A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (23 page)

‘How very odd. According to the docket
Grand Guignol’s
got nine zips in it. Surely there must be some mistake.’

Hyde-Clarke was squatting on his haunches ramming pins into
Grand Guignol
like a riveter.

‘This dress is
DOOMED.
I know it’s doomed,
BOTHER,
I’ve swallowed a pin! Pins, quickly, pins.’

The fitter, a thin woman like a wardress at the Old Bailey and with the same look of indifference to human suffering, extended a bony wrist with a velvet pin-cushion strapped to it like a watch. He took three and jabbed them malevolently into the material; Milly swore fearfully.

‘Mind where you’re putting those … pins. What d’you think I am – a bloody yoga?’

‘You
MUST
stand still, dear; undulation will get you nowhere,’ Hyde-Clarke said.

He stood up breathing heavily and lit a cigarette. There was a long silence broken only by the fitter who was grinding her teeth.

‘What do you think of it now, Mr Newby?’ he said. ‘It’s
you
who have to sell it.’

‘Much worse, Mr Hyde-Clarke.’ (We took a certain ironic pleasure in calling one another Mister.) ‘Like one of those flag-poles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.’

‘I don’t agree. I think she looks like a Druid in it; one of those terribly runny-nosed old men dressed in sheets at an
Eisteddfod
. How much has it cost up to now?’

I told him.

‘Breathe
OUT,
dear. Perhaps you’ll look better without any air. I must say there’s nothing more gruesome than white jersey when it goes wrong.’ ‘Dear’ breathed out and the dress fell down to her ankles. She folded her arms across her shoulders and gazed despairingly at the ceiling so that the whites of her eyes showed.

‘There’s no need to behave like a
SLUT,’
said Hyde-Clarke. He was already putting on his covert coat. ‘We’ll try again at two. I am going to luncheon.’ He turned to me. ‘Are you coming?’ he said.

We went to ‘luncheon’. In speech Hyde-Clarke was a stickler in the use of certain Edwardianisms, so that beer and sandwiches in a pub became ‘luncheon’ and a journey in his dilapidated sports car ‘travel by motor’.

Today was a sandwich day. As we battled our way up Mount Street through a blizzard, I screeched in his ear that I was abandoning the fashion industry.

‘I saw the directors this morning.’

‘Oh, what did they say?’

‘That they were keeping me on for the time being but that they make no promises for the future.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That I had just had a book accepted for publication and that I am staying on for the time being but I make no promises for the future.’

‘It isn’t true, is it? I can hardly visualize you
writing
anything.’

‘That’s what the publishers said, originally. Now I want to go on an expedition.’

‘Aren’t you rather old?’

‘I’m just as old here as on an expedition. You can’t imagine anything more rigorous than this, can you? In another couple of years I’ll be dyeing my hair.’

‘In another couple of years you won’t have any to dye,’ said Hyde-Clarke.

On the way back from ‘luncheon’, while Hyde-Clarke bought some Scotch ribs in a fashionable butcher’s shop, I went into the Post Office in Mount Street and sent a cable to Hugh Carless, a friend of mine at the British Embassy, Rio de Janeiro.

CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?

It had taken me ten years to discover what everyone connected with it had been telling me all along, that the Fashion Industry was not for me.

The answer came back:
OF COURSE, HUGH
.

Nuristan, in the Hindu Kush, was a region that I had long wanted to explore.

Hugh Carless, who had replied so opportunely to my cable, entered the Foreign Service in 1950. The son of a retired Indian Civil Servant, himself a man of unusual intellectual attainments, he is, like so many Englishmen, in love with Asia. For a time he was posted to the School of Oriental Studies, from which he emerged with a good knowledge of Persian.

His Persian being both fluent and academic, he was lucky to be posted to our Embassy at Kabul where he could actually make use of his talents.

From time to time he wrote me long letters, which came to me by way of the District Postmaster, Peshawar, which I read with envy in the bedrooms of the provincial hotels I stayed in when I ‘travelled’. They spoke of long, arduous, and to me fascinating, journeys to the interior, undertaken with horses and mysterious beings called Tajik drivers.

It was early in 1952 that he first mentioned Nuristan.

‘An Austrian forestry expert, a Herr von Duckelmann, has recently dined with me,’ he wrote. ‘He has been three or four times in Nuristan. Food there is very scarce, he says, and although he himself is a lean, hardy man he lost twelve pounds in weight during a ten day trip to the interior.’

Later in 1952 he wrote again.

I have just returned from an expedition to the borders of Nuristan,
The Country of Light
. This is the place for you. It lies in the extreme N.E. of Afghanistan, bordering on Chitral and enclosed by the main range of the Hindu-Kush mountains. Until 1895 it was called Kafiristan,
The Country of the Unbelievers
. We didn’t get in but we didn’t expect to, the passes are all over 15,000 feet and we didn’t have permission. So far as I can discover no Englishman has been there since Robertson in 1892. The last Europeans to visit it – von Dückelmann apart – were a German expedition in 1935, and it’s possible that no one has visited the north-west corner at all. I went with Bob Dreesen of the American Embassy.

I had heard of Dreesen. He was one of the American party which escaped from the Chinese Communist advance into Turkestan in 1950, evacuating the Consulate from Urumchi by lorry to Kashgar and then crossing the Karakoram Range into India with horses. Hugh went on to speak of a large mountain, nearly 20,000 feet high, that they had attempted to climb and of one of his men being hit on the head by a great stone.

Hugh’s telegram was followed by a spate of letters which began to flow into London from Rio. They were all at least four pages long, neatly typed in single spacing – sometimes two would arrive in one day. They showed that he was in a far more advanced state of mental readiness for the journey than I was. It was as if, by some process of mental telepathy, he had been able to anticipate the whole thing.

Then, quite suddenly, the tone of the letters changed.

I don’t think we should make known our ambition to go to Nuristan. Rather I suggest we ask permission to go on a
Climbing Expedition
. There are three very good and unclimbed peaks of about 20,000 feet, all on the marches of Nuristan. One of them, Mir Samir (19,880) I attempted in 1952 (
vide
my letter of 20.9.52). We climbed up to some glaciers and reached a point 3,000 feet below the final pyramid. A minor mishap forced us to return.

He was already deeply involved in the cliches of mountaineering jargon. I re-read his 1952 letter and found that the ‘minor mishap’ was an amendment. At the time he had written, ‘one of the party was hit on the head by a boulder’; he didn’t say who.

I was filled with profound misgiving. In cold print 20,000 feet does not seem very much. Every year more and more expeditions climb peaks of 25,000 feet, and over. In the Himalayas a mountain of this size is regarded as an absolute pimple, unworthy of serious consideration. But I had never climbed anything. It was true that I had done some hill walking and a certain amount of scrambling in the Dolomites with my wife, but nowhere had we failed to encounter ladies twice our age armed with umbrellas. I had never been anywhere that a rope had been remotely necessary.

It was useless to dissemble any longer. I wrote a letter protesting in the strongest possible terms and received by return a list of equipment that I was to purchase. Many of the objects I had never even heard of – two Horeschowsky ice-axes; three dozen Simond rock and ice pitons; six oval karabiners (2,000 lb. minimum breaking strain); five 100 ft nylon ropes; six abseil slings; Everest goggles; Grivel, ten point crampons; a high altitude tent; an altimeter; Yukon pack frames – the list was an endless one. ‘You will also need boots. I should see about these right away. They may need to be made.’

I told Wanda, my wife.

‘I think he’s insane,’ she said, just dotty. What will happen if you say no?’

‘I already have but he doesn’t take any notice. You see what he says here, if we don’t go as mountaineers we shan’t get permission.’

‘Have you told the Directors you’re leaving?’

‘Yes.’

‘You
are
in a spot. We’re all in a spot. Well, if you’re going I’m going too. I want to see this mountain.’

I wrote to Hugh. Like an echo in a quarry his reply came back, voicing my own thoughts.

I don’t think either of you quite realize what this country is like. The Nuristanis have only recently been converted to Islam; women are less than the dust.
There are no facilities for female tourists
. I refer you to
The Imperial Gazetteer of India
, volume on Afghanistan, page 70, line 37
et seq
. This is somewhat out of date but the situation must be substantially the same today.

I found the book in a creepy transept of the London Library.

‘What does it say?’ asked Wanda. ‘Read it.’

‘“There are several villages in Kafiristan which are places of refuge, where slayers of their fellow tribesmen reside permanently!’”

‘It says “fellow tribesmen” and I thought you were going to Nuristan. This says Kafiristan.’

‘Don’t quibble. It was called Kafiristan until 1895. It goes on; listen to this: “Kafir women are practically slaves, being to all intents and purposes bought and sold as household commodities.”’

‘I’m practically a slave, married to you.’

‘“The young women are mostly immoral. There is little or no ceremony about a Kafir marriage. If a man becomes enamoured of a girl, he sends a friend to her father to ask her price. If the price is agreed upon the man immediately proceeds to the girl’s house, where a goat is sacrificed and then they are considered to be married. The dead are disposed of in a peculiar manner.”’

‘Apart from the goat, it sounds like a London season. Besides he admits it’s all out of date. I’m coming as far as I jolly well can.’

‘What about the children?’

‘The children can stay with my mother in Trieste.’

I was heavily involved on all fronts: with mountaineering outfitters, who oddly enough never fathomed the depths of my ignorance; possibly because they couldn’t conceive of anyone acquiring such a collection of equipment without knowing how to use it: with the Consuls of six countries, and with a Bulgarian with whom I formed an indissoluble entente in a pub off Queen’s Gate. He was a real prototype Bulgarian with a big moustache and lots of black hair.

With the Autumn Collection. It was now the second week in May. I was leaving in a fortnight. To add to my troubles I now received a letter from Hugh. It was extremely alarming. I read it to Hyde-Clarke.

‘These three climbs will certainly be a good second-class mountaineering achievement. But we shall almost certainly need with us an experienced climber.’

‘I thought you said he was an experienced climber.’

‘So I did. Do listen!’

‘What about Brown who is now in India as a head of a public school at Begumpet?’

‘He was head of the Outward Bound Mountaineering School in Eskdale, and has done a good deal of Alpine climbing. He and I were at Trinity Hall together. I have sent him a cable asking him to join us in Kabul by air for a five-week assault on three 20,000 feet peaks but he may be on leave. His address in London is v/c
(WRATH)
w. c. 1.’

‘Very appropriate, but what a terrifying cable to receive.’ ‘That’s only the beginning. Listen to this.

‘It is just possible that he may not be able to come. In which case we must try elsewhere. In my opinion the companion we need should not only have climbing ability and leadership but round out our party’s versatility by bringing different qualities, adding them to ours.’

‘It sounds like the formula for some deadly gas.’

‘Will you listen! This isn’t funny to me.

‘Perhaps he would be a Welsh miner, or a biologist, or a young Scots doctor. Someone from quite another background, bringing another point of view …’

‘For the first time,’ said Hyde-Clarke, ‘I’m beginning to be just a little bit jealous. I’d love to listen to you all lying on top of one another in one of those inadequate little tents, seeing one another’s points of view.’

‘Why don’t you come too? I don’t see why Hugh should be the only one to invite his friends.

‘All proper expeditions seem to have a faithful administrative officer, who toils through the night to get everyone and everything off from London on time and then is forgotten.’

‘I like the part about being forgotten.’

‘I know how busy you must be but couldn’t you find one?’

‘With a ginger moustache and a foul pipe …’