Next morning I helped Tony and Terry dig out their car. As we slithered towards Glencoe Village the car radio spoke of 2000 people trapped in Glenshee, marooned trains, three climbers found dead in the Cairngorms … Tony and Terry glance at each other, the slightest shake of the head. Nothing is said. It could have been them but it wasn’t.
At the village I waved them goodbye and plodded to the monument to the Massacre of Glencoe. It’s a simple pillar of stone on a hillock near the river. The inscription was unreadable, being plastered with spindrift. I thought of the sign in the Clachaig: NO HAWKERS NO CAMPBELLS. Life was precarious enough in those days, no need for mountaineering. Climbing has some of the adrenalin, the release, and the self-discovery of combat; the difference is you’re not being asked to kill anyone, and you take no orders but your own. But war and climbing partake of the same odd quirk in our nature – only when our survival is at risk do we feel how precious it is to be alive. Tony and Terry’s silence came not from callousness but an acceptance of the risks involved.
Mal spent most of the day in his sleeping bag, looking haggard and listening to Frank Sinatra on his Walkman. Apparently last night’s session went on long and late. We ate and slept, marking time. Climbers came, gossipped, picked up their gear and left. Towards evening the snow came down again, thick and swirling.
We went over to the pub for one beer, had several, and found ourselves having a long and surprisingly personal talk about our lives. Our paths have been so different, yet there are parallels. It’s hard to imagine now, but Mal worked in insurance in London for five years. ‘Then one day I looked around me, a long, slow look at all the familiar faces reading the papers or looking out the window, and I saw they were only existing, not living. And if I carried on, I’d be like that in another five years. I thought, screw that for a lark. I handed in my notice to quit that day.’ He stared down at his lager with his characteristic frown, part impatience, part perplexity. ‘That’s why I could relate to you from the beginning, because somewhere along the line you’ve chosen not to live like most people.’
I nodded, knowing the unlikely kinship he meant. The turning point in my life had not been as sudden and clear as his. My dissatisfaction with the life I was leading some years ago grew slowly and unnoticed like an overhanging cornice until finally I fell through. I kept on writing because there was nothing else.
And the unhappiness we spread around us on the way makes it all the more important that we do it well.
Climbing and writing seem poles apart, but we had both rearranged our lives round a supremely satisfying central activity that seems pointless to many – sometimes to ourselves. We were both now doing what we wanted. That was our basis for mutual respect.
That night he called out in his sleep, ‘It’s too late now.’ And then, ‘Better put some more runners in, Andy.’
Next morning loose snow still ruled out serious climbing. We spent it working on setting up runners and belay stances, and abseiling. There’s something absolutely unnatural in walking backwards off a cliff. I found it also – when you’re sure of the rope and the belay – surprisingly enjoyable. Just lean back and walk down, paying out rope through the descendeur. Pleasingly ingenious.
I spent some time on placing aids. Hammering pitons (blades, leapers, bongs, angles, channels, pegs, the wonderfully named RURPS – Realized Ultimate Reality Pitons) into cracks; wedging nuts (wedges, wires) into fissures. ‘I lost a couple of friends here last year,’ Mal remarked conversationally, fumbling with something on his harness. I didn’t know what to say, made some sympathetic sound. ‘They’re worth nearly twenty quid now,’ he continued. I stared at him. I know this is an age that sets a price on everything, but this is ridiculous. ‘And even this one is a bit knackered,’ he said, and held out a strange object to me with just the faintest hint of a grin.
It looked like a piece of particularly nasty dental equipment, like an adjustable wrench with its jaws turned inside out. They were spring-loaded so one could pull them back, shove them into a crack and then let them expand to grip the walls.
‘It’s called a “friend”. Not totally reliable, but very useful at times.’
We went through the belaying sequence on the floor of a quarry. I was cumbersome and ponderous as I stumbled along pretending there was a 1000-foot drop on my right, placing runners along the rock on my left. When I shouted ‘On belay!’ my voice sounded absurd and lacking in conviction, like the first time you try to hail a taxi or call ‘Waiter!’. Mal followed on round the corner, walking slowly, treating this charade with elaborate seriousness. He came to the first runner, removed the peg – then abruptly fell back. I instinctively pulled the rope back on the descendeur and he was held. He came on again, head down. When he arrived at my stance he looked up, shook his head. ‘Whew, that was a bit thin, youth!’ We laughed. It was a game. The whole activity is an absurd and sometimes delightful game.
He led through and we did a couple of pitches on genuine slopes. It’s clever and simple, this whole procedure, each climber alternately protecting the other. I was still getting tangled up and several times hit myself on the helmet with an ice axe, but it was beginning to feel more natural. Finding out what crampons can do, working out different moves, reading the slope ahead. The last pitch was a scramble; the snow deep and powdery, no purchase in it, then loose and shallow over rocks. Spindrift blowing up into my face, balaclava slipping over my eyes. The left axe pulled through and I was off balance, hacking away wildly for purchase, slipping … An internal voice spoke very clearly, ‘Slow down, look for it.’ I spotted frozen turf, the inclined pick went in and held. Lovely. Pull up, across, come out on the top and find Mal sitting patient and immobile as a Buddha, wrapped in a cloak of spindrift.
We finished up by building a snowhouse. It was more of a beehive than a classic igloo, but the shelter it provided was impressive. Absolutely silent and windless inside. ‘If those missing Army blokes have made one of these and stay in it, they’ll be all right for days.’
Back in the gloaming, in high spirits, for tea and the latest disaster stories. A few casualties, but no fatalities in Glencoe. In the evening I borrowed a guitar and sang a few songs I’d written years before to go with my Men on Ice. Mal was very taken with them, insisted I put them on tape, and spent much of the rest of our time in Glencoe wandering about with the earphones on, bawling out the lyrics. When he was over in the pub I wrote some new verses to Throw me down some more rope, and a middle section. Mal was amazed on his return. ‘How can you do that?’ ‘How can you solo Grade Five?’ I replied. It was good to be reminded there were things I could do competently.
‘We’ll try a harder route tomorrow,’ he said as I crawled into my bag. I lay thinking about that as he muttered over a new verse and the chorus, trying to memorize the words:
Halfway up ‘Whitesnake’ when the blizzard hits,
Can’t feel your nose or your toes, everything goes
And nothing grips (except you);
It’s a funny desire, wanting to get higher,
Sometimes you wish you’d stayed below,
Sometimes you know that it’s right,
Sometimes you know that it’s wrong,
And sometimes you just Don’t Know –
Throw me down some more rope (throw me down)
Throw me down some more rope (hey, youth!)
Throw me down some more rope ’cos I’m falling,
Yes I’m falling …
We