Sir Edmund Hillary: The high life

Sir Edmund Hillary was the first person to climb Everest. That event changed the world. But how did it affect him? Here, he tells Kathy Marks about the 50 years since that momentous day

The walls of Sir Edmund Hillary's living room are covered, as one might expect, with mountains. There are photographs of the Himalayas and New Zealand's Southern Alps, as well as Mount Herschel, a beautiful ice mountain in Antarctica. An abstract painting of Kathmandu hangs over the mantelpiece. But there are no pictures of Hillary on the summit of Everest.

Astonishingly, none exists. When he and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to reach the roof of the world 50 years ago next month, his priority was to photograph every leading ridge to prove that they had been successful. Then he took a shot of Tenzing brandishing an ice axe and an assortment of flags. But he did not hand the camera to his Sherpa companion. "It didn't cross my mind," he says, stifling a chuckle. "I was a bit naive, I suppose. But it wasn't important to me."

Those were gentler times. Today, adventurers carry digital cameras so that fans can follow their exploits step by step on the internet. But the omission was typical of Hillary, who has spent the past five decades stubbornly resisting the cult of celebrity. "I am a very ordinary person with modest abilities," he says, settling into an armchair in his airy, rambling home in Auckland. "I've always refused to permit myself to be regarded as a hero. I knew I wasn't a hero."

The rest of the world saw things differently. The conquest of Everest coincided with the coronation, and the 33-year-old climber was the toast of the Commonwealth. He was knighted by the new Queen, and fêted by presidents and prime ministers. Huge crowds gathered wherever he went. His name appeared on stamps and coins. He received marriage proposals from strangers. Britain shook off the gloom of post-war austerity and felt Great again. (No matter that Hillary hailed from New Zealand and Tenzing from Nepal; the expedition was British.) It had been a monumental feat, every bit as exciting and historic as Neil Armstrong's moonwalk 16 years later. The Sherpa and the beekeeper had entered 20th-century mythology.

Hillary was "absolutely flabbergasted" by the reaction. He had expected the first ascent of Everest to be of interest only to mountaineers. It was only when they descended to base camp that the impact began to sink in. "Someone switched on a radio and the BBC presenter said, 'I'm happy to announce that two members of the British expedition have reached the summit.' I said, 'My God, we must have done it, the BBC has confirmed it!'" Another chuckle.

Half a century on, he still seems bemused by all the fuss. His lean frame has filled out, but, now 83, he remains a formidable presence, a tall bear of a man with a vice-like handshake and steely eyes. He's a curious mix of contradictions. So bashful was he that, on his return from Everest, his future mother-in-law proposed to his fiancée, Louise Rose, on his behalf. She accepted. Yet a few months later, in the Oval Office, Hillary publicly corrected President Eisenhower when he addressed the expedition leader, John Hunt, as Sir Edmund Hunt.

The socially awkward young man was intensely competitive, and he had a ruthless streak. Realising that the expedition organisers would never countenance two New Zealanders reaching the summit of Everest together, he teamed up with Tenzing, dropping his old friend and climbing partner, George Lowe. The strategy worked, and Lowe – waiting at the South Col with tomato soup – was first to hear the news. Yet the two men have remained good friends.

Hillary has always stressed that the expedition was a team effort. But how important was it for him to reach the summit first? "I can't think of anything more satisfying than achieving something that no one has been able to do before," he says. Would he have bothered with Everest if it had already been climbed? He ponders. "It certainly wouldn't have been as attractive." Neither he nor Tenzing ever considered going back. "We felt we'd made the first ascent and there was no reason to do it again."

The gruff modesty – he and Tenzing "did quite a good job", he says – is genuine. But even as he plays down his accomplishments, he guards them with the ferocity of a mountain bear. The previous year, a Swiss expedition had climbed the highest so far on Everest. Two days before the Hillary-Tenzing assault, two of their comrades set out for the summit but were thwarted by faulty gear. So did luck and timing play a part? The old man looks almost murderous. "A lot of people had been to considerable altitude before and that was the end of the run for them," he says in clipped tones. "They were exhausted and they returned. Tenzing and I were both very fit, strongly motivated and determined to try to reach the summit. Once we were high up, we never really thought of turning back."

That iron resolve manifested itself early on, provoking confrontations with his strict, authoritarian father, who dealt with them by taking the boy to the woodshed for a thrashing. The family grew up in a rural area of North Island; like most country boys, Hillary walked barefoot to school every day. A loner, he was mocked by the physical-education teacher, who put him in a class for misfits. Even after climbing Everest, seen as the ultimate physical challenge, he never lost that sense of physical inferiority.

At university, he failed all his examinations and made no friends. He left to join his father's beekeeping business. Then, aged 19, he climbed his first mountain in the Southern Alps. The experience was a revelation. He climbed more mountains. The bug had taken hold. "At long last I was doing something that I was really good at, and which I enjoyed. Until then, I was just a dreamer who read books about adventure and walked around with my head in the clouds. Mountaineering changed my whole attitude to life. It gave me a strong desire to achieve and be successful."

Hillary climbed frenetically, almost urgently. He recalls "racing" up and down mountains and "knocking off a few extra peaks" after finishing a project early. "Once I got this enthusiasm for the mountains I became completely besotted with them, and I never really lost that feeling. If I was driving along and saw a little patch of snow in a gully way up on the mountainside, I would have an irresistible desire to stop the car, pull on my boots, climb up a couple of thousand feet and stomp around on the snow."

Jan Morris, the journalist who covered the expedition as James Morris, has a recollection of Hillary that is at odds with his description of himself as rather dull and diffident. "He had a tremendous, bursting, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America," she says.

Many climbers wax lyrical about the beauty of the mountains. Not Hillary. He climbed to prove that he could. "The challenge was the driving force. I was constantly looking for new challenges. I was often afraid: I fell down crevasses and got swept away by avalanches. But I found that fear could be a stimulating factor. I respected the mountains. I realised that if a mountain didn't want you to go up – if the weather was bad, for instance – you didn't go up. The mountains had to almost permit you to climb them."

In 1950 he and George Lowe went to the Himalayas with a party of New Zealanders, scaling Mukut Parbat. Two of them – any two, it was up to them to choose – were invited to join a British reconnaissance expedition to the south side of Everest, led by the explorer Eric Shipton. Hillary had a little money left, as did another climber, Earle Riddiford. They set off, leaving behind a dejected Lowe. The trip went well, and paved the way for the 1953 assault on Everest.

Then, getting to the mountain required a 17-day walk from Kathmandu. More trials lay ahead. As he and Tenzing prepared for the final climb, he woke to find his boots frozen solid. "I cooked them over the primus until they were soft enough to pull on," he says. When they reached the top, "I wasn't carried away with excitement, although I did feel a deep sense of satisfaction." What did excite him, as he stood 29,029ft above sea level, was a giant peak on the horizon called Makalu, as yet unclimbed. He was eyeing his next challenge. He and Tenzing began their descent and met Lowe, whom Hillary greeted with the words: "Well, we knocked the bastard off." (His mother was mortified when this sentence was broadcast round the world.)

Everybody wanted to know who had stepped on to the summit first. The Nepalese, in particular, were anxious to hear that it had been Tenzing. Hillary claimed to be irritated by the question, saying that "philosophically" they reached the top together. However, he left no one in any doubt that he got there first.

After Everest, Hillary continued climbing. He even headed an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the yeti, or abominable snowman. But his tolerance of high altitudes declined and he was forced to seek adventures lower down. In 1957 he led a tractor team across Antarctica to the South Pole, setting up depots for the first overland crossing of the continent by the British explorer, Sir Vivian Fuchs. In 1977 he travelled by jetboat up the Ganges to its source in the Himalayas. He spent two years as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, where he rekindled his friendship with Tenzing. The Sherpa had enjoyed some success, establishing a mountaineering academy and travelling. But he envied Hillary, and was lonely and embittered when he died in 1986.

If Tenzing never won due recognition, Hillary has repaid his debt to the Sherpas many times over. He has raised money for schools, hospitals, bridges and airfields in the Everest area, supervising much of the development work. The region and its people are precious to him. His shelves are stuffed with volumes about Tibet, India and Nepal. The house is decorated with ornaments and artworks from that part of the world. On the coffee table is a copy of The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. Last year Hillary made television advertisements for the Indian Tourist Board, and refused payment.

Nepal was also the scene of his greatest tragedy. In 1975 his wife and 16-year-old daughter, Belinda, were killed when their small plane crashed near Kathmandu. Hillary suffered years of depression and drank heavily. He credits his Sherpa friends with pulling him back from the brink. In 1989 he married again, to June Mulgrew, the widow of Peter Mulgrew, a friend and fellow adventurer who died in a plane crash at Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, in 1979.

Hillary has an awkward relationship with his son, Peter. Pat Booth, his unofficial biographer, suggests he was a distant, aloof parent, much like Hillary's own father. Peter, now 47, is a mountaineer and trekking guide who has climbed Everest twice – which reportedly did not impress his father. I ask Hillary if he gets on well with him. "I get on well with him," he says. "I get on particularly well with Sarah [his surviving daughter]. Peter and I are very different people." Hillary appears oblivious to the implied slight. In his autobiography, View from the Summit, he describes Belinda as "the closest thing we had to a perfect child". One wonders how Peter and Sarah felt about that. Hillary says he did not realise that they went through hell, too, after losing their mother and sister. He says: "I don't find it easy to warm to people. I've really found it difficult to have close friends."

The exception seems to be the Sherpas. He is forsaking a grand dinner in London, hosted by the Royal Geographical Society and attended by the Queen, to spend the 50th anniversary of the ascent in Kathmandu. All other surviving members of the expedition are going to London, where they will relive the climb. "Except that they won't be able to describe the summit bit very well," chortles Hillary. "I'm fonder of my Sherpa friends than the majority of my old team-mates. They're more important to me."

Hillary deplores the commercialisation of Everest, particularly the guided trips that have created human traffic-jams on the mountain and turned it into a gigantic rubbish tip – abandoned tents and oxygen bottles litter the slopes, together with frozen corpses. Last year, no fewer than 30 expeditions were on Everest at the same time. When Tashi Tenzing, the grandson of his climbing partner, reached the top, he found 53 climbers crowded on the icy ridge.

Hillary still spends four months of the year travelling, mostly on fundraising tours, patiently retelling the same anecdotes. He scoffs at the notion that he is some kind of living legend. Plain-spoken, unpretentious, his number is in the phone book along with most other Auckland residents. Until a bout of illness six months ago, he was exercising regularly and climbing hills. He fired the starting gun for the Sydney to Hobart yacht race last year. His advice to participants? "Give it hell and get there first."