Space below my Feet, by Gwen Moffat. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1961. 302 pages, illustrated with photographs. Price $5.

Among mountaineering works Gwen Moffat’s book is in a category all by itself. (A well-known climber’s un-mountain-minded wife declares this is the first book on climbing she has read from cover to cover!) The writer is unorthodox, uncompromising, honest, charming and a born rebel. While struggling for means to express herself in the limited routine of the English Army just after the war, a conscientious objector introduces her to rock-climbing in the Welsh Hills. From that moment her entire life unfolds against a background of mountains, and she takes us with her. We follow Gwen in her hobo existence in a shack in Cornwall, in cottages in Wales and Scotland, on a fishing boat; we experience a novice’s thrills during her first climbs, bare-footed, on the Welsh slabs; we go through hairbreadth escapes, and the climbing goes on: difficult, severe, very severe. When we finally part from her and her husband on the summit of the Breithorn after 12 hours on the Younggrat, she is a fully qualified guide. To keep alive and support her little daughter in the meantime she has followed a number of trades, all with a mountain background except for a job in a theatre: running a Youth Hostel in Wales, driving a travelling store on lonely roads in the Scottish Highlands, acting as a maid of all work in a hotel in the British Lakes.

From time to time we are taken for exciting adventures on the Continent, to Chamonix, Zermatt and the Dolomites. To this reader however, the most fascinating parts of the book are the descriptions of the mountains Gwen Moffat knows best, the Welsh and Scottish Hills, and the enchanting island of Skye. People of all sorts come and go in the pages, but they are secondary to the main theme of a human being and her endeavors in high places.

The great attraction of Space below my Feet is the writer’s power to conjure up mountain scenes, moods and weather and her own reactions to them. This is an intensely personal book and may be frowned on by those who like their mountains to be viewed objectively. Mountains are her passion: through them she found freedom and her true self, and she feels she can best express herself climbing among them. The objective mountain worshipper is often personally inarticulate; he dwindles into insignificance beside the beloved object and is rather guilt-stricken about obtruding his own feelings in descriptions of climbs. To him Space below my Feet may smack of exhibitionism. But how readable it is! Let us hope that this unusually honest and vivid writer will continue to climb and to tell us all about it.

Ursula Corning