Beaky's Blather

Short story of a first caving experience.

We assembled in Mold, North Wales, near the Cave. I was approaching the mid point of my RAF Outdoor Instructors’ Course. I loved the outdoors and all types of adventure – it was the reason that I had joined the Military – I wanted the ability, resources and opportunity to introduce people to my wilderness world and teach them the skills they required to remain safe as they accessed remote places that few would ever reach.

Today, we were to ‘experience’ caving. I had to admit that, whilst I relished most challenging activities, caving was something about which I knew little and frankly, had little desire to know more. It was a part of the Course however, so, hey ho, how bad could it be?

‘Right everyone, kit up,’ the caving instructor called. He was a stringy, bandy-legged mole of a man, much, if I thought about it, as I imagined a caver to be.   He indicated the rucksacks of equipment piled on the ground. It was largely familiar kit, the same as we used for rock climbing, with a few exceptions. I scanned around but could see no cave. 

‘This way,’ he indicated a hole, a very small hole in the ground. From his bag he dragged a tangled, aluminium wire ladder; very narrow, the rungs little wider than a boot. He pushed the end into the hole and fed in a further 50 feet, lowering it to its full extent. The end he secured to a stake he had hammered into the ground. 

‘Right down you go’.  I looked around to see who would volunteer to be first. Judging by the length of ladder, the hole was deep and the access point before us obviously tiny. 

Thankfully, someone stepped forward; Alistair, a thin chap.

He sat with his feet in the hole, the ladder in front and slipped forward. The hole fitted neatly around his waist. He wriggled and squirmed downwards, passed the turf, into the hole. I imagined that, below ground, his legs would be hanging in a void. It wasn’t what, before we arrived, I had imagined. I wondered, did the space below gape into a cave? Was there a risk that he might squeeze through this sphincter at the surface and then plummet around 50 feet to the floor of a cavern below should he neglect to grasp the dangling Electron ladder adequately? 

With a concerning level of difficulty – that I realised would confront even our smallest member – I could see he required to wriggle energetically to insert himself through the hole. Eventually, once positioned, clinging to the little ladder, with only his helmeted head at the surface, he disappeared. I wondered how my 14 stone frame would get through. Our instructor, Mole, as I now thought of him, knelt and placed his head inside the hole. We looked quietly at each other across his lowered back. I could hear his muffled enquiry as to how our descending chum was faring. Adequately, I assumed, as he was not reported to have fallen to a deep, dark, death. 

My turn, when I could avoid it no longer, was reminiscent of attempting to re-insert a champagne cork back into the bottle. The hole jammed firmly around my chest, leaving my arms shoulders and head in the air. I heaved and jerked and rwisted, forcing my torso downwards, ever mindful of the need to find a foothold or grasp the ladder as incrementally, I penetrated the space below.

Eventually I was through and descending into enveloping darkness. I lowered myself for a long way, hand under hand, legs dangling, until my feet found a sloping rock surface below, where, in the dark, I sensed rather than could see the presence of the others. Last to arrive was Mick Reece, a truly huge Marine, considerably larger than any of us. I silently wished him luck. 

‘Gather round chaps,’ chuckled Mole, clearly enjoying our discomfort.  Don’t put your headlamps on yet. There’s still a little light here, let your eyes acclimatise. 

‘Right,’ he continued, ‘today will be all about staying calm and adjusting to the challenge. Don’t kick against the difficulties. There will be some choke points that will be hard to get through but you will find a way if you experiment and adjust your approach’. I wondered what I had just squeezed through if that wasn’t a fucking choke point. Also, if there was any ambient light where we crouched, little of it had reached me before we switched on the dim glow from our head torches. Mole set off. Alistair, our first volunteer, I noticed hung back; didn’t seem so keen to go first.

The cave, we were to enter, if such a name was appropriate, for the tiny exit from this chamber, was a 2-foot wide, mud tube. Inside, movement was possible only by slithering along on your side; hands stretched ahead, face 6 inches from the muddy walls. I could see no one although knew that some of our group were ahead and some behind me. I wormed along slowly like this for half an hour, frequently jamming and having to turn on my back or other side. Unable to bend my knees, I shunted incrementally with my feet and clawed with my hands. With each effort I squirmed a further 6 inches, finally arriving in a rocky chamber just large enough for our group of 7 to assemble. 

‘Well done, that’s a good start guys’, enthused Mole to our brooding silence. We were a group of experienced mountain men who thought little of hanging off a thousand foot rock cliff and who had happily tackled head-high river rapids in a canoe, but this was plumbing the depths of our resolve. 

‘Next bits a bit narrow,’ he continued enthusiastically. I wanted to bayonet the little bastard. 

‘Mick’, he said to the Marine, ‘you’re biggest so we’ll get you through this ‘choke’ first, in case you jamb the gap and the rest of us can’t get through and return’. Mick, who I discovered later, had joined the Special Boat Service as a physical training instructor – Lord knows how physically fit you must be for that – crouched, leaned forward and inserted his head through the flattened, horizontal rock gap. He edged forward, thrusting with a grunt. Inch by inch he progressed. Mole moved behind him and pushed at his buttocks, someone else joined in. driving forward the other leg. Suddenly his legs kicked wildly and he bucked and thrashed silently. We retreated from his flailing boots. Eventually Mole grasped a now stilled, rigid leg and pulled him back.  Recovered to our chamber, Mick turned, sat back, facing us; water streamed from his head and face. 

‘Fucking hell’, he uttered quietly in his habitually taciturn way and blew water from his mouth. Eventually he explained, briefly, that, as we had pushed him through, progressively we had driven him, head first, so that he curled forward into a water-filled sump. Had we succeeded in pushing him further, he would have ended up feet in the air, head down in a vertical sump, drowning, unable to surface.

We’re it me – once, down the pub – I anticipate I would have retold that experience – repeatedly – and probably embellished it. I later worked with Mick Reece when we were both in the Falklands and I never heard him refer to it. 

The caving day continued much in this vein, involving pitch black climbing, abseiling, swimming and crawling, ever deeper and upwards, until we arrived in a medium sized dark chamber. 

‘This is it!’ yelped Mole excitedly. ‘Well done guys, I’m really impressed. Not many people reach this far’.

‘Right, he continued, what I want to do now is set you all a real challenge’. I looked at him and realised that we’re it not essential that he lived long enough to get us out again – if no one else had done it first – I’d murder the ferret-faced little cunt. 

‘We’ll go back individually, so you can experience the cave environment alone. And for the first part, I want you switch out your lights. It’s a real challenge in absolute darkness, but stay calm’. He paused, ‘oh, and I hope you remember the route. Don’t get lost… if you’re down here too long…and it rains’. He didn’t finish the sentence. 

‘I’ll go first and meet you further on to show you the exit’. With that, he thrust his head into a tunnel and I watched his skinny buttocks disappear. In the dim light from our head torches we looked at each other. No one spoke. 

I took the tail-end Charlie position and, having left the man before me a 5 minutes lead, I turned off my lamp for a few minutes and ‘enjoyed’, if that is the word, the experience of feeling abandoned in absolute darkness, whilst I imagined drowning, deep inside the earth.  I then I put my light back on. 

Blessed with vision once more, I set off and experienced being a mole, alone in the underworld. In error I investigated some blind tributaries, from which I had to reverse unable to turn around.

We did eventually arrive at the surface – clearly, as you’re reading this – by a different exit, a crack in a cliff much higher than the one where we had entered. We had been underground for over 6 hours. It was raining hard. 

I stood and relished the rain, the light, and the view. We removed our mud-encased overalls and, with white bodies and miner-black faces and hands, we descended to the ruck sacs we had left by the entrance hole where we started. 

As we retrieved the electron ladder from the hole into which we had struggled to gain the first underground cavern in the morning, we all stood and looked down. The cavern into which we had threaded was now so full of water that it gushed from the hole and streamed down the mountainside ahead of us. We looked at this sump quietly for some moments. I looked at the Mole. He seemed deep in thought too… but made no comment.