By Hamish Brown

The other chapters of this story can be found here. Part Two Part Three

The old man, Dennis Greave, was dying and knew it; his son was alive and didn't know it. Each worried about the other, of course. They had become much closer since Mrs. Greave had run off with someone else and left father and son alone in the big rambling house above Minehead. Daughter/sister Julie had already married and emigrated to New Zealand. She did not know her father was dying. Neither Dave nor Julie would know if he could help it. Come the end of the term Dave set off for the Alps as usual.

He'd gone to visit his father in hospital a couple of days before leaving. Dennis had been propped up on the pillows, reading a hardback Agatha Christie, the regular birthday present from his son. Dennis smiled cheerfully at his offspring, the six foot six genetic hiccup, sprung from parents both a mere five foot six.

Dave slouched in with a deceptive lope. He had to slouch. Ever since he'd shot up over six feet life had given his cranium a variety of blows. "I can't go around wearing my helmet all the time" he'd joked. So he shambled along, as his father called it but Dennis had learned the hard way that this skinny awkward-looking youth was made of the toughest fibres.

Dave had just gone up to university (Keele) when his mother ran off with a glib car-salesman she'd met in the new supermarket. The young man had been deeply offended, for their upbringing had been very 'middle class virtuous'. He could never decide just what his feelings for his mother had been. She had been a rather distant, hectoring figure, running the household as if it had been a family business. A cold figure, he'd decided. His father, on the other hand, had been -- and was -- warm. The father-children relationship had been much more comfortable. He did not really miss his mother, but worried that she had had that ability to hurt their father. Dennis never talked about the situation. Two years later Julie married and went off to New Zealand, so willy-nilly father and son were thrown together more.

Dave had discovered climbing at university, and all weekends and holidays were spent in Snowdonia or the Lakes or on the spinal Pennine crags that have produced some of England's best gymnastic climbers. Dave was not just a rock climber, though. He liked the mountain atmosphere. ("If it pissed for ever you'd he quite happy ambling along a canal bank" an irate friend once yelled at the end of two days of wet camping at Keswick.) On the other hand he was a good climber, well in the forefront of that surge that followed the breathing space after the Joe Brown years had passed. Because of his restless roaming Dave's routes tended to be all over the place but partners were never difficult to come by; he was naturally gregarious, never seemed to sleep, cooked great grub (after his mother's desertion Dennis told him he'd have to learn to cook in self-defence) and well-enough known for routes on places as far apart as Cornwall and Orkney. He skied in to put up the first winter routes on Creag an Dubh Loch. In his second year he'd discovered the Alps. After that he was never home in the summer.

Dennis did not mind. He had always been deeply involved in his everyday work, proud to be a craftsman rather than just a worker. He had trained as a cabinet-maker (much against the desires of his own ambitious teacher-father) and specialised in ecclesiastical work: everything from rood screens to lecterns and altars to figures of Christ crucified. He'd even decorated the mirhab of the new mosque in Bradford and spent a year on restoration work in Dunster Castle. A ducal dining table was much less satisfying however; even if the order would take a decade to deliver; twelve chairs still smacked of the conveyor belt.

(To be continued next month.)

You can find more articles in the archive under The Bothy.