It has been quite some time since I have posted anything here; indeed, I had more or less given up this website as defunct. But something happened today that I wanted to write about. I was sitting on the sofa, cuddling my youngest child - who was dozy from having fallen asleep on the sofa - when a post on Facebook caught my eye. 'This is not a hoax. Sandy Irvine's body has been found'.
Sandy Irvine. Andrew Comyn Irvine died in 1924 whilst attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest alongside George Mallory, and he is someone I feel like I have known since my mid-teens, when the chance loan of a book from a teacher threw me into an obsession with the 'mystery of Mallory and Irvine'. The mystery lay in the question of whether, before losing their lives on the highest mountain in the world, they actually reached the top, pipping Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hilary to the post by almost thirty years. For me, it soon came to be about much more than the mere question of whether or not the ill-fated pair reached the summit.
In the seven years since I last updated this blog, I finally published 'my book' about mountains - the book which grew from the PhD years which many of my older posts dated from. In the opening pages of the book, I talked about how the figures of Mallory and Irvine served to draw me down the path that led me to university, to studying history, to writing my PhD on the experiences of 'mountaineers' who lived long before they thought of conquering the roof of the world. One especially pivotal moment, in terms of the interests that would shape the following 15 years of my life, occurred in the library at Merton College, which Sandy Irvine attended, and where his archives are now held. On a cold, dark winter's afternoon, at the age of 17, I sat in that library and held his letters in my hands. It was my first time touching archival material, and a moment, or so it felt, of meeting. I laughed at his jokes, imagined him sitting, 90 years before, at the very same desk at which I sat.
And so it was that when I read those words - 'Sandy Irvine's body has been found' - and followed the link to a news article about the discovery, I felt suddenly and unexpectedly affected. I switched out on cuddling duties with my husband, and went downstairs to make dinner, and cried. Even whilst doing so, I thought to myself, this is stupid. It isn't as if I had thought he was still alive up there, a hundred years on. From the moment I had first known of him, Sandy Irvine had always been dead.
I remember feeling similarly startled, reading that first borrowed book about the 1924 expedition, when the narrative turned to the discovery of George Mallory's body in 1999. The page was illustrated with a famous body of his corpse; head crushed, but the rest intact, frozen to contoured alabaster and stripped mostly naked by the elements. Much has been made of the position of his body, hands outstretched as if he were trying to self-arrest, one leg folded over another as if to protect a badly injured limb. At the time, I thought it an awful enormity that the great climber, author, husband and father should have been so reduced in visible memory to this; a statue laid bare for all the world to see.
The photo heading the articles about Sandy's 'remains', however, strike yet a deeper chord. What has been found is a boot, containing a sock with 'A. C. Irvine' on it, and, the news articles strongly imply, a human foot. And that is all. The boot was found on the Rongbuk Glacier - the likely scenario being that the rest of his body was crushed and scattered by the movement of the glacier. It feels horribly symbolic, that where Mallory - the more famous of the pair - was discovered intact, Irvine, so long in Mallory's shadow, the 'experiment' of the 1924 team, should be discovered piecemeal, his memory represented across news websites in the form of a single boot.
The discovery is also a reminder, a confirmation, of a shocking death - a huge fall, an end which may have been swift but which may not have. And I find that, for some reason, the fact that a century has elapsed makes the reminder no less sharp. I feel for Sandy Irvine. I am sorry he died, sorry he suffered. He has been present, in a strange way, in my life for a long time, and I feel for him.
Perhaps the sleepy boy on my lap also holds some clues to my feelings today - another big development, along with his older sister, since my last posting here. In our long acquaintance, I have come to appreciate Sandy - as a big, blond, cheerful engineer, who was always ready to make a joke, but equally as ready to redesign the team's oxygen equipment in order to increase the chances of a successful summit bid. And here I have my three-year old blond comedian, who has exhibited extraordinary comic timing since the moment he could speak, and who talks through his plans for complicated ball runs before he builds them. And I would be proud, if he grew up to remind me of the version of Sandy Irvine which I have built in my mind. But if he were to grow up to set his sights on Everest?
Tomorrow, or the day after, the sixteen year-old part of me which once wrote a detailed treatise - entirely for my own pleasure - on whether or not Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest, will emerge and I will begin to pore over discussions of whether this discovery changes anything, what new hints it reveals about what happened that day. But for now I think it is fine to pause, and to feel this curious poignancy. Somehow, aged seventeen, I felt that I met Sandy Irvine, and that experienced shaped my life in so many unanticipated ways. Historians do not have to be always objective. It is okay, I think, to be touched by history.
Sandy Irvine. Andrew Comyn Irvine died in 1924 whilst attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest alongside George Mallory, and he is someone I feel like I have known since my mid-teens, when the chance loan of a book from a teacher threw me into an obsession with the 'mystery of Mallory and Irvine'. The mystery lay in the question of whether, before losing their lives on the highest mountain in the world, they actually reached the top, pipping Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hilary to the post by almost thirty years. For me, it soon came to be about much more than the mere question of whether or not the ill-fated pair reached the summit.
In the seven years since I last updated this blog, I finally published 'my book' about mountains - the book which grew from the PhD years which many of my older posts dated from. In the opening pages of the book, I talked about how the figures of Mallory and Irvine served to draw me down the path that led me to university, to studying history, to writing my PhD on the experiences of 'mountaineers' who lived long before they thought of conquering the roof of the world. One especially pivotal moment, in terms of the interests that would shape the following 15 years of my life, occurred in the library at Merton College, which Sandy Irvine attended, and where his archives are now held. On a cold, dark winter's afternoon, at the age of 17, I sat in that library and held his letters in my hands. It was my first time touching archival material, and a moment, or so it felt, of meeting. I laughed at his jokes, imagined him sitting, 90 years before, at the very same desk at which I sat.
And so it was that when I read those words - 'Sandy Irvine's body has been found' - and followed the link to a news article about the discovery, I felt suddenly and unexpectedly affected. I switched out on cuddling duties with my husband, and went downstairs to make dinner, and cried. Even whilst doing so, I thought to myself, this is stupid. It isn't as if I had thought he was still alive up there, a hundred years on. From the moment I had first known of him, Sandy Irvine had always been dead.
I remember feeling similarly startled, reading that first borrowed book about the 1924 expedition, when the narrative turned to the discovery of George Mallory's body in 1999. The page was illustrated with a famous body of his corpse; head crushed, but the rest intact, frozen to contoured alabaster and stripped mostly naked by the elements. Much has been made of the position of his body, hands outstretched as if he were trying to self-arrest, one leg folded over another as if to protect a badly injured limb. At the time, I thought it an awful enormity that the great climber, author, husband and father should have been so reduced in visible memory to this; a statue laid bare for all the world to see.
The photo heading the articles about Sandy's 'remains', however, strike yet a deeper chord. What has been found is a boot, containing a sock with 'A. C. Irvine' on it, and, the news articles strongly imply, a human foot. And that is all. The boot was found on the Rongbuk Glacier - the likely scenario being that the rest of his body was crushed and scattered by the movement of the glacier. It feels horribly symbolic, that where Mallory - the more famous of the pair - was discovered intact, Irvine, so long in Mallory's shadow, the 'experiment' of the 1924 team, should be discovered piecemeal, his memory represented across news websites in the form of a single boot.
The discovery is also a reminder, a confirmation, of a shocking death - a huge fall, an end which may have been swift but which may not have. And I find that, for some reason, the fact that a century has elapsed makes the reminder no less sharp. I feel for Sandy Irvine. I am sorry he died, sorry he suffered. He has been present, in a strange way, in my life for a long time, and I feel for him.
Perhaps the sleepy boy on my lap also holds some clues to my feelings today - another big development, along with his older sister, since my last posting here. In our long acquaintance, I have come to appreciate Sandy - as a big, blond, cheerful engineer, who was always ready to make a joke, but equally as ready to redesign the team's oxygen equipment in order to increase the chances of a successful summit bid. And here I have my three-year old blond comedian, who has exhibited extraordinary comic timing since the moment he could speak, and who talks through his plans for complicated ball runs before he builds them. And I would be proud, if he grew up to remind me of the version of Sandy Irvine which I have built in my mind. But if he were to grow up to set his sights on Everest?
Tomorrow, or the day after, the sixteen year-old part of me which once wrote a detailed treatise - entirely for my own pleasure - on whether or not Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest, will emerge and I will begin to pore over discussions of whether this discovery changes anything, what new hints it reveals about what happened that day. But for now I think it is fine to pause, and to feel this curious poignancy. Somehow, aged seventeen, I felt that I met Sandy Irvine, and that experienced shaped my life in so many unanticipated ways. Historians do not have to be always objective. It is okay, I think, to be touched by history.
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