‘You never move without a proper belay. I start to climb and I go on until I reach a knob of rock on to which I can belay. I take a karabiner’ (he produced one of the D-shaped steel rings with a spring-loaded clip) ‘and attach a sling to the loop of rope round my waist. Then all I have to do is to put the sling over the knob of rock, and pass the rope under one shoulder and over the other. If possible, you brace your feet against a solid block. Like that you can take the really big strain if the next man comes off.
‘When the second man reaches the leader, the leader unclips the karabiner with the sling on it, and the second man attaches it to his waist. He’s now belayed. The second man gives his own sling to the leader who goes on to the next pitch. Like this.’
‘What I don’t see,’ I whispered to Hugh, ‘is what happens if the leader falls on the first pitch. According to this he’s done for.’
‘The leader just mustn’t fall off.’
‘Remind me to let you be leader.’
The Doctor now showed what I thought was a misplaced trust in us. He sent us to the top of a little cliff, not more than twenty feet high, with a battered-looking holly tree growing on it. ‘I want you to pretend that you’re the leader,’ he said to Hugh. ‘I want you to belay yourself with a sling and a karabiner to the holly tree. On the way up I am going to fall off backwards and I shan’t tell you when I’m going to do it. You’ve got to hold me.’ He began to climb.
He reached the top and was just about to step over the edge when, without warning, he launched himself backwards into space. And then the promised miracle happened, for the rope was taut and Hugh was holding him, not by the belay but simply with the rope passed under one shoulder and over the other. There was no strain on the sling round Hugh’s waist at all, his body was like a spring. I was very impressed – for the first time I began to understand the trust that climbers must be able to have in one another.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ said the Doctor.
It was like a memorable day in 1939 when I fell backwards off the fore upper topsail yard of a four-masted barque, only this time I expected Hugh to save me. And he did. Elated we practised this new game for some time until the Doctor looked at his watch. It was 11.30.
‘We’d better get on to the rock. We wouldn’t normally but there’s so little time and you seem to be catching on to the roping part. Let’s go. We’ll take the Ordinary Route. You may think it isn’t much but don’t go just bald-headed at it. I’m going to lead. It’s about two hundred feet altogether. We start in this chimney.’ He indicated an inadequate-looking cleft in the rock face.
It seemed too small to contain a human being at all but the Doctor vanished into it easily enough. Like me, he was wearing nailed boots, not the new-fangled ones with rubber vibram soles. I could hear them screeching on the rock as he scrabbled for a foothold. There was a lot of grunting and groaning then he vanished from sight.
Hugh went next. It was easier for him as he was very slim.
Then it was my turn. Like a boa-constrictor swallowing a live chicken, I wriggled up it, with hideous wear and tear to my knees, until I emerged on a boulder slope.
‘Now we begin,’ said the Doctor.
‘What was that, if it wasn’t the beginning?’
‘The start. This is the beginning.’
‘How very confusing.’
The worst part was what he called ‘Over the garden wall’, which entailed swinging round a projection, hanging over a void and then traversing along a ledge into a cave.
‘I wish he’d wear rubbers,’ I said to Hugh, as the Doctor vanished over the wall with a terrible screeching of tricounis. ‘It’s not the climbing I object to, it’s the noise.’
There was still a twenty-foot chimney with a tree in it up which we fought our way and, at last, we lay on the top panting and admiring the view which was breathtaking. I was very impressed and proud. It wasn’t much but I had done my first climb.
‘What do you call this?’ Hugh said, warily. ‘Easy, difficult or something in between?’
‘Moderate.’
‘How do they go? I’ve forgotten.’
‘Easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult, severe, very severe, exceptionally severe, and excessively severe.’
‘Oh.’
While we were eating our sandwiches the Doctor began to describe what he called ‘The Free Rappel’. More than a year has passed since, for the first and last time, I practised this excruciatingly painful method of descending the face of a mountain. Even now I am unable to remember it without a shudder. Like the use of the bayonet, it was something to be learned, and if possible, forgotten for ever.
‘You first,’ said the Doctor. In dealing with him we suffered the disadvantage that he wasn’t retained at some handsome fee to teach us all this. He was in fact ruining his holiday, in order to give us a slightly more than even chance of surviving.
‘Put a sling round the tree and run the double rope through it; now pass it round your right thigh, between your legs; now up the back and sling it over your left shoulder so that it falls down in front. That’s right. Now walk backwards to the edge, keep the rope taut. Now keep your legs horizontal and walk down.’
I walked down. It would have been perfect if only the face of the cliff had been smooth; unfortunately it was slightly concave, which made it difficult to keep my legs at right angles to the face. I failed to do so, slipped and went swinging backwards and forwards across the face like a pendulum, with the rope biting into my groin.
‘Well, you’ve learned one lesson,’ Hugh said cheerfully, when I reached the bottom after disengaging myself from the rope and swarming down in a more conventional manner.
‘If it’s a question of doing that again or being castrated by Mahsuds, I’ll take the Mahsuds. My groin won’t stand up to much more of this.’
‘You must be very sensitive,’ Hugh said. ‘Lots of girls do it.’
‘I’m not a girl. There must be some other way. It’s impossible in thin trousers.’
After a large, old-fashioned tea at the inn with crumpets and boiled eggs, we were taken off to the Eckenstein Boulder. Oscar Eckenstein was a renowned climber at the end of the nineteenth century, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been the first man in this or any other country to study the technique of holds and balance on rock. He had spent his formative years crawling over the boulder that now bore his name. Although it was quite small, about the size of a delivery van, his boulder was said to apparently embody all the fundamental problems that are such a joy to mountaineers and were proving such a nightmare to us.
For this treat we were allowed to wear gym shoes.
Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.
‘YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF. Imagine that there is a thousand-foot drop under you.’
‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on.’
Back at the inn we had hot baths, several pints of beer, an enormous dinner and immediately sank into a coma. For more than forty hours we had had hardly any sleep. ‘Good training,’ was Hugh’s last muffled comment.
By this time the waitresses at the inn had become interested in this artificial forcing process. All three of them were experienced climbers who had taken the job in the first place in order to be able to combine business with pleasure. Now they continued our climbing education.
They worked in shifts, morning and afternoon, so that we were climbing all the time.