A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (30 page)

I parked the car to the side of the school’s imposing Victorian stone edifice and made my way around to the rear of the building. The sound of a willow bat striking a hard leather ball echoed across the tarmac road, which passed between a towering gable end and the eight-foot-high perimeter wall that separated the school’s grounds from those of the Bowes Museum. In progress was the annual cricket match between the Old Barnardians’ Club and the school’s current First Eleven. I was greeted by the sight of the club’s aged batsmen running between the wickets in an attempt to replicate their more youthful days. From the boundary came polite applause and a shout or two of encouragement from padded-up batsmen waiting their turn.

In the school library, the club’s annual AGM was due to begin. A short distance from the edge of the cricket pitch, the single-storey flat-roofed building was set several feet up from the road that ran around the perimeter of the main school building. I entered via the wide concrete staircase. Inside, photographs of me hung alongside those of Bentley Beetham. I was flattered and not quite sure what to say in response to the honour they had bestowed on me with this action. Beetham had retired from teaching in 1949, some 17 years before I first attended the school. It would have been easy for me to say that the exploits of this true pioneer had been my inspiration, but this was not the case. Our connection was down to nothing more than chance. No doubt stories of the school’s great adventurer of the past will have been told to us pupils. But staring blankly out of the classroom window, my mind regularly wandered well beyond their bounds.

I had been a young boy who dreamt during the daytime. In those days, adventure for me was not what lay abroad; such far-flung expeditions were the stuff of encyclopedias and picture books. I had never been beyond our shores. For me, journeys of discovery lay in the lands that stretched from Barnard Castle towards the North Pennines. During my free time at school, I would enjoy nothing more than exploring the remote areas of upper Teesdale. Now I was to discover that the same wild areas of northern England had also inspired Bentley Beetham during his formative years.

Despite having little recollection of Bentley Beetham himself, I was aware of these early pioneers and greatly admired their tenacity and self-belief. Having climbed the self-same route attempted by the 1924 expedition, and reached the summit that history suggests eluded them, I could do no less than applaud their outstanding achievements in those early days of mountaineering.

Immediately after the AGM, the club secretary, Gay Blanchard, approached me. Accompanying her was Michael Lowes. He had also attended the school and had climbed with Bentley Beetham on the Lake District’s Borrowdale Crags. His Lakeland forays had been part of his education. Michael’s childhood recollections helped bring to life for me Bentley Beetham himself. He had listened first hand to Beetham’s stories of Everest in bygone times and had been enthralled. In more recent years, Michael had been cataloguing Bentley Beetham’s photographic collection. He explained that many of the original four-and-a-quarter-inch glass slides were from the 1924 Everest expedition.

Michael and Gay asked whether I might return at a later date to look through the collection. They wanted my opinion. Up to this juncture, I had been unaware of its existence. It had been hidden away during my seven years at the school. Not once during that time, or for many years before, had it seen the light of day. How could I turn down such a wonderful invitation? I was thrilled to be offered the opportunity.

It was three weeks after the AGM that I returned to the school to view the Beetham Collection. I entered the building via a small pair of blue wooden doors at the rear of the property. In front of me, beyond the cosy square entrance hall in which I stood, stretched a long gloomy corridor with a polished stone floor and high ceilings. On either side, doors opened into what had once been classrooms. I recalled, as a child, standing on my tiptoes to peer through their upper panes of glass. Inside had stood rows of old wooden desks, their hinged tops stained from decades of carelessly dripped ink. At the front, fastened to the wall, had been a large blackboard with chalk dust smeared across the surface where the previous lesson had been erased. Thirty-three years had passed since my parents first dropped me off at the school.

Ahead lay the large open space of Central Hall. It contained a solitary figure, that of Gay Blanchard. Term had ended. A building that was normally filled with vibrant youthful voices now stood in deathly silence. The sound of my approaching footsteps alerted Gay to my arrival.

From opposite sides of the large octagonal hall, two enclosed wooden staircases spiralled their way to the floors above. The soles of our shoes tapped against the thick linoleum surface of the four-foot-wide steps as Gay and I made our way up the eastern staircase. In my youth, I had heard the very same steps thunder with the sound of numerous feet eagerly making their way down to the dining hall below. As we passed the exit to the first floor, where the senior dormitories had been, I ran my left hand along the steeply rising banister that spiralled up through the centre of the staircase. Screwed down onto its polished surface and spaced about one foot apart were rounded brass cones. My fingers ran over the top of one. These had been placed to discourage boys from attempting to slide down on their backsides. They looked painful enough to have worked. I’d never tried.

I had first come to the school in 1966, at the tender age of 11. My older brother Robert had moved up into the sixth form. Such pupils were in the higher echelons and our paths rarely crossed. With his name being Robert, schoolboy logic dictated I should be called Bobby. It was a name I would carry until I was 18, despite early attempts to encourage others to revert to my given name. To the schoolmasters, I was a boy with a school number: Ratcliffe 59. I had been a skinny child who wore knee-length trousers, thick woollen socks, imitation tortoiseshell National Health spectacles and a school blazer that had been previously worn by Robert. My parents had struggled to make ends meet while giving their four sons the best education they could.

Life at the school was a harsh world where you learnt to stand up for yourself. I fared better than some but worse than others. Whenever impromptu games were played, such as football, I was always in the last one or two to be picked out of the line-up. This was not because I was inept, rather because I did not fit with the ‘in crowd’, and because I wore glasses. As time passed, I had less and less time for the pupils who considered themselves more important than those around them. The masters at the school I found by and large a pretty fair lot; the punishments they dealt out were usually deserved. I was often the recipient.

Although I was reasonably talented at sports, these tended to be individual rather than team games. With these, the deciding factor was my ability rather than the decisions of others. Squash and cross-country running came high on the list.

This trait is one that I have seen time and time again in mountaineering. High-altitude climbers, in my experience, are individually driven, self-reliant and content with their own company, often seen as loners. Their preference is to make their own decisions; this they must do while climbing. They are brought together as a team largely through necessity. While climbing on Everest, I’d probably spent 90 per cent of the time on my own. I had been more than happy with this.

In my latter years at the school, I kept hidden a 1953 500cc AJS motorcycle. My brother Stephen, who was studying at a college in Blackpool, had lent it to me as I had by now passed my driving test and could ride a bike of any engine size. To me, it was now the bigger the better. I found what I hoped was a safe hiding place in the bushes at the bottom of what was known as ‘prep school lane’. When the unusual parking spot began to raise suspicion, I moved the motorbike into the walled grounds of the neighbouring stately Bowes Museum. The museum contacted the school to ask if it knew anything about the machine that they seemed to have acquired. I was summoned by the powers-that-be. Their first guess as to the culprit had been correct. For the umpteenth time, I had flouted school rules. After being interrogated, I was informed that my brother would need to come and collect his motorcyle without delay, but all this meant in real terms was that I had to find somewhere else to park my new-found freedom – adventure was in my blood.

Every time the AJS’s large single-cylinder engine powered the black motorcycle through the village of Cotherstone, I would unknowingly pass the front door of Bentley Beetham’s former cottage. And this is how each voyage of discovery began. Skimming past hedgerows along the deserted country roads that extend west from the small market town of Middleton in Teesdale, the needle often eased over 70 mph – rather less than the slightly optimistic ‘max 120 mph’ that Stephen had marked on the machine’s ageing Smith’s speedometer. The thundering sound bellowed from the chrome silencer and the fresh air pummelled me as I sat bolt upright on the leather seat. It was intoxicating. I was 17.

This mode of transport opened my horizons; it allowed me to explore remote places that few others visited. High on Great Dun and Mickle Fell, I found the wilderness I craved. The raging waters that roared over High Force, and those cascading over Cauldron Snout, defined the grandeur of these untamed surroundings. The dark-brown waters of the upper Tees river, which slowly drained through the extensive peatlands above, spoke of great adventures on their onward journey. The ancient grey limestone crags heavily encrusted with coloured lichens and damp mosses promised excitement. I would scale these irresistible rugged outcrops, reaching ledges with stunted bilberry bushes that led on to the next stage on my upward journey. The sense of freedom was exhilarating.

My problem with some of my escapades was that I didn’t know when to stop. One particular episode, in my last year at Barnard Castle, very nearly brought my school career to a premature end. It was one of epically stupid proportions that could have had deadly consequences. I was about to learn a lesson that I would never forget.

It was January 1973. I was on one of the many cross-country runs that we took part in during the spring term. With me was my best friend, Gordon Clark. The run took us alongside the River Tees, past the local sewage filtration tanks and up onto Abbey Bridge before making a course back to the school. At this point we took an unscheduled break. Staring down from Abbey Bridge’s castellated parapets to the dark-brown river water moving slowly through a rocky ravine some 60 feet below, I unexpectedly announced, ‘I could jump off that!’

Gordon looked down to the river below: ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘No problem,’ was my boastful reply.

Over the coming days, the goading and bravado continued. That was until it dawned on Gordon that we could raise some money with such a stunt. Sponsorship from other pupils seemed a good idea. A date was suggested and the numbers willing to part with a small sum to witness the jump began to gather pace.

Two days prior to the main event, we repeated the run, only this time, when we got to Abbey Bridge, Gordon and a couple of willing helpers had managed to drag a large boulder up onto the parapet. Launching it over the side, they shouted, ‘This is how you will fall.’ Plummeting to the river below, it hit the flat surface with a loud smack, followed milliseconds later by a deep thud as sound reverberated from the depths of the water below. Then it disappeared out of sight. I was having second thoughts about the wisdom of my boast. My self-imposed day of reckoning would take place after lessons on the Saturday morning, at 1 p.m.

Gordon and I had carefully considered the health-and-safety aspects of my proposed undertaking. We weren’t complete idiots. We had calculated from our physics lessons that, as the acceleration of gravity was thirty-two feet per second (per second), I would hit the river approximately two seconds after launching myself off the bridge. Hitting the water, provided I jumped off the central parapet, was a definite outcome. The big uncertainty was the depth of the water below, but as the normally fast-flowing river slowed up at this point, we were clinging to the adage that ‘still waters run deep’. The problem with the River Tees was its reputation for rock shelves protruding into its dark-brown water. The assumption was that if I hit the mid-point of the river I should be OK. The only unknown we could come up with was: once I had entered the water, would I resurface?

We decided to approach one of the school’s top swimmers, Martin Jordan. He had the added advantage of having completed a life-saving course. Martin agreed to be on standby at river level. How he would be able to see me in the dark-brown water if I didn’t resurface was a minor point we’d overlooked.

The proposed undertaking bore no hope of the exhilaration I got from my climbs on the limestone crags. On these, fear and anticipation hung evenly in the balance; only when adrenalin tipped the scales would I make the next move. This was the feeling of being alive, the one that would eventually take me to Everest. Had I chosen to jump from the bridge with no one present and without anyone’s knowledge it would have held that edge. Why? Because the choice would have been mine. However, the proposed leap from Abbey Bridge was being driven by peer pressure – a deadly force that could easily lead to disaster.

By the time Friday afternoon arrived, and with less than 24 hours to go, most of the school’s 500 plus pupils were planning to attend. This was an event that happened less frequently than the passing of Halley’s Comet. No one had knowledge of anyone having jumped off the bridge before. But by this point, there was no way out. It was jump or face ridicule and disgrace, of which I wanted neither.

At the beginning of Saturday morning chapel, the headmaster made an announcement: ‘I would like to see Graham Ratcliffe in my study immediately after this service.’

Murmurings and glances came my way as those around me wondered what the outcome of this appointment might be.