Up: My Life’s Journey to the Top of Everest. Ben Fogle

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      I wasn’t ready to become a widower.

      The next 12 hours are a bit of a blur. By the time I had thrown on some clothes, Dad had booked me a plane ticket to London. I raced to the airport and was on a flight by 6 am.

      It was the worst flight of my life. And I’ve had some bad flights.

      For eight long hours, I would have no contact with the outside world. I sat in my seat and imagined what was happening. My sister-in-law, Chiara, warned me in a call before my flight that Marina was bleeding so profusely that she might not make it. Please God, don’t take her from me. I am not a religious person, but here I was, 30,000 feet up, calling on the heavens to hear my prayers.

      I sat there with tears streaming down my face. How could I cope? I couldn’t imagine life without Marina, the lynchpin of our family. The fun and the happiness. The glue. She was the family. We would be lost without her. The children, what about the children? What did they know? Ludo was four and Iona three. How would I tell them? How could I tell them?

      My happy life flashed before my eyes during that endless flight. Our wedding in Portugal, the honeymoon in the Outer Hebrides, the family holidays, dancing in the kitchen. How could life ever be happy again? How could I go up from here?

      As the plane touched down at Heathrow, I turned on my phone. How I was dreading this moment. Rain drizzled down the oval plane window as I called Chiara, who was still a further 1,000 miles away in Austria.

      ‘She’s still in intensive care … but they have stopped the bleeding … she’s going to live.’

      I burst into tears and jumped into a taxi to Luton where I caught a flight to Salzburg in Austria. Those 12 hours were like a foggy nightmare. It was like I was living someone else’s life. This was the kind of thing that only happened to other people, not us.

      In Salzburg, I can remember the shafts of bright light streaming through the hospital windows as I walked up the white corridor. I walked into a large room bathed in Alpine summer sunshine, net curtains blowing in the gentle breeze from the open windows. I could just make out the mountains in the distance. It was ethereal. Beautiful and calming.

      In the middle of the room was a bed surrounded by nurses in starched white uniforms, their smiles dazzling. White. Bright. Warm.

      I walked over to the bed. Marina’s blonde hair spilt over the pillow, her face was drained of colour. Everything was white. Clinical, but calm and soothing.

      I held her hand and she opened her eyes. She smiled. I love her smile, it’s so beautiful. It’s infectious. Tears rolled down my cheeks. She looked at me and squeezed my hand.

      ‘Do you want to meet him?’

      Him. My baby was a boy. We had deliberately not found out his sex. Marina wanted to have a surprise, something to look forward to at the end of labour. A boy, another little boy. A son.

      Wait. What does she mean, meet him? I knew he had been stillborn.

      ‘I think we should meet him to say goodbye.’

      I like to think of myself as a pretty stable, well-prepared individual, little surprises me and I am rarely flummoxed. ‘Expect the unexpected’ has always been my mantra; but now, here, in this faraway hospital in a strange land, I was being invited to meet and to hold my dead son.

      One of the nurses appeared with a baby blanket. She held it in her arms gently and walked through the shafts of sunlight. My heart raced. Nothing, I mean nothing in my life had prepared me for this.

      She handed me the little bundle. I cupped him in my arms and peered at his little face. He was so beautiful. He looked like he was asleep.

      ‘What shall we call him?’ Marina smiled.

      ‘I think we should call him Willem.’ Tears splashed onto his little cheeks.

      Here was a little boy I had longed to meet but would never get to know. For eight months, I had imagined a complete family of five. Suddenly, those dreams had been shattered.

      It can be difficult for those who haven’t experienced this unique form of bereavement to understand how painful it can be, to lose someone you never knew, but I felt like I was suffocating.

      I stared at little Willem and made a resolution there and then that I would live the rest of my life for the two of us, that I would relish every day. I would always smile. I would live it to its full. For little Willem, I would live my life even more brightly, seizing the moments and the opportunities and pursuing my dreams.

      Little did I know it, but in that dreadful moment of tragedy and disappointment was the germ of a journey that would turn my life around and lead me up to the top of the world.

       Up.

      ‘Always look Up,’ my late grandmother used to say. It was good advice. It is too easy to go through life looking down.

      It is almost a symptom of modern society, to look down, both physically and metaphorically. Travel on the commuter train, bus or tube each morning and they are full of people looking down. Down at their phones, their newspapers, their feet, anywhere but up, for fear of making eye contact. Walk along most streets and they are full of people looking down at their phones, their feet, the pavement.

      It is like we have evolved into a downward-looking species.

      I remember once on a visit to New York, a taxi driver pointed out that he could always spot a tourist because they were the ones looking up. That observation is so symbolic. You see, to New Yorkers, those magnificent vertiginous skyscrapers were just another part of their landscape. Complacency meant they never looked up and admired the city that others flocked to.

      Can you imagine how much we miss out on by looking down? Those chance encounters, opportunities and sights. To my mind, we have become an increasingly pessimistic, negative and angry society. We have become suspicious of success. Social media and the press will often pick on the negative, downward-facing stories and opinions.

      Where is the Up? The positivity, the optimism and the celebration? I’m sure if more people looked up and smiled, we would be in a happier world.

      If there is one thing I encourage my children to do, it is to smile. Not in a needless, fake kind of way, but in a positive karma kind of way. A smile has a natural way of lightening and lifting the head.

      Take a look around you. Downward-facing frowns? Lift your head and smile.

       Introduction

      It was a hot summer’s afternoon in 2016 and I was in a crowded tent at Goodwood House in Sussex. My wife Marina and I had been invited by Cartier to join them for lunch at the Festival of Speed. I made my way to our table and peered at the name card next to me.

      Victoria Gardner.

      I’d never heard of her, which was just as well, as she wasn’t there.

      Thirty minutes passed and, after I’d finished my starter, a young girl appeared, apologised profusely for her lateness and sat in СКАЧАТЬ