Psychovertical Read online

  On Sundays we would go to the sergeants’ mess for lunch, where there were pictures of mountains, and walls full of plaques, polished ice axes and mountaineering mementos. On one wall was a giant picture of Mount Everest, with its camps marked, part of an upcoming military expedition. Standing there in my best clothes, I felt I was in a special place, a place of men. Even to a five-year-old, there was such a feeling of being wrapped up in the military, of being one institutional family. I can understand how soldiers can carry on fighting in wars that they feel are unjust, or illegal. It was a home.

  I was a very physical child who was always running, climbing and generally getting into the type of trouble that such kids usually do. My clothes were always a collection of patches, ripped, scuffed, torn and then mended, with shoes lasting me no more than a few weeks, meaning cheap rubber wellies and shorts became the only answer for my despairing mum. My legs were always brown with bruises, and scabby. The arrival of my brother Robin had given me another person to play with, but, because I was a rough child, Robin would often come off worse: falling off, falling down, being hit, knocked out or generally injured in any playtime we had. One of my strongest memories is of my mum often slapping me, my brother standing crying behind her, while she shouted, ‘Your brother must have rubber bones.’ It was a phrase repeated so often I actually believed such a thing was possible, no doubt further adding to Robin’s misery. I used to think that our family were borderline freaks, as not only did my brother have rubber bones but my mum also had ‘eyes in the back of her head’.

  Other children were not fortunate enough to have rubber bones, and for a while I was in big trouble after pushing a twelve-year-old girl off the top of the slide and breaking her arm. I wasn’t a bad child or a bully in any way, only a child who ‘always took things too far’.

  I was a very happy-go-lucky boy, but Robin was less easy to please. My mum would often tell him to stop whining, sometimes slapping him on the legs and telling him ‘Now you have something to whine about.’ She often put the disparity in our characters down to the fact that the doctor had run him under the cold tap as soon as he’d been born, a shock he’d never quite recovered from.

  My mum had met my dad at a dance, and they were married not long afterwards. She was also from Hull. She had wanted to go to art school, but instead had been forced to give up such fancy notions and work in a bakery. I suspect this had had a major effect on the rest of her life, as she would often tell us this story, wanting us never to compromise what we wanted to do. My mum was far from pushy, but she always told us that the world was our oyster – not that I ever really understood what that meant.

  What she wanted most of all, though, was children, and I had been her firstborn, in 1971, Robin coming along a year later. Times were hard for her, with my dad’s pay low, and she would often repeat the phrase, ‘I don’t know how we’ll make ends meet’, which I mistook as ‘hen’s meat’, often wondering if hen’s meat tasted just like chicken. Although we were poor, my mum hid it well, and did things that were free: going for walks, playing on the beach, drawing and painting, and giving the priceless gift of a parent’s attention. My mother’s side of the family had been craftsmen, her father a carpenter, his father a head gardener, her great-grandfather a stone mason. From her I learnt to draw, something that would prove invaluable later in life. I scribbled on anything at hand as soon as I could hold a crayon.

  Like my dad, my mum wanted fun and adventure, and a life less ordinary than the one she had left behind in Hull, but not at the cost of security for her and her kids.

  We lived on the military estate on the edge of the camp, not far from the beach. Even at the age of five I was a bit of a loner and a daydreamer, happy to be by myself, playing for hours in the garden, making up imaginary worlds. I was lucky enough to have the freedom to do my own thing and wander around the estate by myself, in the days before people even knew anything about paedophiles, where there were only ‘funny men’. I was only reined in after I went missing one day and didn’t come home for lunch, and the whole camp was mobilised to look for me. Several hundred soldiers and airmen combed the sea shore, fields and rivers looking for my body. In the end I turned up asleep in a collection of hay bales a few hundred metres from our house. My mum belted me with relief, shouting, ‘I was worried sick,’ a phrase that was now added to her everyday lexicon.

  After that I had to stay with Robin, although this almost cost him his life on more than a few occasions.

  My worst youthful scrape, and one of my earliest fully formed memories, was going to our next-door neighbour’s house with Robin to look at their aquarium. It stood on a wooden stand near the front door, looking like an enormous TV filled with fish. We would stand with our noses pressed up against the glass, and watch the fish race around. On this day, my mum stood talking on the doorstep to the couple who owned the fish, my dad being away on an expedition. She had probably taken us around to see the fish as a distraction because I was missing him.

  We were playing our usual fish-spotting game, eyes tracking the red, blue and purple flashes darting around the tank. The couple who owned the house would always tell us that we had to be careful as the tank held piranhas, and that they would bite us if we got too close. I always wondered if they really would. If I were to stick in my hand, would the flesh be ripped off it in seconds like I’d seen in an old film once on our black and white TV?

  I wanted to find out if it was true.

  The fish darted away from the glass as I moved round to the side of the tank, trying to grab the top so I could pull myself up and dip my hand in. I would probably have lifted Robin up so he could dip his hand in, but already he had learned not to get involved in any of my games and would probably have started crying.

  Being small for my age I found the tank was too high, so, looking for another option, I saw that I could maybe climb up between the wall and the tank, using the skirting board as a foothold. I started by squeezing my leg in, my welly sticking well to the edge of the skirting as I tried to squirm up the gap, which widened as I pushed in.

  I looked through the glass as I moved up, seeing through the drifting green murk my brother’s tiny face, his eyes fixed on the dancing fish. I pushed up. I slipped back. I pushed harder.

  The tank moved … then moved some more … then crashed over onto Robin. An explosion of glass and water shot through the porch, a tsunami raging out of the front door and knocking everyone off their feet.

  There I stood, my back to the wall, looking down at the floor littered with glass, pebbles, soggy green plants, twitching fish and, right in the middle, the tips of two small red wellies – my little brother.

  Incredibly Robin made a swift recovery, and after a night in hospital he left with only a few cuts, being declared by the doctor as having a very strong heart.

  Personally, I put it down to his rubber bones.

  Not long afterwards my sister was born. My mum had always wanted a daughter, and had become so desperate she’d taken to clothing Robin in dresses when he was a baby. Joanne was born in 1976 and from the beginning everything changed.

  She never stopped crying, screaming non-stop for six months. The calm, fun house I’d known existed no longer. Mum and Dad became steadily worn down, tired and strung out. My dad could escape but not my mum.

  Then one day my mum took us all to the hospital, and I can remember me and Robin waiting in the hallway while she talked to the doctor. Then I could hear her crying and screaming, appearing in the hallway distraught. They had asked her if either I or Robin had dropped Joanne. It appeared her hip was broken. Soon, though, it was discovered she had been born with an undiagnosed congenital hip defect, meaning she had no hip bone, and had been in terrible pain since her birth.

  Soon after that, Dad was posted to another camp in Llanwrst on the edge of Snowdonia and a few weeks later we followed him, Joanne’s tiny body encased in plaster. We were leaving the happiest period of my childhood behind.

  Everything was dif
ferent. New school, new house, new friends and, worse still, new parents. I hated school. I felt like an outsider. Starting from scratch. I was no longer at the centre of my parents’ universe: Joanne took up much of my mum’s time, while my dad seemed to be away more and more. When he was around he seemed bad tempered, or not really there at all. He was about to go on a trip to Yosemite, a name I only understood from Yosemite Sam on the TV, and this further added to the stress, leaving my mum with me and Robin, both unsettled, and Joanne. I suspect that the pressure was too much for my dad: his happy and conventional life, a life where he could have the freedom to climb and still have a family, began to collapse. Demands began to be made of him. He was forced to choose.

  One night, Robin and I woke up and could hear noises downstairs. We crept down to the dining room where our mother was at the table with our dad. She was crying.

  There had never been crying before we moved from Tywyn, but now it seemed to be happening all the time. We had always been happy; we had never had much but at least we had that; there had never been room for sadness. This was all to change. He was telling her something. Something she was shocked to hear. Her world and future falling apart. Her heart broken. Another woman.

  The following morning we were bundled out of bed by Mum, quickly dressed, and walked down to the train station. It was early; a fog obscured the line. I wondered if this meant I didn’t have to go to school. My mum wasn’t talking. It took all her strength just to keep it together.

  The train appeared out of the mist and slowed to a stop.

  We stood, no longer the family we had once been, our bags all packed for a new life in Hull, a place far removed from my world of sand dunes and hills, from beaches and green fields full of sheep, and from my dad. I had no idea where we were going, or that we would never come back – that Dad and I would never climb Bird Rock together.

  The valley

  TIRED AFTER MY long rambling journey, passed backwards and forwards from taxis to trains, trains to planes and back again, my mind began to come slowly back to life as the final leg drew to a close and the tiny shuttle bus wound its way up into the Yosemite Valley.

  The valley had been carved in the Ice Age, a mighty glacier cutting deep into the perfect Sierra Nevada bedrock, its slow retreat leaving behind a 3,000-foot-deep, five-mile-wide valley of incredible walls and towers. The valley was a magical place of mighty faces, thundering waterfalls and giant sky-scraping sequoias. It had captivated the minds of all who had visited, made famous first by the words of John Muir in the 1800s and later in the definitive black-and-white big-wall shots of Ansel Adams. It was one of the wonders of the world and a Disneyland for climbers, with rides both big and small, fun and terrifying.

  The little vehicle was full of the usual flotsam and jetsam found on American buses: the poor, the desperate, the foreigners. It was packed with a mixture of seasonal employees heading back to their concession jobs, hotel clerks, swimming-pool attendants and bus boys, all returning to the safety of the valley. Then there were the climbers, drawn from around the world, all buzzing with excitement at finally reaching the crucible of climbing, the danger of the rock faces.

  The landscape outside the window of the bus changed slowly as we went from sea level into the high Sierras, from the flat California grass lands, parched brown after a long hot summer, into thick forest as the floor of the valley rose, creating a space of rock, water, wood and shadow. It seemed timeless after the alarm-bell ringing of the modern world behind us.

  It grew colder and darker in the bus, light and warmth flickering less and less across the windows as we moved higher, among growing trees whose trunks expanded in size until they looked mighty and prehistoric. You could tell who was who on the bus by the way they reacted to the change. The valley workers slumped over in their seats with headphones on their ears, eyes closed or heads buried in books. The climbers pressed against the windows, jabbing and pointing at the increasing majesty of the views beyond, jumping from one side of the bus to the other as it wound up the valley, like kids on a school trip.

  An old hand at the trip, I played it cool. This was my fifth visit to the valley, but in reality I felt just as excited as the first time. This and every other trip was a pilgrimage, and like all pilgrims I had been nervous the first time that El Cap wouldn’t live up to the hype. I’d read and been told so many things about the Captain – that it was a mecca of climbing, an expanse of rock so huge and overpowering it almost had its own gravitational pull, well at least on climbers, and that I wouldn’t ever see anything as awe-inspiring – that I had been afraid it would not live up to its reputation. Now I was afraid that it might let me down, that El Cap would be diminished somehow by the nine ascents I’d already made.

  It never had. It never would.

  Out of the trees appeared the mightiest, most beautiful wall on the planet.

  The first thought on seeing El Cap, springing up from a meadow and leaping into the sky, is one of disbelief. The scale of it is hard to set against anything else you’ve seen before. It is taller by hundreds of metres than the highest building on earth, three times taller than the Eiffel Tower. A ripple of excitement and gasps went through the climbers, those who had seen it before turning with smiles to their friends who had not, with a look of ‘I told you so’ splashed across their faces.

  Its hugeness was as hard to comprehend as the first time, a vast expanse so large it was impossible to fit it within the viewfinder of a camera, or to hold its scale within memory. I loved this piece of rock.

  When we reached the bus stop, we found the usual gaggle of tourists milling around. I stepped down from the bus and collected my bags, then began moving them in relays to Camp 4, the world-famous climbers’ camp site situated a couple of hundred metres away.

  Life on a wall is simple, there is no place for ‘why’, only for ‘do’. A climb can take many days, even weeks, distilling your complicated life back to Stone-Age simplicity: eat, crap and stay alive. This most of all was what I had come to find.

  I dragged my last bag across the dusty car park to the camp site, throwing my luggage into a heap in the closest space I could find that was free. I looked around at the picnic tables, and lines of washing strung up on old ropes criss-crossing from tree to tree, and listened to the faint chatter of resting climbers talking about ‘what next’, and the occasional power shout as a climber slapped the top of the world famous boulders that lay on the edge of the camp site.

  For the first time in ages I felt almost relaxed.

  I began opening my bags and laying out my gear. Experience had told me that there were many reasons for failure – bad weather, ill partners, a lack of will – but the biggest of all was fucking around, not getting down to the task at hand.

  Most climbers would arrive and spend a few days getting used to the place, maybe doing some short climbs, and probably another wall before jumping on the ‘big one’. It is often nice to build up your psyche before embarking on a tough climb, especially if it’s going to be the hardest one of your life.

  You don’t have time.

  I do.

  You have to start tomorrow.

  I have all the time in the world.

  The longer you wait the greater the chance you’re going to bottle it.

  That would be worse than dying trying.

  The longer you stay down here, the greater the chance you’ll tell someone and they’ll talk you out of it.

  I don’t want to be talked out of it.

  I laid out my old tatty plastic tarp and began setting out all my gear, checking that nothing had been forgotten.

  First I put my camming devices in a row: thirty alloy tools, designed to expand into cracks, ranging in dimension from the size of my fingertip to the size of my head. Each one would be invaluable on the climb. Even the smallest were good enough to hold a falling climber, although I hoped that wouldn’t be put to the test. I also knew that this route had minimal placements for bomber gear like this: if I had the chanc
e of finding such a placement I would have to have the correct size to fit. My life could depend on it.

  Next I laid out my wired nuts: thirty loops of incredibly strong and robust steel cable, fitted with a small curved rectangle of aluminium or brass, designed to be slotted into the rock. These were split into sets, each set clipped to a large karabiner, and racked so that if one set was dropped I would have two in reserve. I checked over the nuts, some marked as mine with green electrical tape, others with foreign markings and probably found on other climbs, or gone astray from the racks of past climbing partners. I picked up a number seven Chouinard nut and felt it in my fingers. It was the size of a small box of matches, and was oily and sticky with age, its size and manufacturer, stamped into the alloy, almost invisible under the scratches of a lifetime’s worth of placements. It had been given to me by my dad ten years before as part of my first rack, second-hand, loved and cherished. Back then everything I owned for climbing would fit on a single karabiner; now it wouldn’t fit in a single dustbin.

  I set the nut down amongst the others and hoped I’d get to use it just once.

  Would he ever have imagined I’d bring you here?

  You think too much. It’s just an old nut.

  I pulled out my karabiners, over a hundred, clipped together in neat bunches ready to be racked onto my harness, and began sorting them. The route comprised twenty-one long pitches, many close to seventy metres in length, and these karabiners would be vital to clip every piece of protection to the rope. They were the glue that held everything together.

  As I was pulling out the last of the karabiners, a small wooden train tumbled out with them and fell into the pine needles that covered the ground. I picked it up. It was Ella’s, no doubt thrown in with the rest of my gear while packing. I thought of us setting up her wooden train track in the living room, her telling me what had to go where. I wished I’d taken more time to play with her. I stuck the toy in the pocket of my fleece.