Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (4 page)

When my father and I were going through Willie’s diaries, tiny notebooks with a code of initials which took us some time to decipher, we discovered that he had proposed to Lilian on a stile on Thurstaston Common on Ash Wednesday, 19 February 1894.  This date struck a chord with my father who recalled taking my mother to meet Grandfather soon after the two of them had become engaged.  It was Ash Wednesday 1958 and Willie said to them, ‘I proposed to Grannie the last time Ash Wednesday fell on this date.’  We checked, and he was right: it was exactly sixty-four years to the day.

Lilian was described by her fourth son as ‘slightly formidable but wholly loveable’ and this trait manifested itself early on in the manner of the acceptance she gave Willie.  She would marry him but only after she had extracted a promise from him that he would remain in business rather than following the academic career he wished to pursue.  She told him she wished to rear a large family and to keep and educate them in comfort.  This, she knew, she could not do if he were earning an academic salary.

She was an extremely determined woman who knew how to get her own way, usually  without confrontation.  Her instinct led her to mould her children rather than to mother them.  If one or other of them took a tumble she would reach for the cotton wool and iodine, rather than for the child to comfort him.  She believed that ‘Little children should be seen and not heard’ and she would often use the saying as a rebuke. If they ever asked her the question ‘Why?’ she would respond, ‘Because Y is a crooked letter’.  Lilian’s doctrine was that you couldn’t expect life to be fun all the time and being brought up correctly was a serious business.  Her youngest son, Tur, once said to my father by way of explanation, ‘We Irvines were conditioned never to show any emotion at all.  To do so was unmanly and showed lack of self- control.’

Lilian was an excellent organizer.  She busied herself with preserving fruit and eggs, making jam and saw to it that the gardener kept her well supplied with vegetables and fruit. She also kept chickens and bees and the sight of her in her beekeeper’s hat and black muslin veil was pretty awe inspiring.  One of her nieces remembers being very impressed by her ideas for dish-washing machines and gymnastic apparatus in the nursery.  Perhaps it was from Lilian that Sandy inherited his love of practical problem-solving.  It was a full-time job looking after such a large and hungry family, even with domestic help.  Nevertheless, she was always happy to have nieces and nephews to stay during the holidays and the house was frequently full to bursting with children.  Some of those who came were unused to the strict regime of 56 Park Road South: they found Uncle Willie and Aunt Lilian rather severe and did not like the way they made fun of children.  Lilian was particularly tough on the Irvine nieces and nephews, one of whom – Lyn -  wrote later, ‘we were sensitive and did not like the way they made fun of the children’.

Lilian’s matronly manner was complemented by her poise.  She was relatively tall and she always walked with her back straight, as if she had a book on her head.  She had worn her very fine long brown hair in a bun for as long as anyone could remember.  Indeed she was already wearing the bun when she was photographed aged seventeen.  She favoured dresses with high collars, always with the small gold container pinned to them that held the fine gold spring-loaded chain attached to her pince-nez.  She seldom went outside without a hat and she always wore sensible shoes.  A handsome rather than beautiful woman, she inspired respect rather than affection.  My cousin Anne remembers being made by Lilian to lie at the age of six on a Victorian backboard after Sunday lunch for quarter of an hour hour, half for posture, half for digestion.  She also used to insist that the older children learn a psalm by heart before they were allowed outside into the garden to play.  This tradition continued into the early 1940s when my own father remembers weeping as a little boy because he could not commit to memory a long psalm and was desperate to go out into the garden to join his brothers and cousins.

Agnes, or Aunt Ankie as she was known to Lilian’s children, has become something of a family legend.  She is remembered for being eminently shockable and somewhat prim.  She was a nurse all her life and her last post was as Matron at the Mile End hospital in London and following her retirement spent the last years of her life at Bryn Llwyn.  Aunt Ankie was extremely pious and her nephews, with the exception of Sandy’s youngest brother Tur, spent a great deal of time trying to, and succeeding in, shocking her.  They had a passion for ruthless rhymes which they would recite within her hearing.  Many of these have been passed down and one my grandmother distinctly recalled Sandy reciting in front of Aunt Ankie went:

Tell me, Mama, what is that mess,
That looks like strawberry jam?
Hush, hush, my child, ‘tis your Papa
Run over by a tram.

For all that she was very fond of the children and they of her.  When she was due to go into hospital for an operation in 1920 Sandy wrote her a cheerful letter enclosing some photographs which he hoped she would enjoy when she was able to sit up and look at them.  But he just couldn’t resist a shocking opening to the letter and wrote ‘Dear Aunt Ankie,  I am most awfully sorry to hear that you are going to be cut to pieces tomorrow.’

Sandy was the first of the Irvine children to be born in Birkenhead.  Willie and Lilian had bought a house in Liverpool when they married but it soon became apparent that a larger home was required for their expanding family.  They decided to move back across the River Mersey to Birkenhead, the burgeoning new town at the head of the Wirral peninsula.

l-r Sandy, Willie, Evelyn, Hugh 1905

Number 56 Park Road South had plenty of room for the growing family and the children had a large nursery on the third floor where they had their meals and spent the majority of their time when not outside. Lilian would visit the children in the nursery or school room as and when it suited her but visits from their father were so infrequent as to be events of considerable note and worthy of comment. As a father Willie was a benevolent authoritarian and found parenting easier as the children grew up and he could establish more adult relationships with them.  When they were younger he preferred to see them in contexts he could readily understand, such as at church, although when he was on holiday he seemed to relax and enjoyed spending time with them, teaching them to fish or cycle.  It was almost as if he could not permit the home regime to be disturbed either for himself or for them.  He felt it his duty to instil in them the same values that he had learned as a child.  In the mornings the children rose at seven o’clock but were not allowed to speak to each other under any circumstance until family prayers were said before breakfast at a quarter to eight.  Sunday worship, matins and evensong, was a normal part of family life, with the children attending all services with their parents.  This was as much the case when they were away on holiday as it was at home in Birkenhead.

Sandy’s place in the family had a good deal to do with the way his character developed.  The first three children were all born within three years of each other, there being only fourteen months between Sandy and his sister Evelyn.  He was a determined little boy and could be very demanding when he didn’t get his way.  Being the youngest of the three he had to fight for attention and was often jealous when Evelyn or Hugh stole the limelight.  The focus of his love was his mother whom as a boy he adored above all else.  Even into adulthood he communicated with her rather than Willie, as the others tended to do.  Although she was frequently frustrated by his mood swings and his oversensitive reaction to her teasing, she understood his insecurities and seems to have found a way to inspire his confidence.  For all that she was very tough on him and maintained her physical and emotional distance from him, as she did from the others. When separated from Lilian, Sandy missed her and wrote to her regularly with news updates from school and home, but always first enquiring after her health and well-being.

The social life of the children revolved around the family and Sandy was always popular with the cousins, although it was probably because of his reputation as a dare-devil as much as for his camaraderie that they admired him.  He came to believe that if he were special then others would take notice of him and the way this manifested itself was by doing unusual or daring things.  In this he miscalculated Lilian and she often despaired of his pranks.  Of all of them he was the one she had to watch out for, even in mundane matters.  She told Hugh once that she had been reading an article from the newspaper at tea ‘keeping an eye on Sandy and the cake round the edge of the paper!’.  Sandy felt that to be ordinary meant being boring, a nobody.  Although this is not a particularly unusual trait in a little boy it certainly proved to be a powerful motivating force later in his life.

His older brother Hugh was tough on Sandy and Evelyn, taking it as his role as eldest son.  He could be authoritative and felt a responsibility for keeping the younger ones in check, while himself remaining a little aloof.  This left Evelyn and Sandy to team up as a formidable pair.  Once Sandy was old enough to play sensibly with Evelyn, who was herself very mature and composed, he began to learn that positive attention-seeking was the better way to draw attention to himself.  She encouraged him to do daring deeds and would often as not join in.  For example the two of them, having discovered that Hugh did not have a head for heights, would shin up the nearest ladder and challenge him to join them.

Sandy encouraged Evelyn to climb trees and cycle with him, earning her in the process the reputation of being something of a tomboy, which she relished.  With five brothers she constantly had to prove to herself that she was at least as good as they were.  She surprised her parents by learning to ride a bike before Hugh and said later that this was out of sheer determination not to be labelled a typical little girl.  Anyone who ever came into contact with my grandmother would never have dared to even harbour such a thought, let alone express it.  Sandy and Evelyn were extremely close from early childhood onwards and Evelyn’s influence on him was a very positive one.  She provided the warmth and attention lacking from their mother and she treated him as an equal rather than as the irritating younger brother he felt Hugh found him.  She adored his pranks and would regale her friends with tales of his latest exploits but she was also a steadying influence on him and succeeded, I think to some extent, in saving him from undertaking anything too wild or dangerous.

Evelyn was arguably the most academic of all the children.  She went from Birkenhead High at fourteen to Wycombe Abbey School where was she was later deputy head girl, playing lacrosse and tennis for the school.  From there she went to Oxford, a rare achievement for a girl in those days, where she read Inorganic Chemistry, graduating in 1924 with what today would have been a First Class Honours degree. While at Oxford she gained a Blue for lacrosse, practised Jujitsu and learned to fly Avro 504s, getting her wings in 1923.  Her warmth and generosity made her loved by everyone and she had the ability to make anyone feel special.  She was a match for her brothers both emotionally and physically, and shared their love of adventure.  Her mother described her as being rather forgetful and her father despaired at her untidiness.  She told her son Bill that once Willie had walked past her bedroom, which was in a terrible mess, and made as if to throw up.  She swore after that she would become more organized and tidy.  Sandy was equally untidy and was constantly tearing his clothes and wearing out his shoes, causing Lilian endless mending work about which she complained bitterly.  ‘Sandy’s uniform is rotten,’ she lamented in a letter to Hugh, ‘he gave an extra spring to save himself on a slide today and it is cracked right across his knee.  I shall have a terrible business to make it look decent’. Unlike Evelyn, Sandy never learned to be tidy, although he was later credited with being a good organizer.  There is a running theme of chaos surrounding his immediate affairs and his letters home from school when he was well into his teens were full of instructions to send something here or there, collect this trunk or that suitcase.  Even at 26,500 feet on Everest in 1924 Odell could not resist a wry smile at the untidy state of his tent.

There were various schools in Birkenhead that were patronized by the middle-class families and one of these was Birkenhead Preparatory which Sandy attended from the age of seven, following Hugh in autumn 1911 to Birkenhead School.  He was not particularly academic and did not shine, but he was aware that his parents wished him to gain good marks.  This led to him being insecure and sometimes worried that he was not good enough and he made a point of writing to his mother, when his place in the form order was announced, hoping that she was pleased with his performance.  The headmistress of the Preparatory, Miss Cox, was a formidable woman who took the view that children needed licking into shape and she was extremely tough on them.  Sandy disliked being criticized and could be rebellious and difficult, which did not endear him to Miss Cox in the slightest.  An event of real significance during these school years was relayed by Sandy in a letter to Lilian during the winter of 1909.  The headmaster of the Senior School, Mr Griffin, had been delivering a stern lecture to the children about the dangers of the ice on the school pond and promptly demonstrated the danger by falling through himself.  ‘Most of the ice has thawed and all the place is horrid slush, it was such a funny thing Mr Griffin was telling us to be so careful on the ice on Tuesday and he fell in himself.’  The delight of the prep school boys on that occasion was quashed instantly by the eagle eye of Miss Cox.  Sandy wrote to Lilian the following day: ‘Miss Cox is quite well, Mr Griffin is none the worse for falling through the ice.’ I note that Miss Cox is mentioned first.  She clearly made an impact on him, however much he disliked her.  What Sandy learned from his early years at school was that if he wanted to be liked by the other children, he should concentrate his energies on being kind rather than difficult.