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After Everest
Inside the Private World of Edmund Hillary
By Paul Little, Carolyne Meng-Yee Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2012 Paul Little and Carolyne Meng-Yee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-877505-20-1
CHAPTER 1
FIRST STEPS
'My father always used to say, "Don't tell me the Hillarys are heroes. They didn't go to war." '
Alexa Johnston knew that wasn't right. But the woman addressing her went on to say that her family lived near the Hillarys in Tuakau and that among the locals this was a common view, Everest or no Everest. In fact, the Hillarys, what with father Percy's erratic behaviour and that funny religion, were regarded as a little ... odd.
As Johnston — author of Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life — explained to the woman, Ed had served in the air force in World War II; in fact, he had gone to some lengths to do so. Ed's father, Percy, however, was a pacifist and his brother Rex had been interned as a conscientious objector.
World War I had scarred the lives of both of Ed's parents. His mother, Gertrude, had had two of her brothers killed in the conflict, and Percy had suffered head injuries at Gallipoli. Percy is thus unique in having played a part in two significant New Zealand stories, one a nation-defining disaster, the other a nation-defining triumph: Gallipoli and Everest. 'We have my grandfather's diary,' says Hilary Carlisle, daughter of Ed's sister June. 'He just loved that whole adventure of going to Gallipoli, the training, being an officer. But when he was away he got shot in the nose and as part of that he became ... no one put a label on it, but probably depressed. He had brain damage of some sort.'
Percy was invalided home in 1916. His horrendous experiences had made him a committed pacifist; in later years, he was wont to storm up the aisle of Remuera's Tudor Cinema, if a war movie was being shown, and demand that the screening cease.
Percy was a man with an iron will and a well-developed social conscience. Ed recalled how upset Percy was when he heard of food being destroyed in order to keep farmers' returns high, at a time when many people in the world were short of food. Such basic illogical injustices riled him.
He was an unusual combination of practical man and dreamer. Ed writes ruefully of his father's tendency to leave jobs unfinished — in particular the family home, which he spent many years building and which remained unfinished for much of Ed's life.
It's not hard to see in a reaction to this the seeds of the obsessive planning that was a hallmark of all Ed's endeavours.
Ed was born just after the war, on 20 July 1919. As well as his older sister June, born in 1917, there would be a younger brother, Rex, born in 1920. June later categorised the three by saying Ed had the brains, Rex had the looks and she was 'the girl'. As was customary in those times, she was expected to become a wife and mother; but there is a streak in the Hillary family character that delights in defying expectations, and June went on to teacher training and a science degree in New Zealand before moving to England, where she earned a master's degree in psychology and worked as a clinical psychologist.
Hilary describes the family dynamic thus: 'It was their mother who held the family together. She managed the money and made sure that the kids were okay. So in their teens, Mum always talks about that time when the three children and their mother formed a close group and in a way schemed against their father to get their way.'
Ed was adventurous from the start and, in childhood at least, Rex wasn't far behind. Once, the two brothers swapped bicycles — Ed on Rex's smaller bike, Rex on his brother's big one. Rex was in front and, knowing Ed would be chasing him, was going as fast as he could; but when he turned a corner, he collided with a car, bouncing off the bonnet and landing on the road. The driver was terrified he had killed Rex; Ed was merely terrified of the beating he knew Percy would give him when he saw the state of his bike.
Competition was part of the boys' relationship from the start. In an interview on the BBC's HARDtalk in 1999, Ed recollected his time as a beekeeper: 'I was constantly lugging around 80-pound boxes of honey. And my brother — we competed the whole time. We would rush up the hill with an 80-pound box and dump it and rush down again. And we quite enjoyed the competition. I think the sense of competition carried on over to my mountaineering.'
Although Percy was a pacifist, he was prone to fits of violent rage, and regular beatings were a feature of Ed's upbringing. Although he feared the beatings, Ed admitted he was a vexatious child with a stubborn streak to match his father's. Regardless of his guilt or innocence in any given case, Ed would never give Percy the satisfaction of admitting he had done anything wrong.
Rex's son John recounts the story of a time when Ed and Rex were told to wash their hands. 'They had to run up the stairs to the bathroom. Dad got there first and Ed grabbed him from behind to try and pull him out of the way so he could wash his hands first, but they pulled the basin out and the water was leaking everywhere.'
Simple things could be an offence in Percy's eyes. One Christmas, Rex and Ed received second-hand tennis racquets. Enraged at what he saw as their careless treatment of the gifts, Percy took the racquets and smashed them on a fence.
Ed's early years were lonely ones. He failed to make friends at primary school — which he completed two years early, thanks to some home tuition from his mother, Gertrude, who had been a teacher. This meant he was one of the smallest boys on the roll when he began secondary school — for which he was ill prepared, apart from academically. Later, when he was asked what he would change if he were to live his life over again, Ed always said there was little he would not care to repeat. But if he were given the opportunity to relive his teenage years, he said in a long interview for the US-based Academy of Achievement, he would 'dodge it like fury'.
The Hillarys' family home was in rural Tuakau, where Percy ran the local newspaper — the Tuakau District News — almost single-handedly, and had a sideline in beekeeping. Ed walked barefoot to primary school, rain or shine. Now he found himself spending several hours a day travelling by train from Tuakau to the intimidating halls of Auckland Grammar.
At secondary school, Ed was self-conscious. His feeling that he was a misfit who would never be accepted was exacerbated by an incident that he often recounted as a defining one in his life. In the first week, Ed turned up for gym class. As the instructor surveyed his new intake, his gaze settled on Ed and turned to a look of disdain.
'What have they sent me?' he said, loud enough for Ed to hear, and then began a detailed, humiliating catalogue of his physical deficiencies.
'Get over there with the other misfits,' said the teacher finally.
Ed was crushed. He regarded this as the beginning of his sense of 'inferiority as to how I looked', which would trouble him for a long time to come.
This was not the only unjust humiliation he suffered at the hands of a teacher. It was much later in life that he was able to bring himself to tell another such story in a magazine interview. A different teacher 'had very rigid views on what was right and what was wrong'. It was his habit to make his class stay in later than others every day, with the result that Ed could not catch the regular after-school train; he had to take a later one, which meant he got home as late as eight o'clock at night. Ed steeled himself to approach the teacher and explain this.
'Well, I can't make an exception for you,' said the teacher. 'I'll let you make your mind up what do to. You can leave on time to catch your train or I will swipe you in front of the class.'
It was exquisitely refined bullying. But it met its match in Ed's stubbornness. He said he would take the beating and leave school on time. At the end of every school day for a week Ed bent over and got thrashed with a cane in front of the class before being allowed to catch his train.
Percy and Gertrude worked out something was up and dragged the truth out of their son. Gertrude then wrote a letter for Ed to give to the school principal.
Ed and the teacher were called to the principal's office. The principal expressed his displeasure to the teacher, told him the beatings were to stop, and told Ed he was to catch his regular train from now on.
When he was asked, in his eighties, if he still hated the teacher, Ed said: 'No, I despise him.'
There was some good to be found in these experiences. Rather than let the bitterness fester into something dark, Ed developed the sensitivity to injustice that he would put to work in the world.
In later years, Ed was often asked to come back and address the students at his old school. He always delivered an inspirational message, but he did not shy away from repeating the story of his humiliations. He would warn the students about bullying; and he would admit to how frightening he had found his friendless early days at the school.
Fortunately, in the fifth and sixth form, he shot up several centimetres — he would eventually reach 188 centimetres as an adult. He enjoyed sports and learnt how to handle himself in a fight. In his memoirs, he recounted numerous violent incidents such as brawls with other boys on the train. For a boy who was used to violence at home as a way of dealing with things, fighting would have seemed a natural response.
Apart from heightening his sense of inferiority and his sensitivity to injustice, Ed was exposed to one other incident during his time at Auckland Grammar that would dominate the rest of his life. In 1935, after much persuading and haggling from his son, Percy agreed to let Ed go on a school trip to Tongariro National Park, where he saw snow for the first time; and he had his first encounter with a decent-sized mountain in the form of Mt Ruapehu, an active volcano. He was besotted.
Romanticism and a vivid imagination are traits frequently found in solitary children who spend long periods on their own, and Ed was no exception. He dreamed big. 'I was a very keen walker and, as I walked along the roads and tracks around this countryside area, I'd be dreaming. My mind would be miles away and I would be slashing villains with swords and capturing beautiful maidens and doing all sorts of heroic things.'
His fancies were fuelled by a voracious appetite for books. With his long train trips, there were periods where he was getting through a book a day. He read the books any boy of his age with an adventurous spirit would have devoured at that time — John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Warlord of Mars, and westerns — but also, incongruously, the romance and historical novels of Georgette Heyer. 'The hero was usually a rather middle-aged gentleman, a very good sword fighter, with a beautiful young lady and all the rest of it. Great sword fighting and all highly romantic, adventurous activity. I used to find these things quite entertaining. Nowadays, I find them a little on the naive side.'
He also read so many mountaineering books that 'it's rather put me off reading mountaineering books now'. He ploughed through classic volumes by Shipton and Smythe and Cherry-Garrard.
In 1935, Ed's last year at secondary school, his parents moved to the inner Auckland suburb of Remuera — not far from Auckland Grammar. He no longer needed to make the long journey between Tuakau and Auckland twice a day. Percy had parted ways with the paper, and henceforth beekeeping, which for a long time had been his hobby, now became his family's main source of income. He did not abandon journalism altogether, though — he started a beekeeping industry magazine, New Zealand Honeybee. Beekeeping provided an erratic source of income, as it was dependent on the weather and the amount of honey the bees produced. But the enterprise ultimately grew to include 35 apiaries spread across 64 kilometres.
At university Ed's various interests started to coalesce. He spent two years putatively studying mathematics and science, his strongest school subjects, but with so little enthusiasm that he failed to pass a single exam. However, he did join the tramping club where, far from being consigned to the puny misfits group, he shone from the start. Tramping was something that, with his long stride and incredible stamina, he could do well.
In fact, tramping was the perfect pursuit for a solitary dreamer who had trouble making friends. As a young man, Ed was so shy that, on occasions when a pretty girl walked into a room, he would have to leave hurriedly so no one would see him blushing. Tramping gave him entry into a community that was made up of both sexes, involved in an activity that gave them a common purpose and through which they formed strong bonds.
Ed was good at team sports, but throughout his life he would focus on projects that allowed an individual to achieve his own personal goals within a group. At university, he also took classes in jujitsu and boxing, but head-to-head competition was not his style. An incident at the gym provided evidence of his capacity for recklessness and spontaneity, which are believed to be the hallmarks of the most successful adventurers but are actually quite rare, and mostly occur among those who meet premature deaths.
On one occasion Ed had the chance to spar with New Zealand welterweight champion Vic Calteaux. It seemed to Ed that the boxer wasn't taking his efforts seriously, so when Ed saw his chance he surprised him with a straight left to the nose. A furious Calteaux responded by beating the bejesus out of Ed; the coup de grâce a direct hit to the solar plexus. Ultimately Ed would learn the virtue of giving every action due consideration before taking it.
In 1938, Ed faced the fact that he wasn't suited to university, and defaulted to beekeeping for Percy. From then on, he would drop in and out of the business as it suited him over the years, leaving Rex to pick up the slack. He later acknowledged that he took advantage of Rex's good nature in doing this. Eventually the business was based in a factory at Papakura. Rex lived next to the big honey house and Ed would bunk there as he came and went, joining Rex's family for meals.
Ed would ever after be described as 'the former beekeeper'. His remarkable physiology — distinguished by extraordinary stamina, endurance and physical strength — was suited to beekeeping. It was hot, physically demanding work and in summer he would carry out his duties wearing only shorts and a hat and veil. He might get up to 300 stings in the process, he later told Alexa Johnston.
'Did they hurt?' she asked him.
'Of course they hurt,' said Ed. 'They were bee stings.'
Percy had no shortage of strong, occasionally idiosyncratic beliefs. He believed fasting would cure most sickness. As a consequence, if Ed was ever unwell, he struggled mightily never to let on to Percy so he wouldn't have to add hunger to his list of ailments. It was about this time that the Hillary family became involved with the once-flourishing proto-New Age movement called Radiant Living, which is now remembered mainly because Ed was deeply involved in it as a young man.
English-born Herbert Sutcliffe founded the movement, which had parallels with the Christian Science teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a Christianity-based hodgepodge of dietary advice, mind over matter, physical fitness, affirmations and more. With its central tenet that good mental health was the key to good physical health, Radiant Living found a perfect adherent in Percy; and Gertrude wasn't far behind him in her enthusiasm.
The name, according to an article on NZHistory.net, referred to the belief that 'one must acknowledge the existence of the soul, "the invisible which can be visualised as a (radiant) source for good within us all ..."'. Later, when Ed had achieved his worldwide fame, Sutcliffe was to make much of the association: 'As Edmund Hillary (now Sir Edmund) is inevitably linked with the top of Mount Everest, so is Radiant Living connected with Sir Edmund,' he wrote. Ed travelled with Sutcliffe as his assistant in 1940. World War II would eventually sever Ed's involvement with Radiant Living — he was not inclined to return to it when the war was over, although he continued to be something of a spiritual quester. Over the next few years, he looked into many esoteric religions, but his practical nature meant none could win his allegiance. His studies did, however, leave him with a tolerance of a wide variety of beliefs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After Everest by Paul Little, Carolyne Meng-Yee. Copyright © 2012 Paul Little and Carolyne Meng-Yee. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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