Distant Snows by John Harding

Author:John Harding [John Harding]
Language: eng
Format: epub

– Chapter 10 –

End of an Era

The Paradiso circus had not been copybook alpinism and reinforced the lesson of never chancing your arm with alpine weather. But it had been a lot of fun and it was a sadness that I never climbed in the Alps with any of that equipe again. Big-hearted Charlie, who introduced us to High-Low Poker Everest Base Camp style, was bound for higher things as Chris Bonington’s first-choice medical officer and Peter disappeared from our lives until Georgina and I joined his 1991 Alpine Club ‘Green Expedition’ to Bhutan. And then, only months after our Paradiso adventure, John died from a brain tumour aged fifty-five on Christmas Eve 1976. His death was a grievous loss. Nothing he did later in life quite matched his brilliant triumph on Pumasillo, an ascent immortalised on the cover of George Band’s book Summit that commemorates the Alpine Club’s 150th anniversary. John’s latter years were marred by ill health and the breakdown of his marriage, but I shall always remember him for the innate mountaineering ability, judgment and an imperturbability that made him the ideal climbing companion. Also, for his courage, humour and easy gift of friendship.

The following year, 1977, marked my last career crossroad when, at the mature age of forty-three, I became a partner in Norton Rose. Two months later, we bought ‘Lingmell’, eight Heathview Gardens, a Soames Forsythian villa set in the middle of Putney Heath which was to become our family home for the next twenty-five years. Serendipitously, Heathview Gardens had a raft of mountain and adventure associations. The name of our house had been chosen by its original Cumbrian owners to remind them of Scafell’s main outlier. Number seven, the house next door, had briefly belonged to Ernest Shackleton. In number thirteen, ‘The Corner House’, lived Lord Hailsham, an honorary member of the Alpine Club and brother of my ski mountaineering mentor Neil, while the house opposite his had been that of Walter Haskett Smith, the ‘Father of British Rock Climbing’, whom was still fondly remembered by an elderly neighbour being driven daily by his liveried chauffeur in a Rolls Royce to his barrister’s chambers in the temple. And yes! Sean Connery had once lived just round the corner.

Shortly before we bought Lingmell, it looked as if I might not be around to enjoy it. This was a consequence of my having a ridiculous bicycle race with two cheeky young city slickers who regularly overtook me on the Embankment in the course of my daily ride to my firm’s Moorgate offices. To turn the tables, I bought myself a brand new bike, but the outcome was the same. Not only was I worsted but also finished up in the Intensive Care Unit of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital with a suspected heart attack. Georgina arrived at my bedside waving a mortgage agreement that she insisted that I sign before my demise. Happily, the purported heart attack turned out to be nothing more than a nasty viral infection and I was discharged after a week.

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