“AMONG SECRET BEAUTIES” by Brian Wilkins (Otago University
Press, $NZ45)
The composers of ancient epics
knew that one certain way of grabbing an audience’s interest was to begin in
the middle – in medias res – rather
than at the beginning of the story. Start off with something dramatic and the
audience might be hooked. Brian Wilkins uses this technique with great effect
in Among Secret Beauties. This book
is, as its subtitle says, A memoir of
mountaineering in New Zealand and the Himalayas. Born in 1925, so now 88 years old, Wilkins
spent many years as a lecturer in pharmaceutical chemistry, and before that he
had spent some time as a high school science teacher. But he always had many
interests in his life (or “passions” as he prefers to call them), and one of
the most prominent was mountaineering.
Aged 29, Wilkins was part of the climbing
expedition in the Himalayas that was organised in 1954, with Edmund Hillary,
Charles Evans and George Lowe as leaders. This was the year after Hillary and
Tenzing had conquered Everest. Without any exposition, Chapter One of Among Secret Beauties throws us into the
most dramatic episode in which Wilkins was involved in the 1954 expedition. He
and fellow-climber Jim McFarlane fell down a crevasse as they were following
quite a way behind Hillary’s party on a trek to a mountain camp. Wilkins
managed to get out. To his amazement he heard the voice of McFarlane, who was
badly injured 18 metres below him, apologising for not rescuing them both, even
though Wilkins was the one who had tumbled in first. This is a frightening
narrative, capped by Wilkins’ account of reaching the camp on his own and
getting help from Hillary and a party of sherpas.
Hillary himself almost died as he
descended the crevasse to retrieve McFarlane but, says Wilkins, Hillary’s
account of what happened was so modest that no reader would have known his life
was in danger. It was only later that it became sensational world news. As we
are told only much further on in the book, Jim McFarlane, having suffered
amputations after his crash into the crevasse, was later carried all the way
down the mountains in a modified tea chest strapped to a sherpa’s back
After this opening, all the first
half of the book concerns itself with the 1954 expedition, copiously
illustrated with excellent colour photographs taken at the time, many by
Wilkins himself.
Wilkins is clearly proud of his
part in the expedition and proud of his connection with Hillary. Hillary sent
off dispatches to The Times of
London, which had contributed to financing the expedition. Wilkins watched him
writing part of his account of the Everest expedition during the rest days of
the 1954 expedition. Wilkins doesn’t stint his praise for some other members of
the party and for the sherpas.
But his account is not always
uncritical. He goes into the planning of the expedition, with its genesis in
the New Zealand Alpine Club and the initial fear Hillary might not join them. He
shows awareness of some tensions between New Zealand-based and British-based
organizing committees. He notes:
“Anyone
who has lived in London for a few years can be forgiven for believing that they
are at the centre of the world, and any climber celebrating the achievement of
John Hunt’s expedition could be forgiven for claiming it as the centre of the
universe. The correspondence became occasionally rather testy.” (p.35)
He remarks sharply on how much
those who receive the acclaim are only part of any climbing expedition. The
imagery he uses is entirely appropriate to the 1950s. Chapter 4 opens thus:
“The rocket that propelled Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into orbit
weighed nearly 300 tons and the Sputnik a mere 80 kilograms. What better image
for a Himalayan expedition, another huge construction, delivering perhaps two
climbers only to be the first to stand on the summit and to move into an orbit
of acclamation? The others who helped to get them there, most of whom would
have had summit ambitions themselves, were discarded like booster rockets,
leaving only their hacking breath drifting away into space like spent rocket
fuel.” (p.43)
When he mentions the French team
which, the following year, conquered the summits that the 1954 team had failed
to conquer, he describes them wistfully as “a
triumph of careful planning and concentrated effort from a harmonious party”
(p.104), clearly implying that some of these qualities were not present in
their own expedition. Indeed he goes on to criticise forthrightly the poor
planning of the 1954 expedition and the way it has subsequently been
misrepresented as a geological surveying exercise with a little climbing thrown
in, rather than as the climbing-focussed expedition which everybody understood
it to be at the time.
The blurb on the back of the book
says: “In this frank account
[Wilkins]… submits the writings of his
contemporaries to robust critical attention.”
True.
Chapter 6 is potentially the most
controversial in the book. Wilkins records how, with the accident involving
Hillary and with Hillary also falling sick, the attempt on a major peak had to
be abandoned as effort went into rescuing Hillary by taking him down on a
stretcher to lower altitudes. He
questions Hillary’s leadership in the decisions that were made, noting that
Hillary had never led a Himalaya expedition before, and raising the possibility
that Hillary was already weakened by a never-diagnosed illness even before the
1954 expedition even began. Hence Hillary was never again able to summit in the
Himalayas. Wilkins’ real “villain” however is the later-knighted Charles Evans,
the peremptory ex-army officer who took over after Hillary fell ill, and whom
Wilkins sees as having falsified a report about Wilkins in order to justify terminating
the expedition. Much later in the book (pp.188-189) Wilkins takes a crack at
another historian of New Zealand mountaineering who misrepresented one of
Wilkins’ climbs.
If you are absorbed in Wilkins’
well-told story, you might be tempted to skip the endnotes, but they are very
worth reading. It is here that Wilkins dissents from some other peoples’
version of mountain expeditions in which he was involved. His dissent includes
his story of how other mountaineer-writers misassigned to themselves his photographs
of a fellow-climber on a perilous slope.
Only after all of the 1954 matter
is accounted for does Wilkins go back to the formative autobiographical
material, telling us of his Catholic childhood in Mosgiel and giving a generally
positive account of schooling with the Christian Brothers and intellectual
formation from the likes of the adventurous Jesuit priest who visited when he
was a chaplain with American forces during the war. (Incidentally, the title
“Among Secret Beauties” is a quotation from a pope’s account of the attractions
of mountaineering.) Wilkins tells us of his other major passion outside
mountaineering, singing art songs as a baritone. He is as enthusiastic about
this as he is about climbing, and he describes one singing engagement under
Maxwell Fernie as “a weekly liturgical
space flight powered by Palestrina, Vittoria and other geniuses of polyphony.”
(pp.126-127)
Then it is on to his climbing
career in the Southern Alps, both before and after the 1954 Himalayas
expedition. The anecdotes are vivid, such as the one about surviving a
snowstorm by sheltering with friends in an ice-cave, but having to carry out
one team member who proved to be diabetic (p.144); or, more hauntingly,
worrying about whether his own cheerful published account of descending on one
route down Mt Cook didn’t encourage the climber H.R. (Harry) Scott to try the
same route some years later – and plunge to his death (p.154). The party with
whom he ascended Mount Aspiring hid in an ice cave during an electric storm and
found themselves shoving all the metal objects they had outside the entrance to
the cave, as they did not wish to be electrocuted when the lightning kept
getting attracted to them.
There are a number of
mountaineering deaths recorded in this book, and in his final reflections
Wilkins tells how he gave up mountaineering as he gradually came to see it was
important not to leave his wife a widow. Even so, his interest continued, and
one of the book’s last photographs shows him, in his late 70s, standing on the
East Peak of Mt Earnslaw.
This is a good, very readable
account of the life of a very active man, generous in his praises but also
eager to correct what he sees as misrepresentations of events he witnessed. Its
observations give it an edge over other books of physical endeavour.
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