Summit Fever

by Andrew Greig

  Purely selfish too was the sense of loss for this book of one of its central, most colourful characters. How would I write about what we’d christened ‘Rocky’s Horror Show’ without Rocky? I’d been interested to see how his earnest American ‘there must be a solution’ approach to the climb would play off against the more anarchic, stoic and improvisational attitudes of the British climbers. I’d been interested to find out why someone who had so much going for him should want to risk his neck doing something like this.

  And I was all the more sorry now he couldn’t come, because I was impressed by the magnanimity of his gesture. It indicated a sense of community, of joint purpose, a kind of honourable seriousness one doesn’t associate with the ‘me-centered’ American ethos. He demonstrated as much of the Right Stuff in insisting the Expedition went ahead as he possibly could have on the climb itself.

  So at the last minute we had to rethink the Expedition. Many of the problems that were to follow stemmed from this. We had to drop the Sherpas who had been going to assist Rocky, Burt and Donna, and without their support we could no longer think of fixing ropes most of the way up. This made our chances of success that bit more marginal.

  What had at one point seemed something of a Himalayan circus had been whittled down to a more acceptable modern mountaineering team with a few extras. Much better style, but Burt, Donna and I were worried that with Rocky’s absence the spotlight would switch to us, and that we might just be tiresome baggage that would slow the others up. We’d have to work harder, do better, push ourselves further. The Expedition’s success might depend on how much support we could give the lead climbers. Were we up to it?

  Our chances of success? Mal reckoned it 80 per cent likely that at least one of us would make the summit of Mustagh. Most people considered that wildly optimistic. Roughly one Himalayan expedition in ten succeeds. We counted on one hand the number of active British climbers who’d stood on a summit the height of Mustagh or Gasherbrum 2. The list of those who’d been killed on such peaks took both hands. That was an alarmingly high rate of attrition. Yet we had to start some time, and a new generation of British Himalayan climbers had to appear. If this trip went well, it would establish some new names.

  All our lads swore blind that competition and ambition meant nothing to them, that they just liked climbing. Don’t believe it for a moment. Duff, Brindle, Allan, Tinker – they were all revved up and hungry for success, for the Mustagh Tower and the further glittering prize of Gasherbrum 2.

  *

  So even before setting out, we had our losses and setbacks: Brian Sprunt, Rocky, my father. In a curious way they all seemed to connect. In each case there was much sadness, then the determination, almost the duty, to carry on. It’s the best thing we can do, the only thing other than despair. Remember them when we’re out there, remember what we owe them, then – Go for it, youth.

  4

  The Third-World Body-Swerve

  We get all shook up

  7–21 June 1984

  Mal, Kathleen and I left South Queensferry by bus on a rare, perfect June evening. Blue sky, blue water, green fields. We sat in silence most of the way, each in our own thoughts. A 60-foot-long shark passed by on a flyover. It was no more surreal than sitting on a local bus en route to the Himalayas. Mal had spent the day fishing on some loch, quietly reflecting under his Indiana Jones bush hat. I’d sat on the rocks by the sea, noticing how beautiful my country was. When Kath found me and said suddenly, ‘We will come back, won’t we,’ it seemed one third question, one third statement and one third expression of intent.

  Mal tossed the Daily Express aside. ‘That’s the last paper I’ll read for three months.’ That suited me. I wanted to be away from the western world, from its self-absorbed trivia – and my own. The news increasingly left me stunned or indifferent or helplessly angry, diminished in any case. Now I wanted only our small travelling company and its vast stage, and the unscripted drama we were yet to play out.

  At Waverley station Kath and I stood aside as Mal and Liz said their goodbyes. It was a tender, highly charged moment that they both tried to play down by being very matter-of-fact. Then she hugged us briefly, said ‘Now make sure – no politics, no death talk!’ and walked away.

  A short silence, then we began loading our twenty-five items of baggage onto the train. We pulled out into the night. I sat by myself, looking out the window into the dark, feeling the cords that tie us to our everyday life stretch and snap one by one.

  *

  Next day we began assembling at the Tinkers’ house in Bloomsbury. Jon and Sandy Allan were already there, joking and wearing identical T-shirts: a scruffy figure with a Rastafarian hat emerging from a dustbin, and the mysterious legend ALPINE BIN-MEN GO EAST/IN AN ALPINE STYLEE. Jon explained that through a friend of theirs he and Sandy had worked as bin-men in Chamonix to pay for their climbing. The Rasta hat was a nod in the direction of Jon’s passion for obscure reggae records, some of which would carry an inscription regarding their style or stylee in Rasta-talk, e.g. in a rubadub stylee. Alpine style was the modern, lightweight manner in which they intended to climb Gasherbrum 2, carrying everything in one load on their backs, and hoped to use as much as possible on the Mustagh Tower. The stylee was to stick.

  We sat and joked in the sunny garden. I’d been told that Sandy would be the most easy-going member of the team, with an impressive Alpine record. He’d also been with Mal and Adrian on the first Nuptse West Ridge trip. ‘Sandy just grins – and climbs’ was the general verdict. The grinning part seemed true enough.

  Adrian Clifford arrived. Handshakes all round, and a clowning photo session. Like the rest of us, Adrian was high with adrenalin, but seemed distracted. He was irritated by the nonarrival of the rabies vaccine, and still brooding on how his wife Sue had been pressing him not to go on the Expedition up to the eve of his departure. ‘Not too good for the old morale, old boy.’

  We gathered for a Last Supper round the big dining-room table. A lot of food, more wine, laughter, politics, and all the old death-and-destruction yarns. Mrs Tinker listened and watched as she took in the sort of company Jon was committing himself to for three months.

  Then down to the Lamb for the farewell booze-up with friends, girlfriends and acquaintances. We were all raised, eagerly taking in the last hours of ordinary life yet longing to be away, and after a few drinks everything seemed bright and loud and warm, laughter echoed round and round my head, mixed in with scraps of Adrian’s argument with Mal about the value of work, Kath talking politics with Jon, Sandy mumbling amiably at the girl beside him.

  After closing time we all reeled out into the warm London night. Jon and Sandy disappeared to say certain complex and personal goodbyes, Adrian grumbled about Sue, Mal lit another cigarette, looked up at the stars and nearly fell over, Kathleen hugged me and we tripped over each other. We finally got back to the house late, drunk and thoroughly dishevelled – totally the wrong way to set off on a big expedition early next morning, but all good stylee as Jon pointed out. I shut my eyes and my head swung its way dizzyingly down into sleep.

  We step out of the plane at Islamabad into the Third World dawn: gunmetal grey shimmering heat, the thermic equivalent of a Ramones concert. Soldiers, policemen, porters, officials, all moving slowly as in a dream through the humid veil of the morning.

  Miraculously, all our gear – some thirty items of baggage by now – is unloaded and released through customs in twenty minutes flat. Mal and Sandy regale us with yarns of week-long delays in India as we walk out of the terminus to meet the Americans.

  I look at them curiously as we approach. Like us, they stand out by being white, soggy-looking and disorientated, i.e. not yet part of the Orient. A tall aristocratic figure stands like an eagle at bay surrounded by our blue Expedition barrels, children, beggars, taxi drivers and fruit sellers. His eyes are blue and wild. I assume this is Mr Burt Greenspan, because near him is a short, round, oddly froglike figure with popeyes, waving his hands and talkin
g excitedly – the very model of the Comic Slave in classical comedy. This must be our American slave who’s paid to be Base Camp manager, bring us tea at ridiculous hours of the morning, wash our feet and so on.

  I’m quite wrong. The aquiline aristocrat leans down from his six foot four and drawls, ‘I’m Alex Reid, your American slave.’ His eyes are dancing, he looks extremely stoned. Burt Greenspan interrupts his rapid flat Chicago whine long enough to shake hands – he looks very pale, downright ill, is sweating profusely; one eye looks at me while the other swivels somewhere over my left shoulder. He’s lamenting and cursing the nonarrival of one of the blue barrels from the States: customs problems, our schedule for today. ‘No problem,’ says Mal, ‘we’ll sort it out.’ He says that about everything here. ‘Stay cool in the Third World or you’ll end up neck-deep in sweat.’

  Kaleidoscopic jet-lagged impressions from the taxi window: oxen in the streets, ancient vans groaning with glittering charms, old men cycling slowly on antique black bicycles in the middle of the road with their knees sticking out, children darting and disappearing like minnows. A female beggar sits cross-legged on a blanket on a pavement in the middle of nowhere, no one passing by, her hand held out just the same. Very tall thin men with mournful faces drift like ghosts in pale grey pyjama suits; short men with cropped hair dyed ginger-red spit in the gutter. And everywhere people group, ungroup, cross the road, sit down, spit, stare – a slow mesmeric shifting of patterns whose shape and significance escape me. There is no obvious sense of purpose let alone urgency in their movements. Roadside stalls of watermelons, car tyres, butchers, bakeries, drapers, scooters. Shacks, houses, three-wheeled taxis, glittering buses ricochet past …

  We gathered for lunch in the dining room of Flashman’s. It turned out to be impressively opulent – and expensive. Cool white tablecloths, napkins, waiters, menus … Jon and Sandy especially were awed by this vision of luxury and ease. ‘Not the kind of thing we shuffling dossers are used to.’ Like Mal, their normal style is a sleeping bag in the corner of a doss with wall-to-wall cockroaches, a standpipe and a hole in the ground. Expeditions on a dozen freeze-dried packet meals and a few Mars Bars; like most Brit expeditions, the grimiest of the grimy and the lightest of the light. And here they were, as Sandy recorded in his diary, in what was more of a travelling circus than a modern Alpine-style trip, with trekkers (Kath and Sybil), clients (Burt and Donna), an American slave and – most dubious of all – a writer who would be poking his Walkman recorder and diary into their every conversation and inner life. ‘I suppose it’s good value, but find it hard to be so sure. A friend, an 8000 metre peak, that’s all one needs really.’

  We all felt unreal, I think, half of ourselves still back in London. We were staying in a class hotel, air conditioning and all, separate rooms, a swimming pool (‘Death on a stick,’ Adrian warned us immediately, assuming his medical role, ‘once your lips touch that you can kiss goodbye to this expedition’). Everything was paid for, other than drinks. And on the way out, PIA had given us the full VIP treatment and a huge excess baggage allowance as if we were something special, not just the bunch of scruffs which we knew ourselves to be. We all felt that any moment the manager was going to discover there had been a terrible mistake and we’d be out on the street.

  Bemused but thankful for our new-found luxury, we toasted the absent Rocky Moss and vowed to repay him in the way he wanted – with the summit of Mustagh Tower. A po-faced Alex went round the table pouring our tea in the most dignified manner.

  ‘How long are we staying here?’ I asked Mal.

  ‘A week.’

  ‘A week!’ I’d expected a couple of days. ‘Do we really need that long?’

  We did.

  Mid-afternoon, 13 June, I lie on a sweat-soaked sheet in our room in Flashman’s Hotel while the air conditioner roars and falters like an old VW engine, and consider my companions.

  We’ve been here four days now while Mal and Burt go through the necessary bureaucracy and we sort out and pack and weigh our supplies. Time enough in the heat and the boredom and the separation from friends and lovers for the shape of things to come to gradually appear. We’re all still weighing each other up rather warily, still discovering our roles in the Expedition.

  In fact, we’re not yet an expedition at all. We’re a bunch of bemused individuals thrown together in Rawalpindi. The Mustagh Tower seems a long way away, and we’re a long way from being ready to tackle it as a team. I hope that this frustrating week here and the ten-day walk-in to the mountain will serve to acclimatize us not only to this country and the altitude, but also to each other.

  As we sat for lunch that first day, we were all listening to and watching each other, aware we would be stuck with each other for three months. Will it work? Will I fit in? Can I stand his laugh at 17,000 feet? It was like the first week at a new school for all of us – the same anxiety and curiosity, the same little testing confrontations and conversations, the same assigning of roles – the Clown, the Straight Man, the Mother Figure, the Leader, the Rowdy … Jon’s eyes flicked across the table and caught me studying Adrian, our doctor, who was giving a short lecture on Third World hygiene (‘Death on a stick, old boy, if in doubt – don’t’). He winked. ‘Being the author still, mate?’ That assumed cockney drawl. The others looked at me. I shrugged. ‘Always on duty, Jon,’ I replied neutrally. One of a hundred moments of near-invisible testing out.

  He’s so variable. One moment acerbic and sarcastic, striving for what he seems to see as the upper hand, and the next remarking with simple frankness, ‘I hope I grow up somewhat on this expedition.’

  Another power cut. The air conditioner winds down and the humid heat of ‘Pindi in midsummer pours through the window. Sweat is tickling my legs and chest. Why do hot hotel rooms – well, any hotel rooms really – always make me randy? When will Kath come back from her shopping? The others feel it more, the separation from wives and girlfriends. Gusts of homesickness and sexual frustration blow through our company.

  Jon in particular is very paranoid about my being here as a writer. He eyes my recorder as if it were a voodoo box about to snatch his soul from him. When I speak to him, I can sense he’s ultra-aware that anything he says may be written up later. As indeed it might! He finds that very threatening, and said as much yesterday. His privacy is so important to him. I think Sandy Allan has similar reservations. I hope for the sake of the book-to-be and for myself that they will get used to me. Like Kath, I really feel out on a limb at times, with no real function here. Perhaps I’m making too much effort to fit in, and being too obtrusive with the recorder and notebook in an effort to demonstrate that I do in fact have a role.

  Last night as we all sprawled stranded with a few beers in Room 45, Jon suddenly said, ‘This trip is not a holiday for me.’ Implying that it was for certain of us? ‘And it’s not really a job either. As far as I’m concerned it’s a … vocation, that’s the nearest I can get to it.’ He glanced over to Sandy who nodded and grinned his big Sandy grin. They often do this, seem to understand each other instinctively despite their differences. Then he added, suddenly the abrasive Jon again, ‘So what’s it for you then, Andy?’

  Again I feel he’s put me on the spot. I suppress my irritation, which may after all be the result of heat and indigestion and a longing for the coolness of home, and simply say, ‘A bit of all three.’

  Sandy. We’re already falling into our natural groupings, and Jon and Sandy seem very much a pair. The Alpine Bin Men. They’re totally unalike, but have shared times together in the Alps. With Mal away hassling bureaucracy much of the time and missing Liz the rest, they’re together a lot. Tony’s following us up the Baltoro in two weeks once he’s finished his exams in Wales. They are both amused and bemused at the luxury of their surroundings and the troupe of semi-climbers, trekkers, bumblies and jesters they find themselves with.

  Sandy just grins his big rubbery, lazy grin and shakes his head. He’s from the Black Isle in the northeast of Scotlan
d, an affable, taciturn Scot. Always relaxed yet busy, easy-going, in control. Yet something elusive behind that open countenance. Not that he’s trying to protect something – unlike Jon – but as if a lot of him is elsewhere. Or is he just the cheerful chappie he presents?

  He mentioned the other night that he lost all his hair in his mid-teens and was completely bald for a year. I tried to imagine how that would feel, what one would go through at that age … Is that part of the key to him? That red-blond hair has grown back and flops forward often over his eyes, hiding them.

  Bulky and muscular, a sleepy bull, a honey bear, he gives the impression of having a great deal of solidity and strength in reserve. He’s doing a lot of the sweaty, practical work here. He seems unflappable, extremely capable. That had been Mal’s impression when Sandy first came on one of his Alpine guiding courses some years back. Sandy had done one Scottish route, then decided he’d like to learn something about Alpine climbing and signed up on the course. ‘It was totally obvious,’ Mal recalled, ‘that though this youth didn’t know much technically, he could become a star. He was immensely strong and persistent, learned fast, and had the right kind of temperament. You’ll never see him lose the head. He was a natural.’

  Sandy trained as a distillery manager. At twenty-five he remembered a promise he’d made himself at fifteen that if he didn’t like what he was doing by then, he’d chuck it and do something else. So he did, and took up climbing seriously. He works as a roughneck on the oil rigs – ‘Good jest that, gives me enough money and time to fly to Chamonix every few weeks and do some climbing.’ On the rigs he picked up the Canadian ‘Eh?’ with which so many of his sentences end.

  He jokes about everything. Listening to him, it’s hard to imagine how recently he stood helplessly while a few yards away his friend Brian Sprunt fell to his death on the Matterhorn. If it affected him – as it must have – or his appetite for climbing, he shows no sign of it. The only serious remark I’ve heard from him yet came when I was saying what a relief it was to be away from First-World news and how I couldn’t care less what happened there. ‘That’s not right, youth,’ he said quite sharply. I looked at him, then nodded. Fair enough. Perhaps more to amiable Sandy Allan than meets the eye …