… to me,
High mountains are a feeling …
LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III
My sixteenth birthday was spent in the Alps, on my last Forest School Camp. We had pitched our tents just below the Sustenpass and spent our time on terrifying hikes along crumbling goat paths and shifting cliffs of scree, led by our wild-bearded camp chief, a man as tyrannical as he was hysterical. He prepared us for the hikes by forcing us to skitter down a steep bald rockface. If you hesitated, he made you do it again. He was often angry, and the person he was most angry with was a French boy called Émile.
Émile was cool, and had blonde curls even at sixteen. He shouted back at the bearded old man, and I was smitten. We established a gentle relationship, kissing and holding hands and sleeping side by side. This was just right in the blue-and-white world of the mountains: to be pleased but not disturbed.
We were camping under sunshine in snow and if I walked a few hundred yards away from the site, I could be alone in silence and whiteness. I would watch the mountains enlarge and accumulate, and adjust myself. I knew nothing grander than the Welsh hills and the cliffs of Cornwall. Mountains were a feature of fairytale geography, a world of heightened senses and heightened choices. They were also a trial: jagged peaks that had to be passed through by any questing knight or runaway princess. The landscape had such an epic scale that you could only measure in centuries and histories, the big pictures and big stories, and there was room for them all. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see pilgrims on donkeys, Hannibal with his elephants, Charlemagne with his army.
I couldn’t see this mountain, though, because I was on it. My memory is of a series of parts: the dirty ice, a field of snow, a fall of scree, a frozen stream, a terrifying path. We walked to the Steingletscher, the glacier, and I was shocked by how grubby, dingy and soggy it was, how roughly put together. I had envisaged a glossy lozenge of pure blue ice.
Round the campfire, we sang the usual songs from the FSC songbook: protest, folk and blues. Back at our tents, we sang the songs we’d left behind with our radios and stereos. I had happily forgotten my family, boyfriend and friends but I craved music so much that I would have sung anything.
Just above our campsite was an inn where the local shepherds drank. It had a few guest rooms and we would pool our money, buy a couple of beers between six of us and then take it in turns to sneak upstairs to use the guest bathrooms. We even managed to smuggle in towels and use their showers.
After a few nights, the shepherds approached us. Dark, bristling and unsmiling, they lined up. I pushed my towel out of sight.
‘English?’ One asked.
I nodded: Yes, English.
Their faces cracked open and one stepped forward. ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean …’
Another joined him: ‘My bonnie lies over the sea.’
They all knew it: ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh bring back my bonnie to me.’
We leapt to our feet: ‘Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my bonnie to me, to me …’
I had tears in my eyes. This song meant nothing in particular to me but it was a chance to sing. Émile wasn’t David, but he was who was there. The point of it was feeling – high mountains of feeling.