evening in the Clachaig the sense of siege and drama mounted like the storm outside as one group after another staggered in, red-faced, dazed, plastered from head to foot, head torches making them look like negatives of miners. I floundered through chest-high drifts to our chalet, passed two tents reduced to mangled poles and shreds of material. And this on the sheltered floor of the valley. Rumours spread rapidly. All roads out blocked … sixteen head torches still on the hill … Mountain Rescue team on four calls at once … Hamish MacInnes stranded in his Land-Rover … someone’s taken a fall, broken his collarbone … We drank on, increasingly aware of Tony and Terry’s absence. They’d left at 5.00 a.m. to go to Ben Nevis. Mal was quite confident in them, but still kept glancing at his watch.
Finally, round 10.30, a small and a tall figure pushed wearily through the door. They looked as if they’d been tested in a wind tunnel, a mangle, a car wash, then hit repeatedly over the head for hours with a particularly substantial edition of Being and Nothingness. Which turned out to be pretty much the case as, drinks in hand, eyes still unfocused, they recounted their epic day. They’d succeeded in doing Vanishing Gully in appalling conditions (‘Very vertical,’ said Tony, eyes wide at the memory of it, ‘very’), abseiled off Tower Ridge where their lowered ropes flew straight up in the air like snakes charmed by the banshee howl of the wind, and made it to the CIC hut, mostly on hands and knees. There, unbelievably, they were refused shelter because they were not members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, so they had to continue. From the hut to the road, normally an hour’s walk, had taken them six and a half hours of tumbling, rolling, swimming, crawling, through a world gone berserk. ‘I once took two and a half hours on that walk,’ Mal said, ‘and the conditions were desperate. For Tony to take six and a half hours …’ He shook his head. Terry was slumped back, pale now, staring into his pint, completely drained. Tony was starting to recover, and entertained us with the absurdity of nearly being wiped out crossing the golf course (‘Thought we might set a new record’), finally being slammed up against the fence (‘I thought I was going to come out the other side as mince!’), getting to the car and realizing they’d have to dig it out. Then they’d driven through the blizzard, abandoned it on the road, and battered their way through to the Clachaig on foot.
A definite epic, a tale worth surviving for the telling of it. And sitting in that besieged inn in the wilderness, packed with dripping, excited, exhausted climbers, thinking back on the day and listening to the stories go round, I began to see something of what brings them there. Anxiety, adrenalin, physical endeavour, the surge of exultation; a day locked into the mountains, evening in the company of fellow nutters – after this, any other way of spending the weekend would be simply dull.
And one doesn’t have to be a top-level climber to feel this. At any level the rewards and apprehensions are the same. This is what makes them risk life and limb, scrape, borrow, hitch, neglect work, lovers, family, the future. The moment you commit yourself to the next pitch all those ghostly chains of everyday worries fall away. Lightness in the midst of fear; all that exists is the next move, the mountain, and your thudding heart.
Come closing time we are invited into the Snug bar among the late drinkers. Something of a ceilidh starts; guitars come out and the songs go round. And looking round I suddenly see how this was the original bar I’d walked into sixteen years before. The door must have been here, the fireplace there. I see again the dartboard, the Pale Ale, my Glasgow nurse, myself singing out my teenage years into the hubbub of men. The place is recognizable though overlaid with changes. Me too. For a moment I long to go back, to have that night again, though I know I carry it inside me. Then one of the women’s voices, trained and beautiful, lifts in a haunting Gaelic lament, and in the moment’s silence at the end we are all briefly bound together by the silken, invisible rope of her song.
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
