I was stopping off at my dad’s house just outside Llanrwst, and with no kids to wake me I slept until eight, then woke him up to see if he wanted to go climbing before I drove home.
He’d just returned from working for a month with street children in India, trying to help a charity in Bombay introduce outdoor pursuits to the kids. It sounded pretty mad. He’d had canoe teachers who couldn’t swim, and the local crag was a Buddhist temple built into the rock, with century-old carvings the only belay points.
I assumed this was part of his ongoing 30 year midlife crisis, but the trip sounded like a good remedy, leaving him obviously thankful for what he had and rather reflective. “I’m giving up golf,” he admitted, as we sat having breakfast. As Mark Twain once said I always thought golf spoiled a good walk, but this was the only normal dad-like thing my dad did. When I asked him why, he just said; “I’ve been playing it for 20 years and I’m still crap, it’s time to move on.”
I’d come over to Wales to give a talk to a group of Physical Training Instructors (PTI’s) from the RAF the previous day. It was meant to be on motivation, and for a while I’d been racking my brains on how to go about doing a classic corporate talk, all that leadership, team building, and goals rubbish climbers make up after the event (it’s really all about glorious greed, ambition, selfishness and getting one up on your mates). Anyway in the end I thought hell, and decided to tell them a load of stories about failing.
On the night I was told that there would be “some people from Hereford” coming, which confused me for a moment, and I asked who, imagining they meant some farmers, or the local Women’s Institute or something. “Some people from the Regiment, “ I was told, and again was a bit baffled, after all weren’t all these people in some kind of regiment? Still looking befuddled, the initials “SAS” were finally whispered in my direction.
When we’d finished our breakfast, and my dad had showed me some photos from his trip; lots of beautiful but desperately smiling kids, I suggested we go climbing. When I was younger my dad always wanted to go climbing, dragging me along to hold his ropes, then drag me up after him; and I suppose holding your dad on his first leader fall together is a sort of right of passage (Great Portland street, Millstone, 1985). He was climbing E2’s and E3’s when I was a kid, and to me was the best climber in the world. As I got more into climbing the roles reversed, and it was him holding my falls. I could tell he was losing his hunger when one day after doing Pincushion and the Fang at Tremadog, he suggested we go for a cup of tea even though we had hours of daylight left. At the time I couldn’t believe it, but now I can see that it’s easier to sit and talk to friends over a cup of tea, rather then shout distant commands along ropes. But today he didn’t look too keen on going climbing, and instead suggested that we go for a walk. I thought about going up the Glyders, but he suggested the hill behind his house. It sounded boring but I agreed anyway. “There’s something I want to show you, ” he said.
The gig was held in the back of a British Legion, and I felt like a character out of Phoenix Nights, as I stood there setting up between the bingo machine and the bakelite mixing desk complete with eight-track cassette slot. The chairs were set up as if for a séance (which is always a bad omen) and I tried to spot anyone from Hereford as the PTI’s marched in - although I expected they’d been hiding in the back among the stacked chairs for a week anyway.
In the dimly lit room they looked by far the scariest audience I’d ever had, trained killers and sadists everyone, but with well ironed jeans, ordered to come and listen to a scruffy Northern bloke talk about his holidays. After starting with a cheeky, “is there anyone here from Hereford tonight?” - which went down to a silence that made me feel like I was Gerry Adams - I got straight into it. “Now anyone can be good at successes, but how many people are good at failure...”
We left the house and walked slowly up the hill. It was pleasant, up narrow-hedged lanes, over stiles, and up an acorn-strewn path. We arrived at a lane of wonderfully tall trees, set as if intended as the entrance to a non-existent stately home, totally out of place among the traditional welsh trees that dotted the hillside. They were crazy, almost ostentatious in a tree sort of way, looking like giant redwoods, metres thick, bark like an old giant’s skin. My dad began talking about how he loved coming up here and just looking at these trees, and wondering how they got here, who planted them and why, after all they must have known that they would never see them like we did.
As the final slide faded I slipped off the stage for a sly drink of water, glad it was over. The room was full of laughter, with the usual, “what the f**k was he going on about,” look in a few smiling faces. It turned out that most of the people looked like climbers, but tidier and with short hair, so things had gone OK. But then I saw something large coming towards me from the shadows at the back of the room, a guy so big and scary I had the urge to run, but knew that there was no point. He looked fierce, like a fist on two legs, like a character out of Bravo Two Zero, no doubt a man who had a Hereford postcode.
I braced myself for his attack, as he shot his hand out, no doubt ready to rip my feeble heart out and bite a chunk out of it while it still beat before my eyes. “Great talk mate,” he said to my surprise, shaking me by the hand, “you’re bloody nuts aren’t ya, I don’t know how you do it.” Not knowing what to say I just asked if he was into climbing. “Yes,” he said, “I really like Scotland.” Grasping onto something we had in common, I asked if he’d done anything this winter, as the conditions had been so good and all that. “No,” he said, “I’ve been over in Iraq.” “Oh,” I squeaked.
Before I left the CO grabbed me. For a moment I thought he was going to shout at me for being so scruffy, or about making that joke about how a PTI motivates people (the answer was hit them harder). “We’re running a symposium on combat training to the Royal Marines, and I’d like you to tell them what you told us,” he said. Life is strange.
We walked down the hill, back towards the house, passing fields full of sheep and their lambs, fingers of wool blowing through the fences as we passed by. “Look at the lambs, ” my dad said, stopping. “When they’re born they jump and play all day long, only stopping to drink their mother’s milk. We like them because they seem so carefree and happy, they remind us of being children. Then one day they turn into sheep, no longer playing or running about, just standing silently chewing for the rest of their lives.”
“You know what it is that changes?” he asked. “Their mothers stop feeding them, and overnight they become adults because they must stop playing and begin to eat to survive.” I watched the sheep. I wondered if my dad was making a deeper point, just as you may be thinking about why I’m telling you this now. Perhaps he was and so am I, or perhaps this is just a story about a walk and some sheep. We walked slowly back down the hill, leaving the sheep to drift into the shadows of the amazing trees.
“We’ll go climbing next time you come down, ” my dad said.
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