‘I left letters in case I didn’t make it back’
After climbing Everest, Ben Fogle admits to Peter Stanford how scared he really was – and the moment he thought a fellow climber had died
Ben Fogle is caught between two worlds. One half of him is overwhelmingly glad to be home after six weeks on Mount Everest, alive, well and 22lb lighter, drinking coffee in the colourfully boho kitchen of his west London terraced house, with his wife of 13 years, Marina, at his side. Only the wind burn on his left cheek and the Nepalese prayer flags fluttering outside in the sunny back garden offer any clues as to where the 44-year-old TV presenter has been.
Just a week ago, Fogle was standing on the summit of the world’s highest mountain, 29,029ft up.
“Things are taking time to resettle in my brain,” he says. “That’s what altitude does to you. I feel a bit foggy. It was pretty weird that, three days after standing on the summit of Everest, I was back here, sitting in the garden, watching the royal wedding.”
As he speaks, his hands are spread out on the copper-topped table in front of him. Marina reaches out to place hers on top of his. There is no mistaking how relieved she is to have him back.
As well she might be. Since the “summiting” season opened on Everest two weeks ago, five people have died there, including the experienced Japanese climber, Nobukazu Kuriki, on his eighth attempt. And, at precisely the moment when Fogle was within reaching distance of the top, his plans were thrown into utter confusion after another well-known British TV personality, trying for the summit, was reported “lost, presumed dead”.
On the day we meet, the name of that other climber hadn’t been made public, so out of loyalty Fogle only refers to him as “another household name”. Some digging later, and I conclude the man in question must be Ant Middleton, ex-career soldier, father of five and frontman of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins. He diced with death, but lived to tell the tale or some of it with a slightly ambiguous Instagram post from Everest. Still in his mountain gear, complete with frosted eyelashes he wrote: “When hardship hits, always imagine yourself coming through the other side…”
“At the time, it was all pretty terrifying,” recalls Fogle. “I was in the tent at Camp 4 [the final stage before the summit] and there was a huge storm going on. For five hours we thought he had died. It was traumatic and I got quite emotional.”
Back in London, looking after the couple’s two children, Ludo, 8, and Iona, 5, Marina Fogle hadn’t at that point heard anything from her husband for five days. “I knew there must be a problem. Ben had talked in his previous message about possibly summiting on the Monday and now it was the Tuesday. I just kept thinking, ‘What aren’t they telling me? What’s the real problem?’”
She couldn’t sleep, she remembers, but in front of the children she maintained a brave face. “I couldn’t manifest my anxieties. My job was to hold the fort and put one foot in front of the other.”
Eventually she got a three-line text from Ben. “Safely at Camp 4. A bit windy. Gonna rest an extra day here before summit bid. Love you.”
Did it reassure her? “No,” she said, her voice oddly calm. “When you’ve got three lines of information from the husband you haven’t heard from for five days, and he’s up on Everest, of course you overanalyse.” She turns to Ben. “You never write ‘gonna’. So I began to wonder, is it even Ben writing this? Maybe he can’t write. Maybe someone else has written this for him.”
Her husband immediately defends himself. “I was in the tent and we thought this guy had died. I didn’t know what to write. I showed it to Kenton [Kool, the 44-year-old Briton who had reached the summit 12 times already and was accompanying Fogle on the climb] to check it didn’t contain anything to alarm you.”
Marina sent her reply, likewise revealing nothing of the state she was in. “Love you. Do you think tomorrow? Be safe.”
She then heard nothing until the following day, by which time Ben was ringing her on the satellite phone to announce he was at the top of Everest. “I’d told you,” he reminds her, “that, if I got to the top, I might not be able to call. That I might not be able to string a sentence together. And the other thing was that I knew I still had to go back down. So it could have been good or bad karma. We were up there for an hour and I only rang at the very last minute. It was euphoria that made me do it, but afterwards on the descent I did worry it was bad karma.”
Marina, though, puts him right. “It was the right decision. If I hadn’t heard, I would have been freaking out.”
It is a tiny peek into the process of readjusting to being back together, as well as the sort of conversations that must have preceded the Everest trip in the first place. Initially he was undertaking the climb with Victoria Pendleton, the London 2012 gold medal-winning cyclist, but she
‘Another well-known TV personality was there, missing and presumed dead’
then had to drop out after her body failed to adjust quickly enough to the effects of being at high altitude.
At first, Marina admits, she had been 100per cent against her husband tackling Everest. “Our friend, Bear Grylls, was very clear when he spoke to me about it. ‘Don’t let Ben climb it. It is too dangerous.’”
“If you go back over the years,” Ben interjects, “you’ll see a lot of interviews where people asked me about Everest, and I always said that my wife wasn’t too keen.
“I never said, ‘won’t allow me’, because we are very lucky and don’t have that sort of relationship where we say ‘no’ to each other.”
So what changed? “I love Everest,” says Marina. “I love the stories, the adventure. And because Ben had been quietly planning and said this is more than an idea, this is how he would do it…” She trails off for a moment, perhaps interrupted by thoughts of the sleepless nights of last week.
“Listen,” she picks up her thread, “I was confident that if I’d said ‘absolutely no way’ to the idea, and given a valid reason, Ben would have thought about it. But one of the things that first attracted me to him was his thirst for adventure.”
Marina has previously laughed off some press reports that part of her reluctance about Everest was worrying about her husband heading off up a mountain with another woman. But, even now he is home safe, isn’t she, perfectly understandably, just the tiniest bit irritated with him for all he has put her through?
“I’ve got to say,” she replies quite firmly, “I never felt cross, but sometimes I find myself asking, ‘is our good luck going to give?’, but the rational part of me knows that life isn’t like that.” They both also know that you don’t have to travel to the ends of the earth to face some of the hardest challenges that life can throw at you.
In 2014, they had a stillborn son, Willem. “Around that whole time of losing that little life that was never lived, I made a resolution that I wanted to live my life even more brightly,” Ben reflects. “I didn’t just want to be a dad who had done things before Ludo and Iona were born. I wanted them to live one of these exciting moments.”
But was there anxiety mixed in with the excitement for them? Marina shakes her head. “I remember overhearing one of Ludo’s friends saying to him, ‘if your daddy is going to climb Everest, that means he is going to die’. And Ludo said, ‘no, he definitely won’t’. They are just so proud of him.”
They are making it sound so very easy. “Well, I did ask him to check the life insurance,” adds Marina. And Ben chips in that he did leave individual letters behind for all three of them in case the worst happened and he didn’t make it back.
“I’m a planner,” he explains. “It is a bit dark talking about it and it was horrid writing the letters. I will probably destroy them now.”
“This is the first I’ve heard about it,” Marina says, looking surprised.
Neither of them, though, is ruling out another nerve-racking adventure in the future. Ben suggests a “natural progression” would be half a year away with their children, “on some remote island in the South Pacific”. “I know we’d like to do that,” he adds.
Marina has other thoughts. “I’d have loved to have gone to Base Camp and had the front row seat on this expedition, but Base Camp is no place for children. In 10 years’ time, we will have got to another stage as a family, when Ben and I can do adventures.”
Perhaps a joint attempt at Everest? “I couldn’t do that,” she replies. It sounds like her final answer.
‘Our friend, Bear Grylls, said, ‘don’t let Ben climb it… it’s too dangerous’