Touching the Void climber bombarded with abuse by school children
It is a thrilling tale of courage and survival that ought to grip any school child. But Joe Simpson, a mountaineer whose book details an agonising crawl down a Peruvian mountain with a shattered leg has become embroiled in an unseemly row with pupils who abused him online.
GCSE English students studying Touching the Void for their exams have vented their frustrations on Twitter.
The book charts Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates's disastrous climb of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.The pair were roped together as they descended the mountain in bad weather when Yates was forced to cut his partner free in order to save himself, leaving Simpson, then aged 25, to fall 150 ft.
He abseiled off an ice ledge and crawled for four days without food or water over five miles through the ice and over rocks with a shattered tibia to reach base camp. He arrived delirious, exhausted and just hours before Yates was due to abandon their tents for civilisation.
But the story of the triumph of the human will to survive in the face of almost overwhelming adversity was lost on the teenagers.
They dubbed him a “crevasse w------”, condemned his work as “boring” and even claimed he would lead them to fail their exams.
(continued, amazing modern technology let's you get even with the author)
