I’d like to dedicate my first post to my dad, Andrew Leslie Reynolds, 1939-2018.
Mountains were my dad’s greatest passion in life. He despised flat areas – “Boring!” Work and city life were necessary evils to be endured until he could be in the mountains again. The Lake District, the Peak District, Scotland and – when he could afford it: the Alps.
He was a member of the Lincoln Mountaineering Club, met my mum in the mountains and had a huge group of mountain-loving friends. After his retirement, he assisted fellow walkers and climbers as hut warden every summer on the Scottish Isle of Skye.
In his army green cagoule and technical hiking trousers and boots, he looked out of place in a city. But when I started doing snowboard seasons, he fit right in and often came out to visit, bombing down the black runs right behind me on his skis. He gamely tried snowboarding himself when he was in his sixties. Then I began competing at halfpipe. Many dads might have worried about their daughter doing such a dangerous sport, but my dad made no secret of his approval.
He was always encouraging about my writing and was a fountain of ideas for my previous novel – another mountain-set snowboarding thriller (still incomplete). We spent many a happy hour discussing ways my villains (or the mountains themselves) could kill my characters. I can still hear his shouts of laughter down the phone at my latest gruesome idea.
My dad didn’t write – he could barely read his own handwriting and certainly nobody else could – but he was a brilliant oral storyteller with endless tales to tell. One of my favourites is the story of how, a few years before I was born, he and my mum escaped death by a millimetre on the Matterhorn. My parents, both experienced and proficient mountaineers, were roped together climbing a steep rockface in parallel, five metres apart, when someone above them shouted a warning. My dad looked up to see a boulder the size of a small filing cabinet plummeting downwards. As it neared him, my dad realised it was going to land on the rope between him and my mum. Instinctively he slackened the rope, letting it lie flat against the rockface. His quick thinking saved their lives. If the rope had been taut, the boulder would have landed on it and pulled my parents clean off the mountain. When my parents inspected the rope later, they saw a little nick from where the boulder had scratched it.
My dad passed away in 2018 so he never got a chance to read Shiver, but it seems fitting that my first published novel is set in mountains he knew and loved.
Allie Reynolds 