Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Stephen Venables
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
‘Like the swallows, our son Ollie came in the spring and left in the autumn. Dancing, singing, swooping – there was something birdlike about his energy, joy and laughter – but also the fleeting, enigmatic quality of his life.’
Ollie’s story is one of extraordinary courage and overwhelming spirit.
Without warning, at the age of just two, Ollie’s young life was turned into a baffling challenge with autism. At the age of four, Ollie and his family faced a new and unimaginable menace when he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
But Ollie showed incredible bravery and determination as he proved himself to be an inspirational fighter. In this heartbreaking true story, Ollie’s father, Stephen, tells of his son’s fearless battles and the sadness his family was still to face . . .
Stephen Venables is best known as the mountaineer who in 1988 became the first Briton to climb Everest without oxygen – one of many pioneering expeditions around the world. He began climbing while at New College, Oxford, in the early seventies, and has written eight books about his mountain travels, winning the Boardman Tasker Prize, the King Albert Medal and the Grand Award at Banff International Mountain Literature Festival. He has also appeared in several television documentaries and the IMAX movie, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure. He lives in Bath with his wife Rosie and Ollie’s brother Edmond.
Also by Stephen Venables
PAINTED MOUNTAINS
EVEREST: ALONE AT THE SUMMIT
(FIRST PUBLISHED AS EVEREST: KANGSHUNG FACE)
ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
A SLENDER THREAD
VOICES FROM THE MOUNTAINS
HIGHER THAN THE EAGLE SOARS
With Chris Bonington
MEETINGS WITH MOUNTAINS
With Andy Fanshawe
HIMALAYA ALPINE STYLE
With The Royal Geographical Society
EVEREST: SUMMIT OF ACHIEVEMENT
TO THE TOP: THE STORY OF EVEREST
For children
M FOR MOUNTAINS
Acknowledgements
When Ollie became autistic our family embarked on an extraordinary journey into the unknown. During that journey, complicated by leukaemia, we encountered many wonderful people whom we would otherwise never have met. Only some of the several hundred people who touched Ollie’s life are mentioned by name in this book, some by first name only; others – in the interests of privacy or to avoid a confusing surfeit of names – are mentioned only anonymously; many do not appear at all. But all of you – friends, relatives, neighbours, teachers, social workers, psychologists, doctors, surgeons, radiographers, nurses, carers, therapists, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, shoppers, shopkeepers, drivers, administrators, technicians – I thank you for all you did to help us and our son.
Special thanks are due to the Margaret Coates Unit, Option Institute, Prior’s Court School and Sunfield; and to the Royal United Hospital Bath, Bristol Children’s Hospital, Bristol Eye Hospital, Frenchay Hospital and Royal Free Hospital London.
And to the charities and trusts who helped pay for Ollie’s care and home education: Lizzie Bingley Trust, CLIC, Family Fund Trust, R.J. Harris Trust, Jessie’s Fund, Mead Nursery, Oldham Foundation, Malcolm Sargent Fund, Sharon Spratt Trust, Thompson Charitable Trust, St John’s Hospital, Wessex Cancer Trust and S.D. Whitehead Trust; and the many individuals – too many to list here – who also donated money, both towards Ollie’s education and for setting up Peach.
I would also like to thank the people who helped me in the writing of this book: Hamish Hamilton for permission to quote from Elfrida Vipont’s The Elephant and the Bad Baby, Donna Williams for allowing me to quote from her film Inside Out, and Mosby – Yearbook Inc. for permission to use passages from Mosby’s Medical Dictionary; Tom and Alice Craigmyle for providing a peaceful sanctuary at St Catherine’s; Avery Cunliffe, Bath Evening Chronicle, Sam Farr, Simon Prentice, Southwest News and Ed Webster for allowing me to use their photographs; Dr Charles Clarke, Dr David Rushton and Professor Seth Love for checking relevant medical sections of the manuscript; my agents Euan Thorneycroft and Vivienne Schuster at Curtis Brown; James Nightingale, Neil Bradford, Emma Mitchell and my ever encouraging editor Tony Whittome at Hutchinson; and of course my wife Rosie, the best mother Ollie could possibly have had, for all her vital suggestions, corrections and enormous encouragement.
Stephen Venables
January 2006
For Rosie
Chapter One
WE BURIED HIM on the last day of October, a day of low clouds scudding through a sodden sky. The matting draped over the excavated mound of stony earth was luminous green, like the artificial seaweed in an old-fashioned fishmonger. The real grass underfoot was cold and dank where Edmond, Rosie and I – brother, mother, father – stood closest to the grave, flinching at the terrible finality of those ancient words, ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Echoing their elemental truth, the coffin settled with a hollow groan in its hard bed, oak reverberating on rock.
The service ended and the others stood back slightly in a hushed semicircle while we three stooped to admire the flowers. Then Rosie began suddenly to laugh. Uncles, aunts, godparents and grandparents shuffled uncomfortably behind us: oh no, she’s finally cracked! Another peal of laughter rang brightly through the silent cemetery and she pointed at the puzzling floral arrangement of brilliant banded colours which I had taken for some kind of funerary urn. ‘Look,’ she giggled, ‘it’s a watering can! That’s what it is: see – it’s even got a sprinkler rose.’ And I looked closer and laughed too at the cheerful sunflower spout from which sprinkled a threaded arc of pale slender grass seeds. It was the perfect tribute from his special school to the boy called Ollie, whose obsessive baffling passion for watering cans seemed emblematic of his whole gigantic, quirky, funny, beautiful, enigmatic, defiant personality.
Like the swallows he arrived in the spring and left in the autumn. In between, we joined him on a journey which lasted twelve years and four months. At first we never called him Ollie, preferring his full name, Oliver. I liked the unhurried resonance of those three soft syllables and it was only after something happened in his brain, upsetting the whole subtle balance of sensory perceptions to the point where language became almost impossible for him to process, that we changed to the simpler ‘Ollie’, so much easier to hear and to say.
Now that perky staccato seems inseparable from the boy we loved, synonymous with the laughter he brought to our lives. But also inseparable from a kind of radiance – an innate joyfulness which was never quashed, despite the huge challenges he had to face. So, as I try to tell the story of how he grappled with those challenges, I shall call him Ollie, right from the beginning. But what was the beginning? How did it start – this extraordinary journey, this adventure which so totally changed and enriched our lives?
I suppose that it really began in a country churchyard, another graveyard, on a hot June afternoon in 1986 – a sudden meeting of strangers’ eyes over the headstones as Rosie and I wandered out independently from the wedding of two mutual friends. At the reception afterwards she was bubbling and flirtatious. She was thirty, had just finished studying aesthetics at Goldsmiths’ College in London, and was about to start teaching at a rumbustious inner-city primary school. She was brave and beautiful and she was married to someone else.
I managed to forget about her and was soon gone – away to the Alps to climb mountains, because climbing mountains was what I did. That summer’s glorious odyssey culminated in success on a climb I had dreamed about for fifteen years – the magnificent, awesome, irresistible North Face of the Eiger. In October I returned, elated but penniless, to London and, with no other jobs on the immediate horizon, started working at my Eiger companion Luke’s furniture-making business in Covent Garden. My first book, about mountain explorations in Kashmir, had just been published and one lunchtime I had to go over to the BBC for a radio interview. I was on my way back to the workshop from Broadcasting House, threading the jostling crowds, anonymous in a city of eight million people, when I suddenly saw her – emerging from a wine bar in a burst of golden laughter. I shouted across the street ‘Rosie!’ There was a moment of startled incomprehension, then sudden recall and a hurried exchange of phone numbers before she rushed off to catch up with her sister who asked, ‘Who was that strange man?’
Another three years passed before the strange man was taken to meet Rosie’s parents. During those three years she left an unsatisfactory marriage and enjoyed a brief spell of manless contentment before I began to see more of her. Meanwhile I had given up carpentry and committed myself to the vagaries of freelance writing and lecturing, based around my expeditions. It was a momentous time, making epic journeys through the Karakoram, climbing a spectacular new route up Mount Everest and, back in London, falling in love with Rosie. Then one summer’s evening in 1989, in a friend’s Shropshire garden, she told me to propose to her. So I did; and the following day we went to tell her parents.
Her mother, Kay, was admirably direct: ‘We think you’re a splendid chap, Stephen; we just wish you had a bit of money.’ Robin was more tolerant of my wayward life, attributing romantic and completely unrealistic notions of courage and heroism to my rather self-indulgent Everest climb of the previous year. He seemed confident that, somehow, I would support his youngest daughter, and his only real concern was that she should have babies. ‘She has a very strong maternal instinct, you know. She always wanted to have children and I think she really needs that fulfilment.’
I mumbled agreement, hoping privately to defer fatherhood for a little longer. In any case, we had first to sort out somewhere to live. Rosie wanted to stay in London. I wanted a little more space, with a garden, close to the country. She agreed reluctantly to move a hundred miles west to Larkhall, on the edge of Bath. My parents had lived for twelve years on the other side of the city, so I knew the area quite well and had grown fond of its steep hills, winding valleys and villages built of mellow, golden, oolitic limestone. Of course it is a landscape which can seem cloyingly pretty, verging even on the twee, and in the city itself, for all its gracious beauty, I still yearn for some outrageous brash modernism to challenge the relentless Georgian respectability; but Larkhall, on the edge of town, is less obviously bourgeois. There we took out a mortgage on a small Victorian terrace house with bedroom and study upstairs, and downstairs, adjoining the kitchen, a single long room with space for the Broadwood grand piano I had just inherited from my godfather. We moved in September 1989, ten weeks before I was due to depart on an expedition to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. It was an oddly turbulent time. Rosie missed London and hated the temporary job she had taken at the local infants’ school; and we still had to adjust to our strange new shared life, knowing that any progress was soon going to be disrupted by four months’ separation.
I disappeared to South Georgia. Rosie spent the winter working in the French Alps and it was only when we both returned the following spring, in 1990, that we began to achieve some kind of equilibrium. We pottered contentedly in our tiny garden, digging, planting, watering, nurturing, discussing endlessly the possibilities of colour and texture as the summer days lengthened languorously. We drove over the Severn Bridge to spend evenings rock climbing in the Wye Valley. Friends came to stay. I started work on a new book about the South Georgia expedition, often stealing guiltily downstairs to play the piano, relishing the novelty of domestic stability. Babies were mentioned again, but as part of a future plan, to be scheduled contraceptively around my expeditions and Rosie’s horticultural enthusiasms. Every morning that summer she got up at sunrise to rattle up the Fosse Way in her open-top Deux Chevaux to the plant nursery where she spent the day potting, propagating and weeding, returning in the late afternoon, sometimes with a few precious green sweepings from the potting-room floor, to be nurtured in our own garden. It was the happiest summer she had spent since her childhood in East Africa. In the autumn she was starting a horticultural course at the local agricultural college; the following year she hoped to study landscape design.
In September I was invited to Switzerland, as a special guest of the mountain film festival at Les Diablerets. It was a chance to do some climbing, enjoy faultless Swiss hospitality and rub shoulders with some of the great legends of the mountain world, such as Anderl Heckmair, the Bavarian who had led the very first ascent of the Eiger North Face in 1938. My head was still buzzing with tales of heroic deeds when I returned to Larkhall on a Monday evening. Rosie was in the sitting room, having a drink with our acupuncturist friend Lizzie Bingley. After a quick hello kiss I went upstairs to dump luggage and check my answer machine, then came back down to rejoin Rosie and Lizzie.
The two women looked rather edgy. ‘Have you looked in the study?’ asked Rosie. ‘Didn’t you notice anything?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Right in the middle of your desk, staring you in the face! What is it about men that makes them incapable of seeing things?’ I ran obediently back upstairs to have another look. And there it was – the overlooked white plastic stick, a bit like a pen, with a little window and a blue line, indicating . . . ? I tried unsuccessfully to make sense of the instructions – another disability of the chromosomally challenged male sex. Was it positive or negative?
‘What do you think it means?’ she laughed, as I returned downstairs to pour myself some wine.
‘So . . . you are –’
‘Oh dear . . . are you angry? You look rather shell-shocked. That’s why I asked Lizzie to be here, for some moral support.’
‘Of course I’m not angry. Am I such an ogre? No . . . yes . . . no, it’s wonderful . . . yes – wonderful news.’ Which of course it was. I just felt a little dazed. Departure on the great journey into the unknown, scheduled for some future, still unspecified date, had suddenly, without warning, been brought forward. I felt nervous about being ready in time, anxious about this sudden awesome responsibility for a new life.
But as the winter drew in I began to share Rosie’s unqualified joy. Christmas came, Rosie’s delayed divorce papers finally arrived and, after just one week as an officially unattached woman, she retied the knot on 29th December. We married at the register office – I in a sober grey morning suit, Rosie in dazzling crimson velvet, with some hasty last-minute letting out of seams to accommodate the bulge. We both wore buttonholes of blue iris. Thirty or so friends and family came to lunch at my parents’ house; then the two of us left in pouring rain for Cornwall, to spend a brief honeymoon amongst the winter gales battering the Atlantic coast.
Back in Bath Rosie grew bigger and bigger, struggling now to get into her boiler suit for tractor-maintenance classes at the agricultural college. At home, I spent mornings wrestling with my South Georgia book, before coming downstairs each lunchtime to follow the progress of the Gulf War on the radio. It was strange to listen to the civilised, measured voices of the ‘Defence’ experts analysing the bombardment of Saddam Hussein’s army, neglecting to mention that this consisted of human beings – thousands of young men, being pulverised, atomised, eviscerated, obliterated in the desert sand, while we, at a safe distance from all that horror, were preparing to nurture and protect new life.
We went through all the prescribed rituals, attending ante-natal classes, looking at the little pulsing heart on the CTS monitor, decorating the house, buying and borrowing baby equipment. Rosie’s Siamese cats, Coco and Chai, snuggled proprietorially into the white lace of the beautiful cradle now standing expectantly in the sitting room, and the pale yellow fragrance of spring seemed imbued with new meaning. Then quickly the colours and scents deepened. Rosie was due at the end of May but by 3rd June nothing had happened. Restless and uncomfortable, she suggested a walk, so we lumbered across the roaring London Road and headed for the calm of the canal. The yellow irises were out and a swan glided past with six downy grey cygnets. Everything was singing with new life but still we were having to wait.
It was the week of the Bath Festival, and the following day, Tuesday, we went to a concert in the Guildhall with Lizzie Bingley. There were anxious glances all around as Lizzie and I manoeuvred Rosie into her seat, assessing emergency escape routes. The concert was a cello recital by Steven Isserlis, pouring all his Slavic flamboyance into a gloriously romantic programme, including both the Chopin and Rachmaninov sonatas. And it did the trick. Soon after we got home Rosie felt the first little warning stabs of pain and we drove over to the Royal United Hospital.
The midwife on duty told her to stay but thought that things were going to be quite slow. So I slept at home and bicycled back to the hospital the next morning to find Rosie sitting cross-legged on a bed, bent forward and groaning. When I asked superfluously how she was feeling, she snapped, ‘Bloody awful. And this TENS machine is a complete waste of time.’ She had followed the ante-natal tutors’ advice and hired the special battery pack and electrodes which emit a gentle pain-numbing pulse when attached to your back. Or that was the theory. In reality, they hardly impinged on waves of previously unimaginable pain. Nor did the gas and air seem to make a huge difference. The pain just surged in ever bigger rollers, hour after hour after hour. The garden courtyard outside the window was bathed in rainy, grey-green light. A little finch pecked chirpily at the gravel, mocking the misery inside. Then darkness fell and the hospital drew in on its own bleak fluorescent light. Doctors and midwives came and went, and eventually announced at about midnight that it was time to go down to the delivery room.
As Rosie sprawled on the bed under a stark floodlight, surrounded by medical equipment, I couldn’t banish inappropriate cinematic images of the Gestapo at work. ‘Why does it have to be so horrific?’ I kept asking myself angrily. ‘Why must life be initiated by such hideous torture?’ In desperation, Rosie agreed eventually to have an epidural injection. It gave some relief but still no baby appeared. The young midwife seemed out of her depth. The obstetrician looked worried. A student on an obstetrics placement sat in the corner practising delivery with a foetal doll inside a plastic pelvis. He just looked bemused, wiggling and twisting the doll’s head backwards and forwards, failing dismally to extricate it. Then Rosie started screaming with a new, different, stabbing pain, so intense that she was convinced she was about to die. Only afterwards did we discover that her catheter had fallen out, unnoticed, causing her drip-fed bladder to inflate agonisingly.
She was given another epidural, which reduced but didn’t eliminate this new mystery pain. I asked whether she should have a Caesarean. The doctor agreed that that might be the best thing, but there was no anaesthetist available – too many road accidents to deal with. So we had to stay put in the torture chamber. Then, at about three in the morning an older, highly experienced midwife came on duty. She was a large authoritative woman and she rolled up her sleeves with an air of capable determination, announcing firmly that it was time to get this baby out. Numb, drugged and exhausted, Rosie had to make one final huge effort. All I could do was whisper encouragement in her ear as she clutched me, sinking fingernails into my wrists. Then at last, after thirty hours’ relentless struggle, a slippery blue-grey bundle was pulled from between her legs. The cord was cut and the bundle was whisked over to a special reviving machine, where a doctor did a quick check that the prolonged traumatic birth had done no damage. The bundle cried and someone announced, ‘It’s a boy and he’s fine.’ They brought him back, laid him on Rosie’s breast and for the first time we met Ollie.
After nine months’ waiting both of us had imagined that we knew him already, but this person was a complete stranger. He peered uncomprehendingly at us and we stared back at the wobbly, banana-shaped head, with its crumpled brow, unsmiling eyes and large squashed nose. ‘Hello, little man,’ Rosie said; then laughed, ‘he’s not very beautiful, is he?’ Somehow she – and I – had expected an instant flood of loving recognition. But nothing had prepared us for the trauma of the birth. Rosie was completely exhausted and all she wanted was to sleep; I was just dazed and it was only as I bicycled home through the still dark streets that I began to feel excited. I was a father! I had a son! A whole new life – an unwritten, unknown story stretching ahead for seventy . . . eighty . . . (who knew – ninety?!) years – had just started, right now on this very Thursday morning, June the sixth, D-Day, the sixth day of the sixth month . . . and I – we – would be there, right at the heart of the story, observing and shaping every moment of its first few chapters.
Ollie weighed 6lb 5oz at birth – a touch thin, but nothing to be alarmed about. There was some concern about the difficult delivery so the doctors kept a check on him at first, pricking his tiny bony heels to determine glucose levels in his blood, but after three days they announced that he was perfectly healthy and could go home.
He was fine. Rosie, however, was still very sore. More seriously, she was also suffering psychologically from the trauma of the birth, reliving the pain and terror. She was also finding breastfeeding extremely painful: her voluptuous bosom, source of delight to adult men, seemed less well suited to its primary purpose of feeding a tiny baby mouth. Two years later, when Edmond was born, a friend told her about Rotasept – a magic numbing spray for sore nipples; with Ollie no-one mentioned this simple solution to a problem which was souring the mother–child relationship. So, reluctantly, she gave up breastfeeding and switched to bottle-feeding with a formula based on cow’s milk.
Later, much later, when it became clear that Ollie had an intolerance to dairy products – and was having increasing problems with his immune system – we would wonder whether things might have worked out differently if Rosie had known about Rotasept and been able to continue breastfeeding. But at the time, in June 1991, it was just a relief to escape the pain which had come between her and her baby. With bottles, feeding became a pleasure. And the love, which had at first surprised us with its hesitancy, like a bud furled protectively against a late frost, now burst into flower, intoxicating with its heady scent and luminescence. Like billions of parents before us, convinced that we alone were privileged to experience a unique miracle, we watched the eyes brighten and focus, look, stare, question and, best of all, smile.
With Ollie the smile seemed to have a special intensity. Experts are unable to agree whether that manipulation of facial muscles by the six-week-old baby is simply a physical skill learned by copying the mother, or whether it is an innate expression of joy; but, whatever the mechanism, with Ollie, once that first thrilling contact was made, there was never, ever, anything passive about his smile. It was a smile which engaged robustly with the world. And soon the smile became a laugh. For him the world was a funny place, full of delight. And the more he delighted in the world, the more we delighted in him.
Rosie’s burgeoning enchantment with her baby soon banished the demons of post-natal depression. She had looked forward to having a baby ever since she was a teenager, and now she had that gift she simply adored him. I was at first more ambivalent about fatherhood. Of course I was proud to have been through this rite of passage – in fact, I had been so elated, the Sunday after Ollie was born, that I had driven over to Bristol to lead a friend up the soaring wall of ‘Yellow Edge’, the greatest rock climb in the Avon Gorge, on a surge of confidence – but as the summer ripened and deepened, I was surprised by the way that facile pride was supplanted by a new, deeper contentment, a sense of life having a whole new dimension.
In the meantime I had to earn a living. The South Georgia book advance was all spent. Summer tends to be a thin time for freelancers so I was very grateful when a seasoned journalist friend gave me a lead to Will Ellsworth-Jones, then editor of the Weekend section at the Daily Telegraph. Once the frighteningly inscrutable replies to my telephone overture were over, Will proved to be that rarest of creatures – a friendly approachable Fleet Street editor. He warned me that his boss, Max Hastings, demanded a full quota of hearty blood sports in the ‘Outdoors’ pages, but he promised to try and squeeze in some additional mountainous and environmental stories from me, starting with four articles on my own forthcoming trip to Nepal.
The expedition was still six weeks away, and Rosie needed a holiday. How to pay? I suddenly remembered Catherine Destivelle – the brilliant French climber who had just soloed a new route up the mirror-smooth monolith of the Petit Dru, above Chamonix. At home in Paris she was now more famous than the French prime minister, but there hadn’t been a single column inch in the British press. ‘What’s so special about her?’ Will asked warily. I waxed enthusiastic, detected a flicker of interest on the other end of the telephone, then explained that I would need to go to Paris to interview her: there would be a return fare and a hotel night to pay on top of the fee. This was a bit of cheek, coming from an untried freelance who had not yet produced a single word for the paper, but occasionally you have to be bold. Will asked a few more questions then muttered resignedly, ‘Oh, all right – you’d better go.’
In those pre-budget-flight days the boat ferry cost no more than an air ticket, so I could justify taking the car and including the whole family. We sailed from Portsmouth on a warm September night, drove lazily through Normandy the next day and reached Paris with plenty of time for me to prepare for the interview. Catherine was her usual ebullient self – giggling and enthusing about the eight days she had spent alone on the thousand-metre-high vertical sheet of granite, giving me total concentration for two hours before leaving to prepare for that evening’s television chat show. For the whole of the next morning I sweated at a table in the hotel courtyard, ripping sheet after abortive sheet from the Olivetti. By lunchtime I still hadn’t managed the first sentence. By tea time I had one sketchy paragraph to show for my labours. Rosie came to see how I was getting on and I snapped at her to go away. So she wheeled Ollie back to the Jardins de Luxembourg to while away the rest of the afternoon. An hour before the deadline I finally galvanised my brain into action, racing to a blotchy, Tipp-Exed finish and despatching the agreed 800 words with one minute to spare. Two days later I spoke on the phone to Will who queried a couple of minor ambiguities then added lugubriously, ‘You’ll be pleased to hear I liked the piece.’
Phew! What a blessed relief! Now we were free, the three of us, to enjoy our little holiday which, for me, was a return to old haunts. Like Ollie, I had first come to Paris as a baby – in my case to stay with my grandparents who had lived here. Later, at sixteen, I had stayed here with our friends the Potiers. The parents, Marion and Jean-Pierre, were now in their sixties and retired, but they and their apartment on the Boulevard St Germain seemed unchanged. While Rosie and I joined them for dinner at the familiar round table by the tall elegant window overlooking Rue du Bac, one of their grandchildren played with Ollie who was chuckling contentedly in his reclining rocker chair.
In just three months our ugly duckling, maligned so uncharitably at birth, had metamorphosed into a beautiful baby who seemed to delight everyone with his radiant good humour. At the gardens of Vaux le Vicomte near Fontainebleau next day an extended family of Italians – fellow holidaymakers – went wild with excitement, summoning nephews, nieces, grandchildren, aunts and uncles, shouting to them to ignore the grandiose artifice of Le Nôtre’s fabulous landscape and gather instead around our pushchair, to cluck and coo over the bello bambino. At restaurants each night Ollie gurgled contentedly in his carry basket, resting on a chair beside our table. At Chartres, crammed into the tiny bedroom of a grimy hotel, he transformed our seedy garret into a theatre of laughter. Amongst the ancient sandstone boulders of the Fontainebleau forest, where I had first climbed with the Potiers twenty-one years earlier and where we now met Catherine for a morning’s play, Ollie seemed to share Rosie’s wry amusement at my futile efforts to emulate the rock-climbing superstar. He seemed both to absorb our contentment and to enrich it, reflecting it back to us, adding a glow of enchantment to what would otherwise have been merely a pleasant holiday.
A few days after returning home I set off again, this time alone. The Mountain Club of South Africa had invited me to be principal guest at their centenary dinner in Cape Town, offering also to organise some paid lectures, justifying my trip as ‘work’ and allowing me to escape nappy duty with a clear conscience. It was a thrilling whirlwind tour, filled with dazzling sensations: the canyons of the Magaliesberg mountains near Johannesburg; the towering Sentinel in the Drakensberg, redolent with memories of Michael Caine and Stanley Baker sweating it out in Zulu; the tropical lushness of Durban; the Garden Route; the vineyards of Stellenbosch, serried beneath red mountains; the foghorn booming over the blasted heath at the Cape of Good Hope; and Table Mountain, where on my last morning, a little jaded from the previous night’s dinner, we swung up the giddy, vertiginous, sandstone rungs of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, banishing centennial hangovers with buckets of sweet spring air.
Packed into just ten days, the South African tour hardly impinged on family life in Larkhall. But only two weeks after my return we had to face a longer, harder separation as Rosie and Ollie waved me onto the flight to Nepal. I would not be returning for seven weeks. This was my first Himalayan expedition since the Everest climb three years earlier. The objective – a beautiful peak called Kusum Kanguru, about twenty miles south of Everest – was my own project and it was I who had chosen the team. My two partners for the climb, Dick Renshaw and Brian Davison, were totally dependable; Henry and Sarah Day were wonderful company on the long trek to base camp; Pasang Norbu, our Sherpa cook from the Everest expedition, was one of the kindest, most cheerful people I knew. This venture was entirely my own idea and I ought to have enjoyed it unequivocally. Most of the time I did enjoy myself and the final climb to the summit, completing a new route up the mountain, was intensely satisfying. But I was surprised by how much I missed Ollie, particularly in the evenings, when the autumn mist rolled up from the valley. Pondering fatherhood before it actually happened, I had always assumed that I would stick firmly to my schizophrenic way of life – switching effortlessly between domestic security and wilderness adventure, settler and nomad – but now, confronted with the reality of that dislocating wrench, I realised that it was not going to be quite so easy.
One evening, in a fit of egotism, I took my cassette recorder over to a hollow behind a boulder, out of earshot from the others – who might think I had gone barking mad – and talked to Ollie, telling him all about what I was doing on Kusum Kanguru, anxious that he should not forget the sound of my voice. I even sang his bedtime song: ‘Go to sleep my baby, close your pretty eyes. Angels will be watching; peeping at you from the skies. Great big moon is shining; stars begin to peep. Time for little Ollie Venables; to go to sleep.’ The tape was sent home the next day, along with the latest despatch to the Telegraph.
Afterwards Rosie said, ‘We did listen to the tape for a while, but I’m afraid we got a bit bored with it.’ It certainly seemed to have little effect on Ollie, who looked very unimpressed when a strange man returned to Heathrow airport and started kissing his mother. He became even more alarmed when the stranger got into the back of the car. Every time I raised my head above the level of the front seat he screamed. Talking drew the same response. So I had to huddle silently, head down, all the way back to Bath.
It took a few days for both Ollie and Rosie to adjust to the man who had intruded on their domestic routine. I was large and loud and clumsy and, until things settled down, superfluous. But we soon got over the awkward transition. Ollie either retrieved subconscious images of the pre-departure me, or just accepted the new me. Whatever the mechanism, the bond was re-established. At the airport I had also hardly recognised him. There was a new luminosity in his dark brown eyes, and a bloom to his skin; his nose was straighter and finer, his forehead broader, his chin more defined. He was starting to crawl and soon after I returned I hung a bouncer from the beam between the kitchen and sitting-dining room. At night he settled happily in his cot, chuckling and smiling through the bars; in the morning the same contentment greeted us.
At times it seemed that he was too easy. Surely there ought to be more struggle and angst in this child-rearing business? Shouldn’t he throw more tantrums? Afterwards, when the contentment of those enchanted times was shattered, we wondered what signs there had been of impending catastrophe; but even now, years later, we can find few clues. Despite his traumatic birth, he was a very healthy baby. Rosie was slightly concerned that he was not very cuddly; but apart from that he was extremely sociable. He loved to be with us, but didn’t cling; he had a self-contained serenity.
His weight gain was on target and he was passing all his developmental milestones. However, Rosie did worry about the cow’s-milk formula which was still the mainstay of his diet. During the first weeks of bottle-feeding, he had sometimes arched his back, as if in pain. At times he also seemed unduly windy and snuffly. A couple of times, after visiting the GP, he was treated with antibiotics. Back in July, Rosie had queried the bottle formula, but the doctors felt that Ollie had no serious intolerance to cow’s milk, one GP, as we later discovered in the notes, dismissing Rosie rather patronisingly as an ‘anxious mother’. The only other slight worry, early in 1992, was his strange crawling, with one hip apparently not abducting properly. However, the orthopaedic specialist found no serious abnormality and Rosie subsequently saw a cine film of herself as a baby doing exactly the same lopsided crawl, with one leg stretched straight behind her.
Soon after Ollie was born an old climbing friend, Phil Bartlett, had said what a relief it must be that ‘there was nothing wrong with him’. It had never occurred to me that our baby would be anything other than ‘normal’, and as the months passed that assumption seemed to be confirmed. He was strong, healthy and full of promise. And if I sometimes resented the drudgery of changing nappies and the relentless routine of sterilising bottles, boiling water, measuring formula powder – ‘No, you bumbling dolt: it has to be exactly seven measures and you must level off the powder with a knife and don’t forget to sterilise the knife: you’re not on a mountain now’ – even if those domestic trivia seemed irksome, the object of all this attention repaid us with more and more pleasure as the days passed.
Winter melted and for the third time Rosie and I watched the glaucous daffodil spears pierce the little plot of land we called home. Her professional horticultural ambitions were still on hold, especially as we hoped to have another child soon, but even at our microcosmic amateur level, this whole business of painting pictures with plants was a huge shared pleasure compatible with child-rearing. And for inspiration we had the great set-piece gardens of southern England. That spring we visited Margery Fish’s magical hellebore ‘ditch’ at East Lambrook. We wheeled the pushchair through Sissinghurst and continued the next day to Great Dixter. On Easter Monday we drove north through the Cotswolds to the sublime garden rooms of Hidcote Manor. It was a gorgeous spring afternoon and Ollie thrilled to the wide gracious space of the Great Walk, relishing the huge velvet expanse of lawn, crawling, climbing, laughing, playing to the crowd and, for the first time in his life, getting to his feet and standing upright.
These idylls were interspersed with reminders of a harsher world: interviews with the cave diver Martin Farr and the polar traveller Ran Fiennes, about to start his epic walk across Antarctica with Mike Stroud. There was a new book on Himalayan climbing to get started, meetings of the British Mountaineering Council to yawn through and, looming more urgently, a new expedition. Just six months after returning from Kusum Kanguru, I was leaving again for the Himalaya. It was a joint Indian-British venture co-led by my old Mumbai friend, Harish Kapadia, and the public face of British mountaineering, Chris Bonington. We planned to explore the Panch Chuli – the five sacred cooking hearths of the mythic Pandava brothers, four of them unclimbed, rising to over 6,000 metres in Kumaon, on the India–Nepal border. I was looking forward to seeing Harish and the Mumbai-wallahs again. I was excited by the prospect of unknown, untouched summits. I was even more excited by the deep forested river gorges we would explore to reach those summits. But I was also dreading the separation from Rosie and Ollie. I was going to miss my son’s first birthday and, even though I was departing with an incredibly strong, experienced team, there was, as always, the lurking, unspoken fear that I might not come back.
Chapter Two
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED on the summer solstice, just before dawn. Late the previous afternoon we had reached the summit of Panch Chuli V – the first human beings ever to touch this elusive dome of snow 6,456 metres above sea level. It had been the culmination of a strenuous last-minute dash up a completely unexplored glacier system, right at the head of a remote uninhabited valley, and now, after descending wearily through the night, Dick Renshaw, Victor Saunders, Stephen Sustad and I were nearly back down at the tent, where Chris Bonington waited, perched on a metre-wide ledge. It was the last day of the expedition and, thirty miles away in the village of Munsiari, Harish Kapadia and the rest of the Indian team were preparing for our return to the plains.
We were descending in a series of abseils, taking turns each time to slide fifty metres down the double ropes, before pulling one end to bring them down for the next abseil. Sometimes the knot joining the two ropes jammed behind a rock, forcing one of us to climb back up in the dark to free it. It was cold, exhausting work and we had had virtually nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. However, we had all dealt with countless similar situations in the past and by dawn we would be back at the tent. After a quick breakfast we would then continue down to the valley, reaching base camp that evening. From there everything would be easy, and in just a few days’ time I would be back home with Rosie and Ollie.
It was on the penultimate abseil, soon after I lowered myself over the edge, committing my life to the ropes, that the anchor failed. I had only gone a few metres, feet braced wide against the rock, when I heard the bright, mocking ring of a steel peg ripping from granite and felt a sudden backward lurch into space. The understanding seemed only to come gradually, in slow motion, out of sync with the violent, strident battering, as my body was flung down the mountain, bouncing from rock to rock, flung headlong into the dark void, and I realised with resigned regret that this was death. And somewhere, in the middle of all that hideous tumbling cacophony, hurtling towards the final moment of annihilation, I glimpsed blurred images of the wife and son I would never see again.
I awoke to desolate grey silence, amazed at being alive, terrified of the damage I might find. But I was lucky: neither my skull nor my spine had been damaged during the eighty-metre plunge down the cliff. And my brave companions, watching the body cartwheel through the darkness, had managed incredibly to grab the ends of the ropes and stop me falling a further 300 metres down a huge ice face. That instant, instinctive reaction probably saved my life. However, the battering had still done considerable damage. My left ankle was fractured and my right knee was gashed open. The whole right leg had seized up and the slightest movement was excruciatingly painful. As I hacked out a ledge with my ice axe and heaved my body into some kind of stable position, waves of fear and nausea swept over me. But then I thought of the people who had survived similar disasters. And I thought of Rosie in the labour room – the hours of searing pain and struggle – and I realised that this couldn’t be as bad as that. For the first time in my life I was just going to have to try to be brave.
Nevertheless, as the grey dawn brightened and I saw the blood oozing into the snow, and as I stared down the plunging snowfield – and, below it, the tortured labyrinthine cataracts of ice which we had fought our way up two days earlier – my courage wavered. When Victor reached me with the first-aid kit, I croaked, ‘If I don’t manage to get out of this alive, will you tell Rosie I’m sorry.’ He brushed aside the melodrama, assuring me that there was going to be no dying, and from that moment I never doubted that, somehow, I would get home to my wife and son.
I was lucky to be with four of the world’s best Himalayan climbers. While Dick and Victor lowered me, ropelength by weary ropelength, down the long ice face, Stephen Sustad rejoined Chris to carry tents, stoves and sleeping bags from Chris’s perch down to the comparatively flat basin below, where we eventually established camp, thirty-six hours after setting out on the summit push. There I waited four days with Dick and Victor, while the other two descended to the valley to alert Harish Kapadia and try to organise a rescue.
We got very, very hungry in our tent, but we had a stove to melt snow, so there was enough to drink. With my swollen battered right leg immobilised in a splint, the pain subsided to a dull ache and it was only when the helicopter arrived, on the fourth day, that I had again to be brave. It was an Indian Air Force Lama on its third attempt to find a way through gathering monsoon clouds to our remote camp, nearly 6,000 metres above sea level. With no flat landing spot, the pilot had to hover with one skid resting against the slope and the rotor blades scything inches from the mountain, while Victor dragged my inert body across to the side door. The whole world was reduced to a violent, deafening, pulsating maelstrom of flung snow and exhaust fumes. As Victor said afterwards, ‘One mistake by the pilots and we would all have been turned into salami.’ Cowering beneath the thrumming blades, I had to drag my aching torso upwards and backwards into the helicopter doorway, arms reaching out behind me, cracked left ankle bracing in front, right leg flapping loose in a torment of grating gristle and bone. Victor gave my leg one final grinding shove. I shrieked with agonised exultation and collapsed inside the warm haven of the helicopter cockpit.
The pilots had risked their lives to pick me up, and moments later we were fleeing the dangerous mountain cauldron, speeding back to Munsiari, where we touched down for a brief emotional reunion with Chris and Harish. As we took off again to head south for a military hospital in the plains, Harish handed me a bundle of letters. I had been writing home regularly during the last seven weeks, but no return mail had got through to our base camp. Now, luxuriating in the warm comfortable safety of the helicopter, a solipsist immersed in the miracle of my own survival, I discovered for the first time what had been going on in my absence.
In the first letter Rosie was pregnant. In the second she had had a miscarriage; she felt lousy and was devastated by the loss of a new life. In between, her brother Jake, who ran a travel company, had given her, a friend called Elaine and Ollie a free holiday near Mombasa. Later I saw the photos of Ollie there and at home that early summer – face and hair golden brown, eyes sparkling – paddling, playing in the oak sandpit I had made just before I left for Panch Chuli, standing up proudly with his first birthday card, looking at his first picture book, playing with Nana and Grandpop’s bathtime present and saying his first word, ‘duck’, followed a few days later by his second word ‘shoe’ . . . a whole succession of special unrepeatable events I had missed. What I had also missed was his sudden attack of diarrhoea on the return from Kenya – the wrenching pain and screaming, so inconsolable one night at Rosie’s parents’ house that she had left at midnight to drive Ollie home over the dark empty expanse of Salisbury Plain. A stool test had revealed salmonella, contracted either in Kenya or during the hideous charter flight home, and after several days of agony the infection finally subsided.
It was a mark of Ollie’s robust health that he recovered quickly and totally from that debilitating attack. By the time I was speeding south over the Himalayan foothills to the military hospital at Bareilly, he had regained all his weight and the agonised screaming was just a bad memory. But Rosie had had a hard time in my absence, and the last thing she needed was a battered, shrivelled husk of a husband to nurse back to health. When I arrived back in England eight days after the accident, anger was the predominant emotion as she drove me from Heathrow to Larkhall, telling me that I could spend one night at home but that after that I was to stay in hospital until I was properly mended.
Neighbours helped to manoeuvre my wheelchair through the front door. Then Rosie left me parked in the sitting room while she went to collect Ollie from our friends at the end of the terrace. She returned with him a few minutes later. ‘Look who’s here: it’s Daddy.’
This time he didn’t scream. There was a moment’s hesitation, but then he moved forward, holding a chair for balance. He stopped just short of me, as if to make sure who this really was, stared hard then broke into a huge, giggling smile.
In the morning Rosie delivered me to the men’s trauma ward at the Royal United Hospital, where I stayed for the next five weeks. Apart from a quick patching up of another knee injury nineteen years earlier, some brief frostbite amputations after Everest and the more recent visit to the maternity ward with Rosie, I had no experience of hospitals, none of serious illness. This was a whole new world and I never completely accepted its rituals and hierarchies. I resented the delegation of personal control, the subjugation to some unknown authority, and the delays while other more urgent cases took precedence.
I had two operations: one to repair the fractured left ankle and to insert special beads of antibiotic onto the infected bone of my right knee; then, once the infection had gone, a second operation to repair the right knee with wire, steel screws and a slice of my hip grafted onto the tibial plateau. I emerged from anaesthesia in a filthy temper, cursing everyone in sight. Then I lay inert for several days, watching enviously as Ollie took his first unaided steps across the ward, laughing each time he wobbled and fell to the floor.