Guest review by Nick Hodges: MEMOIRS OF A FELLWANDERER by Alfred Wainwright

  

"... an easy ability and simplicity of style; his delightful pen and ink illustrations of mountain and moorland ..."

Photograph with king parrot by Judith Ramage

Nick Hodges is an Englishman living in Australia. He is a teacher and freelance journalist concentrating on Travel and Nature. His work has been published in Britain's Sunday Times, The Times Educational Supplement and the Tourist Board magazine, In Britain. Down Under, his work has appeared in leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Sun Herald. He has recently completed 20 years of writing a monthly Nature Notes article for a Sydney newspaper. He has designed and taught adult courses on The Birds of Sydney.

Wainwright: to those in the know the name is synonymous with fell (or mountain) walking and his guides to Lakeland, the Coast to Coast Path and the Pennine Way are legendary.

AW - as he is often known - died in 1991 shortly before his Memoirs of a Fellwanderer was published.

Like me, his walking guide books are getting on in years. But whenever I visit the north of England and if the weather half co-operates, the need to climb to high places grips me and so off I go with the appropriate Wainwright volume in my hand.

 

It's AW's way with words; an easy ability and simplicity of style; his delightful pen and ink illustrations of mountain and moorland; Cold Pike and High Pike; Dove Crag and Loft Crag.

Wainwright grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, where he worked in local government before moving both job and home to the Lake District with which he'd fallen in love at first sight.

Subsequently he came to know the paths and the fells like nobody else. In his Memoirs he explains how he took to drawing, writing and publishing his works and the many years of constructing what must be his greatest achievement: the seven volumes of the Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells.

And Wainwright himself? His Memoirs indicate a man of both patience and impatience. Perhaps a grumpy old man? 'I suffer fools badly', he writes. When his first wife left he says, 'I never saw her again. I was not greatly concerned'. However, Betty, his second wife of 21 happy years, who writes the foreword to the Memoirs, sings his praises: he was 'a sensitive man hiding himself behind a gruff exterior'. Certainly he could be self-deprecating: 'I received an award from the Queen: she didn't know the reason for it either'.

AW disliked people walking in groups for the noise and the damage they caused to the trails. Coming across a single file of ramblers on a narrow mountain path he would acknowledge the first and then, as he passed the others one at a time, would studiously ignore them.

When recognised on the fells he would often deny his identity. Groups always received a 'no'. Single walkers had a better chance - especially if young and female.

Walking alone was his way; nearly always the only way. He distinguishes between loneliness and aloneness. The fells were all he needed: his 'silent friends'.

It's all in the Memoirs.

Also, how he hated gadgets and all things mechanical. He distrusted cameras even though he used one.

Among Wainwright's other interests were cats and Coronation Street and, perhaps most importantly, the charity, Animal Rescue. As for books: 'maps have always been my favourite literature'. Between completing one of his seven pictorial guides and starting the next, he writes, 'I paused only to refill my pipe'. All of his spare time and energy were needed for the research and compilation of these pocket-sized volumes.

He never missed a day's work and was never ill. His excellent health he believes was as a result of not having owned a vehicle, preferring to walk whenever possible; yet he smoked 'like a chimney'.

Nearing the end of his Memoirs AW lets off steam about the state of things. He cannot understand those who suffer from depression, bemoans the fact that the Lake District is crowded with caravans - and visitors of the 'wrong' kind; has a good old rant suggesting what we might today call right wing views. And his preferred punishment for football hooligans? I'm not writing it here: suffice to say it makes the blood run perilously close to cold.

But then he relents with a complete turnabout extolling the virtues and beauty of the world: 'this book is not a personal lament but a thanksgiving'.

Most walking guides praise that which they promote and gloss over the hard bits. Not Wainwright. He prefers Lakeland walking to the Pennine Way where, 'the cold so shrivelled some of the body organs necessary for a full and enjoyable life that I feared they were perished for ever'.

But I digress. That's from another book by Wainwright. The quotation is here simply because I like it.

Right now I feel that need: it's time to wax my boots, take a guide book and head for the hills. I'll go alone of course - but I know AW will be with me.

Memoirs of a Fellwanderer is published by Frances Lincoln.

See also Nick's review of This Birding Life by Stephen Moss

WR note: As well as his treasured books and his influence on countless fellwalkers, Alfred Wainwright's great legacy to the book world is the Wainwright Prizes, now the world's foremost award for nature and conservation writing. Established in 2013 as a single award, it's now expanded to include various categories, including children's books and illustration. We've featured several shortlisted and winning books on the blog and will soon post a review of the 2025 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: EVEREST 1953 by Mick Conefrey

 

"The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill"

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His latest publication, Memory's Ransom, is published by Conrad Press.

British rock climbers pioneered the craze for Alpine exploration in the early nineteenth century, followed by nationals of those countries which might have laid a more immediate claim to proprietorship of the great alpine peaks in their country. Perhaps it may be put down to a Victorian thrust for exploration and conquest riding the crest of imperial expansion. The often incomprehensible obsession with ice and adversity – the polar expeditions – ensued. They formed a part, we may say, of the similar preoccupation with heroic failure which began with the Charge of the Light Brigade, the spilling of blood on foreign sand, a calamity puffed by Sir Henry Newbolt’s jingoist doggerel, Invictus, and finally belittled by the heroic triumph of the Battle of Britain. The fascination of ice perhaps began with Cabot’s search for the North-West Passage and underpins the drive to ‘conquer’ Everest – named for a Surveyor General of India; local names were rejected because of native hesitation about allowing foreigners entry. The Tibetan name, Qomolangma, means Holy Mother, and it must be clarified, mountains are never conquered; they may be climbed but remain a challenge forthwith.

Edward Whymper laid the benchmark. An English illustrator, born in 1861, he was sent to the Pennine Alps to make drawings and, fascinated by the daunting sight of the Matterhorn ‘peak of the Meadows’ near Zermatt, a mighty wind-whipped, partly snowbound pyramid of rock, a giant of those mountains, he determined to climb it. At 5.30 am on 13th July 1865, he and four other Britons with two Zermatt guides set off from Chamonix, bivouacked overnight and, at dawn next day began their assault. At 1.40 pm, Whymper and another climber ‘skipped up the final slope’ to the summit. (The word had not yet been debased as a verb – Americans again.) Descending, one man, roped to three others, slipped: fatally, all fell.

The triumph is reckoned by some to mark the end of the Golden Age of Alpine first assaults. Whymper is honoured with a statue in Chamonix.

In the 1920s, the outstanding climber George Mallory led three expeditions on Everest, the first two times eschewing oxygen - considered infra dig, albeit they happily used stimulants and other drugs. Two failures preceded their final attempt in 1924 when the climbers did use oxygen to combat the debilitating effect of perilously thin air. Mallory and his companion may have reached the top; nobody knows. but both men died and Mallory’s body was not found until 1999. He is alleged to have answered the question ‘Why try to climb it?’ with ‘Because it’s there.’

From that final effort, somehow, the British thought of Everest as ‘their’mountain and Edmund Hillary, a bee-keeper from New Zealand, exceptional Himalyan climber, took part in several exploratory expeditions mounted by British teams from the 1930s on.

The Swiss mounted their own attempts – all dependent on permission from the Nepalese government - and, in 1952, came very close, even as the organisation of another British expedition team proceeded, headed by Colonel John Hunt, a first-rate mountaineer. Nepalese Sherpas were routinely called upon to act as guides, porters and support climbers; one, Tensing Norgay, an exceptional mountaineer, climbed with the Swiss and, warming to their amiable attitude, found the more militaristic hauteur of the British far from conducive. Luckily, Hunt was no martinet but that rare species among miltary men, a fine, sympathetic leader with none of that egotism characteristic of so many British officers. Tensing’s inclusion in the 1953 team was fortuitous. Not only did he prove himself a priceless asset as a climber but he bonded closely with the highly experienced Hillary, another ‘outsider’ like him, to form an indelible partnership.

The politics, tensions, rivalries, accommodations of assembling the team, martialling the complicated manner of approach, preparation and final assault – who was to be chosen? – are skilfully narrated, without bias, even the drama of getting the news to London for Coronation Day in 1953, itself a mini epic; all described with meticulous detail and understanding. The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill, the outcome being known.

As to the shabby behaviour and misreporting of clamouring newshounds after the climb, this forms a sorry footnote to a wonderful exploit, rightly celebrated as a British triumph, albeit the two men who stood on the top of the world had citizenship by right of inclusion as men of the colonial governance. No matter. Their achievement does not wait on partisan claim. They did something none else had ever done; their bravery and fortitude are for all humanity. If their success inevitably overshadows the work of their companions, without that superlative support they might have failed.

Everest 1953 is published by Oneworld.

 More reviews by Graeme:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

TOUCHING THE VOID by Joe Simpson, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of giddy exhilaration ..."

Linda Newbery has written many novels for young readers and one for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (published in paperback as Missing Rose). Her Victorian Gothic young adult novel, Set in Stone, was children's category winner in the Costa Book Awards. She is currently working on a new novel and completing a non-fiction title which will be published this year. 

Just looking at that cover is enough to make my stomach lurch in fear. But, although my own experience is limited to walking to easy summits with at most a little rock-scrambling, I love the lure of mountains and am fascinated by the courage and single-mindedness, even fanaticism, of those who tackle forbidding heights.

I read Joe Simpson's account of his extraordinary near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes many years ago, and have seen the Kevin Macdonald film. This time I listened on Audible, and although obviously I knew the outcome - and so does everyone, as here's Joe Simpson writing about it - I was as gripped as on my first reading.

The facts of what happened on the slopes of Siula Grande are well known far beyond mountaineering circles. With climbing partner Simon Yates, Joe completes the ascent of the treacherous, previously unclimbed, 4,500-foot West Face of the mountain. Shortly after they begin to descend, Joe falls, fracturing his leg and driving his tibia through his knee. With conditions worsening, no fuel for their stove and no food left, they attempt to descend quickly to the glacier, Simon supporting his partner on a rope from above, but he inadvertently lowers Joe over a sheer drop. Knowing that both are in mortal danger, and slipping from a snow ledge himself, Simon cuts the rope, sending Joe to (as he presumes) his death.

Joe Simpson has always made it clear that he doesn't blame Yates; it seems to be climbers' ethos that anyone in that dreadful situation would do the same. But Joe, instead of falling to his death, plunges into a crevasse, landing on a snow bridge. Astonished at still being alive he finds himself in darkness and extreme cold, with frostbitten fingers, a fathomless drop beneath him, an excruciating injury, fading torch battery and no provisions … Yet against fearsome odds he slowly extricates himself, facing then a long, agonised crawl over glacier and boulder fields before reaching the relative safety of base camp. Even then - will he reach camp (itself the height of Mont Blanc, and two days' rough walking from the nearest village) before Simon and their waiting colleague Richard depart for Lima, as surely they will, with no reason to wait? It says much for the skill of the writing that even though Joe obviously does make it, tension remains high. 

Whether your knowledge of climbing paraphernalia and techniques is greater or less than mine, it's a mesmerising read. A large part of the appeal is that while describing his 25-year-old self in retrospect as "bold, ambitious, or even a little crazy ... too much testosterone and too little imagination," Joe Simpson is also frank about his feelings of weakness and despair. Though loth to let Simon see how scared he is at particularly dangerous moments of the ascent - his tough, capable persona must be maintained - to us he lets the mask slip. It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of exhilaration. There is so much I could pick out, but I’ll just give these samples:

On reaching the summit: "I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious - a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me ... the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical and frightening conclusion."

After the first fall: "We both knew the truth, it was very simple. I was injured and unlikely to survive. Simon could get down alone. While I waited on his actions, it felt as if I was holding something terrifyingly fragile and precious." Simon could, he realises, simply leave him there to die.

When he emerges from the crevasse and realises that his struggle is far from over: “I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact … If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse … In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices … I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength.”

In a new epilogue, following the making of the film, Joe wonders what course his life would have taken without his Siula Grande experience, concluding that he’d have looked for more and more extreme challenges and probably killed himself in the process, as many of his peers have. Instead, although he continued climbing, the international success of Touching the Void launched a career as writer and speaker.

I think I’ll continue my armchair mountaineering with another Joe Simpson memoir, This Game of Ghosts. Who else can’t resist mountain books? What do you recommend?

Touching the Void is published by Vintage.

The Audiobook is read by Daniel Weyman (Joe) and Andrew Wincott (Simon), with an introduction by Chris Bonington.

See also: Linda Newbery's review of a ghostly mountaineering novel, Michelle Paver's Thin Air.