May 1964. I had barely got halfway through my book and was already six months over deadline, but the Alpine season was pressing close and, after the previous year’s fiasco, my dreams turned increasingly to getting some good climbing. But what to climb – and with whom? Because of the pressures exerted by my commitment to the book, and my own lack of organisation, I had left everything up in the air.
Then I had a phone call from Tom Patey. ‘Would you like to come to the Alps with Joe and me? We’ve got some good new routes lined up; if you’re interested in coming I’ll let you know where they are.’
‘But who’d I be climbing with? A party of three’s no good.’
‘I’ve just the right man. His name is Robin Ford; I climbed with him last week in the Cairngorms.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t done much on the English scene, but he’s got what it takes to make a great alpinist – you’ll have your job cut out to keep up with him. Anyway, have you got anyone better in mind?’
I hadn’t; and so it was settled that I should climb with Tom Patey and Joe Brown that summer. I had only climbed with Joe once before, back in 1962. I was still working in London at the time, had come up to North Wales to climb with Don Roscoe, one of the original Rock and Ice members. When I had arrived he told me that he was unavoidably engaged but that Joe, who was working at White Hall, the Derbyshire outdoor activities centre, was up for the weekend and looking for a partner. I had never met him and was intrigued at the thought of climbing with the living legend of British mountaineering.
Joe was keen to finish a new route he had started the previous weekend on Castell Cidwm, a steep little crag on the south side of Snowdon above Llyn Cwellyn. We walked up to the crag, Joe was agreeable but not talkative; I was slightly on edge. I thought I was climbing well at the time, had made early ascents of many of Joe’s routes, and had often liked to think that I was in the same class as he, as a rock-climber. I have always been intensely competitive and could not resist wondering how my climbing would compare with his.
‘Do you want to have a go first?’ said Joe ‘I had to turn back last week; you might have a bit more luck. You’ll need a lot of chockstones.’
This was in the pre-nut era, when, to protect themselves, climbers still relied on what the rock offered – rock spikes for slings (often only nylon line with a breaking strain of a bare 1,000 lb.) or chockstones jammed in cracks. Joe was probably one of the earliest, and certainly one of the most sophisticated exponents of the inserted chockstone – you carried a pocketful of stones with you and jammed them in the crack. It was a fiddling, intriguing business, demanding a fair level of skill.
The year 1962 was when someone – I’m not sure who – had the idea of stringing bolt-nuts of different sizes on to a sling and using these in place of chockstones. Since then, these nuts have been refined into a series of shapes, tailor-made for their purpose. In many ways, I suspect that this was a retrograde step, for it enabled the climber to gain protection from running belays in places where protection would have been impossible with inserted chockstones or the traditional flake runner. One of the attractions, indeed reasons, for climbing, is the element of risk involved, of pitting one’s own judgement against the mountain, with a fall as the price of a mistake. In its purest sense, the solo climber is getting the most out of the sport since he is staking his life on his judgement. Without companions or rope, he has a good chance of being killed in a fall. The majority of us, however, prefer to hedge our bets, climbing with a companion, using a rope and then contriving running belays to reduce the distance we fall if we do come off. The problem is in deciding just how far we should reduce this risk before losing a vital element in the sport.
There has always been a tradition in British rock climbing that has renounced the use of pitons. Since the war, with rising standards of difficulty, and with the progressive encroachment on to every available piece of rock in the country, pitons have become increasingly used when no other means of protection or of natural ascent have offered themselves; but there has always been a stigma attached to their use, and credit has gone to the man who has succeeded in repeating a route with less such aid than his predecessors. The development of the nut and metal wedge has not been accompanied by any such stigma, even though its resemblance to a piton is very close. Both pitons and nuts are metallic foreign bodies that are being slotted into cracks. The obvious difference is that pitons are driven in by a hammer, while the nut, in theory, is only hand-inserted. It is all too easy, however, to apply a few taps of a hammer to the nut to lodge it more securely. Does this turn it into a piton? I wonder. On the other hand, a piton can, on occasion, be hand-inserted. Does this make it a nut?
The development of the nut was a gradual, insidious process which, as a result, roused little controversy and today, in 1972, it is difficult to imagine any kind of effective rejection of nuts proving practical; but back in the early 1960s they could have been rejected in exactly the same way that the pitons had been and still are. If an ethic or rule had been established that any foreign body, metal or plastic wedge, jammed or placed in a crack, should be regarded as cheating, the sport might have maintained a higher level of adventure or risk, and at the same time, I suspect, would have reached the same level of technical difficulty in the routes being pioneered. The difference would have been that fewer climbers could have repeated the hardest routes, simply because the risks involved, and therefore the self-confidence required, would have been greater. I must confess, though, that I use as many nuts as anyone and certainly depend on them to maintain my own climbing standard.
But I have digressed. Joe and I are standing below Castel Cdwm. The rock juts steeply above, in a series of bristling overhangs, cut by a broken crack. If I had been with anyone but Brown, I think I would have suggested we went somewhere else, but I wasn’t going to back down in his company. I collected my pocketful of stones, jammed a hand in the crack and pulled upwards – at least there were holds, but it was all overhanging. I began to tire. Ten feet up, the angle lay back to what, from below, had seemed a slab, but once on it I found I was off balance and I couldn’t find any holds.
‘Where did you go from here?’ I shouted down.
‘Up the slab,’ came the reply. ‘You can get some good inserted chocks in the crack above.’
But how the hell to get to the crack above! Suddenly, the cliff seemed to grow above me as my arms progressively weakened. I hammered in a peg.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ came from below. ‘I got above there last time without a peg.’
I dangled on it; my arms felt like stretched spaghetti. The climb was undoubtedly impossible.
‘You’d better have a go,’ I conceded.
Back down, I took over Joe’s rope, and spent the rest of the day watching him at work. It was an impressive sight. He was very methodical and completely relaxed. He drifted up the holdless slab, then at full, elongated arm’s reach, placed a tiny stone in the crack above, threaded a sling behind it and sat in the sling. And so he slowly worked his way up the climb.
When I followed him, I got up the pitch quite quickly, cursed myself for turning back, for surely I also could have inserted all those chockstones. It’s just a matter of patience – or is it? It was beyond my conception before the start of the climb that chockstones could be used so ingeniously. It was also beyond my ability to relax sufficiently in a lead position to keep going.
On that first acquaintance I had found Joe easy-going, friendly, yet somehow withdrawn. There is something inscrutable about both his features and his personality. He once admitted to me: ‘I don’t think anyone really knows me – not even my wife, Valerie.’
He was very different from Don Whillans, and you could see why they had fallen apart. Joe and Don between them had made a revolution in British rock-climbing, putting up a series of routes, most of which held a legendary aura of being impossible for any but a breed of supermen of much the same shape and size as Don and Joe – in other words, fairly short and prodigiously strong. They were probably equally good as climbers; Don was attracted by obvious, very direct, usually vicious lines up crags that were often very poorly protected. Joe tended to go for more devious lines, less obvious, but nevertheless superb routes. In sheer volume of new routes, Joe climbed by far the largest number. This was partly because Don began to lose interest in British rock-climbing, preferring the sterner and fresher environment of the Alps, and then the Himalaya. Although Joe has always admitted that he prefers light-hearted rock-climbing to greater mountaineering, his record is impressive. In 1955 he went out to Kangchenjunga with the comparatively lightweight party led by Charles Evans, and went to the summit. The following year he joined Tom Patey, Ian McNaught-Davis and John Hartog, on an expedition to the Mustagh Tower, and also reached the summit. This must rank as one of the outstanding mountaineering achievements of the fifties, for the Mustagh Tower is 23,860 feet, and one of the steepest and most shapely mountains in the world. Climbing it with a party of four, and all four getting to the top, was a magnificent achievement. Don, on the other hand, while being a superb mountaineer, seemed to have an unlucky streak. He had been on two Himalayan expeditions by 1962 (one to Masherbrum and the other to Trivor) but on neither reached the summit, and his expedition to Gaurishankar, in the autumn of 1964, was equally unsuccessful. This disparity in success, the fact that Joe was hailed as Britain’s greatest-ever rock-climber, the fact that he, and not Don, had been invited to Kangchenjunga, had undoubtedly eroded their relationship, and they had ceased to climb together.
I knew Tom Patey much better than I knew Joe. We had had a superb, happy-go-lucky climbing holiday together in Scotland, in the summer of 1960. Tom told the story of our adventures in a climbing journal shortly afterwards, and it is now published in a collected volume of his works, One Man’s Mountains. He had a rich and complex personality, with a bewildering variety of talents. He was undoubtedly one of the outstanding British mountaineers of the post-war period, with a host of new routes in Scotland and the Alps to his credit. He was also a brilliant Himalayan performer, having reached the summit of Rakaposhi as well as that of the Mustagh Tower. He was no technician, wasn’t even a brilliant rock-climber, but on mixed ground of heather, earth, rock, snow or ice, I have never seen an equal. He moved with an easy speed and confidence over this type of ground, as happy unroped as roped. He had an easy contempt for style and elegance, whether in climbing, appearance or general way of life. There was little grace in his movements as a climber; he just swarmed up a rock face, inelegantly perhaps, but in complete control. His general appearance showed equally little regard for fashion or style. Off the crag he’d dress in an old ready-to-wear suit, obviously quickly purchased from a multiple tailor, and always crumpled. On business, or a formal occasion, he’d wear a tie that had been purchased with equally little regard for fashion, but at the first opportunity he’d pull it off, stuff it in a pocket and open the neck of his shirt. He didn’t look an athlete, smoked heavily, constantly took drops for his hay-fever, and had limbs that seemed to have been hung on to his body with as little regard as the clothes that covered them. His face was that of a man who had seen life – the perfect Raymond Chandler tired-and-battered-private-eye face – grey, creased, hard worn, yet somehow compassionate.
But Tom was more than a mountaineer. He had a boundless, impish imagination and a superb command of the English language. He had that very special ability to satirise lightly without hurting his victim unduly. He was also a good musician and carried his accordion with him wherever he went. He could play anything on it from hearty German marching songs to Highland jigs and reels, but his most unique ability was as a song writer. He composed a series of songs about climbers and climbing which were a form of musical cartoon. His favourite riposte, whenever anyone grumbled at being the target of his pen was:
The highest compliment that anyone can pay you is to make you the subject of satire. It’s better to be written about under any circumstances than to be ignored.
You could always guarantee that a holiday, or even a short weekend, with Tom would be full of surprises – that it would develop into a magical mystery tour of pubs, people and mountains. That summer in 1960 we had climbed fifteen new routes, all discovered by Tom who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Highlands. We had started several impromptu ceilidhs, and had met a whole series of bizarre personalities, whom, I am sure, I should never have got to know without him around.
I was full of great expectations and a few misgivings, therefore, when Tom suggested we climb together that summer of 1964. We could be sure of plenty of new routes to climb, for Tom had prepared a dossier of unclimbed lines in the Alps, but they would be routes of his choice.
We drove out to the Alps in his battered Skoda – it was a replica of its owner, unfashionable, untidy, but very rugged. At an early stage of the journey Tom surrendered the wheel and retired to the back seat to play his accordion as we rolled down through France on our way to Chamonix. This was the first time I had met my own climbing partner, Robin Ford. He was in his early twenties and at this stage had done most of his climbing in Britain; almost immediately it became evident that we had little in common. There was too big a gap in age and experience. He would have been better off climbing with someone of the same range of experience, rather than plunging in with quite a high-powered team which had already discovered a great deal about the mountains.
Soon, it also became evident that Tom’s approach to Alpine climbing was very different from mine. I liked big, exciting objectives, but once having decided on an objective, preferred to plan out the attempt very carefully, leaving as little as possible to chance. Tom, on the other hand, regarded the trip as a light-hearted holiday, enjoyed drinking and singing, in the Bar Nationale and at the campsite, into the early hours of the morning, and then would rush up the hill at the last possible moment to snatch a new route, relying on his flair and speed to get up the climb in the day, and back down to Chamonix for another carousal. He was not interested in the multi-day epic, or the highly technical rock-climb. He was a superb mixed alpinist with a genius both for picking out a good line up a mountain and the ability to climb it, only putting on a rope when the difficulties became acute.
We completed two new routes in this style: one up the South-West Ridge of the Aiguille de Leschaux, a beautiful and very isolated peak at the head of the Leschaux Glacier, and the other on the North Face of the Pointe Migot, a subsidiary of the Chamonix Aiguilles. They were both tributes to Tom’s genius for smelling out new routes. He had a big black book full of photographs, often purloined from books and journals loaned to him by friends, in which possible new routes were marked. This was quite an achievement, even in 1964, for almost all the obvious lines in the Chamonix area had long been climbed.
We talked to Lionel Terray, the famous French climber, about our plans for new routes, but he dismissed our ambition with the comment, ‘The virgin climbs around here are like dried-up old spinsters. They are not worth taking.’
There was a lot of truth in this, for all the major ridges and walls had been climbed, but an essential facet of climbing is the desire to seek out new ground. This was particularly strong in Tom, and he was happier searching his way up a comparatively undistinguished rock wall, tucked away at the back of a subsidiary glacier, than following a well-worn trail up a climb of much greater quality. I was less satisfied, however, for these new routes we were doing were Tom’s routes, not mine. In addition, Joe and Tom were a faster pair than Robin and I. As a result, we were simply following them up the climbs without any of the satisfaction and thrill of picking out the route for ourselves.
On the North Face of the Pointe Migot, Robin and I made a firm bid to get out in front. We had been drinking and singing late into the night in the Bar Nationale, and had caught the first telepherique up to Plan d’Aiguilles, the halfway station on the way to the Aiguille du Midi. We left the ugly shell of the telepherique station, and started up the path that led to the Glacier de Blaitière. The Pointe Migot is little more than a nobble on the ridge that sweeps north from the Aiguille du Plan, towards the Chamonix valley. At its end is the shapely tower of the Aiguille du Peigne, which boasts several classic rock-climbs, on which British climbers habitually sharpen their teeth before venturing on to harder things. Beyond the Peigne is the Aiguille des Pelerins, another granite tower, and hidden behind that is the Pointe Migot, whose North Face, black and virgin, drops down into the head of the Glacier de Blaitière. The North Face of the Migot was a coy, and undoubtedly plain old spinster whom no one had yet bothered to court. Only someone with Patey’s appetite for untouched ground would have sought her out.
But that morning our team were in anything but good shape. Patey was muttering about his hay-fever and Joe, recovering from a hangover, was sick halfway up the Glacier de Blaitière. I had retreated to bed early and consequently was feeling moderately fit. I chivvied Robin out into the front, so that we should at least have a chance of taking the lead.
The pace quickened. Patey and Brown obviously guessed what we were up to and tried to reduce our lead. We scrambled up jumbled ice below the Pelerins, and up the gully that led up towards the North Face of the Fou. On our left, the frozen cascade of the hanging glacier on the North Face of the Plan loomed over us. It was a grim place, full of lurking threats of stone-fall. The North Wall of the Pointe Migot was very steep, broken at about half height by a sloping shelf that ran up diagonally from right to left. A system of cracks seemed to lead up towards it.
‘Come on, Robin,’ I said, sufficiently quietly for the others not to hear. ‘If we can get roped up first and into those cracks, Tom and Joe’ll never get in front.’
I spurted towards the foot of the cracks and pulled ahead of Robin who was less used to this competitive climbing. The trouble was, he had the rope. We were still fifty yards in front of the other pair. Robin reached me; I grabbed the rope and started to uncoil it – the damned thing was in a tangle. I cursed. Tom was only twenty yards away. I tossed the rope on the ground – should come free – ‘You untangle it while I run out the first pitch,’ I said.
It was a grotty crack, quite steep, filled with ice. I started up it, climbing fast, ran out twenty feet and the rope tugged from behind. I looked back to see Robin struggling with what looked like a tangled skein of knitting. Patey and Brown were now with him, already roped up. Patey started up the cracks. He reached me.
‘I’m glad to see you’ve a sense of urgency,’ he said complacently. ‘Very commendable in a place like this. I’m sure you won’t object if Joe and I climb past you while you sort out your little troubles.’
‘Not at all,’ I replied.
By the time Robin had sorted out our rope, Tom and Joe were on the next pitch. I had resigned myself to following them up yet another climb. We climbed two more pitches, and the groove we were following divided, one branch going off to the left and the other going straight up. Tom was belayed at the dividing point and Joe was leading up the left-hand groove.
There was just a possibility that they had taken the wrong branch. The groove going straight up was steeper, but it looked as if it might lead directly up to the foot of the gangway in the middle of the face.
‘I’ll just have a look up here,’ I told Tom. ‘It’d save a bit of time if Joe’s going up a blind alley.’
As soon as Robin reached me I started up the groove. It was filled with ice at the back which pushed me out of balance, but there were sufficient holds for three strenuous pulls and the angle eased off; the groove ran easily straight up to the gangway. We’d won. We were out in front once again. I ran out the rope and called Robin to come out. There was an interminable delay as he fiddled around with his belay. I glanced over to the right and could see Joe belayed at the top of his groove. Tom had already joined him and was now swinging across towards me, using tension on the rope.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing down there?’ I shouted to Robin. ‘Get a bloody move on.’
No reply, but at least he was climbing now. The rope trickled through my fingers. Patey had nearly reached me, a couple more ape-line swings, and he was in the groove just below me. He didn’t wait, but climbed straight past, giving me an easy grin. I managed the weakest of weak smiles, and yelled down to Robin to hurry up. But by the time he reached the stance Tom had got to the top of his pitch, and Joe was already on his way across. We had lost Round Two.
The bottom of the gangway was guarded by a small snowfield. Tom launched on to this, kicking into the snow with his boots. He hadn’t bothered to put on his crampons – no time in the competitive climbing game. He got about halfway up, and suddenly there was a sloosh, and he came shooting down the steep snow. It was only a few inches thick, lying on hard ice.
Tom fell about thirty feet, but was held by the rope. He obviously hadn’t hurt himself, and I couldn’t resist letting out a cheer – but how was I to profit from their misfortune? Robin was leading up towards Joe, and was going much too slowly to give us any chance of passing them before they sorted themselves out.
Tom returned to the fray, climbed the snow more cautiously, reached the rock gangway and followed it up to a point where it steepened. I resigned myself to following, and concentrated on enjoying the climbing. This was excellent, being steep and tricky, with the minimum of protection. The whole climb had taken us only four hours, and just after lunchtime we pulled over the top to stand on the summit.
The climb had been fun, the competition had added spice to what was a mediocre route, and we were back in Chamonix that evening. I felt dissatisfied, however, and wanted something bigger and more challenging. Above all, I wanted greater control of the initiative. There was little satisfaction in being on a new route if it was not your own concept and you were just following another pair up it. But that summer I was destined to be disappointed, partly because the weather remained unsettled, but mainly, I suspect, because I was not clear on what I wanted to achieve – either in climbing or in my own life. Tom and Joe were now due to go home, and so I teamed up with two Americans, Jim McCarthy and Dick Williams, in an attempt to make a new direct route up the North Wall of the Civetta, a 5,000-foot limestone wall in the Dolomites. Jim McCarthy had conceived the idea. He had just finished Law School in New York, and was the most outstanding climber on the East Coast of America. Strangely, our paths had already crossed back in 1958, on Jim’s first visit to the Alps, when we had met on the lower rocks of the East Face of the Grand Capucin. My companion, Ronnie Wathen, and I had completed the route, but unfortunately Jim had been forced to retreat after his partner had dropped their rucksack.
Jim had come over to Europe with a formidable array of the newly developed American hardware – the chrome molybdenum pitons that had enabled a small group of Californian climbers to conquer the huge granite walls of Yosemite. A few of them had already made their marks on Europe. In 1962, Royal Robbins and Garry Hemming had made a direct start to the West Face of the Dru, up a series of superb crack-lines in the lower part of that face, and the following year, Tom Frost, another Yosemite pioneer, had made the first ascent of the South Face of the Fou, with John Harlin, Hemming and a Scot, Stewart Fulton. Jim wanted to apply the same Yosemite style of climbing to the North Face of the Civetta. He was aware, however, that his team was on the weak side. He had climbed in Yosemite himself, but his companion, Dick Williams, had never been farther afield than the New Yorkers’ local crag, the Shawangunks. These are a 200-foot high line of outcrops in upstate New York – the American equivalent of a glorified Shepherd’s Crag, or Three Cliffs of Llanberis.
I met Jim one night in the Bar Nationale, and he immediately asked me to find another companion and join him. I had been making plans with Brian Robertson, a young Scots climber, full of big ambitions. He was a leading light in a group of Edinburgh climbers who called themselves the Squirrels, after a famous Italian climbing group called the Cortina Squirrels. Brian was rather like a squirrel, short, strongly built, with a squirrel-like persistence. He was a great enthusiast, becoming near-incoherent in his enthusiasm for whatever happened to be his latest project. He happily agreed to join us, and the next day we all piled into Jim’s newly purchased Volkswagen Varient, and were whisked over to the small town that nestles below the North Wall of the Civetta. McCarthy is a great fixer; he already had introductions to one of the senior guides and great pioneers in the area. We spent the night in his barn, and next day, thanks to his good office, had our mound of baggage, ironware and food whisked up to the hut on the little service telepherique, whilst we wandered up, unladen, through woods fragrant with flowers and the hot resin of pine trees. We stayed in a newly built hut, immediately opposite the face. The more I looked at the wall, the less happy I felt. The line that Jim had chosen was to the right of the Phillip Flamm route, straight up a huge, blank, overhanging wall of grey and yellow rock. There were cracks all right – indeed, the scale was so vast they were probably chimneys – but it all seemed awfully steep. I had not undertaken such a big artificial route before and felt unsure of my own ability and, never having climbed with Jim, felt little confidence in him either.
I insisted on doing a training climb first, and the next morning we all set out to complete the North Face of the Torre Val Grande, a classic route on the far left of the Walls of the Civetta. Brian and I quickly pulled away from the two Americans as we scrambled up the broken gully that led to the start of the real climbing. It was an enjoyable fun-climb, with a thrutchy roof overhang which we swung up in étriers, and then a few good pitches of free climbing. We got back to the hut that evening to find the rest of the team at a low ebb in morale. Dick had never climbed on the loose rock that guards the approaches to most Dolomite climbs. He was unaccustomed to fast soloing, and eventually they had turned back before even reaching the foot of the climb proper.
This boded ill for our plans on the New Direttissima on the Main Wall of the Civetta. Dick wasn’t keen to commit himself to such a major undertaking, and nor were we. That afternoon, however, we had passed the tent of another British climber, Denny Morehouse. I didn’t know him personally, but had heard a lot about him. He had spent a lot of time in the Dolomites, mainly climbing with continental climbers, and had an impressive array of hard routes to his credit.
Sitting in the mouth of his battered tent, he looked a bit like the mad professor in an early surrealist German film. He wore heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, one lens of which was starred, presumably from a falling stone; his gear was in tatters and he had been living for the previous fortnight on a diet of pasta and plain bread.
I suggested inviting Denny, and Jim agreed. We brought him up to the hut, gave him a good meal, and the next day planned to carry all the gear up the face to the start of the difficulties.
The moment we started working together, things went wrong. Big wall climbing demands a high level of teamwork, rope management and awareness of the job in hand. We didn’t have a clue. Jim understood the new American methods; was accustomed to the high level of discipline adopted on the walls of the Yosemite; we were blissfully unaware of these techniques. Soon the rope was tangled into an inextricable mess. Denny, out in front, dislodged a boulder the size of a table, and it narrowly missed Jim. I dropped a peg-hammer; a few stones whined down from above and we all retreated for the night to the hut, full of doubts about each other. We were going to set out for the face at three in the morning. I felt half-hearted as I organised my gear, snuggling into my sleeping bag as a haven of safety, dreading the moment of commitment when we set out for a climb that I don’t think any of us felt up to. I dropped off into an uneasy sleep, to be woken all too soon by the jangle of the alarm. No one moved – and then Jim jumped down from the bunk, looked out of the window and called: ‘The goddamned cloud has come in – you can hardly see the bottom of the face.’
I suspect we were all secretly relieved. I rolled over and immediately dropped into a deep sleep. By morning the cloud had begun to break up, and by midday it had turned into a good day, but the delay had done the trick. With hardly a word said, we abandoned the attempt. Jim and I climbed the Andrich Fae route, a classic free rock-climb to the left of our proposed line, and then we all set off for Chamonix, I anxious to get back to the main scene of action, to snatch at least one good new route before the end of the season.
But our return to Chamonix coincided with the arrival of bad weather. Our little group, that had never coalesced into a team, broke up. Jim and Dick went down to the Calanques, Brian went home, and I stuck it out in Chamonix, just hoping for one good route to make the summer seem worthwhile.
Three weeks went by; three weeks spent hanging around Chamonix, living in other people’s tents, listening to the sound of rain drumming on the roof and eking out my beer money in the Bar Nationale, until near the end of the season, I became involved in a BBC documentary on the North Wall of the Eiger. Amongst my plans for that summer had been an attempt on making a new Direct Route up the North Wall of the Eiger. This was the current last great problem of 1964, and already several leading Continental climbers had tried and failed on it. John Harlin, an American climber, was leading contender, and had already made a couple of attempts. My own plans were little more than pipe-dreams – I had neither sufficient equipment nor the right companions for such an undertaking.
I trekked over to Grindelwald to meet the BBC team at the start of September. I should have liked to have talked about my original ascent of the original route on the Eiger North Wall – a climb full of good and exciting memories. The producer wanted something that was more immediate in its appeal, and I allowed myself to be talked into showing all the gear I should have used on an attempt on the Eiger Direct, as if I were about to go on the route. Having abandoned all thoughts of attempting it that summer, I felt cheapened. It emphasised my own vulnerability and made me doubt my own integrity. At the end of the interviews I returned to Chamonix, washed out and depressed.
But the weather was, at last, looking up, as all too often it does in early September –there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the Chamonix Aiguilles were clear of snow. At last, here was the chance to recoup a wasted Alpine season – one great, exacting route and I could go home happy, my confidence restored. And yet, perhaps, in those weeks of waiting and worry, I had lost sight of the very reasons why we should climb – had lost the sheer spontaneous joy that climbing should entail.
I met up with Mick Burke in the campsite. He, also, was without a companion and we agreed to tackle the South Face of the Fou, a route that still awaited a second ascent, and had the reputation of being exceedingly difficult. I had a few American pegs, sold to me by Jim McCarthy; there weren’t nearly enough, and I suspect we could have got ourselves into a precarious situation if we had ever launched ourselves on the climb. Anyway, Mick and I went into Chamonix to get some bivouac food before setting off for the hut that evening.
It was in the supermarket, between the dried-soup shelves and the refrigerated cabinet holding dairy foods, that I suddenly realised that I had drained myself of all my drive and ebullience – I felt an irresistible longing for home, to hold Wendy close to me, to see and play with Conrad. I had already half-filled a basket with bivouac food; I stood there in an agony of indecision, and then just dumped the basket on the ground and walked out of the shop. I found Mick at the campsite, packing his rucksack.
‘Y’re ready then?’ he said. ‘There’s only ten minutes before the last train to Montenvers, you know.’
‘I’m sorry, Mick, I’m not going. I think I’ve been out here too long. I feel bloody stale, and wouldn’t be any use on the climb anyway.’
Mick took it wonderfully stoically, without any recriminations. Having made up my mind, I had the homing instinct of a carrier pigeon. I caught a train for Paris that evening, spent most of the night pacing up and down in the corridor, in a fever to get home; reaching Paris, I was so impatient that I got a taxi to the airport terminal and took the next available plane to London. I phoned Wendy and caught a train that took me as far as Preston. Wendy drove down in the middle of the night, with Conrad asleep in the back of the van, to pick me up.
That return to the Lakes was a return to reality, to the joy of our life together, to a newly found satisfaction in getting down to the book, which at last seemed to flow with some prospect of, one day, being finished – even to a renewed and fresh enjoyment of climbing, unsullied by worries of maintaining a reputation, or building a career round the mountains.