Christmas in Patagonia meant roast mutton, quantities of booze and a friendly visit by the Neilsons from Cerro Guido. We had been at Base Camp for over a week and the big saucer-like clouds that cruised over the Paine Massif were a sure sign that it was windy as ever in the mountains. The team sank into a restless inertia. Don, John Streetley and I made a foray to attempt to climb the Cuernos, an attractive peak about eight miles down Lake Nordenskjold, the huge glacier-fed lake that lay alongside the Paine range. A rainy bivouac in the woods cooled our ardour, however, and we returned to Base Camp.
It was a restless, disturbing period for me. Wendy and I had planned to wander up through the Americas after the expedition, spending the money I had made from climbing the North Wall of the Eiger. It had seemed an attractive scheme, but now my basic caution and need for stability began to affect me. I longed for solid roots, was worried about getting stuck into a new career and writing the book which had been commissioned just before I left England. I decided, therefore, to go back with the others rather than spend another six months travelling. Wendy was bitterly disappointed, for in many ways she is more adventurous than I. She is the product of a home that had always been unstable financially, yet had remained a close-knit unit. Her father, Leslie, is an amazing man with a free-ranging intelligence, spirit of inquiry and basic strength, that has enabled him to emerge through a series of personal crises that would have overwhelmed a lesser person. Like mine, his father pulled out when he was still young, leaving his mother to bring up four children in Birkenhead. He left school at the age of sixteen to join the art department of Newnes, where he showed special promise as a cartoonist. He would probably have followed a steadily developing career in the magazine world, but then, at the age of eighteen, he was caught by evangelism. This eventually led him into the Baptist ministry. But he had ideas that were years ahead of their time, especially for his parishioners in Buckinghamshire. He tried to apply a psychological interpretation to their problems; I should imagine his sermons went straight over their heads, for he has a philosophical bent, constantly inquiring about the nature of his own belief and that of others, trying to get to the roots of a problem, rather than skating over the surface in the way that I suspect most of his churchgoers would have preferred. Eventually, he fell out with his parishioners and fellow churchmen. Disillusioned, shaken in his beliefs, he left the church and faced the problem of making a new career with practically no qualifications. He started working as a medical artist and then progressed to illustrating children’s books and magazines.
He had married shortly before going into the church and had two children, Neville and Wendy. Money had always been short, with disaster looming just around the corner, but Les somehow managed to give the two children a good education and a stable home life. Wendy went to Brighton High School and then on to Art College, where she stayed for only three years, just getting her intermediate certificate before leaving to earn some immediate money, like her father, as a freelance illustrator.
In many ways she had a lonely childhood, isolated by lack of money, which made her different from most other children at school. This gave her a superficial shyness, yet hidden beneath it was a real strength that enabled her to do without the conventional props of economic security.
I, on the other hand, had had a childhood that was relatively secure financially, but very much less stable emotionally. My parents’ marriage had broken up before I was a year old and my mother had been left, without any help from my father, to bring me up at a time when jobs were hard to get and salaries for women painfully low. Fortunately, as an advertising copywriter, she managed to achieve a reasonable earning capacity and compared to Wendy’s family we were positively wealthy. But the fact remained, she was very much on her own in a thrusting, unstable profession. Because she had to go out to work I was brought up, until the age of five, by my grandmother. Then, on the outbreak of war in 1939, with the scare of bombing, I was sent to boarding school. I was there till 1942, when I was brought back to London and lived alternately with my mother and my grandmother. They were strange, lonely years, for my mother had few friends and there were none of the conventional family contacts with other family groups. I had plenty of love but at times there was a tussle for possession between my mother and grandmother. I suspect this left me with the feeling of insecurity and a need for family existence that made service life very attractive, and tempted me to prolong my National Service into a regular commitment. When I became disillusioned with the army, I had needed another big organisation to jump into and had secured a management traineeship with Unilever. It was largely meeting Wendy, and her contempt for traditional security, that gave me the courage to abandon a conventional career and plunge into the unknown; but a conflict between my desire for security and love of freedom remained. In addition, I don’t think I was ready for wandering in the sense that Wendy was. I had little perception or awareness outside the narrow field of climbing; my entire ambition and concentration was focused on the Central Tower of Paine and my own part in the expedition, to the exclusion of almost everything else. My senses were alive to the feel of the wind and sun, the empty beauty of the pampas, the architecture of the mountains, the mystery of dark pools and tangled glades in the forest below the Paine. But it got no further than my immediate senses. I absorbed the beauty and atmosphere of the place but was lacking in curiosity; I learnt little of the life of Pedro or the gauchos who worked on the estancia. I was too tied up in the climb and my own problems to be able to gain much from a sightseeing adventure through the Americas.
It was a hard time for Wendy. She was so close to everything she had dreamt of doing, yet was unable to fulfil her dreams. The expedition was a man’s world; so was the estancia, and she had become an unwilling appendage. If Elaine had not had a child with her, the two girls could probably have gone off exploring on their own, becoming independent of the expedition, but in the circumstances this could not be.
Just after Christmas the situation changed once again. We were told that Juan Radic, the owner of the estancia, was bringing his wife and family up from Punta Arenas, which meant that the girls had to move from the farmhouse. Much later, I learnt from Derek Walker that this was only an excuse; in fact Juan and Pedro had become tired of having someone else’s small child running riot in the house, and did not really appreciate the girls’ housekeeping. Meals were seldom on time and they weren’t served the vast quantities of food to which they were accustomed. Another irritant must have been the presence of Barrie and me when we were resting at Base Camp. I always felt uncomfortable invading the privacy of their house, but naturally wanted to sleep with Wendy.
There was considerable opposition to the girls staying at Base Camp from the very start. This was largely because it had been understood back in England that Barrie had made arrangements for them to stay in an estancia for the entire trip, and therefore the others, quite naturally, had a feeling of being misled. Not having women or wives of their own with them, one could hardly blame them for resenting the ones who had. The communal mess tent had a feeling of a London Club in its male exclusivity, and I could hardly blame them for wanting to retain it. Wendy and I set up camp in a little two-man tent about a hundred yards from the other tents. I was torn between two emotions: one part of me wanting to immerse myself in the expedition, to be part of the tribe, and the other part enjoying my love for Wendy. At the time I wrote:
An expedition is very much a living, single unit. I find it myself in many ways, and I think Wendy feels it. An awful lot of you goes into the expedition and the mountain you climb. I hope to God it does not mean that I am just not passionate because the depth of my love for her is total and complete, and yet I feel I can’t give her everything; somehow, at times my sexual passion seems to be drained, I think – I hope – by the efforts of the expedition, my own channelling of enthusiasm.
This was when I was tired after our return from the Cuernos, and worried about my relationship with the rest of the expedition because of the girls’ presence in Base Camp, yet in the constant pendulum of emotion that I have always been prey to, the next day, refreshed, I wrote:
We woke up to hear rain pattering on the tent and a distant roar of wind. Although the sun spread a dappled pattern of leaves on the roof of the tent, I felt that the weather had changed once again. It had, and got progressively worse during day.
But Wendy and I spent a delightful morning, in fact a whole delightful day, just loving each other with a great, warm, fresh, light-hearted love. It’s strange, all the aspects of love that you plumb; light-hearted, bubbling, idiotic love that is all coloured and playful; deep love that goes right into your emotions; doubtful love, when you just want to be loved, but can’t imagine anyone loving you.
I think that on this trip we’ve gone through a big range of loving, and of doubts about the present and future, but never doubts of our own love for each other. I know that every day that goes by, my own love, and the confidence that I have in that love, gets stronger and yet each day I feel that I have reached an absolute optimum of loving.
We had known each other for less than a year, had been married for only six months, and were still in that tentative, finding-out stage of a relationship. In spite of the pressures caused by my own split loyalties, the general feeling of resentment against the girls, and Wendy’s sense of lost opportunity, we had some wonderful times together during that fortnight, as we wandered down by the slate-grey waters of Lake Nordenskjold, making love in the soft grass of the pampas, confident that no one would pass our way, and overlooked only by a condor, soaring high above our impassioned limbs.
In face of the continuous bad weather the team seemed to have lost much of its single-minded push to lay siege to the Central Tower. Don was planning to make another attempt on the Cuernos with Derek Walker, though I was surprised that he was prepared to miss a chance of fine weather on the Central Tower. The rest of us were planning to return to the foot of the Tower yet again, to try to build a storm-proof camp where we could wait out the weather. But there was little sense of urgency, or even real unity, in the team at this stage – and then something happened to shake the team out of its fast-growing apathy.
We had known all along that an Italian expedition was on its way to climb in our area, but somehow, until they actually arrived, we never took the threat seriously. On the 28th December, the day that Don and Derek were due to set out on their mini-expedition, we heard that they had reached the Estancia Guido, and the following day they pitched camp about half a mile from ourselves. Derek and Don immediately cancelled their plans, and that afternoon we went over to size up our potential rivals. They were an impressive-looking bunch, slightly older than we were, very neat in matching sweaters and breeches that gave them an almost military air. They gave an impression of disciplined single-mindedness, very different from one that any stranger would have gained from our own motley group.
They greeted us with wary courtesy, and a spate of introductions followed. There were seven of them altogether; their leader, Gian Carlo Frigieri, was grey-haired and could have been in his late forties; a non-playing captain, I suspected. Their star was undoubtedly Amando Aste, dark-haired, rather sullen, who obviously resented our presence in the mountains they had come to climb. He had a reputation for hard solo climbing in the Dolomites, with many well-known routes to his credit. It was undoubtedly a strong team – on average experience probably a good deal stronger than ours.
Unfortunately, they could speak little English, and we no Italian. Barrie produced a postcard of the Towers and pointed to the Central Tower.
‘This is our Tower. We have climbed high on it with much fixed rope in place.’ He pointed to a spot considerably higher than our real high point, a puny eighty feet above the col. They did not seem very impressed; Amando Aste scowled even more fiercely and muttered something in Italian.
Barrie tried once again. ‘South Tower very good, just as steep as Central.’ It looked good in the photograph, if anything more slender than the Central Tower, but it had been taken face on and did not show that the Tower comprised a long, comparatively easy-angled knife-edge ridge. The Italians were not impressed; they had obviously seen photographs of both Towers from more revealing angles.
Before leaving we invited them round for a drink that night and then returned to our camp for a council of war. As we talked, I could sense the growing unity of purpose caused by this threat of competition.
‘Those buggers’ll go for the Central Tower,’ said Don.
‘You never know,’ said Barrie. ‘I think I talked them out of it. They can’t possibly use our fixed ropes, and we’ve got the only line up the Tower.’
‘I shouldn’t be so sure of that,’ I said. ‘All they’ve got to do is climb one of the cracks on the side of the pedestal, and they could come out above the ladder. If they get into that central dièdre, we could never get round them.’
‘Well, we’ll get them well wined up tonight, and persuade them that there’s a good route round the back of the Tower,’ said Barrie.
‘You’re not going to shift them by giving them a bit of booze,’ said Don. ‘In one way, you can’t blame them anyway; calling ourselves the South Patagonia Survey Expedition! How the hell did they know we were going to be a climbing expedition? If you haven’t got proper permission for us to climb the Tower, Barrie, they might well have us moved off altogether. I reckon that’s what they’re up to now.’
‘In that case let’s move up to the foot of the Tower,’ I suggested. ‘I can’t see a policeman walking all the way up there. Anyway, unless we find a way of living immediately below the Tower in this bad weather, we’re going to waste the first windless day in getting back up there. How about pulling Camp II back into the woods, just below the glacier, and sitting it out there?’
‘I think that’s still too low,’ said Don. ‘What we could do with is some kind of hut where Camp III is, just below the Tower. You could then keep a pair in it the whole time, and they could just nip out as soon as the weather got fine, and be on the Tower in a couple of hours.’
‘It would be a hell of a job getting materials up, though, wouldn’t it?’ said Derek.
‘I don’t know,’ said Don. ‘All you need is a solid framework, and you could make the walls out of tarpaulin.’
‘There’s a lot of timber in Juan’s wine store,’ said Vic. ‘I’m sure he’d let us use it. It would be ideal for the frame. We cut it to size down here and then carry the whole lot up.’
Don and Vic went off to find materials for the box. Thus was born an important new concept in expedition tentage, which was to enable us to beat the high winds of Patagonia on this trip, and which, eight years later, in a more sophisticated form, was to play a vital part in our ascent of the South Face of Annapurna.
The presence of the Italians had acted as a catalyst, giving us a stronger sense of purpose and unity than we had had for some time. That night, as we prepared the communal tent for our reception, there was an atmosphere of almost childish gaiety. Wendy, wearing a pullover of brightly coloured patches, looked positively seductive, curled up on one of the camp beds.
‘We’ll have to leave you here on your own to receive the Italians,’ suggested Derek. ‘You might be able to turn their thoughts to other things.’
Meanwhile, Don and John Streetley were fooling around, Don climbing on John’s shoulders, dressed in a long cagoule, to resemble a misshapen seven-foot giant. We were all excited, talking louder than normal, getting a kick out of the potential threat of the situation. It was the feeling of people about to go to war – a little apprehensive, yet excited at the same time.
And then the Italians arrived. There were more handshakes, a pretence at bonhomie, but the conversation soon lagged – apart from anything else, we spoke too little of each other’s language.
I found myself sitting next to an Italian called Nusdeo. We talked in broken French, our only mutual language, and quickly exhausted the normal conversational gambits of what each had climbed, and whether we had any mutual climbing acquaintances. He had been on the North Wall of the Eiger only a few days before Ian and me, making the first true Italian ascent. And then the conversation lulled. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I asked if they intended to tackle the South Tower. He looked embarrassed, muttered something about being obliged to go for the Central, for this was the objective their club had sent them to tackle. There was a strained silence in the room, and the Italians left soon after.
As they trooped out of the tent there was an even stronger sense of unity and determination in our group.
Don summed up everyone’s feelings when he said, ‘If those buggers think they’re going to push me around, they’ve got another thing coming to them.’
I don’t know what the Italians made of us. They must have noticed the huge pile of empty beer bottles outside the tent. We had been in the area for a month, and had obviously made very little progress; at this stage, they had no concept of how savage the weather could be – that the principal problem of climbing in Patagonia was mere survival in the high winds rather than technical difficulty. We were a good deal younger than they, and seemed less well-organised. I suspect we had much the same appearance as Britain did to the Germans in 1940 – disorganised, few in numbers, and fairly contemptible.
‘We’ve got to have it out with them,’ said Don, ‘and find out just what they’re planning to do. If we’re not careful, they’ll be shinning up our fixed ropes.’
‘How about formulating some simple questions with a “yes” or “no” answer?’ I suggested. ‘We can then go over to see them tomorrow and nail them down to some kind of commitment.’
‘That sounds all right,’ agreed Don. ‘What we want to know is – are they going for the Central Tower or not. If so, do they intend to use our col? And if they do, are they thinking of using our fixed ropes? If they do, some bugger’s going to get a bloody nose.’
Next morning, Don, Barrie and I went over to the Italian camp. Barrie acted as spokesman, asking the questions we had formulated the previous night. Their leader repeated Nusdeo’s assertion that they had to tackle the Central Tower, since this was what their club had financed them to climb. He also complained bitterly that they had no idea that an expedition called the South Patagonia Survey Expedition could possibly have designs on difficult rock peaks.
Barrie ignored this complaint and went on to the next question. ‘Well then, are you going from the Col Bich?’ This was the col between the North and Central Towers. It also gave the only obvious route up the Tower. The answer was ‘yes’ once again.
‘But we are already established on the Col Bich with fixed ropes going up one crack line. You don’t intend to use our fixed rope, do you?’
They showed every sign of indignation that we should even make such a suggestion. Taldo, a big tough character, who was the most friendly and outgoing of the Italians, was very positive, smashing his fist into his hand to emphasise his assertions that they wanted an Italian route, a solely Italian route, up the Central Tower, totally separate from any ‘voie Britannique’. There was no sign of Aste; and Aiazzi, his climbing partner, just sat it out in the corner, his face expressionless.
We returned to our camp and Don, Vic, John Streetley and Ian Clough, the practical men of the expedition, began building the prefabricated hut – our secret weapon to beat the Tower. Don Whillans and Vic Bray were the craftsmen, cutting the timbers to the right length and marking out the tarpaulins. At the end of the day, they had completed the hut, tacking the framework together and fitting over it the tarpaulin shell. Even the hinged door was complete, with its written inscription, HOTEL BRITANNICO — MEMBERS ONLY. Each component was then numbered and the hut was dismantled, ready to be carried to the foot of the Central Tower.
It was New Year’s Eve, and that night the bachelors welcomed it in with a hard drinking session. The feeling of unity in the group, engendered by the presence of the Italians, was still not sufficient to overcome their resentment of the girls’ presence, and they preferred to celebrate in masculine seclusion. As a result, I slipped away early, and was asleep well before the arrival of 1963. I woke early to the sound of rain pattering on the tent.
The weather was as bad as ever, but I was anxious to get the prefabricated hut established as soon as possible so that we could take full benefit from the first break in the weather. There was a risk that the Italians, reaching the col and forcing the crack line to the side of the pedestal which we had climbed, would establish their route in the big groove that was the main feature of this facet of the Tower and, seemingly, the only way up it.
Capturing the enthusiasm of the rest of the team was no easy matter. The Base tent was surrounded by the debris of the night before, and they all had splitting hangovers.
‘What’s the point of going up in this kind of weather?’ said Derek. ‘The Italians aren’t going to do anything on a day like this. Remember, they don’t even know the way up through the forest yet.’
‘But we’ve got to keep our advantage,’ I replied. ‘God knows, it’s little enough. They’ve only got to push one pitch up from the col and they’ll be out in front. Short of having a dobbing match halfway up the Tower, we’d never get past them. We must get a pair established below the Tower as soon as possible.’
‘I agree with Chris,’ said Don. ‘Now that we’ve got the box made we want to get it into position quickly.’
‘In that case, how about getting our camp on the glacier pulled back into the woods today? That will give us a secure intermediate camp. We can then carry the box up tomorrow and erect it at the site of Camp III,’ I suggested.
‘Sounds all right,’ said Don.
And that settled it; with Don on my side, the rest soon agreed to abandon the comfort of Base Camp, and return to the front line.
It was nine o’clock in the morning before we were ready to set out. The dismantled hut weighed, with all its timber beams and heavy tarpaulin, about 250 pounds, but divided amongst the seven of us, the loads were a reasonable weight, though some of the timbers were awkwardly long. We left camp surreptitiously, anxious to avoid being seen by the Italians with our secret weapon. Progress up the Ascencio Valley was slow; the rest were suffering from severe hangovers, and the seven-foot-long timbers kept getting caught in the branches of trees and undergrowth. Once out of the forest and on the glacier, it was even worse. The wind whipped across the snow, treating the timbers of the box as sails. It was difficult, anyway, to keep one’s footing on the snow-covered boulders of the moraine, and in the wind we were blown about like a helpless flotilla of dinghies, capsizing in hidden snowdrifts and foundering amongst the jumble of hidden rocks. It was three o’clock before we reached the camp on the glacier. The cave we had excavated under the boulder was full of snow and the gear and food were buried beneath it, a mess of unwashed pans and broken food boxes.
‘You left the place in a hell of a mess,’ I told Barrie. ‘Couldn’t you have washed up and sorted the place out before coming down?’
‘You’d have left it in no better state,’ he replied. ‘It’s all very well to talk, but it was all we could do to keep the tent up, the wind was so bad.’
‘So bloody what! You could still have done a bit of tidying up. We’re not on a Boy Scouts’ picnic, you know.’
But almost as my temper flared, I felt ashamed of my lack of control. It was an anger born from the cold driving wind, and my resentment of the invidious position in which I had been placed in relation to the other members of the expedition because of Wendy’s presence in base camp. In the micro-world of an expedition the pettiest details, like an unwashed pan or an irritating mannerism, are blown up out of all proportion.
But there was no time for anger now. We were battered and half-frozen by the winds, and only had a few hours of daylight to retreat to the woods and put up a new camp. We grabbed tents, cooking stoves and a few dirty pots and pans, and fled back down the glacier to the woods. In these conditions, the mere act of living, trying to stay dry in a waterlogged tent, lighting a fire from wet wood, took up all our energies. During the entire period we had been in the vicinity of the Central Tower of Paine, we had had only about two hours of technical climbing; the rest of the time had been taken up in our losing struggle with the weather.
When we woke in the morning, everything was muffled and quiet. We were near the height of the southern summer, and yet the scene outside the tent could have graced a classic Christmas card, with every branch weighed down by snow. We were so exhausted from the previous day that it was eleven o’clock before everyone had emerged from their sleeping bags and breakfast was cooked.
‘I think we should try to get the hut up today,’ said Don.
‘Christ, have a heart,’ said Derek. ‘I’m shattered, and I think we all are. Can’t we leave it until tomorrow? The Italians won’t get in front of us in this.’
‘Okay. Fair enough, but we must get it up tomorrow.’
‘We’re going to need some more food as well,’ I suggested. ‘Someone had better go back for some.’
‘Well, what about you and Barrie?’ said Don. ‘You’ve got your women waiting down there for you.’
And so it was agreed. Barrie and I set out through the forest, all silent, rather mysterious and very beautiful under its mantle of snow. We heard the sound of distant talking.
‘Could be the Italians,’ said Barrie.
‘We’d better avoid them,’ I suggested. ‘The less they know about our movements the better.’
And we slunk through the trees like a pair of partisans; I must confess, I’ve always had a fondness for playing at soldiers and, on the whole, found the Italian threat thoroughly stimulating.
We returned the following day with big loads of food, to arrive just after the others had returned from putting up the box. They were all jubilant. It had been a savage day, blowing hard and snowing in gusts, but in spite of this they had lugged the timbers up to the site of Camp III, and had erected the hut in position. That night I felt a tremendous feeling of affectionate loyalty to the others. We seemed, at last, to be on the way to beating the elements. The camp in the woods was well sheltered and storm-proof, and, with a bit of luck, the hut would stand up to anything the wind could do round the foot of the Towers.
‘We’ve put it up, so you and Barrie might as well go and sleep in it tomorrow,’ said Don.
‘That’s all right by me,’ I replied, and let myself drift off into contented sleep. Next morning I woke to the sound of the wind howling through the tops of the trees and the patter of snow on the roof of the tent. I stayed in my sleeping bag, reading, delaying the moment of decision when I should have to leave the comfort of the camp in the woods for our vigil high on the flanks of the Paine.
Don shook me out of my lethargy. ‘Well then, are you going up the hill today?’
It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d barely have time to reach the hut before dusk. The weather seemed to be clearing, with patches of blue being torn in the high flying cloud; and then the clouds themselves began to disintegrate into broken gossamer that merged pearly grey with the brilliant blue of the sky. The covering of snow that had made the going so difficult two days before had now been blasted away by the wind to fill the dip between the moraine ridge and the slope leading up to the Towers. Following the crest of the ridge we were able to reach the site of our former Camp II quite easily, but in a matter of minutes the weather changed yet again. As we collected a few extra tins of food from the dump we had left in the cave, there was a roar of wind. It raced down the slopes of the Paine, its front defined by a crest of swirling powder snow, and hit us with a solid force, hurling us to the ground. All I could do was cling to a rock, fearful lest I should be blown away – load and all. Our progress became little more than a crawl between gusts, as wave upon wave of wind rolled down and engulfed us in its demonic fury. I was tempted to turn back, but kept going on two scores: partly out of anxiety for the state of the hut, wondering whether anything might have worked loose in the wind, but more, I suspect, from a fear of appearing to be weak in the eyes of the others.
The hut was still standing, a solid haven against the fury of the wind. It was about seven feet long, five feet broad and four feet high; squat, ugly, yet completely functional – the only habitation that we could have carried up from the valley and which would stand up to the winds.
We spent three nights in the hut and each day tried to make progress on the Tower. I was convinced that we had to climb in the bad weather and high winds, even if it only meant making token progress, so that the moment the weather did improve we should be poised to make a bid for the summit. It was easy to formulate such a plan in the comfort of Base Camp, but the reality of wind-battered rock and ice vanquished resolution. It was all we could do the first day to struggle up to the foot of the Tower and improve the line of ropes we had left on our previous visit. The following day it had started to snow, but hoping that this might be accompanied by a drop in the strength of the wind, I persuaded Barrie to come out once again. The rocks were covered by a white blanket; what had been a walk the previous day was turned into a precarious climb; ropes were concealed and, once discovered, were coated in ice. It was as bad as climbing the North Wall of the Eiger in a winter’s blizzard. We reached the Notch, to find the rocks ice-plastered and ropes frozen in wire-like tangles. My resolve faltered, faced by the sheer immensity of discomfort and cold, and the snow that plastered the rocks, penetrated clothing, froze hands. So often, climbing becomes a battle between resolution and self-indulgence. How far can one force one’s body on in face of such discomfort? My emotions said ‘fight on’, but common sense counselled retreat. After all, we could only climb a few feet beyond the high point on a day like this, and with a good 2,000 feet to go, it became pointless when balanced with the risk and suffering we would undergo for so tiny a gain. We turned back, and as we went down the clouds began to scatter, the wind dropped and the sun began to warm us. Should we turn back and have another go at making progress? I looked at Barrie, wondered if I dared suggest it, but then abandoned the idea. The best part of the day was gone and we were established in retreat.
Don Whillans and Ian Clough were waiting for us at the hut. It was their turn to stand sentry, and it looked as if the weather might at last show us some favour. We pressed on down to Base Camp for a rest – I, torn between the pleasure of seeing Wendy and the longing to be back on the mountain, obsessed by the fear that Don and Ian might snatch a couple of days’ fine weather to climb it while I was resting.
They did have one fine day – enough to make the first real progress after six weeks on the Tower. This was the first sunny, windless day we had experienced since the first few days after our arrival. The snow vanished in a matter of hours; the rock was warm to the touch and it was as pleasant as climbing in the Llanberis Pass on a hot summer’s day. They quickly scaled the wire ladder that John and I had left just before Christmas, and then reached the top of the pedestal which leaned against the main mass of the Tower. Their way was now barred by a region of smooth, steep slabs, leading into the centre of the face where a great, open corner swept up into its upper reaches. This seemed to be the only obvious line.
Don spent the entire day working his way across the smooth, blank slabs. There were few holds for hands or feet; hardly any cracks to hammer in a piton for running belays. A slip could very easily have been fatal. He reached the foot of the great corner just as dusk was falling. He was tempted to spend the night there and carry on next day, but they had barely adequate bivouac kit, and a line of high-flying clouds was building up over the ice cap – a sure sign that the weather was reverting to normal. Next morning the wind was hammering once again on the walls of the Whillans Box.
The Italians had used the one fine day to carry a tent up to a ledge a few hundred feet above our Box, close under the base of the Tower. But they soon learnt, the hard way, that no tent can stand up to the fury of a Patagonian gale. It was blown down during the night, and the following morning, discomfited, they retreated to the woods.
A few days went by. John Streetley and I had another sojourn at the hut, tried to force a route beyond Don Whillans’ high point, but were beaten by the cold and wind. You could only climb rock as steep and hard as this in perfect conditions. We too retreated to the woods, pursued by the fury of the wind, which, even in the shelter of the tree trunks, threatened to destroy our tents. We were now running short of food, but no one was keen to go down to Base to collect more, for fear that the weather might improve while he was away, and the Tower be climbed in his absence.
‘How about tossing for who should go down?’ I suggested.
‘I don’t know. If two go down, every bugger might as well go down,’ said Don. ‘This weather isn’t going to improve for a few days.’
Eventually Derek and Ian decided to continue the siege at the hut, hoping for a further good day, but the rest of us abandoned the camp in the woods, and headed back for the flesh-pots of the estancia. That night we had a drinking session. Don and I happened to go out for a pee at the same time. We stood looking up at high cloud, scudding across the moonlit sky. We looked at each other.
‘I don’t think we’ve miscalculated,’ he said.
‘You know, Don, we’ve avoided each other up to now – I think we’d best get together.’
‘Aye, I’ve been thinking on the same lines. We’d better do the next spell on the hill together.’
I had a tremendous feeling of relief after this conversation. During the expedition Don and I had sensed a definite strain in our relationship. This had stemmed, in large part, from the previous summer, which we had spent together with our wives in the Alps. The main objective had been the North Wall of the Eiger. We had made one attempt together, had become involved in the rescue of another British climber after his companion had been killed at the top of the Second ice-field, and had then gone off to Austria.
We had pitched our tents next door to each other at the camp site in Innsbruck, and then led almost completely separate existences, except when we came together to climb. Once on the mountain, we climbed superbly well together, but in the valley we had too little in common, were too different in temperament. I respected him, couldn’t help liking him, but our backgrounds and attitudes to life were too different for us to achieve any kind of intimacy. Don is shrewd, very calculating, makes up his mind after careful thought and then sticks to his decision to the point of stubbornness. On the other hand, I tend to be impulsive, very often plunge into a commitment on an emotional impulse, and then feel forced to change my mind after more mature reflection.
At the end of the summer the weather had, at last, shown signs of improvement, but Don had agreed to give a lecture in England at the beginning of September. In his position I should probably have cancelled the lecture, but Don had settled in his own mind that the climbing holiday was over, and that, as far as he was concerned, was that! The girls were to hitch-hike back, while Don and I took his motorbike, planning to complete one last climb, the North Wall of the Badile. We then drove back to Chamonix; the weather was still perfect and I, therefore, decided on impulse to stay on, and snatch another climb. Ian Clough was also without a partner, and so we went up to climb the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, realised how well we were going together and dashed off to the North Wall of the Eiger. We completed it in near-perfect conditions. It represented a superb climax to a long summer, both in terms of climbing experience – for I don’t think I have ever been so much in tune with the mountains, moving so well, or being so very fit – and also as the means of launching out into a new career. The successful ascent had brought a commission to write a book, lectures and newspaper articles. It had also shown the risks involved in selling a story to the popular press, when one’s own words can be taken out of context, and sensationalised.
Don had written me a very bitter letter, accusing me, with some justice, of having cheapened the entire climb by what I had said afterwards. Inevitably, I think there was some bitterness as well. Don had always, at that time, seemed to have missed the boat. In his partnership with Joe Brown he had been overshadowed, and it had been Joe, not he, who had been invited to go to Kangchenjunga. He had been on two Himalayan expeditions at a later stage, but these had lacked the aura of romance and importance that surrounded the third-highest summit of the world. Through no fault of his own, the first expedition, to Masherbrum, had failed. On the second, to Trivor, he had worked so hard in the early stages he fell sick at the time of the summit assault, and therefore had to stand down.
I think my opportunism and material success inevitably acted as a barb to a relationship that was fragile anyway. At last, under the stress of circumstances, and the sheer scale of the problem that the Paine presented, our differences seemed unimportant. Climbing together on the Central Tower of Paine we should undoubtedly be faster and more effective than if we split up and climbed with any other member of the team.
And so, that night, on the 13th January, we agreed to climb together.
All we needed now was a fine day.