He went on to tell me that in an expedition it’s everyone for themselves. ‘No one’s going to look after you.’ Though that was undoubtedly the bottom line, his attitude was so different from Mal’s that I wondered how much I was being told about expeditions and how much about Jon.
Over the next few days we relaxed with each other somewhat. In many ways I had more in common with him than any of the others; he had a degree in politics, made a point of having nonclimbing friends, and was strongly interested in books and modern music, the more obscure the better. When we got onto that common ground he was quite a different person, open and enthusiastic, one I liked and found interesting.
And then suddenly one would be back to first base with him. I’d see a hesitation come over him as he remembered that I was a writer, that I might be studying him, and his eyes would twinkle with malice as he prepared one of his remarks. His desire for privacy seemed strong and genuine. He said he liked London because of its anonymity, and mountaineering because of the private nature of the experience.
He struck me as a competitor who went to great lengths to show that he wasn’t. I think of him always as lounging back, legs sprawled, hands stuffed in anorak pockets, a position of exaggerated indifference. He loved to accuse other climbers of ‘secret training’ and to protest how lazy and uncompetitive he was.
Maybe that was the basis of the antipathy that seemed to exist between him and Tony, for Tony was so openly intense and enthusiastic about climbing. He didn’t brag, but saw no point in self-denigration and pretending to be less committed than he was. He loved climbing and didn’t disguise it; he seemed to have no interests outside climbing. And Jon on the surface was exactly the opposite, yet I suspected that underneath he was the same, ‘a real revver’ as Mal said. Maybe that was why Tony seemed to irritate him.
I was there when they met at the Clachaig for the first time in a year. Yes, a definite tension there. Even Tony was less buoyant than usual, and Jon even more indifferent and uninterested. While Tony talked on about his latest doings to Mal, Jon lolled back as if oblivious and entered the conversation only to say ‘I’ve got nothing to prove, mate,’ with just sufficient emphasis on the ‘I’. And when Tony asked him directly if he’d done anything recently, Jon answered, ‘Don’t try to wind me up, Brindle – you can’t do it.’
I asked him later what bothered him about Tony. ‘He’s so wound up and intense about it all. I just like climbing,’ he replied. Which was exactly what Tony had said to me about Jon. I began to agree with the prediction that their relationship could be an interesting part of the Expedition.
We treated each other a lot less warily after I came into the chalet happily drunk in the early hours while he was dossing on the settee. ‘Great to see you, Jon,’ I bellowed, and proceeded to demolish his resting place and his Walkman set-up as I blundered about in the dark. I was being natural for once, and he responded.
Jon was as pessimistic as Mal was optimistic. He gave us a 5 per cent chance of climbing the Mustagh Tower, and less with Gasherbrum 2 – yet he was utterly determined to go and give them what he called ‘maximum pastry’. The phrase quickly entered Expedition vocabulary, as did the ‘shuffling dossers’ coinage of a friend of his, which evokes perfectly the whole hand- to-mouth, day-to-day peripatetic lifestyle of so many climbers. Being free to do serious climbing tends to mean lacking visible means of support. Mal got by with guiding and the help of his wife Liz’s job; Tony was at college on a student grant; Jon worked for little more than pocket money in a climbing shop between trips. Only Sandy Allan, who I hadn’t yet met, made serious money during his spells on the oil rigs. Borrowing, cadging, hitching and sleeping on floors, spending what we had on drink and climbing, shuffling dossers is what we were. It indicated more than a lack of finance; shuffling dossing is a state of mind, unselfconscious existentialism.
But the phrase that really stuck to Jon came out of a heated argument one evening in the chalet between him and a climber who was going on what was reckoned to be a lightweight, no- hope Everest expedition. The climber in question had only a reasonable Alpine record, had never been higher than 19,000 feet, but was quite confident that with sheer determination and ‘going for it’ he had a good chance of making the summit.
‘You’ll die,’ Jon said brusquely.
‘I’m going to go for it.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you go for it – you’re going to die with that attitude.’
‘What’s going to stop me?’
‘Altitude. Weather. All-round deterioration. You don’t know anything about it. If you’re lucky, you’ll all be driven off early. If not, you’re going to die, old son,’ Jon repeated with evident satisfaction.
‘Well, I’m still going to go for it,’ the climber replied defensively. ‘I think I can do it.’
Jon, lounging back, flashed his most sardonic smile. ‘It doesn’t matter what you think. You’ve got a squaddie’s mentality, mate.’ The room seemed to quiver with hostility. Jon sprawled back even further and added the coup de grâce. ‘You deserve to die.’
And since then ‘You’re going to DIE’ became a chorused catch phrase, one he accepted with good grace. It was only later that I learned part of his vehemence stemmed from his experience on Annapurna 3, when one of the small team died during a five-day blizzard that drove them off the mountain. And it was a long time later that he confessed to me that on his return to Kathmandu he had stumbled round the town for a day, blinded by tears.
A complex character. Mal and Tony are just themselves, they don’t change according to their company. But there are at least three Jons – the prickly, laughing, abrasive one, the casual, sardonic Jon among climbing friends, and the disarmingly enthusiastic, open and interesting Jon when relaxed and outside the climbing ethos.
‘You really think I’ve got a chance?’
‘Of making the Col on Mustagh? Should be no problem, if the weather behaves and you can take the altitude. You’re not going to set the climbing world alight, but you seem to have taken to it well enough.’ Pause. I consider Duff’s perennial optimism. ‘Your biggest problem may be the scale of things out there,’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘You haven’t even been to the Alps, and Himalayan scale is a different thing again. It can be pretty daunting.’
This on a cloudy, wet day, sitting halfway up Dinnertime Buttress in Glencoe in late March, smoking cigarettes. The nicotine constricted the circulation at my fingertips and they felt cold. Himalayan scale … I shivered, certainly daunted already, yet a new composure made itself felt deeper down.
‘See how it looks when I get there,’ I replied. My voice sounded surprisingly matter-of-fact. I wondered if I was changing, and beginning to pick up as one might a disease, certain climbers’ attitudes.
He nodded. ‘You’re going to spend a lot of time on this trip being totally hacked off. Headaches, sore throats, the cold, all that hanging around in the middle of nowhere, you’ll think, “This is utterly pointless.” And it is.’ He seemed to be addressing himself as much as me. He was coming to the end of his winter guiding season and looked worn down. ‘There’s no reason for it at all,’ he continued. ‘Going up a mountain and coming back down again doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t affect anything. Well, except you. It doesn’t do anything.’ He gazed gloomily down into the valley. ‘At those times the only thing that keeps me going is the thought that I could be sitting on that 8.10 train