After Everest Read online

  At university Ed’s various interests started to coalesce. He spent two years putatively studying mathematics and science, his strongest school subjects, but with so little enthusiasm that he failed to pass a single exam. However, he did join the tramping club where, far from being consigned to the puny misfits group, he shone from the start. Tramping was something that, with his long stride and incredible stamina, he could do well.

  In fact, tramping was the perfect pursuit for a solitary dreamer who had trouble making friends. As a young man, Ed was so shy that, on occasions when a pretty girl walked into a room, he would have to leave hurriedly so no one would see him blushing. Tramping gave him entry into a community that was made up of both sexes, involved in an activity that gave them a common purpose and through which they formed strong bonds.

  Ed was good at team sports, but throughout his life he would focus on projects that allowed an individual to achieve his own personal goals within a group. At university, he also took classes in jujitsu and boxing, but head-to-head competition was not his style. An incident at the gym provided evidence of his capacity for recklessness and spontaneity, which are believed to be the hallmarks of the most successful adventurers but are actually quite rare, and mostly occur among those who meet premature deaths.

  On one occasion Ed had the chance to spar with New Zealand welterweight champion Vic Calteaux. It seemed to Ed that the boxer wasn’t taking his efforts seriously, so when Ed saw his chance he surprised him with a straight left to the nose. A furious Calteaux responded by beating the bejesus out of Ed; the coup de grâce a direct hit to the solar plexus. Ultimately Ed would learn the virtue of giving every action due consideration before taking it.

  In 1938, Ed faced the fact that he wasn’t suited to university, and defaulted to beekeeping for Percy. From then on, he would drop in and out of the business as it suited him over the years, leaving Rex to pick up the slack. He later acknowledged that he took advantage of Rex’s good nature in doing this. Eventually the business was based in a factory at Papakura. Rex lived next to the big honey house and Ed would bunk there as he came and went, joining Rex’s family for meals.

  Ed would ever after be described as ‘the former beekeeper’. His remarkable physiology—distinguished by extraordinary stamina, endurance and physical strength—was suited to beekeeping. It was hot, physically demanding work and in summer he would carry out his duties wearing only shorts and a hat and veil. He might get up to 300 stings in the process, he later told Alexa Johnston.

  ‘Did they hurt?’ she asked him.

  ‘Of course they hurt,’ said Ed. ‘They were bee stings.’

  Percy had no shortage of strong, occasionally idiosyncratic beliefs. He believed fasting would cure most sickness. As a consequence, if Ed was ever unwell, he struggled mightily never to let on to Percy so he wouldn’t have to add hunger to his list of ailments. It was about this time that the Hillary family became involved with the once-flourishing proto-New Age movement called Radiant Living, which is now remembered mainly because Ed was deeply involved in it as a young man.

  English-born Herbert Sutcliffe founded the movement, which had parallels with the Christian Science teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a Christianity-based hodgepodge of dietary advice, mind over matter, physical fitness, affirmations and more. With its central tenet that good mental health was the key to good physical health, Radiant Living found a perfect adherent in Percy; and Gertrude wasn’t far behind him in her enthusiasm.

  The name, according to an article on NZHistory.net, referred to the belief that ‘one must acknowledge the existence of the soul, “the invisible which can be visualised as a (radiant) source for good within us all . . .” ’. Later, when Ed had achieved his worldwide fame, Sutcliffe was to make much of the association: ‘As Edmund Hillary (now Sir Edmund) is inevitably linked with the top of Mount Everest, so is Radiant Living connected with Sir Edmund,’ he wrote. Ed travelled with Sutcliffe as his assistant in 1940. World War II would eventually sever Ed’s involvement with Radiant Living—he was not inclined to return to it when the war was over, although he continued to be something of a spiritual quester. Over the next few years, he looked into many esoteric religions, but his practical nature meant none could win his allegiance. His studies did, however, leave him with a tolerance of a wide variety of beliefs.

  When World War II broke out and it looked likely his sons would be conscripted, Percy took advantage of a provision that allowed exemption for reserved occupations, including beekeeping. He got his elder son Ed off the hook first. But he did it without telling Ed—who was not pleased.

  Percy then learnt to his dismay that only one exemption per family was allowed. Rex would have to go to war.

  Ironically—and devastatingly—Rex, unlike Ed, was a conscientious objector on philosophical grounds. The older boy would have been happy to sign up; Rex was not and, following his conscience, he spent four years of the war in a detention camp. ‘And Ed changed his mind of course and decided to go to war, and I think if he’d only made his mind up in the first place, my life could have been quite different,’ Rex told Ed’s friend and chronicler Tom Scott years later—with some understatement.

  How Ed felt about what happened to Rex may be assumed from the fact that he does not refer to it in either of his autobiographies. Ed could, of course, simply have gone to war from the very start, but Percy’s will was so strong that he was initially unable to withstand it. Eventually, Percy gave in and Ed finally joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1944.

  He wanted to be a pilot, but the authorities didn’t see him as pilot material and he trained as a navigator. While training in the South Island, Ed encountered more mountains and did a few solo climbs, none too ambitious. From the camp, however, he could see 2884-metre, snowy-topped Mt Tapuaenuku, and he became determined to make an ascent. He arranged a three-day leave.

  A potential climbing partner pulled out at the last minute so Ed decided to go it alone. A friend took him part of the way on his motorbike and Ed then walked 8 kilometres to a farm, where he stayed overnight, and another 24 kilometres the next day. He overnighted again before commencing his climb—having ignored advice from the few souls he encountered to abandon his solo plan. He reached the top and returned safely. The next day he walked another 32 kilometres before getting a lift. He was exultant. He had climbed his first proper mountain. Nothing could compare with this.

  He was also involved in physical activity at ground level. A competent rugby player, he played in a championship team for his squadron. His ability had been noted by a member of a team from another camp, whose side was preparing for a championship final. There wasn’t much between the rival teams, but his team was down two players due to illness. Would Ed and a friend be willing to jump the fence and fill in?

  Ed threw himself into the game in such a robustly physical fashion that afterwards one of the spectators, a supporter of the losing side, was keen to settle the score off the field. On reflection, Ed acknowledged that his conduct on the field had been too aggressive, and he liked himself the less for it.

  Ed enjoyed his war service. He qualified as a navigator and spent time stationed in the Pacific Islands, serving on Catalina flying boats. His already well-developed social conscience was pricked when he met a poor Fijian boy, who begged him first for a piece of bread and then for money. It was a vignette that stayed with him.

  In a navigation exercise, he took a plane off course. This uncharacteristic error occurred because he had taken the word of his pilot, who had misidentified a piece of land as a reference point, rather than trusting his own navigational skills. He would generally follow his own counsel from then on—no matter who was nominally in charge.

  Ed never came near armed combat, though he did contract malaria. In one memorable incident, he and his friend Ron Ward shot a crocodile, memorialised by a photo in which Ed’s grin is nearly as wide as that of the deceased beast. Despite numerous su
bsequent attempts, the pair failed to claim a second croc.

  Ed’s war came to an end in near disaster. En route from Tulagi in the Solomon Islands to Halavo Bay, Florida Island, he and Ward were about to take off in their flying boat when a bump dislodged a full petrol tank inside their plane, and it fell and burst into flames. Before Ed, who was not wearing a shirt, could jump clear of his blazing craft, a wave knocked him off his feet and he fell onto the flames. He then managed to roll off and into the sea.

  Ed suffered second-degree burns; the pain was exacerbated by having to swim 450 metres in salt water and then walk 800 metres under the blazing sun before reaching help.

  He was taken to hospital first at Tulagi, then to Guadalcanal, and shot full of morphine and antibiotics. He was told to expect to spend months in hospital before achieving anything like a full recovery. By his second week he was able to walk around for short periods. By the third week he was bored and restless. He badgered and cajoled until, still bandaged, he was allowed out of hospital, though not off the islands. Finally it was acknowledged that he could recover as well in Auckland as in the Solomons and he was discharged from the air force and sent home.

  Ed’s recuperative abilities were extraordinary and played a large part in his later achievements. For now, however, it wasn’t clear what these achievements might involve. He intended to spend his time beekeeping and mountain climbing. But when he learnt, to his surprise, that Percy didn’t actually have a place for him in the business when he left the air force, he headed to the South Island and started looking around for new challenges.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ON TOP

  George Mallory famously wanted to climb Everest because it was there. Ed Hillary’s actions suggest he wanted to climb it because he wanted to be there first.

  Unlike many young people in years to come, Ed did not grow up dreaming that one day he would climb the world’s highest mountain. He hadn’t even seen a mountain until he was sixteen. But from the time he climbed his first ‘decent mountain’ it was his passion.

  In the post-war years Ed climbed as often as he could. In 1945 he became an associate member of the New Zealand Alpine Club (NZAC) and that year scaled Kitchener, Sealy, De la Beche, Hamilton and Malte Brun. In January of the next year he ascended Mt Cook with his mentor, the great mountaineer Harry Ayres, who would teach Ed much of the climber’s craft. Some of Ed’s earliest efforts at writing were accounts of his climbs that he penned for the NZAC’s New Zealand Alpine Journal.

  As a member of a party that included Ayres and Christchurch climber Ruth Adams, he made the first ascent of the south ridge of Mt Cook on 6 February 1948.

  Three days later, there was a character-testing incident when Adams fell and injured herself in an attempt on La Perouse. While the others went for help, Ed stayed with Adams for what turned into a night spent at the scene, relying on supplies that were air-dropped in. ‘Had a party set itself the task of finding the most inaccessible spot in the high central alps in which to become involved in an accident, it could hardly have done better than the main divide between Mt Hicks and La Perouse,’ wrote MJP Glasgow in the New Zealand Alpine Journal.

  Adams needed to be stretchered out. It was not possible to return the way they had come, so she was effectively carried over the top of the mountain and down the other side. The rescue party took 48 hours just to reach Adams and Ed. Several other climbers—who would later figure in the history of the first ascent of Mt Everest—were also involved: Norm Hardie, Earle Riddiford and Bill Beaven. It remains one of the most dramatic and difficult rescues in New Zealand’s long alpine history.

  Ed liked being first, and he would be the first to climb many New Zealand peaks in the following few years. When his sister June got married in England in 1949, their parents, financially buoyed by an excellent honey season, travelled to the wedding. They stayed on, and early the next year there came a somewhat imperious instruction to Ed to get himself over there as they required someone to drive them around Europe. He did so—and took every opportunity to practise his climbing skills on some European peaks, including the Eiger. At one point he climbed five mountains in five days.

  While Ed was in Europe, he received a letter from George Lowe with a most intriguing suggestion.

  A Hastings-born school teacher and mountaineer, Lowe was a man of great warmth and wit—and he was almost Ed’s peer as a climber. They had met on a bus at Mt Cook and quickly developed a firm bond. Lowe would remain a lifelong friend and colleague of Ed’s. Both men had had self-doubts to overcome. George’s equivalent of Ed’s earlier scrawny physique was an arm that had been broken and set badly. This had prevented him from serving during the war, but it would not prevent him from doing much else.

  George had written to tell Ed that the first-ever New Zealand Himalayan climbing party was being formed. Would Ed like to be involved? He certainly would.

  The other two climbers in the party were Earle Riddiford, a lawyer, and the athletic and entertaining Ed Cotter. Back home the four got to know each other, honing their skills in the South Island, where they prepared for the expedition by making the first ascent of Mt Elie De Beaumont from the Maximilian Ridge. It is a difficult mountain to access and is most commonly climbed from the Mt Cook side of the Tasman Glacier.

  The purpose of their intended Everest expedition was twofold, as Ed wrote in the Alpine Journal: to see if a practicable route existed up the mountain from the southern, or Nepalese, side; and to find out if the post-monsoon snow conditions were suitable for a major attack on the peak. These were crucial preparatory steps. An actual assault would only come later.

  In mountaineering circles there was no greater challenge than a successful ascent of Mt Everest. The world’s highest peak takes its English name from a British surveyor-general of India who never laid eyes on it. In Tibetan it is called more poetically Chomolungma (mother goddess of the universe) and in Nepali Sagarmatha (goddess of the sky). It is 8848 metres high, and natural forces squeeze it up a few millimetres every year.

  Before Ed, the name most associated with Everest was that of George Mallory—that most romantic of mountaineers. Mallory was a member of the first British Everest reconnaissance expedition in 1921 and several subsequent expeditions before the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition, during which he perished on the mountain. Many other people had died trying to scale the peak, including seven Sherpas in 1922 alone and an eccentric English soldier and mystic, Maurice Wilson, who attempted a solo climb in 1934. For the misfit, scrawny, shy kid from the ‘odd’ family, being the first person to climb the world’s highest mountain would redeem it all.

  A turning point in the history of attempts on Everest came in 1950 when the Nepalese Government agreed to allow parties to attempt the mountain from Nepal, on the southern side. Previous missions had attacked from Tibet, on the northern side of the mountain. The Nepalese Government decided to allow a different country every year to have a go.

  The members of the New Zealand expedition gained valuable experience of climbing conditions in the area when Riddiford and Cotter made the first ascent of 7242-metre Mukut Parbat. Riddiford had been fighting illness, and Ed reported later, in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, that the lawyer’s success on this occasion taught him a valuable lesson about just how willpower could be deployed to overcome physical obstacles. Ed himself developed formidable strength of will, but in years to come he would find out that even the strongest willpower was not enough for some challenges.

  Ed’s social conscience was also reawakened by the gap he observed between the poverty that was so prevalent in this part of the world and the high standard of living back home in New Zealand.

  The party was headed to New Zealand when they received a telegram that could fairly be described as a letter bomb, so great was its divisive effect on them. The missive was from the esteemed Everest pioneer Eric Shipton, who had made his first assault on the mountain in 1938. It contained an invitation to join another British reconnaissance expedit
ion.

  According to Ed, he had written to Shipton when he had heard that the Englishman was planning such a mission—effectively inviting Shipton to invite the New Zealanders. At the same time, NZAC had written to their northern counterparts suggesting there were some well-qualified climbers in the club who could be an asset to the British expedition.

  It was the opportunity of a lifetime. The only problem was that the invitation stipulated that the climbers would have to provide their own supplies; and it was for only two people. But which two?

  Ed Hillary, obviously, as far as Ed was concerned. He knew he should get back to the bees, but the chance to get to Everest outweighed any scruples about leaving Rex to mind the store yet again. And he could afford it, because he still had the remnants of a nest egg acquired during six weeks’ work on a South Island hydroelectric project.

  George Lowe and Earle Riddiford obviously felt the same way. The dispute that developed was too much for the genial Cotter, who withdrew any claim for inclusion. And it has to be said that someone who could walk away from that fight probably wouldn’t have made it to the top of Everest.

  It appears that Lowe and Riddiford acknowledged Ed should go, as he was the superior climber. On skills alone, Lowe would seem to have had the next best claim, but he was broke whereas Riddiford was still flush. Riddiford also told Lowe he didn’t have the necessary drive. Lowe was livid, but he also lost the argument.