Read Online A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy; Gavron - Free Book Online

‘courage and fortitude’. But something nags at me. I go back over the articles and read how, even after one of the boys ‘showed signs of collapsing’, the headmaster continued to push for the summit of the mountain.
    There is something familiar about this, and I call Susan Downes and ask her again about going up the mountain with K. There were only a couple of lifts, she says, so they were taught to put skins on their skis and walk up the mountain. It was hard work, but the headmaster insisted they keep going until they reached a hut he had set as their target, even though it was already growing dangerously dark.
    I go to the newspaper library in Colindale and order up other newspapers. In the Daily Telegraph , I read that some of the boys were already floundering ‘up to their necks’ in the snow when they met a group of woodcutters, who directed them on up the hill. Why had the headmaster not asked these woodcutters for help? To guide the boys back down to a village or an inn? Why had he kept going up in the storm when he could have gone down?
    I go to the London Metropolitan Archives to read the report of the inquiry. From this, I learn that the headmaster had been a star pupil at the Strand School before becoming a teacher there, had been head boy, captain of football, cricket. I learn, too, that he had spent his vacations from Cambridge leading school parties on mountain excursions in the Swiss Alps. After university, he worked in the German Alps, guiding skiing and climbing tours.
    In the newspaper reports, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the headmaster’s testimony. But here, in its full length, his account is more logical. In this version of the story, the snow was not yet too deep or heavy when they met the woodcutters, and it was not so much the top of the hill for which he was heading but an inn he believed was on the other side.
    I still have my suspicions — did his experience in the mountains make him overconfident? — but I am alone in them. ‘I can say with a clear conscience that the master in charge of the boys behaved in a very brave and manly fashion,’ one of the villagers who helped to bring the boys off the mountain testified. ‘He was the last to come in from the mountain slopes where he did everything to put heart into the children and to help them out.’
    The tragedy, the inquiry concludes, was caused by freak weather, not human error. The headmaster of the school, arriving in Freiburg two days later, found ‘a clear sky and a hot sun — comparable to a hot June day in England’.
    HERE IN LONDON , the summer is drawing on, the days shortening. I am exhausted by the past few weeks, by obsessing over Hannah and the headmaster. But I still have one more task — to go to Oxford to see Tasha Edelman.
    Tasha doesn’t speak on the phone, so I made the arrangements through her niece, Sonia’s daughter, Becky, who also lives in Oxford.
    Before going to Tasha’s, I meet up with Becky. She tells me about Tasha’s health. After a car accident, which caused a stroke, she had recovered and gone back to work as a psychiatrist. But subsequent strokes had diminished her.
    We talk, too, about Tasha’s troubles with her son and daughter from her first marriage. When the children were young, she left her husband for another man and lost custody of them, and as they grew older they refused to see her. Becky talks of Tasha leaving birthday and Christmas presents for them on the doorstep of their house, and never hearing anything. She subsequently remarried and had another daughter, but she hasn’t seen her older children in years.
    It is hard for me to understand: to be searching for a mother who is forever out of reach, and to hear of these children who have a mother they will not see.
    BECKY DROPS ME at Tasha’s house, and I follow Tasha into a back room piled with old books and magazines. The curtains are