Five years ago this month the British mountaineer, Alison Hargreaves, was caught out in a violent storm on K2, the world's second highest peak, and never returned alive. The newspapers went wild - not just about her loss, and her many achievements, but about the fact that she was a young mother of two.
After the initial plaudits and public expressions of grief - and the memorable quote about her preference for living "like a lion for a day" - it was not long before her death became a battleground. The suggestion was that she had been killed by her own ambition - an ambition that had already carried her up that same year on the first unsupported ascent of Everest without bottled oxygen.
The photographs and heartbreaking television images of her bereft husband, Jim Ballard, and her two children, Tom (6) and Katie (4), seemed to say it all. How could she have been so irresponsible, so ambitious and uncaring about her young family ? The ensuing debate paid little heed to the fact that such questions would rarely be asked about a man. Only days before she disappeared, as one of six lost on the "savage mountain" that week, two highly-respected British mountaineers and fathers, Paul Nunn and Geoff Tier, perished on Haramosh II, close to K2 in the Karakoram.
Polly Toynbee, influential commentator, gave a flavour of the reaction. "Danger for its own sake seems to me no better than drug-taking as a social activity," she wrote. "Danger can be powerfully addictive, and those of us with no taste for it at all consider it as appalling as a taste for crack. It would be better not to glamourise danger, not to prize foolhardiness." What was interesting about Alison Hargreaves, in Toynbee's view, was that she had "behaved like a man".
If authors David Rose and Ed Douglas have now set the record straight in this devastating account of the life and times of the British climber, Toynbee and other columnists must be suffering from verbal indigestion.
Even before she set out for K2, Hargreaves had already had a taste of the moral outrage that was to come. In May of that year, she had become the first woman to record a solo ascent of Everest, without oxygen. The London Times columnist, Nigella Lawson, accused her of "reality-denying self-centredness".
Bewildering as it may have seemed to her, Hargreaves had little time to react to such criticism. The so-called "obsessive" and "ambitious" woman who had spent only a couple of weeks at home with her kids after Everest before heading back to the Himalaya was in fact, under the most severe and horrendous pressure. Her marriage had broken up; she was facing an uncertain career as a professional climber, and the prospect of rearing her children as a single parent. K2 was no ego trip. K2, which has claimed many experienced climbers' lives, was her route to financial security.
Only months before, on a lecture tour to Ireland, she had presented the image of the perfect woman. Unassuming yet single-minded, the diminutive, rosy-cheeked mountaineer met me in a Dublin cafe and spoke simply of her life to date. She talked warmly of her two children, and of her husband, affectionately known as "JB", and made little of her climb of the Eiger's north face when five-and-a-half months pregnant. Afterwards, she sent me a copy of her book, A Hard Day's Summer, which recorded her solo ascent of the "Big Six" classic north faces of the Alps. "Onwards and upwards !"was her inscription, along with a childlike autograph.
The hard shell, the apparent self containment, was a clever disguise. Who was to know, apart from those close to her, that her domestic life was in crisis and that she was so financially strapped? "JB", her husband, who returned to K2 base camp with the two children after her death in the company of a British television crew, had always put her on a pedestal. Yet, the authors claim the marriage was far from happy. The talented and responsible athlete with little or no apparent fear of physical danger appeared to have an enviable spouse; the sort of man who is prepared to put his career second to that of his wife. The reality was very different, and the intrepid adventurer was in a state of constant terror, loneliness and indecision in relation to her emotional life.
Her diary, kept from the time she was a schoolgirl, reveals some of her turmoil. The authors have spoken to family members and friends to piece together a picture of a paradox. With much honesty, they record many examples of apparent single-minded behaviour, such as her insensitive reaction to her sister's contraction of multiple sclerosis and her obsessive jealousy of other female climbers. Yet it also records her painful path to maturity, as she realised, almost too late, that there were "far more mountains out there than just physical ones".
Inevitably, this account will not close the book on Alison Hargreaves's life. Her husband, apparent villain of the piece, gives no direct interview. Alison's parents appear to have been supportive, if fearful of their daughter's future; yet beyond a reference to their own inability to be demonstrative of their love for their children, there is no real attempt to find out why she felt such an overwhelming urge to achieve; and why she was forced into a position where she was unable to turn back from a summit, even though her instincts and experience told her otherwise.
For her children, the account will be painful; not least, the fact that she was heard sobbing in her tent the night before the final attempt on K2 that led to her death.
Lorna Siggins is an Irish Times journalist and reported on the first Irish ascent of Everest for the paper in 1993.
