RECOLLECTIONS OF AN EDITOR

MARGARET BODY

THERE'S NOTHING LIKE cutting your publishing milk teeth on an icon. I was given Eric Shipton's maps to sort out and that was my introduction to the literary climbing world. The Shipton title in question was Land of Tempest (1963) and the maps that exercised us, as well they might, were of the Patagonian Icecap. And from that experience I learnt the first basic fact of publishing climbers: they don't usually know where the hell they've been.

Working with Eric Shipton on Land of Tempest and later That Untraxelled World was a somewhat unnerving experience. I was far too young to act the bossy old party which the job soon turned me into, and he left a distinct impression that publishers' offices were not his natural habitat. So our encounters were vague, delightful but disconcerting. I remember him telling me the famous story of how he absentmindedly left Mallory's ice axe in the street outside his Chelsea house and how a passerby handed it in to the police and how the very intelligent local constable brought it round to Eric's because he knew he was a mountaineering gentleman. Nowadays they'd be measuring the length of the blade and discussing whether or not it was an offensive weapon. Working with Eric Shipton, I can't say I was on top of the job, but I, like every other lady, was so charmed by him that I hardly noticed.

As for the mapping problems, I was blessed with a marvellous calming cartographer, Uncle Alec, whose finest hour had been drawing maps for Monty in the war and was now architect to the headquarters premises of Midland Bank, not far away from Hodder's office at that time on the edge of the city. So whenever I needed him, he'd just declare a site meeting and come ambling round to sort me out.

When I got an interview for a job at Hodders in 19611 naturally rummaged round the house to see which of their books we had at home. There were only two. One was the Moffat translation of the Bible. Hodders was always a good religious house. The other was The Ascent of Everest which we were all given at our school in Coronation year, along with a royal blue propelling pencil with ER2 on it. The propelling pencil ceased propelling some time ago. ER2 is still going, but one could hardly describe it as like a train. The Ascent of Everest however, had an evergreen revival three years ago to mark its fortieth anniversary and who would have thought in 1953 that so many people since would have climbed it by so many routes, skied down it and parapented off it as well.

The reason Hodders got to publish The Ascent of Everest was because they had served a prewar apprenticeship with Hugh Ruttledge and the book of the Everest 1933 expedition, the one on which they found Mallory's ice axe which Eric Shipton did his best to lose again thirty years later. Hodders also supported financially the abortive 1936 expedition and as a consolation (quite a good consolation) got to publish Shipton's Nanda Devi, followed by Blank on the Map, Upon That Mountain, Mountains of Tartary, and the Everest Reconnaissance 1951 book before I got my mits on him a decade later; they also published the Bonington of his day, Frank Smythe, and the medical missionary/ climber Howard Somervell. It's time somebody wrote a novel or made a Chariots of Fire-type film about Somervell.

So when the 1953 Everest expedition was being offered to the publishing scene by the worthies of the Mount Everest Committee, there was Hodders in the front row waving their cheque book. Some wag at the Garrick Club was heard to say that it cost Hodder and Stoughton £ 10 a foot to get to the top of Everest. So you can work out the advance. The actual publication was a famously rushed job for those days of hot metal presses. They climbed the mountain at the end of May, and John Hunt didn't sit down in Llanfairwaterdine to start writing the book until August (with the help of my first Hodder boss, a redoubtable chain-smoking Northumbrian called Elsie Herron), and the book was in the shops in November 1953, price 25 shillings (£ 1.25). The first print was 80,000 copies, which was pretty impressive for 1953. But they ended up with 639,000 copies in circulation and the entire staff of Hodders received a Christmas bonus of £ 10 a head.

The first hero of '53 who I myself met was Ed Hillary who by the time I came to work with him was into Antarctica - more maps of nowhere to be drawn. But by now I had the nerve for it. Trained by my Uncle Alec, I could make it up as I went along, just like they did. I remember taking Ed to Cambridge once for a literary lunch. It was February and the week before his arrival the whole country was paralysed by the sort of heavy snowfall everybody expects in February, everybody that is except British Rail. Trains were stuck in drifts for twenty-four hours. That sort of thing. Well, I thought, if I'm to be stuck in a snowdrift with an author, I couldn't have picked a better qualified one than Ed Hillary. For someone who pipped Fuchs to the Pole there can't be such a thing as the wrong sort of snow. He'll know what to do.

However, I needn't have worried, the day we set out for Cambridge the thaw set in and East Anglia was now flooded. We had arrived in Cambridge two hours early for Anglia TV to interview Ed before the lunch began. But when push came to shove, the local floods were more compulsive viewing than the hero of Everest and the South Pole and all the cameras - all three of them - were out photographing firemen carrying fox terriers to safety through thigh deep Thetford High Street. That's when I discovered what a nice man Ed Hillary was and also that he had hollow legs, as we sat there drinking gin for two hours and waiting for his moment to perform.

There is no contest for the most venerable of all the climbers I ever met which was Captain Noel. Captain Noel had been trying to find a way to Everest (never mind climbing the thing) before the first world war and went along as photographer with the first British Everest expedition in 1921 and the Mallory and Irvine expedition in 1924. I met him when he was ninety-nine, stone deaf and addicted to the telephone. 'Is that Miss Body,'he would boom down the phone to whoever picked it up on the Hodder switchboard.

I was trying to bring out a paperback reprint of his Through Tibet to Everest which I had discovered languishing on the Edward Arnold backlist when Hodder acquired the imprint in the late 'eighties. (Up until 1933, when Hodder took over, all the main Himalayan books were done by Edward Arnold, though today their reputation is as an academic press.)

Doing business with Captain Noel was not easy. As well as being stone deaf, he was notoriously suspicious of anyone trying to do a deal with him. I decided I had better pay him a visit. He lived in the flattest part of Kent in an ancient bungalow with the debris of a lifetime silting up around him. He wore a woolly hat like Compo and sat in a wheelchair, but he still had the massive shoulders of a man who had blacked up and forged his way across forbidden passes disguised as 'a Mahommedan from India".

After we'd done our business he wheeled himself into the kitchen where he had put out some cheese sandwiches on a plate which, like Delia Smith, he had prepared earlier. I put on the kettle. I noticed a few cat bowls about the really revolting floor and, trying to find an easy topic on which to communicate, I asked after the cat. A great grin crossed his face and he wheeled himself to the kitchen door, opened it, shouted something in what I took to be Tibetan, rattled his stick back and fore across the door frame and in through the door and the open window hurtled no less than three large cats who dived straight for the sarnies on the table, sending all flying. 'Oh cripes,"said Captain Noel. 'Never mind, "said the determined editor. And I picked those disintegrating door stoppers up off the filthy floor and dusted them down and put them together again and back on the plate - and I ate two of them. But my reward was to have Captain Noel show me maps and photographs and paintings and say things like 'As I said to Younghusband..." It's occasions like that make the hair stand up on the back of the neck with a sense of history. It was certainly one of my most memorable author visits.

Author visits of quite another sort were up to Glencoe to see Hamish Machines with whom I did a number of books on mountain rescues (for years he led the Glencoe team) and also accounts of his more lighthearted expeditions, notably in the company of such worthies as Joe Brown, and Don Whillans. The first time I went to see him we were trying to fix a date on the phone and I thought he said he couldn't do that week because he was building a bridge for Monty Python. I put it down to a bad line. But I'd reckoned without the fact that at that time no star of large or small screen could climb more than ten feet off the ground in Scotland without Hamish superintending the activity. And what he was doing was building what appeared to be an enormously rickety moss-trailing bridge across a ravine for Monty Python to reach the Holy Grail, but one that in reality had to be solid and tensioned and secure enough to satisfy the combined insureres of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle.

What I also remember about that first book was that when he showed the script to Don Whillans, whose famously laconic dialogue featured largely in its pages, Don's response was 'There's too much bloody swearing, youth...'

Perhaps inspired by verbatim reporting of life with Don and Joe, Hamish also wrote one novel. Not many people know that. It was a ripping yarn called Death Reel, set in the West Highlands with at the crunch moment the hero (he was called Cliff) drifting without power but with the heroine in a small boat towards the anthrax-ridden Gruinard Island. I remember at the last moment we realised we had lost a day in the plot. So while Hamish sat down to write himself out of this problem, I braved the Highland midgies to go out and pick all his raspberries for freezing and the next day he was off on the 1975 South-West Face of Everest expedition, of which he was deputy leader.

In best Hodder tradition we first published the book about how Chris Bonington and his merry men didn't quite get up the South- West Face of Everest and then three years later we published the story of how they did it in 1975. At least by then I knew my way round the maps and topos.

Chapter 14 was the problem for Chris. This was the summit push, the most important chapter in the book. Chris couldn't write it at first hand because of course he wasn't on the summit push, so he had asked both Doug Scott and Dougal Haston to write their accounts for inclusion in the book. Without any colluding they both wrote exactly nine pages of typescript about how we got to the top and dispatched them to their leader. Chris took one horrified look and posted the two versions straight on to me, saying I was to choose which one to use and then he could blame me when apologising to the other illustrious climber.

This seemed to be a spread out on the kitchen table job to compare, contrast and discuss, as they say in exam papers. When I did this, I realised a very simple thing, they had each described their own lead, rope-length by rope-length, so all I needed to do was scissors and paste them alternately and it all fitted perfectly. I did what I thought was a little cosmetic tidying round the edges, and then I sent the chapter to the pair of them who just happened to be climbing together in Washington State. Doug wrote back at length with his opinions on the expedition and life and whither mountaineering, but generously approving what I'd done with the material. Elliptical as ever, Dougal scrawled one sentence around the edge of Doug's epistle: 'Please reinstate the third rope-length of the traverse above the Rock Band.' I did.

In those dying days of siege-style expeditioning everything was much more structured than it is today. The team members had to sign an expedition contract and part of the deal was first access to the team diaries for use in the expedition book written by the expedition leader or designated other. One of the better diarists on Everest 75 proved to be the youngest climbing member of the party who observed: 'For a mountaineer surely a Bonington Everest Expedition is one of the last great imperial experiences that life can offer.' This of course was the opinion of Pete Boardman whom we signed up soon afterwards, largely on the strength of that sentence.

Hodders published both The Shining Mountain and Sacred Summits and I think perhaps the best moment in my publishing career was when I learnt that Pete had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for Literature for his first book. This is a prize which is not limited to climbing literature, and is given for writers of promise in any literary field, at that time, under the age of thirty. I remember Bernice Rubens who was chairman of the judges saying in her adjudication that they had given the prize to Pete because he had written a very good book and probably didn't know it. I think he did know it all right. He took his writing very seriously. He was into sustained metaphors in a big way and liked to model himself on George B. Schaller. He could have become the Noyce, the Shipton of our time, had he lived.

After Everest 75 there was an avalanche of expedition books which is the line I tended to pursue at Hodders. Ken Wilson, who did everything else with a great deal more umph, used to describe my authors as 'Maggie's Teenage Ninja Climbers'. Though teenage was giving the benefit of various doubts to the likes of Jim Curran and Kurt Diemberger, two whose names one usually tries to avoid uttering in the same breath.

Expeditions were no longer siege-style, so they didn't need so much start-up money. The days were past when Barclays International saw Bonington up Everest, or Jardine Matheson saw him into China, or the ill-fated K2 expedition was launched with coloured balloons in the press pack which rather bemused everybody because the sponsors were the London Rubber Company.

What usually happened now with wannabe expeditions was they started with the extravagantly headed notepaper, then if they were really keen, they got on to the expedition tee-shirt, and the expedition postcard. And somewhere along the line they wrote to Hodders. That's the way I acquired Stephen Venables who was the only climber before Mick Fowler who arrived in my office wearing a suit and a tie. And then there was Victor Saunders who I was convinced was the twin of Tony Saunders because that's what he was calling himself in Venables' book. It was quite a relief there was only one of them. Because, delightful as he is, one is confusing enough. Victor was another architect who could declare a site meeting at the drop of a hard hat. And there was Andy Fanshawe. The last time I saw him he gave me a lift in a very small car which was full of muddy spaniels who'd been left there for a couple of hours and were delighted to see us. 'What a good thing you like dogs, Maggie,' he said. And Alison Hargreaves who used to come in to the office with her two very self-possessed small children who would draw mountains on the back of spare printout paper with mummy waving from the top of every one. And Mick Fowler who proposed writing his book after Hodders had been taken over and turned into something quite else. But I just couldn't say to Mick Fowler, sorry we don't do climbing books at Hodders any more. So I sold the idea to my new masters as The Secret Life of a Taxman. They are probably still looking for the dirty bits.

But of all of them it was with Mr Bonington, as he then was, that I had the longest working relationship and the most satisfying, in that Chris has always had a professional journalist's attitude to his prose and was perfectly happy to chum it out and see me scribbling all over it. At the crux of each book, I would go up and stay in Nether Row and we'd work a shift system. Chris is best first thing in the morning, I'm not. So he'd get up and start work at five or six but knock off by three. I'd start by nine, but get into my stride in the early evening and work late. Everything would stop midday for the walk in my case, run in his, up High Pike with the dogs and Louise and Alison and Frances (the heroic component parts of Nether Row Industries) and then back to one of Wendy Bonington's vegi bean salads. Though if Wendy was off in Keswick for the day, we just might nip down to the pub and have Cumberland sausages on the quiet.

Once I was asked to take Chris on the road. They were thin on the ground in the promotion department and editors had to chip in. 'You can take him to Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea,' said my managing director, 'and then you can go home and see your Gower aunties afterwards.' 'Right ho,' I said.

We started off in Bristol where we called into George's book shop which was a fairly underwhelming experience and then Chris was interviewed over lunch by the original freeloading journalist who had everything on the menu, ending up with a liqueur. I had to keep an eye on the time because at 3 p.m. Chris had an appointment with the local intrepid female reporter to take her climbing on the Avon Gorge. The week before she'd gone parachute jumping with the SAS or something. This week she was going climbing with Bonington. So I had ordered a taxi to pick us up at the restaurant at ten to three.

The taxi arrived. 'The Avon Gorge,' I said, and off we went corkscrewing round the one way system of the posh end of Bristol and we ended up outside a very discreet private hotel in Clifton - called the Avon Gorge. What did he think we wanted to do there at three o'clock in the afternoon? 'No, no,' I said. 'He wants to climb it.' So back down the one way corkscrew we swooped and out to the grass at the foot of the Gorge where the intrepid female reporter and her film crew were awaiting us.

I passed Chris the day sack which I had been nursing all the while so that he didn't leave it on the train, or in the book shop, or in the restaurant or in the taxi. And Chris tipped the contents out on the grass. Out fell his mothy old red longjohns, his boots, a large quantity of climbing irons. But no rope. And he was leading a beginner. 'Oh gosh,'he said. 'Wendy packed the sack. Never mind, I'll just borrow one.' And off he loped with an ingratiating grin plastered between his whiskers. He was back in five minutes with a rope which he'd borrowed off some innocent lads along the Gorge 'for just half an hour'. I expressed amazement. 'The camaraderie of the crags,' he explained airily. What a splendid phrase.

So they roped up and put on their mikes and set off up the climb with the cameraman and sound recordist in attendance at a respectful distance, and I settled down to wait at the bottom. After a while the two climbers disappeared up into some bushes and then the rope stopped twitching and even to my untutored eye it looked less than riveting television. And the sound recordist was muttering that they'd dislodged their chest mikes so he couldn't hear what they were saying either.

'Is there a road at the top?' the cameraman asked me. I said he was the local TV team, but I supposed so. So we piled all the surplus gear and Chris's suit into two cars and corkscrewed up to the top, but not before I had had this fleeting vision of two little lads I'd not yet met setting off to the police station and reporting this chap who was passing himself off as Chris Bonington and then had it away with their rope. But no time to worry about them yet.

To a non-practitioner it is disconcerting how different a climb looks from the top looking down, compared with from the bottom looking up. Picture the scene on that nice polite grass at the top of the Avon Gorge: the cameraman, the sound recordist and the editor, tiptoeing along the rim peering over and calling 'Chris, Chris, are you there? Is there anybody there - ?' Rather like a somewhat unrewarding seance. Eventually, we found them, sitting just under the lip of the gorge interviewing each other. The camera rolled. The intrepid female reporter climbed up over the edge. Everybody kissed everybody. Well nearly everybody. And Chris gave the genteel dog-walking ladies of Clifton a cheap thrill by changing out of his climbing longjohns and back into his suit there on the grass. The suit was because we were scheduled to do an interview in Cardiff in an hour's time.

'Just time to catch the train,' he said, throwing me a pacifying glance.

'What about the rope,' I said.

'Oh gosh,' he said.

So back down the one way system we corkscrewed and there by the gents loo at the bottom, looking distinctly foolish by now, and not talking to each other, were the young lads off whom he'd conned the rope over two hours earlier. We restored their rope. We took them to the nearest pub. We plied them with pints and a signed copy of the latest book, and I phoned Cardiff and rearranged the publicity schedule.

That was when I realised what I'd always suspected, that editing is sometimes a softer option than being a publicist. I'd had an early intimation of this some years before when I had to lead Norman Croucher, the so aptly named climber with no legs below the knees, into the trap for This is Your Life. The set up was at the Sobel Centre climbing wall in north London and I remember the occasion not so much for Eamonn Andrews (as it then was) sidling up on us with his Big Red Book as for it being the first time I encountered Ken Wilson in the flesh. You tend to remember moments like that.

Some ladies when they get to their mid-fifties go in for something called HRT, Hormone Replacement Therapy. I had my own special treatment prescribed for me which was AWK, Amalgamating With Ken. For a brief heady time after Hodders took over Diadem, and before Headline took over Hodders, we worked in harness very well. Ken did his thing, I did mine, we batted ideas between us. And occasionally we collaborated, as for the Bonington picture autobiography Mountaineer and the Doug Scott equivalent, Himalayan Climber. The idea in each case was of course Ken's, and the execution and the design. My job in proceedings was to knock the text into shape to fit the spaces Ken had occasionally left for it. As far as Ken is concerned text is the black fuzzy stuff that stops the pictures colliding. So I went along with a dustpan and brush behind the pomp of the lord mayor's show, sweeping up the surplus bits and enjoying the experience hugely.

Working with Chris on this sort of magazine format book was fine. He could produce the words easily and didn't mind them being massacred to fit the length. Working with Doug was a different kettle of fish. Words do not come easily with Doug and when they come he has weighed each one and understandably grown partial to it. We did not make progress. Doug's three expeditions a year schedule didn't help. At crunch time we congregated at the Wilson stately pad outside Macclesfield to force the last chapters out of Mr Scott. Doug and Ken are two people equally convinced of the Tightness of their own thinking. Which of them was the irresistible force and which the irremovable object I wasn't always too certain, but the conjunction was what American climbers used to call awesome.

Doug is the only person I know who buys king-size duty frees at the many airports he travels through during his jetsetting year, and then unravels them and makes them up into twice as many roll-ups. By day three the strain was telling and there were fragments of ex-Rothman roll-up all over the various boilings down of the text. But while Doug was prepared to stand up to Ken he was properly in awe of Ken's wife Gloria, who wouldn't have smoking in the house. So he had to smoke these things with his head stuck out of the French windows of the room in which he and I worked on the text in the lulls between the editorial storms. And so I have always been able to claim that, like some sort of lady vet, I edited Himalayan Climber through the Scott backside. Editorially, it seemed to work just as well as addressing the shaggier end. But the whole experience was exhilarating and the book was remarkably good stuff. And that, as ever, was the object of the exercise.

SUMMARY

When Margaret Body joined the London book publishers Hodder and Stoughton as an editor in 1961 she very soon came to specialise in its mountaineering list. On her departure from the firm at the end of 1995 she takes a light-hearted but affectionate look back at some of the famous climbing names with whom she worked and who became her friends, from Captain Noel and Eric Shipton, to Ed Hillary, Chris Bonington, Doug Scott and Mick Fowler.

This article was first delivered as an address at the Tenth International Festival of Mountaineering Literature, Bretton Hall, Wakefield, UK on 16 November 1996.

 

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