Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Stephen Venables

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Maps

Acknowledgements

Prologue: South Col

1. Norwood Hill

2. Alpine Initiation

3. Christmas in the Super Couloir

4. The Road to Badakhshan

5. Fear and Loathing on the Matterhorn

6. Sod’s Law Peak

7. Chocolate City

8. Land of the Incas

9. Winter on the Finsteraarhorn

10. Painted Mountains

11. Mozart on the Eiger

12. Bigo Bog and Snow Lake

13. With the Colonels to Shishapangma

14. Neverest

15. The Longest Journey

16. Night on a Bare Mountain

Postscript: Rhinog Fach

Picture Section

Index

Copyright

About the Book

High wild places have dominated Stephen Venables’ life and now he has written a full autobiography which explores how and – more importantly – why he became a mountaineer, and reveals a series of never-recorded adventures on four continents. At its climax he revisits his dramatic success without oxygen on the Kangshung Face of Everest, described by Reinhold Messner as the most adventurous in Everest’s history and by Lord Hunt as ‘one of the most remarkable ordeals from which men or women have returned alive’. As Venables writes: ‘Although we didn’t go seeking deliberately an epic near-death experience, it did turn out that way – the ultimate endurance test for which all the previous adventures seemed, retrospectively, to be a preparation.’

About the Author

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 Oxford in the early 1970s, and has written eight books about his mountain travels, winning the Boardman Tasker Prize, the King Albert Medal and the Grand Award at the Banff International Mountain Literature Festival. He has also appeared in several television documentaries and worked on two IMAX movies – appearing in Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and writing Alps – Giants of Nature. His most recent book, Ollie, was a Sunday Times bestseller. He was President of the Alpine Club in the year of its 150th anniversary. He lives in Bath with his wife and son.

Higher Than the Eagle Soars was the winner of the Mountain Literature Award at the Banff International Mountain Literature Festival, 2007.

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

Ollie

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

To my many climbing partners over the years. Thank you for your companionship and thank you for helping to keep me alive.

Parapismus was the name the Ancient Greeks gave to the high snow peaks of the Hindu Kush. The word derives from the Persian uparisena, meaning ‘the peaks over which the eagle cannot fly’ and could apply aptly to all the great ranges of Central Asia which have given me so much pleasure over the last thirty years.

List of Illustrations

1. Winter snow on the path to Everest. (EW)

2. The author flying in Cornwall, 1962. (RV)

3. Zuoz, 1965. (RV)

4. The author on the Grande Casse, 1975. (LG)

5. Budget Bus passes Mount Ararat, 1977. (SV)

6. Lindsay Griffin, 1976. (SV)

7. Lindsay Griffin & Roger Everett on Kohe Sahkt, 1977. (SV)

8. The author on Papillons Arête, 1974. (DL)

9. Richard & Ann Venables skiing past Matterhorn, 1981. (SV)

10. Bill Stevenson on Mont Blanc de Cheilon North Face, 1977. (SV)

11. Philip Venables with injured Jonathan Dawson, Hunza 1979. (SV)

12. Gormenghastly, Oxford 1980. (SV)

13. Dick Renshaw on Karakoram bridge, 1984. (SV)

14. The author on Sod’s Law Peak, 1980. (PB)

15. Dave Wilkinson with Magic Mountain, Kunyang Kish, 1980. (SV)

16. Carlos Buhler on Dance of Sugar Plum Fairy, 1981. (SV)

17. Phil Bartlett descends windslab, Kunyang Kish, 1980. (SV)

18. Tea at Camp One, Kunyang Kish, 1980. (SV)

19. Dave Wilkinson descending from recce, Kunyang Kish, 1980. (SV)

20. Dave Wilkinson on Jatunhuma I, Peru, 1982. (SV)

21. Finsteraarhorn North-East Face, Day Two, 1983. (SV)

22. Finsteraarhorn North-East Face, Day Three, 1983. (SV)

23. Kishtwar-Shivling – the vision in 1979. (SV)

24. Kishtwar-Shivling first ascent, Day Four. (SV)

25. Kishtwar-Shivling first ascent, Day Five. (RR)

26. Siachen Indo-British Expedition 1985 – team photo. (SV)

27. Rimo I – Victor Saunders at fourth bivouac. (SV)

28. Rimo I – Victor Saunders at highpoint. (SV)

29. Camp on Shelkar Chorten Glacier. (SV)

30. Victor Saunders and Henry Osmaston researching penitentes. (SV)

31. Dave Wilkinson on Terong River ropes. (SV)

32. Dick Renshaw with the Gujars, Kishtwar, 1983. (SV)

33. Final camp in Mountains of the Moon, 1986. (SV)

34. Phil Bartlett on Snow Lake, 1987. (SV)

35. Phil Bartlett and Duncan Tunstall battling spindrift. (SV)

36. Rosie at Ferntower Road. (SV)

37. Reading party at Camp Two on Shishapangma, 1987. (SV)

38. Luke Hughes on Hinterstoisser Traverse, 1986. (SV)

39. Luke Hughes at Shishapangma highpoint, 1987. (SV)

40. View down Webster’s Wall, Everest Kangshung Face, 1988. (SV)

41. Ed Webster on crevasse rope bridge, Everest 1988. (SV)

42. Paul Teare camping at Pethang Ringmo, Everest, 1988. (EW)

43. The author returning to South Col, Everest, 1988. (EW)

44. The author and Robert Anderson returning to South Col, Everest 1988. (EW)

45. The author with frostbitten nose, Everest, 1988. (PT)

46. Ed Webster with frostbitten fingers, Everest, 1988. (PT)

47. Pasang, Kasang and Angchu celebrate success of Everest, 1988. (SV)

48. Ed, Mimi, Stephen and Robert final photo at Advance Base, Everest, 1988. ( JB)

Photo Credits

Maps

1. Western Himalaya

2. Kunyang Kish

3. Finsteraarhorn Approach

4. Kishtwar-Shivling, North Face

5. Kishtwar-Shivling: the bivouac sites

6. Rimo I

7. The North Face of the Eiger, 1938 route

8. Western Karakoram

9. Solu Tower

10. The Eastern side of the Shishapangma massif

11. Shishapangma, author’s route

12. Everest, Eastern Approach

13. Everest, Kangshung Face

14. Everest, the complete route to the South Col

Acknowledgements

When I first wrote about our Everest adventure nearly twenty years ago, the late Bradford Washburn’s magnificent map of the mountain had still not appeared. Now, with the help of Brad’s artistry I have corrected some of the heights quoted in my original account, Everest Kangshung Face. I have also benefited from reading Ed Webster’s own version of our expedition, Snow in the Kingdom, which made me aware of several details I had previously overlooked. There is no such thing as a definitive account of an expedition, and in any case Everest appears here rather differently, as the surprise culmination of a long personal journey. Nevertheless, I am glad to have removed some inaccuracies and, perhaps, to have got a little closer to the real essence of our Tibetan adventure.

The Everest climb would not have been possible without the support of corporate sponsors such as Rolex, who had the faith to back our improbable plans. Likewise the 1985 Siachen expedition, made possible by the generous support of Grindlays Bank, and the Shishapangma expedition, sponsored by ICI and Eric Hotung. Many other organisations and individuals have also contributed generously over the years to my travels, but I would like most of all to thank the Mount Everest Foundation and the international committee of the British Mountaineering Council who continue, year after year, to support the kind of exploratory ventures which we seem to enjoy in Britain.

I would like to thank Phil Bartlett, Geoffrey Grimmett, Marianne Meister and Béatrice Rozier for their advice on the manuscript. Many thanks, also, to Phil Bartlett, Joseph Blackburn, Lindsay Griffin, Luke Hughes, David Lund, Joe McGorty, Dick Renshaw, Paul Teare and Ed Webster for allowing me to use their photographs. And to my godfather, Norman Dockeray and my father, Richard Venables, who had no choice in the matter; I wish they were still alive to see their photos in print. And to Reginald Piggott who resists the tyranny of the computer and still draws his beautiful maps by hand. Vivienne Schuster, my agent, and her assistant at Curtis Brown, Stephanie Thwaites, were their usual efficient, nurturing, encouraging selves, as were the wonderful team at Hutchinson: Neil Bradford, Aislinn Casey, James Nightingale and my fellow mountaineer and editor, Tony Whittome. To all of them, a big ‘thank you’.

Prologue

South Col

Frosted tent fabric sparkles in the light of a torch beam where Ed sits hunched beside me in the cramped dome. He spoons a mouthful of noodles from a plastic measuring jug. I slurp my own tepid spoonful, which tastes vaguely of chicken. Or prawns. Or perhaps tomato. What does it matter? It is purely functional, fuel for the job, a last attempt to stoke the furnace for the long journey ahead.

We have moved beyond the world of sensual pleasure. Up here, nearly five miles above sea level, there is no finesse: all that matters is survival. And yet I feel a great surge of excitement, even pleasurable anticipation. For six weeks this mountain has been everything. It has been our life. We have been consumed totally by this wild, crazy, beautiful odyssey. It has been hard, hard work. But it has also been pleasurable work, creative work: our very own new route up the great Kangshung Face. We have defied the sceptics and surprised ourselves. And now we’re here, on the South Col, the first people ever to get here from Tibet. And today, tonight, we are setting off on the final leg of our journey to the top of the world.

Robert is in the other tent a few yards away, but Paul has gone. He had to leave this morning – kind, wise, irreverent, funny Paul. He didn’t feel well and decided that the only safe thing to do was to go back down. When he said goodbye there were tears in his eyes. But he did the right thing: outstay your welcome here, at almost eight thousand metres, and cerebral oedema – fluid on the brain – can kill you very quickly.

So now there are just three of us. Ed and I hear an occasional rustle from Robert’s tent, but we are busy with our own preparations. Meal finished, we work methodically through a series of chores, focused totally on the mundane detail which can make the difference between life and death. Gloves, mittens, over-mitts, spare mitts, spare torch-bulb. Water bottle topped up with laboriously melted snow, then stowed deep inside five layers of clothing. A thick pasty layer of sun cream smeared over nose and cheeks, ready for the blazing solar radiation which will hit us in seven hours’ time. Then the slow ritual of preparing feet: smoothing socks, pulling on pre-warmed inner boots, lacing outer boots loosely, trying not to constrict circulation; finally, panting with the exertion, zipping giant foam-soaks over the top of boots.

We hardly talk because talking wastes breath, and here every scrap of breath is a hard-won prize, a gleaning from the thin air. Since we arrived here yesterday evening I have got better at it: I’ve quelled the panic, learned how to regulate the lungs’ rhythm, letting my diaphragm work the bellows. I feel more confident, particularly now that the wind has dropped and is no longer flapping the frozen tent fabric. Everything is silent, peaceful, calm.

I unzip the tent door and crawl out into the darkness. Then stand up to look around, feeling the air bite sharp and cold on my face. We had hoped our summit bid might coincide with a full moon, but tonight we have only the stars. Against their faint glimmer I can just make out the black solidity of Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain. Turning round the other way, the sky is blocked by the closer, foreshortened bulk of Everest – the final pyramid, the last stage of our journey.

I pull back a mitten to check my watch. Ten-thirty p.m. Robert has now emerged from his tent. Or at least his legs have, swaddled in bulging goose down, unwieldy boots resting on the snow crust. The rest of his body is still slumped inside the tent, trying to find the energy to sit up and clamp crampons – those vital ice-gripping metal spikes – to his boots. I struggle with my own, cold steel searing through flimsy inner gloves, numbing my fingers in seconds, so that I have to retreat into our tent and rejoin Ed, huffing and puffing my fingers back to life. In the end it is Ed – kind, patient Ed – who leans over, panting with the exertion, and completes the fiddly job for me.

At eleven o’clock we are all ready to leave. Ed produces a length of rope, purple in the torchlight. He knots the middle and clips it to a loop around his waist. Robert ties into one end, and I take the other. Then we set off into the darkness. My muffled ears can only just discern the squeaking crunch of boots on snow and the rustle of nylon and those sounds are almost drowned by the closer rasp of my own breath. Everything is reduced to this organism, this body, this miraculous construct of muscle and bone and coursing blood, so fragile and vulnerable, sustaining this consciousness – this me, with all my dreams and hopes and fears and interconnected threads of memory.

Soon it will be midnight. And then the dawn of a new day. The most beautiful sunrise I will ever have seen. It could be my last sunrise: tomorrow could be the day I die. Or it could be the day I stand on top of the world. I still don’t know whether I am capable of it. But how wonderful to have this chance to find out. What a privilege to be here, on this famous stage, playing out the final scene of our story. What a treat. I hardly dare to believe that it is really happening. Who could have imagined that I would end up here? Who could have guessed that that shy, timid, skinny boy would ever set foot on a mountain at all? How could I have known that so many months and years of my life would be spent doing this – trespassing so brazenly in this vertical starlit landscape, choosing such a perverse path, forsaking all those other myriad pleasures? But that path has brought its own special rewards. And pleasures. Yes – real pleasure. And, in a strange, unpredictable, serendipitous sort of way, it has led inexorably to this moment, as though all those other adventures were a preparation for this greatest adventure of all.

Chapter One

Norwood Hill

MOUNTAINEERS ARE EXPECTED to explain themselves. Why the suffering? Why the perverse flirtation with danger? Why the repeated heartache and separation – the endless partings, with their recurrent threat of no return? Why? And, even if we can answer those questions, then how on earth did we get into this crazy pastime in the first place – what was the blinding flash on the road to Damascus? But all I can offer by way of initiation is a glimmer on the road to Bangor.

It was a summer’s evening in 1963 and we had driven all the way up from London, singing songs most of the way, as we always did on long car journeys, my father improvising harmonies to old favourites like ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’, his loud bass competing with the familiar thrum of the Volkswagen’s rear engine. Twilight was falling as we entered the cleft of the Ogwen Valley but in the gloaming I could just make out the mountainside looming over the road – immense heathery slopes riven by gullies; battlements of dark rock veined white with quartz; boulders tumbled wantonly across the most elemental landscape I had ever seen. I was nine and I just knew that I wanted to be up there, amongst those rocks.

Perhaps that was the moment when the seed was sown; but I don’t think the course of a life can ever be explained so simply. The influences are far more richly layered, contradictory and subliminal than that; and in any case, the mountains have only been one strand – albeit a vital one – in my life. So, even if that Snowdonia discovery was a key moment, I want first to go back to the beginning, to where I came from, starting with my Scottish great-grandfather.

William Ogilvie was one of eleven children born into a prosperous Dundee family. In the summer of 1875, during a year spent travelling round the Continent with his mother and some of his brothers and sisters, he visited Zermatt and did some climbing there. He seems to have been an adventurous type, for after training at Edinburgh University to be a civil engineer he sailed in 1886 to Valparaíso, to take up a post working on, amongst other projects, the trans-Andean railway. His young sweetheart, Rotha, refused to sail with him to Chile, assuming that he would soon come back to her. He did eventually return, but in the meantime he met and married a German woman who bore him five children. The family returned to Britain at the turn of the century and right at the end of his life, after his first wife had died, Willy did finally marry Rotha, when he was seventy. Of his successful children, one son became a surgeon, the other a university don. Both were knighted. One of the three daughters married the Anglo-Irish novelist Joyce Cary; the eldest girl, Florence, married an ordained schoolmaster who loved the verse of Shelley, despite the poet’s atheism. His name was Malcolm Venables.

My father Richard was the youngest of Malcolm and Florence’s six children and grew up at Harrow School, where Malcolm was an English teacher and housemaster until forced to resign in 1942 on the pretext of wartime economies. Malcolm then became a parish priest in Somerset and might have ended his life there in obscurity if it hadn’t been for a surprise letter from Clement Attlee announcing his royal appointment as a canon – and later Precentor responsible for music – at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. I still retain a glimmer of a memory of a visit to Windsor Castle before Grandfather died in 1957 – tantalisingly sketchy images of waking early in a strange room with bare floorboards … glimpses of battlements through a high window … aunts coming to quieten me and my younger brother lest we disturb our rather moody grandfather. Granny didn’t die until I was eighteen and we used to see her about once a year. She was tall and gentle, and smelt of powder and fur; and she was very generous, giving us her Blüthner grand piano – and her violin – when she claimed she was too old to play them any more.

My other grandfather, Granchie, the splendidly named John Gower Meredith Richards, was actually only half Welsh – his English mother was a descendant of the Victorian sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott – but there was something unmistakably Celtic about his dark good looks. His three brothers were all scientists – a botanist, an entomologist and a physician – but he bucked the trend by reading Greats at Oxford, then going to the Sorbonne where he wrote short stories, became a fluent French speaker and fell in love with a beautiful young woman called Nina. Nina’s mother was a Russian émigré opera singer whose husband, a Polish-Jewish violinist, had long since done a bunk, leaving her to raise her daughter alone in a tiny flat. The daughter married Gower and moved to London, where Gower earned his living as a schoolteacher and later as a schools inspector, before joining the Ministry of Food during the Second World War. They had just one child, my mother, Ann.

I never knew my grandmother Nina. By all accounts she was a flamboyant extrovert, who loved to sing, performing at every possible occasion and embarrassing my hockey-playing tomboy mother with her foreign accent. Nina was devastated when her own mother, my great-grandmother, died alone and penniless in Paris during the war, unreachable behind the fortress walls of the German occupation. Yet despite that, and her Jewishness, when Nina went to work in Berlin after the war as a translator, fluent in Russian, German, French and English, she wrote to Gower that seeing the misery and destruction all around her it was impossible to hate the Germans. After returning to England she was badly burned in a domestic accident and died a few days later in hospital.

Nina died at the end of 1949 when my mother was away in the Alps on a skiing holiday, paid for with the exhibition she had just won for her first term’s work at Oxford. Later that academic year she met my father, a second-year undergraduate, who spent his time sailing, fly-fishing, playing cricket and singing. The next time my mother went on a university ski trip she took Richard with her. Before he graduated with his third-class degree they became engaged and my mother, daughter of a Welsh agnostic liberal and a Jewish bohemian, was taken to Windsor Castle to meet her prospective father-in-law, The Reverend Malcolm Venables, a pillar of the Anglican establishment, who almost certainly thought the name Lloyd George was synonymous with the devil.

It seems an unlikely marriage, but I like the idea of opposites joined, dissonance resolved. I was proud, as a child, to learn about my mongrel roots and the diverse enthusiasms of my relatives; and yet, despite the Celtic element, I have always thought of myself as English. And European. And inescapably middle-class.

When I was eighteen months old my parents bought their first house – a dilapidated seventeenth-century cottage in a Surrey hamlet called Norwood Hill, within commuting distance of the London advertising agency where my father was an account executive. My brother Mark was born here, at Roundabout Cottage, in January 1956, just after we moved in. As my parents liked to go skiing at least every other year, they staggered babies at two-year intervals. Philip followed in 1958 and Cangy in 1960. Lizzie was a late surprise in 1966.

Early memories include playing in the muddy lane by the farm next door. Walking down the hill to Chantersluer, where I once fell off the Armstrongs’ pony, catching my foot in the stirrup and being dragged at high speed, head bouncing along a concrete path, as the pony bolted for its stable. Falling in the Norfolk Broads, aged four, watching curiously the vertical clay bank as I slipped underwater. Afternoon walks at home, shuffling alongside a pramload of younger siblings, stopping perhaps at the village post office. Driving to the little town of Horley where Stapleys the grocer’s smelt of cheese and coffee, and men in brown aprons wrapped provisions in paper parcels. Balancing upright on my first bike, wobbling triumphantly round the lawn on a misty, smoky autumn evening. The acetic-acid smell of the glue hardener in the garage, where we got under the feet of our father who was always busy, always making things – sailing boats, bookcases, tables, toy houses. Lying in bed at night, listening to the melancholic drone of propeller engines as the planes came in to land at the new airport at Gatwick.

Dulwich, 1956 – in godfather Norman Dockeray’s garden

The idea that I might actually fly in aeroplanes myself seemed preposterous. Ours was quite an inward life, with no television and not much radio, and I was woefully ignorant about the outside world. The Cuban missile crisis passed me by completely and a year later, when the children in my class told me one morning that Kennedy had been shot, I asked, ‘Who’s Kennedy?’ Likewise the news of Churchill’s final, fatal stroke, overheard at a petrol station in January 1965 on the way back from a London visit to Toad of Toad Hall: only then, at nearly eleven, did I finally register Omdurman, the Boer War, the North-West Frontier, Munich, Dunkirk and the last heroic stand of the Empire in Britain’s ‘finest hour’.

By now we had moved half a mile to a bigger house. It was a shoddily converted stable block but there were tantalising remnants of the demolished Victorian mansion it had once served and, as we hacked and burned through acres of brambles, we unearthed remains of heated greenhouses, brick paths and old apple orchards. We had space to roam, trees to climb, fields and woods to explore. It was a secure, comfortable childhood. We all went to a local private school where about half the children were boarders and, bicycling back each afternoon, I thought how lucky we were to be at home with our parents.

High Trees School may have been private but it was not grand. Lessons were taught in old wooden huts smelling of cedar pencil sharpenings and chalk. On frosty winter mornings the windows were opaque with swirling fern patterns and we had to shake numb hands in time with our table reciting, waiting for the paraffin stove slowly to warm the room. Our headmaster, John Norsworthy, combined high educational ideals with splendid eccentricity. Science and current affairs might have been neglected, but he assumed that any vaguely intelligent child should be introduced to Bach and Wordsworth as a matter of course and should participate enthusiastically when he decided to put on a Purcell opera. One year his nephews and nieces gave him for his birthday a baby goat, Seamus, which grew rapidly to the size of a small cow. Neighbours would report glimpsing at twilight a huge malevolent yellow-eyed beast charging headlong through the Surrey woods, dragging on a tether its master – a devout lay preacher – dressed in a black cassock.

When I was six I attended my first football game, gawky in baggy shorts and steel-studded boots, lurking uncomprehendingly at the end of the pitch next to a boy who for some reason best known to himself had taken up position between two white posts, announcing that he was the ‘goldie’. At home that evening I reported proudly to my mother, ‘One time the ball came flying straight towards my head, but I just managed to duck in time.’ I never really came to terms with team games and in the gym I resented Mrs Buzzoni’s endless ball-patting exercises, when I longed to be vaulting the box and climbing the neglected wall bars.

Holidays were different. Several summers in succession we went to the seaside. I loved leaping off sand dunes, traversing cliffs and exploring the great blowhole on the headland above Trevone Bay. And I loved going out from Padstow harbour, trolling for mackerel and bass with bearded Captain Lombard, or casting a spinner from the rocks at the mouth of the estuary, or clutching the jib sheet as the sailing dinghy skimmed the waves.

I loved the wild power of the sea and perhaps I might have become a sailor if the mountains hadn’t interrupted during the summer of 1963. In August we camped beside a Scottish loch, and on the way north we stayed with some friends in the Lake District. I was allowed to join the adults on a walk up Crinkle Crags. I loved all the ritual of it: the restorative thermos flask, the map and compass in the swirling mist, the smell of peat and moss, the brief excitement of climbing bald rock on the ‘Bad Step’ immortalised in one of Wainwright’s classic pen-and-ink drawings. Then in September came North Wales and that first twilit glimpse of the Glyder mountains as we drove the final stretch to Bangor to stay with my great-uncle Paul and his family. He was Professor of Botany at the university and on the Sunday afternoon he took us up past the great chasm of the Devil’s Kitchen to potter barefoot in the bogs above, pointing out all the different red, yellow and green sphagnums and showing me my first carnivorous sundew plant. Later that week we walked up Snowdon, which I suppose was my first real summit.

This was also the year when Mark and I were first taken skiing. The anticipatory thrill of Advent was intensified by busy preparations in the workshop as our father stripped down second-hand skis, repainting the wooden soles, polishing and sharpening the screw-on metal edges, and adjusted bindings, fitting cables and straps to our leather boots with their exotic shiny lace-hooks and cleated rubber soles. Philip and Cangy were packed off to stay with friends and on Boxing Day the rest of us caught the evening ferry to Dunkirk, continuing by road across northern France to Basel, and on for a second long day’s drive to the Engadine Valley in the far eastern corner of Switzerland.

Four years running we made that epic journey and by the fourth trip only baby Lizzie, out of the five of us, was left at home. Twice the car’s dynamo packed up near Arras. Once the windscreen was smashed two hundred miles short of Dunkirk on the return journey, during an afternoon of horizontally driven sleet. Black ice, freezing fog and the wilful perversity of French signposting all added a sense of challenge. Our father occasionally cursed, blaming it all on Charles de Gaulle, but we children were content in our sleeping bags, comforted by the steady drone of the engine, only dimly aware of the sudden rumble of cobbled streets in yet another obscure town somewhere on the Marne.

It was always thrilling to reach the Alps, but nothing could ever beat the anticipation of that first journey in 1963, after two days finally coming over the crest of the Julier Pass and looking down across the white mountainside to the twinkling lights of St Moritz. Our parents disliked the glitzy resort and all it stood for, and we stayed in a tiny village called Brail further down the valley. Arriving late that first night, Mark and I had to be dissuaded from putting skis on straight away; we went reluctantly to bed but we were up again at dawn, floundering happily in the snow outside the chalet.

We skied mainly at the village of Zuoz, which had two ski lifts. In later years we went increasingly to the big runs above St Moritz and Pontresina. And that was how I saw my first real glaciated mountains. And my first avalanche, spilling, tumbling, cascading with strangely silent power down the great buttressed face of Piz Palu. I don’t think I imagined actually climbing these huge peaks; I just liked being amongst them, content simply to enjoy the rush of air as I sped down prepared pistes. One afternoon on the way back to Brail, we stopped to watch the bobsleighs hurtling down the terrifying Cresta Run and my mother said, ‘Maybe one day you’ll do brave things like that … or climbing the North Face of the Eiger.’

‘What’s the Eiger?’

‘Oh – it’s that huge mountain wall where all those climbers died in the 1930s.’

I was a rather timid child, and I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever attempt anything so brave. Nevertheless I did, one summer in the Rhinog mountains in Wales, enjoy setting myself little climbing problems on the scattered boulders of Harlech grit. It was 1966 and we were all staying at a cottage called Nantcol, complete with three-weeks-old Lizzie and our black Labrador bitch and her latest batch of puppies. Grandfather Gower and his second wife Maud came to stay and one morning I walked with them up to Llyn Hywel. This exquisite little tarn was far enough for them but I asked if they would mind waiting while I continued to the summit of Rhinog Fach.

‘What, up there! Are you sure you should?’ asked Maudie. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Yes, I’ll be careful.’

‘Oh well, darling, I suppose so; we’ll watch you.’

And I was away, racing up the steepening slope, loving the urgent intensity of it, grappling with rock and heather, feet balanced wide, hands searching, testing, grasping, my whole being absorbed totally in the finding of the route, the solving of the puzzle, thrilling to the deepening view down to the lake, now far beneath my feet. And then the glorious surprise of the summit – so broad and flat and smooth after all that rocky steepness. I lay there for ten minutes, soaking up the warmth and the smell of heather and the companionship of a lone kestrel hovering silently beside me in the powder-blue sky.

Three weeks later I was back at school, for my last year at High Trees, struggling to concentrate on simultaneous equations and the Latin subjunctive as I stared wistfully at the newly swelling curves of Susan Whillock’s tunic-clad body and dreamed impossible fantasies of love requited. At Easter she left, and I consoled myself with the thrill of singing in the Messiah, my father conducting the tiny village choir in Charlwood church, and, showman that he was, also doing the baritone solos. That summer I worked hard for the Common Entrance exam, getting reasonable marks in most subjects. I even managed to win a couple of races on Sports Day and, hoping to draw me out of my shell a little, John Norsworthy gave me the lead part in the school play that he had written. On television – for the first time in years we had a working set at home – I watched the news of Israel’s Six-Day War, trying to make sense of history unfolding. Later that summer we all watched the first global satellite transmission, which included the Beatles recording ‘All You Need is Love’, live in London. A few weeks later the Sergeant Pepper album was released. Even in our rural Surrey backwater there was an optimistic buzz in the air. My father was now a company director, with a bigger salary, so that this year we went twice abroad, spending our summer holiday in Brail, walking, fishing, cooking sausages on fires and, for one brief day, going rock-climbing.

It was my mother’s idea to sign up for a day’s collective course with a guide from Pontresina. She and I met the rest of the group early in the morning and followed the guide up through resinous pine woods to a cluster of boulders, where we practised standing on tiny rock nubbins, jamming hands in cracks, grasping side-pulls … defying gravity. As the only child, I was pleased to outperform two rather earnest young German men who scrabbled ineffectually in their natty tailored breeches; and after lunch I was thrilled to tie for the first time onto a rope and take my turn following a full pitch of about thirty metres up a steep crag. I looked up the mountainside to further crags and an enticing, jagged ridge soaring to a summit, and assumed that we would be going up there.

But no. Not a bit of it. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the guide announced that the day’s course was finished. The lack of a summit was disappointing, but I had enjoyed my gentle induction and made a mental note to take this game further when the chance arose.

In September 1967 I started at boarding school. The intention had always been to follow in my father’s steps to Marlborough, where he had been incarcerated during the war, but at the last moment my mother baulked at the long pre-M25 drive from Surrey and suggested the closer establishment of Charterhouse, near Godalming. Ever since Robert Graves’s damning account of the school in Goodbye To All That, it had had a reputation for oppressive philistinism, but my father was persuaded that things might have changed in fifty years and agreed to give it a try. And so, one warm afternoon, as the first apples and conkers began to fall, I arrived amongst the hundred and forty or so new boys to take hesitant steps into the place which would be my second home for the next four and a bit years.

Brushing my teeth the first evening, trying to look inconspicuous in my brand-new woollen dressing gown, I was startled by a gaggle of older boys barging into the washroom and asking eagerly, ‘Are you Venables?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any good at football?’

My hopes wilted. Everyone had assured me that it wasn’t compulsory to be sporty at this place. Now I had only been here two hours and already I was being harangued about football. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Aren’t you related? You know – Our Tel … Terry Venables. Tottenham Hotspur.’ And as they chanted, ‘Ter-ry, Ter-ry’ I blinked myopically and contorted my face into what I hoped was a nonchalant smile, pretending that I had heard of this tiresome man who was apparently the most famous footballer in the country.

In fact I escaped lightly, only having to play football once a week for my first two years, and not at all after that. Cricket – the game I would love to have played if I had not been so totally inept – was only forced on me for my first summer term, one afternoon a week; and because the Yearlings in my house were the best in the school, I was never called on to bowl or bat, and only rarely touched the ball at all, whilst fielding on the far perimeter, enjoying the smell of freshly mown grass and the summery whisper of a light breeze amongst the beech leaves.

During my first term I was delighted when the head of the art department, Ian Fleming-Williams, showing new boys round studio, took us into a room full of books and records and announced, ‘You have as much right to come and sit on these sofas and listen to these records as the head of school.’ I warmed to that note of gentle subversion. Only much later did I discover that he was a scholarship-winning artist in his own right, as well as being a world expert on Constable. His colleagues – the seventy or so masters who made up ‘Brooke Hall’ – were an eclectic bunch; most of them worked extremely hard and between them they amassed an impressive range of talents and enthusiasms.

And the boys – that lumpen mass of adolescents corralled so unnaturally onto a few acres of prime Surrey real estate? Of course there was the occasional bully or boorish slob. But there were also many I admired for their brains and talents. And I think that in the late 1960s the stultifying conformity which can make adolescent life so hard was nowhere near as relentless as it has now become. Mavericks and eccentrics were tolerated, even cherished. No one complained when my beloved Brahms roared from my record player, competing with the Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Stones numbers pulsating through the studies of my house, Gownboys.

Music was the great escape. My violin teacher, Geoffrey Ford, was incisive, encouraging and always funny. My piano teacher, Jean Mabbott, took me on a magical journey, introducing the boundless landscape of the Beethoven sonatas, daring me to risk everything in the leaping octaves of Brahms’s rhapsodies. Aged fourteen, I returned one evening to house from my first orchestra rehearsal chattering excitedly about the glorious surge of a tune I had just discovered in ‘Rachimoskythingamy’; we were accompanying an older boy from my house rehearsing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Earlier that year, singing for the first time with a big choir and orchestra, I was electrified by the thud of the bass drum in Verdi’s Dies Irae, overwhelmed by the arching structure of the Requiem, transfixed by the soprano solo soaring ethereally over the whole massed choir and orchestra at the dazzling climax of Libera Me.

It was all new and exciting. Likewise the rapid induction into art and literature and the arcane wonders of medieval history – a crash course through the highlights of European civilisation. And in case that all sounds horribly earnest, I had my moments of rebellion, enjoying the occasional illicit cigarette amongst the leafy boughs on Northbrook playing fields, or climbing illegally at night on the school’s irresistible Victorian Gothic rooftops, rousing our housemaster, John Phillips, to fine displays of disciplinary wrath which never quite concealed his private amusement. The following term, deterred from climbing, we went caving instead, crawling through a manhole cover into a fascinating warren of forbidden cellars. Needless to say, we were caught and punished again.

There was an older boy, Claude Wreford-Brown, who was a real climber and who occasionally showed off his smooth-soled rock-climbing shoes on the arched gateway of Gownboys Tower. By the time I was working for A levels he had already left and was accompanying the American climber Rick Sylvester up a new route on Yosemite’s gigantic granite wall, El Capitan. Another possible subliminal influence was George Mallory, the Charterhouse schoolmaster who had died close to the summit of Everest in 1924. Every day, walking through the cloister to music school, I passed his memorial plaque, alongside that of another Charterhouse master, Wilfrid Noyce, who had died much more recently in the Pamir mountains, and whose Climber’s Fireside Book was given to me for my fourteenth birthday. Both men had been fine natural climbers and both had been unapologetic romantics, lured by the mystical qualities of wild mountain country. While I had no particular ambition yet to be ‘a mountaineer’ – and certainly no desire for a premature death – I think that at a subconscious level I did hope that perhaps I might follow their steps, at some unspecified future date.

In the meantime I kept reasonably fit by running. Most mornings during my first year I was up before first bell, running my way through an endless backlog of punishments. The dawn start became a habit and, even after I learned to avoid punishments, I often got up voluntarily to do a couple of miles before breakfast, determined to excel in the annual cross-country race. For a while I also enjoyed that wonderfully idiosyncratic game, fives, playing regular doubles until the other three boys in the group tired of my dyspraxic incompetence. I also loved tennis. And I had the occasional camping trip with the Scouts – the only permitted alternative to the military CCF. But school on the whole was an indoor business, with the freedom of the holidays set aside for the outdoors.

In August 1968 we camped with our old friends the Pellys beside Loch Ewe, in Wester Ross, and for the first time in my life I handled the world’s most beautiful climbing rock, Lewisian gneiss, scrambling around the craggy shoreline, occasionally scaring myself with the possibility of a big ankle-snapping fall. The following year we went back to Switzerland and the year after that to the ancient volcanic domes of the Auvergne. That holiday was preceded by an exchange, Mark and I staying with friends in Paris related obliquely to my mother’s Russian-French ancestors. The Potiers had a small house in the Forest of Fontainebleau and did a bit of climbing. One Sunday afternoon they took Mark and me to climb on the sandstone boulders which have been a playground for generations of Parisian climbers. Mark, I think, was indifferent. I loved it, and insisted on going back every afternoon, on one occasion, with the eldest Potiers boy, Vincent, managing briefly to get stuck on top of the famous Eléphant boulder, while Vincent’s mother tried unsuccessfully to loop a rescuing rope over the top. We managed eventually to slither back down to the ground.

The following summer in Norway, camping beneath the immense Jostedal Glacier, I longed to be cutting steps in the ice and gazed covetously at smooth granite walls looming out of turquoise fjords. Back in Surrey I telephoned a boy in the village called Jonathan Watkins. He was two years younger than me, just fifteen, but was reputed to be a climber. His ambitions included a plan to read the whole of War and Peace whilst floating on a lilo on Snowdon’s Llyn d’Arrdhu, and hitch-hiking to Kathmandu. And he played the violin. He seemed to have the right approach to life, so I asked if he would take me climbing.

We drove over to the Sussex–Kent border to do some routes on the sandstone rocks at Stone Farm and later that autumn we went to the more extensive Harrison’s Rocks. I bought my first pair of ‘PAs’ – close-fitting shoes with smooth high-friction rubber soles, invented by the Parisian mountaineer Pierre Allain. For Christmas my parents gave me a climbing waistbelt, steel karabiner and standard forty-metre length of polypropylene rope – unsuitable for leading, but quite adequate for ‘top-roping’ on the little sandstone cliffs of South-East England. I never managed the harder routes at Harrison’s, but succeeding on even the easier ones was immensely satisfying. Even more satisfying, in a grim, brutal sort of way, were the natural chimneys at High Rocks, where you thrutched, squirmed and grunted your way up between frictionless walls of dank mossy stone.

In December 1971 I finished at Charterhouse. Apart from spells of homesickness I had generally enjoyed my time there, aware, I think, how incredibly lucky I was to be given all the possibilities of a richly endowed public school. Doors had been opened, interests nurtured, horizons stretched by other boys cleverer and more talented than me. True, I was socially inept and didn’t have any real friends, but at least I had discovered that I could work hard and manage on five hours’ sleep a night if necessary, greedy to do all the things I wanted to do. In my final year I had particularly enjoyed the school’s traditional endurance test, the ‘Fifty Miles March’, walking the sixteen-hour journey alongside a boy called Martin Winter, reciting manic Ginsberg protest poems through the long night, and finally hobbling home through the silent streets of Godalming as the milkmen started their pre-dawn rounds. After a blissful two-hour soak in a hot bath, I had spent the rest of the day on a frenetic round of concerts and music competitions, riding my endorphin high. Now, in my last term, I enjoyed a final glut of music and painting, rather resentfully making some additional time to mug up my British and European History and Latin translation for the Oxford entrance exam, which I assumed somewhat arrogantly that I would pass. Luckily I did, because every other university I applied to turned me down.

And so I walked out into the real world, with nine months to fill before going up to Oxford. During the winter I did odd bits of voluntary work at various hospitals and hostels in Bermondsey; then, in April, a few days before my eighteenth birthday, I flew to Israel to work on a kibbutz. After landing at Tel Aviv I took a bus up the coast road and, as instructed, got out at a stop a few miles north of the city. The bus disappeared towards Netanya and alone in the darkness I shouldered my rucksack and started walking up an empty lane flanked by black cypresses.

Something clicked loudly behind the trees. My scalp prickled as I imagined terrorists lurking with guns. I walked faster. The clicking continued. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to keep walking. Then at last there was a gap in the cypress trees and in the dim starlight I glimpsed the harmless sprinklers flicking spray across the fields. A few minutes later I reached the lights of the kibbutz, found a Swiss volunteer called Ruedi working the night shift in the plastics factory, and he took me to the little hut which would be my home for the next few weeks.

I had dreamed of picking lemons and oranges, but most of my time at Yakum was spent washing up in the kitchen and clearing tables in the dining room – the haderochel. At first I was annoyed to find myself terribly homesick and I considered doing a bunk, running back to England. But I stuck it out, and became gradually quite fond of the place, working in the mornings and spending afternoons reading, practising the piano or swimming in the Mediterranean nearby. In the mornings we were usually up at five, working for an hour and a half before breakfast. And what breakfasts! I was only just eighteen and still growing, and I feasted rapturously on yogurt and honey, olives, cheese, sour cream, eggs, bread, marmalade, cheese, coffee and huge succulent Jaffa oranges.

Word got around that I played the piano and occasionally I accompanied a violinist called Edith during her leaves from the army; but most of the resident ‘kibbutzniks’ were quite aloof, self-contained, even a little dour. Or at least that’s how they seemed to a very gauche eighteen-year-old. Nearly all of them were Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. The kibbutz had been founded in 1947, and it was sobering to think that most of the adults who ran the place were people who had somehow survived or escaped the Holocaust, bringing with them a legacy of unimaginable horror. No wonder they seemed brittle.

My hut was shared with a Japanese volunteer called Yoshito. I liked his courteous reserve and found him cheerfully inscrutable until the night of 30 May 1972, when Japanese terrorists ran amok with machine guns and grenades at Tel Aviv airport nearby, slaughtering twenty-four people on behalf of the PFLP. For a few days afterwards my room-mate was profoundly depressed and apologetic for what his countrymen had done.