At the start of my second-to-last term at Trinity I was still
going out with Alison, the violinist. In
practice anyway. In theory I'd just
about decided that I ought really to try and give it another go with Ellen.
Executing this decision was proving difficult.
Hector and Wendy had finally had enough of
me. Things came to a head over a toothpaste issue. After leaving them I'd gone from
spare room to spare room via a bit of flat-sitting (during which I slept through the famous Michael Fish storm in its entirety), until at last in November
the chance came to move back into the rented flat on Ladbroke Grove I used to
share with Ellen. After we'd moved out,
Martin had lived there, but now he and Frances were going down to Devon to work
in an outdoor centre. Their relationship
seemed to be flourishing. I could have
the flat at least till Martin came back; and he might not come back.
This suited me fine. The rent was cheap. It was in part of London I liked. It was only just down the road from Ellen,
and therefore ideal for reconciliation purposes. After a rootless nine months it was wonderful
to get my belongings out of Hector's attic and unpack everything. I sat in the living room surrounded by
half-empty boxes and tatty possessions, mentally breathing out again.
But although I was only two minutes' walk from Ellen's, getting back together proved harder than I'd anticipated. For one thing, she too was going out with
someone else, a shipping lawyer called Marcus.
This wasn't much of a surprise. Ellen used to work with him, and the few times we'd met I'd wondered if
there wasn't something in the offing.
And then there was the business of the well-made bed when I came back
from Lochailort. I thought he was a bit
of a drip (we used to refer to him - amusingly - as Mucus); but when she wasn't trying to
make me admit that things with Alison were over, Ellen seemed quite attached to
him. In the end they nearly got
married.
The other obstacle to a resumption of relations
was that having a flat of my own provided opportunities for concupiscence with
Alison which would have required unusual strength of character to resist. It took me several months to get a grip on
myself. It wasn't until New Year that I
decided I'd never sort things out with Ellen while I was still seeing Al. I'd have to finish with her. At some point. But not just yet.
One morning Al and I saw an advert at Ladbroke
Grove tube station to the effect that in February Student Railcard holders
could buy a return ticket anywhere in the country for £10.
"We could go to Scotland", I
suggested.
The realisation that there were over two hundred
and seventy Munros, of which I'd climbed only four, had inspired the
calculation that I'd need to do at least fifteen a year if I was to finish in
this life rather than the next. Every
opportunity had to be taken.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I
regretted them. It wasn't fair. Now I'd decided to finish with Alison, the
honourable thing would be to get it over and done with as soon as possible. No Scotland therefore.
But I was a coward; and a worm entered my soul
saying, If you go to Scotland with her you could see how things work out;
and if it's still no good she'll be going down to Sussex to play the violin in "My
Fair Lady" for most of March so you won't see her; and then maybe she'll
have got used to not seeing you, and it won't hurt so much when you tell her
afterwards; and anyway you've never done any winter climbing, and it's so
cheap, you'd be an idiot to refuse it.
And so on.
And so we went.
Alison came from Southport and had done a fair bit of hillwalking
in the Lakes. She'd also been in a
strange organisation called the Venture Scouts, whose members seemed to do a
lot of lying around in tents farting and, she said, having a generally
hilarious time; so she was used to roughing it.
She was keen on me, and dead keen to go to Scotland, even if it meant
getting cold and wet.
I should have been ashamed of myself, and deep
down I was. But even deeper down I
wanted someone to go climbing with.
The snag about British Rail's offer was that you
couldn't go on the sleeper, and you couldn't go over a weekend; we'd have to
spend a whole day travelling in each direction.
Four days absence from College could just about be contrived, and two
days in Glen Nevis seemed just about worth the two train-bound days. I swallowed my pride and booked us into Glen
Nevis Youth Hostel. This meant no sex,
but abstinence would be a sop to my conscience.
We got to Fort William on a winter evening after
a long day’s travelling. I'd no idea how
to get to the Hostel, and there was no sign of a bus. Some taxis were waiting outside the station,
so I hailed one with an expansive gesture, nervously fingering the thin sheaf
of banknotes in my back pocket. We drove
up Glen Nevis, peering out at the darkness.
In the event the fare was £2, derisory by London standards and about a
third of what I'd been expecting. I
tipped the driver out of sheer relief.
In the morning we were up early. The Hostel wasn't as bad as I'd feared. There were a lot of relatively normal-looking
people there, along with several others who looked as if the asylum wasn't
built which could contain them; and inside the dormitory I was transported back
ten years to boarding school, which hadn't been such a bad place either. From this point onwards I took to Hostels
with the zeal of the converted. They
were cheap too.
Out of the kitchen window there was an
absolutely wonderful view up the valley to a sharp and pointed mountain, Stob
Ban, and a much more bulky one which must be Sgurr a'Mhaim. Both were snow covered for the last thousand
feet or so.
I got Al out of doors as quickly as was
consistent with politeness. A little way
up the valley road we climbed over a fence into a plantation on the right, and
struggled up through the trees to a firebreak.
Al then said she had on one pair of tights too many, so I fretted and
looked at the map while she undressed and dressed again; we had to go south
through the woods and round an inconvenient knoll before we could get up onto
the hill proper.
When she was ready we went along the second
forestry road till it ran out and the plantation ended; but then there were
more trees, straggling away from the plantation like refugees, and we had to
fight our way through these and round the knoll before at last we came out onto
open ground. It was all a bit of a
nightmare.
Alison wasn't impressed.
"You look a right bloody idiot in
that."
"Thanks a lot."
"Is that Ben Nevis", she said,
pointing across the valley to a big hill whose top was in cloud.
"I think so. Huge isn't it?"
Soon we came to some fairly hard frozen
snow. I got the ice-axe out. My Dad had lent it to me at Christmas. It was a proper walking axe with a beautiful
ash shaft, and I carried it with pride.
It hadn't occurred to me that we might need one each. I thought I'd carry it, and that if there
were any tricky bits Al would cling gratefully to me for support.
The fatuity of this soon became apparent. A few hundred yards further up she slipped,
and in falling clutched at my arm. We
both fell down onto the snow. This then
happened repeatedly. Al found it hard to
keep her balance, and invariably when she slipped we both did. It began to dawn on me that an ice axe wasn't
much use unless you were actually holding onto it.
Nevertheless we were now getting near the
top. On either hand snowy ridges
striated with fleeting patches of sunlight rose up to meet our own. At the summit, a narrow plateau, there was
suddenly the most striking view. Away to
the south there glittered what looked like range after range of peaks, a
gleaming snowy array seeming all the more vast because we couldn't name a
single one. The Aonach Eagach ridge must
be there somewhere, I thought, transfixed.
"We could almost be in the Himalayas",
I said.
We stared at this miracle until it was too cold
to stand still any more. Blue bits were
to be seen here and there in the sky, but the wind was vicious. It was well before lunchtime. The whole ridge stretched away before us, so
we set off along it towards Stob Ban, the hill we'd seen from the kitchen
window that morning.
In half an hour or so we'd come over a broad
lower summit and were descending to a narrow neck. Ahead, on the Glen Nevis side of the ridge a
steep sheaf of black rocks thrust out of the snow, and across a coire on the
other side we could see Stob Ban. To the
south, grey clouds were piling up.
As we reached the col a blast of wind struck
with such violence that both of us immediately teetered backwards and collapsed
on to the snow. I smashed the axe in and
Al grabbed me with both hands, the ferocity of the blast rendering us
astonished and mute. Long seconds went
by.
When it had diminished to a slamming roar, we
found we were still on the mountain. “I want to go down”, Al shouted. “I'm scared.”
I didn't know what to do. The dirty weather amassing upwind might or
might not mean snowfall. In this wind
snow would mean a blizzard. We only had
one ice-axe. I didn't want to come down,
but it seemed to be the sensible thing to do.
The coire on the Glen Nevis side of the ridge had a steep headwall, but
no cornice. We'd have to get down that
way.
Carefully we climbed over the edge, facing in,
and went down the side of a frieze of dark red rock. At the foot of the outcrop was a steep slope
of bone hard snow. I went down first and
cut steps for Al, my first stepcutting ever.
A painstaking and tiring business, and once I slipped, stopping the fall
by digging the axe in. You could have
great confidence in it, I realised. The
two of us crept downwards together. If
we could get a hundred feet lower, the angle of the slope would be a lot
easier.
After ten minutes or so some figures appeared
over the edge above and soon caught us up.
They were two English lads who'd been in the Youth Hostel; they'd come
down because of the weather too. Strange
to hear their Herefordshire voices in Glen Nevis. One of them had a spare short axe and lent it
to us. After that we made much better
progress.
When we were eating our sandwiches further down
the coire, Al said, "Come on, admit it, you were scared too."
But strangely I hadn't been; only disappointed
that we couldn't go on to Stob Ban. The
brief glimpse I'd had of winter mountains had touched me in some fundamental
place, and I felt an instinctive sympathy with them in which fear had no part.
Like so many of my insights, this one turned out to be
entirely without foundation; but all the same I really hadn't been scared. Recently we'd narrowly avoided being mugged
on the tube coming back from the cinema: that had been scary. Not this.
It was early afternoon. In the coire we were almost totally sheltered
from the wind. Scraps of cloud blew
overhead in a maddeningly clear sky; but there was no popular vote for a re-ascent. We went down the glen to Achriabhach, and
then walked back to the Hostel along the road.
I persuaded Al to carry the rucksack.
Compared to her I was an old man after all. Nearly thirty.
It turned out to be a very long trudge, and she
complained bitterly.
"You women want equal rights", I
said. "That means you have just the
same right to carry the rucksack as me."
This seemed to be quite a clever remark at the
time.
In the evening Al did something really irritating. We'd made dinner and were going through into
the dining room to eat when she saw three lads she knew from the Venture Scouts
in Southport sitting at one of the tables.
She stopped in the middle of the room and stood irresolute holding her
plate, not knowing whether to sit down with them or not.
It was a moment which neatly encapsulated what
was wrong with our relationship. Her
willingness to defer to me was partly what I liked about her; but by now I was
bored with it. Ellen would have gone
straight up to them, or swept past without so much as a nod. But then Ellen wouldn't have been seen dead
in the Venture Scouts anyway.
Al was ill in the night, and when I went to see her in the morning
she was lying shivering under a great pile of blankets. Men weren't allowed into the women's
dormitories, but communication from the door was ludicrous, and anyway there
were few other occupants to complain.
"Don't feel that great", she said.
She didn't look too good either.
"Should I get a doctor?", I asked,
hoping the answer would be no: fetching a doctor would put a stop to any
climbing. At the same time it was
appalling to find I could be so callous.
"I'll be fine”, she said. “Just bring me a glass of water. And a waste bin. In case I'm sick again."
I packed up my rucksack and set off for Stob
Ban, feeling only moderately guilty.
Outside it was cold and overcast, but the tops
were clear. Not such a bad day, I
thought. Later there were many times
when I'd have paid a lot of money for winter weather like this.
I went the same way as the previous day, along
the road for a hundred yards, then up into the woods as far as the first forest
track. According to the map it ran all
the way along the valley to Achriabhach.
Any hope that it'd be more interesting than the road was short-lived;
there was an unchanging wall of fir-trees on either side, treadmill walking for
nearly an hour. No wild-life either: the
trees planted so close together they seemed to squeeze everything else out.
Just before the track rejoined the road at
Achriabhach, a right fork ran uphill almost to the edge of the forest. I went up this, then struggled through dense
undergrowth to the border fence. Across
a rising slab of moor beyond stood the imposing northern shoulder of Stob Ban.
This initial shoulder was hard work, and I went
steeply uphill for nearly two thousand feet.
For the best part of an hour all I could see ahead was an unyielding
bank of grass and moss and stones, and looking around I seemed to be making
minimal progress against the lower slopes of the hills on either side. But the map showed an easing higher up, and
in time I came out at the top of the steepest bit to find a mile of easily
rising snowy ridge ahead, blocked at the top by a rocky pyramid, black against
the blue sky.
After the last gruelling hour this middle part
of the ridge was pure enjoyment. On the
right the long ridges of Mullach nan Coirean ran down to Glen Nevis; to the
east sat the great bulk of Sgurr a'Mhaim, my idea of the true massive Highland
mountain, a revelation to anyone brought up on English hills; the going was
good on hard snow, and ahead the ridge rose gently up to the outcrop barring
the way.
This looked easiest to turn on the west, where
there was less snow. But when I started
up, the rocks were heavily glazed and I clambered up very carefully, conscious
of the air under my boots. Relieved to
get back onto the crest, I found that it now narrowed to a delicate snow-arete
twenty yards long, perfectly level, but with nasty drops on either side.
It was a great moment in my life. I hesitated; a strong wind was blowing from right to left, making the prospect of a
balancing act distinctly unattractive.
It would be stupid to fall. And
yet knife-edged aretes were part of what mountaineering was all about. I had been reading Mountaineering in Scotland, and Murray’s
accounts of his pre-war exploits with McAlpine and Dr Bell seemed to feature a
knife-edged arete on every other page. I
couldn't look him in the literary eye again if I failed now. Obstacles presented themselves, and you
sometimes had to swallow before overcoming them.
I took a deep breath, and walked across, not
looking down.
On the other side I thought, It's so wonderful
to be up here that I wouldn't have turned back for anything.
An easy thought to have when you're past the bad
bit.
Beyond lay broader ground and firmer footing,
and a bealach where my ridge joined the main Mullach nan Coirean - Stob Ban
ridge. Ahead the same extraordinary view
as the previous day; wave upon wave of snowy hills, the clouds and light mingling
with them in dazzling whites and wintry greys.
To the left, the final slope to the summit. It was covered in very hard frozen snow, and
I slithered up, ice axe stretched out ahead for anchorage, feet scrabbling behind
for purchase.
I stayed on the top as long as I could stand the
cold. I thought, It's like a winter
wonderland. A cliche of course, but
that's really what it was like.
After ten minutes or so I went down the east
ridge, much stirred. Sgurr a'Mhaim
looked very tempting across the coire.
It was only one o'clock or so and there was plenty of time. But then I thought that Alison was lying sick
in the Hostel, and I ought to go back to see if she was alright. Besides, the day had been perfect already; perhaps
it was wrong to ask for more.
I'd read about glissading, and here was a chance
to try it out. I slithered all the way
down into the coire, ending up at the snowline with a wet backside but no
regrets. Not about that anyway: looking
up at Sgurr a'Mhaim it was hard not to wish that I was up there now. A path led down the glen to Achriabhach, and
I walked back along the road to the Youth Hostel.
Al was up and about, the waste-bin back in its
corner, unused.
"Did you have a good day?"
"Brilliant."
One of the best in fact.
By the evening she'd recovered sufficiently to
walk into Fort William for a drink; we couldn't afford a taxi. It was a bitterly cold night, and I put on my
balaclava. Once we met some people
coming the other way, and I took it off again until they'd gone past.
"Honestly you, you're so bloody vain",
Alison said. "You take your hat off
even when it's too dark for them to see how stupid you look."
The cab to the station in the morning used up the last of our
money. As the train ran east between
Fort William and Spean Bridge we could see, glimpsed between the ubiquitous fir
trees of the Leanachan Forest, the spurs of Aonach Mor and the Grey Coires,
snow shrouded, gleaming pale yellow in the early morning sun. I'd never seen them before. What wonderful mountains they looked.
"What kind of sheep are those?"
We were rattling along somewhere in the borders.
"Herdwicks", Al replied.
For someone like myself who knew nothing about
farming it was an impressively confident answer.
A hundred miles later I'd received the same
answer half a dozen times, and doubt set in.
"How many breeds of sheep do you actually
know?"
"One."
"Herdwicks?"
She giggled.
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