The Blind Man of Hoy Page 2

  I hesitate. I trust Matthew enough to climb with him, I’m even beginning to consider him a friend but . . . on a need to know basis?

  ‘Oh, you know, I’ve been mulling it over and you’re right, if I don’t say yes now we lose another year and then it’ll only be more difficult. So yeah, let’s do it!’

  Someone who did need to know, the decision if not the process by which it had been reached, is my wife Kate. She is somewhat surprised when Matthew informs her.

  Shortly thereafter she and I leave the party and a room of people wondering whether my bravado will survive the cold light of day.

  3

  Formation and Partial Collapse

  ‘Why climb? For the natural experience; for the danger that draws us ever on; for the feeling of total freedom; for the monstrous drop beneath you. It is like a drug’

  – Hermann Buhl.

  According to my mother I began climbing to escape boredom and inertia at an early age, learning to scale the sides of my cot and mastering the downward traverse to my toy-box before I was a year old.

  As I grew up I emulated Spiderman’s vertical ascents on every available play-frame, tree or building and watched John Noakes’ exploits with a mixture of awe and envy. Blue Peter also introduced me to the great mountaineering feats of the 1970s and 80s and I followed the expeditions goggle-eyed on the BBC. The death of Nick Estcourt on K2 had a greater impact on me than that of Elvis a few months earlier.

  Chris Bonington had become a familiar figure from all his media work, but it was the simultaneous appearance of Joe Brown and the Old Man of Hoy on my TV screen in about 1984 that convinced me I could take my love of climbing to another level. Bonington was a larger-than-life gentleman-adventurer type but Brown came across as an ordinary bloke, a Manchester plumber. And the Old Man was a rock cathedral summoning the faithful that, in comparison to the mountaineering meccas of Annapurna and Everest, lay on my doorstep.

  This form of climbing looked extremely accessible.

  Rural Sussex is not renowned for its crags and peaks but the school’s Cadet Force promised a summer camp in the Brecon Beacons that included a couple of days rock climbing training with the Army; so I signed up and suffered a year’s square-bashing as my fee.

  The course was so good that I stayed in the Cadets for another two years by the end of which both my climbing and marching were pretty sound, before escaping to the sixth form rock club with its twice-termly trips to Harrison’s Rocks in Kent. I was hooked.

  At university I bypassed the Mountaineering Club, my recollection is that they were too Alpine for my taste and pocket, preferring the buttresses, slates and parapets of Cambridge’s roofline instead.

  The company was good, the protection minimal if there at all. Perhaps it is as well that access to the window ledge necessary to complete The Senate House Leap (The K2 of Cambridge Night-Climbing, requiring the traverse of an 8ft wide void 70ft above the cobbles) was barred by the occupancy of a responsible adult in the room beyond.

  My nights out on the tiles were numbered anyway. In September 1989, shortly before my 20th birthday, I was somewhat bluntly informed by a consultant ophthalmologist that I was suffering from Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) and ‘could expect to be ’effectively blind by the age of 30’.

  RP is a degenerative eye condition that affects the photoreceptors at the back of the eye. First the rods, responsible in the main for night and peripheral vision die off, followed by the cones and their colour vision. If you’re lucky the bundle of cells that form the macular and are responsible for central vision hang around for a few years but they too are on borrowed time.

  Back in 1989 I was still in the early stages. My field of vision had only decreased by about a quarter of the standard 95 degrees and I had yet to experience the joys of photopsia (the constant kaleidoscope of flashing lights that burst across my vision as my brain tries to fill in the gaps left by my increasingly dead retina).

  Climbing, however, is all about trust. If I could no longer trust my own abilities how could I expect anyone else to want to climb with me? At the same time though, more than ever, I needed the release; I needed to feel in balance with myself.

  I began to push my luck. Night-climbing in states of Dutch courage that make me cringe for my safety now (bear in mind it was a lack of night-vision that had got me referred to the consultant in the first place) to prove to myself that I could beat the condition.

  My favourite ascent, of the North East face of the Fitzwilliam Museum, topped out at a glorious glass cupola where I could enjoy a spliff before my descent. Maybe this is why I can remember so little of the English Literature I was meant to be reading at the time. Certainly being too wasted to be scared stiff saved me from serious injury on the couple of occasions I took nasty, unprotected falls.

  Eventually the will to live and a realisation that I was fighting a losing battle grounded me and, if truth be told at least where climbing is concerned, I went into a two decade sulk.

  One by one the other sports I enjoyed followed: first cycling, then cross- country and rugby. Substituting them with a rowing machine, swimming and Pilates I continued to keep relatively fit, but these new activities never succeeded in allowing me to vent the frustration I felt at being disabled from pushing myself to my physical limits. And the will to climb smouldered away in the background, reignited regularly by TV documentaries and films like Touching the Void.

  I’d tried a couple of climbing centres in the 1990s but they had been more focussed on bouldering so didn’t satisfy my need to get high at the end of a rope. Consequently when in 2009 my elder daughter announced that she wanted to hold her 9th birthday party at Climb London in Swiss Cottage I wasn’t expecting much. How wrong could I have been?

  According to a couple of the dads who’d stayed to help, the two South American instructors running the party were ‘very tasty.’ I too had started drooling on arrival but for another reason entirely. During the 90-minute session I had ample opportunity to check out the 18 purpose-built walls with their multiple routes. They ranged from simple 75 degree 10m-high slabs to a sparsely featured 14.5m overhanging monster. I left feeling my eyes had been opened to a world of new possibilities.

  If the staff at Climb London in Swiss Cottage were surprised to receive a new client brandishing a white stick they certainly never expressed it. Rather, as the weeks went by and we got to know each other, they treated it as a challenge that would result in them becoming better teachers and me climbing outdoors again – which of course is where all true climbers should want to be. I was happy to start from scratch; much of the equipment had been updated anyway and two decades of beer and curry weighed heavily on my agility.

  Trevor, my first instructor is an old trad climbing hand who works to pay for his crag habit. He worked patiently with me, offering encouragement as I rebuilt my confidence and stamina with a series of Rambo-style assaults on the easier routes, then chatting amiably about great places to climb as I gasped for breath in recovery.

  Gradually he began to remind me that by employing skill and technique I could conserve energy and tackle more difficult routes. As the months passed, the prospect of getting out onto rock again became less absurd, until one day as I lay gasping but jubilant having just conquered a tricky overhanging problem and Trevor was waxing lyrical about coastal climbing, I confided my dream of scaling the Old Man of Hoy.

  The dream had never died, just gone into suspended animation to be galvanised whenever I saw an advert for the Scottish Tourist Board or watched an episode of Coast. Like the summer romance I never quite had with a school-friend’s older sister, it was cheering to bathe in thoughts of what might have been.

  Trevor rubbed his chin and in his calm, considered way said, ‘well . . . it’s only an HVS . . . with a bit of work you could probably manage it.’

  For the next couple of years that was enough. I was content to know that my dream wasn’t completely untenable and it remained, a distant goal to work towards. I made slo
w but pleasing progress, which was a happy counterpoint to my fast degenerating eyesight.

  I don’t think that I or anyone at home or Climb London really expected me to try to make the dream become reality, but then none of us had anticipated the intervention of Matthew Wootliff.

  Matthew had been among the first of the existing parents to introduce themselves when my daughters started school. A sinewy blend of Leeds forthrightness and North West London chutzpah he worked from home and often did the school run. He was also equipped with a voice and laugh that made it easy for me to locate him in the crowd, no matter how close to twilight it was.

  In the 13 years I’ve been one I’m still the only full-time house-husband I’ve ever met, so it was good to have another dad to talk to; even more so when we turned out to be the only male representatives on the PTA. However, although both pairs of our daughters were in the same forms, neither was best friends. So Matthew and I met mostly briefly, at school functions or in the twice-daily tidal flow through the gates and, like our children, got on well-enough without knowing each other that well.

  Over five years I’d got an inkling of the streak of dogged determination in him; enough that when I mentioned I was a regular at the climbing wall and he expressed interest, I was kicking myself even as I suggested he join me.

  This was my activity, my time away from my fellow parents and Hampstead neighbours (some of whom were one and the same) – my little bit on the side that I wasn’t ready to share . . . let alone with someone as vociferous as Matthew!

  Besides he was notoriously fit and healthy, a former ski-instructor who rode a single-speed bike everywhere and whose physique was much commented on by the mums at the school gate. What little physical self-confidence I was regaining by dint of my steady improvement through the climbing grades would be shattered if a novice outstripped my performance at his first or second attempt.

  It took barely 70 minutes. By the second route of our second session he was climbing a grade beyond me. His agility was galling. I still beat him on strength and stamina but how long was that going to last? For the first time since I’d started at Swiss I left feeling thoroughly dejected.

  That night I seriously considered changing my visits to a day Matthew couldn’t manage.

  4

  Breaking Out of Solitary

  ‘A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.’

  – Benjamin Franklin

  The fact is, by summer 2012 I’d reached a point where I expected people to make allowances for my disability but got infuriated when I felt defined by it. I was happy for my climbing instructors to be amazed that I could tackle 5b grade routes but pissed off when Matthew climbed a grade higher and they pointed out that he had the advantage of being able to see the holds.

  Fortunately the Paralympics came to town and made me re-examine my attitude.

  One of the few joys of carrying a white stick is that so many people offer help. It might not always be needed but a gracious ‘thank you, I’m fine, but it’s always lovely to be asked’ is a small price to pay for feeling the kindness of strangers.

  At the same time it’s a bore repeatedly explaining that ‘yes, I do have some sight’ and ‘only 3% of those registered blind in the UK see nothing at all.’ It’s hardly surprising though. In popular culture the blind are invariably sightless; presented either as stricken victims or sonically super-powered. That’s why I’d written Blind Trust; to set the record straight, to educate and entertain, by giving the reader a behind-the-lens look at what it’s like to be robbed of your vision. Building that into a crime novel seemed grimly appropriate.

  Of course, I’d been aware that the majority of blind people cite a loss of independence and resultant sense of isolation as the biggest challenge arising from their sight loss, but I’d been confident that my duties as a house-husband would provide a sociable counterbalance to the couple of hours I’d be scribbling while the kids were at school. So it had proved – at first.

  The plot had been bubbling away in my head for a few years and poured out easily enough. And though it took a while to find a publisher (a couple even suggested making Joe the stricken subject of a misery memoir or exaggerating his auditory powers), the book had made it to the shelves pretty much unadulterated.

  However, what had been liberating swiftly became a bind as I struggled to produce a sequel and discovered that there is no one more isolated or morbidly introspective than an unproductive writer. The authors I’d looked to for inspiration had become monsters, their gigantic talents mocking my puny efforts. Climbing, which had been my weekly reward for good work, became my sanctuary from failure. The last thing I needed was Matthew jauntily cruising up routes I’d taken weeks to conquer, mocking my small steps with his effortless strides.

  At the same time I recognised that he too saw his time at the wall as escapism and his untethered, vociferous and often very amusing rants about life cheered me up, in the way that only schadenfreude can. After climbing I picked up my kids, but he had to go back to his desk!

  I swallowed my pride, bit my tongue and we carried on meeting each Thursday afternoon. After another couple of weeks the work rota at Climb London changed and we were assigned a new instructor. Andres Cervantes, a stocky 26-year-old Colombian PhD student at Brunel, had learned his English while studying Product Design Implementation in Manchester. As a result his smooth South American tones were peppered with flat vowels and visceral slang. Possessing equal measures of swagger and a disarming eagerness to join in whatever was going on, he also proved to be an indomitable problem-solver.

  In this respect he and Matthew were kindred spirits and were soon discussing ways of improving communication between me and whichever of them was on the ground directing my progress. Up till then I’d relied on my instructor shouting up my next move, which on the 14.5 metre walls often left both parties hoarse and frustrated, especially since the area behind the sports centre had become a construction site.

  Andres’ bipolar accent, the fact that he dealt in centimetres while I thought in inches and our mutual inability to know our left from our right only exacerbated the problem. After one particularly bad-tempered exchange that culminated in me kicking the wall so hard I was unable to continue climbing, Matthew insisted we organise a night out to discuss the issues over a few beers.

  He challenged us to come up with a system of length and direction that would be simple for Andres to deliver and me to understand. Meanwhile he would investigate two-way radios and headsets so that we could hear each other over the din of jackhammers, angle-grinders and all the traffic that flowed round the Swiss Cottage gyratory.

  Matthew and Andres also both tried climbing blindfold, to gain a sense of the challenge facing me.

  At another time I might have baulked at their efforts, resenting their interference or finding the blindfold experiment patronising, but my cynicism was tempered by their genuine consideration, then blown away as Paralympic euphoria swept the nation.

  Day after day the media was giving extensive and overwhelmingly positive coverage to disabled people. This was no one-size-fits-all portrayal of disability; there were no stricken victims here. The success of these super-fit but otherwise everyday heroes forced you to look beyond their disability and recognise the individual. Medal winners were encouraged to tell their story, and again and again I heard a blend of pride and humility as they expressed thanks to coaches, trainers and support staff. It began to dawn on me that mountains don’t get conquered single-handed but by teams. Blind Trust had been a solo effort and, in climbing terms, I’d bagged a Munro, but if I wanted to tackle further peaks I’d need to accept the help that was on offer.

  So, buoyed by the extraordinary goodwill I was encountering each day on London’s streets that summer (which, though muted, persists to this day), I took some positive action, accepted the help on offer and worked with Matthew and Andres to develop a system that would minimise the impact of my blindness on my sport.

  Matthew
didn’t exactly bring a clipboard to the pub but he had made notes and drawn up a strategy. His tart defence was that someone needed to and he’d known I wouldn’t. I bought the first of several rounds and he called the meeting to order. He approached the issue of my climbing like the business research analyst I discovered he is. It was an operation that needed streamlining to optimise performance while taking into account certain local idiosyncrasies. He bluntly informed Andres and me that the way we were currently going about things was untenable and more likely to end in strife than success. Both of us were at fault but the responsibility to find a solution lay squarely with me. So how did I propose to make it easier for Andres to give me accurate instructions?

  It felt like a dressing down, half-time hairdryer treatment, and put me immediately on the defensive.

  ‘Look, I know I get narky and I’m sorry. But I get frustrated with all the hanging around between moves. I’m wasting all this energy and knackering my arms just trying to hang on while you guys work out what my next move should be. I just want to get on quickly, not hang around in stress positions like I’m in Guantanamo.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s exactly what we’re here to do – to sort out communication and optimise your outcome on the wall. If you understand exactly what you are being told to do you can conserve that energy for the climb and stop taking your frustration out on Andres and me. So what ideas have you come up with?’

  A gulp of beer drew the sting of being addressed like a recalcitrant teenager and I tried not to sound too sulky as I outlined my ‘back to basics’ plan. I proposed using a clock-face system, whereby if the next hold was above me and slightly to the left Andres would call out ‘left hand eleven o’clock’; more than half-left would be ten o’clock. Likewise my feet would operate in the three o’clock to nine o’clock sector, with the centre point of the clock-face being in the area of what Andres referred to as my ‘Queen’s jewels’.