After Everest Read online

‘Are they alive?’ Ed asked her.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Shit, what will I tell the parents?’ Louise’s mother and father were in Nepal at the time.

  The small plane had crashed on take-off, killing the pilot, Peter Shand, and all four passengers. The cause was a simple oversight: the locking pins that held the tail flaps in stall position had not been removed. Those on board never stood a chance.

  Ed insisted on flying to Kathmandu and the crash site. ‘Sometimes now I regret that I did this,’ he says in A View from the Top. ‘It was an awful sight to see my wife and daughter in this condition. For a number of years the picture I saw would come up in my mind with monotonous regularity. This helped make it difficult for me to recover from the experience.’

  A photo of Ed at the site shows a man in pieces, seemingly drained of every vital essence. As Pat Booth described it: ‘The grief is all over him.’

  The bodies were cremated that night. ‘It was a pretty terrifying sight, seeing the most important part of my life disappearing up into the cloud,’ was how Ed described his reaction to the ceremony. ‘Terrifying’ was not a word he often used.

  At the time his mother and sister were being cremated, Peter Hillary did not even know they were dead. He had been travelling in India and it was some time before he was tracked down and told the terrible news.

  As for Jim and Phyl Rose, ‘I think it was really hard on them,’ says Sarah Hillary. ‘They aged considerably.’ Sarah had been in Auckland, staying at the family’s beachside holiday home at Anawhata. Peter and June Mulgrew were in Nepal; they learnt the news on their arrival back in Auckland.

  John Hillary was in Australia, and read about the accident in the newspaper. ‘I didn’t know who was in the aircraft,’ says John. ‘I knew my father was there so I was somewhat worried for a while till I found out he was okay. But it was pretty traumatic for him.’

  Rex stayed as close as he could to Ed for the next couple of weeks; he was perhaps the only person close enough to be able to provide any support.

  Peter Mulgrew flew back with Sarah, who was to get another shock when she arrived. ‘I thought as soon as I saw my father everything would be all right, but when I got off the plane Liz Hawley was there and warned me he wasn’t very good.’

  He was terrible.

  Ed had led a triumphant life up until then, and it had all been of his own making—he had always been in charge. Even the bad things that had occurred had been his responsibility and he acknowledged the errors he had made. But this was a game of the gods. This was his worst nightmare, and there was nothing he could have done about it. All his stamina and strength skills were of no use in the face of this cruel accident.

  ‘We know what happened,’ says Sarah. ‘When we went there, we heard about what had happened to the plane from another pilot; we heard lots of other stories about it. But we didn’t want to talk about it because it was so upsetting. We would all start crying—it wasn’t just him.’

  ‘We understood everything that happened,’ adds Peter, ‘including the pre-flight checks, what had happened in the aircraft, what Mum would have felt like.’

  The same need that drove Ed to the crash site to view the wreckage for himself was presumably what led him to visit Peter Shand’s father later. It was, according to Norm Hardie, a harrowing interview. ‘Ed asked Jim Wilson and me to attend the meeting,’ says Hardie. ‘It is clear the locks had not been withdrawn and this made the plane uncontrollable in the air. The father struggled to try to blame the ground crew for not taking the necessary action. Ed expressed sympathy but it was very emotional for all four . . . On the way home, Ed said, “Of course, in the end it was pilot error.” ’

  Ed’s grief was bleak, deep and long-lasting.

  ‘If we are talking about what his weakness was,’ says Mike Gill, ‘it was truly being unable to cope with what had happened with the deaths. There’s not many people that would’ve been as shattered as Ed was. He absolutely loved Louise and Belinda. He didn’t really handle the post-Louise thing well, but that’s not a criticism; it is just built into his character, and how can you criticise him for that?’

  Ed blamed himself for a long time, for reasons he explained to the BBC’s HARDtalk in 1999: ‘The main reason is that Louise hated flying in small aircraft—and she expressed this view quite often—but I always persuaded her to come on these flights on small aircraft in very rough country. Finally when the disaster occurred . . . I really felt that it was my fault. I felt that if I hadn’t persisted in getting her to come to all these places and joining me, she would still be alive.’

  It’s an emotional, natural but irrational way of thinking; and Ed was eventually able to see that. ‘Nowadays,’ he continued, ‘I’ve largely got over that feeling even though I sometimes still have an uneasy feeling about pushing her into doing things she didn’t want to do.’

  Guilt led to thoughts, obviously fleeting, of ending his own life. Ed wrote to his friends of these thoughts—as always, he was better able to express himself in letters than face to face. According to Peter, he wasn’t the only one—‘We all felt a little bit like that.’

  Ed was able to break through the cloud of his own misery for long enough to see clearly the disastrous effect it would have on those who remained—his children, the Roses and his Himalayan aid work. ‘I knew I couldn’t wipe that all away by doing myself in.’ Besides, as he said in another interview, ‘I didn’t know how to do it anyway, so the idea never developed into any strong feeling.’

  So he carried on.

  His first autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, was due to be published around the time of the accident. ‘Ed was meant to be going on this book launch tour, so he just decided to continue on with that,’ says Sarah. ‘We went on that with him and he met up with friends along the way who comforted him . . . but deep down there was this sadness where you just knew things weren’t right and would not be for a long time.’

  Eventually the three Hillarys arrived back in New Zealand. In the meantime Sarah had come to a conclusion: she would be the one to replace Louise and Belinda and would dedicate her life to helping Ed. But it soon became obvious that that wouldn’t be possible.

  Ed headed back to Nepal to carry on with his work: there was still a hospital to be built. Sarah went back too, to help Mike Gill with the film he was making about Ed. ‘I went over as a sound person, because I was considering what I could do as a career. But it was in the days of very primitive sound. There was no digital anything and the recording device broke down. I remember being over in Nepal and thinking, I don’t want to be over here anymore. It was too depressing.’

  But the work was a balm for Ed. Years later Peter told ABC-TV’s Foreign Correspondent program that Ed ‘realised if he didn’t carry on and complete Phaplu Hospital and some of the other projects it was just going to make it worse’.

  All his friends wanted to help, but few of them were brave enough to try. On Ed’s side, the emotional shutters went up; on his friends’ side, this was Ed Hillary—if something was too much for their hero to deal with, what use could they be?

  Graeme Dingle spent quite a bit of time with Ed over the next few years, but never in that time did Ed talk about his loss. ‘The worst thing was—and I suspect many of his other friends were the same—we didn’t know what to do. Had I been a bit older, I would have just got on a plane and been there for him. As far as I know, Peter Mulgrew was the only one who did that. I honestly did not know what to do. I don’t handle death very well anyway.’

  Ed, as we have seen, like most men of his time, was not emotionally expressive—or receptive. ‘Even years later,’ says Dingle, ‘I wrote him a letter telling him what a great example he’d been to me and I went through that whole business of saying how at the time of Louise’s death I just didn’t know what to say to him. He never replied to it, so I don’t know if he ever got the letter.’

  ‘Dad received these things but he would never respond,’ says Pete
r. ‘It was just the way it was. He never responded to a lot of things. A lot of people wrote letters or would phone up and say things and he would just sit there. It wasn’t a very good coping strategy, but that is what he did.’

  Peter says that although he and his father talked about their loss, there were still ‘some areas you just couldn’t go to. I don’t think anyone went there actually. He was this huge person—most people felt in awe of him. These friends were senior doctors, senior business people, leading climbers or just really good friends. And they didn’t feel they could go there.’

  Wally Romanes, who had taken part in the Makalu expedition, was obviously determined to do something, and came up with a touching solution. He ‘would turn up [at Ed’s house],’ says Peter, ‘mow the lawns and go. He was desperate to do something, but didn’t quite know what to say. They didn’t necessarily come in, but it was rather nice that people did these things for us.’

  ‘We were going through quite a lot ourselves,’ says Sarah.

  ‘We’d lost our mother,’ explains Peter. ‘Everyone focuses on him and I understand that, but we were having our own struggles, that’s for sure.’

  Peter—like just about everyone else, it seems—had an image of his father as a man who was always on top of things; and he expected him to be the same now. But he realised, when he first saw Ed after the accident, that Ed was not sorting this out. ‘It was the first time Ed wasn’t in control,’ adds Sarah.

  Later, Peter and Ed would visit the airstrip at Phaplu, as if in hope that through some magic the plane with Louise and Belinda aboard would turn up after all. ‘Dad and I would walk up and down, up and down. You just wanted to roll back time.’

  Those around Ed felt for him; and they grieved for the loss of two such vibrant and loved personalities. Mingma Tsering had been devoted to Louise, and all three children were much loved by the Sherpas. And the grief endures. ‘It is really painful and I don’t want to talk about it to be honest,’ says Murray Jones in 2012. ‘Both the air accident and Ed’s death is extremely painful still.’

  When Tom Scott, interviewing George Lowe on camera at Ed’s house in the 1990s, broached the subject of Louise and Belinda’s deaths, the climber burst into tears and taping had to stop. ‘That was one of the most devastating periods of my life,’ said Lowe.

  Rex Hillary’s response was full of pathos, and an indicator of just what an effect Louise and Belinda had on those who knew them. ‘Although I’d lost one of my own children and that was very painful,’ said Ed’s brother, ‘I don’t think any death affected me quite as much as the deaths of Belinda and Louise.’

  In the midst of all this, Ed made the claim—for the first, but not the last time—that the accident had robbed him of the two people he loved most of all. Pat Booth heard him say it ‘several times in my hearing’. It was repeated in the Academy of Achievement interview and as late as View from the Summit, which was published 24 years after the accident.

  The statement made some wonder about Ed’s feelings for the two children who were still alive; at best, he was being insensitive to their emotions. But it was not surprising, given Ed’s nature. ‘He had a ruthless honesty,’ says Scott. ‘If he behaved badly or was depressed, he said so. If he thought someone else had behaved badly, he said so. So when he said “two people most dear to me” that’s what he believed. The publisher tried to get him to take it out. But it was the truth. He said it more than once.’

  Ed had lost perspective. His tragedy was terrible, but not unique. He was not the first man to lose a wife and child in one awful moment. This calamity befalls people every day in motor accidents, fires and other forms of sudden death. Many of these people grieve and get on in a way that Ed could not bring himself to do.

  ‘I think it shows the extent to which he’d turned in on himself,’ says Gill. ‘He couldn’t see any loss except his. Peter and Sarah simply had to go their own ways, because suddenly there was no family left. It wasn’t like the other half was being cohesive. Ed wasn’t trying to hold that together either.’

  ‘He stopped whistling,’ says Peter. ‘He never whistled again. He used to whistle and whistle . . . he would be so happy he would just whistle.’

  In part, too, Ed’s reaction was the single-minded reaction of the high achiever. If he was getting to the top of Everest, nothing else was happening. And if he was grief-struck, that was what his existence was about—there was no real room for anything else, even as he went through the motions of his regular activities.

  Just as there was no one who could help Ed work through his sorrow, there was no one who could stand up to him and say, ‘These words are hurtful. You are neglecting two people who are depending on you to support them. You have to stop saying this and help the two children you have left.’ There was no one to remind Ed that he was still a father, and with that came responsibilities that did not disappear simply because he was in a bad way himself. It was his job to put Peter and Sarah’s grief and recovery ahead of his own.

  This was his most unheroic moment.

  Eventually he came to understand what he had done. In A View from the Top he admitted, ‘my sorrow and sadness about the whole activity affected me personally. I sometimes ignored the fact that my children were equally affected by this great disaster.’

  When Sarah is asked about Louise and Belinda being the two people he loved most, she answers indirectly. ‘I think in the beginning of the book he wrote, “You are the one that I really care about” to Louise and she was the focus—she was the top one. He loved his family and friends, but she was his support. It was a true deep love.’ No one has ever doubted that.

  So Peter and Sarah went their own ways.

  Peter thinks that, in his case, the accident probably played a part in his decision to go into aviation and get his pilot’s licence.

  Sarah had been studying. ‘After the accident happened I went back to Auckland but decided I couldn’t continue my course, so I bummed around for a bit. But I did go back to varsity the following year, to Dunedin. It took a long time to sort myself out. I think I was quite self-destructive for a very long time. I was eighteen when they died, and by 21 I’d had a child, so I ended up having children very young. It got me into action once more because I realised I had to get a career as well, so I had to do that at the same time as having young children. So I think that pulled me together.’

  Many people say there was a before Ed and an after Ed; that he never quite regained the spark he had when Louise and Belinda were still alive. But John Hillary maintains that Ed didn’t change deep down—that his reaction was a normal one.

  ‘For a long time he was really depressed about it and sad, which is hardly surprising,’ says John. ‘To lose two of your family members like that—and I know from personal experience—is very traumatic, especially if you loved them. But to say he changed dramatically, for me, is a load of rubbish. I never saw that in him. He did a lot of great things after they died. He carried on doing all the things he had been doing before they died and he carried very sad memories of them for a very long time.’

  Asked after Ed’s death whether he missed him, Mike Gill said, ‘No, I wouldn’t say I miss him [because] he was a changed person post-1975. He was much harder to get through to.’

  Ed, whose unfeigned ebullience was a large part of his make-up, was also prone to, if not depression, at least the blues. Tom Scott notes that if you added up the number of times he referred to being ‘a bit low’ in print or interviews over the years ‘you would say his resting condition is melancholia’.

  He required the adrenaline of a challenge—whether of an adventurous or humanitarian nature—to get him motivated and keep him upbeat. So he would naturally have been predisposed to a strong reaction when faced with a trauma such as the death of Louise and Belinda. He also fell back on some traditional palliatives—alcohol and tranquillisers; he was consuming several scotches and sleeping pills every night. ‘The combination of booze and drugs,’ Ed says in A View fro
m the Top, ‘certainly helped me over that particular period.’

  The months of grief turned into years, but eventually he started to come right. Ed refused to believe the adage that time would heal the wounds; but he did find that, ever so slowly, it helped them become less painful.

  Former New Zealand Governor-General Dame Cath Tizard describes being present at one turning point. It was an era when friends’ social lives consisted to a large extent of rotating Saturday night parties at each other’s houses. She and her then husband Bob were family friends of Max and Lois Pearl’s, who had spent time with Ed in the Himalayas and had been supporters of the work in Nepal.

  ‘They rang and said they’d managed to persuade Ed to come around one night with just some close friends,’ says Tizard. ‘I didn’t know then how depressed he had been after the deaths. We went around to the Pearls and Ed was very withdrawn and quiet. But they had got all his climbing mates up from the South Island. And late in the evening, when most of the guests had gone, someone brought up Gilbert & Sullivan and one of the chaps was a great aficionado. We started singing Gilbert & Sullivan, and Ed thought this was hilarious and perked up no end. Our singing was probably half drunken and terrible, but it was good fun. The Pearls told us later that for Ed that night was a turning point. The defining moment when he finally decided there was life after death.’

  The recovery from the loss of Louise and Belinda had begun, but it would take another remarkable woman to complete the process.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE DHARMA BUMS

  Ed was always happiest when he had an adventure to think about, and his lack of interest in such activities had been a sure sign of his depression. But in 1977 he was ready to get going again, albeit without the customary élan.

  ‘During that time, after Louise’s death,’ says Graeme Dingle, ‘the sort of contact [we had had], because I was living down the central North Island, was a bit harder because it was quite a trek to get to Auckland. Generally we could come when Ed told us to come, so he kind of closed down and didn’t invite us to come up. But one day he called out of the blue and said, “Come up, we have some things to talk about.” There was this fabulous gathering at his house and he said, “We are going to the Ganges.” ’