Wathen Ronnie

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Biografie:
Ronnie Wathen (1934-1993)
I must write warily: I feel there may be a 'most individual and bewildering ghost' glaring with mock ferocity over my shoulder, a restless shade who would never forgive me if I tried to bury him with platitudes. Ronnie Wathen was quite spectacularly different: unpredictable, provocative, abrasive yet stimulating in argument, generous with himself, always able to see and articulate the quirky side of life. What can I really say of a man who did his National Service in his father's smart cavalry regiment and passed idle moments in his tank knitting!
During our South Audley Street days I would know that Ronnie was in the club when a bicycle was chained to the railings and then, across the room, I would spy his tall, burly figure, a head torch in his tousled hair, hairy pullover and, sometimes, shorts. In a matter of moments mutual insults would be pinging between us, argument raging, friendship abounding. He was an endangered species: the true eccentric; in other words different by nature and not for effect.
Outside his family there were three thrusts to Ronnie's life: poetry, mountaineering and the Uilleann (Irish) pipes. He was differently good at all of them.
Ronnie was introduced to mountaineering by one of his Marlborough masters, pre-war Everest climber Edwin Kempson. Instinctively and correctly he spurned Oxbridge and went on to Trinity, Dublin, where the future pattern of his life took form. In Ireland he found what he had been seeking and it gave him a rich bounty. This powerful link once formed was never broken although he was to lead a wandering and gipsy life.
In Ireland Ronnie's first poems appeared and many slim volumes were to follow. He had a most splendid, if unruly, facility with words. Usually he employed them seriously but he also loved frolicking with them, standing them on their heads just for fun. He wrote about anything and everything that caught his fancy, as a poet should. However, there is curiously little about climbing although his later mountain travels in Greece and Turkey are well recorded.
He laboured long and hard with his Uilleann pipes and must be one of very few Anglo-Saxons to become really proficient with them. He was to give very entertaining one-man shows, playing the pipes and reciting his poems in his strong, clear, declamatory voice; in the same league as Dylan Thomas. He was blessed with a prodigious memory and could, for instance, recite vast chunks of the tortuously difficult Finnegans Wake.
Emerging from Trinity he tried work and marriage, both experiences lasting but a few weeks! He therefore opted for independence on his small private income, living life on his own terms. Some while later, working on an Israeli kibbutz, he met Asta, a charming Icelandic woman of sterling mettle. This time the marriage was enduring.
As a mountaineer Ronnie had an early Alpine season with Chris Bonington and was a member of Simon Clark's expedition to Pumasillo (20,490ft) in the Andes in 1957. He took a nasty fall while supporting the summit push, damaging his ankle. However, his upthrusting urge was undented and, recovering, he made the summit. Other expeditions led him to the Karakoram and Mt Kenya. He was a very steady climber and an uncannily good route-finder. He remained constant to his Irish climbing and described Dalkey as 'my favourite climbing wall in the western hemisphere'.
Clearly Ronnie pursued his chosen activities with skill and dedication but it was the coruscating wit of the man himself that has left such an indelible impression on his many friends. The Ronnies of this world are of a rare and fu~itive quality. He will be sorely missed and our condolences go out to Asta and his children, Sunna and Sean.
My last and very typical memory of Ronnie was at the usual Sunday morning gathering of veteran Irish climbers at Dalkey, just a few weeks before his sudden and final illness. Ronnie was being Ronnie: controversial, assertive, entertaining, rumbustious. Frank Winder, at 65 still a powerful climber, was therefore assigned the task of sapping Ronnie's energy by leading him up as many climbs as possible that were known to be at the limit of Ronnie's ability to follow. To everyone's delight, including Ronnie's, this was duly done. Its success was only partial. After lunchtime drinks with Bill Hannon, the last I saw of Ronnie was when he strode off up the road to do a kindness to an old friend.
I must end with a grumble. Ronnie was an insomniac, never known to leave a party until very late. His parting prank was to quit the party of life far too early, at the age of 58, just to tease I like to think. It was a cruel jest.
On Asta's inspiration, he held his final party at the little church of Calary, below Sugarloaf Mountain, in the verdant lap of his beloved Wicklow Hills. On that sunny autumn afternoon many, many friends crowded the church, farewells were spoken in prose and verse, laments welled up from three of the finest pipers in Ireland and a lone fiddler knelt by the open grave and hauntingly played the restless Ronnie to his rest.
Mike Banks
GLENDALOUGH, COUNTY WICKLOW
Ronnie Wathen was a shaman.
Only he knew what it was he blew
From the mountains of his life
Through his poems and his pipes.

Waking to a bright morning of white houses
circling Dublin Bay, we rolled off the ferry
and into the cloud-clearing hills of Wicklow,
into the raised glacial arms of Glendalough.
We passed St Kevin's sixth century retreat,
its round tower, rounded Celtic crosses,
to walk through the Scots pines beside the lake
dancing with grains of gold from the mines above.
We pinched ourselves. Was this your latest trick?
The day was so bright we must be crossing
the water still, in some crag-walking dream.

Sweating up the big scree boulders we met
goats. I memorised your eulogy. We rushed
up a jinksy little slab climb of closed
cracks called Expectancy, then abseiled
off a metal ring against the deadline
of your funeral. (Are you writing this?)
You'd have laughed at the three of us changing
in the carpark toilets. We heard you laughing
as we circled round the Sugar Loaf Mountain
searching, cursing, asking for the right church
which was the first church we had passed.

Poems and poignant pipes, words and weeping,
a fiddle and bright flowers sent you down.
In the quiet sunlight and open fields
by the mountain, the crowd could not leave,
could not come to believe that it was you
under that mound of wet Wicklow earth.
How the Irish understand the circle.
Exile and return. A tower, a round cross,
a ring of a hill. What you gave us was
Expectancy, a life that leaped circles,
as full of surprises as your death.
Terry Gifford

Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 99, 1994, Seite 330-333


Geboren am:
1934
Gestorben am:
1993