Cold Wars Read online

  Walking back to the car I checked the damage. The front was bent, the lights on one side smashed. I opened up the bonnet and checked the engine, pulling out bits of bodywork that were getting in the way. It looked fine.

  Getting back in, I asked Mandy again, ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I put my hand on her bump.

  ‘Yes. Are you?’ she replied.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  I started the engine. It sounded all right. The traffic had begun moving again, a green Land Rover pulling in to where the deer lay, a man in wellies jumping out.

  I pulled back out into the traffic, and drove on towards Scarborough. Mandy burst into tears.

  ‘I can’t believe how calm you are,’ she said, sobbing. ‘You’re so calm.’

  A few days ago I’d been on the crux of the Reticent Wall.

  ‘What’s going on dad?’ said Ella, waking up.

  I turned up for work on the Monday morning, and stood behind the counter selling boots, telling the story of my holiday to as many people who would listen. My feet were still sore from the wall, my hands still swollen and scabby. I yearned to be back there, away from mundane things. I had been transformed into something magnificent. Now I was normal again.

  ‘What you been up to, youth?’ asked a customer I’d known for a long time, once a hard man of the Himalaya, but now just coasting to a standstill. When I first met him he’d just returned from climbing Everest. I was nineteen. He was the first person I’d ever met who’d climbed it, and I shook his hand as though he were an astronaut. His handshake was steel, his body hard, and he had a wicked grin on his face. Back then.

  Now his handshake was soft – like his body. His hair, once military smart, was unkempt, his clothes crumpled and baggy. There were stains on his shirt – dribbles of baby food. He was a mess. A shadow. Now I was the strong one. I told him about the Reticent and felt I was sticking a knife in him.

  ‘I’m thinking of trying Latok with a couple of mates,’ he told me. Latok being one of the world’s plum hard summits, a route the very best had been trying to climb for decades.

  I scanned his bloated face, his belly obvious even beneath the baggy shirt he wore to obscure it, presumably from himself as much as others. His kids were at school, but you could still feel the weight of them on him. He was deluding himself. He was over the hill at thirty-five. His feet wouldn’t leave the ground again.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I said.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Something dead hard,’ I replied.

  ‘I might give climbing up,’ I said to Mandy as we sat beside the river. Ella paddled in the water, the sun casting shadows around us.

  ‘That would be nice,’ she replied flatly. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t think I can keep it up,’ I said.

  ‘Me neither.’

  I stood in the living room with Ewen, my baby son, born only twelve hours before, in my arms. Mandy slept upstairs.

  I stood there and watched planes smashing into buildings and becoming flames, on that perfect September day. First one tower fell, then the other, live, on television. It was the first day in years when I didn’t think once about climbing.

  ‘I think I’m off,’ I said to Dick, the best boss I’d ever had. My days of shop work were at an end. ‘I’m going to make a go of it as a full-time climbing dude.’

  ‘Can you afford to leave?’ he asked, obviously concerned, more as a friend than a boss.

  ‘With my talks, my magazine column and other stuff I can leave and just focus on climbing. Also, I think maybe I’m past my sell-by date working in a climbing shop,’ I said. I loved working in Outside, loved working for Dick Turnbull and being with all my mates, cycling out to the Peak District every day. I never once didn’t look forward to work. It was well paid, for a job in a shop, offered loads of holidays, paid and unpaid, and made my passion my job. Dick and his shop were cornerstones in the life I’d built for myself.

  ‘I love working here, but I know that I have to leave,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ asked Dick.

  ‘For one, I hate it when people say: “Are you still here?” Also, I’m too comfortable. I could stay here forever. You don’t really get anywhere in life when you’re happy.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ said Dick.

  ‘Oh, and I’ve also just been approached by Snow and Rock about being sponsored by them,’ I said, Snow and Rock being one of the bigger outdoor chains in Britain. ‘It would look a bit odd to be sponsored by one shop, while working in another.’

  ‘So this is your last day then?’ said Dick.

  ‘I guess so.’

  As the music played, the coffin containing Mandy’s grandfather slipped away through the curtains. She sat beside me in the front pew. I was holding her hand. She was crying. We hadn’t held hands for a long time. These days it was one of Ella’s hands in mine, and the other in Mandy’s. It was Ella that joined us as a family.

  We walked outside and stood amongst the graves as she tried to stop crying.

  ‘What were you thinking when you saw his coffin?’ she asked.

  ‘That maybe the next time I went to a funeral it would be mine.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Dawn found us beneath Fallout Corner, a classic hard mixed route about three pitches long on a frosted-up crag in the Cairngorms. I was due to give a talk in Inverness that night to raise funds for the Torridon Mountain Rescue Team, and had asked Ian Parnell and my dad to come along.

  I rarely saw my dad. My parents had split up when I was six, and I moved from Wales to Hull with my mum and brother and sister. My dad had his own life, and I suppose dads were different in the 1970s. Even so, he had left a huge hole that was never filled, only papered over. I never consciously hated him for it, and as I got older I began to understand better how a dad could not see his kids. I could see how a child can still love an absent parent; the love is deep within you. But now, with kids of my own, I found it harder to understand. Although, instead of pity for my younger self, I felt sorry for my father: it was Dad who really paid the price.

  I pulled out my harness from my rucksack and noticed that it held the same pieces of gear, including a skyhook and several ‘birdbeaks,’ from the day I topped out on the Reticent Wall six months before.

  Six months without any climbing at all.

  ‘How hard’s this route, young’un?’ asked Dad.

  ‘It’s a grade six I think.’

  I set off up the first pitch, Ian taking pictures while Dad belayed, looking a little as if he hadn’t belayed anyone for a long time, standing in a mess of ropes in borrowed crampons.

  ‘Do you want me to stop while you sort that out?’ I called down to Dad, worried as I watched him pulling at a tangled puzzle of knots with no obvious sign he was actually belaying me.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK. Keep going, I’ll sort it,’ he said, head turned down in concentration.

  I carried on, scraping and scratching above him, twisting the picks of my axes into cracks until they stuck, then pulling up and repeating, my calves feeling heavy and weak.

  ‘You do know I haven’t been winter climbing for ten years,’ he shouted up to me.

  ‘I feel the same,’ I shouted back.

  On my travels I’d met a lot of people who had met my dad Pete while he’d been in the Royal Air Force, either when he was a physical training instructor, or later as one of the longest-serving team leaders in the RAF Mountain Rescue. Each told stories about a man who always made an impression, generally a good one, even if he came across as a bit mad. Most tales would start: ‘One day, me and your dad…’ and go on to describe some major epic. One bloke I met told me about paddling across the Irish Sea with Dad in a double kayak, and how my father had turned up in just his running gear – without waterproofs or drysuit – and worse still with nothing to eat.

  ‘I’ll just have some of yours,’ he’d said.

  It also transpired, rather like with our climb in Scotland, that
he hadn’t paddled a kayak for a decade. They made it, but had to crawl on their hands and knees from their kayaks to the ferry booking office to find out when the next boat back to Holyhead was.

  It took me many years to put my finger on just what it was about my dad – and in turn me – that created so many stories of epics and near-death incidents. In the end, I put it down to blind optimism. That’s also why he was the perfect man to run a rescue team. He always believed victims could be saved.

  Safe at the belay, Dad followed, climbing up below me, a grin of concentration across his face. To pull himself up, he hooked his axes into the gear, which, although not strictly ethical, was certainly effective. I thought it impressive that not having climbed for ten years, he was still happy to follow his son up a hard route. Dad had taught me to climb in the first place, leading me up the sweeping Idwal Slabs in Snowdonia. This was so long ago I couldn’t remember it clearly. It had been a long time since we’d climbed together.

  I suddenly realised he was my oldest climbing partner.

  ‘That wasn’t too bad,’ he said, as I clipped him to the belay. The two of us looked up at the pitch above – a hanging slab, thin and scary-looking.

  ‘Glad it’s my eldest leading though,’ he said, smiling.

  Unlike me, my dad kept most of his stories to himself. I thought this was down to some kind of Yorkshire hard-man kind of thing, not being brash or showing off.

  ‘Actually, I just can’t remember anything,’ he admitted.

  Yet every now and again, a little story would pop out, often to my amazement. One such tale emerged when I was telling him about a piece I’d read by a guy who’d survived the Fastnet race tragedy in 1979, when fifteen sailors died in a storm. It was the largest maritime rescue operation since the war.

  ‘Oh, I was caught up in that storm,’ said my dad, as though he was talking about a brief shower. ‘It was pretty bad. I was on a small sailing boat on a training trip from a joint services centre. We were in the same area and ran for safety to the Isle of Wight. But because so many others had done the same thing we ended up mooring beyond the harbour walls. During the night, the boat was moving up and down like crazy. Stupidly I went out to check an unusual noise on my own. It was pitch black and stuff was flying everywhere, and I ended up falling overboard. Worse thing was I fell between two boats, and I still have no idea how I didn’t get squashed. Somehow I managed to pull myself back on board.’

  I could picture him perfectly, staggering back down into the cabin, his mates jeering at him. ‘Trust Kirkpatrick to fall in.’

  It occurred to me on hearing the Fastnet story that my dad had not only taught me to climb. He also taught me how to have epics.

  The pitch was delicate, moving up a steep wall, crampons balanced on horizontal breaks as I fiddled gear into cracks that were coated in a thin layer of ice. It was very slow going, as each two-second move would take ten minutes of thought, preparation and general fannying around.

  ‘Have you seen the time?’ Ian shouted from below, his tone indicating that he had, and that he suspected there wasn’t enough left to finish. We had to be in Inverness by seven. I had a talk to do.

  ‘No,’ I shouted back, wanting to add how it was hard to look at your watch when you were clinging to the rock for your life. ‘But I think we’ve got time,’ I added with typical Kirkpatrick optimism.

  ‘I don’t think you have,’ he shouted back, his tone now authoritative, even dictatorial, like a teacher explaining something to a misbehaving pupil: ‘It’ll take an hour to get down, and an hour to drive to Inverness and it’s nearly four now.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, looking down at the two of them between my legs.

  My dad just kept smiling.

  We scurried back to the car having left our ropes tied to some nuts at the high point, the plan being we would come back tomorrow and finish it. Ian hurried along, axes dangling haphazardly from his rucksack, his trousers patched with tape, his National Health Service glasses askew. It was hard to believe he was one of Britain’s greatest living alpinists – or soon would be. Like me, he had some optimism engine that powered him on, only his ran much hotter than mine. From the first day I met him I thought: ‘You’ll not be alive long.’

  Thankfully, he’s proved me wrong so far.

  We’d only climbed together a few times, and to begin with I didn’t like him, as he seemed posh, or at least posher than me, as most people are. I only found out later that he’d had elocution lessons and this was the reason for his good diction. He’d also been a bell-ringer, which I found endearing and funny, often telling people, ‘Ian’s a bell-ringer,’ and pointing out this wasn’t a euphemism for something else. One thing we shared in common was having both been a bit arty. Ian actually was an artist, and had gone to art school. Then both of us had swapped that passion for the love of climbing, making me wonder if climbing wasn’t just another creative pursuit.

  The first time we climbed together was in Yosemite in 1998. He was a few years older than me, so seemed like an old man, but he proved his metal when we climbed a route called Lost in America, on which, as was my usual want, I almost died, pulling off a large rock and pitching into the night.

  Ian had held my fall.

  What I saw in Ian was what I saw in me, a kind of uncompromising and scary drive. Only mine was compromised. I was a husband and father, and he was not. In many ways Ian was who I could be. He was the man who stayed behind when I had to go home. He had no limits or limitations. Unencumbered by the baggage of love and fear, Ian’s rise would be meteoric. As for Ian’s view of me, all I know is that he’d described me as the most ambitious climber he’d met.

  After Yosemite I viewed Ian, along also with Jules Cartwright, one of Ian’s partners, as being one of the few people daft enough to climb with me, and we’d done a few trips to France ice climbing. Things came to a head when we tried something hard, the Maria Callas Memorial route on the North Face of Les Droites. It was winter, and the route awaited a second ascent. The Maria Callas was state of the art and I was hungry to try the hardest route I could. Most good climbers know their place, and would not dream of trying such a route. Not me. I was an upstart – and so was Ian. In a way we were both outsiders, neither having done a traditional apprenticeship, and that’s why we got on. When we climbed with proper climbers our ignorance shone through.

  What compounded our choice of route that winter were the terrible conditions in the mountains, with tons of snow and high winds bringing a death a day. The low point for us was the death of Jamie Fisher, and the near death of Jamie Andrew, who would have both hands and feet amputated after surviving a week near the summit of Les Droites. It made no difference what had happened; it simply had no effect on me. I didn’t know Jamie, and neither did the mountain. I felt indifferent, as we walked all the way up from the valley, since the cable car was shut down, ignoring the risk, just fixated on the summit.

  We started in the middle of the night but progress was poor up the bottom of the face. I thought Ian was climbing too slowly, coughing and wheezing as he went. He was too weak, and because of him I knew we were going to fail.

  I hated him. I hated him for being posh. I hated him for having so much time, and how for him failure meant nothing. He had another month here in the Alps after I went home. For me, this was it. I hated him for being weak because I knew how weak I was, and hoped he could carry me up the face with him.

  I caught him up as he stopped, and asked him blankly what the problem was.

  ‘I don’t feel well Andy,’ he said, coughing.

  ‘That’s fucking winter alpine climbing,’ I spat back, only to catch myself, realising where I was, and with whom: a dangerous face; a friend who expected nothing from me.

  We went down but something was broken. I’d had high ambitions for our partnership, but after that it was dead, for the short term at least. Instead I just watched – green with envy – as he went on to put up the kinds of routes I coveted, in Alaska, Greenland and the
Himalaya. It was what I deserved.

  Rushing down from Fallout Corner, we made it back to the car as it grew dark and since we barely had time to make the gig, we just piled in and drove off without changing from our climbing gear. Then I realised I’d neglected to ask exactly where the talk was being held, only that it was somewhere in Inverness. We made it to the talk, and only half an hour late, and I did the first part dressed in all my climbing gear, changing into my jeans in the toilet for the second half. I think some people thought my costume was part of the show, and seeing as all the proceeds went to the mountain rescue team, no one was too unhappy.

  That night we drove back towards the Cairngorms, eating fish and chips as I drove, my dad in the front, Ian in the back listening on his iPod to what sounded like someone doing DIY, his music tastes always eclectic.

  ‘Do you think it went well tonight?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Yes, I thought it was okay. Did you?’ I suddenly wondered if my performance had been below par.

  ‘I always think it’s good. You’re my son,’ he replied, an uncomfortable silence building until I laughed his affection off.

  ‘What is the most you would like to make from doing talks,’ he asked, knowing that I already charged around three hundred quid.

  ‘A thousand pounds?’ I replied. ‘Yes, a grand, that would be great, although I’d probably be happy to talk for free. Getting paid is just a bonus.’

  ‘Well, if you’re ever going to get that much money, then you have to make sure you’re worth a thousand pounds.’

  I guessed it was his way of telling me to pull my finger out, dress properly – not in climbing gear – and find out where the venue was. It was a suggestion I wouldn’t forget. You can seem shambolic and crap, and it’s funny, but if you can’t change, or at least conceal it, then no one would ever take you seriously. Being taken seriously was what I wanted more than anything. I knew he was right, but I felt a little defensive, thinking that he was just as much of a fuck-up as me.