exchanged one obsession, writing, for another, climbing – though I denied and derided it to the last. I picked up the elements of Good Brit Style: not to be seen training, not to have gleaming new gear, to play down all but one’s fears and fiascos. To drink too much too late, to get up reluctantly and late next morning, moaning and groaning, to arrive at the foot of the route with three hours’ daylight left and still climb it: that was considered Good Style. I had little problem in acquiring that.
The substance was another matter. Due to poor weather I only had another four weekends’ winter climbing in Glencoe. Yet the promise and threat of these changed my entire winter, made it something to be enjoyed rather than just suffered. Weekdays were a time for recovery and appreciation of home comforts, with the weekend to both dread and anticipate. My social life was suddenly full of climbers, climbing talk, climbing plans and reminiscences. Much laughter, drinking, abuse and friendship, shared experience. And gradually, the beginning of some composure.
It was, quite simply, very exciting. It dramatized my life.
By the end of the season, I’d done a grand total of six Scottish routes, none harder than Grade 3 or 4, and an amount of yomping about on the hills. It was an absurdly inadequate background for going to the Himalayas – the norm would be several Scottish winters, then a few seasons in the Alps doing the classics and adding some new routes, then one might consider Pakistan or Nepal.
My anxiety at exposure didn’t disappear, but did diminish. I still disliked waiting on belay halfway up a route. And some days I had no appetite or nerve for it at all, when climbing was all slog and fear and trembling and wanting it to be over with, hating it. That too – and having to continue just the same – was valuable experience. But other days …
One day in particular remains with me, always will. A day when nervousness took the form of controlled energy, when I wanted to climb. When I had the appetite. A day of great intensity and joy. Then I rejoiced in the challenge of the crux of SC Gully; pulling up and over it and moving on, I was lifted up like a surfer on a great wave of adrenalin. The day was perfect: ice blue, ice cold, needle-bright. After two hours in the shadowed gully I finally pulled myself through the notch in the cornice overhanging the top, and in my eyes was a dazzling world of sunlight and gleaming ridges and all the summits of Glencoe clear across to Ben Nevis. Mal silhouetted against the sun, belaying me; a few climbers moving on the summit ridge; my panting exhilaration – in that moment I felt like a king, and what I saw in front of me was the earth as Paradise, blue, golden and white, dazzlingly pure.
The intensity we win through effort! In that pristine clarity of the air and the senses, the simplest experiences become almost mystical in their intensity. A cigarette smoked in the lee of a cairn, an orange segment squirting in the mouth and the smell of it filling the moment, making the world fruit, the patch of lichen inches from your face, the final pulling off of boots at the end of the day – Glencoe and winter climbing gave me moments of completeness. I will never forget them.
Though I still intended to pack it in after the Mustagh trip, it was hard to imagine what I did with myself before climbing came along. The company, the personal struggle and the intensity of sensation on the mountains are all highly addictive. And more than that, I found all my customary worries and concerns – money, love life, boredom, the future, the past, politics, whatever – ceased to weigh on me in Glencoe. Such things cease to matter. All that matters is this move, the next hold, keeping the rope running out, the approaching storm clouds and the beer at the end of the day. All other worries slip off one’s shoulders and slide away into obscurity, like the sacks we sometimes sent off down a snow chute, to be picked up again on our way back down.
The weight one takes on in committing oneself to a mountain or a route is considerable, but it’s nothing compared to the weight of the world one leaves behind.
It was at the Clachaig that I first met Jon Tinker, the third of our lead climbers. I knew he’d been out to the Himalayas once, on an unsuccessful but highly educational trip to Annapurna 3, and that he was beginning to make a name for himself with some bold Alpine ascents. ‘A bit of a headbanger,’ someone opined. ‘I don’t know,’ Mal said, frowning, ‘I thought he was pretty impressive when we did that new route on the Ben.’ At twenty-four and a couple of months younger than Tony Brindle, he was the youngest of the team. I’d been forewarned that he’d be the most awkward and abrasive member, and that there could be some interesting strains between him and Tony.
‘So you’re the author chappie who wants to poke about inside our heads’ were practically his first words to me. And then he laughed, just a shade too loudly. That was typical Jon: the remark that niggled, then the forced laugh that seemed to say he was just joking yet with just enough edge to make it stick. I was to see him do it many times with people he’d just met – with men, at least, for he was much more charming and at ease with women – and quite often with those he knew well. He seemed to always strive for the upper hand.
I considered him. A blue-eyed, fair-haired, compact, Anglo- Saxon boy. Prickly and intelligent. He lived in Bloomsbury – unlikely address for a climber – with his parents. His father was chaplain to the University of London; his mother had written several books on housing the aged. A very pleasant English upper-middle-class household, yet Jon spoke in a quasi-cockney accent and was the scruffiest of the bunch of scruffs we were. I wondered if his background was a reason for his defensive– offensive attitude.
He went on to tell me that in an expedition it’s everyone for themselves. ‘No one’s going to look after you.’ Though that was undoubtedly the bottom line, his attitude was so different from Mal’s that I wondered how much I was being told about expeditions and how much about Jon.
Over the next few days we relaxed with each other somewhat. In many ways I had more in common with him than any of the others; he had a degree in politics, made a point of having nonclimbing friends, and was strongly interested in books and modern music, the more obscure the better. When we got onto that common ground he was quite a different person, open and enthusiastic, one I liked and found interesting.
And then suddenly one would be back to first base with him. I’d see a hesitation come over him as he remembered that I was a writer, that I might be studying him, and his eyes would twinkle with malice as he prepared one of his remarks. His desire for privacy seemed strong and genuine. He said he liked London because of its anonymity, and mountaineering because of the private nature of the experience.
He struck me as a competitor who went to great lengths to show that he wasn’t. I think of him always as lounging back, legs sprawled, hands stuffed in anorak pockets, a position of exaggerated indifference. He loved to accuse other climbers of ‘secret training’ and to protest how lazy and uncompetitive he was.
Maybe that was the basis of the antipathy that seemed to exist between him and Tony, for Tony was so openly intense and enthusiastic about climbing. He didn’t brag, but saw no point in self-denigration and pretending to be less committed than he was. He loved climbing and didn’t disguise it; he seemed to have no interests outside climbing. And Jon on the surface was exactly the opposite, yet I suspected that underneath he was the same, ‘a real revver’ as Mal said. Maybe that was why Tony seemed to irritate him.
I was there when they met at the Clachaig for the first time in a year. Yes, a definite tension there. Even Tony was less buoyant than usual, and Jon even more indifferent and uninterested. While Tony talked on about his latest doings to Mal, Jon lolled back as if oblivious and entered the conversation only to say ‘I’ve got nothing to prove, mate,’ with just sufficient emphasis on the ‘I’. And when Tony asked him directly if he’d done anything recently, Jon answered, ‘Don’t try to wind me up, Brindle – you can’t do it.’
I
