Recollecting Doug
I met Geoff Douglas (Doug, to me, "Doog" to the people in our French climbing club) forty years ago at a little campground outside of the village of La Palud just above the famous Verdon Gorges. I was there with my climbing club and he was there with some of his friends from Yorkshire or Derbyshire or something. One evening he told me about this woman he'd met in a German class he was taking. He was madly in love with her, he said, but she wasn't from his working-class world. What was he to do, he asked me. As in all cases when you give advice on love and relationships, you make sure you say what the other person wants to hear. So, I said, "Stay the course." And he did. For forty years. Something that not many people can say. Bravo, Doug!
On one of the many occasions when he visited me in Paris, I gave him a copy of Jack London's greatest book, Martin Eden. It's about a working-class guy who falls in love -- but from afar -- with a woman who is not from his working-class world. And so, in order to be part of her world, he takes classes of all kinds in the little spare time his job offers him. He keeps adding to his knowledge and ultimately becomes a wealthy and much admired man in society. He attains the world he had once so aspired to, but at the same time, becomes aware of its faults and weaknesses. Sound familiar? Well, Doug was always for me the great, real-life Martin Eden figure in my life, an almost unbelievable fount of talent and intelligence who for too long was shunted off into factory work because of errors of his youth and his working-class background. I have referred to him often as a Martin Eden who would have made Jack London proud, an example of what you can do if you really want to make something of your life, regardless of your background.
I could come up with hundreds of stories about Doug, many of them, of course, related to climbing. One I particularly like was when he took me to some crag -- Stony Middleton or High Tor, as I recall. It was the last route of the day and I was pretty tired. I was leading and by the time I got to the last bit at the top, my forearms were absolutely dead. And there in a little pocket behind a bulge was a peg, just begging to serve as a handhold. But most importantly, I thought, Doug the Purist couldn't see it from where he was belaying. My hand crept towards the little bit of iron stuck in the rock. At that exact moment, up from below came a shout, "Get yer hand off peg!" Bastard, I thought, how did he know? and somehow finished the route.
It will take me a considerable while to adjust to his being gone and no longer working on some new photography or violin-making or language-learning or crag-climbing or bicycle-riding or house-renovating project.