After my post the other day about the big rescue in OFD, I thought it was about time I did some more cave content. I picked this particular trip because it involved a nice “bimbly” trip with photos – underground photos from my caving days are spectacularly rare – but it also, and completely coincidentally, involves the one rescue I was actually present for. Should have guessed it would have been that weekend, this was the one where everything seemed to have happened. Oh, and this all took place way back in February 2004.
It’s a little bit awkward because it features a few people from my real life, who I haven’t seen since about 2007. I considered giving them fake names but there’s very little point when there are real photos, so I guess if anyone reading this realises that it’s about them and that they know me… um, hi, it’s been a while. Get in touch. My phone number is still the same. If anything, I’m probably about to be more complimentary about you than you might be expecting.
Originally there was supposed to be quite a huge number going – my scrapbook says twelve, which was a prodigious number for a club that only really comprised about six “core” members at the time. For some reason we weren’t taking the minibus and it dawned on us at the usual Thursday night meeting (outside the bar, because that’s what we were like back then) that you couldn’t fit twelve people in two cars. Well, I say two cars. Our oldest regular undergrad member was leaving at 3am on Friday morning and picking up a graduate member after his night shift, while everyone else was coming in the two cars at the usual after-work hour on Friday evening. Three people dropped out at the last minute and I was volunteered to go in the ludicrous-hours car because I was the only one present, and therefore able to be volunteered, who didn’t have lectures on a Friday. Even then, the plans suddenly changed. The intended passenger emailed our driver to say he wasn’t working a night shift after all and instead of leaving at 3am, they were going to leave pretty much immediately. So at 10pm, I had to rush home to pack, caving kit had to be borrowed for me since the sports centre attic had closed for the night, and off we went.
Our driver was Nigel, who was a final year engineering student. He’d taken me on my first ever trip earlier in the year when the official first trip was oversubscribed and his own planned weekend was slightly undersubscribed. In hindsight, taking two freshers on their first ever trip with a group of his graduate friends was both incredibly kind and also utterly insane. I admit that the other girl never caved again but I became “core” and we had a good trip. In my scrapbook I wrote of the occasion “I probably know more about Nigel now than I want to know about anyone in the world” – we fended off awkwardness on the long drive in both directions by Nigel talking about literally anything that came into his head. We were picking up Pat, a Basque girl who’d also been on that first trip and the nearly-night shift worker was Jerome. Pat and Jerome were both graduate members of the club and although we only met Pat a couple more times, Jerome became a regular in my second year when he returned to do his masters. Umm… you’ll get to know what Jerome is like throughout this post. In my way, I adored him – and Nigel – but he was what you might kindly call a bit of a character.
We set off from Faversham at about midnight and reached Priddy, a little village in the Mendips, at about 4am, where we had a snowball fight before going to bed. Caving mornings are often a bit slow – student cavers drink too much for early mornings – but we didn’t get up until 10.30 and then went over to Green Ore for a proper roadside cafe breakfast – I assume in our rush to leave, we hadn’t brought any food with us. Next it was off to Wells to raid Tesco – apparently we “bought out most of their supply of orange juice” and did some shopping at Bat, the much-mourned little caving shop opposite.
After all the faff getting borrowed caving kit the previous night, I didn’t even go caving that day. Nigel and Jerome decided on Eastwater “to do caving that would probably destroy them”, quotes my scrapbook, and Pat and I weren’t up to that. I’ve never been in Eastwater but I seem to remember it being taglined something like “the cave that bites back”. A post on the UK Caving forum from 2016 includes the phrases “Eastwater begins as it means to go on – as a horrendous nightmare of a cave” and “the nicest part of any element of the cave is the bit where you get to stop doing it” and “Eastwater has a habit of confusing and bewildering you”. So my memory is correct, it’s not one you generally take freshers in.
Clearly it was a bad idea for me to go and Pat didn’t want to either. Instead, while the boys were inventing “power caving”, we played in the snow up on the hill like children and then went back to the hut, where apparently I spent the afternoon reading Alpine Caving Techniques ** by torchlight. Why was it so dark in the hut? This book was our caving bible but it’s quite something for a beginner. It’s a bit like handing a GCSE student a manual for building a nuclear reactor. You just don’t know where to start.
This was another reason why I’d taken to Nigel – when I explained that I didn’t understand anything in the book, he spent part of the drive back explaining it and then brought it to the next meeting to answer any and all questions I had on it. None of the others had really encouraged the freshers’ interests so far – it was Nigel who’d offered to teach us how to lifeline and who’d threatened to headbutt anyone who belittled our burgeoning caving abilities. He was someone who I think you had to get to know before you could like him but as I’ve already said, I got to know him very well very quickly and he was an absolutely wonderful example of someone sharing his passion and bringing new people into it, with endless encouragement and kindness and no gatekeeping.
That evening, while we waited for the other two cars, we went to the pub. The Hunters Lodge Inn is – or was back then – a very traditional country pub. In fact, it had something of the Wild West saloon about it. It’s the sort of place where you drink Buxton Bitter or nothing and where phones got snatched out of your hand by the landlord and nailed to the bar. A Google review from a month ago says this is still the policy. I’m astonished Roger has managed to keep that up in this day and age but if anywhere isn’t going to change in nearly eighteen years, it’s the Hunters. On this occasion, Jerome did answer his phone in the pub – not only that, he then wandered around talking openly to the rest of the group on it, somehow without getting caught while Nigel visibly panicked. He probably wouldn’t have got away with it a year later, which must be roughly when he started deliberately trying to infuriate Roger with his drinks orders.
This particular night, when the rest of our group arrived, we collected them and went down to the Belfry. We never stayed at the Belfry. Back in 2004, it was renowned for being a bit… chaotic. We stayed at the Wessex, which I think was a bit staid and middle-aged for a lot of the other student clubs. Certainly the flaming sambuca and sofa rugby that happened that evening would never have happened at the Wessex…
That big party was the reason for the nice bimbly trip the next day which is really where this story starts. Our plan to go to Burrington Coombe and do some of the relatively fresher-friendly caves there were scuppered by logistics, including “of course, you can’t take a phone down a cave” and so we went to Swildons. We went in three groups. Nigel and Jerome did the round trip because having invented power caving the day before, they wanted to put it into practice. Becky, one of our other final-year members, wanted to take some photos so I went with her and we were joined by Sarah. The rest made up a third group which would go down to the sump.
Cave photography in 2004 was a tricky thing. These days, I see my club – I’m still in their Facebook group – come back with hundreds of photos. You can just stick a GoPro on and film the entire trip. What I wrote of the process in my scrapbook is “With a normal camera, you need flashguns, but apparently not with digital, you just need enough light to fool the camera into putting the flash on, so me and Sarah had to be models and stand and look at the things with our lights shining on them”. Oh yeah, digital photography was in its infancy at the time and all my above-ground photos from the weekend were from my 90s-style film camera.
We didn’t go far and we did it gently. Becky’s a very different leader to someone like Jerome or Nigel-in-Jerome’s-company or indeed our other leaders. We went to the top of the 20, which is a 20-foot pothole you descend using a wire ladder and lifeline. There’s an overhanging rock at the top so the ladder is pressed against it, which makes holding the thing very difficult and then it goes through a waterfall. We posed for some photos at the top and went back the Wet Way. My scrapbook suggests I struggled a bit. Becky was into climbing and diving as well as caving, so she had no problems and Sarah was several inches taller than the two of us so she did fine too but it seems the two of them had to help me up in places, either by providing footholds or by brute force pulling. My memories of this trip are quite dim but I think I remember it not being overly strenuous and enjoying the change of pace that came with caving with Becky. I use these photos quite a lot and it’s because they’re the only photos of me underground that were taken until I went on a trip many years after I graduated.
We were first back, showered and chilling when Nigel and Jerome returned. They’d picked up Pat along the way because she’d got bored with the sump group. Probably for the best as something must have happened about thirty seconds after she parted ways with them. They’d just got out the shower when the leader of the third group “came charging in”. One of the group had dislocated her knee and we were suddenly in the middle of my first live call-out. My scrapbook says that “Nigel and Jerome immediately started shovelling down toast ready to go out” but because it was one of our group, we weren’t allowed to be involved in the rescue.
Underground, the group of four who’d set out for the sump had become two. Pat had left with the boys and the leader had come to sound the alert, leaving two freshers alone, one injured. Now, that’s about all you can do under the circumstances but they’d happened to meet Reading and they’d stayed with our girls. I’m not going to name our casualty because to this day, I don’t think her parents even knew she’d been in the caving club. Spoiler: they got her out and took her to hospital in Bath and she had her entire leg put in a big purple cast, which she removed and hid, possibly at someone else’s house, when her parents happened to visit a few weeks later, before putting it back on after they’d gone. It was a bit of an effort to get her out. Swildon’s – at least the parts we ever got to – is a relatively friendly cave but this accident had happened below that 20-foot pothole and ladder climb I mentioned earlier. It can be tricky at the best of times but I suspect some haulage had to happen to get someone up it with a dislocated knee.
Once she was out and we knew she was safe, give or take a touch of hypothermia and the knee, we went to the pub to deliver the money for the keg for the rescuers – that’s the done thing, to buy a load of beer as a thank you – and to the Belfry to retrieve some of our kit that had been left with Reading during the emergency. “Of course, as with everything, things at the Belfry got out of hand”, says my scrapbook. Reading introduced us to their “Experimental Vodka Workshop” and the upshot was that no one was fit to drive home and Pat was so drunk and sick that we were concerned it was appendicitis or the recurrence of a disease with amoebas she’d picked up in South America once and in that state, the four of us had to walk back through country lanes at about half-three at night. I have a dim recollection of leaving Nigel to deal with Pat and going back with just Jerome and being really cold. I thought I remembered an ambulance but my scrapbook makes no mention of it, so that must have been the girl who got similarly drunk and sick in my final year. I wasn’t helplessly uncontrollably emetophobic back then but I also wasn’t going to share the small ladies’ dorm with someone that sick so I moved upstairs to the big mixed dorm where Jerome and I discovered that we could change the tone of someone’s snoring by flashing a torch at them and apparently we “enjoyed playing with that for a few minutes” before going to bed.
Caving didn’t go great on Sunday. I was up brighter and earlier than I expected. Pat was up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, much to everyone’s astonishment. The boys were not quite so chirpy but they planned to power cave Rhino Rift, using twelve ladders instead of a few ropes, which they were told was stupidity and apparently they didn’t make it out of the hut anyway after too many nights drinking and too many days power caving. It occurs to me now that I have no idea where they planned to get twelve ladders from or how two of them proposed to carry them and enough rope to go with them. Especially as one of our ladders was still in Swildon’s. No one had derigged it and brought it back during the rescue, so Becky and I, along with the girl who had been left with the casualty, went to get it. We hadn’t thought to charge our lights the night before “so mine was quite dim” apparently. This was back in the days when we used FX2s, two halogen bulbs in the headpiece attached to a brick-sized battery on your belt. Those things only had 4-6 hours of light in them, just enough for one trip if you kept it on the secondary bulb most of the time and switched it off whenever you stopped – that’s a habit I never got out of, even in the days of LEDs and tiny long-life batteries. It was pretty dim even when it was fresh. I can quite well imagine I was caving three-quarters blind that day. Because I’d been in Swildon’s only 24 hours ago, Becky let me lead parts of it, which I suspect means that I’d say “is it that way now?” and Becky would either agree or disagree. No way I was actually assuming any role of responsibility for the group back then. Our third member struggled a bit with the ladder – apparently it was only her second ever trip – and that made me get on with it a lot better than I might otherwise. I was wearing my neoprene wetsocks for the first time ever and wanted to get my feet wet the whole time. I wonder why I didn’t wear them on the Saturday? I’d bought them in South Wales a month ago – why didn’t I wear them on either of the trips that weekend, come to that? Then we packed up the ladder and went home.
Because of Pat’s antics the night before, the staff wanted us out of the hut by 4, which was at least two hours earlier than we’d normally leave. We had all the luggage because the other car couldn’t fit luggage and a plastered leg and naturally, we went straight to the bar instead of going home, since we were back so early. This is where I’ve listed Jerome’s grand plans but I suspect he actually came out with them over the weekend. He was going to cut holes in his wellies to drain the water as he went (this he actually did and his inhaler fell out – why he kept it in his boot is beyond me), he was going to build his own lamp (“it’s just a few LEDs and a halogen bulb connected with standard connectors to a battery!”, no problem to an engineering graduate), he was going to make his own helmet, invent a new method of free-diving sump two (which is not free-divable), make his own oversuit (ok, I’ve fallen for this beautiful idea and ended up not doing it too), jump down climbs and free-climb the 35-foot pitch in Eastwater. And then I think, after four full days away, we went home. I was very tired after a long weekend and the boys were quite battered, between the power caving and the sofa rugby.
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve read my scrapbook and I hadn’t realised that the Pat/Eastwater thing, the photo trip and the rescue all happened on the same weekend, or that it was the one where I took a load of photos. It wasn’t exactly a typical weekend – we’d normally just have a few drinks at the Hunters and a few more back at the hut, we’d never been to the Belfry before or since, and we wouldn’t normally go Thursday night or take it so easy over the weekend, but I guess there are worse weekends to blog about.
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