At Easter 1947 a party of young people were walking over the Glyders in Snowdonia by the track from Nant Peris to Bethesda which goes down the side of the Devil's Kitchen cliffs. They were overtaken by rain and darkness and the party became separated. Some struggled down to Idwal youth hostel but two spent the night under a boulder above the Kitchen an an altitude of approximately 2,250 feet. They were a boy and a girl of roughly the same age.

During the night the boy died. In the morning the girl went on for help, missed the track and fell partway down the cliffs. As she lay on the ledge where she had fallen, she saw the rescuers searching the cwm below and waved to them. The guide, George Dwyer, climbed down and carried her back to the top of the cliff.

This was the first rescue in which I was involved. I handn't been climbing for long and most of my friends were at the same stage. The fact that the girl survived when the boy died aroused our interest, although I don't think we were unduly surprised. We were close enough to the War to remember women in open boats and prison camps. There was talk of subcutaneous fat and those of us who still had puppy fat derived some consolation from the fact that we thought we stood a better chance of survival than men and more slender girls.

In the years that followed I learnt a surprising amount about myself and something about women generally, and men. I learnt a little about the weather, cold and fear. And I saw the effect that panic may have on people who one thought I possessed strong characters. It appears to me that subcutaneous fat was too trivial an explanation for the fact that women suffered less than men from the effects of exposure. Five years after the boy died above the Devil's Kitchen a tragedy occurred on Ben Alder which refuted still further this theory that a layer of fat was responsible for feminine survival.

The Ben Alder accident involved four men and one woman. They were John Black, Sydney Tewnion and his wife Ann, John Bradburn and James Grieve. I had climbed a little with Black and a great deal with Tewnion. With the exception of Grieve they were competent climbers and extremely experienced mountaineers, capable of devising safe and comfortable bivouacs in the most unlikely places and in bad weather. At least four were members of the Glencoe Mountaineering Club, and Black was a member of the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland. Tewnion was probably the strongest member Continue to page 2