CHAPTER 4
The man who had the courage to climb the world’s highest mountain could not mount up the courage to ask Louise Mary Rose to marry him. Louise was the daughter of Jim Rose, a lawyer, and his wife, Phyllis—an impressive pair in their own right. An ancestor on the Rose side had been the first mayor of Auckland, and the Roses were stalwarts of the New Zealand mountaineering community, which is how Ed became acquainted with the family.
Ed was soon besotted with the pretty, smart and cultivated Louise, twelve years his junior. A talented musician, Louise had won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; she arrived there at the end of 1952 to study the viola. Her voice, as heard in old newsreels and family films, has an uncanny similarity to that of Queen Elizabeth II. Such tones aren’t in vogue these days, but that was how well brought up young Auckland ladies of the time were taught to speak.
She was not overly enthusiastic about climbing, but she loved the outdoors and had an adventurous spirit that she would have many opportunities to satisfy over the years to come.
That is, if Ed ever got round to asking her to marry him.
Ed always expressed his deepest feelings more comfortably in letters. Those he wrote to Louise are heartfelt and are said, by those who have been lucky enough to read them, to be very moving. But none of these epistles included a proposal of marriage—although many circumlocutions definitely hinted at it, with speculations as to what the future might hold for both of them, and whether the things he hoped for might come to pass.
On his way to the Himalayas and Everest, Ed had stopped off to see Louise in Sydney; and the relationship had got to the point where the pair shared a first kiss. He also stopped off on the way back from England, post-Everest. The local press got wind that Sir Edmund had a girl in town and tried to track her down, with no success.
Ed’s account of how Louise came to be his wife changed in the telling over the years. In a deviation from the facts, he wrote in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win that he asked Louise to marry him and she agreed. By the time he wrote View from the Summit he had revised the story so that, in Sydney after Everest, the two had confirmed that marriage was on the cards, but there was nothing definite.
Back in Auckland, before setting off to the UK for the Everest lecture tour, Ed told Louise’s mother Phyl that he wanted to marry her daughter—and would very much like to marry her in time for her to accompany him on the tour, which could then also be a honeymoon. The major obstacle in Ed’s mind was one that is common to many men: What if she said no?
Though hardly matinée-idol handsome, Ed was definitely attractive to women. He might have felt more confident of his chances with Louise if he had known the opinion of Earle Riddiford’s wife, Rosemary, who, many years later (after her husband’s death), confided to Tom Scott: ‘Ed was gorgeous . . . Of course, he had no idea how gorgeous he was.’
‘They were all remarkable men, weren’t they,’ said Scott. ‘Your husband . . .’
‘I wouldn’t call Earle remarkable. But Ed—there was a man.’
Phyl Rose, who almost certainly knew what her daughter’s answer would be, asked Ed if he would like her to ring Louise and ask on his behalf. So, not only was Ed unable to ask his girlfriend to marry him, he couldn’t even directly ask her mother to do it for him. But he did accept Phyl’s kind offer and, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Louise immediately agreed. In his HARDtalk interview Ed ruefully acknowledged that it was ‘a cowardly thing on my behalf but it worked out extremely well’.
Louise was one of those rare people about whom no one has a bad word to say. By all accounts, to know her was to love her; and Ed was an extremely lucky man.
‘She was just lovely, there is no other way of saying it,’ observes John Hillary. ‘I truly loved that woman—it was just devastating when she was killed. She was an author, a good wife and a good mum. She was a great aunt, very people orientated, very warm. She was very much like my mother.’
Hilary Carlisle remembers Louise for her kindness and her intuition. ‘She was very concerned for others, and was wonderful to me,’ says Carlisle. ‘I was a 21-year-old, young and naive. She seemed to know what you needed, and nothing ruffled her.’
There were inevitably times when the stresses and strains of a busy life started to show. ‘I think she often found it hard,’ says son Peter. ‘You have this busy household, three kids and she was involved with Volunteer Service Abroad, the Himalayan Trust and her orchestral work. She wrote books, so she had a lot going on.’
Daughter Sarah recalls an occasion when ‘Louise had broken her leg and she was stuck in a tent, so she got unusually grumpy, because she usually had such a sunny personality. I remember walking past the tent and she yelled out “Sarah, will you just shut up.” She wasn’t very happy.’
Ed and Louise’s first child, Peter, was born in 1954, followed by Sarah in 1955 and Belinda in 1959. It’s an oddity of Nothing Venture, Nothing Win that, although Ed notes the occasion of their births, he does not record their names at first mention.
Ed was never going to be a ‘hands-on’ father, as today’s parenting philosophy requires. With Percy as his example, there was little chance of that. He would be involved and active, but in his own way.
‘I can’t imagine Ed being a great nappy changer in 1954,’ says fellow mountaineer and physiologist Mike Gill. ‘But he was proud of his kids and loved them, even though he didn’t find it easy to show it.’ In View from the Summit, Ed describes himself as being ‘fond’ of the children.
Ed and Louise built a home on a property next door to Jim and Phyl Rose, and the grandparents were to have a large presence in the children’s lives.
One key to the success of the relationship between Ed and Louise, according to Sarah, was that ‘Louise was never fazed by Ed. She thought he was great, but she wasn’t afraid of him. She was completely normal with him. She was definitely strong and sometimes feisty, so it was an equal thing, otherwise I think it would have been a disaster, because he was really strong and stroppy.’
‘All their married life Louise was the sun and Ed circled around her,’ is Tom Scott’s description of the dynamic. ‘He was in her orbit.’
Their children remember Louise as being able to soften Ed’s temper—which could be activated, they say, by several things—including lethargy, laziness, insolence, and people who didn’t stand by their word.
‘He did have a fiery temper,’ says Sarah, ‘but I think Louise modified that a bit and sort of calmed him down. It wasn’t so much about his anger but it was needing to be there to calm him down—he had a lot on his plate. Even though he was quite jolly about it, it was stressful. I think it showed that Ed wasn’t perfect all the time.’
Nor was he around all the time. His lifestyle meant frequent long absences, notably sixteen months spent away on the Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
‘She never moaned,’ says Hilary. ‘She had the family and she was committed that family life continued, that was the important thing. It was all exciting, she never saw anything as a problem.’
‘She went back to her own life,’ Sarah explained of her mother’s response to Ed’s absences. ‘She was very busy. She was a writer, a musician and she was heavily involved in the fundraising [for Nepal], so she would give lectures . . . [S]he would just drop everything when Ed came back and help him. But he would go back and she would continue on with her things. The trips she went on with Ed were really important to them . . . if they didn’t have that time together, then it wouldn’t have been much of a relationship.’
Ed himself said the reason he was able to combine family and a life of adventure was that he had ‘a suitable wife. My wife was very long-suffering. She knew that there were certain things I wanted to do and she was happy that I should do them. She was prepared to put up with considerable periods of being alone with the kids.’
Like many an absent father, Ed’s approach to discipline was relaxed in the early years of coming and going.
Peter, Sarah and Belinda slipped into the traditional roles that went with the order of their births. Peter was the responsible, serious one of whom most was required. Sarah was the under-the-radar one who got to follow her own path. And Belinda was the pet, adored by everyone.
‘She was very like Aunt Louise,’ says Hilary of Belinda. ‘She had the same personality—the caring side. Peter and Sarah are more Hillarys. The Hillarys are always questioning, always striving to improve or do the best they can. Belinda was fun and always ready for the next thing. She went out of her way to make things work.’
No one who has read Louise’s first book, Keep Calm If You Can, will forget her description of having to find flowers wherever she went while they were travelling around the United States, because three-year-old Belinda could only go to sleep holding, not a teddy or special blanket, but a fresh flower.
Ed was an inspirational father, to Peter at least. ‘I can remember being in Wanaka,’ says Peter, ‘and Dad would look up and see snow, and you could just feel how it excited him, and I felt the same way. With three kids floating around in the back seat, with Dad whistling and driving, you picked up that emotion. Mum was there, the mountains were sparkling. You knew there was something on his mind and it was all good.’
Even at home, daily life sometimes revolved around adventuring. ‘We used to put these little charts together right above the kitchen table,’ says Peter. ‘Like the next trip. It was either Great Barrier Island, skiing in the South Island, going to Nepal—anywhere really—and we’d tick them off and open another one up.’
‘It was always a great adventure when Uncle Ed came to town,’ says Hilary, who spent her early years in Norwich in the UK. ‘He’d come to London and we’d be taken out of school to drive down and have this amazing day with him . . . wherever he would go, he would take us along.’
When Ed had to attend a function at New Zealand House, in the presence of the likes of New Zealand Prime Minister Keith Holyoake and soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, he insisted Hilary and her brothers go too. ‘We tagged along like country bumpkins. Aunt Louise took us under her wing while Uncle Ed did all the handshaking business that he had to.’
Hilary’s introduction to Holyoake prompted a misguided attempt at intergenerational humour on his part.
‘Oh, have you started social climbing now?’ he asked the bewildered twelve-year-old.
Then Uncle Ed just stepped in and sorted it out: ‘He always looked after us.’ Hilary says she never appreciated Ed’s stature—he was just her mum’s brother from New Zealand—until she moved to the other side of the world.
John Hillary, Rex’s son, was taken along on a family holiday in the South Island. ‘Ed loved sporty cars,’ John recalls, ‘but on that trip he had the Mini Cooper and three kids as well as Aunty Louise. Belinda was that young she sat on her mother’s knee all the way in the car.
‘He paid for me to fly down and we camped on the bank of the Clutha River. He paid for me and Peter to fly around Mt Aspiring in the aircraft. It was quite amazing.’
One evening John caught a trout that got off the hook. Determined to catch another, he stayed after Ed had gone to bed until he finally landed one at around 9 pm. Thrilled, he ran with this trophy and burst into Ed and Louise’s tent to show them.
‘Very good, John,’ said Ed patiently. Louise told him they would have his fish for breakfast.
‘I thought afterwards, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to burst into their tent. But they handled it very well.’
Ed had a playful side, and was usually up for horseplay of any description. ‘He used to put us in the boot of his Sunbeam Talbot and pretend to drive off with us,’ John recalls. ‘And when he was having dinner at our house, I would sit beside him. All of a sudden he would turn and say “God, look at that,” and when I did and looked back my dinner was gone.’
Sometimes, though, the playfulness turned into a character-building exercise. ‘We went deer stalking above a creek and along the hills,’ says John. ‘When we got near the top of the ridge there was a near vertical strip of about 14 feet which had shelves sticking out. He went up there like a jack rabbit, of course, and disappeared over the top. I had a pack on my back and I got halfway up the darn thing and a piece of shale in my right hand came out of the ground, so I was pivoted on my left foot, by holding on with my left hand, and my pack went all the way around. There I was, looking down . . . and I was thinking, “Oh my God—I am going to die.” And my darling uncle, who I loved dearly, leaned over the top and said “Come on, hurry up. What are you doing? Stop messing around.” . . . Then he disappeared over the top. So I had no choice but to climb up to join him.’
‘My kids loved Ed,’ says Mike Gill. ‘My daughter Caitlin went to the Himalayas . . . You’d go into a village and he’d receive this huge welcome and she would be able to sit alongside Ed and feel so important.’
Louise shared the adventurous spirit. In 1962 the opportunity arose to take everyone to the US for a year. They would be based in Chicago, and Ed would travel around lecturing to the staff of the World Book Encyclopedia, which promoted itself as ‘the number-one selling print encyclopedia in the world’ and was the most important rival of the more famous Encyclopaedia Britannica. They would also tour National Forest Campgrounds and report on them for the US Department of Agriculture; and they travelled as far as Alaska, testing camping gear for Sears Roebuck.
In Keep Calm If You Can, the conqueror of Everest is seen as a mere mortal, struggling with the normal vicissitudes of a family camping holiday: forgetting to pack the right map; taking his eyes off the road to deal with his misbehaving kids in the back seat; leading the fun charge with sing-alongs in the car; and retelling the Jimmy Job stories his own father made up to entertain him.
But it is Louise—typically for the time—who does most of the parenting. At the end of their trip home, they arrive in Nepal, where Ed takes Peter and Sarah for a two-day trek, complete with Sherpas, into the mountains. Louise stays behind with Belinda, who is unwell. The highlight comes when the Hillarys reach a point that provides Peter and Sarah with an inspiring view across Nepal to Mt Everest.
The childhood treks and trips were frequent—scaled down so the children could manage them easily, and with copious supplies of chocolate to keep spirits up. ‘And when we were really young,’ says Peter, ‘if we were having a hard time, we would be bound into a sleeping bag and dropped into a basket on a Sherpa’s back.’
‘It was quite hard going overseas,’ recalls Sarah. ‘People barely travelled in those days. It was a major deal when we went to Nepal because they had to save money, and there was a lot of organisation.’
In Keep Calm, Louise reports Ed telling her that if the whole family was to make a trip to the Himalayas she would need to produce another book to finance it. It’s not entirely clear from her account whether he was joking or not; but Mike Gill also describes her having to ‘write books to subsidise their trips to the Himalayas’.
Whatever the motivation, Louise produced another fine family memoir in A Yak for Christmas, the story of the family’s trip to Nepal, India and elsewhere. ‘The trips to Nepal were amazing,’ says Peter. ‘On one, Mum took us across India to Nepal when the whole country was in lock-down. There were military police everywhere and she had this gaggle of children.’
‘First we were turned back to Sydney,’ says Sarah. ‘They decided the planes couldn’t go through. Then I managed to leave my passport behind. They held the plane, so when I got to the airport I was thrown into a jeep, driven across the tarmac and came on board. I was totally oblivious to the whole thing except my mother was crying and all the other passengers were glaring at me.’
One less tense, but no less adventurous, jaunt was to the challenging environment of central Australia, following the Birdsville Track. ‘And there was this tremendous one-in-ten-year massive flood,’ says Sarah. ‘It happened when we were camped in the loop of a river. We were in the tent and the parents were in a campervan, so they rescued us in the middle of the night . . . When we woke up the next morning there was a raging torrent around us, we had to try and get through that with the car. They took the fan belt off so we could drive through, but as soon as we got over it we discovered there were entire lakes of water and it was really hard to get out.’
As his absences grew fewer and shorter, and the children got older—more visible and less biddable—Ed began to have a more direct, day-to-day involvement in raising them.
‘Parents of his generation,’ says Peter, ‘were on a cusp. There had been a way of raising children, probably for a hundred years, up to that point, where it might have started bending to the sort of new age way of doing things.
‘He would try and make us do what his father did, which was really strict. He did move towards [the new way], but I do think it was the way that previous generation had been.’
Louise, who was younger than Ed, tended to prefer the new style of parenting. Sarah thinks Louise found all the usual faults in children—answering back, not cleaning their rooms—easier to deal with because she had spent more time with them.
Ed had firm views about money. He was not wealthy—though far from poor—and if the children wanted anything out of the ordinary they had to work to earn the money to pay for it.
As for bringing boys home . . . ‘That was a little bit difficult,’ says Sarah. ‘Ed was very old-fashioned when it came to me. It was very different for Peter. I was the oldest girl and Ed was very protective. I remember being invited to a party and being told at the last minute I couldn’t go. I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but I remember our grandparents coming over to comfort me about the whole thing because it was so embarrassing.’
On another occasion, Sarah had arranged to have a party in the garage, which had been especially decorated for the occasion. But when someone rang and told Ed a large group of people were planning to gatecrash it, he told Sarah the party was cancelled.
‘So I had to ring everyone—that was total humiliation. I told Ed he had to tell me who it was [who had called], but by the time he got around to it he couldn’t remember. He was very strict about socialising and things and that was one of the reasons why I left home really early and went to Dunedin University. I left school after the sixth form, went down there and partied up.’
Just as Ed was having to learn how to be ‘Ed Hillary’, his children were learning how to be ‘Ed Hillary’s kids’. Being the child of a celebrity was rare at that time, especially in New Zealand. ‘The one thing I remember is, it was really embarrassing when they asked you what your father did and I never knew what that really was with Ed,’ says Sarah.
‘He was the beginning of this new era,’ says Peter. ‘Job descriptions are really complicated, varied and different these days. Back then, without a traditional job, it didn’t mean you weren’t hugely successful and very innovative and clever . . . Dad was something else.’
‘I always felt I could never talk about my family like most other people would . . .’ says Sarah. ‘I always felt that, if I said something, everyone was listening, so you couldn’t make casual comments. They will take it away and it will be their “Ed Hillary story”.’
One of the few things Peter and Sarah disagree about when discussing their upbringing is whether their paternity earned them any special treatment. Sarah thinks not: ‘I don’t think we were treated differently, but we did have different experiences. At school, I was just a normal person with my friends, but we would meet other people who would come and visit Ed, then we went on trips that perhaps other people didn’t have the chance to do so we did have different experiences.’
‘I remember being a small boy at school,’ says Peter, ‘and going with [Governor-General Sir Bernard] Fergusson’s son back to Government House and playing, and Mum coming to pick me up and curtseying to Lady Fergusson. Later in India, when I was 30, I had lunch with Indira Gandhi and carried on up to see Tenzing. They are not typical experiences.’
As for school, Peter says there was no sense of different treatment by the teachers, but there was from the students. ‘I remember walking around the quadrangle, where students weren’t meant to walk, and these kids yelled out: “You just think you can do that just because you are the son of Ed Hillary.” So I personally felt a lot of that.’
The greatest pressure was the need to perform for the media. ‘Whenever there was a photo opportunity we had to smile for the camera,’ says Sarah. ‘Already when we were very young we had to deal with a public and private division. I remember having a tantrum as a small child when Ed had come back from some trip. I was very tiny but I refused to smile.’
Sarah was not keen on heights—like her mother, she liked mountains, not mountaineering. Instead, she found her calling as an art conservator, becoming principal conservator at Auckland Art Gallery and exhibiting as an artist in her own right.
Ed wanted all three children to go to university and become professionals. He was enthusiastic about Peter studying engineering—but instead he studied geology for a while, before abandoning it. Peter says: ‘He was incredibly proud of what Sarah achieved with her career and her qualifications, which he felt was a real triumph and so do I. Belinda was really interested in medicine and I think she would have been a fantastic doctor.’
Peter, on the other hand, would follow in his father’s footsteps. Over all the ups and downs of childhood, Louise’s benevolent presence cast a warm glow. ‘Our mother was a sunny personality,’ says Sarah, ‘a very positive person. She could also be very cynical and very funny, but she basically looked on the bright side, and she liked people a lot. She was very outgoing.’
Sarah once got a letter from a man who recalled meeting Ed and Louise, not long after they got married. ‘He said Louise entertained them all evening. There were lots of laughs and wonderful stories. Ed just sat back and enjoyed the whole experience. He felt they were so obviously in love.’
‘I think that, from the five of us,’ says Peter, ‘Sarah and I and Dad were of a certain strong-willed ilk, reasonably complex personalities, determined. Our younger sister was very much like my mother. They were both incredibly capable people, they were much more adept at dealing with people and knew how to weave their way around things, and really for our family they were the glue that made it function. They could bond it all together and make it work.’
Bonding it together and making it work was something Ed would struggle to do in years to come.