the record of that era, I was aware of a pattern.

The moor was clamped with the cold but I drew out this last moment, savouring its sadness and remembering. I remembered the blonde reporter who complained that Lees was rude to her when she begged him to tell what he really did for the George Medal. I remembered seeing men afraid and my own triumph that they should not mind my seeing. I thought of punch parties on the last nights of winter courses in Glen Nevis and recalled how vin rose can ruin a whisky man....And I saw the stretcher tilting to the vertical as a lower started and the ropes tightened, and the sound of men taking the strain was nylon sliding through leather palms, and gravel ground under boots. And I saw again a mountainside with the long line of the sweep search moving through the heather, and men mounted on the ridges like sentinels, with the antennae of the radio sets whipping the wind.

I thought that it is one thing to be a woman driven to survive despite herself, but it is an entirely different matter when men expose themselves to discomfort, pain and death, not through compulsion but voluntarily, and going out again and again (knowing in every detail what may happen) not to friends, nor lovers nor their own children, but to strangers who have most likely transgressed most of the mountaineering rules in their book.

These man are no larger than life; they have all the vices of ordinary men (but there are times that they are brushed with more than a hint of his splendour); they may be intolerant of ways of life outside the RAF, outside mountain rescue. They have little interest in life on a higher plane, in the citizen's responsibility, in the fate of humanity. Humanity for them is found in a black night and a blizzard and a wind like a beast gone berserk; humanity is two red stars that rise and bow like a tender flower, pointing them to their objective.

A stag roared in the corrie. Violent young animals, I thought and smiled, remembering the wistful words of an older man; violent and young, yes, but at times most compassionate, at times more gentle than a woman...did anything else matter? They were the right men for the job. Return to the RAFMRA Home Page