On the Hill

I was stopping off at my dad’s house just outside Llanrwst, and with no kids to wake me I slept in until eight, then woke him up to see if he wanted to go climbing before I drove home to Sheffield.
He’d just returned from working for a month with street children in India, trying to help a charity in Bombay introduce some outdoor pursuits to the kids.  It sounded pretty mad.  He had people who where going to teach canoeing who couldn’t swim, and the local crag was a Buddhist temple built into the rock, with century old carvings the only belay points.  I assumed this was part of his ongoing 30 year midlife crisis, but the trip sounded like a good remedy, leaving him obviously thankful for what he had and reflective.  “I’m giving up golf” he told me, as we sat having breakfast.  As someone once said I always though golf spoiled a good walk, but this was the only normal dad like thing my dad did.  When I asked him why, he just said “I’ve been playing it for 20 years and I’m still shit, it’s time to move on”.

I’d come over in Wales to give a talk to a group of psychical training instructors from the RAF the day previously.  It was meant to be on motivation, and for a while I’d been racking my brains on how to go about doing a classic corporate talk, all that leadership, team building, and goals rubbish climbers make up after the fact (it’s really all about glorious greed, ambition, selfishness and getting one up on your mates!).  Anyway in the end I thought bollocks and decided to just tell them a load of stories about failing.

One the night I was told that there would be ‘some people from Hereford’ coming, which confused me for a moment, and I asked who, imagining they meant some farmers, or the local women’s institute or something.  ‘Some people from the regiment’ I was told, and again was a bit baffled, after all weren’t all these people in some kind of regiment?  Still looking non the wiser, the words ‘SAS’ where whispered. 

When we’d finished our breakfast, and my dad had showed me some photos from his trip; lots of beautiful but desperately smiling kids, I suggested we go climbing.  When I was younger my dad always wanted to go climbing, dragging me along to hold his ropes, then drag me up after him; and I suppose holding your dad on his first leader fall together is a sort of right of passage (Great Portland street, Millstone, 1985).  He was climbing E2’s and E3’s when I was a kid and to me he was the best climber in the world.  As I got more into climbing the roles reversed, and it was him holding my falls.  I could tell he was losing his hunger when one day after doing Pincushion and the Fang at Tremadog he suggested we go for a cup of tea when asked what next, even though we had hours of day light left.  At the time I couldn’t believe it, but now I can see that it’s easier to sit and talk to friends over a cup of tea, rather then shout distant commands along ropes.
He didn’t look too keen about going climbing, and instead suggested that we go for a walk.  I thought about going up the Glyders, but he suggested we walk up the hill behind his house.  It sounded boring but I agreed anyway.  “There’s something I want to show you” he said.

The gig was held in the back of a British legion, and I felt like a character out of Phoenix Nights, as I stood there setting up between the bingo machine and the bakelite mixing desk complete with 8 track cassette slot.  The chairs where set up as if for a séance, which is always a bad omen, and I tried to spot anyone for Hereford as the PTI’s marched in; although I expected they’d been laying in the back among the stacked chairs for a week anyway.
In the dimly lit room they looked like by far the scariest audience I’d ever had, trained killers and sadists everyone, but with well ironed jeans, ordered to come and listen to a scruffy Northern bloke talk about his holidays.  After starting with a cheeky ‘is there anyone here from Hereford tonight’ -which went down to a silence that made me feel like I Gerry Adams - I went straight into it.  “Now anyone can be good a successes, but how many people are good at failure…”

We left the house and walked slowly up the hill.  It was pleasant, up narrow hedged lanes, over styles, and up an acorn strewn path.  WE arrived at a lane of wonderfully tall trees, set as if intended as the entrance to a stately home that was never built, totally out of place among the traditional welsh trees that dotted the hillside.  They were crazy, almost ostentatious in a tree sort of way, looking like giant redwoods, metres thick, with bark like an old giant’s skin.  My dad began talking about how he loved coming up here and just looking at these trees, and wonder how they got here, who planted them and why, after all they must have known that they would never see them like we did. 

As the final slide faded I slipped off the stage for a sly drink of water, glad it was over.  The room was full of laughter, with the usual ‘what f**k was he going on about’, look in a few smiling faces.  It turned out that most of the people looked like climbers, but tidier and with short hair, so things had gone OK.  But then I saw something large coming towards me from the shadows at the back of the room, a guy so big and scary I had the urge to run, but knew that like a bear there was no point.  He looked fierce, like a fist on two legs, like a corrector out of Bravo Two Zero, no doubt a man who had a Hereford post code.
I braced myself for his attack, as he shot his hand out, no doubt ready to rip my feeble heart out and bite a chunk out of it while it still beat before my eyes.  “Great talk mate” he said to my surprise, shaking me by the hand, “you’re bloody nuts aren’t ya, I don’t know how you do it.’  Not knowing what to say I just asked if he was into climbing.  “Yes” he said “I really like climbing in Scotland.’  Grasping onto something we had in common I asked if he’d done anything this winter, as the conditions had been so good and all that.  “No’ he said “I’ve been over in Iraq.”  ‘Oh’ I said.

Before I left the CO grabbed me.  For a moment I thought he was going to shout at me for being so scruffy, or about making that joke about how a PTI motivates people (the answer was hit them harder).  “Were running a symposium on combat training to the Royal Marines, and I’d like you to tell them what you told us” he said.  Life is strange sometimes.

We walked down the hill, back towards the house, passed fields full of sheep and their lambs, fingers of wool blowing through the fences as we passed by.
“Look at the lambs” my dad said, stopping.  “When they are born they jump and play all day long, only stopping to drink their mothers milk.  We like them because they seem so carefree and happy, they remind us of being children”.  “Then one day they turn into sheep, no longer playing or running about, just standing silently chewing for the rest of their lives.” 
“You know what it is that changes?” he asked.  “Their mothers stop feeding them, and overnight they become adults because the must stop playing and begin to eat to survive”.  I watched the sheep.  I wondered if my dad was making a deeper point, just as you may be thinking about why I’m telling you this now.  Perhaps he was and so am I, or perhaps this is just a story about a walk and some sheep.

We walked slowly back down the hill, leaving the sheep to drift into the shadows of the amazing trees.  “we’ll go climbing next time you come down” my dad said.