About this Journal

How We Discovered Night Climbing

If there is one thing that can be said about Cambridge, it is that it has a spirit to it that is in some sense unchanging. Certainly, our lives as undergraduates in the nineties are vastly different from those lived by students in the sixties or in the thirties - a combination of financial pressures and increasing academic demands have seen to that. But there are traditions that, like the oldest buildings, remain the same. I believe night climbing is one of these traditions. This journal is an attempt to document the night climbing experiences I am going through with a group of friends whilst concluding my third year as a Cambridge engineering student.

I came to night climbing somewhat later than might be expected, and even now only rarely climb (Julian, Jon, and Que Sera Sarah on the other hand are addicted fanatics). True, my interest had been piqued whilst I was in my first year, on climbing into college over the thin dividing wall between B and C staircase to visit a friend in Old Court after a late night party. But this was more of a scramble than a climb, and simply involved jumping up, grabbing the ledge at the top of the wall, and pulling myself over. It is to an event in the last week of my second year that I can pin the germination of a dormant seed within me.

A group of us were visiting a friend in a room on the second floor of C staircase (now since graduated - it is his room that I now live in), two floors above the television room, which has a bay window that forms a narrow ‘balcony’ visible from what was then the living room of my set. It was a late balmy October evening, and all the key players in this account were present: Julian, Que Sera Sarah, Carol Singer and Jon. We were drinking tea and some of the group were throwing about a couple of the soft toys in the room. During this process one was accidentally thrown out of the window. When we peered out, we could see it clearly on the balcony among some debris and what looked like an old Christmas tree.

Julian observed that we could either climb down and get the toy, or we could go down the stairs and see if we can climb up to it. Three of us (myself, Julian, and Jon) rushed down the stairs whilst the rest stayed behind, peering out of the window. To my surprise it was a fairly simple task to clamber up on the external window ledge, and then carefully using the protruding lead in the window pane pull myself onto the narrow balcony at the same time as Julian. We tossed the soft toy down to Jon, and also threw down the remaining debris including the brown and desiccated remains of the Christmas tree.

Unfortunately, as we were climbing down, the porter on duty came walking along the flagstones from the porters lodge towards us. I quickly jumped down, and together with Jon ran for the next staircase, but Julian was a bit slower. By the time he had reached the ground the porter had reached him, and there was no chance for him to escape.
  ‘What exactly are you doing,’ the porter asked.
  ‘I was climbing up to clean out some of the rubbish up there,’ Julian replied quickly, pointing at the debris scattered around his feet. The porter looked at this for a few seconds, and then replied in a flat voice, ’Well, clear it all away then, and don’t let me catch you climbing up there again.’
He then turned around and walked back to the lodge. As soon as he was out of sight we returned to Julian and helped him gather up the mess. All the while we were doing this we talked in surprise at the porter’s leniency - in college he held a reputation for gruff and intolerant behaviour towards undergraduates.

Back in the room we were all buzzing with excitement, even though we had been caught.
  ‘I can’t believe how easy it was to get up there,’ Julian kept saying, and although the others kept pointing out that we had only scaled one floor, I knew exactly what he meant. Although climbing the side of the college building looked tricky, it had turned out to be simpler than scrambling over the plain college wall, something that we had all done many times. It was at that point that I think we resolved to become night climbers.