Goodbye to all That by Robert Graves — Read

GEORGE MALLORY did something better than lend me books: he took me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacations. I knew Snowdon very well from my bedroom window at Harlech. In the spring, its distant white cap lent a sentimental glory to the landscape. The first time I went with George to Snowdon we stayed at the Snowdon Ranger Hotel, near Quellyn Lake. It was January, and we found the mountain covered in snow. We did little rock-climbing, but went up some good snow slopes with rope and ice-axe. I remember one climb to the summit. Finding the hotel there with its roof blown off in the previous night's blizzard, we sat by the cairn and ate Carlsbad plums and liver-sausage sandwiches. Geoffrey Keynes, the editor of the Nonesuch Blake, was in the team. He and George, who used to go drunk with excitement at the end of his climbs, picked stones off the cairn and shied them at the hotel chimney-stack until it joined the ruins of the roof.

George is still rated as one of the three or four best climbers in climbing history. Nobody had expected him to survive his first spectacular season in the Alps. He never afterwards lost his almost foolhardy daring, yet knew all there could be known about mountaineering technique. I always felt absolutely safe with him on the rope. George went through the war as a gunner lieutenant, but kept his nerve - by rock-climbing while on leave.