’ quarters of an old deserted mansion. One day, aged seven, I tied my younger brother on one end of mum’s washing line and we climbed into yew trees behind the house. As we moved along some branches my brother fell down one side of the branch we were on, and I fell down the other. We were left dangling and screaming for help. Luckily our father heard us and rushed out of the house and cut us down before we died of asphyxiation. We received a sound thrashing with the leather end of a horsewhip. It didn’t put us off though.
We were a solid middle class family with a few skeletons in the closet like everyone else. After all we do live in the real world and nothing is perfect. Dad was a self-made man, who had risen from his illegitimate beginnings from mining stock in Yorkshire to become a Major in the British Army in India during the Second World War, and afterwards to become a chartered surveyor and pillar of the community. He had climbed in the Indian Himalaya during times of leave, and from an early age I remember there were always stories of India, and when he was de-mobbed from the army, many pieces of our furniture had been sent back from Bombay with his kit.
I admired his achievements but hated his Victorian views, his strict discipline and the rather narrow minded, black and white view he had of the world; it led to too much prejudice in my view. He was clever and could be utterly charming, but if you got on the wrong side of him like as not you would find yourself bettered in a court of law with damages and costs to meet. Despite the fact he had lived in India dad also suffered from the typical type of barely concealed colonial racial prejudice that was widespread with his generation. He also held a very low opinion of the mental abilities of Americans. He cared deeply about many other things and I have so far painted much too black a picture of him. He built flats for the elderly, rescued buildings he thought had architectural merit from being bulldozed, and sat on the Town Council. He absolutely loved our mother who in fairness had been sent from heaven to look after us. She came from a one time wealthy family who had made their money from a fleet of trawlers which operated out of Grimsby and Fleetwood. The fleet had not been modernised and the money was fast dissipating, but still they lived a rather grand style of life, and granny played canasta once a week and all her friends wore furs. Grandpa Olliff had been gassed three times in the First World War and never really worked again afterwards, but I digress.
Dad certainly loved the mountains most of all. Weeks away in North Wales were the only time we got on well together. We ticked off all the peaks over two thousand feet listed in a book by W. A. Poucher, always finishing with an ascent of Snowdon. We stayed at Mrs. William’s farmhouse which had no electricity and a toilet built over a stream, and I remember after one long day walking in the hills dad drinking twenty seven cups of tea from Mrs. William’s bone china tea cups.
When we were living at Kirtlington, and I must still have only been five, dad came home after a climbing trip to North Wales, and taking off his shirt revealed that he was black and blue all over. He had fallen off trying to lead Munich Climb on Tryfan and with the rope only having been tied round his waist had sustained a lot of bruising.
He stopped climbing after that until I was seventeen when mum let him take me on my first proper rock climb, on the proviso that we employed a professional guide. Ron James took us up The Parson’s Nose on Crib y Ddysgl and from that day on I couldn’t wait to do more.
The following day in fact dad and his best friend Dr. Plint both failed to lead Pulpit Route on Tryfan and I pleaded to have a go. Successfully reaching the belay after a steep little wall I was as high as a kite, and thereafter gave up tennis, cricket and athletics and spent any spare time climbing.
One of the main reasons for me moving to Bristol aged twenty one was because I knew I would have the Avon Gorge on my doorstep. It didn’t take long to make friends with the bunch of young climbers who were always hanging around Stan’s tea van in the car park below the main area of limestone cliffs. Some became friends for life, but later quite a few died in the mountains. We were wild and free, couldn’t care less about authority, drove our cars far too fast, smashed them up too often, partied, smoked cannabis, ate magic mushrooms, and competed with each other for the physical affections of the dismally small number of females who were attracted by our company. We spent all our spare time rock-climbing and discussing individual moves in great detail in the pub afterwards.
Life went on like this for a good many years. Some of our number became world class rock-climbers in their own right, and before convention and matrimony infiltrated the group, we gave free rein to ambition. We thrashed an assortment of old bangers across France to the Alps, we climbed above topless beaches near St. Tropez, and we played with our American cousins at the Mecca that all rock-climbers aspire to, Yosemite, California. Eventually, of course, we began to fantasise about the Himalaya and this book is a collection of some of those adventures.
I have tried to tell the truth as far as I can. I mean why the hell not; the truth is the truth after all, and I have never pretended to be a starched white shirt. I have, however, not revealed certain rumours which might hurt living relatives of friends who have died in the big hills, or which would spoil my own relations with certain foreign governments.