snapping in a freezing wind. The pictures went round the world and the people of Britain surfed on a great wave of national pride: a wave made all the more powerful because it was coronation year.
As coronation day approached, and while the Everest expedition was still only in the foothills of the Himalayas, our teachers decided that Lapage Street Secondary Modern School would stage a patriotic pageant to mark the Queen’s accession to the throne, and to celebrate the dawn of a New Elizabethan Age with poetry, song and spectacle. A programme was worked out. Rehearsals began. An invitation was posted to the Lord Mayor who promised to put in an appearance on the day, should his busy schedule permit.
We failures were excited, not by all these preparations but by the prospect of the day’s holiday we were to get on coronation day itself, and the souvenir mug crammed with toffees every child in the land was to receive. I say all, but it would be more accurate to say all but one of us was excited. While the rest of us laboured to memorise a very long poem about Queen Elizabeth the First and hoarded our pennies to buy tiny replicas of the coronation coach, Piggo Wilson sank into a long sulk because he couldn’t get anybody to believe his latest story, which was that Mount Everest had actually been conquered years ago in a solo effort by his uncle.
He’d tried it on Ma Lulu first. Her real name was Miss Lewis. She was the only woman teacher in our all-boys’ school and she took us for Divinity, which is called RE now. On the day the news broke that Sir John Hunt’s expedition had planted the Union Jack on the roof of the world, she was talking to us about the courage and endurance of Sherpa Tensing and Edmund Hillary, the two men who’d actually reached the summit, when Piggo’s hand went up.
‘Yes, Wilson?’ We didn’t use first names at Lapage.
‘Please Miss, they weren’t the first.’
Ma Lulu frowned. ‘Who weren’t? What’re you blathering about, boy?’
‘Hillary and Sherpa whatsit, Miss. They weren’t the first, my uncle was.’
‘Your uncle?’ She glared at Piggo. We were all sniggering. We daren’t laugh out loud because Ma Lulu had two rulers bound together with wire which she liked to whack knuckles with. Rattling, she called it.
‘Are you asking us to believe that an uncle of yours climbed Mount Everest, Wilson?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Rubbish! Who told you this, Wilson? Or are you making it up as you go along, I expect that’s it, isn’t it?’
‘No Miss, my dad told me. My uncle was his brother, Miss.’ Sniggers round the room.
‘What’s his name, this uncle?’
‘Wilson Miss, same as me, only he’s dead now.’
‘His first name, laddie: what was his first name?’
‘Maurice Miss: Maurice Wilson.’
‘Well I’ve never heard of a mountaineer called Maurice Wilson.’ She appealed to the class. ‘Has anybody else?’
We mumbled, shook our heads. ‘No,’ snapped Ma Lulu, ‘of course you haven’t, because there’s no such person.’ She glared at Piggo. ‘If this uncle of yours had conquered Mount Everest, Wilson, everybody would know his name: it would have become a household word as Hillary has, and Tensing.’
‘But Miss, he didn’t get back so it couldn’t be proved. Some people say he never reached the top, Miss.’
‘Wilson,’ said Ma Lulu patiently, ‘two weeks ago I set this class an essay on the parable of the Good Samaritan. You wrote that you’d been to Jericho for your holidays and stayed at the actual inn.’ She regarded him narrowly. ‘That wasn’t quite true, was it?’
‘No Miss,’ mumbled Piggo.
‘Where did you actually spend those holidays, laddie?’
‘Skegness Miss.’
‘Skegness.’ She arched her brow. ‘Does Jesus mention Skegness at all in that parable, Wilson?’
‘No Miss.’
‘No Miss He does not, and why? Because Jesus never visited Skegness, and your uncle never visited Everest.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Wilson: not only do you insult me by interrupting my lesson with your nonsense, you insult those brave men who risked their lives to plant the Union Jack on the roof of the world. Open your jotter.’
Piggo opened his jotter. ‘Write this: I have never been to Jericho, and my claim that my uncle climbed Mount Everest is another wicked lie, of which I am deeply ashamed.’ Piggo wrote laboriously, the tip of his tongue poking out. When he’d finished Ma Lulu said, ‘You will write that out a hundred times in your very best handwriting and bring it to me in the morning.’
We all had a good laugh at Piggo’s expense, but an amazing thing happened next morning. Instead of presenting his hundred lines, Piggo brought his dad. He didn’t look like a special agent, but nobody’d expected him to. We watched the two of them across the yard, but we had to wait till morning break to find out what it was all about. Turned out Piggo’s late uncle had made a solo attempt on Everest back in the thirties and had been found a year later 7,000 feet below the summit, frozen to death. The climbers who found him claimed they also found the Union Jack he’d taken with him, which seemed to prove he hadn’t reached the summit, but the story in the Wilson family was that Maurice had taken two flags, left one on the peak and died on the way down. The climbers had found his spare. The fact that nobody outside the family believed this didn’t worry them at all.
Ma Lulu probably didn’t believe that part either, but she was as gobsmacked as the rest of us to learn that Piggo’s tale was even partly true. She apologised handsomely, cancelled his punishment and used our next Divinity lesson to tell us the story of Maurice Wilson’s brave if foolhardy attempt to conquer the world’s highest peak all by himself We were a bit wary of Piggo after that, but taunted him slyly about his family’s version of the outcome. He stuck to his guns, insisting that his uncle had beaten Tensing and Hillary by more than twenty years.
Our pageant came and went. The Lord Mayor didn’t. He had another engagement but his deputy attended, wearing his modest chain of office. Some parents came too. Piggo’s mum was one of them, which is how we found out she wasn’t a Siamese twin as her son had insisted. On coronation day school was closed. There were very few TVs then, so most people listened to bits of the ceremony on the wireless. Most adults I mean. We kids had better things to do, like setting the golf-course on fire as an easy way of uncovering the lost balls we sold to players at a shilling each.
For us, the best bit of that momentous year came a few weeks later. The Headmaster announced in assembly that a local cinema was to show films in colour of the coronation ceremony, including the Queen’s procession through London in her golden coach, and of the conquest of Everest, compiled from footage shot by expedition members, including the final assault on the peak and views from the summit. Pupils from schools across the city would go with their teachers to watch history being made in this stupendous double bill. There’d be no charge, and our school was included.
We could hardly wait, and Piggo was even more impatient than the rest of us. ‘Now you’ll see,’ he crowed, ‘it’ll show the peak just before those losers Tensing
