Chapter Five - The Alpine Club 1909-1911

I had George’s home address from Geoffrey in reply to a postcard of mine; not that it did me much good over the winter, for George was then in Paris, living in the back room of the Bussys’ – Dorothy Strachey and her husband Simon, the painter – hardening himself by sleeping on the fire escape in four degrees of frost – by which his heart trouble came back again; amusing himself by climbing up and down the same fire escape instead of using the stairs; and improving himself by learning French from the five or six children of the family.

He had got my address in Elm Park Gardens from Geoffrey also, writing that the Alpine Club – of which he was not yet a member – would not give it him. So he wrote, rather desultory and to me confusing letters, at once intimate and distant: intimate about mountains and paintings and the contents of his mind, and distant about his personal feelings. He maintained a rather chummy persona quite unlike our closeness in Zermatt, which regularly devolved into awkwardness at the end of letters, as if he did not know quite how to think of himself in regard to me. At the one hand, it was dear that he was so proper, ever addressing me as ‘Miss Sanders’ even while arguing the most inflammatory points of socialism; at the other, it kept me off-balance and confused as to how I should think of him.

I knew nothing whatever at this time of the real anguish about James Strachey under which he was labouring when we met, nor about his romantic friendship with Geoffrey, though I ought to have done. But I was quite unworldly then, and could only think in conventional terms. Was he a suitor? He did and did not behave like one. Even my sisters could not say whether he was or not, certainly not my mother, who was as puzzled as she could be about the propriety of arrivals of books of poetry and climbing literature as she had been of Francis Younghusband’s ice-axe.

George wrote to me sporadically. There were weeks where I would get two and three letters and then nothing for months. I had one from him before he left for France in October of 1909. He had sprained his ankle on a ramble in Birkenhead, nothing to bother about, but it pained him still. (It happened that he had broken it, but that was not discovered until much later.) There was a postcard from Paris, a gay frippery of the Champs Elysees and a slim volume of some short stories of Balzac – thankfully in French. He liked the realism of them, he wrote, and did I not prefer that as well? I hardly knew how to respond! To answer No would have been to seem off-putting, but to answer Yes would have been to admit to a sophistication I did not have. I expected that we would be able to talk about it at Christmastime at Pen-y-Pass, and Jack and I went up in this hope, but George did not appear.

I had another postcard, with good wishes for the New Year, saying there was much he would like to share with me, but no explanation of why he had missed Wales. He was still in Italy then, and I sent him the address of my cousins the di Brazzas in Fruili, but there was no reply. At length, towards the beginning of February, I gave up trying and went to Munich with my cousin Diana to hear the operas, but I was greatly perplexed and not a little hurt by his ambivalence. I’m afraid that I wasn’t very insightful then; it never occurred to me that young men might struggle also not knowing how to conduct love-affairs, with either men or women.

The subject of Francis Younghusband’s ice axe was of some amusement to my sisters, as much because of the source as the gift itself. I would never have called Sir Francis a suitor, for he was married with children and old enough to be my father. But he was very famous when I met him in 1905, and his attentions were very flattering so it hardly appeared seemly to me to refuse his generous and very expensive gift, even though to do so under ordinary circumstances was very improper; the axe he gave me was the very top of the line from outfitters in Jermyn Street, and was a great improvement on my shabby indifferent one which he so despaired of in Zermatt. It arrived at Elm Park Gardens in a large box, like roses, with a card reading ‘Quality follows on quality. May this stay you in high places. F.E.Y.’ It did, seeing me through twenty years of climbing as sound at the finish as it was at the start. But it was something of an embarrassment as well. He was quite taken with me at the hotel, obviously so, and I, sixteen years old and much more used to being treated as one of the boys, was at a complete loss how to respond to his presence and rather overwhelming gallantry.

He was at the time an explorer of some note, having travelled extensively in the Himalayas and the Karakoram, was the author of many books, and the ‘hero’ of the British Expedition to Lhasa, which was in fact an invasion, rather than an expedition, the sole purpose of which was to gain, by whatever means, Tibetan permission for access to the region round Everest. It is interesting that later both he and Charlie Bruce, leader of the 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions, each used to say that the other was responsible convincing the other of the idea of climbing Everest back in 1885. Nevertheless, Sir Francis was personally responsible for open up Tibet to the British.

His personal story is a curious one, in some ways not unlike the common run of those in the Alpine Club, in other ways, very unlike. He had been born in India to a military family. His mother took him back to England until he was ten years old, when the family went back to India. He joined the First Dragoon Guards at the age of nineteen, transferring in 1890 to the Indian Political Department. On leaves, he explored the region, Manchuria in 1886. And in 1887, the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass in the Karakoram.

In 1902 he was appointed British Commissioner to Lhasa. By 1903, the race between the Russians and the British for control of passage through Tibet was on and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, sent Sir Francis, then a Colonel, to go to Lhasa and extract the promise of exclusivity from the Dalai Lama. In 1904, the British invaded from their colonial territory on the Indian subcontinent, marched north past Bhutan into Tibet at Yatung, and then to Gyantse. During the two months in Gyantse nearly a thousand Tibetans died; the British casualties were only four, with thirty wounded. The Dalai Lama issued a conscription order, and monks and laymen from every part of Tibet enthusiastically responded to the call, and recruited more than 3,000 militia who rushed to the frontlines. The shelling went on for days before the Tibetans surrendered to the Army’s modern firepower and greater numbers.

The Expedition then forced the Tibetans to sign a convention which read: ‘Without the consent of Great Britain, no foreign power shall be permitted to send either official or non-official persons to Tibet, no matter in what pursuit they may be engaged...or to construct roads or railways or erect telegraphs or open mines...’ The British Empire's attack had traumatized Tibet, and to his credit, Sir Francis called this ‘a terrible and ghastly business.’

As if to make up for this dreadful episode, Sir Francis was later a very vocal proponent of Indian nationalism, for he had by then surveyed the Brahmaputra and Sutlej rivers. During his tenure as Representative to Kashmir, he studied the Hindu religion, and published a book on his experiences and observations of the customs and religion, ‘the Heart of a Continent’, when I myself was still climbing trees. He was, much later, responsible for bringing Paramahansa Yogananda to Britain, and was the founder of the World Conference of Religions, an organisation which promotes religious tolerance and ecumenism.

For all his contradictions, Sir Francis was essentially a spiritually oriented man, and it is in this guise that I appreciated him most. In Lhasa, in 1904, just before he left, he went up to the mountains – the very mountains he had planned, fifteen years earlier to travel to in disguise – to take a last look at the beloved scenery. There, gazing down on the holy city of Lhasa, he had an epiphany. He gave himself up to the exhilaration of the moment, which grew and grew until he was overwhelmed by the powerful intensity. He said afterwards, that he could never think evil of or be at enmity with any man. All nature, and all humanity were bathed in radiance. That single hour in Lhasa was worth all the rest of a lifetime.

He was one of the few people in the climbing world who had the same mystical understanding of mountains that George and I did, and moreover, he understood the importance of dreams to me. This was the ground on which we met, the subject of the conversation that led to his sending me the ice-axe: I told him of several dreams I had of mountain climbing and mountain accidents by friends, all of which came true, and he listened, fascinated, told me some of his own and gave me observations and insights into the dreams as spiritual communications from a higher source which I had not considered before. Later in his life, Sir Francis was to write about his communications from beings not of this world that spoke with him by telepathy, and of his visions of a utopian world to come. I did not dismiss these, in great part due to my own experience this way, and because of the integrity of his observations to me on such matters over the years. But he was sadly ridiculed elsewhere amongst his cronies in the Alpine Club.

The Alpine Club was formed in December of 1857 in Covent Garden. The group was small to begin with, only twenty members, but all were wealthy serious alpinists. The Old Boys network flourished here as elsewhere, for it was exclusively male and largely limited to Oxbridge graduates and dons. The Ladies Alpine Club, considered by the men to be its subordinate, was not formed until 1907. The two clubs were then synergistic, as many of the members of the latter had husbands in the former. Both had regular meetings to discuss papers on mountaineering and exploration, and by 1863 the Alpine had a Journal; the Ladies Alpine Club followed suit only in 1925 after protest from many members, including myself, that other clubs offered more benefits to their members such as huts, climbing guides and instruction assistance.

Technically speaking, Alpinism was born in the Eighteenth Century, when Swiss naturalist Horace de Saussure offered a large reward to a one who could find the way up Mont Blanc. Thus was born the rather spurious association of mountaineering with science. In 1787 he was the third person to summit Mont Blanc – Balmat and Paccard had done it the year before, without a reward. In the 1808 Marie Paradis summited, if one can call it that. Being exhausted she was hauled the last 200 feet by her companions. As she also begged to be thrown into a crevasse, it may be safely assumed she was suffering from mountain sickness. An embarrassingly inauspicious beginning for the ladies! Mountaineering as a sport is usually dated from Sir Alfred Wills’ ascent of the Wetterhorn, at Grindelwald, in 1854. His grandson, Edward Norton, was a Charterhouse boy and on both the climbing expeditions on Everest, in 1922 and 24. Teddy was very modest and never made much of his climbing skills, but his family had a chalet in the Haute Savoie and he cut his teeth in the Alps. He was a great dear, with a tremendous wry wit, extremely accomplished: he painted, was a linguist, a birder, a fine horseman, gentle-hearted and true blue. He was forty years in the Indian army and afterwards Acting Governor of Hong Kong, a post then akin to being Viceroy of India in the days of the Raj.

The most famous of Alpine climbs in the public mind was not Mont Blanc, but the ascent of the
Matterhorn in the ‘golden age of climbing’ between 1854 and 1865 by Edward Whymper, who afterwards wrote about the harrowing and tragic descent of that climb in his famous book Scrambles Amongst the Alps, which influenced entire generations of climbers. Whymper was an engraver by profession, and went into the central and western Alps to produce a series of sketches for which he had been commissioned. Among the objects of this tour was the illustration of an unsuccessful attempt made by Professor Bonney's party to ascend Mont Pelvoux, at that time believed to be the highest peak of the Dauphin Alps. Whymper successfully completed the ascent of Mont Pelvoux in 1861. From the summit of Mont Pelvoux Whymper discovered that a neighbouring peak overtopped it; this was subsequently named the Pointe des Ecrins, and before the annexation of Savoy added Mont Blanc to the possessions of France it was the highest point in the French Alps.

Professor John Tyndall and Whymper were in a race to reach the summit of the Matterhorn by the Italian ridge. Whymper had failed six times already and was determined to try the eastern face, convinced that its precipitous appearance when viewed from Zermatt was an optical illusion, and that the dip of the strata, which on the Italian side formed a continuous series of overhangs, should make the opposite side a natural staircase. He succeeded by what is now the normal route on July 14 1865. On the descent four members of the party, including Whymper’s brother, slipped and were killed. The rope broke on a knob, which saved the rest of the party. There was a great gossipy scandal that the rope had actually been cut – a great taboo amongst climbers – but no one was ever able to ascertain whether it was or not. Whymper later led an expedition to Greenland in 1867, which resulted in an important collection of fossil plants, afterwards housed in the British Museum. But, as with George and the death of the Sherpas in 1922 on Everest, the death of the men on the Matterhorn haunted him for the rest of his life. He blamed himself for the accident, and, some said, drank himself to death because of it.

Death in the mountains is always difficult for everyone involved, and climbers, no less than their families are forever devastated by it, but we take it as a recognized hazard, as men do in war. I was in Wales at Pen-y-Pass at Easter in 1910 when Donald Robertson died. How different this party to the one at Christmas! Donald was leading up the East Gully on Glyder Fach with a party of four. I was not on the mountain yet, having arrived late and was on my way to Tryfan to meet up with Geoffrey. Donald too was late. He arrived, was hurried, not focused, not present, when he went up.

For twenty-five feet he was fine, but then his hands cramped and he struggled with the pitch. It was most unlike him. Another ten feet and he came to the overhang. He grasped it with both hands, but could not pull himself up or find a foothold. Then, after a second’s pause, his hands quietly opened and he dropped silently without an effort. He fell head first into the gully. It is almost certain that the fall was due to a momentary suspension of consciousness, induced by the overtaxed muscles and nerves, for the climb was well within his normal abilities. This phenomenon has been responsible for so many apparently unaccountable accidents. Poor Donald cannot even have known that he fell.

A runner was sent for Geoffrey, and that is how I knew. I heard the word, and moments later saw Geoffrey streaking past with a face full of wild fear, running along the tiny path like someone blinded or demented, throwing his scarf back as it blew across his face. When he reached the party and the unconscious Donald, he gave a great groaning cry and wept over the pitiably broken head of his friend.

This was the scene I came upon. It was the first mountain death I had witnessed, and nothing simpler and more horrible can be imagined, except for death in war. Donald was Geoffrey’s beloved. How many there besides myself knew it not? How he must have suffered, even more than he appeared to do those first days. But he was brave. Distraught, he nevertheless oversaw every detail of getting Donald down to the hospital in Bangor, and sat with him all night until he died at midnight. Donald never regained consciousness. Poor Donald! And poor Geoffrey. Donald was buried a local churchyard with the pallbearers being the young climbing men, all in their mountain clothes, and no more simple grace could there be found for an epitaph than Donald’s own words it the Alpine Journal of the year before:
High places are homes of ancient worship; ascent is a consecrated type of
labour for an exceeding great reward.

Geoffrey was convinced that he would have preferred this death to any other, and who were we, in those first terrible days of his madman’s grief, to say otherwise? There is comfort in the thought of a mountaineer being forever thus among mountains. I was to think of this over and over again in later years when mountain friends died, on mountains or off them. There is some truth in it. But in those first days it seemed to me to be such a stupid waste of a beautiful life. That is always my first response; it was to Donald, to H. O. Jones and his wife, to my brother Jack, to Siegfried Herford, and to George. One may ask then, why climb? Why expose oneself to the hazards of such a life? George had the best answer when someone in America asked him this with respect to Everest: because we are mountaineers, and it is our nature.

In August of 1909 I was accepted as a member of the Ladies Alpine Club, having got by then more than the minimum number of major climbs, and the coup of a first ascent of the North-East arête of the Weisshorn by a route to the left of that made by Geoffrey and Percy-Smith. From the 1904 season I had done the Tschingelhorn, the Lauterbrunnen Breithorn, the Jungfrau Traverse, the Mönch, the Eiger (Eastern face), and the Gross Schreckhorn, the Gross and Klein Spannort, the Jungfrau traverse from Mont Blanc, the Untergabelhorn, the Welen Kuppe, the Rothorn traverse, and the South-West Arete of Monte Rosa. Edith Mudd stood for me and Mary Nettleton seconded. Both were founding members of the club. I was delighted to return from Zermatt to this news, for I had only just applied when we left, and while I was proud of my record I was still anxious of acceptance, for to me, then, mountains were the most important thing in my life.

Mountains had done for me what they do for everyone who really begins to surrender to them – they had transformed my whole scale of values, and given me a different attitude to everything. Mountaineering had become a sort of religion with me, as indeed it is. It demanded, as I saw it, the exercise of moral qualities: patience and self-control and sometimes fortitude, and the subordination of everything else to striving towards an end greater than oneself. (I was already by then a great smoker, but used to knock off for the six winter months – except if I went to Wales for a week – to keep my wind good.) And it had like other religions its moments of ecstasy, of worship and of abasement. It went further than that; it seemed essential to carry back in to everyday life the illuminations found, as it were, before the altar – to live all the time in the high and humble spirit in which we set out, carried through a long climb – not be found unworthy of the mountains, which had given so much, in any activity or any particular.

George became a member of the Alpine Club in December of 1910, proposed and seconded by Geoffrey and Graham Irving. This was a quite significant partnership, as Geoffrey had been one of those in the Alpine Club to censure Irving’s taking his Wykehamists to the Alps. The Vèlan, the Combin, the Droites, the Chardonnet, Mont Blanc, the Herbetet, Mont Pleureur, the Grivola, the Nesthorn, Dent Blanche, the Charmoz. These were his big Alpine climbs. But it was much more his ability on rock in Britain that had made him famous as a mountaineer already at that time, had so impressed Geoffrey, and made the Old Boys perk up their ears. Rock climbing was then just beginning to be respectable, and there were still plenty of the whiskey and soda set who believed that it was only in the Alps one could be a real mountaineer.

George missed the Easter meeting at Pen-y-Pass as he had done Christmas, although he was back in England in April. It was probably better that he had missed it, for I think he’d have taken witness of Donald’s death very hard, for he liked him very much. And, the horrible thought occurred to me at the time, it could have been him, instead of Donald: the rocks were wet, many of us were late and in haste, it had been a couple of months since climbing for everyone. If a sacrifice had been wanting, it might as well have been George as Donald, and that thought quelled any irritation I had of his failure to appear. I wrote to him, scolding, from Gorphwysfa for not letting us know at least. He wrote back to me, saying ‘I am quite awfully sorry not to have let you know, but I forgot about it until the last moment and then what would be the point, for you would know by then. But I can promise you that I will be a better correspondent in future, as those things that have prevented my writing before are now no longer a concern, what with one thing and another. You can believe me on this!’ He had given up the last hope of repairing his friendship, let alone romance, with James Strachey – this was the genuine cause of his ambivalence towards me – and he had settled on a teaching job for the end of term at the Royal Naval College, which kept him more or less in one place for a few weeks. My sprits soared with hope, especially as he stopped in to Elm Park Gardens on the way to his sister Avie’s wedding, and we knew that we were all to be together in Switzerland shortly.

He came in August, in charge of a boy of fifteen, in his own phrase, bear-leading. They were at Arolla and elsewhere and came twice to Zermatt when we were there. I should think it was probably the most trying season George ever spent in the Alps. The boy, John Bankes-Price, with his parents’ approval, was being taught and encouraged to climb but he had no taste whatever for the pursuit; he was weak and clumsy, he disliked cold and heat and exercise, and it was impossible to kindle in him the smallest spark of enthusiasm. He opposed the whole weight of his via invertiae to George’s attempts to induce him to undertake even the most modest of expeditions. George’s consternation and astonishment of this state of affairs were pitiable to witness. He had already begun to set the feet of those younger than himself on mountain paths with some success and he simply did not know what to make of this pupil, especially after his success at Dartmouth.

‘He’s perfectly infuriating!’ George said to me in the lounge while the bear was fetching another bun from the sideboard at teatime. He ran a hand through his hair and peered at me askance as we sat at the table. ‘I don’t know what to do with him. I suspect he’s angry with his parents for a mountain of other things and is taking it out on me. I won’t have it, I tell you! But good Lord, what sort of boy is it that does NOT want to be active? It’s unnatural! He’s unnatural! What should I do?’
I glanced at him and then at Jack, who was sitting next to me. I opened my mouth but then noticed the bear was returning. ‘We’ll think of something. But here he comes.’
One of the things which always irritated George most was any failure to respond to stimulus – a ‘jelly-fish’ attitude. His own enthusiasm was so enormous – not only for mountaineering, it was a quality of itself in him – and capable of such sustained effort; he was so ready to throw anything and everything into its service that he found it much harder than most people to make any allowance for apathy. The bear, when he sat down, responded to our expectant glances with a suspicious ‘What?’

Jack, with his usual good cheer started right in, pretending he knew nothing of the boy’s recalcitrant ways, saying,
‘I’ll bet you can’t wait to get in a walk after the train journey! The Stockhorn glacier is fabulous! Cottie and I were there this morning first thing, weren’t we?’
I nodded encouragingly. The bear looked at us, bun half in his mouth, as if we had suggested that he run naked through the street.
‘What do you mean by first thing?’ He asked warily.
‘Oh we were out by five,’ I said wickedly. I stole a glance at George, who started a little at this, trying not to laugh but looking very solemn. ‘It’s as nice in the evening, if you’ve a mind to go. I wouldn’t mind getting out.’
The bear sat as if turned to stone at that, not answering or looking at any of us, but staring out across the lounge with a blank expression. I had to admit, it was an effective weapon, if infuriating. How did George stand it and not box the boy’s ear? It was the end of our trying to get him out that day, but we went on talking about climbing anyway, because we couldn’t do otherwise. Geoffrey had just climbed the Dent d’Herens and the west face of Dent Blanche. There had been a great winter snowfall, a brief thaw then another freeze, which left hard snow everywhere, which made some interesting climbs possible.

For George the contrast between the last season, when he was doing lots of big expeditions with Geoffrey, and this, when he was tied by the leg to young John, whom he could neither abandon nor drag up things with him, must have been overwhelmingly present to his mind. It wouldn’t be true to say that he accepted the situation, because it was a situation which he would have thought it positively wrong to accept. But I never once saw him fail for a moment in duty or temper towards his charge. His patience and good temper with the boy himself were good to see, especially given his natural impatience.

The next afternoon I took them out for what was a disastrous picnic in the fields towards the Gorner Gorge. I had got the idea that if we couldn’t get the bear up a mountain or at least a glacier, we could get him near one and let the magic of the scenery do its work. I put this to George in the evening on my way to bed, knocking on his door in the panelled hall as quietly as I could. He came near the door and asked who it was.
‘Cottie,’ I whispered furtively, feeling rather foolish. He opened the door as little as possible and came out in his dressing gown.
‘Thank God it’s you! I was going mad in there.’ He ran a hand through his hair and peered at me sideways, taking my arm. ‘Come on,’ He steered me down the hall by the stairs, where we stood together, he leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, I sitting on the stair.

‘What did you come up with?’
I told him. And he smiled a little, looking hopeful, while he considered, then scowled again. ‘It’ll never work. The boy is a lump.’ I looked up at him.
‘It will if we insist. He’s just being petulant. He wants to have his way as a protest against being here. Think of it like church.’
‘Eh?’
‘We were both of us forced to go to church every Sunday.’ He grinned at this and I went on, ‘We had no choice. We didn’t want to go, but we were compelled. It didn’t matter how much we complained. But when we got there, pretty soon we lost ourselves in the experience, or at least found something else to occupy our thoughts—’
George laughed outright, warmly. ‘Always something else,’ he said with affection. “Et tu. Et tu.’
‘So,’ I continued, ‘shall we get him lost in something else. But he’s there! And that’s what matters. And moreover you are. You look terrible. You need to be out in the mountains.’
‘So would you look terrible if you’d been cooped up with that sullen little gourmand for a fortnight,’ he ran a hand through his hair and looked at me. ‘I need a cigarette. Will you come?’
He held out his hand.
‘Yes,’ I stood up. He was only an inch or so taller than me, and I could look almost directly into his eyes. He caught his breath.
‘God, I’d forgotten how stunning you are,’ he murmured, as much to himself as me. He coloured in a sudden, hectic, and very telling way. I couldn’t think, my mind went entirely blank. He said hastily, ‘come on, Miss Sanders, before I forget myself.’

We went out onto the porch at the end of the hall, where he dropped my hand at last, and lit a cigarette, which we shared. The night was warm and tranquil, and he relaxed at last, leaning on the railings on his elbows.
‘Thank you for your kindness. You’re quite right. I do need to be in the mountains, and not like that awful camp of ours!’ They had camped at Bel Alp for a week above the snowline, making small excursions daily, with George teaching John the basics of climbing. But then he managed, purposely George thought, to strain his left knee so that he was lame and could barely walk and they had to come down.
‘I know,’ I said with sympathy. It was painful to watch this beautiful wild creature of the mountains pace a cage in this way.
‘So I’ll take you up on this picnic idea – god knows I’ve not come up with anything! – and we’ll see where it goes.’ He took a long drag on the cigarette and handed it to me, squinting. ‘I’m sorry I’ve neglected you.’
I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, so nodded instead and hoped he wouldn’t notice the tears that sprang to my eyes.

The next day we assembled in the lounge. I had been out with Jack very early on a ramble on the glacier and was looking forward to lying in the sun at our picnic for it was very hot and humid. But when George and John arrived, from the bookshop, I suspected our outing was not going to be a success: George looked very irritated, and behind him John was sullen, walking along as slowly and truculently as possible.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked, pretending not to notice either’s state of mind.
‘At the Wega,’ George said shortly. He shot a glance at John. ‘Can we go?’ Something had happened but I had no opportunity then to ask what it was. I dutifully picked up my rucksack, crammed as it was with picnic gear, and nodded.

It was quite a long way up to the meadow beside the high cliffs of the narrow Gorner Gorge. I had hoped, oh how much, that we might persuade the bear to walk along the Gorge at least so far as the bridge. It would, liven him up I thought and being in the stunning canyon would take that awful look out of George’s eyes. But it was not to be. As we climbed amid the larches with John behind us, I asked him what happened at the Wega.
‘I kept showing him books – the Abrahams, and Conway and Whymper – and he steadfastly refused to take them up,’ George looked out over the brilliant green meadow beside us. ‘In fact he went so far as to categorically state that he had no intention of climbing anything, so why bother reading about it? It was so difficult to hold my temper! I’m just not used to boys of his age not wanting to be out having adventures.’ He glanced at me. ‘The trouble is, he is not timid. I could understand that.’ He clenched his fists in the pockets of his short trousers.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I pressed them on him anyway, saying that he could use them in school essays. I made him take them! I felt a perfect villain and I don’t like it. Can you imagine Leslie Stephen pressuring Thoby and Adrian to read climbing books? Having to do, I mean. It’s obscene!’ Leslie Stephen was a noted climber and had been president of the Alpine Club, in addition to being a literary critic of great renown. His book on the Alps, The Playground of Europe, was one of my earliest acquisitions. George was a friend of the family, through Adrian’s sister Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive. I could not imagine, not having met Sir Leslie, and took this expression of frustration at face value.

We walked along in silence, with John trailing after us some distance, until at last we came to a spot we liked and moved out of the woods into the sunshine. John remained steadfastly in his cloud of blank gloom and refused to talk to us, even to make the most perfunctory of courtesies.
The sunshine, the long walk in the clear mountain air, the stupendous scenery, had moved him not a jot. Then, to crown all, when we searched for the stream we remembered from last year, we found we were a mile down from it yet – and it took the bear an hour to come back with the water for tea. George was very cross. We couldn’t eat without the boy, of course, but he had deliberately taken as long as possible. On sight of him, George swore one last time and gave over his complaining and sat scowling darkly. I took the water from John with the barest of civilities and set it heating on my little cooker, while a tense silence crackled like thunder behind me.

Lunch was a disaster, with every avenue of conversation met with perfect silence from both of them, until I was in despair. Finally, picking myself up, I decided to walk over to the edge of the meadow and look down into the lovely gorge. I needed to get hold of myself, or say something unforgivable, and while I didn’t care what the bear thought, I cared very much for George’s good opinion, much as I felt just then that they deserved one another.

At length, for I was gone some while, they came over, George with his hands in his pockets and John carrying my rucksack. They came to where I was leaning on the parapet, looking down into the swirling white water of the falls crash against the rocks far below.
‘Full in the centre of this rock display’d, a yawning cavern casts a dreadful shade: nor the fleet arrow from the twanging bow, sent with full force, could reach the depth below,’ George quoted, with a little smile. ‘I thought you’d fallen in, you’ve been gone so long.’
‘It’s not a good abseil,’ I said, smiling too now.
John, on my other side, was staring dumbstruck at the waterfall and the steeps sides of the gorge.
‘You’d climb down there?’ He asked in amazement, his first words to me all day.
‘Oh yes,’ I mused. ‘It’s quite something.’
He looked at me in a startled sort of way, as if thinking if a girl could do it, maybe he should reconsider this climbing business. George caught the drift of this and pressed my elbow with his own. I sighed in relief, looking down into the water, feeling some terrible spell had been broken.

That very same evening, while the bear was dawdling over his dessert, we had an extraordinarily good talk about some of the younger French writers George had met while Paris. He was very much taken both with them and their work. The special quality that he found and valued in them was their sincerity; their readiness to sacrifice almost anything to perfect by sincere and direct prosecution of their subject and their choice of subject. I remember his saying something about their being almost religious in their outlook. I didn’t in the least realize what he would mean by that and was a good deal puzzled a bit later on as finding so little in common with the C of E in Gido and Charles-Lewis Philippe and others. This led on to a prolonged talk on French literature, about which he knew a great deal and I very little. Much of it was hopelessly over my head, but what I could take in was his enthusiasm and his sense of the beauty and the importance of writing. Like myself, his ambition was to be a writer, and that thrill I knew well.

Next day we went down to the Wega and both bought quantities of French books, with a great deal more talk – a lot of looking for special passages and then buying the book because it was not cut at the right place and one must see it now. He had got some Moliere and Ataler, which was one of the few things I had read and he had not, amongst others. He laid it on me very much to read de Musset – for his grace and perfection chiefly. (De Musset was an important figure in the Romantic Movement. He wrote of his celebrated love affair with George Sand in his autobiographical novel, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, and she wrote of it from her point of view in her Elle et Lui.) We did not buy an edition then because George said there was a widely printed edition on good paper, just as cheap as the rather nasty yellow one, which is all the Wega had got. I found it afterwards in Chamonix – the Omvoes in eight volumes, published by la Renaissance du Fiore – and got a lot for a few francs. This was the beginning, the first instalment, as it were, of what I afterwards got so much of from George. He was always opening my eyes to new things, putting me in the way of fresh pleasures and activities of the mind, touching things with a fresh light and a new actuality. And it was always done in the same way, by the infection of his enthusiasm and his own eager delight in the subject.

This was characteristic too of all the rest in one particular especially – his peculiar appetite for the essential rightness or righteousness in anything. In spite of his preoccupation with form, which he always kept but which was especially strong at this stage, the important thing for him about the French writers had been their almost religious sincerity; he had in fact an equally strong moral preoccupation, which he carried into everything, which coloured his view of everything.

I find a note in my diary here. ‘I can see he is really modest,’ which looks as though someone had implied that he was not. Perhaps he was rather dogmatic – and there was about most of what he said and did an air of its being deliberated – which I think some of it was! (But most people deliberate much too little as to what they shall say and do.) He was certainly accused of pose by people who did not know him well – and of priggishness too, even by some of those who did. There was something in all these accusations at that time. He was not naturally tolerant, and he had and kept always a sort of native lordliness of mind, of which I don’t think he was in the least conscious. He used to look so merely dismayed when years afterward we ragged him about it.

The next day, having whetted the bear’s appetite for some kind of outdoor pursuit, we got him up the Riffelhorn at last. Not an auspicious beginning but it was better than sitting round the hotel. We did the glacier couloir, which was sufficiently challenging to John, but not enough to put him off, and not simply a ladies’ walk for us. We climbed to the west summit by the ordinary route, then down-climbed into the couloir first making a traverse of the terraces – it was not steep or dangerous – before making two easy pitches up to the thirty-foot chimney. It was a climb of just two hours, but standing on the summit, looking down onto the vastness of the Gorner glacier below with the Matterhorn looming at the end of the valley made it a perfect first for the boy. He looked pleased, anyway.

The next day I took charge of John in the afternoon while George had a flying dash at the Arbengrat, on the Zermatt side of the Obergabelhorn, which was unsuccessful. This is somewhat harder and longer than the Matterhorn, more comparable to the Weisshorn, a mixed route on rock. George got about half-way when the wind came up very strongly, forcing him off. It was very disappointing, but as he was climbing alone and moreover unroped, he didn’t want to chance being blown off. What would we say to the bear’s parents?

After a few days of this sort of thing, shopping at the Wega and beer-drinking at the Schumed, he took John to Arolla. On August 27th he made up for the failure on the Arbengrat, and did a traverse of the Collon in shocking weather, an expedition which gave him great satisfaction. I did the Nordend of Monte Rosa on the same day and we had a great deal of mutual satisfaction over this afterwards, as exhaustive enquiries seemed to show that we were the only two parties in the Central Alps to finish the climb on that date.

They came back again to Zermatt on the 3rd. While he was away I had undertaken to make him a little linen bag to keep sugar in instead of the ineffectual little tin he used to use, which let it spill all over his rucksack. I hated to sew and this little mark of affection was a tremendous effort. My mother, who was there with Jack and me, was very amused to see me sitting, needle in hand, with great absorption, making French seams and embroidering the thing with his initials and a little edelweiss motif. She smiled at me in amusement, as one would do a favourite child, and let me make my own mistakes, which were many. I struggled with it, and redid much of the work, for I did so want it to be perfect! And for George to have some little reminder of me always when he was out in mountains. By the time I got to the initials, Jack was all over me with merciless teasing, for I had told him it was for myself, but my mother only smiled.
‘You like him very much,’ she murmured. Then, before I could reply, ‘so do I.’ I could have wept in relief. Everyone else in my family thought he was very odd and much too progressive. My father called him an atheist – not to his face of course – for his socialism.

I gave it to him on the porch after dinner where we had gone to share a cigarette. I couldn’t smoke in the lounge, for not even my gracious mother would stand for that. We stood at the end opposite the stairs, as far away from public view as possible, in the strong moonlight. We had been talking about making an ice-climbing venture on Mont Blanc, and fell now into one of those vast speaking silences that were so achingly stirring, awakening emotions I had never felt before and didn’t know what to do with. He stood too near, very attractive in a red shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his hair curling over the collar. His eyes were luminous as the moonlight. He was so near that I could feel the heat of him and his heart beating strongly. My ears were roaring suddenly.

‘Oh Cottie...’ he broke off, closed his eyes a moment. ‘How sweet to call you that....’ He looked at me directly, his next words hushed and intimate, ‘I want very much to climb with you... Do you understand? I’ve not forgotten the descent on the Stockhorn—’ he had come along the traverse behind me when I had a bad moment, lending his marvellous balance, but it was shattering to be between him and the rock. This was the first indication I had that it had been so for him as well.
‘No,’ I managed, gulping. I could hardly look at him, but could not look away.
‘I don’t know what to do about you,’ he murmured in a way that I found almost frightening for its effect. ‘If you were a man, I should know what to do, what to say, but I have no experience with women at all. I know what I should like to do, but—’ he broke off and touched my hair lightly. It was very curly and always coming loose round my face. ‘God, look at you! I could—’ he broke off and took a long breath and I noticed then that he was shaking. ‘This is so hard! I’ve never felt this way about any woman,’ he admitted, his hand closing on my hair. Now I was really frightened, not of him, but of the terrible swooning feeling I couldn’t control. ‘You must help me,’ he said. ‘Won’t you, dear? Please help me.’ His gaze was intense.
‘How? To do what?’ I managed to croak. I was terribly confused, and feeling very giddy. I didn’t know what he wanted, or what I was feeling meant. Such was the shameful and dangerous ignorance of girls in my day about sex.

He took another long shaking breath. ‘Dear Cottie, I must be very frank: you have no idea the effect you have on me, on not a few men!’ He nodded, taking my face in both hands. ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard some stories from Geoffrey! He’s not immune himself.’ He smiled a little. ‘But you are so innocent, dear. And as much as I feel tormented I would keep you that way. You’re not the sort of girl to make a mistress of.’
The word was like a dash of cold water and I gasped.
‘Yes!’ He said emphatically. ‘Yes, that is what I mean, what is so euphemistically referred to as conjugal love – of which you know nothing! I’ve seen your confusion about the books I give you.’ He smiled here to take the sting out of the words.. ‘I have been through some difficult and confusing times since we met, which is why I’ve kept away, but it’s not been for lack of interest. You must believe that.’ I wanted to. I so desperately wanted to, and so said Yes.

‘More than anything I want to do this right,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how to do that. I need to regain my innocence, and you, who really are innocent, can help me. You know all the right ways to be, to conduct a courtship—’
I blushed at the word, and started, and hoped for an awful moment that I wouldn’t cry.
‘But I don’t know how to do that,’ he said. ‘I want to. So I ask you to help me. Tell me what is right, and if I get it wrong, tell me that too! Please.’ He looked at me searchingly.
‘I will.’ I promised, still bewildered by his intensity.
‘Thank you!’ He spoke with sincere relief and kissed my forehead and moved away a little. ‘You are really very compelling, you know! A moment ago I’d have abandoned all caution. I wanted to so much!’ he smiled a little, ruefully. ‘I can’t say I won’t want to again, but you must say if you feel frightened.’
‘You knew?’ It was a tremendous relief.
‘Yes... but there was something else there too, and I saw it. So it is up to me to captain this boat, because I know, and you don’t.’ He paused. ‘But, dear Cottie, I want you to know that I really do want to climb with you, not just for the physical thrill, but because I fancy that we have the same attitude towards mountains,’ he smiled here, ‘much holier than church.’

I could smile at this, because at least I understood it. It also reminded me of my present to him.
‘I have something for you,’ I ventured now.
He was smiling. ‘Do you? What?’
I took the bag from my pocket. ‘For your rucksack, instead of that infernal tin. To keep your sugar in.’
He took it and unfolded it. ‘Why, thank you,’ he said automatically. Then he saw the work and initials and stopped, speechless.
‘I made it,’ I volunteered haltingly, ‘while you were away.’
George ran a hand through his hair. ‘Oh God, what a dolt I am! I should have known – you made this just for me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, surer now. ‘And I hate sewing!’
He looked at me, searchingly. ‘I’m so sorry. When I was away, I convinced myself – because I was confused – that your own feelings were merely friendly. But I should have known, I did know, that you were in love with me, from the first.’
I gasped at such forthrightness, because it was true. But I wasn’t used to men just saying such things.
‘You are, aren’t you.’ It was not a question. I could only nod dumbly in embarrassment. He took my hands, with the little bag between them, between us. ‘Please don’t feel odd. I promise you, I don’t take such things lightly.... Look, I’ve made an awful pig’s ear of this thus far. Can we start again? I promise to be a better lover in future. Give me a chance.’ He was smiling enticingly now, and I had to laugh. He could move one with pure charm.
‘Yes,’ I said. And with that, all the hurt and bewilderment of the last year vanished like a puff of cloud. I knew where we stood and what his intentions were and I slept very well that night, the mysterious stomach disorder from which I had suffered since arriving vanishing as if it had never been.

We made great plans for the next Easter in Wales; he and Bishop Evans, my brother and I, were to be in the party and climb two or four as the spirit moved us. When Donald Robertson was killed because of the upset and the funeral I had only one day on Lliwedd. But I knew the lie of the ground and we were very gay over our plans.

Among those at Zermatt that year, I met my friend Miss Broome. We had first met in 1907. Phyllis’ father was a very prominent, though now elderly, member of the Alpine Club, Edward Broome, a businessman from the Midlands; he lived at Areley Kings near Stourport in Worcestershire; he came to Switzerland in the summers to climb. ‘Old Broome’ as Geoffrey, George and the rising generation called him, had done many spectacular climbs in his day, but presently spent most of his time in Zermatt, doing short, easy scrambles on the Riffelhorn, and on glacier walks with his guides, or similar easy rambles. He was hardheaded and down to earth, with a salty, but essentially kind, humour, and this latter quality Phyllis inherited. Like her father, she was casual, cool, amusing and amused, the most down-to-earth person imaginable. She did not climb, but had used to sit in The Wall, as the terrace outside the Monte Rosa was called, watching the climbers come and go with an ironical eye and listening to their gossip with an amused sort of scepticism. She used to rail me mercilessly about some of the middle aged AC men who took a fancy to me. But when I went down with dysentery in 1908, she looked after me with the utmost kindness until I was able to totter back to the moraines and make the first weak attempts at glacier-walks. It was that year or the next, 1909, that a fascinating dream incident happened, not to me for once, but to Phyllis.

She had a much-loved, rather elderly cat, on whom she lavished a more uncritical affection than I ever knew her to give any human friend. When she and her father came to Zermatt, the cat went on holiday too, accompanying the housemaid (also elderly) to her home some forty miles away in a hamper. The cat had done this for several years and was quite accustomed to the procedure; it liked the housemaid; there was never any trouble. But one morning, Phyllis told me that she had a painfully vivid dream of the cat, all wet and muddy, its fur plastered to its body, mewling piteously, plainly in great distress. She was so upset that I suggested she should write to the housemaid to enquire.
‘No,’ she said decidedly, ‘ I shall telegraph.’ And telegraph she did, reply paid, from Zermatt to Worcestershire (a shocking extravagance to my mind) not only to the housemaid at her home, but to the housekeeper at Areley Kings as well, since if the cat had left its temporary abode it would have presumably made for its own home.

At that point I set off with my brother Harry to climb some mountain (it must have been 1908), an overnight job – we walked up to a hut in the late afternoon, slept there, did our climb, and got back so late for dinner the next day that after a bath I had supper in bed. So it was only on the following day that I learnt from Phyllis what had become of the cat. She had heard first from Areley Kings – the cat was there, quite safe, the housekeeper telegraphed. Later came an agonized wire from the wretched housemaid – pussy had escaped. In due course, letters reached Zermatt giving full details of the course of events: the cat had arrived back at Areley Kings the day after Phyllis Broome had her distressing dream, and it had appeared exactly as it had it the dream, soaking wet, mewling piteously, having travelled the forty miles from the housemaid’s home to its own. The reasons for this break from the establishment was never ascertained – and it never happened again as long as we knew them – but it was enough to convince a good many people in Zermatt, who were of course regaled with the story, of the reality of dreams.

Next day we went on to Chamonix and he presently returned to England and went to Charterhouse School. I had a letter from him in September just before he went – he was staying with Hugh Wilson at Worcester – damning the English climate, suggesting fresh plans for Easter, and ending ‘I pray that it (the letter) may come upon you in some pleasant place and that you may be moved to respond to your humble servant at Charterhouse. Yours in montes—’

That was his first term at Charterhouse and I saw very little more of him till quite the end of it, and was not able to judge when I did see him how he had got on. But I rather think that he found it a little difficult at first, from what he told me afterwards.

He came up to London on the 7th of December, to go to the Alpine Club Reception at the Grafton Galleries, and he came to tea with me first. He appeared at our door in a very nice old comfortable greenish tweed suit and a very odd-looking porridge-coloured felt hat, which was his favourite headgear. I was not down when he came, but was upstairs trying to sort out the packing of my evening clothes with Miss Metsch, so he sat in the parlour with my mother some quarter of an hour until I came down. My sisters, thankfully, were not let near him! Parts of the conversation I had from both later. From George I heard that they had talked of America, where my mother was from, and of Canada, where they both had cousins; but my mother told me that since he seemed so awfully nervous to hearten him she told him of going out walking and coming upon James Sanders – my father – who was quite beside himself and could hardly speak the whole of their first encounter.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Sanders!’ George replied. ‘I’m quite composed when out on mountains with Cottie, or writing to her, but when I catch sight of her or she walks into the room, I become a perfect idiot. Friends of ours have noticed, and said I am in love, but Mrs. Sanders, I feel more that am in thrall! She is dearer than anything to me.’
My mother smiled at this artless confidence.
‘Of all her young men, I certainly can tell you there is no one she’s raced to the post for faster than a letter from you, nor talked more of in his absences. So I would say you’re very safe in your thraldom, George.’
He coloured vividly and gulped his thanks before I came galloping down the stairs. Tea was rung by my sister Grace a moment after our greeting, so I didn’t get to ask the reason for his peculiar intensity. But my mother did say to him, in passing into the hall, ‘Do come round any time, I should love to talk with you about your poets. You are always welcome here.’ So George became one of my mother’s fast favourites.

I got very little of him to myself at tea; as was the habit when he was about, my brothers and sisters asked him all sorts of questions about his travels and his adventures at Cambridge and he told not a few stories against himself, which is how I came to know many of his close scrapes, like his roof climbing habits and being locked out of buildings after hours, and coming so near to being sent down for playing cards, his pranks with Rupert Brooke and other Apostles or getting lost in Friuli on his way to visit our cousins the di Brazzas and being question by the police for sleeping in a hayrick. He always presented these stories as droll cautionary tales, not meant to be emulated by impressionable young men like Jack – at least while my sisters were in the room. He could make the house ring with laughter with bad puns and complex word puzzles for us to decode. I by no means always won the latter, no matter that I was fairly competent with languages. Oh, we all admired him and loved his companionship. Those times were very gay and easy.

After tea we lingered, he and Jack and I, to talk about our plans for Wales. Jack and I had found we could manage a whole week at New Year there. We had got so far as the first half of the first day, with maps and guidebooks spread all over the table, and many jokes matching this person or that to various climbs according to personality – harmless, but telling: ‘Percy Farrar on the Parson’s Nose’ and ‘Oscar Eckenstein on the Bwlch Coch pinnacles’ are two I remember. We were having great fun until my sister Jenny came in and told us that it was half-past six and if we did not want to miss our reception as well as dinner he had better hail a taxi. Guiltily, we scrambled for the door and raced across town, laughing at our near-miss, for once again absorption had made us social ennuis. I had been really looking forward to this night, for we promised ourselves a thorough good evening among the pictures. The Grafton Galleries, where the Reception was held, were then housing the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organised by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, both friends of George’s from Bloomsbury. I had danced away among these several times since they arrived in November, and thought them comic, but I was quite prepared to be taught better by George.

The Reception was a very characteristic episode altogether, though I didn’t find it terribly funny at the time. We arrived at the Gallery just in time for make our respective dinner meetings. I was taking a party to the Ladies AC dinner, and he was off to the regular AC meeting, the first he was attending as a member. We stood in the hall for only a moment, rather stunned by the whirlwind timing, now we were here.
‘I must go and change,’ I said, looking rather alarmed in the direction of the Ladies Cloak Room.
George smiled a little. ‘You’ll be fine. I’ll meet you under the “Gulf of Marseilles” – that’s Cezanne, remember, in the hall just to your right, there – at half-past eight. Yes?’
I smiled to please him, thinking of every moment ticking by and how I ought to have chosen a different dress! How would I fasten it up the back? And would I ever remember which Cezanne he meant?
‘Yes,” I said.
‘Good,’ he pressed my hand and I whirled away to the cloak room.

I came down ten minutes later to meet my group, and found Percy Farrar waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I felt guilty for our earlier sport at his expense, for he was a DSO, having been condemned to death by the Boers in the war, and escaped. He was also a mountaineer of some seventeen Alpine seasons, with many first ascents, one of them – of the Jungfraujoch with Herbert Reade – in 1907, when we was fifty. He could be rather forbidding to the young ones, but he was in fact quite progressive, taking up Oscar Eckenstein’s new short ice-axes, the use of crampons, an acceptance of guideless climbing, and when it came, oxygen; he was, in the days of its controversial use, poor George Finch’s greatest proponent.

‘Good evening, Captain,’ I said cheerily. Farrar, his open, tea-planter’s face looking distinctly unhappy, grimaced and harrumphed and replied,
‘Good evening, Miss Sanders, ah... I have some bad news for you.’
‘Bad news, Captain?’ I smiled down at him. ‘What could be bad news tonight?’
He coloured up. ‘Oh dear. It’s not terribly bad news, just rather... inconvenient, I suppose.’
‘What is it?’ I looked about. Three of my ladies were waiting beyond in the foyer, but they looked perfectly cheerful.
Farrar harrumphed again, and blurted at last, ‘It’s about your young man – Mallory. Well, he’s left in rather a hurry. I thought you should know.’
‘What!’ Now I was really alarmed. ‘Why?’

The poor man looked acutely embarrassed. ‘Well, ah. I asked him if he were going to change, so as not to be late to dinner, and he said to me, “Change?” So I said, “Yes, boy, into evening clothes.” Well, he was horrified, I tell you. Looked at me in dismay, cried “Oh my God!”, fluffed his hair and fled....’ Farrar looked chagrined. ‘But not before he charged me to tell you.... I’m terribly sorry. If you need a lift home I’d be happy to share a taxi.’

I was caught between humiliation and distress on one hand and irritation and gratitude on the other. Poor Captain Farrar! To be the cause and cure of bad news at once! I didn’t know what to think of George at the moment, but I could assuage the Captain’s feelings. I patted his arm.
‘Thank you, Captain! You are very kind. I may take you up on it. I shall know more after our meeting. Thank you for telling me. But I really must go now, or none of us shall have any dinner.’
He smiled at me, in obvious relief, and I fled to my ladies, and our dinner meeting. In the end I had a miserable evening, though I endeavoured not to show it. Later I shared a hansom with Miss Mudd, who refused to let me pay my share, and got home intending to write a note to George, but he had already left one for me; my mother gave it to me when I came in, with a kind little glance.

‘He came here,’ she said, ‘in a state, and talked with me for some time until he had calmed down. He was so distressed my dear! He really feels he let you down.’
‘He did more so by leaving,’ I said stubbornly.
‘Perhaps,’ my mother said slowly.
‘It was humiliating! If I’d intended going alone I’d have gone with Miss Mudd!’
‘Think about it from his view, Cottie,’ she said gently drawing me out of my high dudgeon. ‘He would not want to shame you by being less than he should be in the one place that matters to him, and to you.’ She paused. ‘I’d be very sure in saying that this won’t happen again.’
‘I hope not.’
‘You’ll see.’ My mother smiled. ‘He means very well.’
‘I suppose.’ I trudged upstairs, note in hand, and read it in the room I shared with Grace.

My dear Cottie,
What an ass you must think me. I’m so very sorry. It never occurred to me to bring evening clothes to a reception of the Alpine Club – a gathering of climbers! Who could have presupposed evening dress? At any rate, I should like to see you tomorrow if you’re free, and we can go to the gallery on our own and look at the pictures all afternoon. I should like that very much. Please allow me to make this up to you. Yours ever, G.M.

George’s simplicity in the matter of conventions was extreme; he had actually purposed to go to an evening reception of about a thousand people in a green tweed suit and that outlandish hat! Even I knew better than that. But there was a sort of fittingness or integrity about it – he did not in any case pretend to be something he was not. So I could not with any real justice continue to be angry with him, though I wanted to for several hours. We did go to the Grafton Galleries the next day, before lunch, and had a splendid time. I really did learn what the Post-Impressionists were trying to do, so came to be more tolerant of their painting, and after tea at Rumpelmayer’s we sat down with Jack and finished sketching out our climbs for the New Year in Wales. I was terribly pleased, for I had George to myself all day, and every moment was perfect, full of learning and laughter and the companionship I had longed for and missed from him.

One of the most impressive people I met at Pen-y-Pass that season was Oscar Eckenstein, the Himalayan climber, known to me only by reputation before. George had met him at Easter in 1909, and in certain ways they had much in common. He was an engineer by occupation, with a build and beard of our first ancestry, the father of bouldering, and the first mountaineer in this or any other country to begin discussing holds, and the balance upon them, in a theory with illustrations. Geoffrey wrote of him in his Snowdon Biography, ‘and as I watched him hanging ape-like from the rock face of his eponymous boulder below the wall, and then passed my hand between his lightly-touching fingers and the rock, it was the first suggestion of the balance and foot climbing later analyzed in Mountain Craft.’

Eckenstein’s father was German and his mother English. The father was a socialist and so too was Oscar, frequently denigrated the policies of his country, became an active member of the National Liberal Club. He was a terrific gymnast as a boy and later put this to use in his form of balance climbing which was dissimilar in style to George’s, but not in principle.

Eckenstein dressed shabbily as a matter of protest, and sported a bushy black beard. He emphatically stated that ‘a mountaineer should be a vagabond’. But he was often taken as an eccentric English millionaire when abroad, because he could travel first class always whenever he wanted. He resembled nothing to much as a farmer, for his build was compact and rather stocky. He was immensely strong. He had a terribly abrading personality, a quick temper, and a confounding wit. He stuck to a topic like glue, arguing passionately, wearing down his opponent by sheer tenacity.

On one occasion he called a meeting of the Climbers' Club to rebut the assertion that his leg had been ‘shaky’ while on the exploration of a new route, as George Abraham had implied when writing about the attempt. Thereafter, in his absence, a leg tremor due to prolonged strain was called by some, including Graham Irving, an Eckenstein. He had no tolerance for the Alpine Club, many of the old boys were put off by his demeanour, his socialist leanings, and his German Jewish ancestry. He was very interested in spiritualism, especially in mind control, which he had got from the works of the explorer Sir Richard Burton; it was for this reason that I liked him. He talked to me for several hours at intervals about the great explorer, whose works he collected; with George he debated the merits of socialism, until the party grew impatient with such seriousness and called for the singing of folksongs.