‘Where shall we live? How about Wales? Or the Lakes? Or perhaps even the Peak District?’ This was a freedom I had never known before and which, I suppose, comparatively few people ever know. Where I lived had always been conditioned by my work, first for the army, and then for Unilever.
But now I was a freelance – in what, at this stage, I wasn’t at all sure. We got back to England at the end of March. Our possessions consisted of a few clothes, plenty of books, Wendy’s guitar and paints and my climbing gear. I had spent most of the money I had made from climbing the North Wall of the Eiger on taking Wendy with me to South America. I now had an advance of £500 for the book I had been commissioned to write by Livia Gollancz of Victor Gollancz. But most of this went on our first essential, a vehicle to get around in. We bought a brand-new Minivan – the first vehicle I had ever owned.
The immediate future was quite clear: I had my book to write and in the autumn I had some lectures. Beyond that I wasn’t at all sure, and, in fact, downright frightened. People had a habit of asking, ‘How long can you keep up this climbing business?’
‘Oh, well into my forties,’ I’d reply.
‘Yes, but what are you going to do then?’ they’d ask.
I’d put on a brave front and reply, ‘Well, I’m going into the communications game – to learn how to write and talk about climbing. If I can do that successfully, I’ll be able to make a real career of it.’ They’d look sceptical, and I’d felt little conviction in what I had explained.
But in the present, there was a book to write – my first venture in the communications game – and I put off starting it time and again, frightened of the sheer scale of the project, of all those words I should have to spew forth. At that stage my total writing experience consisted of four articles in mountaineering club journals; and so I chased after easy alternatives, and there were no shortage of these.
Immediately on our return I was involved in making a commentary to Vic Bray’s film of the Central Tower. Don and I had taken no film at all on our push for the summit, and Vic had been down in the valley; we were therefore desperately short of climbing footage, and so the BBC hinted that perhaps we might try to ‘find’ some film of the summit assault – good, close-up material of pitons being bashed in, hands going on to holds, and so on. Time was short, money shorter, and so we decided to shoot the necessary sequences near Don’s home.
‘I know just the place,’ he said.
Our ‘Potted Paine’ was in a quarry high above a Yorkshire valley, near the village of Heptonstall. Below us, the chimneys of the mills jutted like granite needles out of the smog. The rock itself was steep enough, though it was stained black by centuries of pollution and the texture was coarser than that of granite. Most embarrassing were the initials and messages carved into the rock. Vic had his work cut out to avoid filming either the factories in the background or the graffiti on the quarry wall – even so, there crept into the corner of one of the sequences used in the film to depict our summit assault, a rough-hewn heart inscribed ‘Kate loves John’.
To bolster our lack of film still further, the BBC built a ten-foot-high replica of the Tower, round which I had to peer as I made my commentary direct to camera. It was the first time I had ever been in front of a TV camera, and I was so nervous I could barely keep the quaver out of my voice as I read the script from the autocue.
While I was in London I met a long-lost cousin who was something – I’m not sure what – in television. He was quite a bit older than myself, very sophisticated, and had all kinds of important connections. My appetite for filming had been whetted, and I mentioned to him a scheme that was in my mind.
‘How about making a film on the North Wall of the Eiger – a documentary of a complete ascent?’
My cousin knew just the man to finance such a venture, a man who had various television interests in the former Commonwealth. I went to a sumptuous office off Sloane Street, and was immediately in a strange world – it seemed almost straight out of a TV spy thriller. I was very much at sea as we talked of a £50,000 budget, production companies, and so on. But I went ahead and invited various climbing friends to join the bonanza – Whillans, Clough, Patey, MacInnes and several others. We were all going to spend the summer below the Eiger, playing at film stars. It seemed too good to be true – it was. I was handed over to an assistant, who handed me on to someone else, and from buoyant enthusiasm they became more and more cautious, until eventually the entire scheme fizzled out. This was a period of enjoying an ephemeral little glitter, of being a minor celebrity – something that had never happened to me before. I was eager to snatch at every opportunity to get myself established as a writer, film-maker, what-have-you, in an effort to find a clearly defined career.
Making a living around climbing was nothing new, even in 1962. Frank Smythe had done it successfully before the war, through his writing, photography and lecturing. Edward Whymper could, perhaps, be described as the first climbing journalist, though of course his income was primarily based on his profession as proprietor of a wood-engraving firm. In the post-war period, Alf Gregory and some of the other Everest climbers had made a fair amount of money by lecturing, but there was still a strong feeling of amateurism in the sport. I was often asked at lectures, ‘Are you using the fee to finance your next expedition?’ as if there were almost something slightly nasty about using the fee as part of one’s income.
We had still not decided where to live. Wendy, at this stage, was uncommitted to any one area, provided that it was deep in the country. We had had six months together in a furnished room in Hampstead before going to Patagonia, and that was enough for her of London living. I felt the same, and obviously wanted to live in a mountain area. Originally, we had planned to settle in Wales, with the hope that I could get into the University College of North Wales at Bangor, but this seemed no longer necessary.
I was attracted to the Lake District, partly perhaps because I had done comparatively little climbing there, but also because it has a quality of beauty lacking in Wales. Snowdonia has a grandeur that is difficult to match anywhere south of the Border, but it is a beauty that is somehow alien to man. The farms and cottages suggest harsh austerity, unsoftened by hedgerows or gardens. Somehow, they don’t seem to belong. The Lakes, on the other hand, are altogether softer, and more varied in their appeal. Each valley has its own special character. Man has succeeded in becoming an integral part of the country, with the cottages and houses blending into the hills as if they were an essential part of the landscape. There are more trees in the valleys, hedgerows intermingle with stone walls, and even on the open fell, there is a lighter, warmer quality.
And so we settled for the Lakes, loaded our brand-new Minivan with our few possessions – sleeping bags, Wendy’s guitar and paints, my climbing gear – and drove north. We were under the happy illusion that we should be able to find a charming country cottage for about £1 per week. We were soon disillusioned. The summer season was nearly upon us and holiday cottages were at a premium. Even a two-roomed cottage could cost as much as £10 per week.
We stayed with friends in Keswick and started hunting. After a week, we had looked at a dozen cottages, had chased after several long-odds tips, had even applied for a council house in Mungrisdale, though, not surprisingly, failed to get it.
We were beginning to give up hope of finding something that we could afford, and were even thinking of looking for a cottage in the Peak District, when we called in at the Royal Oak, in Ambleside, one Sunday lunchtime to have a drink. I began talking to the barman, and it emerged that he was a climber. After working through the normal climbing gossip of mutual friends, we mentioned that we were looking for somewhere to live.
‘If you’re really desperate, I know a place near here,’ he said. ‘I stayed in it myself last winter. It’s a single room over a garage on a farm. It’s pretty rough, but at least it’s a roof over your heads.’
This was to be the first time I had met Mick Burke, and it was to be another two years before we met again. At this stage, he was just one of the lads who had chucked up regular jobs to live in the hills with the minimum of work and the maximum of climbing. He came from Wigan, had started as an insurance clerk, but had quickly tired of a routine nine-to-five job, and had spent the previous year around Ambleside, doing a bit of labouring, or working the bar in the Royal Oak when he felt in need of a rest.
We left without further delay, and drove to Loughrigg Farm to see if the room was still vacant. The farmer warned us – ‘It’s a bit rough, you know.’
It was. An outdoor staircase led up from the farmyard to a small balcony. A peeling wooden door opened into a fair-sized room, lit by a couple of windows. The walls were of bare plaster, brown with dirt, and traced with a network of cracks. The floor was covered with rotting linoleum, which had long lost its colour, and the room was furnished with a few pieces of battered furniture that had probably been rescued from a refuse dump. The nearest water was from a tap in the yard and the sanitary facilities were limited to an earth closet, most primitive and smelly of all toilets, placed at the back of a pigsty. Set in the backstreets of a city it would have been unbelievably sordid, but here, in the heart of some of the most beautiful country either of us had ever lived in, it didn’t seem to matter.
Loughrigg is on the southern edge of the Lake District, nestling amongst the broken foothills that spill down from the Langdale Pikes. From the balcony outside the door we could gaze across the farmyard, over the spring green grass of a field, dotted with clusters of Scots pine and larch, to the still waters of Loughrigg Tarn. A scattering of elm, still bare of leaves, ringed the lake, and beyond it, breaking up the fields and part-concealing other farm houses, grey-barked spinneys’ arms intertwined, merged with the darkling green of spruce forest. This, in turn, mingled with the open fell leading up to the Langdale Pikes, picked out by the waning snows.
We lived in Loughrigg for three months, and were able to watch the explosion of colour, of every shade of green, that takes place each spring in this part of the Lake District. I did comparatively little climbing, in part surfeited by our expedition to Patagonia. I was still working on my project to film the North Wall of the Eiger. When that fell through, I thought up a more modest scheme, with the hardy Scot, Hamish MacInnes, to make a low-budget film of the North Wall of the Matterhorn. This was to fill the summer of 1963.
In the meantime, we continued a desultory search for a more comfortable home, and eventually stumbled on one through the good offices of Heaton Cooper, the Lakeland artist. We had never met the Heaton Coopers, but a mutual friend had told them about us. They called on our garret one afternoon when we were out, and left a note inviting us round for coffee.
Several other people were there, and soon the conversation turned to finding somewhere for the Boningtons to live. Fenwick Patterson, another artist, who had abandoned the rat-race and settled in Coniston, thought he knew where we might find a furnished house. In a few days this led us to Woodland – to me, and happily to the vast majority of Lakeland visitors, an unknown corner of the Lake District. It is down in the south-west corner of the Lakes, between Coniston and Broughton-in-Furness. The road runs beneath Coniston Old Man, barely wide enough to take two cars, between a mixture of dry stone walls and hedgerows. You pass Torver, and on either side is the open fell – in no way mountainous, but with mysterious little hills clad in bracken – and then, round a bend, past a farm, you come to the signpost to Woodland, down a steep little tree-clad hill. It’s off the road, an oasis of green in the midst of the russet browns of bracken-clad hills. A newly-grown fir forest jostles with coppices of fine old deciduous trees, a few houses and farms spread on either side of the lane; you reach a signpost marked Woodland Hall, a makeshift cattlegrid, a rough, potholed drive; continue through a wood of young birch, past an artificial lake, full of weed, willows brushing the surface of the water: everything is overgrown, wild, attractive, up to the Hall itself.
We’re after the Lodge. It’s owned by the Dicksons, seed farmers from Essex, who have made their money from market gardening, and have now succumbed to the romance of the Lakes. They have bought the Hall, its attendant farm, and the Lodge, a cluster of buildings clinging just below the crest of a low ridge that bounds Woodland on its western flank. The Lodge is T-shaped, with the base of the T dug into the bank. In the front are two rooms on either side of the hall, and all look out on to Blow Knot Fell, a hump of hill that has an endearing beauty which grows on you as you look at it through the seasons; through the deep browns of autumn to spring, to the light, glistening green of the new sprouting bracken that dulls so very fast as the bracken grows, and which, even at full maturity, when it is a drab grey-green, ripples in the wind to make the hill seem live, capable of responding to the love it evokes.
And Woodland did evoke love – Wendy’s and my love for each other, and our love for the place itself. It was a backwater, hidden away from tourists, standing back from the bigger hills of the Lakes and looking across at them. The northern horizon is dominated by Coniston Old Man, framed in trees from the cottage, a graceful, near-symmetrical cone, unbalanced by the sweep of the ridge that embraces Low Water and hides Dow Crag in its grasp. From the top of the ridge, just below the houses, you can look across a marshy valley to another ridge, lower, field-clad, which guards the secret little valley of Broughton Mills. Beyond it, slightly higher, a third wave-like ridge, breaking here and there with rocky surf, guards the Duddon Valley. And then you look down the valley to the Duddon estuary – brown sands and mud flats only covered at high tide. At night there’s an angry glow at the end of the estuary from Millom Ironworks – ugly perhaps from close up, but from a distance, strangely beautiful.
But we hadn’t yet been accepted as tenants. We walk up to the door of the big house where we meet Ivor and Beeny Dickson – the Pattersons have warned them of our arrival. Ivor is a big, rather sleepy man who has learned to stay silent and allow the constant flow of his wife’s talk to continue, unheeded, past him; and Beeny, as we came to know her, is small, birdlike, with endless energy and a great capacity to be interested in the affairs of others. She had been planning to rent the Lodge as a holiday let, but on the promise of at least a year’s stay, to include the winter, she agreed to let us have it for £3 a week, fully furnished. We had been paying £5 a week for a single room in London.
And so we moved into Woodland Lodge. It had become increasingly important to find a firm base, for we were fairly certain that Wendy was pregnant. We had already had one false alarm on the boat back from South America, when she had missed a period. This had seemed appalling in the limbo we were in at that time, with no knowledge of where we were going to live, or what I was going to do. Wendy certainly did not want a child at this stage; she wanted a few more years of freedom, to develop her own work as an artist and, more to the point, to see something of the world. I, on the other hand, had mixed emotions. When I viewed the prospect of parenthood logically, it appalled me, but whenever I was drunk a deep-rooted desire to procreate took hold of me.
We were both superbly ignorant of the complexities of pregnancy, but Wendy took a series of ultra-hot baths and went in for violent exercise, on the off chance that this might cause a natural miscarriage. To our vast relief, she had her next period just after getting back to England, and in celebrating our narrow escape, using the laxest of lax rhythm methods, she conceived in earnest.
Now that we were established in the Lake District, parenthood became an easier idea to accept. We were quickly resigned, and then excited, at the prospect. Wendy was due to give birth around Christmas, 1963, and we decided that she should come out to the Alps for the summer, while we made our film on the Matterhorn. I succeeded in getting a small advance, and our film stock, from the BBC. Meanwhile, Hamish got everything else organised. I had known Hamish, off and on, over a period of ten years. On my first trip to Scotland, at the age of seventeen, I had met him and had been taken up a series of winter climbs. At this stage I had never climbed on snow and ice, and I was employed as a portable belay. We made the first winter ascent of Raven’s Gully (described in I Chose to Climb), and a couple of other routes.
Our paths had then split, mine into the army, while Hamish, always the lone individualist, had temporarily emigrated to New Zealand; had set out to climb Everest with another hard Scot, John Cunningham, and had then returned to Britain.
In 1957 we had climbed together again in equally bizarre circumstances. It was to be my first Alpine season, and Hamish had talked me into making an attempt on the North Wall of the Eiger. Fortunately for me, we did not get very far up the Wall before I found an excuse for retreat. It was a matter of out of the frying-pan into the fire, for he then persuaded me to try the other great North Wall of the Alps – the North Wall of the Grandes Jorasses. This attempt also ended in fiasco, when Hamish fell into a crevasse in the pitch dark.
The following year we climbed together once again, and ended up by making the first British ascent of the South-west Pillar of the Dru. This was the first time that I had met Don Whillans. Our present project was very different from these early adventures – then, we had been climbing for fun, now we were trying to make a film. In a way, this was to be my introduction to the problems associated with making a living out of the mountains.
Wendy and I drove out to the Alps in our Minivan, stopping at Chamonix on the way. The weather was perfect, and I was sorely tempted to snatch a climb before starting work in Zermatt – we were due to meet Hamish the following day – but my sense of duty won, and I thrust the temptation aside. Hamish was waiting for us in Zermatt and had already done some superb ground work. He had enlisted the support of the head of the local tourist office and, as a result, we had unrestricted free-access to all the telepheriques, subsidised accommodation in a chalet in the village, and a special concession for hut fees.
We had everything – but the weather. It broke a few days after we reached Zermatt, and never really improved throughout the summer. Hamish filmed goats, cows, tourists and the familiar local life of Zermatt. Ian Clough arrived to take part as one of the ‘stars’ – I being the other – and we all sat and ate and drank through the long, wet summer.
The only climb I did was an ascent of the Matterhorn by the Hornli Ridge, climbing solo with Hamish, jostling with the long queue which trailed its way to the top of the most famous mountain peak in Europe. On a good day up to 300 people have been to the summit – the majority of them tourists, who are hustled to the top by the local guides, and then raced down to enable the guide to get some rest before taking up the next pair. That summer the fee for an ascent of the Matterhorn was £14, and so in theory the guide could make a fair amount by shuttling clients from the Hornli Hut to the summit, getting back to the hut at midday, having an afternoon rest, meeting the next client and setting out at two o’clock the following morning. The amount he made, though, depended entirely on the weather, and during 1963 the guides must have had a lean time, for even the Hornli Ridge was out of condition for most of the summer.
The profession of guiding has changed a great deal in the last fifty years. In the old days, the local guide was very much the leader of the party, invested with the respect of his clients who, in their turn, were experienced mountaineers. In recent years, however, particularly since the war, the vast majority of climbers have ventured into the hills without guides. A few outstanding mountaineers, such as Walter Bonatti, Gaston Rébuffat, René Desmaison and Michel Darbellay, the Swiss climber who made the first solo ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger, have managed to preserve a select clientele of wealthy amateurs, who are also competent mountaineers, but the vast majority of guides are now dependent on the casual tourist, who would like to be taken to the top of a well-known mountain – Mont Blanc from Chamonix, the Matterhorn from Zermatt. As a result, both the status and ability of guides have declined. A man who spends most of his mountaineering career hauling clients up the Hornli Ridge of the Matterhorn, can gain only limited experience, and this must inevitably diminish the level of his prowess on the hills.
That summer saw the start of my real interest in photography. Up to this time I had always taken a camera with me on my climbs, but had been little more than a holiday snap shooter. Hamish was very interested in photography, and had his own firm ideas on the ideal camera – a massive, old, folding 2¼-inch square Zeiss Ikon which, inevitably, he had picked up at bargain price in a sale. Fired by his enthusiasm, I sank all our savings in a second-hand Hasselblad, which Hamish assured me was a fantastic bargain. It couldn’t have been more unsuitable for climbing. It is the Rolls-Royce of 2¼-inch square cameras – a single lens reflex camera, shaped like an oblong box, with interchangeable lenses and backs, to enable one to shoot different types of film without having to finish the spool.
It was bulky, heavy, and even the lens alone was worth about £100. In the hands of someone as unmechanical as myself, it was doomed to a hammering. But for the rest of that summer in Zermatt, I wandered round the foothills above the village taking chocolate-box pictures of mountains framed by trees, or reflected in little lakes. In doing so, I became more visually aware.
By early September, all the climbers had packed up and gone home, the snow was creeping down towards the valley, and an early winter seemed to have arrived. We returned to England.
A wasted summer? In a way, yes; but I had learned a great deal. Wendy, now six months pregnant, was beginning to bulge, and we could feel the movement of her babe in the womb. We were both becoming increasingly excited by our looming parenthood. In the past, I had always had a feeling of anti-climax at returning to England – there had been nothing there for me – but now, with Wendy, the prospect of returning to our little lodge at Woodland was immensely attractive. We were tired of the ordered prettiness of Switzerland. On the way back we stopped for only a day in London, and then hammered towards the Lakes. In the next two years I was to learn the way to Woodland all too well, as I drove, tired, rather depressed after frenetic lecture tours. But I came to know the landmarks of the return, and always felt a rising excitement as I got closer and closer.
The home stretch started at Leven’s Bridge, at the turning off the A6, on to the Barrow and Ulverston Road, round the southern part of the Lake District. The next marker was Newby Bridge, at the foot of Windermere – wooded hills, rocks breaking through – and then the dye works at Backbarrow. The road narrows and winds through the works itself – everything stained blue – and then on the right an old iron works which must be one of the oldest, and certainly the most decrepit, in England, with rusty machinery that blends into the landscape. I’m getting excited now, in spite of tiredness; swing round the bends, up the long straight, across the head of the Cartmell Estuary, take a short cut on to the Broughton Road, up narrow lanes, round blind corners, and then back to the main road – now narrower, like the upper reaches of a great river – up to Broughton Fell, swing right on the moorland road to Woodland – we’re nearly home – I feel a warm love of the place – could almost stop the car to get out and feel the turf at the side of the road. The fells are bracken-covered and the road winds across, unfettered by walls or hedge, over a final rise, and there’s Woodland beneath – the Hall and Lodge a squat, grey mass of buildings, clinging to the crest of a low ridge; beyond, in rolling waves, the hills of the Southern Lake District. This isn’t grand, awe-inspiring country, but neither is it pretty. There is a secret intimacy about its little valleys, tree-clad, winding their way into craggy fells.
We race down the hill, the engine, raucous, noisy, past the corrugated iron bungalow where we bought all our eggs, and then up the winding tree-covered drive to the Lodge.
The Lodge wasn’t a handsome house; the kitchen was incredibly damp, the rooms were box-like, with ceilings that were too high for their small size, and the sheets on our bed always felt a bit damp – but it didn’t matter, for the setting of the place was perfect. We both came to love the changing colours and tones of the bracken-clad hill opposite.
Back at Woodland, it was time for me to start writing my book – but there were also lectures to give, for we had now spent the advance, and were flat broke. Through the autumn and winter I made frequent forays to the south, lecturing about the Eiger until I knew the lecture parrot-fashion. It was lonely, depressing work, for I frequently spent several days, even weeks, away from home, living from my van, staying at a different place each night.
I felt very vulnerable, uncertain of the future, aware that my only asset was an ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger. My activities of the summer heightened these worries, for we had really failed in my first creative venture – we had not produced a film for the BBC. I had little idea of film technique, and my dreams of directing Hamish, who was the cameraman, had proved abortive – Hamish is eminently undirectable. He knew a lot more about filming than I, anyway, and knew exactly what he wanted to do.
We were becoming entrenched at Woodland, building up a circle of friends who, like us, had withdrawn from the conventional career game. There was Tony Greenbank, tall, lank, immensely enthusiastic about every scheme and project. He was my age, had been a librarian, but had always had an ambition to write. It was much harder for him to get started than it had been for me, for he was just an average climber, who got a great deal of enjoyment from his sport, but was in no way a celebrity.
He abandoned his job as a librarian and went to Eskdale Outward Bound School as an instructor, with the intention of using it as a tool to get established as a freelance writer. He was already married, which made his step still bolder. He soon became unpopular with some of his fellow instructors, who resented the fact that he was making money on the side by contributing articles to regional papers such as the Yorkshire Evening Post. It was this constantly recurring resentment of professionalism, and particularly of contributing to the media, and hence to the popularisation of climbing, that I had encountered. I suspect that there was often an element of jealousy in it – that you were making money out of something that was just a pastime for the majority. In Tony’s case, his fellow instructors’ resentment could hardly be based on grounds of professionalism, since they were also making a living out of climbing; I suspect it was a combination of straight jealousy, aligned with resentment of someone publicising their own private world.
Tony took a correspondence course in writing, and then resolved to give up his job at the Outward Bound School and work full-time as a freelance writer once he had reached a self-imposed target of annual earnings. It said much for his determination and sheer hard work that he reached this target in two years, whilst working at a job that was both physically exacting and time-consuming. He then bought a caravan in his native Yorkshire Dales, had his first child there, and somehow still managed to churn out his work. When I first met him in 1963, he had progressed to a small cottage at Arnside, near Kirkby Lonsdale, on the fringe of the Lake District.
Another aspirant writer we came to know was David Johnstone. Very different from Tony, he was small and slight, with a shock of dark hair and delicate features. He was an adept at judo. While Tony had few intellectual pretensions and was essentially a popular writer, David wanted to be a serious writer, and had already written several plays and a novel, sadly, all rejected.
He was the son of the local optician in Ulverston, had been sent to Rossall, a public school near Blackpool, and on leaving it had decided to devote his life to writing. For a time he had survived in London, writing during the day and busking with his violin in the evening – this was before the time when it became fashionable for hippies to pick up a living folk-singing in the passages of Underground stations.
He met his wife-to-be, Caroline, a big voluptuous girl, while flitting on the outskirts of the deb scene, and once they had married they took off to Northern Italy, where for a time they lived an idyllic life under the hot sun, with David writing and Caroline earning a little money by teaching English. Eventually, they were forced to return to England, and when we came to Woodland were living in a caravan near Coniston. Shortly after we arrived we were offered a farmhouse high on a hillside near the foot of the Duddon Valley. We were content with Woodland and so told David about it, and he moved in with his newborn child. They furnished the house from the pickings of a single auction sale, for the magnificent sum of £25. He needed much greater courage than I. He had no publicity to help him, was trying to establish himself as a serious playwright, and fought in the face of repeated rejection by publishers and theatres. He had to earn a living somehow, and so took a job in forestry – back-breaking, hard work, for a minimal wage. He lost this job when the foreman found him asleep in a ditch; and then, after a period on the dole, he found work in the tannery at Millom, hauling maggot-ridden hides and plunging them in the steaming curing-baths. There was no question of writing any longer – just one of brutish survival, of being penniless, desperately tired every night, and somehow trying to maintain a prickly pride in the face of seeming defeat.
Things at last improved when he managed to get the job of Duddon roadman. The pay was £10 a week, barely enough for food and rent, but he was comparatively free, could start the day when he wanted, and wander the roads with his broom and shovel, thinking his own thoughts.
On a fine day I often tempted him from the path of duty, and we would go off climbing on Wallabarrow Crag, nestling amongst trees in the bed of the Duddon, or disport ourselves on the Duddon School of Bouldering – a little array of crags I had discovered near the road.
And so 1963 slipped into 1964. The changing year was marked by the arrival of Conrad, our first child. He was born in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, 1963. I had wanted to be with Wendy at the birth, but had been confronted by the solid conservatism of a small local maternity home.
‘No one’s ever asked for anything like that,’ said the iron-willed matron. ‘We haven’t got the facilities, and anyway you’ve got to think of the feelings of the midwife.’
I wasn’t going to stop there, and phoned the chief gynaecologist of the area.
‘My dear chap, I’ve nothing at all against the husband being with his wife for the birth – it’s a personal matter and, I must say, as far as I’m concerned, I think it’s best to let the wife get on with it on her own. I’ve four kids, and I’ve never been with her – but that’s purely a matter of choice. I’d be delighted for you to be with your wife throughout, but I’m afraid we just haven’t got the facilities and, in her interests, I’ve got to say “No”.’
I didn’t have a leg to stand on; they allowed me to stay with Wendy during her initial contractions, but as soon as she went into the second phase she was wheeled into the delivery room and they tried to show me the door. I was probably unnecessarily stubborn, but I insisted on staying at the home. Wendy had a long and painful delivery, perhaps aggravated by the tension caused by the reliance she had placed in having me with her. She spent long hours awake through the night, a lot of the time on her own, unattended, while I spent the same long hours sitting upstairs waiting, helpless – it was all so unnecessary, since she needed me and I could have helped her and the midwife, but we were confronted by the solid prejudice of tradition.
In the later stages I could hear her crying out in pain, gasping and groaning. Had I been with her it would not have been frightening, since I would have been working with her, reassuring her and helping her in what small way I could; but sitting in an empty, cold little room, I could only imagine the worst. I became convinced that Wendy was dying, and, for about the first time in my life, actually knelt down and prayed, from my own absolute helplessness. At the same time I felt a tinge of shame, that I was only doing this as an emotional last resort, for I cannot claim to be a Christian and, if anything, am agnostic. There seems much that we cannot explain in purely physical and scientific terms; there might well be some kind of spiritual force, but it seems sheer wishful thinking to believe that this force is particularly concerned with mankind’s wellbeing – there is so much suffering in the world, so much ill done in the name of good, so much crime that does seem to pay. But that night, faced with the fear of losing Wendy, I was snatching at straws and went through an emotional hell, until at long last, at five o’clock in the morning, her raking gasps ceased and were replaced by the persistent raucous cry of a newborn child.
I was allowed down to see her, pale, exhausted, but wonderfully tranquil, and our tiny babe, freshly washed and incredibly ugly. After bandying a lot of names about, we settled on Conrad.
Once she returned to Woodland, life went on very much as before. We got around a lot, carrying the baby in his pram-top in the back of the van, on occasion leaving him in the van when we went to a pub. I had my lectures through the winter, and Wendy accompanied me to some of them. I also skirmished with the book and, as winter changed to spring, snatched every fine day to go climbing.
In many ways it was an idyllic life. Work pressures were few, since I only had the book to write and had not yet succeeded in getting established as a photo-journalist. Once the lecture season was over, I had long periods at home. In the evenings we played canasta, and at weekends, when friends arrived, endless games of Risk, a splendid game of world conquest. Wendy learned to drive and then became interested in folk singing. She already played the guitar and had a pure, haunting voice with an extraordinary emotionalism in it. After practising for some time, she screwed up her courage to sing at a folk-song club in Keswick, run by Paul Ross, a well-known Lakeland climber, with whom I had made the first British ascent of the South-West Pillar of the Dru back in 1958.
Those years of 1963 to 1965 were, in some ways, a limbo period. I had reached a peak in my Alpine career, with the ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger, and was now casting round to try to find the next step forward in my life. As far as climbing went, I had reached a plateau. I had attained a high level of competence in general mountaineering, but to push beyond this level needed a greater degree of organisation and a greater awareness of technical developments, especially those taking place on the West Coast of America in the Yosemite National Park.
That summer of 1964, I hoped to achieve the same level of satisfaction and excitement that Ian Clough and I had achieved in 1962, but I was destined to be disappointed.