There cannot be more than half a dozen real hard men,
perhaps youthful aspirants to the Alpine Climbing Group, who have made the
journey, on foot and by road, from the beginnings of Llanberis Pass to
Beddgelert. To the best of my knowledge I am the only man living who has made
this appallingly dangerous journey on two occasions. Of the second, on which I
had a companion, I have already written in another place, but my solitary
attempt has remained unchronicled. I now set out, below, what I recall of my experience
in the spring of 1951. I was not able to make notes at the time, but the facts
are essentially as I record them here. About ten o'clock one morning towards
the end of March 1951, or it may have been 1950, I was sitting in the bar
(since remodelled and renamed the Smoke Room), of that small hotel at the foot
of Llanberis Pass which is known to all travellers in those parts.
I was
sipping a whisky and soda, having just finished reading a most excellent
article on the climbing situation in Wales in the 1940s called 'Return to
Arfon'. On the table in front of me was a big blue-covered volume, 'Rock
Climbing in the English Lake District', by a man called 0. G. Jones. Some
people from a place called Keswick had taken some old-fashioned photographs to
illustrate the work and I was finding it of interest. My presence in that hotel
at that time of year was due to an obligation I was under to write a work of
fiction containing a gang fight in Wales, preferably on the face of a steep
rock climb. My thoughts had no connection with Beddgelert and were indeed
focused upon the measurements of the bar. It had just occurred to me that a
determined man, sitting where I had positioned myself, could hardly miss the
landlord with a shot from a .32 Mauser pistol, if the landlord happened to be
standing at the cash register. At that moment the door of the bar opened and
the landlord's wife came in to join me.
She was not in those days much given to conversation, being
endlessly busy about the house. 'I've come to have a little chat with you', she
said, 'It's nearly eleven o'clock'. `So late', I said, emptying my glass, 'I
was sitting here thinking'. `Not thinking', she said, 'Drinking'. `So I was', I
said, holding up my glass, 'I must have another of these'. `That's what I want
to talk about', she said. 'You drank a bottle and a half of Scotch last night
in this very room, and here you are doing it again, or in a fair way to doing
it again, before lunch. You should go out more, into our lovely hills'. `I did
that from this very hotel, just after Christmas,' I reminded her, 'and I was
ill for weeks. Your lovely hills are very dangerous.' I stood up, all the same,
and returned the red Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English
Lake District to the corner bookshelf in the bar which, in those days, had
twenty or thirty of the Journals, but not one of them with anything quite so
good as 'Return to Arfon.' I didn't know what any of it meant. It was just
interesting to read.
The author was a man called A. B. Hargreaves, and I didn't
know him either. I put 'Rock Climbing in The English Lake District' under my
arm. It had just come into my head that my hero might well be reading it in his
bath when a villain, still uninvited, thrust a gun through his bathroom window.
The essence of thriller writing is that heroes', preferably unarmed, should
invariably outsmart relentless thugs with guns in either hand. It seemed to me,
as I weighed it in my hand, that 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District'
was at least throwable. `I'll get hold of my packed lunch and go', I said. I
tried to sound a little hurt, a trifle wounded: I've always found that
difficult.
There was a look of
total despair on his face. 'Have you seen Marcus'? he asked me. `There was a
man in the bar last night they were calling Marcus' I said. 'He was trying to
read the `Tractatus' of Wittgenstein, but they kept interrupting him'. `Sounds
like him' said the despairing man, 'I was to meet him here at half past ten'.
`And you've been standing here in the rain all this time? Come in at once and
have something to drink'. To the look of despair he added a look of real
horror. `I am a member of the Alpine and of the Climbers' Clubs' he said; 'I
never drink in the middle of the day. We try to keep ourselves reasonably fit'.
I bowed, silently. It seemed to be the only thing to do. `You'd have seen
Marcus at breakfast, if he'd been there, wouldn't you, don't you think?' the
despairing man said, almost to himself. It was clear to me from his
constructions that he, at least, had not, spent the previous evening reading
the `Tractatus', or even the 'Philosophical Investigations' of Herr
Wittgenstein, but it was my turn for the look of despair and horror.
`I never eat
breakfast,' I said, 'I'm never well enough.' That man seemed not to like being
with me. 'I think I'll go inside,' he said, and I stood alone with my problem
in the heart of Welsh Wales. I could see no way round it; I would have to go
for a walk of some kind. It had been on the tip of the despairing man's tongue
to ask me to go climbing with him. I had only saved myself with my inspiration
about breakfast. I embarked upon my journey. I still had no thought of
Beddgelert. I don't suppose that I had, in those days, ever heard of it as more
than 'a place'. But there was, as there still is, in a much altered form, a
High Road and a Low Road for part of the way in which I was, merely by chance,
going. I stood at the junction (there was no gateway then), took a pull at my
pocket flask and considered matters. A blonde woman in Scandinavian costume who
was standing beside me began to sing `Solveig's Song' from Peer Gynt.
As I
turned to seek her advice she disappeared. There was a lot of loose gravel on
the Low Road, and a little bird with a white rump was hopping about. It
frightened me rather, and I set out along the High Road.
There was very little traffic on that road in those days,
and it had not been straightened out anywhere. But there was a blinding flash
every five or six minutes as a motor bicycle or motor car skidded upon me round
unsuspected corners. There was an Admiral of the Fleet in full dress uniform
walking beside me, making a rather curious clanking noise with his sword. I
asked him if he thought our situation dangerous, but he didn't reply. I asked
him if he would like a sip out of my flask, but he had vanished. Some time later
I reached a Post Office in a place they told me was called Nantgwynant.
I
enquired for licensed premises and was told that Beddgelert was my first hope,
but that 'they might be closed by the time you get there'. I sat down by the
roadside and opened my sandwich packet. Everything was made from cheese and
onions. One of the misty people all round me said something that sounded like
lucus a non lucendo', but I didn't know what he or she meant and just threw the
sandwiches away and emptied my flask. It seemed wasteful in my desperate
circumstances to pour a libation for the gods, and I did not. I struggled
towards Beddgelert. It was a long journey, but I thought I could do it. I
remembered dreamily that the night before someone had been talking about a man called
Carr who used to stay in Beddgelert and run over Snowdon every morning, with a
bicycle on his shoulders, on his way to a mountain called Tryfan. 'It's quicker
that way', he is alleged to have said.
I supposed that was
why I was without conscious design, now on the way to Beddgelert, and moreover,
with an empty flask. I began to recite aloud the Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, but when I came to the bit about measuring out my life with coffee
spoons an Australian Aboriginal, who kept throwing a boomerang across my head,
and snatching at it with his left hand as it came back, asked me to shut up.
`You need concentration for what I'm trying to do,' he said. I made for the
public house where Mr. Borrow was said to have spent a night or two on one of
his missionary journeys, reaching it as the rain stopped. You could say I was
wet. They told me the bar was closed, and that, at that time of year they
seldom bothered to open it during the week until 'going on seven.' The barmaid
was knitting a strange looking tube from a huge ball of grey wool. 'Nice not to
see climbers,' she said, `If you and I were locked in the snug no one would
know, isn't it?
'Not a soul', I said. We drank a bottle of gin together in the
snug and quite soon the Australian went away and I was alone with her. Just
before six o'clock I asked her if she thought a determined man with a .32
Mauser pistol could blow the lock off the snug door. 'You had better be getting
back, isn't it'? she said. We embraced, a brother and sister in extremis. Perhaps
there was a cousinly touch to the final kiss as she slipped a half-bottle into
my pocket and kept the change.
'Don't let them put
you into one of those places, bach,' she said. 'I've a book to finish,' I told
her, stiffly, and set off on my return journey. "You’re going to find this
bit difficult, cobber", the Australian said. He'd been waiting for me
outside, together with a man from a circus who had a herd of camels with him. I
put my face towards Nantgwynant. I woke up just before it was full dark. I think
I had rested, with a book, because, as I opened my eyes, a little man in a pink
hat closed 'Esmond' for me and dropped it into my book bag. As I reached the
hotel the guests were just coming out from dinner and the landlord's wife
called out to me, 'Oh, there you are: You're just in time if you hurry up and
change'.
'You look ever so much better.' In those days I preferred dining alone,
and I gave any loitering diners all the time they needed. There was never a crowd
in the early fifties, just a few climbers. When I reached the dining room the
Wittgenstein man was sitting by himself reading, and absent-mindedly picking at
a plate of Welsh mutton. 'Do you happen to know any German'? he asked me, 'I'm
trying to re-write and re-translate a rather bad piece for the Alpine Journal.'
I did once, long ago,' I told him, "But where the number 2 bus used to
stop they've set up a kind of jungle with orang-utangs hung on the trees."
I must have spoken all Kastner's piece from `'Emil' in German because I heard myself saying Orang-Utans hingen in den zweigen and the Wittgenstein man stood up and held out his hand. 'Please don't bother' he said, 'my name is Marcus, and I'm a doctor. What you need is a nice long rest.'
I go to that hotel rather a lot, now, and the other night a woman guest said, 'Don't you ever drink anything except tonic water'? 'Oh, yes' I told her, 'at Christmas time and Easter I quite often have a bitter lemon, or something like that. You see I'm a member of the Alpine Club, and the Climbers' Club, and we have to try and keep fit.' Then I went up to bed. There was a book up there waiting for me called 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District' and I was longing to read it for the twentieth time, and to look again at the lovely photographs taken by the Abraham Brothers of Keswick eighty years ago.
Kevin Fitzgerald: Published in Mountain Life Dec/Jan 1975
