Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Read online

  Also by Ranulph Fiennes

  A Talent for Trouble

  Ice Fall in Norway

  The Headless Valley

  Where Soldiers Fear to Tread

  Hell on Ice

  To the Ends of the Earth

  Bothie the Polar Dog (with Virginia Fiennes)

  Living Dangerously

  The Feather Men

  Atlantis of the Sands

  Mind Over Matter

  The Sett

  Fit for Life

  Beyond the Limits

  The Secret Hunters

  Captain Scott: The Biography

  (The Times best biography of 2003)

  RANULPH

  FIENNES

  Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Copyright © 1987, 2007 by Ranulph Fiennes

  Parts of the text first published as LIVING DANGEROUSLY

  in Great Britain in 1987 by Macmillan

  First published in paperback in 2008

  The right of Ranulph Fiennes to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 440 4

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 95169 9

  Map of Southern Oman by Raymond Turvey

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my surviving sister

  Gill

  with love and many happy memories

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to my late wife Ginny for a lifetime of love, friendship and inspiration. To my late mother and my late sisters, Sue and Celia, for being my loving family for sixty years. This book is dedicated to my surviving sister Gill. To our good friends for all the happiness and excitements we’ve shared.

  To all fellow expedition co-travellers, sponsors and advisors, including those in Appendix 2 on page 365.

  Also, for their help with this book, Gill Allen, Professor Gianni Angelini, Ian Bannister, Anton Bowring, Tom Briggs, Bob Brown, Tony Brown, Kenton Cool, John Costello, Dr Tim Cripps, Monty Don, Norman Dunroy, Simon Gault, Nick Holder, Gill Hoult, Morag Howell, Peter James, Mike Kobold, Andrey Kosenko, Arabella McIntyre Brown, Mac Mackenney, John Muir, Ian Parnell, Donald Sammut, Lord Saye & Sele, Steven Seaton, Ski Sharp, Neal Short, David Smith, Mike Stroud, Paul Sykes, Judy Tarring, Dr Gordon Thomas, Gary Tompsett, Yiannis Tridimus, Giles Whittell, Simon Wilde, Arabella Williams and John Yates.

  Also, for the production of this book, my thanks to Ed Victor, Rupert Lancaster, Jill Firman, Maggie Body (my oft-times editor since 1968!), my wife Louise, stepson Alexander and daughter Elizabeth (for their patience), and to all those individuals mentioned in the text who went with me down the long years to ‘the limits and beyond’.

  Ranulph Fiennes

  2007

  Contents

  1 At First

  2 Young Love and the SAS

  3 Fighting for the Arabs

  4 The Fastest River

  5 Ginny’s Idea

  6 The Bottom of the World

  7 Full Circle

  8 Hammer and Sickle

  9 The Frankincense Trail

  10 The Longest Track

  11 How Not to Get Old?

  12 Solo South

  13 Sorry Straits

  14 Falling Through

  15 Amputations

  16 Heart Attack

  17 Ginny

  18 Almost

  19 Vertigo

  20 Murder Wall

  Appendices

  Maps

  British Columbia

  The Transglobe Expedition, 1979–82

  The Transglobe Expedition’s route across Antarctica

  The North-West Passage

  The Transglobe Expedition’s route across the Arctic

  Southern Oman

  The continent of Antarctica

  Ascent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Antarctic Plateau

  Descent from the Antarctic Plateau to the Pacific Ocean

  1

  At First

  The Guinness Book of Records described me as ‘the youngest posthumous baronet’. This unwanted claim to fame came about because my father, another Ranulph, was killed during the Italian Campaign in the Second World War four months before my birth. In June 1943 he came home on leave and I was conceived. When he left, my mother was never to see him again. He commanded the Royal Scots Greys at Salerno and, reconnoitring a bridge over the Pescara River unarmed and alone, he surprised three Germans in a cave and took them prisoner at the point of his briar pipe. Not far from Naples, checking out a possible route of advance, my father trod on a German S-type mine and died in a Naples hospital. My mother never remarried. From childhood I wanted to be as he was. Especially I wanted to command the Royal Scots Greys.

  My grandmother, Florrie, had lost her elder son in the First World War, now she had lost her younger son, and her husband had also died. She had nothing left to keep her in Sunningdale, so as soon as the war was over she decided to return to her own family in South Africa and my mother, three elder sisters and I were wafted along in her wake. We arrived in Table Bay in January 1947. I was two and a half. A cousin came to meet us and welcome us to our new country. Turning to me, he asked Granny: ‘And what is her name?’ Granny exploded, for she was very proud of her only grandson. ‘But,’ protested the cousin, ‘how can you blame anyone for mistaking his sex when you doll his curly hair up with these long blue ribbons?’ My ribbons, the height of Sunningdale kiddies’ fashion, were removed that very evening, never to be worn again.

  There were thirty-three cousins in Granny’s family, the Rathfelders, most of whom lived in happy harmony in Constantia, the Valley of the Vines, in the shadow of Table Mountain, which was an idyllic place for a small boy to grow up. There were no white children of my age in the valley except cousin Bella who cried all the time. Soon the coloured boys took me to their homes and showed me how to play their version of Pooh-sticks under the plank-bridge by their stream. Over the next four years our little gang often roamed the valley, avoiding the forest with its baboons and packs of wild dogs. Bamboo spears and short leather straps to whip the dirt were de rigueur and I became co-leader of the gang along with a one-armed lad named Archie. My mother, meanwhile, became fervently involved with a then relatively docile anti-apartheid movement known as Black Sash and drove about collecting signatures on behalf of coloured people’s rights.

  In October 1950 Granny Florrie suffered a stroke. She died quietly in the house she loved and was mourned by everyone in the valley. The funeral was held in the Anglican church in Constantia, although our normal place of worship was St Saviour’s in Claremont, where Canon Wade had two skinny little daughters. The younger, Virginia, later became an English tennis star who won the Women’s Singles at Wimbledon.

  At prep school the severe-faced headmaster who beat me from time to time for good reason, awarded me the Divinity Prize. I decided briefly to become a priest, until Pathé News showed the first ascent of Everest. Somehow I was left with the muddled impression that Mr Hillary and a Chinese friend had been sent up this great mountain, higher even than Table Mountain, as a weddi
ng present for the English Queen. I, too, would become a climber of mountains and stick the British flag into fierce features of far-flung landscapes; but only after being colonel of the Royal Scots Greys.

  My mother had been brought up in another era and in different circumstances. She had married at nineteen and left her protected family environment without even knowing how to boil an egg or iron a shirt. When Granny Florrie died, she was on her own for the first time, with nobody to turn to for advice. Eventually, in 1954 she decided we should return to England. I promised, on saying goodbye, to write to Archie and the gang, but I don’t think I ever did.

  While Mother house-hunted, I was packed off to my new English prep school in purple blazer and cap and grey flannels. After sobbing into my pillow for the first week I came to enjoy Sandroyd School in Wiltshire as it transformed itself from a hostile planet into an exciting playground. My sisters and I had all developed the Afrikaaner way with English vowels, but English schooling soon eradicated this and in the dormitory I discovered my South African years were an unsuspected asset when it came to spinning ‘tales of the jungle’. I only told my stories on Saturday nights, mainly because we were given our weekly chocolate bars on Saturday afternoon. I charged a square of chocolate from each listener.

  About the time of my twelfth birthday my mother purchased St Peter’s Well, a long, low house that had once been three cottages on the edge of the village of Lodsworth in Sussex. Right across the front garden wall, as far as the eye could see, stretched a paradise of fields, valleys and forest. The River Lod ran along the bottom of our valley and one day my sister Gill – then seventeen – and I canoed down past where it joined the Rother, paddling through the domain of dragonfly, swan and kingfisher, until we passed through a cleft in the South Downs and reached the Arun and, at length, the sea. Mother collected us and the canoe in her bull-nosed Morris Minor. She owned this car for twenty years and to the best of my knowledge never once exceeded thirty miles per hour, probably causing numerous crashes by frustrated speedsters.

  A month before our own arrival, a family of five settled in the hamlet of River, a mile from Lodsworth. Mr Pepper ran a chalk pit at Amberley. There were two sons about my age and a daughter of nine, three years my junior. We were invited to tea.

  ‘You must put shoes on, Ranulph,’ my mother said sharply. ‘People do not expect visitors with bare feet, especially on first acquaintance.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to tea with two boring boys and a silly girl. Can’t I go down to the river this afternoon?’

  Exasperated, my mother was firm. ‘They are our neighbours. We can’t be rude, and how do you know they are boring or silly since you’ve never met them?’

  So we went to tea at the Peppers. There were excellent cakes which made up for lost time by the river, and the boys were not boring. In the attic they had an elaborate electric train set, the working of which they were happy to explain to me.

  After a while a pin pricked my knee under the table and I knelt to spot the cause. I had quite forgotten the boys’ sister, Virginia. Her brothers ignored her in a pointed fashion so I had done likewise. Now I saw that she had been playing all along underneath the table and had fired a spring-loaded toy cannon at me.

  ‘Stop it. That hurt,’ I told her.

  She screwed up her nose at me.

  I went back to the trains, rather hoping that she might fire another pin. But she didn’t. I had noticed that her eyes were very blue, almost violet, and that her eyelashes were long. Soon afterwards, I returned to school. Common entrance exams came and went. I passed with just sufficient marks to make it into Eton. My mother was proud and delighted and so was I, for luckily I could not foresee the immediate future.

  My great misfortune was to be a pretty little boy. I can hardly blame Eton for that, yet my memories of the place are tarnished because of it.

  My mother drove me to Mr Parr’s House at Eton, the Morris Minor laden with suitcases, a colourful rug and two framed prints of spaniels. Accustomed to Sandroyd with its hundred pupils, I was awed by the thought of over 1,000 boys, many of them eighteen-year-olds and over six feet tall. Some, I was told, used razors.

  At Sandroyd my baronetcy and my South African background had proved to be good for my street cred. Here there were numerous ex-colonials, and baronets were trashy nonentities eclipsed by a welter of earls, lords and viscounts. At first the customs, the colloquialisms and local geography left me bemused. Those first weeks were like an attempt to gain a set of daily changing objectives blindfolded in a swamp, with a host of hostile custodians shouting instructions in a weird language.

  The fagging system was an ever-present bane of my existence. The six senior boys in each House had only to stand at their doors and scream ‘Boyyyy!’ for every faggable boy within earshot to drop whatever he was doing and head at maximum speed to the source of the scream. He who arrived last was fagged. Trying to come to terms with this amazing new world, I had little time to be homesick and even less for leisure. But I did find myself attracted to the Drawing Schools where the senior master was a kindly soul named Wilfrid Blunt whose younger brother Anthony was in charge of the Queen’s paintings and pursued other activities we knew nothing about at the time.

  Quite when and how the horror started is now lost to me since the mind does its best to heal the deepest sores. But I believe I had been at Eton about a month when two older boys entered my room just before lunchtime.

  ‘They say you’re a tart, Fiennes. Did you know?’

  ‘What,’ I asked them, ‘is a tart?’ But they giggled together with much uplifting of eyebrows and wouldn’t tell me. Eventually I discovered that in Eton slang a tart is a boy who sells himself for sexual activities in return for favours, be they in cash or kind. There could be no lower form of life. I must prove my innocence at once.

  ‘I am not a tart,’ I would protest. I did not realise that any pretty boy at Eton is going to be labelled a tart and that gossip is based not on what actually happens but on what the gossipers would like to think has happened.

  Perhaps if some male relative had warned me of the impending problems adolescence at Eton would involve, I might somehow have forearmed myself. But I had no brothers, no uncles and no father. My tormentors were unremitting. I seriously contemplated throwing myself off the bridge over the Thames between Eton and Windsor, only restrained by the thought of making my mother suffer. Instead I decided to cultivate a perpetual scowl and join the school boxing team. I also enlisted my mother’s support to allow me to switch early from the the bum-freezer, the short cutaway jackets worn by Etonians under five feet four, to the less provocative tailcoat of the bigger boys. But neither the new tailcoats that hung protectively over my backside, nor my well-practised scowl, nor even a gradually growing reputation as a pugilist could alter my girlish face. Boys had crushes on me and the verbal torment continued.

  Fortunately, time was on my side. Each term brought a fresh crop of pretty faces to distract the gossips. Slowly, I began to enjoy one or two aspects of Eton life. History was my favourite subject, especially the study of British naval heroes and explorers. But one attempt to show off rebounded when I shot my hand up to the master’s question: ‘What did Stanley say at his famous jungle meeting?’ My instant reply, ‘Kiss me, Livingstone,’ was greeted with the derision it deserved. At that time an attempt to complete the crossing of Antarctica was in progress, led by Sir Vivian Fuchs and my Everest hero Sir Edmund Hillary. Our history master traced the course of the expedition on an ancient chart of the frozen continent.

  German, with a new master, David Cornwell, had taken on a new lease of life. He kept the language interesting and the lessons enjoyable. But he left Eton quite soon, sadly for us but profitably from his point of view, when his income rocketed thanks to the books which he wrote under the name of John le Carré.

  I had always found making friends at Eton difficult and I only began to enjoy life at school after meeting Michael Denny who was ‘in the Library’ (i.e. a
prefect) at Mr Crusoe’s House, the House nearest to Eton’s tallest and most imposing building, School Hall. Since neither Denny nor I was an experienced climber it is difficult to conjure up quite why we began to climb together, but somehow the partnership was formed and, as a result, my last eighteen months at Eton included a good deal of nocturnal excitement.

  There is nothing new about stegophily, the dictionary term for the practice of climbing buildings by night. It has nothing to do with the more normal sport of rock-climbing. Indeed, since I had no head for heights and easily succumbed to vertigo, daytime climbing was anathema to me. The beauty of night-climbing is that the thrill of danger is present without the full visual impact of the drop below. Denny and I hoisted assorted dustbins or lavatory seats onto various prized pinnacles and watched with secret pleasure while steeplejacks with ropes and long ladders brought them down again. In some of our activities we were aided and abetted by Chris Cazenove, already an aspiring actor with the Eton Dramatic Society and adept at putting on an innocent face under questioning.

  As my time at Eton drew to a close I had to decide on my future. But there had really only ever been one career choice. One day I would be commanding officer of the Royal Scots Greys, like my father. That was the summit of my ambitions and to that end I had joined the Eton College Corps and enjoyed every moment of the training. There were still officers and men in the Royal Scots Greys who had served with my father eighteen years before and remembered him by his nickname, ‘Colonel Lugs’, on account of his slightly prominent ears. But family connections were no longer a pass into the Army. Now, to enter the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, you needed at least two General Certificates of Education at Advanced Level, including mathematics or physics, and five certificates at Ordinary Level. This precluded any chance of my becoming a professional officer by the normal route. But there was a possible alternative: to obtain a short-service commission through Mons Officer Cadet School and, once in the Army on a two-year commission, to try to extend. Even for Mons, however, I would need a minimum of five Ordinary Level passes and nearly five years of Eton had only gained me four. After consultation with my house master, my mother told me the wonderful news that I could leave Eton at the end of the summer term and enrol in a specialist crammer abroad.