‘Richard, do something interesting with your life.’
There was admonishment in his voice when my old school friend Eddie said this to me. He was telling me off. A reprimand. Maybe even a warning. We were standing outside The Kings Head pub in Cuckfield, West Sussex, just after having said our goodbyes. He said this and then I watched him walk away. My first reaction was irritation. How dare he? Who did he think he was? What made him so perfect that he felt he could pass on advice to me? I walked away in the other direction, pissed off. Even now, it pisses me off a little bit.
I can’t remember exactly when this happened. It was all so long ago. I think it was probably around 1986, which would make us both 21 years old. I remember it being summer? If it was summer 1986, then, in December of that year, I went on to study at International House, Piccadilly for the Preparatory Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). I passed. In January 1987, I bought an inter-rail ticket and travelled to Milan to try to get a job teaching English. I remember I had to travel via Oostende – this was pre-Eurostar. Such was the demand for English by companies in and around Milan in the ’80s that I ended up getting four jobs. I accepted one with Oxford Institutes Italiani, who had schools in Milan and Magenta, and stayed in Italy for the next two years. But that’s another story.
Did Eddie know this when I met him at The Kings Head? If he did, his reprimand was even meaner. Wasn’t travelling to a new country, whose language I didn’t know, and living there for two years, an interesting thing to do? I’d have thought so. Why didn’t he? Or, more realistically, he probably didn’t know. If I knew when I met him at The Kings Head that I was going to study for a TEFL certificate, I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have told him, so maybe I hadn’t yet applied. Or even known about the course. Maybe his parting shot inspired me to search for something interesting to do and, when I found out about the TEFL course, apply for it. Who knows. In any case, it turned out that this would be the last time I ever saw Eddie.
In 1978, I started my third year at Oathall Secondary School in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. I was 13. My class was called 3J1. In the first year, it was 1J1, in the second 2J1, and now 3J1. We were the same group of kids throughout and we were about to start our third year together. We were a tight unit. I remember the names of some of the other kids – Huw Brown, Peter Boyer, Stephen Dewhurst, Ian Pickering (Pickers?), Susan Paternoster (yes, really), Lindsay Whatshername, Judith Thingimijig. It all gets a bit hazy after that. I remember their faces and nicknames better. There was Tuppence (because he was so small), Bogey, Foggy, Chalky. Many years later, I remember wondering how on earth I had got away with five years at school without anyone cottoning on to the fact that they could have called me Dick Skinner.
But, in September 1978, there was a new kid in class, whose name was Eddie Stone. He had joined us from a local prep school called Great Walstead. I’m sure it’s exactly the same now as it was then in small provincial towns that have both state and private schools, but there was a great deal of animosity between us and the posh boys. And Eddie was posh. His family lived in a beautiful 17th century house, called Upper Lodge, in Ardingly, a quiet (and very expensive) village just outside Haywards Heath. I seem to remember his father worked in the City. On his first day at Oathall, Eddie carried a leather satchel and wore grey flannel shorts. Shorts! He had the mickey taken out of him about that for years afterwards. He never lived it down.
For some reason, Eddie was told to sit next to me in registration. For the rest of Secondary school – three years – we sat next to each other in registration from 9-9.25am five days a week. We also sat next to each other in English, Geography and a lot of other classes. I like to think that, because I was probably the first person he got to know when he arrived at Oathall, he naturally gravitated towards me. Wishful thinking. But I do remember hours and hours spent at our pair of desks, listening to white-haired Mr Poulson in his three-piece suit in English classes reading from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Eddie on the right hand side facing forward and me on the left, so that, when we were writing, because Eddie was left handed, we would be facing each other. I can picture Eddie’s handwriting clear as day, even now. We used the same kind of Parker pen.
But the thing that connected us most strongly was our mutual love of the Lake District. In the summer before I started secondary school, my dad and I climbed Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). This was the summer of 1976, the hottest summer on record for years. There was a drought on and water bans were in place everywhere. We took the route via Crib Goch, an arête whose name in Welsh means ‘red ridge’. It’s not for the faint hearted, but I was a fearless 11-year-old.
When we got back down, we went for a swim in a lake because the showers at Pen-y-Pass youth hostel where we were staying were banned. Just as I was about to dive under the water, I felt a sudden rushing, as though a tap had been turned on in my body. It turned out that I had stepped on a broken bottle, which made deep cuts in my big toe and ball of my foot. With no hospitals anywhere nearby, we were told about a convent up in the mountains which had a treatment centre, so my dad drove me there. The nuns told me to stand in a bowl of hot water, which I knew would open up the wound again. I said I didn’t want to, but the nuns told me I had to because they needed to check for broken glass inside my foot. I was terrified, but I did so and the bowl soon turned red with blood. With the all clear, they put butterfly stitches on the cuts, which afterwards felt like the buzzing of a dodgy electrical connection. We drove back home the next day and I have never returned to north Wales since. It felt cursed.
The following year, my dad and I switched our attention to the Lake District. I planned all the routes, wrote the letters to all the youth hostels to book beds, dad signed the cheques. We then spent every one of my school holidays climbing as many of the 214 fells as possible, eventually bagging the last few in the summer of 1981 after my final year at school. On the last climb, we carried a bottle of fizz up and opened it on the summit.
When Eddie arrived at Oathall, I found out that he shared my obsession with all things to do with mountaineering. He had been visiting the Lakes for years with his family, too. When I sat my Geography O level, Eddie and I just happened once again to be sitting next to each other. I opened the paper and saw that one of the questions was all about the geology and agriculture of the Lake District. I looked up at Eddie and we smiled at each other. We both got As. This was the thing that bonded us. For us, mountains were theatres for dreams.
By the end of school, there was a group of us that hung out together: me, Eddie, Steven B, Mark S, Mark T and Neil A. In the summer holidays after school finished, we went on a camping trip in the Ashdown Forest. We had terrible tents and too little food. It was hot. Arguments broke out and we cut short the trip and went home. The next month, we all went on to the local sixth-form college together. On the first morning of sixth form, I went to my registration group and who should be there? Eddie. Once again, we sat next to each other every day for the next two years.
By now, Eddie was a dedicated follower of fashion. At college, he wore Kickers, a mustard-coloured pair of dungarees and Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts. He smoked weed, listened to Bob Marley and the Tom Robinson Band and wore a feather earring in his left ear. He had come a long way from his satchel and shorts. He was cool. Cooler than anyone else. Way cooler than me.
Throughout college, Eddie and I went out with many of the same girls. My first girlfriend was Nicky W, whom I unceremoniously dumped one night at a party. I had no good reason and I’ll never forget the look of hurt on her face when I told her. I regret that. She ended up going out with Eddie. Along the way, we also both went out with Helen M and Jess S.
And then there was Kim, who loved Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan and dressed like a Rolling Stones groupie. I had never met a girl like her before. I didn’t know how to handle her. She blew hot and cold and was hard to read. She had a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to use it. It was years later that I understood all this was just a form of self-defence. She got kicked out of college after only a month due to lack of attendance. The nerve of her.
She, Eddie and I had a Jules et Jim type relationship for a short time but it never really happened between me and Kim. We never got it together. She and Eddie, however, were a perfect match and they had an on-off thing over the next few years. I knew on some level I was jealous. Despite that, Kim and I managed somehow to maintain a friendship, which has lasted to this day, although we haven’t seen each other in a long time.
After college, I drifted. I had failed my A levels badly and didn’t know what to do. I got some casual work in the industrial estate in Haywards Heath. Some of my friends were drifting too. On days off, Steven and I would meet in pubs at lunchtime, play Juno First all afternoon and get drunk. At the local social club, Steven, Neil and I played snooker against people older than us that we used to be afraid of at school. Eddie was no longer around at this time. He had moved to north Wales to become an outward bound instructor. I was impressed. While the rest of us were stumbling around, Eddie seemed to have found the way forward for himself.
I knew I had to get out of Haywards Heath as well. If I stayed any longer, I would never leave, and I didn’t want anything that Haywards Heath had to offer. Out of sheer desperation, one day Mark S and I decided to move to London. It was April 1985. A room had come up in my sister’s friend’s house, which Mark and I shared. I signed up with a temping agency doing soul-destroying jobs and Mark worked long hours as a waiter. Anything to pay the rent.
I have a photograph I took of Eddie sitting opposite me on a London tube train and giving me the V sign. It was definitely taken on the London Underground so it must have been taken after I moved to London. I have no idea why we were together in London or where we were going. No memory at all. Our paths had diverged. He had pursued the path that we had both started as young teenagers in the Lakes, which Eddie had then explored more fully throughout our college years by taking up rock climbing seriously, whereas I had pulled away, moved to London, met a girl and continued to drift for the next year or two.
Then that meeting at The Kings Head in 1987 and his comment that made me bristle so. I seem to remember that, by then, not only was Eddie happily working as an outward bound instructor in north Wales, but was also sharing a cottage with his girlfriend. It sounded idyllic. I still hadn’t done anything with my life, yet his seemed to be all sorted out. Maybe my irritation was about my dissatisfaction with myself rather than with Eddie’s words. Yes, that’s it. His comment had touched a nerve. Maybe he knew me better than I realised. Maybe his comment was an encouragement, not a criticism. I had almost certainly misjudged him.
The next few years for me were TEFL teaching in Italy for two years, then back to England to study for an English Literature degree at Sussex University, something I had decided to try for while in Italy. At 24, I had got in as a mature student rather than on my terrible science A level grades. Looking back, it was a huge moment in my life. It was the first time that I’d felt a sense of direction and purpose. I savoured every moment of my degree. I didn’t know what the outcome would be, but I knew I was finally on the right path.
A few months after I finished studying at Sussex, I went back to Haywards Heath to visit my dad and step mum for the weekend. In the kitchen, drinking tea, my step mum told me that Eddie had died in a climbing accident.
What?
The details were sketchy, she said. Apparently, Eddie had gone free climbing solo, without telling anyone, including his girlfriend, where he was going or when he would be back. All this was highly unusual for any experienced climber, but especially for someone who had been trained as an outward bound instructor. I recall understanding that, because of all this, it was many days before anyone found his body.
Why hadn’t he used ropes? Why go out alone? Obviously he had put himself in such a position that if he made any kind of mistake, even a tiny one, the consequences would be fatal. Why? Knowing Eddie as I thought I did, I just didn’t understand what had driven him to put himself in such a precarious, dangerous place.
I wrote a letter of condolence to his parents but never received a reply. Then I heard a rumour that the whole family had moved away suddenly. Weirdly, I remember his older sister Emma and his younger sister Charlotte really well. The grief was too unbearable, I presumed. I don’t think I felt grief, exactly. I was shocked and confused. So young. Why? Was he unhappy? Did he go out knowing he wouldn’t come back? All the signs were there – leaving secretly without telling anyone, climbing solo with no rope. Madness. Or not? Did he want to die? Eddie was always streets ahead of me in terms of being more certain about life choices. Was he ahead of me in this, too?
All I had were questions that would never be answered. No one was there at the moment of death to record the exact circumstances. Eddie’s death has haunted me all my life but I’ve had to learn how to accept that there will never be any answers. All that remains of him are a few snaps that have changed colour like autumn leaves, some shaky memories and that awful final image in my mind’s eye of him losing contact with the rock face, arms flailing, legs bicycling, floating through air.
On 21st August 2024, an acquaintance of mine messaged me to tell me that a close mutual friend of ours, Adrian, had died in a climbing accident in Wales.
Fuck!
I can’t believe it. This can’t be happening. Ade was a fully fit and healthy man. How on earth could he have died? My acquaintance didn’t know anything, only that he had fallen. Over the next 48 hours, I remained in a state of shock. It was so surprising that I would never see him again. Slowly, details emerged. It turned out that Ade was climbing Yr Wyddfa and that he was alone. Later, I found out that he was actually on Crib Goch when he fell. Two other climbers saw him fall and it was them who called the Mountain Rescue Team. Apparently, it took the MRT two hours to get there but I still didn’t know if they found Ade dead or alive.
The nearest MRT is in Llanberis. From there, it is a five-mile drive to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. Crib Goch is at 923m. The average time it takes to climb Yr Wyddfa from Pen-y-Pass via Crib Goch is four hours. The time it took for the Llanberis MRT to muster, drive to Pen-y-Pass and then get to where Ade was on Crib Goch was just two hours, which is an absolutely superhuman effort. It struck me that the only way the two other climbers could have known that it only took them two hours to get to Ade was if they had stayed with him. That they stayed with Ade gave me some comfort but I was still desperate to know what happened.
I first met Ade (whose surname is Cross) in 2007, when he enrolled onto the Creative & Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths University, London, where I was a tutor. Since finishing university in 1992, I had gone on to complete a Masters in Creative Writing and then managed to publish a novel. On the back of that, in 2002, I landed a job teaching at Goldsmiths. I was assigned as Adrian’s one-to-one mentor.
The first thing I noticed about Ade was that he and his writing were very funny. And scatty. He wrote hilarious and surreal stories about things like trying to catch rattlesnakes in parks. We became fast friends and I gradually learned more about him. He had studied Philosophy at Lancaster University and was now working as an Education Officer for refugees for Wandsworth Council. Wow, I thought, that’s a worthy job. I quickly realised that Ade was a highly-principled man with solid socialist leanings and a strong sense of social justice. He had spent the summer of 2016 in Palestine helping to rebuild housing that had been destroyed. How many other people did I know who would do that? Not many. No one, actually, including me.
In 2011, I started a live monthly reading series called Vanguard Readings. Ade was its number one fan. He would come along to every event without fail. He was so reliable and trustworthy that I asked him to host some of the events. He stepped up to the mark with relish and his introductions to the readers became legendary for their dry wit and eccentricity.
In 2014, I formed a publishing branch of the reading series, called Vanguard Editions. Our first publication was an anthology of short stories. I asked Ade and a friend of ours, Des, to be the editors. They both enthusiastically agreed and did a great job. Ade and Des, along with another Goldsmiths graduate, Kat, became Vanguard’s Trustees.
In 2013, myself, Ade, my climbing partner Sam, my wife and my wife’s friend went on a walking trip to the Lake District. We stayed near Bowness and climbed Loughrigg and Bowfell. I’d never seen Ade happier. But this was peanuts for him. He used his holiday time to go on very active, sometimes extreme trips. He went whitewater rafting in the croc-infested Zambezi, on a long sledding trip north of the Arctic Circle in the depths of winter. He would travel alone to the Cairngorms and traipse around them with nothing but a bivouac. No tent. No phone signal. This last trip alarmed me. I’ve been walking in the Highlands and I know how wild they are. One foot in a rabbit hole and you’re screwed. I urged him not to go out solo like that again without some way of being in contact.
Over the years, I saw Ade very regularly at the Vanguard Trustee meetings as well as readings, launches and other events. The last time I saw him was in April 2024 when he agreed to sit with me all day at the Poetry Fair in London, where Vanguard had a stall of books to sell. I asked him for his help and he gave up his whole Saturday, without question, to support a press he wholeheartedly believed in. That was the measure of the man.
In the weeks that followed Ade’s death, I waited for more news. I decided I would attend his inquest. I kept an eye on the website for the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd, but nothing came up for months. Ade’s funeral was in September but, I was away and couldn’t go. I was really gutted that I couldn’t get to say my farewells. To my dismay, I was out of the country when his inquest was finally announced. Des, however, was able to attend and he passed on to me some details that were outlined at the inquest.
Apparently, Ade had arrived at the B&B in Betws-y-Coed where he was staying at around 7pm on Friday 16th August. The following morning, he exchanged pleasantries with the other guests, commenting on what a lovely day it was, such good weather for walking. He seemed happy. He left at around 8am.
He was seen falling from the heights of Crib Goch by another walker at about 11am. The rescue services were called. They found him with severe injuries consistent with a tumbling fall from height. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Close by his body were his notebook and a novel, Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. In his pocket were some fridge magnets, which said ‘I climbed Snowdon’. The coroner said his boots had a good tread and were suitable for the terrain.
I winced at the title of that book. It was so typical of Ade that he would be carrying a hefty novel with him up a mountain; not only that, but a hefty Polish novel in translation by a Nobel-prize-winning author. He was a ferocious reader. But that title. Then there was Crib Goch, the red ridge. I googled pictures of it and couldn’t believe how perilous it looked. I couldn’t believe I’d climbed it aged 11. Perhaps that’s the best age to do it, when you have no inkling of the danger. Did Ade have that inkling? Any fear? I doubt it. He was a maverick, never one to turn down a challenge.
So, it was a solo walker who spotted him, not a pair. And the words ‘a tumbling fall from height’ suggests the fall was sheer and that Ade had died quickly, but who knows? No one, and no one ever will. I just hope he died quickly, with little or no pain.
Those magnets raise a question. All common sense would say that he must have bought them at the shop on the summit, which suggests that he was on his way down when he fell. But Ade fell at 11am. I’m assuming Ade caught a bus, or took a taxi, from Betws-y-Coed to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. That journey would have taken about 20 minutes. From there, the average time to the summit of Yr Wyddfa is four hours. So if Ade had caught the bus, climbed to the summit, bought the magnets and then was on his way down, all in just three hours, he must have been moving very fast. My feeling is that he was on his way up. If so, the fact that he took three hours to get to Crib Goch would fit in with the average four-hour journey time to the summit. If that is the case, where did he get the magnets? I’ll never be sure.
So that was the end of the road for me. Ade had died in a tragic mountaineering accident. Just like that. I was left with a mountain of good memories of a kind man, funny and original, clumsy and loveable. Gone too young. The same age as me. His boots with a ‘good tread’ making one wrong move amongst the rocks on the red ridge, then a terrible chute through air, floating.
The news about Ade immediately triggered memories of Eddie and, for those first few days after Ade’s shocking death, I was also transported back in time to Eddie’s death 32 years earlier. While I waited for further news about Ade, I started to ransack my memories about Eddie and his death. All I knew was that he went free climbing solo without telling anyone and that it was a few days before his body was found. I needed to find out more.
On Facebook, I reconnected with Mark T and Steven B. I asked if they had any information about Eddie’s death but they only knew as much as I did. I asked Kim for her memories and stories about Eddie and she sent me photos of us all at college and told me what she remembered. We talked about Eddie a great deal but, she said, she had ‘virtually no memory’ of him. I understood. For me, too, it was hard to picture what I did with Eddie. We spent so much time together between the ages of 13 and 19 but I can remember precious little about him.
The fact that he was alone, used no ropes and told no one where he was going always perturbed me. Had he gone out that day knowing he would not come back? When I tentatively put that to Kim, she was adamant that there was no question of suicide. ‘No never!! Hubris might have killed him but in a million years he would never have taken his own life,’ she said. But Kim went on to say that Eddie had once said to her that he knew he would die young. He died at 27 years old, the same age as Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt and Amy. Eddie always had the whiff of a rock star about him.
I googled endlessly about climbers in north Wales but came up blank. Eddie died in 1992, just pre-internet, so there was next to nothing about him online. And then I found a quote by a climber, who said, ‘I watched Ed Stone down climb Axle Attack taking his gear out on the way.’ That was tantalising. It sounded as though the climber was impressed. Then I found another reference to Eddie by another climber, who just said that he remembered ‘going back many times to Wales to stay with and climb with the late Ed Stone.’ To hear Eddie being called Ed by these people was strange for me. I realised that these guys probably knew Eddie better than I did. They had a new name for him. Eddie was reborn as Ed in north Wales. He’d found his true place and calling.
I wrote to the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd asking for a Record of Inquest for Eddie. The only information I could give them was his name, that he died somewhere in north Wales and the year of his death. They couldn’t find anything with so little to go on. I was at a dead end.
Then Kim sent some more photos. She had been digging a bit deeper and had found a photo of Eddie roped up on a rock face in mid-climb. He’s wearing grey lycra pants and a peach-coloured T shirt. It was terribly moving to see him in action like this. So young. Kim had also found the original clipping from the local paper, the Mid Sussex Times, about Eddie’s death. This turned out to be the crucial turning point in my effort to discover the facts. It said:
A FORMER Mid Sussex man has been killed in a climbing accident in Wales.
Psychology student Edward Stone, 27, died in a fall on Snowdon while climbing solo.
Mr Stone, son of Judith and Reg Stone, who used to live in Upper Lodge, Ardingly, was a mature student at Bangor University. He had lived in Wales for some years.
A keen and experienced climber, he had set out on the expedition fully equipped on Friday. Royal Air Force rescue crews and the Llanberis Mountain Rescue team discovered his body the following day. The cause of the accident is unknown.
The funeral will be held today (Friday) at Llanberis parish church.
The first detail that leapt out at me was that he had died on Yr Wyddfa, as Ade had. No way. Then I noticed the words ‘fully equipped’. So he wasn’t free climbing. Also, the fact that he was found the following day meant that someone raised the alarm quickly after Eddie failed to return home that night. Finally, that the Llanberis MRT found him so quickly suggests they knew where to look, which in turn suggests that whoever raised the alarm knew where Eddie had gone. All this refutes any idea that Eddie had acted recklessly that day to ensure he wouldn’t return, which is a source of great comfort.
The clipping showed me that I had believed a false story about Eddie’s death all these years. He wasn’t free climbing at all, so why had I believed he was? Who told me? How did I pick that up? And it wasn’t days before his body was found – it was found pretty fast, actually. Far from being a solitary, lonely, possibly suicidal event, it was instead a tragic, unexpected accident and the alarm was raised very quickly by someone close to him.
Kim had added the date by hand to the clipping – October 1992. With this less vague date, plus the names of Eddie’s parents and other information, I wrote once again to the Coroner’s Office. This time, after a week or two, I received the Record of Inquest for Eddie, which provided even more clues. It said his injuries were:
1a) Acute cardio-respiratory failure due to
1b) Fracture dislocation of the neck due to
1c) Consistent with a fall from a height
2 Diffuse subarachnoid haemorrhage and fracture of skull
A quick google revealed that a ‘subarachnoid haemorrhage’ was usually the result of a blow to the head and a ‘fracture dislocation of the neck’ was usually the result of a fall from a significant height. This information, plus the fractured skull, suggests that Eddie, when he fell, landed on his head.
The Record also said that Eddie’s body was found at the base of Trinity Gully. I researched this online and found images of Trinity Face – an enormous, sheer rock face hanging just below the summit of Yr Wyddfa that looked like a miniature version of the north face of the Eiger. There are four routes up Trinity Face: Great Gully, Little Gully, Left-hand Trinity and Central Trinity. ‘Trinity Gully’ didn’t tell me which route exactly Eddie was on at the time of his death but all four, more-or-less vertical, ascents looked terrifying.
But what I still struggled with was why the ropes hadn’t saved him when he lost contact with the rock. I presume he had hooked himself onto crabs at pretty tight, regular intervals so that, if he did fall, he wouldn’t have fallen far or harmed himself. But the injuries Eddie sustained suggest a fall from a great height, which doesn’t tally with that idea. Once again, I will never have an answer to this question. No one was there to witness the fall. Eddie’s secret will remain with him forever.
Eddie’s death is a distant memory for me, and an unreliable one, it turns out. I had misremembered him, and therefore misrepresented him, for years. I can’t say with certainty that I knew Eddie well. Did I ever? Those teenage years are tumultuous. You go through so many changes – layers, even – so quickly, make bad decisions, mistreat people. Ade’s death is brand new in relative terms, more raw, but I knew what kind of person Ade was from the off. Soulful, good-natured. They were different characters from different moments in my life but, because they were both friends who died on the same mountain, they will be forever tethered in my mind. But what was the tether? A leyline? A tightrope? Ariadne’s thread? Their deaths were caused by tiny errors, a boot put in slightly the wrong place, a fingertip in a fingerhold not exerting quite enough pressure. Narrow margins. I had also passed over that terrain and mercifully had escaped with nothing but cuts in the foot. I was lucky.
I want to end this piece with something I discovered during those many days researching Eddie’s death. I found out that, following Eddie’s death, a climber friend of his (or friends, I don’t know) put up and named a new route after him. The route is an E7 Trad climb on a mountain called Gallt yr Ogof, which is approximately seven miles north east of Yr Wyddfa. The route is called Heart of Stone. Far from being forgotten, Eddie will always be remembered by those who knew him best.
There was admonishment in his voice when my old school friend Eddie said this to me. He was telling me off. A reprimand. Maybe even a warning. We were standing outside The Kings Head pub in Cuckfield, West Sussex, just after having said our goodbyes. He said this and then I watched him walk away. My first reaction was irritation. How dare he? Who did he think he was? What made him so perfect that he felt he could pass on advice to me? I walked away in the other direction, pissed off. Even now, it pisses me off a little bit.
I can’t remember exactly when this happened. It was all so long ago. I think it was probably around 1986, which would make us both 21 years old. I remember it being summer? If it was summer 1986, then, in December of that year, I went on to study at International House, Piccadilly for the Preparatory Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). I passed. In January 1987, I bought an inter-rail ticket and travelled to Milan to try to get a job teaching English. I remember I had to travel via Oostende – this was pre-Eurostar. Such was the demand for English by companies in and around Milan in the ’80s that I ended up getting four jobs. I accepted one with Oxford Institutes Italiani, who had schools in Milan and Magenta, and stayed in Italy for the next two years. But that’s another story.
Did Eddie know this when I met him at The Kings Head? If he did, his reprimand was even meaner. Wasn’t travelling to a new country, whose language I didn’t know, and living there for two years, an interesting thing to do? I’d have thought so. Why didn’t he? Or, more realistically, he probably didn’t know. If I knew when I met him at The Kings Head that I was going to study for a TEFL certificate, I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have told him, so maybe I hadn’t yet applied. Or even known about the course. Maybe his parting shot inspired me to search for something interesting to do and, when I found out about the TEFL course, apply for it. Who knows. In any case, it turned out that this would be the last time I ever saw Eddie.
In 1978, I started my third year at Oathall Secondary School in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. I was 13. My class was called 3J1. In the first year, it was 1J1, in the second 2J1, and now 3J1. We were the same group of kids throughout and we were about to start our third year together. We were a tight unit. I remember the names of some of the other kids – Huw Brown, Peter Boyer, Stephen Dewhurst, Ian Pickering (Pickers?), Susan Paternoster (yes, really), Lindsay Whatshername, Judith Thingimijig. It all gets a bit hazy after that. I remember their faces and nicknames better. There was Tuppence (because he was so small), Bogey, Foggy, Chalky. Many years later, I remember wondering how on earth I had got away with five years at school without anyone cottoning on to the fact that they could have called me Dick Skinner.
But, in September 1978, there was a new kid in class, whose name was Eddie Stone. He had joined us from a local prep school called Great Walstead. I’m sure it’s exactly the same now as it was then in small provincial towns that have both state and private schools, but there was a great deal of animosity between us and the posh boys. And Eddie was posh. His family lived in a beautiful 17th century house, called Upper Lodge, in Ardingly, a quiet (and very expensive) village just outside Haywards Heath. I seem to remember his father worked in the City. On his first day at Oathall, Eddie carried a leather satchel and wore grey flannel shorts. Shorts! He had the mickey taken out of him about that for years afterwards. He never lived it down.
For some reason, Eddie was told to sit next to me in registration. For the rest of Secondary school – three years – we sat next to each other in registration from 9-9.25am five days a week. We also sat next to each other in English, Geography and a lot of other classes. I like to think that, because I was probably the first person he got to know when he arrived at Oathall, he naturally gravitated towards me. Wishful thinking. But I do remember hours and hours spent at our pair of desks, listening to white-haired Mr Poulson in his three-piece suit in English classes reading from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Eddie on the right hand side facing forward and me on the left, so that, when we were writing, because Eddie was left handed, we would be facing each other. I can picture Eddie’s handwriting clear as day, even now. We used the same kind of Parker pen.
But the thing that connected us most strongly was our mutual love of the Lake District. In the summer before I started secondary school, my dad and I climbed Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). This was the summer of 1976, the hottest summer on record for years. There was a drought on and water bans were in place everywhere. We took the route via Crib Goch, an arête whose name in Welsh means ‘red ridge’. It’s not for the faint hearted, but I was a fearless 11-year-old.
When we got back down, we went for a swim in a lake because the showers at Pen-y-Pass youth hostel where we were staying were banned. Just as I was about to dive under the water, I felt a sudden rushing, as though a tap had been turned on in my body. It turned out that I had stepped on a broken bottle, which made deep cuts in my big toe and ball of my foot. With no hospitals anywhere nearby, we were told about a convent up in the mountains which had a treatment centre, so my dad drove me there. The nuns told me to stand in a bowl of hot water, which I knew would open up the wound again. I said I didn’t want to, but the nuns told me I had to because they needed to check for broken glass inside my foot. I was terrified, but I did so and the bowl soon turned red with blood. With the all clear, they put butterfly stitches on the cuts, which afterwards felt like the buzzing of a dodgy electrical connection. We drove back home the next day and I have never returned to north Wales since. It felt cursed.
The following year, my dad and I switched our attention to the Lake District. I planned all the routes, wrote the letters to all the youth hostels to book beds, dad signed the cheques. We then spent every one of my school holidays climbing as many of the 214 fells as possible, eventually bagging the last few in the summer of 1981 after my final year at school. On the last climb, we carried a bottle of fizz up and opened it on the summit.
When Eddie arrived at Oathall, I found out that he shared my obsession with all things to do with mountaineering. He had been visiting the Lakes for years with his family, too. When I sat my Geography O level, Eddie and I just happened once again to be sitting next to each other. I opened the paper and saw that one of the questions was all about the geology and agriculture of the Lake District. I looked up at Eddie and we smiled at each other. We both got As. This was the thing that bonded us. For us, mountains were theatres for dreams.
By the end of school, there was a group of us that hung out together: me, Eddie, Steven B, Mark S, Mark T and Neil A. In the summer holidays after school finished, we went on a camping trip in the Ashdown Forest. We had terrible tents and too little food. It was hot. Arguments broke out and we cut short the trip and went home. The next month, we all went on to the local sixth-form college together. On the first morning of sixth form, I went to my registration group and who should be there? Eddie. Once again, we sat next to each other every day for the next two years.
By now, Eddie was a dedicated follower of fashion. At college, he wore Kickers, a mustard-coloured pair of dungarees and Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts. He smoked weed, listened to Bob Marley and the Tom Robinson Band and wore a feather earring in his left ear. He had come a long way from his satchel and shorts. He was cool. Cooler than anyone else. Way cooler than me.
Throughout college, Eddie and I went out with many of the same girls. My first girlfriend was Nicky W, whom I unceremoniously dumped one night at a party. I had no good reason and I’ll never forget the look of hurt on her face when I told her. I regret that. She ended up going out with Eddie. Along the way, we also both went out with Helen M and Jess S.
And then there was Kim, who loved Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan and dressed like a Rolling Stones groupie. I had never met a girl like her before. I didn’t know how to handle her. She blew hot and cold and was hard to read. She had a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to use it. It was years later that I understood all this was just a form of self-defence. She got kicked out of college after only a month due to lack of attendance. The nerve of her.
She, Eddie and I had a Jules et Jim type relationship for a short time but it never really happened between me and Kim. We never got it together. She and Eddie, however, were a perfect match and they had an on-off thing over the next few years. I knew on some level I was jealous. Despite that, Kim and I managed somehow to maintain a friendship, which has lasted to this day, although we haven’t seen each other in a long time.
After college, I drifted. I had failed my A levels badly and didn’t know what to do. I got some casual work in the industrial estate in Haywards Heath. Some of my friends were drifting too. On days off, Steven and I would meet in pubs at lunchtime, play Juno First all afternoon and get drunk. At the local social club, Steven, Neil and I played snooker against people older than us that we used to be afraid of at school. Eddie was no longer around at this time. He had moved to north Wales to become an outward bound instructor. I was impressed. While the rest of us were stumbling around, Eddie seemed to have found the way forward for himself.
I knew I had to get out of Haywards Heath as well. If I stayed any longer, I would never leave, and I didn’t want anything that Haywards Heath had to offer. Out of sheer desperation, one day Mark S and I decided to move to London. It was April 1985. A room had come up in my sister’s friend’s house, which Mark and I shared. I signed up with a temping agency doing soul-destroying jobs and Mark worked long hours as a waiter. Anything to pay the rent.
I have a photograph I took of Eddie sitting opposite me on a London tube train and giving me the V sign. It was definitely taken on the London Underground so it must have been taken after I moved to London. I have no idea why we were together in London or where we were going. No memory at all. Our paths had diverged. He had pursued the path that we had both started as young teenagers in the Lakes, which Eddie had then explored more fully throughout our college years by taking up rock climbing seriously, whereas I had pulled away, moved to London, met a girl and continued to drift for the next year or two.
Then that meeting at The Kings Head in 1987 and his comment that made me bristle so. I seem to remember that, by then, not only was Eddie happily working as an outward bound instructor in north Wales, but was also sharing a cottage with his girlfriend. It sounded idyllic. I still hadn’t done anything with my life, yet his seemed to be all sorted out. Maybe my irritation was about my dissatisfaction with myself rather than with Eddie’s words. Yes, that’s it. His comment had touched a nerve. Maybe he knew me better than I realised. Maybe his comment was an encouragement, not a criticism. I had almost certainly misjudged him.
The next few years for me were TEFL teaching in Italy for two years, then back to England to study for an English Literature degree at Sussex University, something I had decided to try for while in Italy. At 24, I had got in as a mature student rather than on my terrible science A level grades. Looking back, it was a huge moment in my life. It was the first time that I’d felt a sense of direction and purpose. I savoured every moment of my degree. I didn’t know what the outcome would be, but I knew I was finally on the right path.
A few months after I finished studying at Sussex, I went back to Haywards Heath to visit my dad and step mum for the weekend. In the kitchen, drinking tea, my step mum told me that Eddie had died in a climbing accident.
What?
The details were sketchy, she said. Apparently, Eddie had gone free climbing solo, without telling anyone, including his girlfriend, where he was going or when he would be back. All this was highly unusual for any experienced climber, but especially for someone who had been trained as an outward bound instructor. I recall understanding that, because of all this, it was many days before anyone found his body.
Why hadn’t he used ropes? Why go out alone? Obviously he had put himself in such a position that if he made any kind of mistake, even a tiny one, the consequences would be fatal. Why? Knowing Eddie as I thought I did, I just didn’t understand what had driven him to put himself in such a precarious, dangerous place.
I wrote a letter of condolence to his parents but never received a reply. Then I heard a rumour that the whole family had moved away suddenly. Weirdly, I remember his older sister Emma and his younger sister Charlotte really well. The grief was too unbearable, I presumed. I don’t think I felt grief, exactly. I was shocked and confused. So young. Why? Was he unhappy? Did he go out knowing he wouldn’t come back? All the signs were there – leaving secretly without telling anyone, climbing solo with no rope. Madness. Or not? Did he want to die? Eddie was always streets ahead of me in terms of being more certain about life choices. Was he ahead of me in this, too?
All I had were questions that would never be answered. No one was there at the moment of death to record the exact circumstances. Eddie’s death has haunted me all my life but I’ve had to learn how to accept that there will never be any answers. All that remains of him are a few snaps that have changed colour like autumn leaves, some shaky memories and that awful final image in my mind’s eye of him losing contact with the rock face, arms flailing, legs bicycling, floating through air.
On 21st August 2024, an acquaintance of mine messaged me to tell me that a close mutual friend of ours, Adrian, had died in a climbing accident in Wales.
Fuck!
I can’t believe it. This can’t be happening. Ade was a fully fit and healthy man. How on earth could he have died? My acquaintance didn’t know anything, only that he had fallen. Over the next 48 hours, I remained in a state of shock. It was so surprising that I would never see him again. Slowly, details emerged. It turned out that Ade was climbing Yr Wyddfa and that he was alone. Later, I found out that he was actually on Crib Goch when he fell. Two other climbers saw him fall and it was them who called the Mountain Rescue Team. Apparently, it took the MRT two hours to get there but I still didn’t know if they found Ade dead or alive.
The nearest MRT is in Llanberis. From there, it is a five-mile drive to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. Crib Goch is at 923m. The average time it takes to climb Yr Wyddfa from Pen-y-Pass via Crib Goch is four hours. The time it took for the Llanberis MRT to muster, drive to Pen-y-Pass and then get to where Ade was on Crib Goch was just two hours, which is an absolutely superhuman effort. It struck me that the only way the two other climbers could have known that it only took them two hours to get to Ade was if they had stayed with him. That they stayed with Ade gave me some comfort but I was still desperate to know what happened.
I first met Ade (whose surname is Cross) in 2007, when he enrolled onto the Creative & Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths University, London, where I was a tutor. Since finishing university in 1992, I had gone on to complete a Masters in Creative Writing and then managed to publish a novel. On the back of that, in 2002, I landed a job teaching at Goldsmiths. I was assigned as Adrian’s one-to-one mentor.
The first thing I noticed about Ade was that he and his writing were very funny. And scatty. He wrote hilarious and surreal stories about things like trying to catch rattlesnakes in parks. We became fast friends and I gradually learned more about him. He had studied Philosophy at Lancaster University and was now working as an Education Officer for refugees for Wandsworth Council. Wow, I thought, that’s a worthy job. I quickly realised that Ade was a highly-principled man with solid socialist leanings and a strong sense of social justice. He had spent the summer of 2016 in Palestine helping to rebuild housing that had been destroyed. How many other people did I know who would do that? Not many. No one, actually, including me.
In 2011, I started a live monthly reading series called Vanguard Readings. Ade was its number one fan. He would come along to every event without fail. He was so reliable and trustworthy that I asked him to host some of the events. He stepped up to the mark with relish and his introductions to the readers became legendary for their dry wit and eccentricity.
In 2014, I formed a publishing branch of the reading series, called Vanguard Editions. Our first publication was an anthology of short stories. I asked Ade and a friend of ours, Des, to be the editors. They both enthusiastically agreed and did a great job. Ade and Des, along with another Goldsmiths graduate, Kat, became Vanguard’s Trustees.
In 2013, myself, Ade, my climbing partner Sam, my wife and my wife’s friend went on a walking trip to the Lake District. We stayed near Bowness and climbed Loughrigg and Bowfell. I’d never seen Ade happier. But this was peanuts for him. He used his holiday time to go on very active, sometimes extreme trips. He went whitewater rafting in the croc-infested Zambezi, on a long sledding trip north of the Arctic Circle in the depths of winter. He would travel alone to the Cairngorms and traipse around them with nothing but a bivouac. No tent. No phone signal. This last trip alarmed me. I’ve been walking in the Highlands and I know how wild they are. One foot in a rabbit hole and you’re screwed. I urged him not to go out solo like that again without some way of being in contact.
Over the years, I saw Ade very regularly at the Vanguard Trustee meetings as well as readings, launches and other events. The last time I saw him was in April 2024 when he agreed to sit with me all day at the Poetry Fair in London, where Vanguard had a stall of books to sell. I asked him for his help and he gave up his whole Saturday, without question, to support a press he wholeheartedly believed in. That was the measure of the man.
In the weeks that followed Ade’s death, I waited for more news. I decided I would attend his inquest. I kept an eye on the website for the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd, but nothing came up for months. Ade’s funeral was in September but, I was away and couldn’t go. I was really gutted that I couldn’t get to say my farewells. To my dismay, I was out of the country when his inquest was finally announced. Des, however, was able to attend and he passed on to me some details that were outlined at the inquest.
Apparently, Ade had arrived at the B&B in Betws-y-Coed where he was staying at around 7pm on Friday 16th August. The following morning, he exchanged pleasantries with the other guests, commenting on what a lovely day it was, such good weather for walking. He seemed happy. He left at around 8am.
He was seen falling from the heights of Crib Goch by another walker at about 11am. The rescue services were called. They found him with severe injuries consistent with a tumbling fall from height. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Close by his body were his notebook and a novel, Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. In his pocket were some fridge magnets, which said ‘I climbed Snowdon’. The coroner said his boots had a good tread and were suitable for the terrain.
I winced at the title of that book. It was so typical of Ade that he would be carrying a hefty novel with him up a mountain; not only that, but a hefty Polish novel in translation by a Nobel-prize-winning author. He was a ferocious reader. But that title. Then there was Crib Goch, the red ridge. I googled pictures of it and couldn’t believe how perilous it looked. I couldn’t believe I’d climbed it aged 11. Perhaps that’s the best age to do it, when you have no inkling of the danger. Did Ade have that inkling? Any fear? I doubt it. He was a maverick, never one to turn down a challenge.
So, it was a solo walker who spotted him, not a pair. And the words ‘a tumbling fall from height’ suggests the fall was sheer and that Ade had died quickly, but who knows? No one, and no one ever will. I just hope he died quickly, with little or no pain.
Those magnets raise a question. All common sense would say that he must have bought them at the shop on the summit, which suggests that he was on his way down when he fell. But Ade fell at 11am. I’m assuming Ade caught a bus, or took a taxi, from Betws-y-Coed to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. That journey would have taken about 20 minutes. From there, the average time to the summit of Yr Wyddfa is four hours. So if Ade had caught the bus, climbed to the summit, bought the magnets and then was on his way down, all in just three hours, he must have been moving very fast. My feeling is that he was on his way up. If so, the fact that he took three hours to get to Crib Goch would fit in with the average four-hour journey time to the summit. If that is the case, where did he get the magnets? I’ll never be sure.
So that was the end of the road for me. Ade had died in a tragic mountaineering accident. Just like that. I was left with a mountain of good memories of a kind man, funny and original, clumsy and loveable. Gone too young. The same age as me. His boots with a ‘good tread’ making one wrong move amongst the rocks on the red ridge, then a terrible chute through air, floating.
The news about Ade immediately triggered memories of Eddie and, for those first few days after Ade’s shocking death, I was also transported back in time to Eddie’s death 32 years earlier. While I waited for further news about Ade, I started to ransack my memories about Eddie and his death. All I knew was that he went free climbing solo without telling anyone and that it was a few days before his body was found. I needed to find out more.
On Facebook, I reconnected with Mark T and Steven B. I asked if they had any information about Eddie’s death but they only knew as much as I did. I asked Kim for her memories and stories about Eddie and she sent me photos of us all at college and told me what she remembered. We talked about Eddie a great deal but, she said, she had ‘virtually no memory’ of him. I understood. For me, too, it was hard to picture what I did with Eddie. We spent so much time together between the ages of 13 and 19 but I can remember precious little about him.
The fact that he was alone, used no ropes and told no one where he was going always perturbed me. Had he gone out that day knowing he would not come back? When I tentatively put that to Kim, she was adamant that there was no question of suicide. ‘No never!! Hubris might have killed him but in a million years he would never have taken his own life,’ she said. But Kim went on to say that Eddie had once said to her that he knew he would die young. He died at 27 years old, the same age as Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt and Amy. Eddie always had the whiff of a rock star about him.
I googled endlessly about climbers in north Wales but came up blank. Eddie died in 1992, just pre-internet, so there was next to nothing about him online. And then I found a quote by a climber, who said, ‘I watched Ed Stone down climb Axle Attack taking his gear out on the way.’ That was tantalising. It sounded as though the climber was impressed. Then I found another reference to Eddie by another climber, who just said that he remembered ‘going back many times to Wales to stay with and climb with the late Ed Stone.’ To hear Eddie being called Ed by these people was strange for me. I realised that these guys probably knew Eddie better than I did. They had a new name for him. Eddie was reborn as Ed in north Wales. He’d found his true place and calling.
I wrote to the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd asking for a Record of Inquest for Eddie. The only information I could give them was his name, that he died somewhere in north Wales and the year of his death. They couldn’t find anything with so little to go on. I was at a dead end.
Then Kim sent some more photos. She had been digging a bit deeper and had found a photo of Eddie roped up on a rock face in mid-climb. He’s wearing grey lycra pants and a peach-coloured T shirt. It was terribly moving to see him in action like this. So young. Kim had also found the original clipping from the local paper, the Mid Sussex Times, about Eddie’s death. This turned out to be the crucial turning point in my effort to discover the facts. It said:
A FORMER Mid Sussex man has been killed in a climbing accident in Wales.
Psychology student Edward Stone, 27, died in a fall on Snowdon while climbing solo.
Mr Stone, son of Judith and Reg Stone, who used to live in Upper Lodge, Ardingly, was a mature student at Bangor University. He had lived in Wales for some years.
A keen and experienced climber, he had set out on the expedition fully equipped on Friday. Royal Air Force rescue crews and the Llanberis Mountain Rescue team discovered his body the following day. The cause of the accident is unknown.
The funeral will be held today (Friday) at Llanberis parish church.
The first detail that leapt out at me was that he had died on Yr Wyddfa, as Ade had. No way. Then I noticed the words ‘fully equipped’. So he wasn’t free climbing. Also, the fact that he was found the following day meant that someone raised the alarm quickly after Eddie failed to return home that night. Finally, that the Llanberis MRT found him so quickly suggests they knew where to look, which in turn suggests that whoever raised the alarm knew where Eddie had gone. All this refutes any idea that Eddie had acted recklessly that day to ensure he wouldn’t return, which is a source of great comfort.
The clipping showed me that I had believed a false story about Eddie’s death all these years. He wasn’t free climbing at all, so why had I believed he was? Who told me? How did I pick that up? And it wasn’t days before his body was found – it was found pretty fast, actually. Far from being a solitary, lonely, possibly suicidal event, it was instead a tragic, unexpected accident and the alarm was raised very quickly by someone close to him.
Kim had added the date by hand to the clipping – October 1992. With this less vague date, plus the names of Eddie’s parents and other information, I wrote once again to the Coroner’s Office. This time, after a week or two, I received the Record of Inquest for Eddie, which provided even more clues. It said his injuries were:
1a) Acute cardio-respiratory failure due to
1b) Fracture dislocation of the neck due to
1c) Consistent with a fall from a height
2 Diffuse subarachnoid haemorrhage and fracture of skull
A quick google revealed that a ‘subarachnoid haemorrhage’ was usually the result of a blow to the head and a ‘fracture dislocation of the neck’ was usually the result of a fall from a significant height. This information, plus the fractured skull, suggests that Eddie, when he fell, landed on his head.
The Record also said that Eddie’s body was found at the base of Trinity Gully. I researched this online and found images of Trinity Face – an enormous, sheer rock face hanging just below the summit of Yr Wyddfa that looked like a miniature version of the north face of the Eiger. There are four routes up Trinity Face: Great Gully, Little Gully, Left-hand Trinity and Central Trinity. ‘Trinity Gully’ didn’t tell me which route exactly Eddie was on at the time of his death but all four, more-or-less vertical, ascents looked terrifying.
But what I still struggled with was why the ropes hadn’t saved him when he lost contact with the rock. I presume he had hooked himself onto crabs at pretty tight, regular intervals so that, if he did fall, he wouldn’t have fallen far or harmed himself. But the injuries Eddie sustained suggest a fall from a great height, which doesn’t tally with that idea. Once again, I will never have an answer to this question. No one was there to witness the fall. Eddie’s secret will remain with him forever.
Eddie’s death is a distant memory for me, and an unreliable one, it turns out. I had misremembered him, and therefore misrepresented him, for years. I can’t say with certainty that I knew Eddie well. Did I ever? Those teenage years are tumultuous. You go through so many changes – layers, even – so quickly, make bad decisions, mistreat people. Ade’s death is brand new in relative terms, more raw, but I knew what kind of person Ade was from the off. Soulful, good-natured. They were different characters from different moments in my life but, because they were both friends who died on the same mountain, they will be forever tethered in my mind. But what was the tether? A leyline? A tightrope? Ariadne’s thread? Their deaths were caused by tiny errors, a boot put in slightly the wrong place, a fingertip in a fingerhold not exerting quite enough pressure. Narrow margins. I had also passed over that terrain and mercifully had escaped with nothing but cuts in the foot. I was lucky.
I want to end this piece with something I discovered during those many days researching Eddie’s death. I found out that, following Eddie’s death, a climber friend of his (or friends, I don’t know) put up and named a new route after him. The route is an E7 Trad climb on a mountain called Gallt yr Ogof, which is approximately seven miles north east of Yr Wyddfa. The route is called Heart of Stone. Far from being forgotten, Eddie will always be remembered by those who knew him best.
