‘If Tom has perished, he did so living his life to the full. I have to use that to make sense of it all…’
Jim Ballard, whose son Tom is missing in the Himalayas, also lost his wife, Alison Hargreaves, to a ‘killer’ mountain. Filmmaker and family friend Chris Terrill sits down with him as he braces himself for the worst
Iam on the night sleeper from London to Edinburgh. Except that I am not sleeping. I can’t. My head is full of tortured thoughts, painful reflections, tormented images. In a few hours I will arrive and Jim Ballard will be waiting for me on the platform.
When we meet, not a word will be spoken. We will hold on to each other for a moment, locked in a man hug. Then we will probably go for a walk and spend the rest of the day talking about a man called Tom. Tom is Jim’s son, now aged 30, but I have known him since he was a small boy.
As I speed north, Jim does not know whether Tom Ballard, one of the world’s finest mountaineers, is alive or dead. Nobody does. But the signs are not hopeful. He went missing 12 days ago while climbing Nanga Parbat, a mountain in the Himalayas known ominously as the Killer Mountain.
It is the ninth highest peak in the world but among the most treacherous to climb. Savage and unforgiving, prone to ferocious storms and sudden deadly ice falls, the mountain has taken 84 lives since 1895. Perhaps two more have now been added to its dark account.
It is feared that Tom and Daniele Nardi, his Italian climbing partner, were swept away by a huge avalanche, but there has been no final confirmation.
Two weeks last Sunday, Mr Nardi’s ground team reported the pair had reached around 20,670ft. However, they added: “The weather is not good, there was fog, sleet and wind gusts.” It was the last communication the team were to receive.
Since, the world has been watching, waiting and praying for news that will confound expectation; news that the men have somehow survived against the odds further stacked against them by the season. It was their courageous, some may say rash, decision to attempt this climb in winter, the cold-blooded ally of any Himalayan peak that does not wish to be scaled.
Helicopters and search teams have been combing the precipitous, icestrewn slopes, but to no avail. Only an orange, snow-filled tent was spotted in the early days of the search. It had been crushed. Swept away by the enormous force of a surging, cascading, tumbling inundation of snow and ice. Nothing else had been seen until yesterday when someone reported seeing two ghostly silhouettes on an upper ridge.
Shadows? Rocks? Who knows. The only certainty was that the shapes were statue still. Motionless. Maybe later there will be more news. It is likely to be the final day of searching before the men are officially declared “missing, presumed dead”. In fact, that almost happened three days ago, but crowdfunding raised nearly €150,000 in 24 hours to extend the rescue attempt – though in all likelihood it has long been a recovery operation.
The first time I met Tom and Jim was 25 years ago in 1995, and that too was a meeting born of heroic tragedy. Jim’s wife, Alison Hargreaves, Britain’s greatest female mountaineer, had just been killed on K2 – also, by coincidence, called the Killer Mountain. This was just three months after summiting Everest, a legendary climb she achieved solo and without oxygen. She had also summited K2, but was consumed by a massive storm on her descent along with seven other climbers. Jim had the terrible task of telling his children, Tom, then aged six, and his sister Kate, aged four, that their mother had died.
Tom immediately asked if they could go to K2 to say their goodbyes. Jim did not hesitate, and within weeks an expedition had been organised to take the kids deep into the Karakorum range of the Himalayas, all the way to the Pakistan/china border and to K2 itself – what we called Alison’s Last Mountain. I went along as a filmmaker to record the journey for the BBC and posterity.
Ever since that incredible, poignant, affecting trek I have remained a close friend of the family and watched with increasing amazement and pride as Tom and Kate grew into the most remarkable young people – both developing as hugely accomplished and gifted climbers, skiers, snowboarders.
If rock, snow or ice was involved these “children of the mountains”, as I dubbed them, were unbeatable, untouchable, unassailable and, I always thought, indestructible.
It is 6.30am and the train pulls in to Waverley Station. Jim, now 72, is there to meet me on the platform. He has been staying with a friend in Scotland for the past two weeks. Previous to that, he was renovating a house in France, but thought it better to be with his friend, where communication would be much better than if he went straight to Pakistan. We walk towards each other and embrace in silence. Inside, he will be torn apart, but the gruff, tough Yorkshireman whom I have known for so many years is doing all he can to hide his pain. I know him well now. It’s his coping mechanism.
“How are you, Jim?”
“I’m OK,” he lies to us both.
After walking a bit: “It’s bloody