Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

kids.

      We lived on the military estate on the edge of the camp, not far from the beach. Even at the age of five I was a bit of a loner and a daydreamer, happy to be by myself, playing for hours in the garden, making up imaginary worlds. I was lucky enough to have the freedom to do my own thing and wander around the estate by myself, in the days before people even knew anything about pedophiles, where there were only ‘funny men’. I was only reined in after I went missing one day and didn’t come home for lunch, and the whole camp was mobilized to look for me. Several hundred soldiers and airmen combed the sea shore, fields and rivers looking for my body. In the end I turned up asleep in a collection of hay bales a few hundred metres from our house. My mum belted me with relief, shouting, ‘I was worried sick,’ a phrase that was now added to her daily litany.

      After that I had to stay with Robin, although this almost cost him his life on more than a few occasions.

      My worst youthful scrape, and one of my earliest fully formed memories, was going to our next-door neighbour’s house with Robin to look at their aquarium. It stood on a wooden stand near the front door, looking like an enormous TV filled with fish. We would stand with our noses pressed up against the glass, and watch the fish race around. On this day, my mum stood talking on the doorstep to the couple who owned the fish, my dad being away on an expedition. She had probably taken us around to see the fish as a distraction because I was missing him.

      We were playing our usual fish-spotting game, eyes tracking the red, blue and purple flashes darting around the tank. The couple who owned the house would always tell us that we had to be careful as the tank held piranhas, and that they would bite us if we got too close. I always wondered if they really would. If I were to stick in my hand, would the flesh be ripped off it in seconds like I’d seen in an old film once on our black and white TV?

      I wanted to find out if it was true.

      The fish darted away from the glass as I moved round to the side of the tank, trying to grab the top so I could pull myself up and dip my hand in. I would probably have lifted Robin up so he could dip his hand in, but already he had learned not to get involved in any of my games and would probably have started crying.

      Being small for my age I found the tank was too high, so, looking for another option, I saw that I could maybe climb up between the wall and the tank, using the skirting board as a foothold. I started by squeezing my leg in, my welly sticking well to the edge of the skirting as I tried to squirm up the gap, which widened as I pushed in.

      I looked through the glass as I moved up, seeing through the drifting green murk my brother’s tiny face, his eyes fixed on the dancing fish. I pushed up. I slipped back. I pushed harder.

      The tank moved . . . then moved some more . . . then crashed over onto Robin. An explosion of glass and water shot through the porch, a tsunami raging out of the front door and knocking everyone off their feet.

      There I stood, my back to the wall, looking down at the floor littered with glass, pebbles, soggy green plants, twitching fish and, right in the middle, the tips of two small red willies—my little brother.

      Incredibly Robin made a swift recovery, and after a night in the hospital he left with only a few cuts, being declared by the doctor as having a very strong heart.

      Personally, I put it down to his rubber bones.

      Not long afterwards my sister was born. My mum had always wanted a daughter, and had become so desperate she’d taken to clothing Robin in dresses when he was a baby. Joanne was born in 1976 and from the beginning everything changed.

      She never stopped crying, screaming non-stop for six months. The calm, fun house I’d known existed no longer. Mum and Dad became steadily worn down, tired and strung out. My dad could escape but not my mum.

      Then one day my mum took us all to the hospital, and I can remember me and Robin waiting in the hallway while she talked to the doctor. Then I could hear her crying and screaming, appearing in the hallway distraught. They had asked her if either I or Robin had dropped Joanne. It appeared her hip was broken. Soon, though, it was discovered she had been born with an undiagnosed congenital hip defect, meaning she had no hip bone, and had been in terrible pain since her birth.

      Soon after that, Dad was posted to another camp in Llanwrst on the edge of Snowdonia and a few weeks later we followed him, Joanne’s tiny body encased in plaster. We were leaving the happiest period of my childhood behind.

      Everything was different; new school, new house, new friends and, worse still, new parents. I hated school. I felt like an outsider, starting from scratch. I was no longer at the center of my parents’ universe: Joanne took up much of my mum’s time, while my dad seemed to be away more and more. When he was around he seemed bad tempered, or not really there at all. He was about to go on a trip to Yosemite, a name I only understood from Yosemite Sam on the TV, and this further added to the stress, leaving my mum with me and Robin, both unsettled, and Joanne. I suspect that the pressure was too much for my dad: his happy and conventional life, a life where he could have the freedom to climb and still have a family, began to collapse. Demands began to be made of him. He was forced to choose.

      One night, Robin and I woke up and could hear noises downstairs. We crept down to the dining room where our mother was at the table with our dad. She was crying. There had never been crying before we moved from Tywyn, but now it seemed to be happening all the time. We had always been happy; we had never had much but at least we had that; there had never been room for sadness. This was all to change. He was telling her something. Something she was shocked to hear. Her world and future falling apart. Her heart broken. Another woman.

      The following morning we were bundled out of bed by Mum, quickly dressed, and walked down to the train station. It was early; a fog obscured the line. I wondered if this meant I didn’t have to go to school. My mum wasn’t talking. It took all her strength just to keep it together.

      The train appeared out of the mist and slowed to a stop.

      We stood, no longer the family we had once been, our bags all packed for a new life in Hull, a place far removed from my world of sand dunes and hills, from beaches and green fields full of sheep, and from my dad. I had no idea where we were going, or that we would never come back—that Dad and I would never climb Bird Rock together.

      THREE

      The valley

      Tired after my long rambling journey, passed backwards and forwards from taxis to trains, trains to planes and back again, my mind began to come slowly back to life as the final leg drew to a close and the tiny shuttle bus wound its way up into the Yosemite Valley.

      The valley had been carved in the Ice Age, a mighty glacier cutting deep into the perfect Sierra Nevada bedrock, its slow retreat leaving behind a 3,000-foot-deep, five-mile-wide valley of incredible walls and towers. The valley was a magical place of mighty faces, thundering waterfalls and giant sky-scraping sequoias. It had captivated the minds of all who had visited, made famous first by the words of John Muir in the 1800s and later in the definitive black-and-white big-wall shots of Ansel Adams. It was one of the wonders of the world and a Disneyland for climbers, with rides both big and small, fun and terrifying.

      The little vehicle was full of the usual flotsam and jetsam found on American buses: the poor, the desperate, the foreigners. It was packed with a mixture of seasonal employees heading back to their concession jobs, hotel clerks, swimming pool attendants and bus boys, all returning to the safety of the valley. Then there were the climbers, drawn from around the world, all buzzing with excitement at finally reaching the crucible of climbing, the danger of the rock faces.

      The landscape outside the window of the bus changed slowly as we went from sea level into the high Sierras, from the flat California grass lands, parched brown after a long hot summer, into thick forest as the floor of the valley rose, creating a space of rock, water, wood and shadow. It seemed timeless after the alarm-bell ringing of the modern world behind us.

      It grew colder and darker in the bus, light and warmth flickering less and less across the windows as we moved higher, among growing trees whose trunks expanded in size until they looked mighty