One Old Man and Three Old Gits Terry King
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ome people go quiet when they get scared. Others make a noise. I hadn’t been climbing for over thirty years but I had agreed, in a moment of rash enthusiasm, to return to The Old Man of Hoy and do a fiftieth anniversary ascent with the same two guys I had done it with back then. At the start of the first real difficulty, an exposed traverse, I had gone completely silent. If I didn’t move quickly my strength would simply run out but trying to persuade myself to commit to the traverse wasn’t going well. Every time I pushed my right foot out towards the foothold I needed to stand on, it came straight back to me, making no attempt to stay Snod and Terry on the ferry there. I used to glide easily over this sort of ground, mind and body working in effortless cooperation. Now my foot had a will of its own and between my ears was a hiss like an undetected gas leak. In 1967 I was seventeen, John and Dave, always known as Gobbo and Snod, were twenty one and we had roared up to Orkneys on motorbikes. Driven by the certainty of youth and honed by years of hard practice on the gritstone crags around our home town of Sheffield we did a very early ascent of the Old Man, which had only been climbed for the first time one year earlier. For three youngsters with no track record of that kind of undertaking it had been a bold stroke. As we came together to do it again and drove the long miles north, we wondered at the audacity of our younger selves and tried to recall whose idea it had been in the first place. None of us could remember but we did have to stop for a pee at regular intervals. Snod and I hobbled around to restore some mobility to our bad hips and Gobbo did exercises for a stiff neck, a sort of repetitive nodding that had the smack
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