18TH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF MOUNTAINEERING LITERATURE

Listening to a succession of speakers at Bretton Hall telling us how it really was – you know, really was – on K2, Broad Peak, Yosemite or in the Brown-Whillans hey-day in the Peak and North Wales, I kept thinking of an old friend, Khalid Hasan, and the title of a book of Urdu short stories he had edited, Versions of Truth. That is what we, an attentive full-house of an audience, were getting, new versions, or at least a different perspective, on mountain exploits we had thought we had the measure of.

Thus Richard Sale, author of Broad Peak (Carreg 2004) adjusted the spotlight away from Kurt Diemberger and Herman Buhl and on to their comrades on the 1957 Austrian expedition, Marcus Schmuck and Fritz Wintersteller, who were actually the first to the top of the mountain. (Schmuck and Wintersteller were present to hear the reputations burnished, and to receive a standing ovation.) And Australian Robert Marshall rubbished Ardito Desio’s ‘official’ account of the Italian first ascent of K2 in furtherance of his campaign to untangle a ‘web of deceit’ that has blighted the life of Walter Bonatti.

Bretton impresario Terry Gifford had set the theme of the festival as ‘Whose History?’ It worked well, so much so that one was left thinking that everybody’s account of anything should be qualified by an ‘it is alleged’ or a ‘claimed’. Chris Jones highlighted the unsung part played by Europeans in North American climbing history while Matthew Entwhistle upgraded Millican Dalton, the eccentric Borrowdale caveman and ‘professor of adventure’, to a more serious educationalist with unspecified new routes to his credit. (Millican Dalton: a Search for Romance and Freedom Mountainmere Research 2004)

Given the age and pedigree of much of regular lit’ fest’ audience, it was no surprise that the keenest interest was in Jim Perrin’s readings from The Villain: the life of Don Whillans (Hutchinson 2004). Several of the audience had climbed with Whillans and more had an acquaintance. Perrin though is a smooth and engaging performer and dealt with a disarming frankness when questioned by a panel, notably Gordon Stainforth, about a possible lack of candour over Whillans’s excesses and treatment of his wife Audrey.

The Villain was an attempt to achieve a realistic portrait that would do Whillans credit, Perrin said. ‘Obviously there is material I didn’t include in the book and there is material of which I had a suspicion but I couldn’t actually get it. It is quite difficult this. I do know things that have happened and I deliberately left them out.

‘When you attempt any portrait, the matter of shading is crucial. And the shading is as I wanted it to be.’

Perhaps Khalid Hasan could have called his book ‘A Matter of Shading’. Versions of Truth was dedicated to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the deposed and hanged president of Pakistan, for whom Hasan had worked as a press officer. Writing from his death cell, Bhutto had wondered whether his name would be bracketed with criminals or heroes.
Climbing, of course, is neither as serious nor as risky as central Asian politics, but as Bretton showed, its practitioners are every bit as touchy about their reputations. Many thanks to Terry Gifford for exposing our conceit.