Echoes.
The thin skin of the tent stretched and pressed into my face, a freezing-cold bump bulging like a pregnant woman’s stomach. Outside the snow continued to fall. Turning from the bump, I shuffle in search of a new position that will relieve the ache on the bulging walls of my bladder. My bladder had pushed with insistence for fifteen hours. The tent was dark damp and festering. Almonds of condensation stuck to the ceiling like frozen teardrops.
I discovered climbing at the age of 27 while training to be a Physical Education Instructor in 1992. I discovered aggression and violence, loathing, lying and prejudice several years before. At the age of twenty-one the doors opened to a world that society would rather forget. The shadows clinging to the dark beneath the walls of the Prison Service entombed and changed me, the sick minds rearranged my mind. Fifteen years later fortune shone, the doors opened and I was released to begin a life of adventure-excitement-travel and people. Fear and terror were still with me, but there was no risk of a red-hot pan of cooking oil mixed with sugar being thrown into my face anymore.
The punishment block of Gartree maximum-security prison is dark. The corridor runs in the shape of an
Waking after only two hours of sleep, worry and stress made the night an intimate companion. I would drag myself from bed in the morning and dress, blue trousers, a white shirt and tie, whistle-stave and key-chain. I knew I would be dressing again as soon as I arrived and entered the gloomy medieval environment of the block. A flame-retardant boiler suit and plastic shin guards, thick leather gloves-steel toecap boots and a helmet were my suit of armour and the shield I hid behind was made of Perspex. There was no way to avoid the oncoming fight. I drove the ten miles to work with the radio playing music I didn’t hear. I nearly crashed into the rear of the car in front most mornings. Concern coursed through my veins, twisted guts bubbled and tension gnawed. Arriving at the prison car park I hoped there would be no space so I could turn around and drive home. On entering the prison fear and bitterness was simmering beneath the surface. I would joke with other Prison Officers, false laughter, bullshit and bravado. The maggot in the intestines squirmed. Before opening the four-inch-thick wooden door of the block I would breathe deep and savour the time before aggression.
The time arrives when psychological turns to physical. Stressing before opening the door on hatred and aggression, before being smashed into brick and slammed to the floor is good mental and physical conditioning for the hardships of the mountains.
Huddled all night wrapped in a Gore-tex bivvy bag at 5500-metres on a crest of snow, the wind buffets while the void drops sickeningly on each side. The fabric pushes into my face, damp, humid and claustrophobic. The rime-encrusted wall above wares me down, it whispers to me through the night daring me into the unknown. My character will not be able to back down from the challenge. No escape, no way around the on coming confrontation. The wall is like a murderer holding out his meal tray waiting for more food at the serving hatch. Wooden fingers attempt to tie the laces of frozen boots, slow ungainly movement, delaying tactics. Confrontation is unavoidable. The ice-coated metal work is packed and the ropes, frozen solid, uncoiled.
The mental strength needed to face another day of savagery on a winter climb in the French Alps or the Himalayas, or force myself on when every inch of my mind screams to stop-turn around-run away-re-warm and recover, is never as hard as what it was like to open a cell door knowing aggression and hatred, pain and brutality, a certainty.
Fisher,
I jumared ropes for the first and only time on the Sharks Fin. We had fixed our four climbing ropes on the first attempt and ran away when the regular afternoon snow had started to fall in the morning. The two 10mm ropes and the two 8mm ropes had been fixed and left in place for a return match. All four ropes were stretchy climbing ropes. For a week between the first abortive attempt and the second attempt the ropes had swung in the wind chafing like a scab on a kneecap. Jumaring with a 25kg sack adding to my 70kg bodyweight, while watching 8mm of nylon repeatedly saw across a sharp edge above terrified me. Inexperience didn’t entertain the thought of fixing the ropes tight or duct taping the ropes where they ran over edges. Thoughts of
*
Expect the unexpected.
Like fire-fighters in the station on a slow Sunday afternoon, four of us would doze in the office of the Block-feet up and prone, relaxed on the surface, but guts twisted and messed up. It would only take the sound of an alarm bell to break the monotony. In the Block any bad shit happening would be flushed our way. We were the u-bend between the pan and the sewer of the prison population. Gartree prison is for the worst offenders in society, a category A prison. The key had been thrown away for most and because of this there was little to loose. Sitting dozing, waiting and wondering before jumping into action when an alarm bell rang was great preparation for the mountains.
On the second attempt Schwitzer and I, climbing through the night, pulled from the gully onto a large rolling cornice of snow that had formed at the top of a ridge. The cornice overhung so far a semi-detached house could stand beneath it. A cliff of black-blocks jutted from a frozen pebble dashed wall of rotten-snow until reaching the Savoia glacier a thousand feet below. Arriving late in the afternoon we hurried to cut a level platform from the snow on top of the cornice. In the fading light of the early evening we moved around with a long lead of rope attached to rock anchors fifty feet away and we tried not to think of the gaping void beneath the floor of snow.
Gasherbrum IV,
We brewed and survived. Life above 6000 metres is not easy. Noodles and soup boiling in a hanging stove spilt and soaked into down reducing the warming properties of the feather insulation. The litre pan full to the brim with gruel swung and rattled, it reminded me of an incense burner in a Greek sermon. The slop slithered down the outside of the pan baking to a dry crust. The wind tore across the cornice battering the little tent and the snow fell in large flakes threatening to burry us. Settling down for the night, fully zipped-arms strapped along my side, unable to move, but warm, I thought of the inmates I had fought and held face down, hand pushing into hair, warm skin pushed into the cold concrete floor of the strong-box so hard that the blood left their cheek and the crazed etching of the concrete was copied on soft skin. The special cell was like a padded cell, but not as comfortable. The inmates wrists were locked into handcuffs that were fastened to a 6-inch wide leather belt around their waist. Trussed, arms straight and by their hips they would be left to contemplate the error of their way. More than once, even after being trussed the inmate would attack us as we entered into the cell. A team of three, in arrowhead formation behind a shield, spitting-head-butting-kicking and charging were all in the rules of engagement and used against us regularly. There wasn’t an inch to spare in the tiny single skin tent, this was our cell, a cell of deprivation, I wondered what crime I had committed to put myself through this torture?
Schwitzer began to snore, he always snored and it really pissed me off. I lay there in the dark with my sleeping bag tight around my face listening to the wind and the snow and the snoring. I must have dozed off but suddenly woke with a jolt.
“Did you feel that?”
“Of course I felt it, you know what’s happening don’t you?”
The cornice had loaded with fresh snow and the extra weight had caused it to crack and settle. It was two in the morning-we frantically pulled frozen boots on without tying the laces. The inside of the tent was as cold as a freezer but we had to get out. I could imagine the cornice breaking off and the tent with us wrapped inside like a chicken in cellophane, hanging, suspended on a thread, unable to escape before the tent ripped apart spawning the contents from the fabric-bowels into dark void thousands of feet below.
The snow blew into the tent as soon as it was unzipped. Heavy flakes slapped into my face. I crawled from the entrance, floundering on all fours into the blizzard, through deep snow lapping cold against my chest and thighs. I edged from the overhanging section of the cornice and balanced on the crest of the ridge. I was unclipped, but the only anchor was the one the tent was fastened and I wasn’t keen to clip that.
Schwitzer joined me, a snow-covered apparition crawling from the dark. Whiskers of his goatee mingled with the ice encrust to his face, round John Lennon glasses streaked, steamy and lopsided, hiding his eyes, eyes that were wide and wired-like a crack addict, like my own. We crouched scared a gust of wind would blow us from the edge and wondered what to do. The cornice had dropped a foot. A crack had opened running its length. The wind cut through my body and soon we both were shivering. It was obvious we couldn’t stay out in the open. Clipping to the rope we cautiously stepped onto the cornice expecting it to collapse. It appeared to be solid, so without using our imagination we began to clear the new snow from the cornice to lighten the load. An hour later we crawled back into the tent to start the long wait and several more snow clearing sessions each hour. Schwitzer didn’t snore again that evening.
Escaping from the deadly cornice camp the following day we met Fisher and
Brutality is something I equate to the mountains, but the mountains are not brutal. People are brutal. Death and injury, disfigurement and distress occur in the mountains but the mountain has no soul. Occasionally being in the wrong place at the wrong time or sheer bad luck takes a toll. Sometimes a mistake or a bad decision or when ego and ambition get in the way accidents happen.
I witnessed brutality first hand inside a prison. For fifteen-years slashing-stabbings-beatings and bludgeoning were common in my life. I watched an inmate spin and break the cheek of a colleague as we escorted the inmate into the strongbox. My colleague was 6ft 5” and built like a brick-shithouse. He fell to the floor unconscious in a bloody-pulp with the single punch. Another Prison Officer and I fought for twenty minutes, rolling, twisting, writhing… separated from the rest of the prison, no-one knew until another Prison Officer happened on us and rang the alarm bell.
On another occasion I held the head of an inmate, pushing a gym vest into the hole in his scull where he had been hit twice over the back of the head with an iron weight-training bar. A contract had been taken out on the inmate as it had been discovered he was a paedophile. The price I found out later was a £20 crack deal. The second swing from the iron bar puncturing the inmate’s skull saving his life by reducing the pressure that had built from the first blow. I wallowed in tangled-twisted-sticky strings of clear cerebral fluid that hung from his ears. The grey matter running freely from ears and nose mixed with vivid bright red blood. I lay slithering and slipping while attempting to save the life of the inmate who writhed in agony. Thirty inmates in the gym stood and watched, none helped.
A clot dried on the gymnasium floor, large and jagged, like the outline of
Red-hot-oil-filled chip pans with sugar added, making the oil stick on contact with skin, were a favourite for the delivery of maximum pain and permanent scarring. PP9 batteries in socks made superb implements to cave in skulls with one quick swing. A table leg wheeled like a baseball bat, Bic-razor blades melted into the head of a tooth brush and tubes of steel, machined in the engineering shop by I.R.A. terrorists, made to fire a single round, were all a part of my life in the late 80s. The learning curve was steep on the way to prejudice-paranoia, bitterness and loneliness. Luckily I found the gym, which led to the mountains and finally my escape.
Witnessing so much injury and having to deal with savagery on a daily basis probably helped me with some of the incidents I have seen occur while mountaineering or rock climbing.
*
“WATCH ME
I remember calling to my climbing partner vividly, his eyes were as big as an owl’s as the blood pumped hitting the grey rock all around him. I had only just recovered from breaking my kneecap after falling from a climb on the Rainbow Slab. On that occasion
Several rock-over moves forcing my still not fully functional knee into positions it didn’t like, caused it to ache like a bastard. My eyes attempted to focus on the sharp crozzled rock inches from my face but failed, the combination of sweat and tears brought on by pain and effort stung and blurred. I was still on the sick from work and I was facing a ground fall from 70-feet. Forearms burnt with the effort of crimping edges no thicker than tiles around the sink of a washbasin. I attempted to work out the moves that led to the comfort of the first piece of gear since starting on this madness. Time stood still. Nothing else mattered apart from moving right 10-feet.
The climber tackling Cenotaph Corner to my right was a blur, an insect buzzing on the periphery. There, but only in the grey mist of my sub-conscious. I lock off. The muscles in my shoulder tense, shake out-chalk up, study-plan-breathe-deep with control. Prepare. Once committed to the sequence of moves I would be continuing in one of two directions, reverse was not an option. The insect moved to my right. A move he will not forget for the rest of his life. A move I will not forget for the rest of my life. He pulled on the pudding stone, a house-brick lump of rock wedged for years into the crack of Cenotaph Corner. The Pudding stone ripped from the corner as easy as a vegetable-knife is pushed into a Prison Officers neck on a quiet evening in Gartree Prison.
The clarity coursing through my veins, heightening my senses made me watch with deadly fascination. End over end, the block spun, plummeting. The insect stopped buzzing and screamed. His belayer took no notice. I watched with deadly fascination, still unable to pull my eyes away from the 5kg lump spinning its way to misery. The insect screamed again. The block twisted and turned closing in on its target only several feet above the skull it was about to smash into a grey-splintered mess. The belayer looked up and jerked his head back. The pudding stone missed his brow by an inch ripping into his bare arm. Blood shot high into the air covering rock. The belayer collapsed, the insect whimpered no longer on belay. Mayhem ruled. Blood spurted.
“WATCH ME
I made the moves. A rock over-a match-a foot swop, flagging, gently easing body weight controlling the barn door my body wanted to emulate and finally into Left Wall and protection.
Hanging from big holds with the gear placed, I looked into the owl-sized eyes of
*
As the rain hammers against the window of
The rain soaks the hillside and the streams pour in white-gushing torrents. The leaves on the trees open with new vivid-green fresh and innocent leafy-life. Grey rock drips with the deluge and sheep shuffle beneath boulders. No longer hate and misery. No-longer bigotry, violence, aggression and mutilation, or a life tracked until retirement, the right to vote or possessions. No-longer wealth, but now I have more riches imaginable.