Tarquin Cooper meets Stephen Venables, one of Britain's best and bravest climbers
Stephen Venables does not fit the public image of a mountaineer. Bookish and bespectacled, the 53-year-old is more Harry Potter than Sir Edmund Hillary.
While many of Britain's top climbers have come from tough, industrial heartlands, Venables grew up in middle-class Surrey and read English at Oxford.
Yet 19 years ago he became the first Briton to reach the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen, a feat so unbelievably hard that only 19 people had succeeded before him, four of whom died during the descent.
What is more, Venables made the ascent via a new, unclimbed route and summitted alone, spending a night in the open without tent or sleeping bag and losing all his toes to frostbite into the bargain. Hard as nails, in other words.
'Stephen is an outstanding mountaineer,' says no less a figure than Sir Chris Bonington. 'The climb on Everest was incredible. You should read his hit list: he's in the best traditions of exploratory climbing.'
Now you can do just that, with the publication of Venables's autobiography. 'It's an attempt to tell the story of how I got to the summit of Everest,' says Venables. 'It's about the journey. There are so many adventures I haven't written about.'
His trek is one of the most impressive undertaken by any British climber. There are remote expeditions through Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. Closer to home, he traversed Skye's infamous Cuillin Ridge in a single night and has completed some of the hardest climbs in the Alps.
These include a solo ascent of the North Face of the Matterhorn, where Venables was, by his own admission, 'scared witless', and an ascent of the North Face of the Eiger in 1986.
So how did a man who left Oxford to work at Glyndebourne with a view to going into the arts become one of the world's top climbers?
'The things I enjoyed at school were music and art,' he says. 'They were a great escape. In a way, mountains parallel that: the structure, the shape, the colours. For me, mountaineering is closer to art than sport. The poetry of mountains… that's the appeal of it, the sense of being transported into another world.'
Venables hates it when climbing is assumed to be all about suffering and struggle. For him, it's a joy. So he describes his ascent of the Eiger, a route steeped in mountaineering legend, as 'three of the most enjoyable days of my life'.
But there have been harrowing experiences. In 1992, after making the first ascent of Panch Chuli V in the Himalayas, he fell 150 feet and broke his leg, a story he told in A Slender Thread. 'He was unbelievably stoical,' recalls Bonington, who was there. 'He was in absolute agony: bones were sticking out but he didn't complain. He's very brave and in his personal life, too.' This, presumably, refers to the death of Venables's autistic son at the age of 12, a story related in Ollie, which was published last year.
Higher than the Eagle Soars chronicles Venables' trajectory from pupil at Charterhouse to the summit of Everest and stops there. It also notes that his journey was not without precedent. It was a Charterhouse schoolmaster whose name became linked with the mountain – George Mallory, who disappeared in 1924.
And Mallory was the first to survey the mountain's east Kangshung face, declaring: 'Other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us.' This was the route that, as Venables acknowledges in the book, would mark a turning point in his own career.
The three-mile-high face had never been climbed before. It was a nine-day epic for Venables, and one that would bring him closer to exhaustion and death than any other adventure.
'The totality of the experience was harder than anything I'd done. That's what was so exciting. We had a feeling from the start that this would be a great adventure. We had no idea if we could pull it off.'
As it turned out, Venables was the only member of the four-man team who did. 'Sixteen hours after leaving the South Col, I was coughing my way up alone,' he recalls. 'I remember saying to myself: 'I really must give up smoking after this one.''
Maybe climbing really is closer to the arts than sport, after all.
