Ascent

Introduction

Old Man

The Old Man of Hoy is the tallest sea stack in the British Isles but it started life as a promontory, a sheer band of red cliffs jutting out into the fierce tides of the Pentland Firth. Over time the sucking waves and wind hollowed out a tunnel in the sandstone that slowly expanded into a vast arch and then collapsed, leaving behind a slender tower, like a 400-foot needle, rising from the wild North Atlantic. It survives, for now, because it rests on a plinth of harder rock, a slender finger beckoning every climber who ever saw it. But in the wind you can feel it swaying, reminding you that nothing is for ever.

The Old Man was made for theatre. The clifftop opposite forms a perfect dress circle for an audience and the jumbled rocky isthmus that once linked it to the mainland are the uncomfortable stalls. Making my way down to the bottom, gingerly following a narrow twisting path slippery with wet grass, I was acutely aware of the dizzying space below my feet. The first time I came this way was almost half a century ago. Then I was thirty-two years of age, arguably in my prime. Now I was eighty, and every step was a struggle. Drizzle had been falling from the grey sky. Not for the first time in my life, I wondered what I was doing there.

It was Leo Houlding’s idea. Leo is one of Britain’s most talented young climbers and aged eleven had been the youngest person ever to climb the Old Man of Hoy. If we did it together, I’d almost certainly be the oldest. I was immediately attracted to the idea, but at the time was facing the greatest crisis of my life. My wife Wendy had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in December 2012 and was in the final stages of this cruel illness. I couldn’t leave her, certainly not to go climbing. She died on 24 July 2014. My grief was intense but climbing offered me the possibility of relief, almost an escape.

Going up to the Orkneys to climb the Old Man remained an attractive objective; it wouldn’t be the first time I’d sought consolation in this wild and lonely place. In 1966, Tom Patey, one of the great characters of Scottish climbing and a dear friend, had invited me to join him in making the first ascent shortly after the tragic death by drowning of three-year-old Conrad, my first son. I think his aim had been similar to Leo’s, to help me through my bewildering sense of loss. So I accepted Leo’s invitation and in late August set out to climb the Old Man of Hoy once again.

In many ways, our lives had followed similar paths, both of us making a living through the sport we love, lecturing and filming our ventures. Yet even though Leo is almost young enough to be my grandson, I think we share the sheer joy in climbing. We had come to know each other through our association with the outdoor brand Berghaus; I have been their non-executive chair for twenty years, Leo is their highest-profile athlete. He has matured into an outstanding team leader, becoming an important international ambassador for British climbing while still retaining a wonderful warmth and sense of fun.

Our climb on the Old Man of Hoy would have a media dimension, for The One Show, the BBC TV magazine programme. They were sending a climbing presenter, Andy Torbet. The schedule was tight, just four days to get the Old Man climbed and filmed, whatever the weather, and it wasn’t good. The first day was a recce while the crew rigged the route in preparation for filming. When I first climbed the Old Man live on television in 1967 for one of the BBC’s most successful outside broadcasts, it had been a logistical extravaganza at the very limits of broadcasting technology. Now it was all done wirelessly with lightweight digital cameras and edited on computers.

One thing you can’t change is the weather. It was raining hard now and there was a blustery wind as we plodded up the path to the top of the cliffs opposite the Old Man. I had plenty of time for doubts. For a start, I was horribly unfit; with Wendy’s illness I hadn’t had time for exercise, let alone climbing. In addition I had pulled something in my back just before leaving home while shifting some furniture. Was I up to it? Would I make a fool of myself in front of the cameras? Was it even possible to climb something like this at eighty?

The top of the Old Man came into sight, peeping over the clifftop, and I felt a tide of memory rushing in, familiar faces from that broadcast so many years ago: Tom Patey, one of the greatest pioneers of Scottish mountaineering; Joe Brown, that rock-climbing wizard with his sly sense of humour and tombstone grin; Ian McNaught-Davis, Joe’s ebullient, charismatic partner that day; and two from the next generation climbing a spectacular new route, the tyro Pete Crew and Dougal Haston, who would become a close friend and key member of my expeditions, enigmatic but hugely driven, all the way to the summit of Everest in 1975.

Soon Leo and I were standing on the edge of the cliff looking across to the Old Man: slender, somewhat menacing and very, very tall. There were group shots to take, and strategy to discuss. We were due to climb the following morning; the forecast was similar to what it had been for today, good in the morning but deteriorating. It was then I made my stand. I told the director there was no way I was prepared to try to climb it in those conditions and insisted on waiting another day. He wasn’t happy but I stuck to my guns and it was finally agreed we’d spend the next day doing interviews and climb the day after.

The following morning dawned fine; we could certainly have climbed and filmed but I desperately needed that break. Being interviewed by Leo took my mind off things, exploring how my life had unfolded. Always at its core was the climbing: the great joy of movement on the crags, the challenge of wild and remote landscapes and the chances I’d taken both in the mountains and in my career. Even the little fill-in sequences, walking over the beach or hopping between the wave-smoothed rocks had a therapeutic quality. By the end of the day I had recovered my equilibrium.

Next morning it was cloudy again, with a light intermittent drizzle, but it wasn’t too windy. We had no choice but to go for it and I felt ready. At the base of the tower, looming above us like a skyscraper, I took a deep breath: climbing shoes and harness on, waterproofs zipped up, feeling bulky and cumbersome, the radio mike emphasizing I was on show. Leo, cheerful and business-like, drifted up the first pitch. I had soloed this back in 1967 but when I started now I knew immediately my back wasn’t right. Each move hurt, particularly when I bridged out, my legs wide apart. There was nothing to be done. I had to get on with it.

The second pitch is the crux and very daunting. It begins with an awkward traverse under a bulging overhang into the dark heart of the cliff’s east face, moving from a place of security to having an unnerving void beneath your feet, the boiling sea a hundred feet below. It’s what climbers call exposure, that thrilling mix of space and fear. The traverse ended below an overhanging crack too narrow for my body but too wide for my hands. I coped at first and despite my back was climbing reasonably well. Leo kept the rope tight, but it didn’t do much to help. He’d also left a couple of slings in place at strategic points for me to pull on. Bless you, I thought, taking full advantage. It was only slightly cheating.

Filming a climb can be irritating; there are so many delays. Now I welcomed them since they allowed me a chance to rest and chat with old friends on the film crew. I had worked on several film projects with Dave Cuthbertson, universally known as ‘Cubby’, a brilliant rock climber who had refined his skills as a photographer and cameraman. He was doing the close-up work. We reminisced while Leo brought up Andy, our One Show presenter, and continued as Leo led the next pitch, quickly disappearing from sight.

I thought the climbing would now be relatively straightforward but the rock was wet and greasy and Leo had gone slightly off route, stuck in a high runner and traversed out to the right across a seemingly blank wall. I would now have to follow this traverse, with the promise of a swinging fall, like a pendulum, if I messed it up. To add to my trial, a fulmar chick was resting on a sloping ledge just above the start. The fulmar’s method of defence is to puke a jet of fishy bile at whatever threatens it, including rock climbers, and it proceeded to empty its stomach at me as I struggled to find a way across.

We had another welcome rest below the final pitch, a steep corner that bristled with holds. It was the one I had led on the first ascent back in 1966, the easiest of all the main pitches but aesthetically the most satisfying with the great bonus that it led to the top of the Old Man. I had hoped to lead it, but realized I wasn’t fit enough. Every move was now painful and I had the ominous feeling my back was about to get a lot worse.

There was another long but welcome delay as the filmmakers got into position for the final shots and then it was my turn to climb. I was glad of the rope above me, feeling slow and clumsy, but I managed without needing a tight rope, pulling over the top with a mixture of joy and tearful emotion. There was a hug from Leo, a pause while he brought up Andy, and then he produced a bottle of champagne from his rucksack. We toasted each other as the sun tried to break through and an Orkney ferry went cruising past. All the self-doubt was gone. The struggle and pain no longer mattered.

As I told the BBC interviewer, this business of getting old, in a way, is a bit of a pig. You’re stiffer and you’re slower; you can’t quite achieve what you did before. What getting to the top of the Old Man of Hoy showed me was that one can at least go on doing something. In ten years, I reflected, I would be ninety: a sobering thought. It seemed unlikely I would still be able to climb something like this then. What I wanted was to make every single day of my eighties mean something, get out and climb and walk, enjoy my grandchildren, keep working and make life as rich and exciting as it possibly can be. That’s what keeps you going.

PART ONE

Beginnings

Chapter One

Who Do I Think I Am?

How far are our personalities and the course of our lives shaped by the genes we inherit and how far by the environment in which we are brought up? I rather think it is a combination of the two, but with our genetic makeup having a very strong influence and those traits becoming visible from a young age. Looking back at my immediate ancestors, quite a few of them were undoubtedly adventurous in a variety of ways. They weren’t great explorers or sportspeople, but they carved out a distinct life of their own.

On my mother’s side, my grandmother, whom I knew as Nan and who played a major part in my early upbringing, was brought up a Catholic, the tenth child of a family of twelve. Her father, Timothy Doran, born in 1814 at Enniscorthy, County Wexford, went to Sydney as a young man, attracted by stories of fortunes to be made from the gold rush that started around that time. Until the gold rush, the majority of migrants had been convicts.

For Timothy, it was a step into the unknown, starting with the horrendous four-month voyage in a cramped sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope and across the empty southern Indian Ocean, battened down in the hold for days on end, drinking brackish water and eating weevil-infested food. He spent twenty years in Australia but didn’t talk about it; only scraps of family legend persisted. He spent most of his time in Sydney but ventured out to the lawless goldfields, where if he saw a shadow fall across his tent he shot first and only then went out to investigate.

One story suggests he was a fence for the armour-clad bushranger Ned Kelly, Australia’s beloved outlaw, a Robin Hood who robbed the rich English cattle and sheep farmers encroaching on the land of small, mostly Irish homesteaders and was eventually hanged. There was never any mention of Timothy prospecting for gold; he was more likely a gold-mining ‘sutler’, selling provisions and implements, perhaps advancing money to prospectors and no doubt dabbling in the black economy of the time. Whatever the truth, when he returned to England in the early 1860s, settling in Liverpool, he had accumulated a modest fortune, bought a couple of houses and set up a chain of pawnbroker’s shops.

When he met my great-grandmother Helen, then just nineteen, he knocked twenty years off his declared age, claiming to be thirty-one when they married in 1865. Helen had twelve children in twenty years and he gave all but two of them the middle name Sydney. Helen died in 1896 at only fifty, presumably from exhaustion. Timothy, born a year before the battle of Waterloo, died in 1903 at the grand old age of eighty-nine.

My maternal grandfather, Francis Storey, was also from Irish stock, albeit Protestant. His father, also Francis, my great-grandfather, was born and brought up in County Wicklow. He joined the Royal Irish Constabulary and then, also having an adventurous spirit, emigrated to Australia in 1865. More conformist than Timothy Doran, he joined the Australian Mounted Infantry and led an exciting, hard-riding life hunting down bushrangers and closing down shebeens. He claimed to have been one of the officers sent to arrest Dan Kelly, brother of Ned. Returning to England around 1881, he settled in New Brighton on the south bank of the River Mersey, a day-trippers’ resort for the people of Liverpool where Francis built up a profitable shop called the Bon Marché opposite the pier. He also sat on the town council for many years, becoming mayor of Wallasey. I can remember my pride when in the late 1940s I sailed on a ferry named in his honour.

His eldest son, Francis Hubert, my grandfather, also had a nomadic disposition. He was training to be a doctor in Wrexham when he met Nan, my grandmother. They married but he didn’t stick around, getting a job with the Colonial Service as a doctor in Nigeria. He’d come home every three years for six months but always seemed a stranger in an all-female household ruled by my grandmother, with two young daughters, Helen, my mother, and Thea. There was also Polly, Nan’s younger sister, who never married, and a live-in maid. Francis was given early retirement in the mid 1930s, perhaps because of the quantity of whisky he consumed. He didn’t stay home for long, getting a berth with the Blue Funnel Line as a ship’s doctor, sailing the Atlantic convoys throughout the Second World War before retiring.

There were plenty of adventurous genes on my father’s side. My paternal grandfather, Maximilian Christian Bonig, was born in Schleswig-Holstein in 1874. He always claimed to be Danish, since Schleswig and Holstein had been under Danish rule until Bismarck invaded in 1864. Holstein’s population, however, was mainly German and my grandfather’s relatives were all German. I assume it was because he ended up working for the British and became a British citizen that he changed the family name to Bonington.

Maximilian’s family were farmers but life on the land didn’t appeal; he ran away from home at the age of ten to join a sailing ship before being hauled back ignominiously. His parents eventually compromised and apprenticed him to a shipbuilder. Max knuckled down but still yearned for the sea. In 1890, aged sixteen, he went down to the docks to sign on as carpenter in a barque bound for Mauritius. It was the start of many adventures. He spent months at sea in a New Bedford whaler, was shanghaied aboard a Nova Scotia boat bound for the east coast of America with a blue-nosed, red-haired, one-eyed skipper and a mate who used a belaying pin to club the crew.

Aged twenty-one, he was mate on a schooner, but the ship ran aground near New Brunswick and Max was washed overboard. He was found unconscious on the sand. The rest of the crew took to the rigging but were found frozen to death the next day. After that he joined the United States Navy but his prospects seemed limited and missing home returned to Schleswig-Holstein. The sea soon lured him back. He found a ship bound for India, the ill-fated Highland Glen. Running flat out in the Roaring Forties, a freak wave washed Max overboard. He hung on to the foretopsail brace and was lifted back onto the deck as the ship heeled over. He left the ship at Calcutta, a fortunate decision, since it disappeared on its next voyage carrying kerosene to the West Indies.

Seeking more security, Max then got a job on the troop ship Warren Hastings, a state-of-the-art steamship with a metal hull that was claimed to be practically unsinkable. In January 1897, carrying a thousand troops and their families from Mumbai to Mauritius, the boat went off course in thick fog off the island of Réunion and struck a rock just after midnight. My grandfather was thrown out of his bunk and rushed on deck to find the bows of the vessel resting on a reef and thirty fathoms under the stern.

The ship was taking on water but the engineers stayed at their stations to keep the lights burning. If the watertight doors were shut, the vessel could be kept afloat long enough to get the passengers and crew off. With a few Indian lascars Max went below, barefoot and still in his pyjamas, working for nearly an hour in deserted gangways, shutting the heavy doors and screwing down the ports, gradually working his way aft. Then the lights flickered, the whine of the dynamos stopped and the scene was in darkness. Yet closing all those waterproof hatches worked. The crew got a line ashore and the women and children and then the troops escaped over the bows. Only two on board died.

Max was commended for gallantry and given the job of assistant harbourmaster at Port Blair, the principal town and centre of government in the Andaman Islands, then a colony formed on the same principles as Australia for convicts of both sexes from the Raj, prisoners released on ‘ticket-of-leave’ to work in the timber industry. The islands were covered in tropical rainforest and mangrove swamps and home to one of the oldest and most isolated human populations: the Negritos, dark-skinned and averaging four and a half feet in height. In Max’s time, they presented a picture of life 30,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers who knew nothing of agriculture. When my grandfather arrived, there were only a few hundred left, the amiable coastal Negritos and a jungle tribe called the Jarawas who killed any intruder venturing into their hunting grounds.

Grandfather loved his new life, especially as he was in charge of shipbuilding, overseeing the construction of many vessels, some of them several hundred tons. In Port Blair he met Alice Parkinson, a pretty nineteen-year-old, whose dead father had been a sergeant major in the Royal Engineers. They fell in love and remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, marrying in 1908. Their first home was a wooden bungalow on Ross Island, in the harbour of Port Blair where the European officials lived. There were two clubs, one for senior officers, the other for juniors. In the evenings, white children, each with their ayah, played on the lawn. There were tennis courts, a library and even a bandstand, where convicts, dressed in smart white-and-blue uniforms, played in a brass band.

After seven years, Max moved to the forestry department, surveying every corner of the 3,000 square miles of the Andamans and Nicobars. I have a feeling he was happiest out in the jungle away from civilization and the social round of colonial life. He also became officer in charge of the Aborigines, looking after the friendly coastal tribes and doing his best to protect the tribes in the interior from contact with outsiders. Grandfather came nearer to understanding their minds than any other white man of that time. They trusted him and treated him as one of their own.

During the Great War, when he was in his early forties, Max was appointed to build and run a new settlement in the North Andamans to exploit the virgin forest there. Max picked a sheltered harbour called Stewart Sound. The Indian government was trying to encourage settlers so the population comprised mostly free people from the mainland. They lived under canvas, chopping down huge trees and draining mangrove swamps. Max and a medical orderly nursed those who succumbed to malaria or cholera. Elephants were imported from India to drag logs to the nearest tidal creek where they were lashed into rafts and towed to the newly built sawmill. The settlement thrived and thanks to Max’s inspirational leadership was named Port Bonington. He was awarded the OBE when he retired in 1930, and later settled in Blackrock, Dublin, where he lived until his death in 1956.

His son, my father Charles, was born in 1910 on Ross Island, followed by two sisters, Marjorie and Lucy. Charles described in his unfinished memoir how he was cared for by a woman convicted of killing her husband: ‘Her name was Chand Bibi, which in Hindustani means daughter of the moon; she was a short dumpy woman of about forty and her hair was turning grey; her brown face was crinkled and leathery, but in those early days, she was a second mother to me.’

Charles had an unusual early childhood. Aged eight, Max took him to the new settlement leaving his mother behind, saying that he’d be company for him since there were no other Europeans there. I have wondered if Max wanted to show his son, whom he obviously loved deeply, a different kind of world to that of Ross Island with its strict Edwardian values. ‘My father was always a wonderful person to me;’ my father wrote, ‘he never beat me, but usually left that task to my mother. The next four years were the happiest of my life spent living in the North Andamans in the jungle camps. I spent all my time playing with the aboriginal pygmies . . . out on the reef in their canoes – fishing, swimming and turtle hunting.’

When Charles was ten he was sent back to England to a strict Catholic prep school, where the cane was used for the slightest offence, and then Ampleforth, the Catholic public school. His parents came home for a long leave every three years, otherwise the children stayed with relatives. He then went up to Oxford where he met my mother. Mum had had a very different upbringing in Wallasey. She was quite a tomboy, preferring Meccano and Hornby train sets to dolls. Dark-haired and slim, she was handsome rather than pretty. Her sister, Dorothy, known as Thea, couldn’t have been more different: a curly-haired blonde and very pretty, who played with dolls.

At the age of twelve, Mum started at Notre Dame High School for girls, was good at sport and increasingly successful academically. She was a rebel though, and fell foul of the school, which told her she would have to complete her two-year Higher School Certificate course in a year. She not only succeeded, she won three separate scholarships to Oxford to study English. She was the first girl from the school to go there.

Success undoubtedly went to her head. She partied a lot, discovered the joys of sex, went to very few lectures and fell in love with my father. He was even wilder than her and dropped out in his second year, returning to Burma, where his father got him a job with a timber company. Mum scraped through with a third-class degree, not bad considering how few lectures she attended.

After leaving Oxford, she persuaded Nan to sell her house in Wallasey and move down to London with her. Mum took a secretarial course and got a job as a shop assistant at a bookshop on Baker Street. She and Charles had kept up a warm correspondence and in early 1933 Max paid his fare back to England and gave him an allowance of four pounds a week. Charles and Mum were both very much in love, started to live together and slipped out to Kensington register office without telling their parents to marry. They moved into a small basement flat in Hampstead.

Even though she hadn’t been to church since leaving school, Mum insisted on getting a blessing at the lovely little St Mary’s Church in Hampstead. She became pregnant shortly afterwards and I was born on 6 August 1934 at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital by Whitestone Pond, the highest point in London. She also had me baptized at the same little church with the name of Christian John Storey Bonington, maintaining her own family name.

The honeymoon didn’t last long. It was the height of the depression and Charles couldn’t get a job. My mother complained he was drinking too much and spending most of the day in bed. Money was short. Mum managed to get a part-time job with a successful romantic novelist called Berta Ruck, whose secretary had run off with her husband, the ghost-story writer Oliver Onions. Life became a struggle: caring for a baby, who cried through the night, struggling up the narrow steps with the pram, dropping me off at a local nursery each day and then returning in the late afternoon to a squalid flat.

Arguments escalated until, in a furious quarrel over money, Mum hit my father on the head with a poker. He dropped to the floor, unconscious, bleeding profusely. She dragged him to the bathroom and stuck his head under the old-fashioned geyser. Then, worried she’d killed him, Mum rushed out to the nearest phone box, her blouse and skirt covered in blood, leaving me fast asleep in the flat. She didn’t dare return to the flat on her own so waited by the phone box till Nan arrived. When they got back, I was still fast asleep in my cradle and Charles was gone.

Mum took me to live with Nan, and Grandfather Bonington paid for Charles to travel to India. My mother didn’t hear from him for several years. He remained in the Andaman Islands working for his father and then took off for Australia where he went walkabout across Queensland and New South Wales, worked a short stint on a Sydney newspaper, travelled plenty, made many friends and enjoyed the absence of responsibility he craved.

Back in England, Mum was also building a new life. While Nan took charge of me, she started working full-time, first as a copy typist then as secretary to the proprietor of a small advertising agency. Recognizing her talent with words, he promoted her to copywriter. Mum and Nan moved to a larger ground floor flat in Tanza Road with a big garden that backed onto the lower slopes of Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, settling into a comfortable routine. Mum’s personal life also improved. She began an intimate relationship with an Australian journalist called Margo, while still sharing the Tanza Road flat with Nan.

My own memories of early childhood are disjointed: just stray, vivid images. My strongest, when I was probably three, was my first adventure. Playing with a little girl of around my age in the garden, we let ourselves out through the gate onto Hampstead Heath and were gone for a few hours. Nan was so worried she notified the local police. One of them found us playing together and took us back to Belsize Park police station where I spilt milk all over the inspector’s desk.

I was an avid tree climber and attended a ‘Health Kinder Garten’ run by Mrs Kroemer who believed in unstructured outdoor play. Mum felt Nan was possessive and that I should have some discipline. I suspect there was an element of jealousy, handing over so much of my care while she went out to work to secure our financial survival. Yet Mum’s career was going from strength to strength. She got a job as copywriter at the London Press Exchange, one of the top advertising agencies at that time.

I was blissfully unaware of the tensions between Mum and Nan or the tide of war about to engulf us. Mum on the other hand was riveted. She and Margo became increasingly politically aware, identifying themselves with the extreme left in the face of Nazi Germany’s aggression and fascism in our own country. With the declaration of war, she was anxious to get me out of London and found a small boarding school called Pinewood at Goudhurst near Tunbridge Wells. Aged five, it took a little time for me to settle but eventually I was perfectly happy. With the fall of France and the threat of invasion, the headmistress, Miss Reid, decided to amalgamate the school with another, called Moorlands, near Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland. From an upstairs window, your eye followed a long winding drive, flanked with trees, to a view of the hills of the southern Lakes to the west and those of the Yorkshire Dales to the east.

During holidays, Nan came up and we usually stayed at a vegetarian guesthouse in Grasmere, Nan being a strict vegetarian. Mum would come up for short periods when she could get away from work. The impact of the Lakeland hills was more subliminal than anything else. Nan was essentially a suburban woman and never ventured into wild country. Our walks didn’t go much further than the lower slopes of Fairfield, though I can remember a walk on a rainy day alongside what I think must have been the Sour Milk Ghyll in Easedale just out of Grasmere. It was wild, untamed country and I can still trawl its image from my memory. On another occasion I rowed Nan to the island in the middle of Grasmere and when she dozed off in the sun, I got back in the boat and explored, leaving her marooned. Given I couldn’t swim and didn’t have a life jacket, she was not best pleased.

My mother was once again in contact with my father, who was taken prisoner of war in November 1941. Having volunteered for the Australian Army at the outbreak of war, he was posted to Egypt, moved to a British regiment, was promoted and then volunteered for the newly formed Special Air Service, a tiny group of seven officers and sixty other ranks recruited by David Stirling, a charismatic young lieutenant with an outrageous plan. I suspect my father’s unconventional past got him into the SAS, at thirty-two its eldest member.

The first operation was disastrous. Divided into five groups, each comprising an officer and ten men, they were to be dropped near two airstrips packed with Messerschmitt fighters near Tobruk. The weather was bad over the drop zone with high winds and poor visibility and as a result all their five aircraft missed it, landing the raiders miles away. Several were injured or killed in the process and only twenty-two made the rendezvous in the desert where the Long Range Desert Group picked them up.

My father’s plane was shot up by a Messerschmitt and crash-landed. He had a badly shattered shoulder and was captured with the other survivors, spending the rest of the war in Germany. He joined in several escape attempts but never successfully. He wrote to me from his PoW camp, inspiring me to start hatching escape plans of my own. In a way, this proved my first expedition and exercise in leadership. I must have been eight at the time. I recruited three or four fellow escapees and scavenged bacon rinds at breakfast. Our greatest coup was stealing a fruit loaf bought for afternoon tea with prospective parents visiting the following day.

We slipped away at lunchtime and headed across the fields, stopping after an hour or so by the banks of a stream where we spent the rest of the afternoon playing. We ate the fruit loaf for tea and then began to think of where we’d sleep. There was a large tree by the stream. We could sleep in the branches to escape wild animals. It didn’t take long to discover how uncomfortable that was. It was now getting dark and we drifted to the nearest road where a relieved but angry Miss Reid had been scouring the roads for us in her Morris Minor.

I was happy at Moorlands but my mother was concerned about the quality of my schoolwork. She felt I would do better closer to London where she could visit me more easily, choosing a progressive boarding school in Letchworth just north of London. It was vegetarian, which appealed to Nan, co-educational and didn’t require a uniform. It was also much bigger and while I have no memories of it, I was bullied. The night before returning to school after a half-term holiday, my mother wrote in her diary: ‘He looks well and heavier but his eyes seem sly and evasive. At night, his gallant pretence of happiness breaks down and he begs not to return to school.’ My wish was granted. I stayed home but Mum was so concerned she took me to the Tavistock Clinic for psychological assessment. They didn’t find anything drastically wrong and, to my mother’s surprise, assessed my IQ at 143.

After I went to boarding school at the beginning of the war, Mum moved out of Tanza Road and set up home with Margo in a ground floor and basement flat on Downshire Hill, next to St John’s Church. It had a back garden and an Anderson air-raid shelter for us and the other three tenants in the house: a sunken corrugated steel tunnel, covered in earth with room for two bunk beds. I was to get to know it well in the next year. The Blitz was over, but there were still regular night raids. Mum was so anxious about the shelter’s impact on me that she read articles on how to distract children from the claustrophobia.

Things hadn’t been easy for Mum. In 1943 she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium. She had barely recovered when she decided to keep me at home. She chose a small co-educational prep about a mile away at the top of Hampstead Heath. Miss Miles, my new headmistress, asked if I had any questions.

‘Yes please. Do you have discipline in this school?’

‘We do – a kindly but firm discipline.’

‘Then I’ll come.’

It was a good choice and I quickly settled down, at the age of ten, walking to school by myself from the very start, making friends and enjoying lessons. But I was told I would no longer be seeing Nan. I didn’t really understand why, but accepted it, as I think one does as a child, though I missed being taken out for treats and lunches at her flat in Roslyn Hill. Her queen of puddings with its meringue topping was a wonder.

‘As the weeks go by,’ Mum wrote in her diary, ‘Chris grows plump again. Now that the over-close relationship with Nan has been ended, he seems to have sprung up, mentally and physically, like a retarded plant given new conditions. Every night, I dream of Nan. She stands in the dark room, rebuking me. But by day, I feel an immense relief and an absurd sense that I, too, have grown and gained in maturity.’

At home in Downshire Hill, Margo did all the cooking on top of her day job. She was now assistant editor of Soviet Weekly News, the Russian propaganda organ in the UK. I can’t recall them being demonstrative in the love they felt for each other. Mum slept in the room on the ground floor linked to mine by double doors, the former sitting room of the house. Margo slept on a divan in our cosy kitchen-living room in the basement, looking out onto the garden. They had a cat called Maisky, named for the Russian ambassador.

In the evenings, after supper, we read Shakespeare plays, each of us taking different parts. Mum regularly read to me at night and made huge efforts for my birthdays and Christmas, finding Hornby train sets, lead soldiers and even an antique pistol. I felt comfortable with the family set-up, though must have been aware it was very different from that of my friends at school. This compounded my innate shyness and lack of social confidence. Mum describes how she admonished me for feigning a limp because I was frightened of another boy and didn’t want to go to a birthday party where I might meet him.

‘Sometimes you treat me as if I’m an old man of thirty,’ I retorted. I was ten at the time.

‘I guiltily realize,’ Mum wrote in her diary, ‘that I do expect considerable self-knowledge from him and apologize humbly. Unfortunately, such trivial incidents awaken my memory of Charles who so often evaded obligations by various subterfuges.’

My most vivid memory from this period was a German night raid, when we all retreated to the shelter in the garden. There was the roar of bombs detonating near by, the crackle of anti-aircraft fire and the more distant drone of bombers. I was both frightened and enthralled and wanted to get out of the shelter to see it all happen. The adults felt differently. There was a big thump alongside the shelter but no explosion followed. When at last the all-clear signal wailed, we emerged to find an unexploded incendiary bomb.

Approaching the end of my school year, Mum realized I had little chance of getting into a grammar. Determined to give me the best education she could, and earning a good deal as her career blossomed, she applied to our local public school, University College School, which had a junior branch that didn’t require an entrance exam. Once there, you could move up into the senior school automatically. All I had to do was survive the interview with the headmaster, ‘the alarming Dr Lake’, as my mother described him. He was tall, very thin, white-haired with fierce dark eyes. Remarking on my name, I explained my Danish origins.

‘Well, Christian, my young Dane, what is the capital of Denmark?’

‘Belgrade, sir.’

I might not have known the answers to all of his questions, but I stood firm and looked him in the eye and never once glanced towards Mum for reassurance. I was accepted and soon settled down, making a few friends, though none of them close. I was conscientious in class but still behind and a terrible speller, something that worried Mum a great deal.

The war ended that summer and my father, released from his PoW camp, came back into our lives, much to my excitement: a father at last. He brought me an SS dagger and a two-dimensional brass model of a U-boat. Mum insisted on having the point of the dagger blunted so I couldn’t stab myself or anyone else. My father tried to get back together with Mum, but she wasn’t interested. After a couple of visits he no longer called; he would say he wanted to see me and then not show up. I remember vividly being hurt. He left to get on with his own life, eventually meeting Mary, who was to become his second wife and the mother of my half-brother and three half-sisters.

A year went by and Mum booked me into a holiday farm in Devon for the summer. I was now twelve and had met very few girls in the last two years, UCS being boys only. I can remember the thrill of having an illicit bath with one of the girls I met. There were riding lessons, and they had some ferrets, which were put under my care. At the end of a happy holiday I got the train back to Paddington but to my surprise Nan met me. I hadn’t seen her for two years. She told me that Mum was ill in hospital and that I’d be staying with her until Mum recovered.

It’s only since reading the notes for Mum’s unfinished book that I learned the full story of what happened. She had been under intense pressure: the terrors of the Blitz, the challenge of bringing me up in conflict with Nan, and the stress of work. She had been promoted to running one of the agency’s creative groups but with the return of male colleagues from the war there was fresh competition. Perhaps worst of all, Margo had fallen in love with a male colleague at work and as a result their relationship was in question.

‘At work,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘my mind seems incapable of operation. My head feels as if it’s stuffed with damp black cotton wool. I ring my doctor, but she is on her rounds. At lunch break, I call at her surgery but she has still not returned. I go home early. Most of my actions are compulsive and have a ritual quality. When I wash up, I feel compelled to turn all the cups the other way round on their hooks. When Margo gets home, she persuades me to go to bed. She then rings Nan, who sends Father around. He sits beside me all night through the long hours of darkness, nightmarish with hallucination. In the morning, Margo has disappeared and I persuade Father to go home. Alone in the flat, I resolve on suicide. I close the kitchen window, block-up the key hole, turn on the gas and put my head in the oven.’

Fortunately Nan came round as soon as my grandfather had told her what was happening. She was just in time to switch off the gas and Mum was taken to hospital and sectioned. She was there for the next eighteen months. It’s interesting how children accept what is happening to them. Nan’s home was a first-floor flat in a big Edwardian house. I had a lovely room where I could play with my collection of lead soldiers, while Nan and Grandfather each had a very small bedroom. Nan contacted my father for financial support, since Mum was no longer working, to help with the fees at UCS, but he was starting afresh with a new family and strapped for cash.

I moved up to senior school, into the bottom stream, and life continued as normal. Then Mum was released from hospital. Her consultant had performed a lobotomy, a surgical procedure on the frontal lobe of the brain severing certain nerves to treat extreme depression. It had been successful, and while it removed some of her personal drive, in no way had it affected Mum’s intelligence. She was, if anything, a kinder, warmer person.

There was no room for her in Nan’s flat so she rented a bedsit nearby. She had lost her job with the London Press Exchange, and they wouldn’t take her back, but she quickly found another job and naturally wanted to resume her role as mother so I moved into a corner of the bedsit. Her first problem was cooking. She had always had someone to do it for her: first Nan and then Margo. It was only after I complained that she took lessons. More importantly, she fed my huge appetite for reading, pointing me at the English classics: the Brontës, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, then the Russians: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and French literature, Emile Zola’s Germinal and Voltaire’s Candide. Only recently have I come to appreciate how much I owe her and how great her love was for me.

Her relationship with Nan was now much better and I was able to enjoy both their affections. Money was tight but after a few months, through social services, we were able to get a fair-sized second-floor flat at a rent she could just afford, a few minutes’