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 with my eyes glazed over.’
We’d become close in the last six months, during days in the hills and evenings in the Clachaig or the pubs of South Queensferry With Kath and Liz. Because I was not a dedicated climber, he could air his doubts, worries and reservations with me. Malcolm had my father’s fascination with information; his sober level-headedness was like my elder brother’s, while his impetuous enthusiasm and fondness for flying a kite in argument reminded me of myself a few years back. He seemed at once older and younger than me, and our relationship oscillated between those two poles. Turning up at the foot of the north face of the Eiger, seventeen years old and fresh from his Edinburgh public school, with a sleeping bag, an ice dagger and a couple of screws, ready to do battle with the big one – that was pure Malcolm. (He got as far as ‘the Difficult Crack’ – some 2000 feet up – and had to turn back. ‘I realized I wasn’t quite ready for this.’ ‘You George Watson F.P.s are all the same,’ I retorted, ‘you think all you have to do is show up at the hill and it’ll roll on its back and say, Walk up me!’)
He passed over another cigarette and we lit up. Duff’s diet is a dietician’s nightmare, I reflected. He seemed to live entirely on coffee, white sugar and cigarettes by day, and lager and cigarettes by night. He avoided fresh fruit and raw vegetables like the plague. And he had the nerve to be healthy! I glanced at him: leaning forward elbows on his knees, chin resting on clasped hands, frowning thoughtfully at nothing in particular – this was the way I’d always think of him.
‘Why did you really ask me on this trip?’ I asked casually.
He grinned and snapped out of his mood as I’d intended. ‘I’d never met one of you writer chappies before. I thought it might be interesting to see how you’d react if I actually put you on the spot.’
So that was it. I’m here and going to the Himalayas as the result of someone’s whimsical curiosity. Not just anyone’s – no one other than Duff would have come up with such a suggestion and carried it through. I laughed in delight at the absurdity of it all. Mal shook his head as if trying to shake the dust from his brains. ‘You showed you had the right stuff. The trouble is,’ and here he concluded the line of thought he’d been trudging down, ‘by the time you get to climbing in the Himalayas, you’ve forgotten why you started in the first place.’
I was to think often of this conversation in the coming months. We went on to chat casually about Rocky Moss on Mount McKinley, the sex life of butterflies, suitable film, the origin of the Jesuits – and
