The Hanging Valley

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It was the most exhilarating feeling in the world. His thighs ached, his calves throbbed and his breath came in short sharp gasps. But he had made it. Neil Fellowes, humble wages clerk from Pontefract, stood at the summit of Swainshead Fell.

Not that it was an achievement comparable to Sir Edmund Hillary’s; after all, the fell was only 1,631 feet high. But Neil was not getting any younger, and the crowd at Baxwell’s Machine Tools, where he worked, had taken the mickey something cruel when he told them he was going on a fell-walking holiday in the Yorkshire Dales.

‘Fell?’ taunted Dick Blatchley, one of the mail-room wags. Tha’ll a fell before tha’s got started, Neil.’ And they had all laughed.

But now, as he stood there in the thin air, his heart beating deep in his chest like the steam-driven pistons in the factory, he was the one to laugh. He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and wiped off the sweat over which they had slid. Next he adjusted the straps of his rucksack, which were biting into his shoulders.

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