Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  By the time September and a new term came around, we were back together and spending increasing amounts of time in each other’s company. By about Christmas I realised with a shock that I was most definitely in love. Over the winter break I got a commission from the Traveller magazine to write an article on the Trans-Siberian railway. Fiona came with me on the journey. To while away the days as the train trundled slowly across the vast wastelands of the former Soviet Union, we drank spectacularly cheap Russian champagne and made love in our cabin between stations.

  In Siberia the stations are a very long way apart.

  By the normal course of events, given my previous failures with steady girlfriends, my relationship with Fiona was due to grind to a halt. But it didn’t. In fact it got stronger and stronger. By the time we realised that we had better do something about our exams, we were virtually living together. At the last minute, with the crunch just days away, panic set in and I managed to revise enough to give me a second-class degree. Fiona also scraped through after a couple of weeks of all-night revision.

  Somehow, somewhere, I had come to the notice of the Foreign Office – or to be more precise MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. After a series of interviews conducted in central London, they offered me the chance to apply for a career which would have plunged me into the world of covert intelligence-gathering. After some very serious thought I declined their offer. I didn’t want to be a spy, I had already decided on a career in television.

  I had to start somewhere so I wrote to the BBC, asking to join one of their trainee schemes. They wrote back an extremely brief letter informing me that 38 million people had applied for six vacancies and anyway I had missed the deadline for applications.

  In a fit of rage of the ‘I’ll show the BB Bloody C what fools they are’ variety, I applied for the first cash-paying job I saw in the local paper and got it. Cleaning out chicken sheds was not exactly the high-profile media career I’d envisaged but it was a start. I lasted three disgusting days then went on to other equally soul-destroying jobs doing construction work, assembling double-glazing units and travelling the country putting up marquees at fetes and fairs.

  Fiona worked at a travel agency and we pooled all our money. The idea, when we had saved enough, was to go on a long journey across the Sahara in the old Landrover which I had recently purchased for £500. On the day we departed, Fiona’s bewildered parents had the tearful look of a couple that weren’t at all sure they would ever see their daughter again.

  They nearly didn’t.

  The Landrover broke down. Bang smack in the middle of the Sahara desert on the piste from Tamanrasset to Djanet in the deep south of Algeria. And when I say broke down, I mean it really did break; the rusty old chassis snapped in two just above the rear axle with the dramatic result that the poor old Landrover dragged its arse along the ground like a dog with no rear legs. If it hadn’t been for some Italians who happened upon us by chance we could have been in serious trouble.

  Using an ingenious collection of bits of broken leaf spring (I had quite a collection of these by this stage in the journey) and by drilling fixing points into the broken chassis we managed to jack the vehicle more or less back into shape and bolt the pieces of metal across the broken section. Then, after a dodgy welding job in the nearest oasis, we limped back to England at about fifteen miles an hour.

  Restless for more travelling, I applied for the job of trek leader with adventure holiday company Explore Worldwide and was accepted. During my first season in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco I had plenty of time to think and it was Fiona who was foremost on my mind. The journey across the Sahara had brought us closer together and now I realised that I desperately didn’t want to lose her. After the High Atlas I was already pencilled in for a season running felucca sailing boats down the Nile for the same company; that would take me away from Fiona for another extended period – perhaps six months – and I wasn’t at all sure she would hang around waiting for me much longer without some sort of longer-term commitment.

  In the closing days of my Moroccan contract, after a few beers in the Foucauld hotel in Marrakech I found myself thinking about what the chances were of a long-term relationship – a really long-term one – succeeding. Would I ever stop travelling? Could I kill off the restlessness that run through me as thick as my own blood? Could I ever – and the very words struck a chill deep inside me – ‘settle down’?

  The answer to all of those was an emphatic ‘no’. A cosy domestic life was absolutely the last priority on my personal list. It threatened every freedom I had and seemed to me to be tantamount to giving up. A few beers later I was still wrestling with the problem and I decided that flipping a bottle top might give me a hand in the decision-making process. Logo side up would mean ‘yes’, crinkle side up would mean ‘no’.

  I balanced the metal disc on my thumbnail for a second then spun it into the air …

  When I got back to England I asked Fiona to marry me.

  We set the date for September and then I left to guide drunken Australians down the Nile, leaving Fiona and her mother to make all of the arrangements for the wedding.

  The first few years were manic: Fiona ran a Tuscan villa company from a back room of our small house in St. Albans and had Thomas, Alistair and Gregory in rapid succession. I concentrated on establishing my career in television. By a series of lucky breaks, the BBC offered me a researcher contract on ‘Wogan’, the early evening chat show. The show was live, which added a certain adrenaline to the job. It was also intensely competitive amongst the eight researchers, who had to come up with a constant flow of high-profile guests if we were to get our contracts renewed.

  It was an extremely exciting and glamorous show to work on. With guests like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Princess Anne, Mel Gibson and Zsa Zsa Gabor, our average working week was filled with extremely interesting lunch appointments. There were moments of real drama too; on the night before Live Aid, the ‘Wogan’ producer Jon Plowman decided late that he wanted Bob Geldof on that night’s line-up. We tracked Geldof down to Wembley where he was putting the finishing touches to the biggest live concert ever, but we couldn’t get a message to him.

  ‘Go and get him,’ Plowman told me.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just get him on the show.’

  I left the television centre at about 5.50 p.m., in a souped-up BBC limousine. ‘Wogan’ went live at 7 p.m. Having blagged my way into Wembley stadium past some pretty determined security I found that Geldof was on-stage rehearsing with the Boomtown Rats. Between numbers I walked on to the middle of the stage, told him who I was and told him the BBC wanted him for that night’s ‘Wogan’. Geldof told me, in his usual earthy style, that he was busy and couldn’t come. I pointed out that if he made it on to the show he would be able to persuade an extra eight million people to watch Live Aid the following day. Geldof walked with me off the stage there and then and after a high-speed chase through west London we made it to the studio just as the opening titles to the show were running.

  It was that kind of programme.

  By 1988 I was in a good position at the BBC with the prospect of producing and directing jobs just a few years away. But the constraints of working within a big institution were eating away at me. I was already restless to move on. When I looked at the staff producers above me, with their safe salaries and secure careers I realised that I did not want to be one of ‘Aunties’ men.

  I resigned from the BBC and went freelance, a move which most of my colleagues thought was crazy. Fiona supported me completely, even though the move would inevitably mean less financial security.

  John Gau Productions offered me my first freelance job, as Associate Producer on the ITV series ‘Voyager’, which featured expeditions and adventures in the wild corners of the planet. That run of thirteen half-hour programmes changed the direction of my career, and took me increasingly out on to location. In my first year on the job I shot in countries such as China, Egypt an
d Morocco. The whole process of producing ‘Voyager’ was a fascinating one, but more than anything I loved being in the field, filming people who were the best in the world in their chosen fields of adventure.

  The films were highly visual and got a prime time early evening slot on ITV where they won good audience figures. But for me, their real success was in the way we portrayed the adventurers. We tried, as far as we could, to get the protagonists to reveal more about why they chose to risk their lives for a goal that most people would regard as crazy. Getting under the skin of our heroes was the key.

  By 1990 I was producing and directing for the second series of ‘Voyager’, filming (among other projects) a record-breaking hang-glider flight from the world’s highest live volcano in Ecuador, and following a world powerboat champion as he attempted to regain his title in one of the world’s most dangerous sports.

  Then things got really busy. Together with ‘Voyager’ series editor Colin Luke I created the BBC1 series ‘Classic Adventure’, which we filmed on location in India, Kenya, Brazil and Greenland. We pushed the limits a little further on this new series and the expeditions we filmed were sometimes extreme. In India we shot a very hazardous whitewater descent of the Brahmaputra river, in Kenya we filmed a team of hang-glider and microlight pilots flying through the wilderness terrain of the Rift Valley.

  Life as a freelancer in television is always precarious but, specialising as I did in overseas expedition work, there were other inevitable pressures which built steadily as the years went by. The sheer amount of time I spent away was definitely making life more difficult for Fiona as she was left to manage all our financial affairs. We had always walked a tightrope financially and the responsibility of staving off mortgage companies and banks was often down to her.

  For me the travel was part of the drug, part of the kick of the films I made, but being on the road so much was sometimes difficult for me too. Having established my career I couldn’t possibly afford to turn work down, and the relentless months of location work meant I missed many important events which I really should have been there for. My brother’s wedding. Numerous of my own wedding anniversaries. New Year’s Eves. Half of the time I wasn’t even in the country to see my own films being broadcast.

  But there is a limit to how many ‘Happy Birthday’ telephone calls you can make to your children from hotel rooms in Chiang Mai or Mombasa before it starts to get you down. Then in 1992, while I was away in Nepal filming an expedition of disable climbers attempting a trekking peak, Fiona’s sister Stephanie suffered an unexpected tragedy. Her husband Howard, who was thirty-one, collapsed on a rugby pitch from heart failure and later died. Completely unaware of this, and totally out of touch in the Himalayas, I got back to Kathmandu to hear this tragic news (four weeks old) from Fiona. I had missed the funeral, that was bad enough, but more importantly to me, I had missed the chance to help Fiona and her family through an incredibly difficult time. Fiona really needed me during those days and weeks and I wasn’t there to support her. It had always been a standing joke between us (albeit a bitter-sweet one) that I was the ‘invisible man’, but on that occasion being the invisible man wasn’t a joke at all. I felt I had failed Fiona in a very fundamental way, and that wasn’t easy to live with for either of us.

  The list of companies I worked for grew through the early 1990s as the projects rolled on: Mentorn Films, Pioneer Productions, Antelope Films, Mosaic Pictures, Goldhawk Films, Diverse Productions, they all wanted adventure and I was one of the very few directors specialising in that field.

  Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, and in Fiona’s too, a few red warning lights were beginning to flash. Many of the projects I was directing contained elements of danger, or featured people who were taking risks. Broadcasters want drama, and as the years go by, they have come to expect ‘extreme’ expeditions almost as a matter of course. As the person in charge of the content of the film it was my job to push – sometimes quite hard – for the best possible pictures. How many times, I began to ask myself, could I ask people to raft perilous rapids ‘one more time’, or film climbers working on extreme cliffs without ropes before someone was going to get seriously hurt? No film is worth even the smallest injury, let alone fatality, but I had heard of many instances where filming had led to this.

  The possibility of something going badly wrong increasingly haunted me and there were risks for the crew as well. If there’s a river to be run, we run it too. If there’s a cave system to be explored, someone from the crew has to be there shooting it. In China, making a film about a surfer trying to ride the biggest tidal wave in the world, our crew boat was caught in the maelstrom and flipped over. The revolving propellor of the outboard missed the cameraman’s head by a matter of inches. I can think of plenty of other near misses, most of which I never told Fiona about.

  Then, in January 1994, I stared death in the face.

  We were filming on Mt. William, a peak in Antarctica which has on its upper slopes a number of enormous hanging glaciers and seracs. As we descended from the summit, on the final stages of the climb, the seven of us (five climbers and two of us filming) entered a steep ice gulley. It was four o’clock in the morning and the scene was lit by the gloomy half-light of the Antarctic summer.

  Suddenly, several hundred metres above us, the sky was filled with a terrifying sight. The billowing cloud of a massive avalanche descending upon us from the North-East Face of the mountain. It moved incredibly fast, and there was barely time for a screamed warning before it engulfed us.

  In the few seconds before we were hit, my brain was able to calculate where the avalanche must have come from and to conclude that the whole of the North-East Face had ripped away. All day we had known full well that the snow was in prime avalanche condition but we had waited six weeks for a weather opportunity to climb the peak and this was our last chance. Now, millions of tons of snow and ice were about to smash us to pulp.

  There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever in my mind that we were all going to be killed. It was the same for the other six, they too saw no way we could survive. We pushed ourselves into the ice and waited to be crushed or ripped off the Face and dashed on to the rocks hundreds of metres below us. It is a very curious sensation to be utterly sure that your life is about to end. My life didn’t exactly flash before me but I do remember feeling an extraordinary experience of calm and a sense of wonder at the power that was unleashed upon us.

  It didn’t happen. The shock wave engulfed us at more than one hundred kilometres an hour but the debris of the ice avalanche shot right over our heads. The gulley was steep enough to have thrown the force of the avalanche away from us. Some smaller blocks hit us, and one of the climbers nearly lost an eye from an impact, but apart from the bruising, we were fine. Somehow we had all managed to hang on to our positions. Ten minutes earlier we had been standing right at the top of the gulley where death would have been inevitable.

  It took me a while to tell Fiona about that incident.

  After the avalanche I was increasingly aware that I had to move on from adventure if I was to develop my film-making career … and stand a reasonable chance of staying alive. Apart from the risks, there are only so many expeditions that you can film in a world in which all the major challenges of exploration have been ticked off. I was exploiting a very tiny niche, and with each film I made that niche was diminishing.

  But, pressed by the need to earn money, I had no choice but to continue to put my energies into developing new adventure projects in an attempt to keep the cash coming in while at the same time doubling my efforts in another field, movie scriptwriting. Increasingly, I found it hard to summon any real enthusiasm for the adventure films I was making and my movie ideas were an escape … a way of dreaming, a way of letting my imagination run wild.

  As far as my relationship with Fiona went, this too was entering a dangerously rocky phase by the end of 1994. The pressures of trying to hold the family together when I was so often away, combined with my
perpetual restlessness, was adding up to a diminishing return for Fiona. She was putting a great deal more into the relationship than I was, and getting less out of it year by year. Trying to keep tabs on an absent and increasingly wayward husband was no joke and our relationship seemed to teeter from one crisis to another.

  Fiona had never tried to own me. That was the beauty of our relationship, but it was also its flaw. We were two very different people united by a bond of real love, by a family, and by the tendons of loyalty which we both felt. But we had always known that, in essence, we were not similar people at all. There were a lot of dreams we shared, but there were a hell of a lot more that we didn’t. Those fundamental differences had now reared up and were prising us painfully apart.

  The horrible realisation was beginning to dawn that Fiona might actually be better off without me, and I found that very difficult to deal with. But to resolve it, to become the husband she actually wanted, would mean giving up freedoms which selfishly I had come to take as a matter of course. I had always been a traveller, in fact I had always seen myself as a free spirit (whatever that is), but I loved Fiona far too much to keep hurting her as much as I seemed to be doing. A body clock inside me was tick-tock-ticking away, telling me, whispering in my ear like it first did when I found myself lured off at the age of seventeen on journey after journey into the Sahara desert, that it was time to go. But an equally strong set of pressures was telling me to grow up and meet my responsibilities.

  Now, the Everest expedition gave me the opportunity to sort myself out and make a decision about which direction my life was going. Ten weeks in Tibet would give me plenty of time to think, and away from the problem perhaps I could find a new perspective and work it all out.

  I called Julian Ware at ITN Productions and told him I would take the Everest job. Then I loaded twenty volumes of the Children’s Britannica into a rucksack and went out into the footpaths and fields of rural Hertfordshire for a five-hour walk.