GEORGE MALLORY did something better than lend me books: he took me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacations. I knew Snowdon very well from my bedroom window at Harlech. In the spring, its distant white cap lent a sentimental glory to the landscape. The first time I went with George to Snowdon we stayed at the Snowdon Ranger Hotel, near Quellyn Lake. It was January, and we found the mountain covered in snow. We did little rock-climbing, but went up some good snow slopes with rope and ice-axe. I remember one climb to the summit. Finding the hotel there with its roof blown off in the previous night’s blizzard, we sat by the cairn and ate Carlsbad plums and liver-sausage sandwiches. Geoffrey Keynes, the editor of the Nonesuch Blake, was in the team. He and George, who used to go drunk with excitement at the end of his climbs, picked stones off the cairn and shied them at the hotel chimney-stack until it joined the ruins of the roof.
George is still rated as one of the three or four best climbers in climbing history. Nobody had expected him to survive his first spectacular season in the Alps. He never afterwards lost his almost foolhardy daring, yet knew all there could be known about mountaineering technique. I always felt absolutely safe with him on the rope. George went through the war as a gunner lieutenant, but kept his nerve – by rock-climbing while on leave.
When the war ended, George loved mountains more than ever. His death on Mount Everest came five years later. No one knows whether he and Irvine actually made the last five hundred yards of the ascent, or whether they turned back, or what happened; but anyone who has climbed with George is convinced that he got to the summit and rejoiced in his accustomed way without leaving himself sufficient reserve of strength for the descent. I did not see it mentioned in the newspaper account of his death that he originally took to climbing while a scholar at Winchester, as a corrective to his weak heart. He told me that life at Winchester had made him so miserable that he once ran away: taking nothing with him but his beloved mathematics books. George’s other claim to fame is that he wrote the first modern biography of James Boswell.
He was wasted at Charterhouse where, in my time at least, the boys generally despised him as neither a disciplinarian nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his class in a friendly way, which puzzled and offended them, because of the school tradition of concealed warfare between boys and masters. We considered it no shame to cheat, lie, or deceive where a master was concerned, though the same treatment of a school-fellow would have been immoral. George also antagonized the housemasters by refusing to accept this state of war and fraternizing with the boys whenever possible. When two housemasters, who had been unfriendly to him, happened to die within a short time of each other, he joked to me: ‘See, Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face!’ I always called him by his Christian name, and so did three or four more of his friends in the school. This lack of dignity put him beyond the pale with most boys, and all masters. Eventually the falseness of his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four or five boys who were, like him, out of their element, befriending and making life tolerable for them. Before the final Everest expedition, he had decided to resign and take a job at Cambridge with the Workers’ Educational Association; tired of trying to teach gentlemen to be gentlemen.
I spent a season with George and a large number of climbers at the Pen-y-Pass Hotel on Snowdon in the spring of 1914. This time we did real precipice climbing, and I had the luck to climb with George, H. E.L. Porter (a renowned technician), Kitty O’Brien, and Conor O’Brien, her brother, who afterwards made a famous voyage round the world in a ridiculously small boat. Conor climbed, he told us, principally as a corrective to bad nerves. He would get very excited when any slight hitch occurred; his voice usually rose to a scream. Kitty used to chide him: ‘Ach, Conor, dear, have a bit of wit!’ and Conor would apologize. Being a sailor, he used to climb in bare feet. Often in climbing one has to support the entire weight of one’s body on a couple of toes – but toes in stiff boots. Conor claimed that he could force his naked toes farther into crevices than a boot would go.
The most honoured man there was Geoffrey Young, an Eton master, and the President of the Climbers’ Club. His four closest friends had all been killed climbing; a comment on the extraordinary care which he always took himself. It appeared not merely in his preparations for an ascent – the careful examination strand by strand of the Alpine rope, the attention to his boot-nails, and the balanced loading of his rucksack – but also in his caution on the rock-face. Before making any move he thought it out foot by foot, as though it were a chess problem. If the next hand-hold happened to be just a little out of his reach, or the next foot-hold seemed at all precarious, he would stop to think of a safe way round the difficulty. George used sometimes to grow impatient, but Geoffrey refused to be hurried. His shortness put him at a disadvantage in the matter of reach. Though not as double-jointed and prehensile as Porter, or as magnificent as George, he was the perfect climber; and still remains so. This, in spite of having lost a leg with a Red Cross unit on the Italian front. He climbs with an artificial leg, and has recendy published the only reliable textbook on rock-climbing. I felt very proud to be on the same rope as Geoffrey Young, and when he told me one day: ‘Robert, you have the finest natural balance that I have ever seen in a climber,’ this compliment pleased me far more than if the Poet Laureate had told me that I had the finest sense of rhythm that he had ever met in a young poet.
I certainly must have a good balance. Once, in Switzerland, it saved me from a broken leg or legs. My mother took us there in the Christmas holidays of 1913–14, ostensibly for winter sports, but really because she thought that my sisters should be given a chance to meet nice young men of means. About my third day on skis I went up from Champéry, where we were staying and the snow was too soft, to Morgins, a thousand feet higher, where it closely resembled castor sugar. Here I found an ice-run for skeleton-toboggans. Without pausing to consider that skis have no purchase on ice at all, I launched myself down it. After a few yards, my speed increased alarmingly and I realized with a shock what I was in for. There were several sharp turns in the run, protected by high banks, and I had to trust entirely to body-balance in swerving round them. On reaching the terminus still upright, I had my eyes damned by a frightened sports-club official for having endangered my life on his territory.
In an essay on climbing written at the time, I said that the sport made all others seem trivial. ‘New climbs, or new variations of old climbs, are not made in a competitive spirit, but only because it is good to stand somewhere on the earth’s surface where nobody else has stood before. It is good, too, to be alone with a specially chosen band of people – people in whom one can trust completely. Rock-climbing, one of the most dangerous sports possible, unless one keeps to the rules, becomes reasonably safe if one does keep to them. With physical fitness in every member of the team, a careful watch on the weather, proper overhauling of climbing apparatus, and no hurry, anxiety, or stunts, mountaineering can be much safer than foxhunting. Hunting implies uncontrollable factors, such as hidden wire, holes in which a horse may stumble, caprice or vice in the horse. Climbers trust entirely to their own feet, legs, hands, shoulders, sense of balance, judgement of distance.’
My first precipice was Crib-y-ddysgel: a test climb for beginners. About fifty feet above the scree – a height that is more frightening than five hundred, because death seems almost as certain and far more immediate – a long, sloping shelf of rock, about the length of an ordinary room, had to be crossed from right to left. This offered no hand-holds or foot-holds worth mentioning, and was too steep to stand or kneel on without slipping. It shelved at an angle of, I suppose, forty-five or fifty degrees. One rolled across upright, and trusted in friction as a maintaining force. Once across the shelf without disaster, I felt that the rest of the climb would be easy. They called this climb ‘The Gambit’. Robert Trevelyan, the poet, had been given the test in the previous season, but been unlucky enough to fall off. He was pulled up short, after a few feet, by the leader’s well-belayed rope; but the experience disgusted him with climbing and he spent the rest of his time at Pen-y-Pass just walking about.
Belaying means making fast, on a projection of rock, a loop of the rope which is wound round one’s waist, and so disposing the weight of the body that, if the climber above or below happens to fall, the belay will keep the whole party from going down together. Alpine rope has a breaking-point of a third of its own length. Only one member of the climbing team moves at any given time, the others wait, belayed. Sometimes the leader has to move up fifty or sixty feet until he finds a secure belay from which to start the next upward movement, so that if he slips, and cannot put on any sort of brake, he must fall more than twice that length before being pulled up.
That same day I was taken on a spectacular, though not particularly difficult climb on Crib Goch. At one point we traversed around a knife-edge buttress. From this knife-edge a pillar-like rock, technically known as a monolith, had split away. We scrambled up the monolith, which overhung the valley with a clear five hundred feet drop, and each in turn stood on the top balanced. Next, he had to make a long, careful stride from the top of the monolith to the rock-face; here there was a ledge just wide enough to admit the toe of a boot, and a hand-hold at convenient height to give an easy pull-up to the next ledge. I remember George shouting down from above: ‘Be careful of that foot-hold, Robert! Don’t chip the edge off, or the climb will be impossible for anyone who wants to do it again. It’s got to last another five hundred years at least.’
I was in danger only once. Porter took me climbing on an out-of-the-way part of the mountain. The climb, known as the Ribbon Track and Girdle Traverse, had not been attempted for ten years. About half-way up we reached a chimney. A ‘chimney’ is a vertical fissure in the rock wide enough to admit the body; whereas a ‘crack’ is only wide enough to admit the boot. One works up a chimney sideways, with back and knees; but up a crack with one’s face to the rock. Porter, fifty feet above me in the chimney, made a spring to a hand-hold slightly out of reach. In doing so, he dislodged a pile of stones which had been wedged in the chimney. They rattled down, and one, rather bigger than a cricket ball, struck me unconscious. Fortunately I was well belayed, and Porter had made his objective. The rope held me up; I recovered my senses a few seconds later and managed to continue.
At Pen-y-Pass we used to take a leisurely breakfast and lie in the sun with a tankard of beer before starting for the precipice foot in the late morning. Snowdon is a perfect mountain for climbers, its rock being sound and not slippery. And once they reach the top of any of the precipices, some of which are a thousand feet high, but all just climbable, one way or another, there is always an easy track to jog home down. In the evening, when we got back to the hotel, we lay and stewed in hot baths. I remember wondering at my body – the worn fingernails, the bruised knees, and the lump of climbing muscle which had begun to bunch above my instep, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this new purpose. My worst climb was on Lliwedd, the most formidable of the precipices when, at a point that needed most concentration, a raven circled round the party in great sweep. I found this curiously unsettling, because one climbs only up and down, or sideways, and the raven seemed to be suggesting diverse other possible dimensions of movement – tempting us to let go our hold and join him.