The Book of the Bivvy. Ronald Turnbull

      PEIGNE AND SUFFERING

      On the way up, we met two other British people coming down. ‘Benighted: abseiled off: you’ll see our rope hanging in the chimney.’

      Silly Brits, don’t understand Alpine climbing, always get benighted. We’d pick up their rope as we passed it and bring it back to the campsite that evening. Or that late afternoon – the Aiguille de la Peigne is one of the smallest of the Chamonix Aiguilles, good rock and Grade III (British Diff) all the way.

      The trouble with guidebooks is that they’re written by people who are very good at it. Our book was an English-language selection. The English-language selectors had omitted the Ordinary Route up the Peigne in favour of this terribly easy but rather nice rock route. But there are 600m/2000ft of that terribly easy rock. This is fine if you consider English Diff a scramble and climb it unroped. It’s not fine if you consider English Diff a climb.

      As we went up we looked at our watches, looked at the rocks above, and got less and less British and more informally Alpine in our climbing. We reached the previous people’s jammed rope and removed it from the chimney. We got to the top of the climb and crossed onto the ordinary route. We abandoned all idea of the summit and set off down the ordinary route. It got darker.

      The trouble with downhill rock climbing in the dark is that you can’t distinguish the worn footholds, the trampled ledges, the turned-over screes of the correct line. So on a suitable rocky ledge we decided to stop and get benighted.

      All night long we heard the meltwater dripping, so the temperature can’t even have got down to freezing. And we were equipped. We’d read all about it in The White Spider, and we’d gone in to get some of this sophisticated survival equipment. ‘I would like,’ I told them at Tiso’s, ‘a bivouac sack.’

      They looked puzzled, then laughed. ‘Ah – you mean a polybag!’ Surprisingly for such an advanced bit of kit, the cost was only five shillings.

      The five-shillingsworth were bright orange and rather thick. I wriggled into a cosy hole below some boulders. The other people’s rope, coils opened out into a long figure-eight, made a bed that was almost comfortable. A barley-sugar sweet, placed in the downhill cheek, spread an illusory warmth – bad for the teeth but good for morale. I certainly slept for some of the time.

      After we’d listened to about a hundred thousand drips, the dripping darkness gave way to a dripping grey half-light. When you know you’re about to leave the bag and be even colder it seems less uncomfortable. A good shiver warms you up and then you can doze a little. Until a strange whirr and sudden rattle from overhead…

      We were directly underneath the Mont Blanc cablecar. Fifty yards away in the grey air, well-fed people were passing through the sky in a warm plastic box. Their windows were steamed up: with any luck they couldn’t see us.

      We packed our bags and scurried down the mountain. In the meadows below, the first of the new day’s climbers were heading for the Peigne. A pair with the patched-breeches look of the British were heading off towards the bottom of the 600m/2000ft terribly easy rockclimb…

      PROBLEMS OF THE POLYBAG

      Today we’ve upgraded the name to ‘Survival Bag’ but the price is relatively unchanged at between £5 and Free With This Month’s Issue. And there’s no doubt that these things do aid survival. Dumfriesshire, for example, has two extra inhabitants because of them. An elderly neighbour suffered a mild heart attack in the Enterkin Pass and lay for five hours in a snowstorm. A much younger one fell while descending into Glen Shiel, broke both ankles and jawbone, and nobody knew where he was except a friend who’d just that day emigrated to New Zealand. He lay in his bag for four days.

      No piece of equipment does better in terms of lives saved per pound sterling, with the possible exception of bootlaces and other short lengths of string. But the survival bag means what it says. You wake up miserable, but alive.

      Much of that misery is down to dampness. A medium-sized human, in the course of a night, emits about a pint of water. This pint (or half-litre, for a slightly smaller person who thinks in metric) condenses on the inside of the plastic. From there it gets into your hair, your clothes, your sleeping bag if you’re lucky enough to be in one. It gets in between the pages of this book: the later chapters will be largely concerned with that pint of water in the night.

      The plastic sort of bag is like the western side of Scotland. It’s warmer, but also wetter.

      This book is about misery that’s mixed in with pleasure, rather than taken straight: about self-indulgence rather than mere survival. However, all bivvybags do have a secondary function as survival aids, and it’s true that you can’t have much of either fun or suffering if you died the previous winter.

      For pure survival, there are various items offered of lightweight plastic or so-called ‘space blanket’. These cost very little, weigh very little (about 100g/3oz) and they’re very little use.

      That’s not the same as no use at all. After the London Marathon they gave us aluminised plastic wrappers with the sponsor’s logo. Thus we became, among the streaked concrete of Waterloo Embankment, a fluttering blue and silver throng as we consumed an other-worldly sports drink which itself tasted strongly aluminised. Space blanket claims to conserve 90 per cent of body heat. This is misleading. Heat is transferred by radiation, conduction and convection. When lying under a stone wall in a snowstorm, heat is lost by conduction (into the freezing ground below) and by convection (into the passing breeze above). Aluminised plastic reflects only radiant heat.

      However, when strolling on the Embankment damp with sweat and wearing only your undies, the blue and silver wrapper is what you need over damp skimpy shorts and a Galloway Sheep tee-shirt.

      This wrapper came free – I only had to run 26 miles to get it. And while it was of little use, it was also of little weight, which could be good value; so I took it on the Mountain Marathon. On these events a cooker is compulsory: so I also brought along some delicious savoury rice. Alas! When Glyn unwrapped the cooker it was of a purely formal sort – small paraffin blocks, a stove like a dead spider sculpted out of rust, and a foil tub for saucepan. The super-lightweight saucepan had been remarkable value: less than £2.50, with its first hot meal, plus beansprouts, included at no extra charge. However, it had been on several mountain marathons already and was no longer rice-tight.