Sandy found his natural expression in snow/ice climbing. At 25 he finally gave up his job as a trainee distillery manager for the hand-to-mouth existence of the dedicated climber. There followed the customary apprenticeship: Scotland, the Alps in summer, the Alps in winter, some notable ascents, then Nuptse West Ridge with Mal, then the Mustagh Tower.
‘Sandy just grins,’ Mal had said to me before Mustagh, ‘you’ll find him easy to get on with.’ Well, yes, but during the trip and in his diaries afterwards, I found a very different inner man behind that amiable exterior:
Sandy … One look into Jhaved’s eyes and he knows what I want. One straight hit with my axe and I find a good ice placement. C’est la vie, Dominique would say. Don’t worry, Sandy, she’d say. They’ll never know you or what you’ve done.
I fade away to wash by the stream. It’s good to wash the sweat of the hill away, and I watch the dirty soapy water. What right have I to pollute the water here? But it soon turns clear. What right have we to hold opinions? Every right, I say to myself, and then I say if we have the right to opinions, do we have a right to put them to other people to try and change their views? Do we have a right to build a small dam in the stream to make a convenient washing place, it’s OK for us but by what RIGHT? And Jon says, every right. He’s an opinion holder …
And climbing is not so important to me, it’s more the way I feel, the way I react, the language I speak and the words I scribe, the mess that I leave behind, the way that I eat my food … These suit my feelings.
Smiling Sandy Allan indeed! I was astonished that Mal could have shared two expeditions with Sandy and know nothing of his inner nature. Yet the signs were there: his keeping a journal at all times, his inability to stay in one place for more than a few days, the way his glance focuses only briefly on the person he’s talking to. In all our Mustagh photos he is always slightly blurred as if just about to move away, eyes averted or obscured by his hand or his hair.
‘We had to have Jon Tinker, that abrasive Cockney Rasta-man …’ Jon was Sandy’s partner on the Mustagh Tower, but they are very different. He’s a blue-eyed, fair-haired, compact Anglo-Saxon; edgy, alert, intelligent, one of life’s stirrers. I picture him lounging back, exaggeratedly relaxed, hands stuffed in his pockets, obscure reggae dubs on his stereo, while he protests vigorously in his quasi-Cockney accent how lazy and uncompetitive he is. A master of giving stress, of sarcasm, of winding people up. We could never really understand why he tended to treat encounters as a form of verbal arm-wrestling, always looking for the upper hand – and at other times be disarmingly thoughtful, enthusiastic and open. When one has had enough of climbing talk, Jon is a good person for general conversation about music, books, politics, ideas. He is determined not to let climbing be his entire life, though it often seems to be. I came to like him a lot during and after the Mustagh trip. You can say this for Jon, he’s a little fire-cracker; you have to be wide awake when he’s around.
He’d taken a degree in politics and since then has lived largely as a ‘shuffling dosser’, working in climbing shops or guiding between expeditions, perpetually broke. At 24, he was to be the youngest of the Everest team’s lead climbers, having made his name through a series of very bold Alpine winter ascents.
‘I’m convinced I’m going to die on the hill before I’m 30,’ he said once in Glencoe. Then he added, ‘That’s bullshit, of course … I know I’m immortal!’ Pause. ‘Everyone is till they die.’ And when we first talked about Everest he suddenly confessed, ‘My greatest fear is being left to die on the hill. I look at the people I’m climbing with and wonder if they’d stay with me …’
Mal and I drove down to the Lake District one wet day in October to see Chris Bonington. We needed his advice and his support before we could go any further. Bonington knew more about Everest and expedition organization than anyone in the country. Any potential sponsor would come to him to ask if we were worth backing. Most important, he knew the North-East Ridge, having led the only attempt ever made on it, three years before.
We’d quickly read his book1 before driving down. The bare facts made grim reading. Of the four climbers, Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman had both disappeared forever somewhere on the Pinnacles that bar the way to the summit, Dick Renshaw had suffered two strokes, and Bonington himself had finally dropped out from sheer exhaustion. And these were four of the élite, among the finest mountaineers in the world.
I looked at Mal as he drove, his fingers drumming on the wheel. Born in Kenya but brought up in Scotland, I still thought of him as ‘the wild colonial boy’. He has a grizzled, serious, sober air, yet loves high jinks and wild schemes. He once jokingly described his politics to me as ‘crypto-liberal-fascist-anarchist-communist-conservative’ and all those impulses are in his nature. He likes to play himself off against me as an unimaginative, down-to-earth realist, yet at the same time he’s an impulsive romantic.
‘Romantic? Malcolm?!’ I can hear his wife Liz say. ‘He can be romantic, but not about climbing. That makes him sound wet.’
True enough. Mal is about as wet as the Kalahari desert. Yet he is driven by dreams, as mountaineers are. There is nothing practical in climbing a mountain, and suffering and risking your neck for nothing. And certainly impulsive – who else would have asked someone like me with no climbing experience whatsoever on the Mustagh Tower expedition? ‘Well, I’d never met one of you author types and I thought it would be interesting to see what you did when I put you on the spot!’
‘Like a cigarette, youth?’
‘Thanks.’ His head bobbed as he whistled tunelessly, rehearsing the issues he wanted to bring up with Chris Bonington when we arrived. He’s physically and mentally restless; the only time I see him entirely at peace is occasionally in the pub and always when he’s climbing. ‘It’s a wonderful game,’ he once said, ‘only sometimes you look round and realise half your friends aren’t there any more.’ And I wondered what his life expectancy would be if he began getting involved in trips like this. Well over half the people who start climbing in the ‘death zone’ above 7,500 metres wind up dead, and half of the North-East Ridge is above that height …
I cut off this line of thought as Mal cut the ignition and we sat in the car outside Chris Bonington’s house while the rain hammered down.
‘Nice house.’
‘Very.’ Here was a survivor and a success. We picked up our notebooks and the bottle of whisky we’d brought by way of introduction, and dashed for the front door.
We shook hands with Chris and went into his office. While his secretary made coffee we looked around the filing cabinets, the ordered racks of slides, the word-processor, the signed photographs. I felt like a sixth-form schoolboy in the headmaster’s study to discuss his career.
He was brisk and business-like, neither patronizing nor over-effusive. He congratulated Mal on the Mustagh Tower and asked some questions about it. He told us the modified Norwegian expedition was well in hand and he was going with them both as an advisor and climber, hoping to finally make the summit on this his yet-again last time on Everest. They were tackling the now standard South Col route, with sherpas and oxygen, so if the weather behaved they had a good chance.
But did we? Mal outlined the team and tactics he’d been considering, the few areas of improvement he felt could be made on the basis of Chris’s experience on the North-East Ridge. Cut out one of the camps by making the first camp higher; take a slightly larger team; fix ropes across a couple of awkward sections where a lot of load-carrying would be necessary; use tents rather than try to dig a snow-hole below the Rock Buttresses.
Chris listened, letting his eyes flick over Malcolm, assessing him. Then