OLD MAN OF HOY

1967 - 2007

August 6^th, 2018

Some people go quiet when they get scared. Others make a noise. I hadn't been climbing for over thirty years but I had agreed, in a moment of rash enthusiasm, to return to The Old Man of Hoy and do a fiftieth anniversary ascent with the same two guys I had done it with back then. At the start of the first real difficulty, an exposed traverse, I had gone completely silent.

If I didn't move quickly my strength would simply run out but trying to persuade myself to commit to the traverse wasn't going well. Every time I pushed my right foot out towards the foothold I needed to stand on, it came straight back to me, making no attempt to stay there. I used to glide easily over this sort of ground, mind and body working in effortless cooperation. Now my foot had a will of its own and between my ears was a hiss like an undetected gas leak.

In 1967 I was seventeen, John and Dave, always known as Gobbo and Snod, were twenty one and we had roared up to Orkneys on motorbikes. Driven by the certainty of youth and honed by years of hard practice on the gritstone crags around our home town of Sheffield we did a very early ascent of the Old Man, which had only been climbed for the first time one year earlier. For three youngsters with no track record of that kind of undertaking it had been a bold stroke.

As we came together to do it again and drove the long miles north, we wondered at the audacity of our younger selves and tried to recall whose idea it had been in the first place. None of us could remember but we did have to stop for a pee at regular intervals. Snod and I hobbled around to restore some mobility to our bad hips and Gobbo did exercises for a stiff neck, a sort of repetitive nodding that had the smack of a malfunctioning robot with grey hair and varifocal specs.

These were the septuagenarian super heroes who were going to be my guides. They had kept climbing in all the intervening years and now, in their retirement, with more free time, they were going really well. I hadn't been out for three decades. The only preparation I had managed was couple of days on Hen Cloud where we did a few VS's which I found pretty taxing but Snod was adamant that there wasn't going to be anything harder on The Old Man.

"You'll be fine..." he kept saying "you'll be fine..." and Gobbo said the same when I spoke to him on the phone and quizzed him about the level of difficulty. "You'll be fine...you've kept really fit...you'll fly up it...don't worry."

"You'll be fine..." I tried to convince myself as I stalled on the traverse, "don't worry..." Some chance.

We had all been saying that it didn't matter if we didn't get up it second time round. The whole trip would be worth it just for old time’s sake and there was no point in taking chances if conditions weren't right. I was encouraged by this. Icy tendrils of morbid anticipation had been snaking around my guts for a while and they had increased no end when we glimpsed the totem pole of rock that is the Old Man of Hoy as the ferry from the mainland sailed right passed it.

My anxiety levels took another leap when the weather forecast, which had consistently predicted high winds and rain, suddenly offered us a one day window of opportunity. We took the ferry to the tiny Island of Hoy, ready for an early start. There's a bothy at Rackwick Bay, the jumping off point for the walk over the moors to the Old Man. We had been told that it was basic but there were a few mats to sleep on and a stove, so we could make tea.

The scattered collection of low cottages at Rackwick Bay would score highly in a competition for the most remote settlement in Britain. The wind and the ominous clouds that hugged the cliff tops and skidded across the horizon only added to the desolate atmosphere. But it wasn't all poetic landscapes. The stove turned out to be the relic of an old wood burner but there was no wood and we hadn't brought any matches.

I didn't sleep much. A thin mat on a stone floor made my hip hurt if I lay on my right side. If I lay on my left side my bad shoulder hurt and if I lay on my back, thinking about the coming dawn, it forced me to turn over and the whole cycle started again. A quick carton of juice and some chocolate biscuits passed for breakfast. The wind was still very strong and I was harbouring a secret hope that this would be enough to scupper our chances of even making a start.

Snod was not so easily deterred. He was beginning to display symptoms of the kind of grizzly determination that can blind itself to anything but the goal. As we trudged over the moors towards the cliff top where the descent to the base of The Old Man starts, we saw a stream cascading over the edge and down to the sea hundreds of feet below. Except it wasn't cascading down. It was being blown straight upwards by the wind. Blown vertically into the air. This was surely the signal that further progress could only be judged as reckless.

"Wow..." I said "look at that!" Neither of them answered, they were slightly ahead of me on the path, maybe the wind was snatching my words away. "Look at that! " I tried again, louder. Still no response so I yelled at the top of my voice. "Can you not see that!" Snod looked back over his landward shoulder so that he couldn't see the water careering skywards.

"You what?" He beamed, his hair blowing wildly in the gale, "this wind should be drying it out nicely eh?" I knew the drill. There was a time when I too could pretend to see no ships. That was then.

The descent from the cliff top, down steep grass that was wet and muddy, above almost vertical drops to the sea, with the wind tearing at us at every step was pretty scary. Snod shot up the first pitch and I followed. It wasn't hard climbing but the rock was damp and sandy. Gobbo came up to join us and Snod set off to examine the traverse, out of sight around a corner, which leads to an overhanging crack, the crux of the whole route. If it was still damp then this would be a golden opportunity for an early return to base. He was surely going to be as good as his word and take no chances.

“It’s shit,” he called back, “there’s sand all over the holds...it’s like a beach"

Choirs of angels began to trumpet in my head. One straightforward abseil from here and we'd be back on the ground. Bingo. But while I was luxuriating in the comfort of retreat and already composing the text home saying I was safe and sound but sadly failed due to atrocious conditions, I became aware of Gobbo yelling above the gusts of wind.

"Nice one Snod! What does the crack above you look like?" It began to dawn on me that Snod had actually got across the traverse and my heart sank. "What does the crack look like?" Gobbo shouted again.

"Shit..." came the almost inaudible reply but soon he was moving again and all contact was lost in the flapping wind. There was nothing to be seen or heard of him except the rope snaking slowly out as he climbed higher and higher up the crack.

Then it was my turn.

I had to get across that traverse. I had to move. I didn't have the reserves of strength I used to have and if I didn't climb without a pause my meagre ration would be used up before I'd even started. I tried to coax my foot towards the foothold again but it felt as if I was trying to balance an empty shoe, tied to a trouser leg full of billiard balls, on a small, sloping, slightly damp shelf that was also covered in a thin layer of sandy granules. Two days’ practice on Hen Cloud felt hopelessly inadequate.

The traverse tiptoed above huge overhangs with nothing between the soles of my feet and the rocky seashore way below. The giddy air seemed to swirl like an invisible whirlpool dragging me towards it and my foot came straight back again. I kept telling myself to calm down but the only voice I could hear properly belonged to the doctor I had seen a few months earlier.

"I've got the results of your hip Xray." His words replayed in the back of my mind.

"Yes." I had agreed at the time. No surprise so far, that was why I had been called to the appointment.

"There is virtually complete loss of the anterior aspect of the right hip joint...mmm" he fiddled with his computer mouse and appeared to be trying to remember, as he shot furtive glances back at me, whether I had managed to get into the surgery under my own steam or someone had wheeled me there. "Well...let's start at the beginning...how far can you actually walk?"

"I can run...I go running."

"You run!" he barked, as though I had confessed to heavy drinking shortly after a liver transplant.

"Yes."

"You go running?" Later he admitted that they did recommend gentle exercise for arthritis but it was clear he didn't mean the kind of exertion that I was in the middle of. He went on to offer a hip replacement, which I thought was a bit melodramatic at the time, but the prospect of my hip just ceasing to function suddenly felt very real.

Fear can pack a lot of impressions into a fleeting moment. I seemed to spend an age at the beginning of that traverse but the stream of doubts and internal debate lasted no more than a second or two before instinct took over and I was moving. A part of me that had lain dormant for over thirty years materialised like a genie from a bottle and took control. The holds weren't bad but they were damp and sandy and it felt precarious but the other me unlocked the puzzle of how to climb it and all I did was repeat to myself, keep moving, don't stop, keep moving, don't stop.

Then came the overhanging crack above it. There were footholds on the side walls to bridge onto; they were still damp and sandy but at least there was always a crack of some kind and anyone brought up on gritstone will always feel secure with a hand jammed into a crack no matter how long the absence. Holding my weight on the jams hurt an awful lot more than I remembered as the protecting callouses on the back of my knuckles, the result of years of climbing in all weathers on forbidding gritstone outcrops, had faded a long time ago.

Although my hands had gone soft the genie hadn't and I was making good progress. By following the subconscious dictates that rose from somewhere deep inside me and repeating over and over, keep moving, don't stop, I gained height steadily. The pitch went on for longer than I was expecting and by the time I arrived at the tiny stance where Snod was belayed I was breathing hard and the fingers of my left hand were starting to get cramp but I had made it. He was sitting down, squashed into the back of a small triangular niche trying to keep out of the wind.

"Great lead Snod," I said as I joined him, "really good lead." He looked happy, with a wizened grin on his face, as if he was watching the world go by from the entrance to a little cave with a jolly greeting for anyone who passed by. He had good reason to be pleased.

In 1967 he had been the last to set off up the crack. We had planned to haul a sack but before Snod could attach it, the haul rope somehow came free and flew out into space. So he followed up the crack with the sack on his back until a chockstone he was pulling on came out and the weight of the sack yanked him off backwards.

Gobbo had held him while he got back onto the rock but even after fifty years the memory still rankled and the grim determination to lead that pitch, despite the weather, despite the conditions, had been brewing for all that time.

I wondered if there was any chance that he might now feel sufficiently vindicated to be thinking, as I was, that an immediate retreat, direct from there, was actually the most sensible option available to us. The crack had been damp but the next section was going to be out and out wet because it wasn't as steep. Surely the pair of them would see sense. When we were all three reunited, it quickly became clear, without a word having to be said, that the daredevil pensioners had got the bit between their teeth and nothing was going to stop them.

It was ‘Berlin or bust’ and I was with them for the ride whether I liked it or not. Gobbo collected the gear from Snod and set off with purpose. The cherished possibility of an early return to the chocolate biscuits, waiting for us below, vanished as he disappeared from sight. If my ability to climb had mysteriously come back at the beginning of the traverse, then the knack of keeping a lid on rampant anxiety during the periods of waiting was as far from my grasp as the biscuits were.

There were no rescue facilities here, no phone signal, nothing to fall back on. There was no way of getting out of trouble except what we could effect by ourselves. We were on our own. I used to enjoy that kind of commitment. I used to like the feeling of being out on a limb, of being where the currency of everyday life had no value, of having to rely your own resources. Now I could see very clearly why Snod’s Mum had always taken a much gloomier view of the potential hazards.

"You'll brek yer silly necks," was her constant refrain as she flapped around trying to do six things at once and Billy the budgie chirped away in the background and Snod and his Dad shouted "What's up Billy?" in unison before his Mum chimed in once again with, "You'll brek yer silly necks...you will...you'll brek your silly necks." Maybe her pet prediction could yet prove to be uncannily near the mark. Just half a century out.

You would never have guessed from his Dad’s quiet, slightly retiring manner that he’d been a soldier in the deserts of North Africa, fought through Italy and then across France and beyond. Our parents never mentioned the interruption to their own young lives but were happy for us to enjoy the freedoms they had won.

The rope went tight and I began to climb. I couldn't hear Gobbo or see him but I followed anyway, diagonally to the right across a series of brittle ledges where the rock was green and loose, interspersed with wet sloping sections where the holds were at times almost sludgey. It was another really good lead. Long, loose, insecure and, under the conditions, really testing. Gobbo was belayed at the base of the final right-angled corner below the summit. It was the only place on the whole climb that was actually sheltered from the howling wind.

When Snod arrived he took over the lead again and battled his way to the top. When he got there he sat down to belay and didn't move from that position until it was his turn to start down. I found the final corner much harder than I was expecting, perhaps because the cramp in my hands was gradually getting worse. My index and middle fingers kept locking and twisting around each other as if I was crossing my fingers in hope.

On the final section of the crack it opens out and you can see right through to the other side of the Old Man. The wind was gusting loudly through the gap and as I clambered onto the summit it got louder still. I sat down next to Snod and like him I didn't move. Gobbo was braver, he strode around, oblivious to the wind, taking photos. Fifty years ago we had bathed in glorious sunshine and seemed to spend hours up there. We built a cairn, inscribed our names onto a slab of sandstone and waved at the ferry as it came in close and gave three toots on the horn. I don't remember being the slightest bit concerned about the descent.

Now we were grimacing into the teeth of a gale and I couldn't think about anything else. I couldn't wait to get on with our escape even though the thought of actually submitting my weight to the rope made my stomach lurch. It was a hell of a place to relearn how to abseil after a thirty year gap. Gobbo was in charge of getting us down. He reached the bottom of the first stage with no fuss. I shut my eyes, metaphorically, and committed myself to a slow, cautious, descent, worried that the cramp in my hand would prevent me from gripping the rope tight enough to stop it from sliding too quickly through the descendeur and I would lose control.

The second half of the abseil slanted diagonally to the left. Pushing across on the wet rock was worrying but my hand was still holding up as I got down to where Gobbo was waiting. There remained a chasm of a drop below but we were on our way. Snod arrived and we set about retrieving the ropes. I held my breath. What if they jammed and we were stuck there. What if we dropped them and had no way of getting back down. Together we hauled on the rope like press-ganged sailors and slowly, inch by inch, the knot came towards us and the ropes came tumbling down with no mishap.

Compared to 1967 this should have been a piece of cake. We had no descendeurs then, no friction belay plates, no harnesses. We tied the rope directly to our waists, we belayed around the waist with an extra twist around our arms and Gobbo had negotiated these intimidating abseils in the classic style by wrapping the rope around his body. Snod and I were thoroughly modern: we used a long sling to improvise a sit harness fastened together with a karabiner. We passed the rope through the karabiner, then over our shoulders and off we went into the void without a care in the world. If only I felt as self-assured now, festooned with all the advantages that modern technology could provide.

Gobbo started down again. Another diagonal slant but it was harder to push sideways without skidding. We all had worrying moments and skinned our shins when we were dragged back towards the fall line of the rope but we made it to the top of the difficult crack. We pulled on the ropes once more. As the knot moved slowly and the final abseil was being prepared I might have started to believe that safety beckoned. But this was the section that had been alarming me most. The ropes now hung free down the bulging crack and plunged into space over the huge overhangs below.

The whole of this abseil would be hanging free, twisting and spinning on the rope. Gobbo took a long time to get to the bottom which did nothing for my peace of mind. When my turn came I began gingerly. Only a few feet down and my feet were no longer touching the rock. I didn't like this sensation even when I was climbing regularly but now, as I swung further and further out into thin air, I urgently needed something to take my mind off the gut-wrenching exposure. Without consciously choosing to do it I found myself reciting a nursery rhyme.

"One, two, buckle my shoe..." I whispered as I dangled in the abyss, hoping that my hand wouldn't get cramp and lose the capacity to grip, "three, four, knock on the door..." as the rope spun me around like a spider on a silken thread, "five, six..." but all of a sudden, before I got anywhere near nine ten, a big fat hen, I forgot how to count. The ability to remember what came after six just vanished into the aether and I was left wide eyed and opened mouthed, suspended in a vacuum, expecting the screaming to start at any moment. An easier mantra saved the day.

"Here we go...here we go...here we go..." I kept mindlessly repeating, over and over in the back of my head as the floor slowly got nearer and I landed with a gentle bump. A wave of relief gushed through me. I was down. I'd done it. I'd done it! We'd done it. Well, actually, Dave and John had done it and I was dragged along in their wake. Well done boys, you did really well and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Not one tiny bit of it. Not one moment. I was willing you on from the beginning, you know I was, of course I was, urging you upwards, every step of the way. Honest.