Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Read Online Free PDF

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