He was in floods of tears shouting ‘I’m at the top’
MARINA FOGLE was fast asleep at her home in west London on Wednesday night when her mobile phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. As she struggled into wakefulness she peered at the caller ID on the screen and made out the distinctive pattern of a satellite phone number. It was the call she had been desperately waiting for since the previous Sunday.
By now her husband Ben, who has made a career out of carrying out increasingly dangerous feats of derring do, had been on Mount Everest for a month. Five days earlier he had called her to say that he and his team, under the leadership of world renowned mountaineer Kenton Cool, were aiming to make a bid for the summit the following Monday – Sunday night her time.
“So I went through the weekend thinking it’s soon going to be over, it’s soon going to be over,” she says. “I think it was on Sunday night that I was anticipating that phone call. I was tossing and turning and couldn’t get to sleep so I thought I’d listen to something.
“The only thing I had on my phone was the audio version of Fire And Fury – that book about Donald Trump – so I thought I’ll stick that on. I then proceeded to have a series of disturbing nightmares about Donald Trump.
“That was quite funny. When I wasn’t having nightmares about Ben on Everest it was disturbing dreams about Donald Trump. I don’t know which was worse.”
She adds: “Then I didn’t hear anything at all on Monday and I was like, ‘He’s meant to be summiting and I haven’t heard anything.’ And everyone was asking me what was going on.
“I went through that night not sleeping, waiting for a phone call, not getting a phone call and being a bit worried thinking, ‘Oh gosh what’s gone wrong?’”
“Ben had said, ‘I might not be able to call you from the top of the mountain, we might not have any satellite signal, I might not be able to string a sentence together’ so I knew that it wasn’t a definite.
“But I had hoped he would call me – not because I wanted to get a call from the roof of the world but just so I would know whether or not he’d made it.”
SHE then received a “very very brief” text saying that the team was at camp four – the last staging post before the summit – but this provoked as many anxieties as it laid to rest.
“It said that they were going to have a rest day and maybe summit on Wednesday and that was it,” she says. “And of course you catastrophise – I was thinking, ‘Is he in the right state of mind?’
“You know camp four is at 8,000m, which is within the death zone [the section of the climb which is at such high altitude that there is a limit to the length of time that a climber can survive without supplementary oxygen].
“You do not want to be spending any more time there than you have to. A rest day at camp four is so SUPPORT: Marina and their children Ludo and Iona, above. Ben celebrates reaching the summit, right. The children react to the news of his conquering Everest, below way that I didn’t beforehand. That raises the stakes quite a lot. It felt like there was so much more on the line – for a start he’s older.
“I know lot about Everest, I’ve read all the books. I was obsessed with it as a young girl. I know exactly what the real dangers are.”
And so there were many dark nights of the soul before Marina got that all-important 3am call.
“I just remember hearing my phone ring in the middle of the night and thinking is that going to be the satellite phone number? And it was. He was in floods of tears just shouting, ‘I’m at the top, it’s amazing, it’s beautiful.’
“That was a huge relief that they’d got there and he could string a sentence together.”
AND Marina wasn’t the only one overjoyed to hear that Ben had summited safely. Their children Ludo, eight, and Iona, six, were equally elated.
“I was honest with them about the dangers of going up Everest and the challenges he faced but I think children focus on the adventure and excitement.
“They were so proud of him. Their school had been really involved. Ben had done an assembly from base camp. He’d talked to the whole school and all their classmates were asking about Ben and when I told them he had reached the top they were just so proud and excited they were literally leaping around, jumping on my bed.”
That said, Marina was aware that the descent from the summit was even more dangerous than the ascent due to fading adrenaline, growing fatigue, the effects of altitude and lack of food.
“Until he was back down through the ice fall above base camp I wasn’t going to allow myself to be relieved that he was back,” she says. “But now I am absolutely the most relieved woman in Britain.”
So has Britain’s foremost celebrity adventurer had the temerity to broach any plans for future challenges?
“I think he’s just desperate to come home,” she says. “He did say that he’s happy to give up mountaineering for good and I know that this has been tough. He says it’s the hardest thing he has done by a long way.
“I asked him, ‘Have you lost a lot of weight?’ And he said, ‘To be honest I haven’t taken my clothes off for five weeks. I have no idea.’ It will take him a good few weeks to recover and then he’ll write his book and he’s creating a series of podcasts. There’s a lot of work to do now.
“I don’t think I’ll be hearing too much about future expeditions, certainly not in the short term. In the long term I know I married an adventurer and I think for him to lose that spirit of adventure would be to lose a part of himself and I wouldn’t want that.” Ben’s climb, in support of The British Red Cross, was backed by AnythingisPossible.world. He is a UN patron of the Wilderness and Mountain Hero.