ON TOP OF THE WORLD

An Everest Climb, Fergie, and the letters I carried but never read

I found a photograph of myself this week. It had slipped to the bottom of a drawer, the way the good ones always do.

A much younger man, lean and burnt brown by the sun, standing in the foothills of the Himalayas with the whole of the Khumbu rising behind him.

I had to look twice to be sure it was me. More than thirty five years have gone since that morning. Yet the instant it surfaced I was back there – boots on cold stone, the air thin and clean, the mountains close enough to touch and impossibly far away.

It was the autumn of 1993. I was royal reporter of the Daily Express, young enough still to think a mountain was an invitation rather than a warning.

The reason for the trek was a serious one. Sarah, the Duchess of York, had joined an expedition into the high Himalaya alongside a party of British mountaineers who lived with physical and learning disabilities.

The point was to raise money, and to prove a quiet, stubborn truth: that disability need not mean the end of ambition.

Their target was Pokalde, a Himalayan peak of close to nineteen thousand feet in the shadow of Everest itself. The cameras came too. My good friend Mike Dunlea came too.

The journey was later broadcast as a documentary, An Everest to Climb.

I went with good friends. Today reporter Charlie Rae was there, and Ted Verity, now editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, then simply one of us, on the road, laughing his way up the trail.

We flew into Lukla from Katmandu by helicopter that notorious little airstrip carved into the side of a hill.

It is a tiny mountain village in northeastern Nepal that serves as the primary gateway to Everest for climbers.

Perched at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet it is where the vast majority of trekkers and climbers start their foot journey into the Khumbu (Everest).

Our group then trekked from there up towards Namche Bazaar – the Sherpa capital, the great trading town in the shadow of Everest.

The path took us over swaying rope bridges strung high above the gorges.

Yaks crossed them ahead of us, unhurried, the bells at their throats ringing out over the drop, and here and there a plank was missing and you looked straight down through the gap to the river far below.

You learned not to look. You kept walking.

We ate dal bhat, lentils and rice, almost every day, and we were grateful for it.

It was on the mountain that the news reached us via the sat phone our team of sherpas were carrying.

Word came through that Steve Wyatt, the Texan who had once been close to her, had married. A reaction was wanted. Someone had to go and speak to the Duchess, and the lot fell to me. I went over.

What happened next has stayed with me all these years. She gave me a line. A short response to the news that i shared with the others so we could all file it on our Tandys (early computers).

She then handed me a small bundle of letters – private correspondence between herself and Prince Andrew – and asked if I would carry them down and deliver them to the British Ambassador in Kathmandu, to be passed on to the Prince. I didn’t share that information.

I put them in my pouch. I never opened them. I never so much as glanced at the writing on the envelopes. I carried them off the mountain and into Kathmandu and arrange to hand them over exactly as she had asked, and they made their way home to Andrew via the diplomatic bag.

A small act of trust, high up in the clouds, between a reporter and a woman the world spent its days picking apart.

I wish now that I had taken more photographs. I have only a few – the couple I found this week, a frame or two more.

But you do not always know, in the moment, which moments you will want to keep.

Some part of it never left me. Years later I painted the scene from memory: the bridges, the bells, the white peaks, that hard blue sky. The painting holds what the photographs missed.

I have stood on a great many famous lawns and balconies in thirty-five years of this trade. I have been in the room for engagements and weddings, funerals and coronations. But the foothills of the Himalayas in the autumn of 1993 remain, without question, among the most breathtaking and the most purely enjoyable experiences of my life.

For once, as a journalist, I was on top of the world – quite literally, and metaphorically too. A life-changing experience, in the end.

The place humbles you. Deeply spiritual. The people lift you. And the silence up there, broken only by yak bells on a rope bridge, is a praceful sound I have never forgotten.