Hugh Montgomery has scaled mountains and spirited Irish hostages out ofIraq. But these ripping yarns pale beside his years-long quest to find apublisher for his first book. The flying doctor who truly puts the 'full' in Monty talks to Arminta Wallace.
It's hard to know where to start with Hugh Montgomery. True, he has written a children's book: 212 pages of rhyming verse, a ripping yarn of good and evil involving pirates, ghostly ships, a team of divers and a heroic, if somewhat tatty, dog.
So far, so straightforward. But then - according to his own press release - Hugh Montgomery is also a) an intensive care consultant in a busy London hospital; b) leader of the research group which discovered the gene known as "the jock gene" in 1998; c) holder of the Argentine army record for the fastest ascent of the 7,000-metre-high Mt Aconcagua; and d) holder of the world underwater piano-playing record. He has run the 80 kilometres from Petersfield to Brighton - uh, twice. In the build-up to the Gulf War he flew into Iraq to collect hostages. He skydives for fun. He narrowly missed being killed by an avalanche in the Himalayas.
Meanwhile, back at the children's book, a closer look reveals that its genesis has been anything but straightforward. Montgomery began The Voyage of the Arctic Tern two weeks before Christmas 1993 as a present for his young godchildren. He finished it three years later, and sent the manuscript to a publisher, who promptly rejected it. As did the next. And the next: 28 rejections in all.
Did it ever occur to Hugh Montgomery that his book might not be, well, any good? "No," says the mild English voice on the phone, firmly but politely. "And that's not arrogance. Well, a bit, maybe."
Montgomery says he had three good reasons to believe in his book. First, he was so excited by the writing of it, by the way the story developed, that he reckoned anyone who read it would have to feel the same. Second, his partner, a paediatrician, was "feeding" the story, chapter by chapter, to kids at her hospital. They loved it but they also had criticisms - this bit is boring, this bit is difficult, this bit is great.
"And thirdly," he says, "I didn't trust the opinions of the people who turned it down, because none of them actually said they didn't like it." Two rejections, in particular, rankled. "One was a note saying, 'Dear Dr Montgomery, thank you very much for your manuscript. This book will not sell. Children do not like verse'. Near the end, in despair, I wrote to another publisher and said, 'Look, I keep getting rejected because the book is in verse. So I won't send it to you unless you think it's worth seeing. Tell me if you're interested in a book in verse, and I'll send you some chapters.'
"Two weeks later they sent me a full critique of my manuscript - which I hadn't given to them."
The verdict on the non-existent manuscript was, naturally, negative. "It said, 'We've sent your book to our readers, who thought the characters were very well defined, the plot was pacy, blah, blah, blah. But in the current market . . . ' That was when I got bloody minded and decided to publish the book myself."
Montgomery postponed his wedding, remortgaged his flat, withdrew his life savings and printed 2,000 copies of The Voyage of the Arctic Tern in October 2000, complete with gorgeously atmospheric illustrations by Nick Poullis. Not only was every single copy sold; the book went on to win awards for Self-Published Book of the Year and Poetry Book of the Year. Now it has been reissued by Walker Books. "And of course," says Montgomery, "I'm now sweating cobs because they've put so much effort into producing a book that really looks lovely - and I'm sitting here hoping it sells more than three copies."
An unlikely prognosis, doc. The tale rattles along at a cracking pace, with plenty of mood swings and humorous asides to add to the fun. There are cameos of present-day Plymouth and skulduggery at sea in Elizabethan times and a dreamy interlude set in the Arctic.
There's also a strong diving theme. Did we mention that Montgomery, at the age of 16, joined the team which salvaged Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose? "Oh, but," he protests, "my interest in diving came about by accident, really. When I was about 14 I developed a rheumatic problem in my knees. I was very into walking, and was supposed to go to Iceland with my school, to walk a glacier - but I couldn't even climb up on to a pavement, let alone a glacier."
To compensate for the disappointment - and relieve the pressure on his knees - Montgomery took up diving; and much of the book's tone of wonder derives, he says, from those early experiences underwater. "It's every child's dream, isn't it? When you see ships that haven't been touched for hundreds of years."
It's hardly surprising that a child who grew up in Plymouth would develop an abiding love of the sea, and seafaring was in Montgomery's family, insofar as his paternal grandfather was skipper of the Larne-Stranraer ferry. Yet young Hugh turned his back on the ocean waves, in a sense, when he chose a medical career which took him to London. "Until about 14 or 15 I thought I was going to be a policeman," he says, "but my father was a paediatrician and my mother was a paediatric nurse, and then my father's brother was a missionary GP, so medicine is in the genes, too."
The genes also turned out to be in the medicine. Since the discovery of the so-called "jock gene" which determines fitness capability, Montgomery and his team have made further progress in the field of genetics; the results will remain unpublished for the present. "There are people who get the wrong end of the stick about this kind of research - and then there are people who are deliberately Machiavellian. After we published the stuff about the fitness gene, we had Premiership football clubs ringing us up saying, 'Can you screen children for us to see who's going to be a good footballer?' Which we can't do, anyway. But it's horrible that people actually think like that."
For Montgomery, though, the biggest drawback associated with his discovery is that it applies to himself. "This gene has a particular impact on mountaineers because it's to do with the efficiency with which you burn oxygen. If you've got two of the wrong sort of gene you're very, very, very unlikely to get to the summits of, say, 8,000-metre mountains." Montgomery has the genes, "But I've decided to challenge my own research. I've been to 7,000 metres and felt really good, so the next step is 8,000. I'll see how I feel there."
The 7,000-metre climb to Mt Aconcagua was part of a joint British-Argentinian Falklands reconciliation project. "It was just magical -- in fact, that's where my next book has come from. Walking through this fantastically rich baked soil, with condors overhead, and llamas and everything." But how does he get to go on these jaunts? "Ah. Well, I'm in that very fortunate position where, because I'm a doctor, people ring up and ask, would you terribly much mind putting yourself out to go on some fantastic expedition that you'd actually give your eye teeth for."
And Baghdad? "Um, I had taken a year off to go and work in Africa, and I was raising the money to do it by flying air ambulances -- dropping into countries and picking sick people up from weird places and flying them back to England. So I suppose I was fairly uniquely equipped to do a trip like that. And I was also available. With a lot of things in life, it doesn't matter whether you're any good - what matters is, if you can actually go, on the day."
Baghdad, he says, was "a great trip. Really entertaining." Excuse me? "Well, it was a bit scary coming in, because Baghdad was completely blacked out. They just lit up one runway. And then the lights went off, and we were left sitting on the tarmac for hours, not knowing what was going to happen next, not knowing if we were going to bekidnapped ourselves."
The hostages, when they finally got them on board, turned out to be a crowd of Irish builders who had been working on Saddam Hussein's palace. "They'd been out there for ages, and then someone had kidnapped them and stuck them in a missile silo. So when they got on the plane, it was just one big party all the way home."
So far, the flying doctor has discussed the extraordinary statements on his press release as if they were items on a shopping list. But surely even he can't make a 110-hour world underwater piano-playing stint sound reasonable? He can, of course.
"I was a first-year medical student and they were trying to raise money for a portable ultra-sound machine. They're flying around like handbags now, but at the time, in 1981, it was a big thing. I've really no idea how the idea came about, but I remember thinking it would be quite easy: just dump a piano at the deep end and you'll be fine. And then, of course, you do it and the wood warps and you can't play it. We ended up getting Yamaha to build a synthesiser set into a piano case."
And what, I dread to ask, did they play? "Ah. Well. We started with Handel's Water Music, and all that sort of thing; and then it gradually degenerated into anything at all. The notes gradually packed up, so at the end we had three working notes, which rather limited the tunes. But we got the money for the machine - and, strangely enough, no one has ever tried to beat the record . . . "
Hugh Montgomery has probably done more, in just under 40 years, than most over-achievers get through in a lifetime. But he admits there are things he still burns to do.
"I suppose it's part of working in intensive care. Dying isn't a terribly romantic thing. It's usually not at the right time. Most people aren't ready to die; they aren't expecting it. It's just a complete wild card. They're perfectly well one day, and then something happens that night and it has all gone horribly wrong. I've always been frightened that I'll get the card dealt to me and I'll go, 'Damn'."
The burning ambitions, he says, are to climb a few more mountains and write a musical. And, of course, to write more books. "I have two ideas, one of which I'm really excited about. It's a mythical story set by a canal, with a bridge." But first he needs to finish a follow-up to Arctic Tern. "I'm halfway through that, and I hope to have it finished by October. I got slightly diverted because I'm also writing a thriller that had been on the back shelf for, oh, it must be about four years. A nasty medical thriller with an ensemble cast of nine women."
This will be coming to a TV screen near you in due course. By which time, Hugh Montgomery will probably have discovered a whole new planet. I suspect he has done it already.
The Voyage of the Arctic Tern is published by Walker Books (€16.99)