After Everest Read online

  As his absences grew fewer and shorter, and the children got older—more visible and less biddable—Ed began to have a more direct, day-to-day involvement in raising them.

  ‘Parents of his generation,’ says Peter, ‘were on a cusp. There had been a way of raising children, probably for a hundred years, up to that point, where it might have started bending to the sort of new age way of doing things.

  ‘He would try and make us do what his father did, which was really strict. He did move towards [the new way], but I do think it was the way that previous generation had been.’

  Louise, who was younger than Ed, tended to prefer the new style of parenting. Sarah thinks Louise found all the usual faults in children—answering back, not cleaning their rooms—easier to deal with because she had spent more time with them.

  Ed had firm views about money. He was not wealthy—though far from poor—and if the children wanted anything out of the ordinary they had to work to earn the money to pay for it.

  As for bringing boys home . . . ‘That was a little bit difficult,’ says Sarah. ‘Ed was very old-fashioned when it came to me. It was very different for Peter. I was the oldest girl and Ed was very protective. I remember being invited to a party and being told at the last minute I couldn’t go. I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but I remember our grandparents coming over to comfort me about the whole thing because it was so embarrassing.’

  On another occasion, Sarah had arranged to have a party in the garage, which had been especially decorated for the occasion. But when someone rang and told Ed a large group of people were planning to gatecrash it, he told Sarah the party was cancelled.

  ‘So I had to ring everyone—that was total humiliation. I told Ed he had to tell me who it was [who had called], but by the time he got around to it he couldn’t remember. He was very strict about socialising and things and that was one of the reasons why I left home really early and went to Dunedin University. I left school after the sixth form, went down there and partied up.’

  Just as Ed was having to learn how to be ‘Ed Hillary’, his children were learning how to be ‘Ed Hillary’s kids’. Being the child of a celebrity was rare at that time, especially in New Zealand. ‘The one thing I remember is, it was really embarrassing when they asked you what your father did and I never knew what that really was with Ed,’ says Sarah.

  ‘He was the beginning of this new era,’ says Peter. ‘Job descriptions are really complicated, varied and different these days. Back then, without a traditional job, it didn’t mean you weren’t hugely successful and very innovative and clever . . . Dad was something else.’

  ‘I always felt I could never talk about my family like most other people would . . .’ says Sarah. ‘I always felt that, if I said something, everyone was listening, so you couldn’t make casual comments. They will take it away and it will be their “Ed Hillary story”.’

  One of the few things Peter and Sarah disagree about when discussing their upbringing is whether their paternity earned them any special treatment. Sarah thinks not: ‘I don’t think we were treated differently, but we did have different experiences. At school, I was just a normal person with my friends, but we would meet other people who would come and visit Ed, then we went on trips that perhaps other people didn’t have the chance to do so we did have different experiences.’

  ‘I remember being a small boy at school,’ says Peter, ‘and going with [Governor-General Sir Bernard] Fergusson’s son back to Government House and playing, and Mum coming to pick me up and curtseying to Lady Fergusson. Later in India, when I was 30, I had lunch with Indira Gandhi and carried on up to see Tenzing. They are not typical experiences.’

  As for school, Peter says there was no sense of different treatment by the teachers, but there was from the students. ‘I remember walking around the quadrangle, where students weren’t meant to walk, and these kids yelled out: “You just think you can do that just because you are the son of Ed Hillary.” So I personally felt a lot of that.’

  The greatest pressure was the need to perform for the media. ‘Whenever there was a photo opportunity we had to smile for the camera,’ says Sarah. ‘Already when we were very young we had to deal with a public and private division. I remember having a tantrum as a small child when Ed had come back from some trip. I was very tiny but I refused to smile.’

  Sarah was not keen on heights—like her mother, she liked mountains, not mountaineering. Instead, she found her calling as an art conservator, becoming principal conservator at Auckland Art Gallery and exhibiting as an artist in her own right.

  Ed wanted all three children to go to university and become professionals. He was enthusiastic about Peter studying engineering—but instead he studied geology for a while, before abandoning it. Peter says: ‘He was incredibly proud of what Sarah achieved with her career and her qualifications, which he felt was a real triumph and so do I. Belinda was really interested in medicine and I think she would have been a fantastic doctor.’

  Peter, on the other hand, would follow in his father’s footsteps. Over all the ups and downs of childhood, Louise’s benevolent presence cast a warm glow. ‘Our mother was a sunny personality,’ says Sarah, ‘a very positive person. She could also be very cynical and very funny, but she basically looked on the bright side, and she liked people a lot. She was very outgoing.’

  Sarah once got a letter from a man who recalled meeting Ed and Louise, not long after they got married. ‘He said Louise entertained them all evening. There were lots of laughs and wonderful stories. Ed just sat back and enjoyed the whole experience. He felt they were so obviously in love.’

  ‘I think that, from the five of us,’ says Peter, ‘Sarah and I and Dad were of a certain strong-willed ilk, reasonably complex personalities, determined. Our younger sister was very much like my mother. They were both incredibly capable people, they were much more adept at dealing with people and knew how to weave their way around things, and really for our family they were the glue that made it function. They could bond it all together and make it work.’

  Bonding it together and making it work was something Ed would struggle to do in years to come.

  CHAPTER 5

  TO THE END OF THE EARTH

  When Ed reached the top of Everest, his career as a mountaineer could be said to have peaked. There were still many more unscaled mountains to climb, alpine challenges that men had been dreaming about for years—some reputed to be even more difficult than Everest. But several circumstances would keep Ed from another success like Everest.

  His health was a major factor—that apparently superhuman constitution was not invulnerable after all. The outcome of his first post-Everest mountaineering challenge was a portent of things to come. In 1954, having gained permission from the Nepalese Government, the New Zealand Alpine Club chose Ed—and who else could they possibly have chosen?—to lead a Himalayan expedition into the Barun Valley. Among its peaks were two that would loom large in Ed’s story in years to come: the unclimbed Makalu and Ama Dablam. Members of the expedition included Everest veterans Charles Evans and George Lowe, as well as Norm Hardie, Bill Beaven and others. Among the Sherpas was Mingma Tsering, whose life would become closely connected with Ed’s until Tsering’s death in 1993.

  Having set up base camp, Ed sent two groups off on surveying sorties while he, along with Jim McFarlane and Brian Wilkins, headed off to explore the Barun Glacier. Ed returned after three days of the planned four-day trip, while McFarlane and Wilkins pressed on.

  As the hour when they were due to return came and went, and then more time passed, Ed was beginning to worry. Finally, an exhausted Wilkins came into view. He and McFarlane had fallen into a crevasse; Wilkins had managed to extricate himself but McFarlane was injured and was still trapped there.

  Ed returned to the site with some Sherpas. He tied a rope around his chest and had himself lowered to the injured man. But the chest was the wrong place to take such weight and, although he didn’t realise it at
the time, he cracked three ribs. Numerous attempts to lift McFarlane out failed, and it was all Ed could do to get himself out.

  It was clear McFarlane couldn’t be removed that night, so sleeping bags were thrown down to him. Although he told his would-be rescuers he had got into the bags, he had merely wrapped them around himself and would pay the price later with the loss of parts of his feet and fingers to frostbite.

  Eventually McFarlane was brought to safety, but this wasn’t to be the end of the expedition. A party set out to attempt Makalu, leaving the injured Ed behind. But his restlessness proved his undoing and, although in pain, he set off to join the party.

  Before long his injuries got the better of him: in addition to his broken ribs, he suffered a recurrence of the malaria he had contracted during the war. He began to hallucinate—and he in turn had to be carried out. George Lowe worried Ed might die, and John Hunt was asked to write an obituary—just in case.

  Norm Hardie is scathing in his assessment of what happened. ‘There were lots of mountain technical mistakes and leadership omissions . . . His lack of language to explain to Sherpas on the surface what was to be done. Taking all his big weight on just a chest loop was forcing big stress on his body and making it difficult to extract himself at the top of the crevasse lip. Not going down the full length of rope, and then removing his crampons and putting McFarlane into his sleeping bag. Among mountaineers there was dismay to learn that the man who had climbed Everest was so lacking in mountain skills.’

  On the other hand, McFarlane, who was the person with most reason to be critical, bore the expedition leader no ill will in later years: ‘I feel privileged to have known him,’ he told Pat Booth.

  After the Barun Valley expedition, Ed slowed down; he even went back to helping Rex with the beekeeping. There was still time for the occasional mountain, though. With Harry Ayres, he made the first successful attempt of Mt Magellan in the South Island in 1955.

  Ed had got into the habit of adventure. It kept at bay a tendency to melancholia that Louise recognised was never far from the surface and that would erupt if Ed didn’t have something exciting to do.

  His next adventure would occupy him for the next couple of years, and preoccupy him for a lot longer. The 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) is still the most controversial exploit in Ed’s career.

  The Antarctic had irresistible appeal for Ed. Ernest Shackleton and the other early explorers in the region had been among his greatest childhood heroes. At the time of the TAE, Shackleton had been dead just over 30 years. But perhaps the great age of polar exploration was not over. Perhaps it just needed a kick along.

  British geologist Dr Vivian Fuchs was planning to cross the Antarctic from the Weddell Sea, with two objectives in mind. The primary aim—serious and scientific—was to conduct a geological survey to find out, in layman’s terms, what was under the ice. Along the way, he would be the first person to cross the great southern continent on land: the British press called it the ‘last great journey in the world’.

  To achieve his goal, Fuchs needed many things—not least, money. The name of the conqueror of Everest would definitely help with that. He would also need supplies dropped at certain points so his party would have enough fuel and food to get them through. Ed could come in handy there too.

  The plan was for a British base—called Shackleton Base—to be established first, on the Weddell Sea. A New Zealand base—Scott Base—would then be established on the Ross Sea on the other side of Antarctica. Fuchs and company would set off from Shackleton Base; and Ed and the New Zealand support party would set out from Scott Base and travel roughly halfway to the South Pole, leaving supplies in depots that they would establish along the way.

  As we know, Ed liked to be first, and the expedition as proposed didn’t seem to offer much scope for firsts. But no one had reached the South Pole by land since Scott in 1912, and he would be heading that way. Also, no one had ever got there by vehicle. Ed held out hope for some time that there would be a separate New Zealand expedition, which, naturally, he would lead; and he kept his options open. But his hopes came to nothing and he eventually accepted the ‘junior’ role and became deputy leader of the TAE.

  He did his bit back home, barnstorming the country, addressing fundraising meetings and cajoling donations from schoolchildren and others. The public could even buy ‘shares’ in the expedition, in the form of garish certificates.

  Fuchs invited Ed to accompany him on the trip to set up the British base so that Ed could get some Antarctic experience. But the expedition got off to a near-disastrous start on the Weddell Sea side in 1955. Fuchs made a bad call in deciding what route to follow. When the captain of their ship, the Theron, questioned the choice, Fuchs overrode him. As a result, the Theron was nearly iced in. Only the superlative flying of New Zealand Wing Commander John Claydon, who managed a daring take-off from the ice and found an escape route for the Theron from the air, allowed the team to find a way out.

  Because of poor planning, much of the team’s gear was flooded; and when the Theron was finally able to get out, after being delayed for a month, it had to do so in such a hurry that the hut being built for the men who were to remain behind over the winter was not finished. This meant the men spent the coldest Antarctic months in a packing crate by day, and sleeping in tents by night.

  Ed was aghast. Summing up the near-disaster on the Theron, he said it had given him as much experience in negotiating pack ice as he would ever be likely to need. In Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, after having described in excruciating detail Fuchs’s series of blunders, Ed concluded drily by expressing admiration for his leader’s continued belief in his own decision-making skills.

  As for Fuchs’s attitude to Ed, from the very start the Englishman had shown the lofty contempt that would permanently sour relations between the two men. He seemed to grasp every opportunity to patronise Ed. As far as Dr Fuchs was concerned, Sir Edmund was the junior partner—a glorified grocery boy in charge of some deliveries.

  A key difference between the two, as Ed had noted, was that Fuchs was a man who stuck with his plan, come ice or high water. Ed was also a meticulous planner, but he could change his plan in an instant if he saw that the circumstances required it.

  Fuchs went so far as to exclude Ed—his deputy leader—from planning meetings, telling him he was just along as an observer. Ed was even shut out of social occasions. When the captain of the Royal Navy vessel the Protector, which was in the vicinity and kept in contact with the Theron, invited Fuchs to bring a group on board for dinner, the scientist excluded Ed. When an invitation was extended to the rest of the team to come over for a drink, the captain was mortified to encounter the Conqueror of Everest and to realise he hadn’t been included in the first party.

  ‘I don’t think Fuchs had thought it through properly,’ says Mike Gill now, looking back at Fuchs’s treatment of Ed. ‘If you are dealing with someone as famous as that, with that personality, they just don’t do as they are told.’

  Seeing Fuchs botch one decision after another convinced Ed to make his own arrangements. This extended from the gear everyone wore (Fuchs went for a one-size-fits-all approach, while Ed ensured that everything was made to fit the man who would wear it) to the music (Fuchs limited listening time so there wouldn’t be squabbles).

  After he returned to New Zealand, to prepare for his part in the expedition Ed took his team to the Tasman Glacier for practice in conditions that were as near-Antarctic as he could find. And he chose his men for characteristically canny—if apparently quixotic—reasons. Faced with a choice of two potential radio officers, for instance, he chose the one who didn’t call him ‘sir’ during his interview—naval captain Peter Mulgrew.

  New Zealand’s contribution of items for the expedition was loaded onto the Endeavour, and the contingent set sail in December 1956. Peter Mulgrew’s wife, June, who, along with Louise and Peter, was farewelling the team, described a slight awkwardness when the wharf
side band had to keep playing ‘Now is the Hour’ as the tide pushed the boat back to port.

  Even before leaving New Zealand, Ed had pondered the possibility of going to the Pole on a frolic of his own. It’s not clear exactly when he made his final decision to travel the extra 800 kilometres past Depot 700—the point 700 miles from Scott Base that had been agreed on as the official finishing point for his supply drop-offs. Fuchs’s high-handedness alone would not have been enough to make up Ed’s mind, but it would have contributed. ‘What started as a calculated whim became a steely master plan,’ in Tom Scott’s words.

  ‘Ed never did things on the spur of the moment,’ said Ed’s brother Rex. ‘He would have done some planning.’

  As had happened on the Theron trip, Fuchs, carrying out his time-consuming and exacting task, started to fall behind almost before he set out. Meanwhile Ed’s party, on the way to establishing Depot 700, managed to explore some previously unknown areas of the continent and do experiments of their own. But Ed was still left with a lot of time on his hands, and he wasn’t of a mind to slow his pace to match Fuchs’s, sluggish progress.

  And so began the story of the so-called Race to the Pole—which was never really a race because Fuchs was never actually in it; but, with one explorer approaching the Pole from one direction and another from the other direction, it did have elements of a race about it.

  Both parties had air support, and messages were carried back and forth by this means as well as through radio contact, which also kept them in touch with the outside world. As the news filtered through, the newspapers in Britain and New Zealand reacted along patriotic lines: Britain accused Ed of exceeding his brief and grandstanding for personal glory rather than putting the empire first; and labelled Ed the ‘Abominable Showman’. In New Zealand, the general reaction could best be summed up in the idiom ‘Whack-oh the diddle-oh’. It looked like their boy was going to do it again.