My lesbian mother, her communist lover and the lobotomy that helped save her from suicide
Britain’s greatest living climber reveals the startling story of how two risk- taking parents inspired his pioneering spirit
HE WAS the first Briton to conquer the North Wall of the Eiger, and led the first expedition up the SouthWest face of Everest. And as he explains in this moving account of his childhood, a taste for dangerous adventure was in the genes...
HOW does a life- changing experience start? With some, it’s a single event; with others it creeps up on them over time. For me it was the latter. In the autumn term of 1951, I was determined to climb a mountain in the Christmas holidays and had persuaded a school friend, Anton, to join me. What better objective than Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales? I bought a pair of ex-War Department hobnailed boots from an Army surplus store, but Anton made do with his school shoes. We both had our school macs. Yet we had chosen one of the hardest winters of recent years for our introduction to the hills.
Our map showed a footpath to the summit known as the Pyg Track. The trouble was, it was concealed by snow. We were about to abandon our attempt when three climbers with ice axes strode past – so we followed them. Soon we had not the faintest idea of where we were as we floundered up to our waists in snow. The figures in front were fastvanishing blurs in the swirling flakes.
Suddenly everything around us was moving: we were caught in an avalanche, sliding with increasing speed down the steepening slope. We had no idea of how dangerous our situation was or the consequences if we had gone over a cliff. We were tumbling down, laughing and whooping, until we came to a rest just above a frozen tarn. When we got back to the youth hostel that night, I was soaked, exhausted, but deliriously happy.
I had tasted the addictive elation of a brush with danger. HOW far have our personalities and the course of our lives been shaped by the genes we inherit and how far by the environment?
Looking back at my immediate ancestors, quite a few of them were undoubtedly adventurous. They weren’t great explorers or sportspeople, but they carved out a distinct life of their own.
My mother Helen, for example, had been quite a tomboy, preferring Meccano and Hornby train sets to dolls. Dark-haired and slim, she was handsome rather than pretty, and extremely intelligent, winning three separate scholarships to Oxford to study English, the first girl from her school to go there. Success undoubtedly went to her head. She partied a lot, discovered the joys of sex, went to very few lectures and fell in love with my father, Charles Bonington.
In 1933 they got married – without telling their parents. She became pregnant shortly afterwards and I was born on August 6, 1934.
It was the height of the Depression and my father couldn’t get a job. My mother complained he was drinking too much and spending most of the day in bed.
Mum managed to get a part-time job with a successful romantic novelist called Berta Ruck, whose secretary had run off with her husband, the ghost- story writer Oliver Onions.
Even so, life became a struggle and arguments escalated until, in one furious quarrel over money, Mum hit my father on the head with a poker.
He dropped to the floor, unconscious and bleeding profusely. She dragged him to the bathroom and stuck his head under the old-fashioned geyser. Then, worried that she’d killed him, Mum rushed to a phone box, her blouse and skirt covered in blood, leaving me fast asleep in the flat.
She didn’t dare return on her own so waited by the phone box until Nan, her mother, arrived. When they got back, I was still asleep in my cradle and my father was gone. After he left us, Mum built a new life working full-time as a copywriter, while Nan took charge of me. We moved to a large groundfloor flat in Tanza Road in Hampstead, North London, with a big garden that backed on to the lower slopes of Parliament Hill, settling into a comfortable routine.
Mum’s personal life also improved. She began an intimate – if, for the time, highly unconventional – relationship with another woman, an Australian journalist and communist activist called Margo, while still sharing the Tanza Road flat with Nan. MY own memories of early childhood are disjointed, just stray, vivid images. My strongest, when I was probably three, was my first adventure. Playing with a little girl of about my age in the garden, we let ourselves out through the gate on to Hampstead Heath and were gone for hours. Nan was so worried that she notified the police. One of them found us playing together and took us back to Belsize Park police station where I spilt milk all over the inspector’s desk.
Mum felt Nan was possessive and that I should have some discipline. I suspect there was an element of jealousy, handing over so much of my care while she went out to work to secure our financial survival. Yet Mum’s career was going from strength to strength. She got a job as copywriter at the London Press Exchange, one of the top advertising agencies at that time.
I was blissfully unaware that a tide of war was engulfing us. Mum on the other hand was riveted. She and Margo grew politically aware, identifying themselves with the extreme Left in the face of Nazi Germany’s aggression and fascism in our own country. THINGS hadn’t been easy for Mum. In 1943, aged 33, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium. Shortly after she recovered, I lived at the home Mum and Margo now shared in Downshire Hill, Hampstead.
By then, Margo was assistant editor of Soviet Weekly News, the Russian propaganda organ in the UK. She did all the cooking. I can’t recall them being demonstrative in the love they felt for each other. Mum slept in the room on the groundfloor linked to mine by double doors, the former sitting room of the house. Margo slept on a divan in our cosy kitchen-living room in the basement, looking out on to the garden. They had a cat called Maisky, named after the Russian ambassador. I felt comfortable with the family set-up, though I must have been aware it was unusual. This compounded my innate shyness and lack of social confidence.
A year went by and Mum booked me into a holiday farm in Devon for the summer. I was now 12 and had met very few girls in the last two years – the University College public school I attended was boysonly. I can remember the thrill of having an illicit bath with one of the girls. There were riding lessons, and the farm had some ferrets, which were put under my care.
At the end of a happy holiday I got
the train back to Paddington but to my surprise I was met not by my mother, but by Nan. Things had been so strained between them that I hadn’t seen Nan for two years but she told me that Mum was ill in hospital and that I’d be staying with her until she recovered.
Indeed, it was only on reading notes compiled by my mother – for a book that she never finished – that I would later learn the full story of what had happened. She had been under intense pressure, combining the terrors of the Blitz, the challenge of bringing me up in conflict with Nan and the stress of work.
She had been promoted within the agency, but the return of male colleagues from the war brought fresh competition. Perhaps worst of all, Margo had fallen in love with a married man at her newspaper – a Russian, quite possibly a Soviet agent – and as a result, their relationship was in question. Mum wrote in her diary: ‘At work my mind seems incapable of operation.
‘My head feels as if it’s stuffed with damp black cotton wool. I ring my doctor, but she is on her rounds. At lunch break, I call at her surgery but she has still not returned. I go home early.
‘Most of my actions are compulsive and have a ritual quality. When I wash up, I feel compelled to turn all the cups the other way round on their hooks. When Margo gets home, she persuades me to go to bed. She then rings Nan, who sends Father around. He sits beside me all night through the long hours of darkness, nightmarish with hallucination. In the morning, Margo has disappeared and I persuade Father to go home. Alone in the flat, I resolve on suicide. I close the kitchen window, block up the keyhole, turn on the gas and put my head in the oven.’
Fortunately, Nan arrived at the house and was just in time to switch off the gas. My mother was taken to hospital and detained under the mental health laws of the day for the next 18 months.
It is curious how willingly children accept what is happening. Nan’s home was a first-floor flat in a big Edwardian house and I recall a lovely room where I could play with my collection of lead soldiers.
My mother, meanwhile, underwent a al lobotomy – a procedure to treat extreme depression that involves the severing of nerves in the frontal lobe of the brain. It had been successful, and while it removed some of her personal drive, in no way had it affected her intelligence. She was, if anything, a kinder, warmer person on her release.
Mum spent some time looking for Margo after discovering that her married lover had returned to his family in the Soviet Union. Later, Margo, in her grief, had taken her own life. It must have been a terrible blow, yet it was never discussed. My mother would go on to find contentment with a new partner, Diana.
Even by 1976, when I received my CBE and Mum st ood smiling proudly by my side, I don’t think I had fully understood how much she had suffered and sacrificed. When I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme In The Psychiatrist’s Chair and spoke to Anthony Clare a little about my father, and the role of fathers. Mum wrote me a heartfelt letter wondering why I hadn’t spoken more about her, and the role of mothers.
I couldn’t help but feel a stab of conscience, given just how much she had done to help me achieve success.
© Sir Chris Bonington, 2017
Ascent, by Sir Chris Bonington, is published by Simon & Schuster on October 19, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount with free p&p) until October 21. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 5710640.