Cold Wars

by Andy Kirkpatrick

  ‘They haven’t shot any down yet,’ I said.

  ‘They’ve shot down a lot of our helicopters, and they shot down a lot of Russian planes when they were there. We trained them to do it. So I guess it’s not if, it’s when.’

  ‘Are you scared?’ I asked, imagining what it must be like when you have to go, not like a climb, where the only machine in motion is you, and you can just stop.

  ‘It’s my job… but yes I’m shitting myself.’

  ‘What if we go into Iraq?’ I said.

  ‘I just hope we’re not stupid enough to have more than one war at a time. We’re stretched as it is.’

  We drove back home for Boxing Day tea, my sister Joanne joining us, a teacher at a local school, our little sister.

  ‘How’s work,’ she asked Robin after having a hug.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re not off to any wars are you?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it’ he said.

  Gathering the kids and their presents together, I bundled the lot into the car, Robin and my mum coming out to say goodbye.

  ‘Lets not leave it so long,’ I said to Rob, shaking his hand, knowing we would, and I probably wouldn’t see him again for a long time.

  I gave mum a hug and kiss, turned to get in the car, but instead spun around and gave Robin a hug too, probably the first one ever, lifting him off his feet.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said, as I put him down. He felt light, not like a man, but like a brother.

  ‘Be careful Rob,’ I said quietly, so mum wouldn’t hear.

  ‘You too.’

  NINE

  Troll

  February 2003

  The trip out to Norway was long, driving from Sheffield to North Shields, the Northeast’s answer to the port of Hull, only without the charm. There we would board the ferry for the overnight trip across the North Sea, our destination the Troll Wall, the highest in Europe.

  ‘The Troll Wall is mighty,’ I had told Paul Ramsden over the phone, seeing if he was interested in trying a new route, and in winter, on one of the most serious challenges around. ‘Mighty big, mighty loose, mighty dangerous and we mighty die.’

  I’d been climbing with Paul off and on since we went to Patagonia in 1999. He had a reputation as the quiet man of hard alpine climbing, his hangdog expression making him look older than he was. Until Patagonia, I’d never heard of him, but he had ticked off more hard routes than many of the more famous climbers of his generation. He was only a year older than me, but felt like my dad, perhaps because he’d lived several lifetimes’ worth of hard climbing and adventure.

  Paul was from Bradford, a typical northerner, and worked as one of the country’s top health-and-safety men, helping to draft legislation to protect the public, then breaking all the rules in the mountains.

  I often say that when going on an adventure it’s best not to go with professional climbers, as all they can talk about is climbing, which gets stale quickly. People with proper jobs are always much better, as you can learn stuff from them. Stuck in a tent or snow hole with Paul I learned about many things, like Britain’s regulations on asbestos, the manufacture of incontinence pants and how they polish the cockpit of the Eurofighter.

  Just before getting on the ferry, we stopped at a North Shields branch of Netto, wary of how much higher the cost of living was in Norway. Throwing in bags of pasta, tea bags and soup, we racked our brains for all the things we thought might make life tolerable for two weeks on a huge wall in winter.

  Pushing the trolley around the aisles it was impossible to ignore the state of the other shoppers, who, by and large, looked as though they were in transit from prison or the grave, either coming or going. When I’d been on the dole in Hull and London I’d shopped in places like this, the bottom of the food-store chain, the next step looking in bins. I realised I’d avoided them ever since.

  ‘Bit grim in here, isn’t it?’ said Paul, nodding at a man with no teeth, shuffling along holding up his trousers and wearing dirty pink slippers.

  ‘If they attack remember to go for the brain,’ I said.

  ‘How come they don’t have baskets in these shops?’ said Paul.

  ‘I guess people pinch them,’ I replied.

  ‘What could you do with a basket?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Use it to fry chips?’

  I watched a harried mother holding a can of lager with two grubby kids, their fat faces a sign that at least they were fed with something. I wondered how you got in such a state, and how my mum, a single a parent in the days before the state looked after such people, had managed to bring up three kids without recourse to drugs or alcohol.

  I knew the answer: she fought for life, for hers and her kids, never compromising, never letting the weight of poverty crush us. Here you saw people who were squashed flat, their lives, the lives of their children, as low as the prices.

  We sat in the car, waiting to go on to the ferry, the car’s suspension loaded down with a ton of gear: haul-bags, a portaledge, big-wall gear as well as alpine kit. This climb would test everything we’d learned as climbers, the wall requiring a unique set of skills: aid climbing to a high standard as well as hard mixed climbing in axes and crampons. With the wall close to the sea, we’d have to survive every kind of atrocious weather, from Arctic cold to Scottish conditions of freezing rain and snow. The biggest challenge was mental – we’d have to be mental enough to imagine we could do it.

  I hated silence, something I put down to having a television as a kid which required fifty-pence pieces to work. Silence in the house meant we didn’t even have fifty pence to our name. With Paul there were often silences, he being a man who didn’t waste words. That meaning I was always finding something to talk about to fill the void.

  ‘How come you don’t have any tapes in your car, Paul?’ I asked, opening the glove compartment and knowing he spent a lot of time driving.

  ‘Not really into music,’ he said.

  ‘Do you listen to Radio Four?’ I asked, twiddling with the knob.

  ‘Too posh,’ he said.

  ‘If you did listen to music what would it be?’ I went on.

  ‘The Beatles?’ he said, sounding unsure.

  ‘What album?’ I asked, now searching in the door pocket.

  ‘The Best of The Beatles?’ he said.

  I looked at him, his expression that of a man waiting to go in for a major operation.

  ‘Excited?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, his face as deadpan as ever.

  ‘Are you an optimist, Paul?’ I asked, wondering how such a man could climb so many hard routes.

  He looked at me, his face looking like it always did, as if he was about to cry. ‘I hope so.’

  The lights of the cars in front came to life. A man in a yellow high-visibility vest waved us on to the boat.

  I love that moment of driving down the ramp onto a ferry, and being directed where to park. There’s the ritual of switching off the car, sticking it in gear, grabbing your kit and heading up the steep staircases to the fancy part of the ship, everyone excited, doing the same little tour, checking out the bar, the restaurant, the soft-play area and the aisles and aisles of seats. Even on a routine ferry ride, there’s a sense of embarking on an adventure.

  A night ferry was another matter. Instead of trying to sleep in the play area’s ball pool, which generally smelt of wee, the balls all sticky with kid glue, we had a cabin, raising my excitement to new levels.

  ‘We’ll never get out of here if the ferry rolls,’ said Paul as we lay in the cabin, feeling the boat rock as we moved offshore.

  ‘Best keep morbid thoughts for the wall,’ I said.

  Paul gave a dirty chuckle.

  I thought about the route, how we had loads of time, loads of gear, and loads of experience, and that it must be in the bag.

  It wasn’t about doing a new route. This was about the next step. It would also put a ghost to rest, having tried to solo the wall a few years before.

 
; The wall – and its trolls – was no match for us.

  We rolled off the ferry in bright, cold sunshine, Kristiansand’s harbour edged with ice, and began the long drive along the coast to Oslo, then north to Romsdal.

  The temperature dropped as we drove, sun turning to icy clag, passing through Oslo and up to Lillehammer, the heater unable to cope. It would have been nice to have some tapes, as the Norwegian radio was worse than silence.

  I got Paul to tell me the story of climbing the Eiger when he was still really only a kid with his uncle Peter, a tale of climbing up waterfalls and a night at Death Bivouac, all told with typical Yorkshire understatement.

  ‘Pretty easy really,’ he concluded.

  Paul operated under the radar of climbing magazines because he had no reason to seek fame, having a good job and no need to make money from his climbs. I was different, and felt a bit like a whore next to Paul. What was my motivation? Was I making money from climbing, or climbing to make money?

  ‘Tell us a story about an industrial incident,’ I said, knowing Paul had a wealth of these, having been involved in investigating many a horrible death.

  ‘There was this industrial oven…’ and so he began.

  I liked Paul a lot, both for his skill as a climber, but also his skill at being normal: married, with a good job, balanced and uncomplicated – at least on the surface.

  It was dark by the time we arrived in the Romsdal valley, snow banked up beside the road, the tarmac grey and bloodless with cold. We parked up at the viewing point for the Troll Wall, where the coaches and sightseers stopped in the summer to gawp.

  We got out and looked up into the darkness.

  We couldn’t see it. But we felt it.

  Paul had climbed the wall by the Rimmon route several years before, while I had my own memories.

  Such a wall never leaves you.

  Looking up, both of us were thinking the same things, imagining ourselves up there, a chunk of our bravado leaving us in the cold, feeling the huge weight of space hanging unseen above us – a space we would have to cross.

  We drove into town and found it empty, the inhabitants locked away inside for the winter. The only place open was the petrol station, where we hung around eating a hot dog for tea, Norway being the world capital of hot dogs. They were also about the only hot food we could afford.

  There are many ways to read a culture, but one of the best is to check out its magazine stands. There you will see a slice of its people’s interests, obsessions and peccadilloes. A news stand in Geneva is very different to one in Milan, the glossy, high-brow magazines on business and culture replaced by gossip rags, their paper as thin as their content.

  The magazine stand showed a healthy society, with a good mix of middle of the range titles, without much gossip, but lots of healthy outdoor covers – pictures of rifles, fishing rods and dirty boots. The one thing out of the ordinary was the bottom shelf, which contained a section of children’s magazines on one half, brightly coloured, complete with attached toys that would be forgotten the instant they were ripped from the cover, while the other half held porno magazines and adult novels.

  Maybe this showed a healthy Scandinavian approach to sex.

  I explained my magazine stand world theory to Paul and pointed out the bottom shelf, but he just looked at me like I was a bit mad as he popped the last of his hot dog in mouth.

  ‘Maybe Norwegian pervs tend to be on the short side?’ he said.

  In the morning we drove back to the wall and pulled in between giant mounds of bulldozed snow, finding it just as vast and daunting as we’d remembered – a mile-high span of rotten and loose rock topped by troll-like spires, giving the whole edifice the appearance of some warped dark fantasy castle, the lair of something horrible. The nature of the wall defied any logic for it to be climbed apart from that very reason itself. It was a horrible cliff, ugly, terrifying, and so it had to be scaled.

  ‘Looks good,’ said Paul, with his hands in his pockets. ‘Let’s start.’

  The crux of the climb would probably be getting all our kit to the bottom of our proposed new route, which was several hundred metres up the huge approach slope of steep scree, and would involve ice climbing and a great deal of toil. I couldn’t wait.

  A wide river full of ice and slush ran between the car and the wall, meaning we had to do a big detour across a railway bridge in order to start our approach to the wall, repeating the trip again and again, bent double from heavy loads.

  We had enough hardware to tackle anything we might find, from wide cracks to ice and snow, plus two weeks’ food, stretchable to three, learning lessons from the Lafaille Route on the Dru. Each carry into the base of the wall felt like a step towards success, the greater the pain in our shoulders the better our cards when it came to climbing, like stockpiling ammunition before a battle.

  Nevertheless, the slog up the slope, the snow deep and unhelpful, was exhausting, each flex and straightening of my legs under such a heavy load making my thighs scream.

  After three days of work, we were hauling our bags in the dark up to our first proper portaledge bivy, set up under an overhang at the base of the wall, a mile above the river, snow slopes and ice cliffs below us. From here we’d push up our ropes for several pitches then move our camp, hauling our bags with all our gear and supplies after us, before repeating the whole process, climbing capsule style, a tactic Ian and I had also learned on the Lafaille.

  With the slope dropping away below us we felt a long way up before we’d even started, and the first pitch, which began with crampons and axes, felt like cloud walking.

  True to form, once the ice dried up the rock became pretty poor, split with cracks and some sections loose, others okay, everything stuffed with mud and moss and grass. It was about the most unappealing rock you could climb, but we weren’t there to be appealed to, and as long as we were moving upwards then that was fine.

  It took most of the day to climb two pitches, crossing a small roof, the rock always unpleasant. I led all day while Paul belayed, jumaring up after each pitch, happy to take it easy the first day, huddled below me in a huge duvet jacket.

  The section ended at a good ledge, our next home, and it was a delight to simply abseil down the ropes back to our portaledge, rather than haul in the dark and face the usual struggle with the ledge, always undertaken when most exhausted.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ asked Paul as I lay down, happy that we’d begun.

  ‘Oh yes, love,’ I replied, as he lit the hanging stove and stuck on a pan of snow, the flame warming up the tiny space within the flysheet of the ledge in a few minutes.

  ‘This is the life,’ I said, laying back in my sleeping bag, warm and cosy, tea and biscuits in hand, as dinner bubbled away in the pan.

  ‘It sure beats alpine climbing,’ agreed Paul. ‘Sat on some ledge with too thin a sleeping bag, not enough food, and not enough gear.’

  ‘I doubt we could have any more food or gear,’ I said, half congratulating myself, and then stopping: ‘Maybe that’s not a good thing? Maybe it’s not meant to be like this? Maybe this is cheating?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Paul, laying back. ‘Maybe it’s not meant to be a foregone conclusion?’

  We climbed for a few more days, pushing our ropes up the wall, the climbing never hard, but potentially dangerous. We were always careful about what we pulled up on, or pounded pegs into. Reaching a sloping ledge, the spot for our next camp, Paul led the pitch above before it got dark.

  ‘Good fun this,’ said Paul as he carefully eased onto a skyhook.

  ‘Good for married men,’ I shouted up.

  ‘I think I might need a birdbeak for this bit. Any tips?’ he asked, fiddling for some beaks on his harness.

  ‘Stick one in, hammer it until it doesn’t come out. That usually works.’

  ‘Right, okay,’ he said, tapping the beak in.

  ‘You know what they say about Yorkshiremen, Paul?’ I shouted.

  ‘What do they say?’ he asked.r />
  ‘You can always tell a Yorkshire man, but you can’t tell him much.’

  The pitch half finished, Paul made an anchor and tied off the green lead rope, before we rappelled back to the portaledge.

  Next morning, we started early, packing up all our kit into the two huge haul-bags to begin the gruelling process of hauling. I went up first and taking in the slack on the haul line, which fed through a locking pulley, Paul lowered the bags out into space. The weight of the bags was tremendous, and we could only haul them with both of us weighting the haul line, dragging the rope through inches at a time as the bags slowly rose up the wall.

  It was knackering work, the same process repeated at each belay until we’d reached the ledge. Putting in a big effort I hauled up the bags alone, while Paul gave them a push from below, helping them avoid catching on loose rock.

  It was a great feeling to be working as a team, to be climbing carefully and with a big margin of safety, this style of climbing perhaps the antidote for my growing unease about the risks in pushing the limits.

  Pulling up the bags, and attaching each one to the belay, I looked up at the next pitch, thinking we had enough time to push another rope length up the wall, then scanning around to check there was enough snow on the ledge to live here for a while.

  The climbing above looked very hard and the rock compact, requiring skyhooks and birdbeaks. I was ready for it, my first new route and on the Troll Wall in winter. Paul took a while to arrive, and as soon as I saw his face, pale and strained, I knew something was wrong, his movements awkwardly mechancical.

  ‘It’s my back,’ he said, as he stepped onto the ledge and leaned like an old man against the rock.

  ‘My back’s gone.’

  I’d heard all about Paul’s back, and the damage he’d done to his spine having landed straight-legged from a boulder problem. As a result of his injury, he’d spent months laid out on the living-room floor, totally incapacitated. He’d seen every back doctor he could, unable to sit for more than fifteen minutes. Clutching at straws, he’d seen an acupuncturist, whose treatment had allowed him to walk and sit again. Since then it had flared up again from time to time, but not like it did in the middle of the Troll Wall.