Great Gable above Wasdale: Alfred Heaton Cooper:Heaton Cooper Studios
Whenever I go into Brackenclose, into the men’s dormitory,
my eye roves up to the top bunk in the far left-hand corner of the room, and to
the rafters above it. I’ll tell you why. The time is long ago, and the place is
Langdale on a fine December afternoon. The occasion is an unofficial meet of
the L.U.M.C. As students, when we came to the mountains for a weekend, our behaviour
was very similar to that of small children let out into the playground at
playtime. We burst upon the scene with just the same mixture of elation and
surplus undirected vigour. We also took enormous pleasure in each other’s
company and experienced all the cheerful solidarity of the gang.
This explains, though it will hardly excuse, the
extraordinary decision we made to hike over Esk Hause and Windy Gap to
Ennerdale in order to force an entry into Black Sail Hut which we knew to be
closed. We somehow persuaded ourselves that we could enter the building without
causing damage and naturally we would leave it in as good condition as we found
it, if not better.
The idea came to us as we sat expansively over a farmhouse
tea at the foot of The Band. It may well have originated from one member of our
group who is now a highly respected officer of the Club but who at that time
had a propensity for lighting the blue touch-paper.
The farmhouse tea, which we were having as a late lunch, was
too enjoyable an occasion to hurry and when we rose from it it was nearly three
o’clock. We were already in shadow but the sunlit bracken shone like copper on
the slopes of Pike of Stickle and walking in darkness was part of the idea. We
filed up the side of Mickleden and by the time we reached the foot of Rossett
Ghyll darkness had advanced upon us, assisted by a huge black cloud which had
been forming in the west. We climbed up the steep and rocky slope into an
altogether different and forbidding region of gloom, darkness and incipient
storm. What had started as a delightful lark was changing rapidly into a
serious undertaking. By the time we reached the top of Rossett Ghyll we were in
a tempest.
The rain came at us downwards, sideways and even upwards.
The wind buffeted us in a brutish and unseemly manner. Angle Tarn was seen as a
livid blur in the general blackness. Progress was slow. Our party was seven or
eight strong. Or seven or eight weak, it would be truer to say, for keeping
everybody together was not easy. We had regarded the path over Esk Hause as an
unmistakable highway. In the roaring dark, however, and with patches of snow
across it, it proved surprisingly easy to lose. We also lost the capacity to
estimate time and our walking, and waiting, and struggling seemed interminable.
To an observer we would have looked like a demented, squabbling rabble, but we
were only trying to make ourselves heard, and keep our feet in the savage wind.
We had frequent discussions about the route, yelling our opinions, staggering
in the wind, occasionally clustering round a wet map by the light of a failing
torch.
Somewhere on the top of Esk Hause my balaclava flew off my
head in a violent gust of wind and disappeared for ever, leaving me with a
strong feeling of outrage. I wrapped my scarf round my ears and we pushed on. A
dangerous looking void ahead turned out to be the nearby waters of Sprinkling
Tarn. No doubt a ragged cheer went up from our wretched little band. All should
now be plain sailing to Sty Head. But a curious thing about walking the hills
at night is an unconscious reluctance to go downhill. Visibility on a very dark
night is limited to little more than a yard. One can generally see or sense the
ground at one’s feet, but anything lower than that is indistinguishable.
One’s
tendency then to step where one can see something to step on and that is
usually something slightly higher than foot level. In this way one
unconsciously prefers going slightly uphill to going down. We lost the path but the feeling of knowing where we were
was strong after leaving Tarn, and we hoped to run across it again. We set a
compass course. Sometime later we came to a drop. Those in the rear cried
‘Forward!’ and those at the front cried ‘Back!’ Cautious probing suggested we
were on the top of a cliff. Tossing a stone into the blackness confirmed it. We
tried more to the left. More cliff. We tried to the right. Cliff again. Those
in charge of the compass protested that we had now tried all reasonable
directions and that it made no sense.
These conjectures, of course, were made
at the pitch of our voices on account of the storm. In the end we took the only
course open to us, which, as the compass-men bitterly pointed out, was back the
way we’d come. We scrambled and slithered downhill and eventually found the
path. After that whenever we lost it we would send our scouts in
various directions until we found it again. In this way we got down to Sty Head
Tarn. The plan of continuing up Aaron’s Slack into Ennerdale was now unanimously
rejected while a proposal to get the hell out of our present difficulties was carried
unanimously. Finding the start to the path to Wasdale was not easy however. We
came to the col where nowadays the mountain rescue box stands and here I expressed
the View, at the pitch of my lungs ,“that we needed to go up a little to make
sure of hitting the track.
My friend Wildblood disagreed, on the ground that we would
then be in danger of taking the Gable Traverse path. We became surprisingly
heated for two people on the brink of hypothermia. It was like a scene out of King
Lear. I do not know how it ended but after we’d torn a passion to tatters for
some time we did eventually find the way down and wentlurching down in the
teeth of the storm until we reached at last the levels of Wasdale Head. Endless
columns of rain still swept up the valley from the Irish Sea. We trudged on
until we came to the lake. There was a light showing in Brackenclose. We looked
at the time and found to our astonishment it was only nine o’clock. We thought
it must be at least one in the morning.
Fell & Rock Club hut Brackenclose in Wasdale
We knew Brackenclose, having stayed there with our president
Graham Macphee. We now stood at the door, a forlorn, hapless crew, wet through.
We knocked. It opened, revealing a vision of dryness, warmth and light. We
explained that we were a university mountaineering club, that our President was
a member of the Fell & Rock and though he was not at present with us would
no doubt be willing to vouch for us. We were becoming seriously affected by the
cold and wet.
‘This is a private hut’, said the spokesman of the dry
people within, speaking in what we instantly registered as an Oxford accent.
‘The Rules of the Club say that guests must be accompanied by a Member.’ One of
our difficulties was that we had no very plausible explanation for our presence
in Wasdale. We could hardly admit that we had been frustrated in our nefarious
plan to occupy Black Sail Hut. In the end we were turned away from the door,
back into the rain and darkness. Or rather we took ourselves off, gathering the
rags of our dignity around us, resolved to seek shelter in the barn of Wasdale
Head Hall, half a mile away.
Our interview at the door of the farm was a good deal
shorter. At first we thought we discerned some glimmer of sympathy in the eye
of the farmer’s wife, but when she saw that were girls in the party her face assumed
a rather stony expression and it was thumbs down from then on. Whether she
imagined she might be giving licence to romps in the hay, or whether she simply
felt that girls needed better accommodation than a barn was not disclosed, but
it made no difference. We had the choice, she said, between Brackenclose (half
a mile), the hotel (two miles) and the Youth Hostel (four miles). She found it
easier no doubt than the climbers to refuse us. There is a certain kinship
among climbers, even between respectable club members and those beyond the
pale. For them, turning us away must have felt a little like turning away poor
relations. But to her we were visitants from another planet, part of that
strange alien tide of townspeople that lapped intermittently round the
boundaries of the farm.
We went back to Brackenclose to report our failure. This
time we pushed the girls well to the fore. They hardly looked like sex symbols
with their blue faces and bedraggled hair, but perhaps in those days chivalry was
less dead than it is now. The climbers, moreover, had had half an hour and more
to listen to the rain beating on the windows and to compare their lot with ours
as they sat toasting their toes before a roaring fire, mugs of tea in hand. They
relented, and our troubles were over. Some brave and kindly soul must have
entered his name in the book as the member responsible for us.
(I wish I knew who he was, to be able to thank him again
after all these years). We paid up, we crept obsequiously around keeping out of
people’s way and cooking our soggy food. The girls, stripping off wet clothes
and combing out their dripping hair, revealed themselves to be more girl- shaped
than might at first have been thought and made themselves exceedingly pleasant
to the company at the fireside. On the whole our intrusion did no-one much harm
and some perhaps a bit of good. It was only years later, however, that I
realised fully the nature of the dilemma we put those people in.
But the point of this story, it is has a point, and the
culmination of the whole incident and the thing that has made it stay in my
memory when so much else has faded, was climbing into that top corner of the
three-tier bunkhouse, close under the sloping dry timbers of the roof, to be
cradled in the total luxury of dry blankets, and to hear the rain furiously
pattering and hissing on the slates a few inches above me. I was at one with
all animals, in all dens, all over the world.
Tom Price: F&R Journal 1992
