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  AFTER EVEREST

  AFTER EVEREST

  Inside the private world of

  EDMUND HILLARY

  PAUL LITTLE

  with Carolyne Meng-Yee

  Disclaimer. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author or of other persons and are not those of the publisher: the publisher has no reasonable cause to believe that the opinions set out in the book are not the genuine opinions of the author or those of other persons.

  First published in Australia in 2012

  Copyright © Paul Little and Carolyne Meng-Yee 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street Level 3, 228 Queen Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065 Auckland 1010

  Australia New Zealand

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Phone: (64 9) 377 3800

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A catalogue record for this book is available from

  the National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN 978 1 877505 20 1

  Typeset in Adobe Caslon 12/17 pt by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 First steps

  2 On top

  3 Down to earth

  4 Family life

  5 To the end of the Earth

  6 Triple peak

  7 The best adventure

  8 The catastrophe

  9 The dharma bums

  10 Another chance

  11 Like father, like son

  12 Politics

  13 India

  14 Trust in turmoil

  15 Story approval

  16 A view from the summit

  17 Death and legacy

  18 The watch that became a time bomb

  19 Ed of State

  Bibliography

  ‘You can’t do that to me. I’m an icon.’

  —Ed Hillary

  ‘Well if you have a big life, a lot of stuff happens.

  Dad had a big life.’

  —Peter Hillary

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  One of the great pleasures of working on this book has been the opportunity it gave to meet and talk to some of the many remarkable individuals who touched or were touched by Ed’s life. Our thanks for sharing their time and insights to:

  Kevin Biggar, Pat Booth, Hilary Carlisle, John Claydon, Graeme Dingle, Mike Gill, Roger Goodman, Norman Hardie, Rebecca Hayman, John Hillary, Peter Hillary, Sarah Hillary, Alexa Johnston, Murray Jones, Naomi Lange, Mary Lowe, Ken Richardson, Mark Sainsbury, Tom Scott, Cath Tizard, Judith Tizard.

  June Hillary was kind enough to consider our request but regrettably chose not to be involved with the project.

  INTRODUCTION

  When Ed Hillary descended from the summit of Mt Everest, the highest point on earth, on 29 May 1953, he was on his first day at a job no one had done before. Conqueror of Everest turned out to be a full-time career. Ed had to work out for himself what the job entailed and how to do it. In many ways, though he was a prodigious planner he spent much of the rest of his life making it up as he went along.

  Many books have been written about the life of Sir Edmund Hillary, most of them by Ed himself. After each great adventure, he produced his own account; in all he wrote or co-wrote sixteen volumes. These include the autobiographies Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1975) and View from the Summit (1999), as well as a memoir jointly authored with his son Peter in which they tell their own, sometimes overlapping, stories in half the book each; and Ed’s accounts of various expeditions and adventures from Everest on. Many of those who went along on one of Ed’s adventures penned their own account of it, sometimes in conjunction with Ed. These include not only Ed’s first wife, Louise (three books) and son Peter (ten books) but such friends and colleagues as Peter Mulgrew, Mike Gill and Desmond Doig, each of whose writing fills gaps in Ed’s own accounts.

  So when we told people we were writing this book, most expressed some doubt that the world needed another book about Ed. Then they would invariably add, after a pause, ‘Though all that business with the family is interesting.’ Similarly, when we approached people close to Ed and asked them to speak to us for this book, we could almost hear them silently saying to themselves at the other end of the phone: ‘What—another one?’

  We spoke to many people from Ed’s immediate circle, nearly all of them impressive and charismatic individuals in their own right. Many said from the start they didn’t want to talk about the ‘fuss at the Himalayan Trust’ or ‘that business with the watches’ and proceeded to talk at length about the Trust and that business with the watches.

  We also encountered at least three people who were willing to speak to us but made it clear they were planning to write their own books on Ed and would be keeping some information to themselves.

  Indeed, we wondered ourselves whether another book about Ed was necessary until, having read through his writing and the other biographies, we realised that, although they all did an excellent job of recording Ed’s achievements—and that is no small labour—their emphasis on what he did had not left much room for talking about what he was like. And that is the purpose of this book: to present a picture of Ed in the round.

  Inevitably we will revisit his great adventures and expeditions—Everest, the South Pole, Makalu, the great Ganges journey, the time as New Zealand high commissioner to India, and the greatest of all his adventures, his aid work in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust—as the lens through which we view the man.

  We will also be exploring the many paradoxes of that character: the individualist who always worked with a team; the lonely boy who ended up loved by millions; the man who could be distant from his own children but is regarded as a surrogate father by thousands of Nepali; the left-leaning thinker who accepted the highest order of chivalry from Queen Elizabeth II; the man behind the legend.

  Note: We will refer to Sir Edmund Percival Hillary throughout as Ed because that is how most who knew him, including his surviving children, refer to him and because it reflects the character of the man better than Sir Ed or Sir Edmund or Hillary.

  CHAPTER 1

  FIRST STEPS

  ‘My father always used to say, “Don’t tell me the Hillarys are heroes. They didn’t go to war.” ’

  Alexa Johnston knew that wasn’t right. But the woman addressing her went on to say that her family lived near the Hillarys in Tuakau and that among the locals this was a common view, Everest or no Everest. In fact, the Hillarys, what with father Percy’s erratic behaviour and that funny religion, were regarded as a little . . . odd.

  As Johnston—author of Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life—explained to the woman, Ed had served in the air force in World War II; in fact, he had gone to some lengths to do so. Ed’s father, Percy, however, was a pacifist and his brother Rex had been interned as a conscientious objector.

  World War I had scarred the lives of both of Ed’s parents. His mother, Gertrude, had had two of her brothers killed in
the conflict, and Percy had suffered head injuries at Gallipoli. Percy is thus unique in having played a part in two significant New Zealand stories, one a nation-defining disaster, the other a nation-defining triumph: Gallipoli and Everest. ‘We have my grandfather’s diary,’ says Hilary Carlisle, daughter of Ed’s sister June. ‘He just loved that whole adventure of going to Gallipoli, the training, being an officer. But when he was away he got shot in the nose and as part of that he became . . . no one put a label on it, but probably depressed. He had brain damage of some sort.’

  Percy was invalided home in 1916. His horrendous experiences had made him a committed pacifist; in later years, he was wont to storm up the aisle of Remuera’s Tudor Cinema, if a war movie was being shown, and demand that the screening cease.

  Percy was a man with an iron will and a well-developed social conscience. Ed recalled how upset Percy was when he heard of food being destroyed in order to keep farmers’ returns high, at a time when many people in the world were short of food. Such basic illogical injustices riled him.

  He was an unusual combination of practical man and dreamer. Ed writes ruefully of his father’s tendency to leave jobs unfinished—in particular the family home, which he spent many years building and which remained unfinished for much of Ed’s life.

  It’s not hard to see in a reaction to this the seeds of the obsessive planning that was a hallmark of all Ed’s endeavours.

  Ed was born just after the war, on 20 July 1919. As well as his older sister June, born in 1917, there would be a younger brother, Rex, born in 1920. June later categorised the three by saying Ed had the brains, Rex had the looks and she was ‘the girl’. As was customary in those times, she was expected to become a wife and mother; but there is a streak in the Hillary family character that delights in defying expectations, and June went on to teacher training and a science degree in New Zealand before moving to England, where she earned a master’s degree in psychology and worked as a clinical psychologist.

  Hilary describes the family dynamic thus: ‘It was their mother who held the family together. She managed the money and made sure that the kids were okay. So in their teens, Mum always talks about that time when the three children and their mother formed a close group and in a way schemed against their father to get their way.’

  Ed was adventurous from the start and, in childhood at least, Rex wasn’t far behind. Once, the two brothers swapped bicycles—Ed on Rex’s smaller bike, Rex on his brother’s big one. Rex was in front and, knowing Ed would be chasing him, was going as fast as he could; but when he turned a corner, he collided with a car, bouncing off the bonnet and landing on the road. The driver was terrified he had killed Rex; Ed was merely terrified of the beating he knew Percy would give him when he saw the state of his bike.

  Competition was part of the boys’ relationship from the start. In an interview on the BBC’s HARDtalk in 1999, Ed recollected his time as a beekeeper: ‘I was constantly lugging around 80-pound boxes of honey. And my brother—we competed the whole time. We would rush up the hill with an 80-pound box and dump it and rush down again. And we quite enjoyed the competition. I think the sense of competition carried on over to my mountaineering.’

  Although Percy was a pacifist, he was prone to fits of violent rage, and regular beatings were a feature of Ed’s upbringing. Although he feared the beatings, Ed admitted he was a vexatious child with a stubborn streak to match his father’s. Regardless of his guilt or innocence in any given case, Ed would never give Percy the satisfaction of admitting he had done anything wrong.

  Rex’s son John recounts the story of a time when Ed and Rex were told to wash their hands. ‘They had to run up the stairs to the bathroom. Dad got there first and Ed grabbed him from behind to try and pull him out of the way so he could wash his hands first, but they pulled the basin out and the water was leaking everywhere.’

  Simple things could be an offence in Percy’s eyes. One Christmas, Rex and Ed received second-hand tennis racquets. Enraged at what he saw as their careless treatment of the gifts, Percy took the racquets and smashed them on a fence.

  Ed’s early years were lonely ones. He failed to make friends at primary school—which he completed two years early, thanks to some home tuition from his mother, Gertrude, who had been a teacher. This meant he was one of the smallest boys on the roll when he began secondary school—for which he was ill prepared, apart from academically. Later, when he was asked what he would change if he were to live his life over again, Ed always said there was little he would not care to repeat. But if he were given the opportunity to relive his teenage years, he said in a long interview for the US-based Academy of Achievement, he would ‘dodge it like fury’.

  The Hillarys’ family home was in rural Tuakau, where Percy ran the local newspaper—the Tuakau District News—almost single-handedly, and had a sideline in beekeeping. Ed walked barefoot to primary school, rain or shine. Now he found himself spending several hours a day travelling by train from Tuakau to the intimidating halls of Auckland Grammar.

  At secondary school, Ed was self-conscious. His feeling that he was a misfit who would never be accepted was exacerbated by an incident that he often recounted as a defining one in his life. In the first week, Ed turned up for gym class. As the instructor surveyed his new intake, his gaze settled on Ed and turned to a look of disdain.

  ‘What have they sent me?’ he said, loud enough for Ed to hear, and then began a detailed, humiliating catalogue of his physical deficiencies.

  ‘Get over there with the other misfits,’ said the teacher finally.

  Ed was crushed. He regarded this as the beginning of his sense of ‘inferiority as to how I looked’, which would trouble him for a long time to come.

  This was not the only unjust humiliation he suffered at the hands of a teacher. It was much later in life that he was able to bring himself to tell another such story in a magazine interview. A different teacher ‘had very rigid views on what was right and what was wrong’. It was his habit to make his class stay in later than others every day, with the result that Ed could not catch the regular after-school train; he had to take a later one, which meant he got home as late as eight o’clock at night. Ed steeled himself to approach the teacher and explain this.

  ‘Well, I can’t make an exception for you,’ said the teacher. ‘I’ll let you make your mind up what do to. You can leave on time to catch your train or I will swipe you in front of the class.’

  It was exquisitely refined bullying. But it met its match in Ed’s stubbornness. He said he would take the beating and leave school on time. At the end of every school day for a week Ed bent over and got thrashed with a cane in front of the class before being allowed to catch his train.

  Percy and Gertrude worked out something was up and dragged the truth out of their son. Gertrude then wrote a letter for Ed to give to the school principal.

  Ed and the teacher were called to the principal’s office. The principal expressed his displeasure to the teacher, told him the beatings were to stop, and told Ed he was to catch his regular train from now on.

  When he was asked, in his eighties, if he still hated the teacher, Ed said: ‘No, I despise him.’

  There was some good to be found in these experiences. Rather than let the bitterness fester into something dark, Ed developed the sensitivity to injustice that he would put to work in the world.

  In later years, Ed was often asked to come back and address the students at his old school. He always delivered an inspirational message, but he did not shy away from repeating the story of his humiliations. He would warn the students about bullying; and he would admit to how frightening he had found his friendless early days at the school.

  Fortunately, in the fifth and sixth form, he shot up several centimetres—he would eventually reach 188 centimetres as an adult. He enjoyed sports and learnt how to handle himself in a fight. In his memoirs, he recounted numerous violent incidents such as brawls with other boys on the train. For a boy who was used to viole
nce at home as a way of dealing with things, fighting would have seemed a natural response.

  Apart from heightening his sense of inferiority and his sensitivity to injustice, Ed was exposed to one other incident during his time at Auckland Grammar that would dominate the rest of his life. In 1935, after much persuading and haggling from his son, Percy agreed to let Ed go on a school trip to Tongariro National Park, where he saw snow for the first time; and he had his first encounter with a decent-sized mountain in the form of Mt Ruapehu, an active volcano. He was besotted.

  Romanticism and a vivid imagination are traits frequently found in solitary children who spend long periods on their own, and Ed was no exception. He dreamed big. ‘I was a very keen walker and, as I walked along the roads and tracks around this countryside area, I’d be dreaming. My mind would be miles away and I would be slashing villains with swords and capturing beautiful maidens and doing all sorts of heroic things.’

  His fancies were fuelled by a voracious appetite for books. With his long train trips, there were periods where he was getting through a book a day. He read the books any boy of his age with an adventurous spirit would have devoured at that time—John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, H Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Warlord of Mars, and westerns—but also, incongruously, the romance and historical novels of Georgette Heyer. ‘The hero was usually a rather middle-aged gentleman, a very good sword fighter, with a beautiful young lady and all the rest of it. Great sword fighting and all highly romantic, adventurous activity. I used to find these things quite entertaining. Nowadays, I find them a little on the naive side.’

  He also read so many mountaineering books that ‘it’s rather put me off reading mountaineering books now’. He ploughed through classic volumes by Shipton and Smythe and Cherry-Garrard.

  In 1935, Ed’s last year at secondary school, his parents moved to the inner Auckland suburb of Remuera—not far from Auckland Grammar. He no longer needed to make the long journey between Tuakau and Auckland twice a day. Percy had parted ways with the paper, and henceforth beekeeping, which for a long time had been his hobby, now became his family’s main source of income. He did not abandon journalism altogether, though—he started a beekeeping industry magazine, New Zealand Honeybee. Beekeeping provided an erratic source of income, as it was dependent on the weather and the amount of honey the bees produced. But the enterprise ultimately grew to include 35 apiaries spread across 64 kilometres.