lost a few brain cells along the way. ‘Yes, if you’re very fit, can take the altitude, have considerable determination and are lucky – ’
‘That doesn’t sound like me at all,’ I interrupted him.
‘– there’s no reason why not. It may blow your mind a bit, but you’ll be safer than you think. Mind you, the Himalayas make the Alps look like a kiddies’ playground – but you’ve never seen the Alps, have you? And of course,’ he continued, smiling, ‘if something doesn’t go according to plan – and that’s bound to happen – you could be in real trouble. You’ve maybe one chance in twenty of snuffing it.’
We had another whisky and I looked over the photos on his wall. Douglas crawling beneath stomach-turning overhangs, Douglas on Patagonian mountains, Douglas and friends steering a 12-foot inflatable through a Greenland ice pack. A lump of quartz from a Patagonian first ascent. Mementoes of another world. Nice to have some souvenirs like that …
It’s the little vanities that get us going.
‘The trip’s a freebie,’ Douglas said. ‘Take it.’
After five days of indecision – or rather, of constantly changing decisions – I went home to Anstruther to talk it over with my parents. I wanted to hear their opinion; perhaps that would clarify my thoughts.
So, should I go?
Dad paused so long I thought he hadn’t heard me properly. A long, awkward silence, my mother at the other end of the table, waiting for his response. Then he said very slowly, ‘I’m too old to be asked a question like that.’ He looked at me, his eyes pale blue and slightly fogged over, set deep among the ridges, wrinkles, creases and weathering of eighty-four years. ‘You see,’ he said simply, ‘I can no longer see any appeal in experience for its own sake.’
How had I failed to see how old, how very, very tired he’d become in the last year? The hand that held the glass of wine had shrunk to skin and bone. He took a sip, grimaced. ‘I’ve even lost the taste for this. But in your position, at your age … Yes, you should go.’
Then he began to pull out from the vast, shadowy storehouse of his memory bales of stories of scrambling in the Cairngorms as a medical student in the 1920s, seeing the colossal Grey Man of Ben MacDui, the early days of the Scottish Youth Hostel movement, escapades in Ardnamurchan, taking the first motorcar over the old drove road to Applecross, hurrying five miles across a snowbound moor in the dead of winter to deliver a baby in an Angus bothy …
And vitality came back to him like a fitful companion as he talked, and I sensed it was all happening again for him, behind the eyes of this most unsentimental of men. It had been these tales, together with his recollections of dawns in Sumatra and hurricanes in the China Seas, that had first made me long for my own adventures, for those experiences of youth that nothing, not even extreme old age, can take away from you as long as you breathe.
Listening to him confirmed in me what I’d always known. When it came down to it, I’d take the chance.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Kath?’
‘Yes.’
Pause. Me leaning on the door frame, her grinning on the settee.
‘We’re going then?’
‘Yes.’
And that was the decision made, in an instant, on an impulse. The impulse of life that says, ‘Why not?’
Mal had just gone out the door, and taken most of my reservations with him. He’d filled us in on more details, and they were largely reassuring. He’d promised my Glencoe initiation would not be terminal. I was very aware that my life would depend largely on his priorities and his judgement; in the end, on his character. I’d been watching and listening to him closely. I’d liked him from the start for his great enthusiasm for life. He was interested in practically everything, not just climbing. Now I sensed behind the casualness considerable determination. Behind the romantic was a hard-nosed realist. Behind the restless energy that kept his fingers tap-tapping a cigarette and his right knee jumping as he sat, there was a sense of self-possession. These were not nervous mannerisms, but those of someone who revved his way through life. The sardonic grin, the offhand climber’s humour, the thoughtful frown into the mug of coffee – they all seemed in balance with each other.
He struck me as the kind of person who might get you into scrapes but would probably get you out of them again. (And how prophetic that turned out to be!)
I’d trust him.
A deciding factor was Kathleen’s inclusion. She asked if she could come along with the trekking group who were to accompany us on the walk-in to Mustagh, and cover her costs through writing articles about her trip. Just flying a kite … Mal took it quite seriously and said he saw no reason why not, subject to Rocky’s agreement.
We hadn’t actually said Yes to him but, grinning wildly at each other, we knew we’d decided.
The world was transformed. Being alive felt dramatized and vivid, vibrant with challenge. We couldn’t sit still. Adrenalin propelled us outdoors into a mild November night. We walked fast and aimlessly past moonlit stubble fields, dark cottages, a hunched country church. An owl glided between us and the moon. An omen? The night felt huge and elating as we talked, half giggling, spilling out plans, images, anticipations and fears.
It was like being a teenager again. The same pumped-up energy, the fancies and fantasies swirling through the body, the sense of the world being wide open and there to be explored. The ordinary things around us seemed vivid and precious, shining as the map Kathleen drew with a finger dipped in beer on a polished table in the Hawes Inn that night. ‘Here is Pakistan,’ she said, ‘and here’s Islamabad where we fly to.’ She wetted her finger again and drew a squiggly line. ‘And here, I think, are the Karakoram.’
We sat and stared at the table, silent for a minute as the crude map of our future shone then faded.
A novice is initiated 20–26 January 1984
As we head north on icy roads in mid-January, Mal enthuses about the conditions. A substantial fall of snow, a slight thaw, now freezing hard. ‘Glencoe will be crawling with climbers this weekend.’ I’m less enthusiastic; if anyone will be crawling this weekend, it’ll be me. The van heater is broken so I huddle deep in my split-new climbing gear, watching our headlights skew out across deepening snow. We don’t speak much, each absorbed in our own thoughts.
I’m keyed up, anxious yet oddly elated. To shut out the cold I mentally run through everything Mal had shown me about the basic mechanics of snow and ice climbing, in the warmth of his flat a day before. It had been quite bewildering – the knots, the principles of belaying, the extraordinary array of ironmongery, the pegs, pins, channels, screws, plates, nuts, crabs, slings … An evocative litany but especially confusing when everything seemed to have several alternative names. This was starting truly from scratch.
I try to review it all logically. First, the harness. I smile to myself in
