After Everest Read online

  Peter grew up both proud of his father’s fame and burdened by the legacy. The youth he describes in Two Generations, the book of which he and his father each wrote half, was a serious child, not a loner but lonely; not given to boisterous social activities; and unfulfilled by the usual adolescent distractions. This boy grew into a stroppy adolescent who, like many intelligent teenagers, had little tolerance for school subjects that did not interest him—giving him a reputation as an adequate but not exceptional student.

  There is much in Peter’s description of himself that could equally apply to the young Ed—solitary and thoughtful. One notable difference is that Ed, unlike his son, was an enthusiastic participant in team sport.

  His father expected Peter to be self-reliant from an early age, although he was sometimes thwarted by Sherpas. Once, camping in Nepal, Peter was with his sisters in a tent that collapsed when Belinda tripped over a pole. Ed yelled to eleven-year-old Peter to get up and fix it. Before he could do so, Mingma Tsering had seen to it.

  But Ed was not careless of Peter’s personal safety, as one might expect of someone given to high-risk pursuits himself. When their son wanted to get a motorcycle on which to travel to university, Ed and Louise were reluctant; but eventually they agreed to allow him to have one, as long as it was no more than 90cc—and they bought it for him.

  Not long afterwards, Peter persuaded Louise to act as guarantor for the purchase of a 750cc bike, without Ed’s knowledge. When Ed found out, he was furious and he and his son did not speak to each other for a fortnight. Ed chose not to relate this incident in either of his autobiographies.

  Much of the Hillary children’s early years was spent travelling, following their questing father in his relentless flight from boredom. Peter was ten when Ed took him on his first climb—up Mt Fog in the South Island with Mingma Tsering, who was on holiday in New Zealand. He was roped between the two older men and, struggling to match their pace, slipped more than once, sliding downhill until the rope stretched taut and halted his progress so he could be reeled in. He was never afraid.

  ‘I thought there was Ed Hillary, this is my father, this is Mingma—what could go wrong?’ says Peter. ‘So if I am rocketing down a slope, a young kid, I thought everything was fine because boing!—up you come. They fulfilled all of my faith in them. I just felt that this was Dad’s show, whatever we were doing, and he would sort things out and he always seemed to.’

  Most boys—at ten at least—think their father is Superman. Peter’s father actually was Superman—although he would later find out that his father was not invulnerable, after all.

  ‘One of the reasons why I was so shocked when my mother and sister were killed, when I saw Dad . . . even with this terrible thing that had happened and I was so heartbroken over . . . you thought he would sort it out, because he sorts everything else out.’

  If Ed was hard on Peter, ‘Peter was a strong-willed person, too,’ says Mike Gill. ‘He could be angry and difficult. He certainly wasn’t an easy teenager. He just didn’t like going to school, and there was nothing obvious he could drop into. Some people are lucky that, quite early in life, they find something that absolutely possesses them and they can follow it through and they are happy with it. But Peter seemed condemned to copy Ed.’

  The tale of Peter’s youth most frequently told, perhaps because it epitomises the complications that come with having a famous parent, is his practice of using an alias when he took holiday jobs, calling himself Peter Hill. It got him out of having to answer the questions that would inevitably come if he was identified as Ed’s son.

  Peter shared some adventures with his father, too. In 1979, he was a member of the Ocean to the Sky Ganges expedition; and he later accompanied him to the North Pole, meaning that both men had achieved the rare hat-trick of standing on both poles and atop the world’s highest peak.

  Ed described Peter on the Ganges trip struggling with the role of famous son. A constant on the journey was the number of people wanting to greet the living god wherever they went. And if he wasn’t available, the son of the living god was the next best thing. For a young man with a self-conscious streak, this was punishing. When the cameramen pointed Ed out to some locals wanting autographs, Peter exploded, and Ed—no stranger to bouts of bad temper himself—had to try to talk him down.

  ‘I can remember a couple of times when I was a bit fiery and I felt we really needed to push on and go for whatever it was,’ says Peter of travelling with his father. ‘I wasn’t the only one, either, because a lot of the younger members—Murray Jones, Graeme Dingle—were all in the same boat. They were young then, impulsive—so that just comes with the territory.’

  ‘In many ways Peter is a chip off the old block,’ says fellow adventurer Dingle, who has had many encounters with Peter over the years. ‘I think, when you get two similar characters, you are going to have some tensions. You have a young male and an older male. When we were making the Kaipo Wall film [for The Adventure World of Sir Edmund Hillary series], Peter must have been seventeen or eighteen, and almost every day I could hear Ed say to him: “On the 18th of February you are going to university.” I could see Peter stick out his jaw and look away. Then the 18th of February came and went and Peter didn’t go, and that sort of thing created huge tension.’

  Such tension is part of what being father and son means. ‘I think it was a normal father/son thing,’ says Hilary Carlisle, ‘trying to work out how to work together. It can’t have been easy for Peter, wondering what he was going to do with his life, because being the son of a famous person is a hard thing to follow. It was difficult for Peter to find his niche, because there was always another adventure.’

  To hear Peter tell it, it could never have been otherwise. ‘The sort of person I am, in the environment we lived in . . . around that dining-room table we often had pretty exciting people come and join us for dinner. They would tell stories about where they had been with Dad.’

  When Peter began to think about how much he would have liked to go on those adventures, it was ‘the thin end of the wedge because, if you wished you had been there with him, well, maybe you will be next time. And of course he kept organising these expeditions. I started going as a junior member.’

  ‘It is immensely difficult being the son of a hugely famous person,’ says Mike Gill. ‘There are expectations of you that you can’t possibly live up to, because only one person could have climbed Mt Everest. There were other mountains to climb, but none of them mattered. No matter how much Ed might say that the most important thing [in his life] was helping out the Sherpas, a lot of other people have helped the Sherpas. Some not as well as Ed but they are not famous for it. Climbing Everest was a one-off.’

  Peter could have avoided comparisons by choosing a completely different field of endeavour. But hearing him speak of the marvellous adventures and stories of adventure that filled his childhood makes it hard to imagine he could have seriously considered any other path.

  Murray Jones disagrees. ‘Sarah didn’t do that,’ says Jones. ‘Scott’s son became an ornithologist. It’s not easy having famous parents, but he also had a lot of opportunities. We all did, because of Ed.’

  Hilary Carlisle also believes that Peter was under no pressure to take on a life of adventure. ‘It was Peter’s choice. I don’t think Ed was pushing him into things at all.’

  Sarah’s decision to become an art conservator meant she didn’t have to confront many of the famous-father issues that Peter did. Just being the offspring of someone famous brings unwanted attention and numerous complications, but if you then go and emulate the famous parent’s career, you are multiplying the potential complications for yourself.

  ‘I think Dad gently tried to put the pressure on all of us to pursue careers that were more conformist, really,’ says Peter. ‘I don’t subscribe to the idea “Just go and do what you are passionate about”. You might be passionate about something, but what if you can’t make a living? And is what you can make a living out of
, as a 21-year-old, something you can support a family on and save for the future? He didn’t discuss it in that detail, but he did want us to develop good careers.’

  Ed, of course, did exactly what he was passionate about and nothing else. And he didn’t have a proper job until he was in his sixties. Like many fathers, he seems to have had more conservative views about what his children should do than about what he himself should do. But if he was a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ father, it didn’t work in Peter’s case. Peter started a degree but, just like Ed before him, abandoned his studies—something he regrets.

  ‘I certainly wish I had finished my degree, because it’s something uncompleted and in the background,’ says Peter. ‘I am interested in natural sciences and virtually every day I read stuff about that type of thing because it does fascinate me. But I did a commercial pilot’s licence and, while I didn’t go on and develop a career in aviation, I completed that course.’ Ed, it will be remembered, failed to be selected for pilot training when he was in the air force.

  Ed was always proud that no one ever lost their life on any of his expeditions. Peter’s successes have been coloured by more than one tragedy or near-tragedy. He nearly lost his own life, and another climber, Ken Hyslop, did perish in 1979 when he was attempting to climb Ama Dablam—the mountain that had proved irresistible to four members of Ed’s 1960–61 HSME when they became the first to climb it. Peter’s party was hit by an icefall, which killed Hyslop instantly.

  Peter clearly had Ed’s sheer passion for climbing and, indeed, the risks that come with it. As he puts it, ‘When you are doing things that are very testing and challenging, especially ambitious mountaineering, you are trying to do something in a different way, a different route. It’s not that we become complacent, but you go in there with a sunny optimism—we are the group and we have got the skills. We nearly pulled it off. We nearly did this new audacious route, straight up the centre of the west face of Ama Dablam—this beautiful mountain. And we were just about to go out at the 21,000-foot mark and bivouac for the night and we got clobbered.’

  Fortunately, Ed was in the Himalayas at the time of the Ama Dablam incident. When he first heard the news, it was in a message from Elizabeth Hawley—who had told him of the accident that killed Louise and Belinda just four years before. Hawley knew one of Peter’s party was dead, but not which one. It was a terrifying moment for Ed when he thought that he might have lost another child in an accident in this part of the world.

  ‘He was immediately on the helicopter with me when I came out of there,’ says Peter. ‘We picked him up at Kunde; he came down to Kathmandu; he made sure I was in the hospital. There was a visiting American surgeon and so he was involved with that. And that was a demonstration of his caring. He wanted to do something; just standing and patting you on the back wasn’t his style. But he could do something—he could be there in the helicopter, he could make sure he could be there to talk to the surgeon. That was certainly the Ed Hillary way.’

  Peter first reached the top of Everest in 1990, with fellow New Zealanders Rob Hall and Gary Ball—making Ed and Peter the first father and son to have summited the mountain. Peter called Ed. The two had a brief talk, which Ed said was the longest they had had for some time. Peter told Ed he had been impressed at just how difficult the Hillary Step was.

  Writing about the occasion in View from the Summit, Ed reflected that Peter’s admiration for his feat of 1953 had caused him to feel ‘a slight glow of pleasure’. He also marvelled at the new technology that made the call possible. But of Peter’s achievement he expressed no opinion.

  In 2002 Peter made his second ascent of the mountain. This time the phone call was filmed. Peter was wearing a hat with blue-and-white-striped shade, just like the one Ed’s sister, June, had made and that he wore on the peak in 1953. But their conversation was less than inspired:

  ‘Dad, it’s Peter here—can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you. How are you?’

  ‘Good. We’re on the summit of Everest—we’ve been here for 40 minutes. It’s cloudy all around—amazing outlook, Dad.’

  Peter had had other adventures in between, often marked by the sort of conflict Ed went out of the way to avoid on his own expeditions.

  ‘In 1991 Peter and I were doing the traverse of the Himalayas and we were having tremendous difficulty getting on,’ says Graeme Dingle. ‘We met Ed at Kunde and stayed there for a while. Peter seemed a bit grumpy, and at one stage I said, “Hey, Ed, can you give me some advice on getting on with Peter?” He said, “No, I can’t help you.” That really surprised me at the time. It meant that he would probably have to compromise and he didn’t want to do that. Years later, when Peter went to the South Pole, the guys [Peter] didn’t get on with came to me and said, “Can we talk to you about this?” I said, “No, I can’t help you.” I kind of understood then.’

  Dingle and Peter had many disagreements during their historic traverse. As Dingle tells it, ‘Peter can be quite volatile, very stroppy. He could storm out at times, when we would be climbing, and I didn’t cope with it.’

  Though the two never came to blows, ‘I felt like it at times,’ says Dingle, ‘but if it comes to decking your climbing partner, that’s the end of the road. So I suffered some enormous emotional agony trying to get through the whole thing. Peter is a very, very determined person as well, just as Sir Ed was.’

  Dingle—who, with his climbing experience and close acquaintanceship with both men, should be a very good judge of these things—has high praise for what Peter has managed to achieve in his own right. It’s a sentiment echoed by John Hillary. ‘Peter is tough but he is focused. There are a lot of people who have determination, but it can only happen to one in a million people that it comes together. Peter has done really well and I admire how he has handled himself and his life.’

  Peter did really well indeed to survive a storm on K2 in 1995 that took the lives of his seven climbing companions. The group was well on its way to summiting the world’s second highest mountain when Peter developed an intuitive sense that something was wrong. With the weather taking a turn for the worse, he decided not to carry on; and he was the only survivor of the terrible storm that beset K2 that night.

  He also did well to survive the attempt to retrace Captain Scott’s doomed 1912 journey by skiing to the South Pole and back with two Australians, Eric Phillips and John Muir, in late 1998. Compared to his father’s relatively jaunty trot to the Pole, this was a hellish journey that dissolved into bitterness. During the 84 days it took to get to the Pole—after which they were flown out—the party endured fierce storms, painful frostbite and hunger. Some sort of temporary insanity or ‘expeditionary madness’ seems to have developed among all three. Peter suffered hallucinations.

  The relationship between the two Australians and Peter collapsed. Within the narrow confines of their shared tent, the other two managed to shun him. They accused him of being not up to the demands of the trek and, in contrast to his father’s reputation, not being a team player.

  ‘I think I was the team player,’ says Peter. ‘I don’t accept that at all. These things can become incredibly intense. There were some tensions, if you speak to the members of Dad’s expeditions to Antarctica—they were there for 15 months. If you go back to Captain Scott, Amundsen or any of the other polar expeditions in between, it is a very testing environment. The ice trek wasn’t one of my successes for sure. I do feel that, on most of the expeditions I have been on, the great thing has been the camaraderie, the times spent together waiting out the bad weather.’

  In another paternal echo, it seems that, just as Vivian Fuchs had piggybacked on the Hillary name to raise funds for his polar exploit, so too had Peter attracted the sponsorship that got the trek going. Eric Phillips later wrote a bitter account of the affair.

  ‘A number of months before I left, I realised that I’d made a mistake with Eric Phillips,’ says Peter. ‘But what could I do? I was the person who really organised the spon
sorships, brought the money in. It was like it was almost too late to change. You can pull out and collapse the whole thing, or do you want to take up the opportunity? Going to Antarctica on a major expedition is an extraordinary thing to organise. So you hope there will be sufficient maturities in the group and [they] will approach it the way you would any business. The three of us were in business. It’s not like we had to like each other.’

  Sarah is in no doubt that her brother and father share very similar personalities. ‘He is very driven and very active and has many things going on. Peter is very talented with public speaking; he’s athletic; he’s good at climbing.’

  Dingle sees in Peter—and Sarah—a ‘tremendous blend of both their parents. There is a bit of the artist; quite a lot of the “considered opinion” of Ed.’ John Hillary believes ‘both Peter and Sarah have inherited his [Ed’s] toughness’.

  As it was for Ed, the toughest time for Peter and Sarah was after the death of Louise and Belinda. In his own personal variation on the strategy Ed employed to cope, Peter found some comfort in communal activity. ‘With most of my expeditions there were great friends, great times, fabulous adventures. I think that was a coping mechanism because the relationships on these expeditions are very fraternal. I mean you are brothers in arms out there, you rely on each other, you are telling stories. If someone bursts into tears in Auckland city, people will say, “I think we need a psychiatrist.” Up there on the mountain you go, “He’s had a tough day,” because he has. It’s a very testing place; people are scared. Emotions bubbling to the surface is okay because it’s that sort of place. But in the city it’s not okay, because everyone should be able to restrain themselves and be composed. So one of the things that drew me, going on those climbing trips, was that you let your emotions go.’

  It’s impossible to imagine Ed expressing such sentiments. He was uncomfortable talking about emotions at the best of times. Tom Scott reports Ed disliking the book Peter wrote about the disastrous polar trek because Peter talked about feelings in it.