16 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the timesnonfiction
The peak of madness
John Self is moved by this story of a plucky and eccentric
amateur who in 1934 attempted a doomed ascent of Everest
L
ondon has 14 railway termini,
more than any other city in the
world. It has no Grand Central
station like New York, nothing the
Germans would call a Haupt-
bahnhof. It has no significant mainline
stations that aren’t termini either and no
line circling the city, like Paris’s Petite
Ceinture. If you’re travelling from
Manchester to Southampton, or Bristol to
Norwich, say, you must change trains in
London. Twice.
Of the 14, three are within a five-minute
walk of each other (King’s Cross, St Pan-
cras, Euston), three more line the north
bank of the Thames (Victoria, Charing
Cross, Cannon Street) and one is surely
imaginary, existing only in Monopolyland
(apparently 19 million passengers use
Fenchurch Street each year, but I’ve never
met one).
The first to be built, London Bridge
(1836), is like a labyrinth from a Jorge Luis
Borges poem, operating on many levels of
track and consciousness simultaneously
(“... the galleries seem straight/ But curve
furtively, forming secret circles/ At the ter-
minus of years”). Only after 1,000 journeys
will the commuter unlock its mysteries —
by which time all the exits will have
changed places again.
None of this had to be this way, as the
prolific railway historian Christian Wol-
mar stresses in this affable guided tour.
Wolmar dedicates his book to John Betje-
man, the saviour of St Pancras, “whose
writing I sadly cannot match”. I’m glad he
said it. But while he doesn’t offer much by
way of lyricism, Wolmar builds a compel-
ling narrative that celebrates these indus-
trial wonders — and teases at how much
better spent some of that Victorian money
might have been.
All the “cathedrals of steam” were built
in a four-decade burst of speculation
between 1836 and 1874 (Marylebone, “a
public library from Nottingham which hasA station spotter’s
unexpectedly found itself in London”, as
Betjeman described its quaint size, was the
outlier, arriving in 1899). All would today
be classed as “megaprojects”, costing
hundreds of millions of pounds and mak-
ing — conservative estimate — 120,
people homeless. And all were built with
no government help by “rapacious land
grabbers” whose main thought was
making life difficult for their rivals.
The Victorians believed competition
would sort out the men from the boys. No
one, as Wolmar writes, “was giving any
thought to the creation of a unified rail
network; much effort was, however, put
into ways of ensuring shareholders
received a good return on investment”.
Competition did produce a few master-
pieces. Why did the Midland Railway
commission a vast neo-gothic hotel and
majestic engine shed at St Pancras?
Because its directors wanted to outdo the
elegant twin arches of Great Northern’s
King’s Cross next door.
But while the spirit of the age could pro-
duce Brunel’s Paddington, it could also
produce a mess. If you have ever wondered
why Victoria’s platforms are split in two
sections, it’s because for most of its history
Victoria was operated as two stations by
rival companies with a massive wall
between them. In The Importance of Being
Earnest Jack is quick to remark that he was
found in a handbag on the (classier) Brigh-
ton side. “The line is immaterial!” comes
Lady Bracknell’s reply.
Perhaps a love of detail for its own sake
goes with the territory. I’m not sure I
needed Wolmar to tell me that the com-
pany that provided refreshments at
Waterloo was founded during the Austra-
lian gold rush of 1850. However, the inci-
dentals are usually well chosen. A young
Thomas Hardy found work exhuming
graves for the construction of St Pancras.
Waterloo, King’s Cross and Victoria all fell
prey to “trunk murders” — a 1920s vogue
for depositing murder victims in left lug-
gage. The Eastern Counties Railway com-
pany spent £15 14s on firearms during its
incursions into the dangerous Shoreditch
slums. If you find people applying mascara
on trains annoying, be thankful no one is
cooking a herring.
Prostitutes soon cottoned on to the factThis lively history of
London’s stations is
full of nerdy detail,
says Richard Godwin
anyway: one early expedition in 1924 had
packed soup plates and carving knives.
To get to Everest, Wilson determined to
“build a new man” through fasting and fit-
ness, to buy his plane and fly from Britain.
His brother thought him a “lunatic”, his
mother that he was “chasing a chimera”,
but he “refused to be overcome by fear”.
The book takes us through Wilson’s capers
over air and land, from Europe to Africa
and Asia, dodging and cheating his
way across Nepal in disguise to get to
Everest base camp. It’s scrupulously
researched — Caesar has not just tramped
the fields of Wijtschate, but looped the
loop in a plane like Wilson’s — but with no
damage done to the flow of the story. (Al-
though I scratched my head over what the
book Sexual Life in Ancient Greece was do-
ing in the bibliography.)
The moth of the title is Wilson’s plane —
a Gipsy Moth — but also Wilson himself:
the spiritual text The Voice of the Silence
that he carried with him to the mountain
wrote of how “the moth attracted to the
dazzling flame of thy night-lamp is
doomed to perish in the viscid oil”.
The story of how a man could be
driven to try to scale this “giant’s
tooth made of rock and ice” has a
built-in excitement, but Caesar
enhances the flavour with
extracts from Wilson’s letters
to the third woman in
his life, Enid Evans, and from
his diary.
Wilson’s voice is as charac-
terful and funny as we might
expect of someone with this
much “pluck”. “Now in forbid-
den Tibet,” he wrote as he
again evaded capture by the
authorities, “and feel like sending
government a wire ‘Told you so’ or
‘How’d you like your eggs boiled’.”
Caesar, caught between the desire to
know and the ability to know, tries to work
out why Wilson was so driven to this
doomed enterprise. He speculates that it
was “forged in private trauma”, not just by
Wilson’s experience of the war, but that of
his brother Victor. Perhaps it was a hole
being filled, a “journey of the soul”, or Wil-
son was, as the mountaineer Reinhold
Messner described himself, “a fool who
with his longing for love and tenderness
runs up cold mountains”. Or was it simply
the restlessness that Wilson had exhibited
throughout his short life, an inability or
unwillingness to settle into “a regular mid-
dle-class existence”? Would he know, as he
did during the war, when it was time to beat
a retreat? In the last letter Wilson wrote,
21,000ft up the north face of Everest, he
said simply: “Some of us go looking for it
and some wait for it to call us up.”
Flames are a recurring image. Wilson,
the moth drawn to them, thought of the
renown his exploits would achieve and
hoped that “the world [would] be on fire”
with the news. Caesar reports how, after
Wilson’s final ascent, the story of his
adventure “blazed around the world three
times”. Maurice Wilson was a one-off,
quite outside the ordinary run of people,
and The Moth and the Mountain is a “sorry,
beautiful, melancholy, crazy” tribute to a
man who, like a leaf in autumn, burnt
brightest just before he fell.T
his bonkers ripping yarn of
derring-don’t is a hell of a ride. It
is an eye-opener into the mind
of a daredevil for those of us
whose idea of risky business
would be, as Victoria Wood put it, to step
on to an escalator in a soft-soled shoe.
A Mancunian writer for The New Yorker,
Ed Caesar has followed his debut book
about marathon runners, Two Hours,
with the tale of a much greater magnitude
of endurance.
The First World War veteran Maurice
Wilson, at the age of 35 in 1934, attempted
to be the first person to scale Mount Ever-
est — alone. Given we know that the
first successful ascent of the world’s high-
est peak was by Edmund Hillary and
Tenzing Norgay in 1953, we don’t need to
wonder whether he made it; but here the
destination, although Wilson would not
have agreed, is less important than the
journey.
Caesar dashes off Wilson’s formation
with journalistic panache, neatly colour-
ing in the outlines of his background and
war service, with succinct digressions on
shellshock (originally thought to arise
from the physical force of an explo-
sion), the economic development
of Bradford (with its own per-
manent symphony orchestra,
albeit one, as the local writer
JB Priestley noted, “with a
weak brass section”), and
Wilson’s survival of the war,
by beating a retreat from
enemy fire near the Belgian
town of Wijtschate through
the remnants of his de-
stroyed battalion.
War and mountaineering
are pursuits where men battle
against themselves, but Wilson’s
world was one not of men, but of
strong women. He travelled to New
Zealand, where he married the business-
woman Mary Garden, then to Canada,
where he became close to the fashion
buyer Lucy Pitman and abandoned his
marriage. But any relationship they had
didn’t last, and Wilson, with unerring
timing, continued to America in 1931, just
as the Great Depression closed its jaws on
the nation.
The skittishness of his travels and
relationships might have been related to
wartime trauma, which led to what Wilson
called a “serious nervous breakdown”
before he returned to Britain. Or it might
have been the keystone of his personality
— “there was no quit in Wilson, and there
never had been” — and soon he became
consumed with the fire of the ambition
that would occupy the remainder of his
life: to scale Everest.
His sanity seemed questionable as he
plotted crackpot methods of getting to the
mountain without the consent of the Nep-
alese government, which rarely granted
access. He would parachute on to the
slopes from a plane. No, he would fly there
himself and crash-land on the lower
reaches before triumphantly ascending to
the summit. He didn’t know how to fly —
or how to climb a mountain — and his left
arm was weakened in the war, but that
was no matter because alpinism was
largely the field of the gentleman amateurpilot light Maurice
Wilson leaves Edgware in
1933 in his Gipsy MothA sorry,
beautiful,
melancholy,
crazy tribute
to a man
who burnt
brightest
just before
he fell
The Moth and
the Mountain
A True Story of Love,
War and Everest
by Ed CaesarViking, 288pp; £18.