Mike Banks leads the first pitch of Wreckers' Slab:SV
Memories have been stirred recently by recent features on the Very Severely Frightened
theme. I have often been frightened — of course I have, jibberingly so — but
not usually on a VS route. Memorable VSs — yes plenty of them. My very first
was Cir Mhor's South Ridge Direct on Arran. I was slightly apprehensive about
leading the crux Y cracks but in the event I coped okay and the dominant mood
was one of contentment, lapping up glorious acres of granite and savouring the
thrill of using for the first time my very own rope, nuts and slings. Another
beauty, but harder, was Longland's Climb on Cloggy. But for real pant-wetting,
mouth-drying, leg-trembling terror, I can only offer Slape, an unfashionable
little number in the Llanberis Pass.
It was a cold March day, 1974. My first climb after
breaking a knee four months earlier. The crux wall on, I think, the second
pitch, seemed horribly steep. I had no arm strength and no technique to
compensate. Stuck too far above protection, fighting the hysterical sewing
machine judder of my legs, clawing frantically with numb fingers, I hung on for
ages, whimpering at the prospect of limb-smashing spikes on the belay ledge
beneath, before finally dredging up some precious reserves of adrenaline to
scrabble up the last moves to safety.
I'm not sure I could cope with that level of fear now.
At the time it was a therapeutic opportunity to triumph over my own weakness
and the victory was deliciously sweet, restoring some much needed self respect.
I can remember those sensations vividly but details of the actual climb are
vague and I'm ashamed to say that I have forgotten which fellow undergraduate it
was who witnessed my solipsistic jibbering. In other words, there's not really
an article's worth of material. So I am going to fast forward 20 years to a
very different VS experience. On this late summer day in 1994 there was no
epic, no cold-sweat-fear, no victorious catharsis but the route was a classic
and it was made specially memorable by my companion for the day, an old friend
and neighbour, Mike Banks.
At 71 he was still horribly energetic. Wrecker's Slab,
a famous VS on the wild north coast of Devon, was to be his final limbering up
before a charity ascent of the Old Man of Hoy. As we drove down the M5 he remarked
cheerfully: "I bet Bonington can't wait for me to kick the bucket so that
I don't clutter up the Golden Oldie media slot." I asked if he was going
to write his memoirs: "I'd love to, but I'll have to wait until quite a
few retired generals have fallen off their perch or they'll all be sueing
me." Rebellious, provocative, impatient of authority, he used sometimes,
like that other great iconoclast John Barry, to be a thorn in the flesh of the
Royal Marines. However, after wartime service in the Far East, he found his
niche in Cornwall as a climbing instructor in the cliff assault wing and became
one of the great aficionados of South West climbing. One of his juniors was a
young naval doctor called Tom Patey, and it was with him in 1958 that Banks
made the first ascent of one of the world's highest and most beautiful peaks,
Rakaposhi.
Like so many Himalayan summits, Rakaposhi was snatched
at the eleventh hour, in this case on the second expedition Mike had led to the
mountain. The weather was lousy and by all normal criteria the two men at the
top camp should have gone down, but as Mike recalled: "I'd invested two
years in this mountain. It was probably our last chance and we had to get up
the bloody thing." So they went for it, boldly, and got away with
it,escaping with just a touch of frostbite. "And what about The
Doctor," I asked, "how did you get on?" "Oh, he was a
lively, talkative, irreverent sort of bloke. We were bound to get on
well."
It was the same doctor, the incomparable explorer,
Patey, whose route we had gone to climb. Wrecker's Slab, in 1959, was one of
the first explorations on the Culm — the unique rock of North Devon, laid down
millions of years ago as mud, then squeezed, compressed and solidified to slaty
consistency, folded, twisted and finally forced up into the tilted slabs which
now brood over the Atlantic. Wrecker's is the largest of several overlapping
slabs, faintly reminiscent of Cloggy's West Buttress, which form the headland
of Cornakey Cliff. lain Peters, in his admirably idiosyncratic guide to North
Devon and Cornwall, pays fulsome tribute to the first ascensionists — his
grandfather, Admiral Lowder, Zeke Deacon and Tom Patey, 'who had all the
necessary qualifications for success; experience on loose rock, ability and,
uniquely, a robust, individualistic, almost "buccaneering" approach to
climbing in the finest tradition'.Inspired
by those stirring words, Banks and I left the car and headed across the fields
under a darkening sky.
Rain began to
fall as we geared up at the top of
the cliff, so we waited under a wind-bent hawthorn. Mike ruminated about a Quaker friend: "I don't think much of religion but
at least these chaps have lots of
silence — very conducive to thought' while I got out my camera for some stock shots of the thinker, enjoying an all too
rare moment of silence, under a crown
of thorns. Then the rain slowed down
to a drizzle and we headed down, seaward.
The
sea was a wonderful sculpture of glistening pebbles. Fronded fins of
culm stretched jagged out to sea, like Chaucer's 'grizzly, fiendish, blacke rockes' and one could imagine the
wreckers at dead of
night, with their deceiving lanterns, luring unwary ships to disaster. But we
were there by day, the
drizzle had stopped and within minutes the slab's sheen had evaporated.
Banks led the first awkward
step off the beach (which turned out to be the hardest move in all of the
400ft of the climb) and we were away.After the great build up of legend and tradition the route was, dare I say it, a little bit
disappointing.
By the second pitch
Banks was muttering: "Don't
think much of that, certainly not VS. Still, it is the biggest sea cliff route in England." And even if the moves
did seem disappointingly easy, the atmosphere
on that great tilted sweep of culm, speckled orange with lichen, sprouting translucent remains of spring's pinks and still juicily pungent
samphire, with the turquoise ocean
far below, breaking white on the
boulders, was truly exhilarating.And,
even if time and experience has tamed the
route, it is still no place for complacency; any one of the thousands of slaty tiles which corrugate its surface might break off without warning and,
as the admiral's grandson warns,
protection is indeed sparse.
The sun
was now bright, with that special clarity of early autumn and both of us were
busy photographing. Banks, ever image conscious, wished that he had left his
helmet behind: "I'm making a cottage
industry out being a wrinkly; my white hair is my most valuable feature," but he still looked quite striking with his bushy Asterix moustache.
A moment later, with uncanny
coincidence, we found a little
white-haired gnome wedged in a crack. I stuck it for a moment on Banks's head, then put it respectfully back in its crack, wondering what Friendless wag had brought it up there for protection. Another long, sunny pitch and we were on top, following a final arete till it merged with the
green and russet cliff top.
The rain
returned so we retreated to the
Morwenstowe pub, where I ordered a
pint of the excellent local bitter and Mike asked smugly for an alcohol free lager. "It helps
the arthtitis." I could easily
have stayed all afternoon, sinking
into a beery stupor but the breezy teetotaller suggested that while the weather made up its mind we should visit the church, a Culm masterpiece, fortified in places by foreign Dartmoor granite. The Saxon font, Norman dogstooth arches and intricate 16th century wood carving testified to centuries of continuity at this ancient place
of worship, making a mockery of our
frivolous pastime on the rocks below but we were ostensibly there to climb, so as soon as the sun re-emerged we
headed back to the cliffs.
We finished the day at Oldwall's
Point, on an almost Alpine arete
above a huge expanse of glittering ocean, with Banks posed patiently for hackneyed silhouttes against the
westering sun. A few days later he established his new age record for the Old Man of Hoy and raised a large sum of money for his Quaker friend's charity. I had
longer to wait for my next climb but
that seemed pretty unimportant after
such a wonderful day out on the incomparable Culm cliffs of north Devon.
Stephen Venables:
First Published in High 166
