47

Lost Innocence

EVERY TIME I scramble down the Sgumain Stone Shoot on the Isle of Skye, and I pass the foot of Petronella, I think of Mairet. And of what her life might have been. And of what she might have come to mean to me.

The only reminder I have of her is a photograph taken in cloud on some long-forgotten hill top. Her back is to the camera and the hood of her anorak hides her mane of long black hair. You can’t even tell it’s Mairet. Only I know it is.

She was barely into her 20s. Dundee University Rucksack Club’s top female rock climber. Only Ritchie was more acrobatic on rock. Like me, she loved the hills and never missed a club meet, but while I aimed for a summit, she gravitated to a crag. Rock was her love.

As with other colleagues in the club, we came to know each other through long coach trips to the Highlands (few of us owned a car in the 1960s) and boozy après-climb evenings where we discussed the day’s derring-do and, in Housman’s words, ‘cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world’.

In those pre-feminist days, when girls were supposed to drink martini and lemonade, she sank pints with the boys. She hated to be thought of as a member of the so-called ‘weaker’ sex. After a hard day on the hill, a quenching pint would soon become three. Outsiders would look at her askance and pass unflattering remarks, and sometimes her anger would boil over and she would confront them for their misogyny. She knew we had her back. She was one of us and we protected our own.

As products of single-sex schools, we were painfully slow to realise we shared a growing attraction that went beyond companionship. I began to see in her a beauty of which, in her desire to be taken seriously as a rugged climber, she seemed oblivious. I related to her sense of adventure, her abandon, her refusal to give any countenance to ‘straights’ (as we cool young people of the ’60s called anyone who wasn’t like us).

It took us more than a year of furtive glances to make sense of the mutual signals and take tentative steps to do something about it. We found ourselves hanging out down at Riverside Park beside the River Tay, metaphorically circling each other, essaying conversational gambits. They weren’t dates. There was no way I would have been capable of asking Mairet out on a date, and girls certainly didn’t ask boys out in those days.

We barely knew how to speak to each other, never mind articulate attraction. We’d meet on the pretext of going for a jog or discussing the next weekend’s meet. On one occasion she managed to borrow a bicycle and we took turns on that. And that was all. Our relationship never evolved. We were young and innocent. We had no moves.

At the end of the academic year, we joined the annual ­Rucksack Club pilgrimage to the Isle of Skye. We didn’t go together, we were just part of the crowd that turned up at Glenbrittle campsite. We all loved the Cuillin. Who wouldn’t? To me, the pinnacled ridges and summits were an irresistible lure. For Mairet, the endless, soaring, sun-kissed crags were a spiritual home. I seconded a number of rock climbs, even led a few, but I was never in her league and chance had it that we never found ourselves together on the same rope.

One day she climbed Petronella on the great Coire Lagan face of Sron na Ciche. It was graded Severe in my dog-eared Climbing Guide, but the awkward crack at the start always looked harder to me. Today it is graded Very Severe. Petronella is named for a Scottish dance. I wasn’t witness to Mairet’s ascent, but I was told later that she had indeed danced up the rock. When she returned to Glen Brittle campsite, her eyes sparkled.

After Skye, like everyone else, we went our separate ways, any latent feelings for each other forever unacknowledged. I would spend the summer tarring North Sea oil pipes to earn money. She would follow her dream.

That dream took her to the Alps. She climbed The Matterhorn and was killed on the way down.

I heard the news when I returned to university for the autumn term. Her parents were in town to meet her friends, but I didn’t press them for details. No one knew about our barely acknowledged feelings for each other, so I grieved in private. As far as I know, her body was never found.

I don’t pretend that the loss was as great for me as it was for her family and those who knew her more intimately, but she was too young, the same age as I was, both of us on the cusp of life… with so much between us left unsaid.

Now, after all the years in between, those guarded feelings seem to belong to a young man I barely recognise. Life goes on. There are new experiences. More mature relationships. It troubles me that I can’t even remember Mairet’s last name.

But, my goodness, her face haunts me still.