I stood on the bridge in a black Glen Coe and listened to the ice breaking and thought about the two men I had just left. There were no stars, no line of mountains against the sky, so the cloud was down. The snow-filled corrie we had descended a few hours ago was hidden, but I saw it again in imagination as it had been in the dusk, with the white hares on top which were fun, and the rotten snow bridges half-way down which were hell - and there were a hundred other times I should remember vividly, which were more sensational, more gay, more infuriating. Like the time Lees pushed me off a ridge to demonstrate how quickly a guide could stop on snow after a fall, or the shockingly inebriated course that went up Snowdon one New Year's Eve, or my being sick in the moonlight on Tower Ridge. But this was the moment that stuck, which I would always remember - with the burn talking under the ice and the light blinking at the moor as the men prepared for bed.

This is the last time, I thought, surrendering to sentiment, to nostalgia, to the love of a love-hate relationship I had suffered for nine years, not with a man so much as an organisation - this is the last time that I will see him take a handful of men and turn them into leaders of mountain rescue teams. The last climb of the last course was over and all the students were dispersed now except Pib - Corporal Pibworth - who was to exchange the frosts of this Scottish winter for the burning rocks of the Yemen where he would take charge of the new Khormaksar team. Poor Pib, I thought, destined for the desert, and (huddling deeper in my duvet) I could do with a little of it now - the desert.

I would come back to Glen Coe - many times - but never again with the RAF. By the time the next course took place, Lees would have left the Service. I wondered idly where we would be, not in a year's time perhaps but in two years - when we were settled. I knew that, whatever happened, mountains would still be the dominant factor in our lives. So, although we loved the Welsh farmhouse, I would not have been greatly surprised to know that, in two years' time, we would have exchanged Wales for the Lakes: guiding in Snowdonia for guiding on Scafell - and that Johnnie would be an instructor for Outward Bound.

Civilian life for him, for both of us (since a woman married to a regular serviceman cannot remain untouched by the Service) would be a new phase. We were in the act of severing ties. Perhaps his greatest achievement in the RAF had been the training of team leaders, which was why this particular night epitomised the end of an era. And because I was a writer, was already writing Continue to page 2