SPACE BELOW MY FEET

An offhand chronicle of Gwen Moffat's unpredictable life- and precarious passion, mountain climbing, begins when at 21, after three years in the A.T.S., she deserted, went on the road with some casual acquaintances, and learned to climb in Wales. Aware that she only ""wanted adventure, freedom, rejection of authority"", she travelled here and there with different companions, married Gordon Moffat for a time, had a little girl, chafed at any curtailment of her activities, and left her husband (permanently) and her little girl (temporarily- farmed out in school and with her mother) to return to the continent and climb in the Swiss Alps and the Dlomites. Always short of money, she took odd jobs (a season in the theatre), wrote, teamed up with Johnnie whom she eventually married, and finally achieved some sort of financial reward from her avocation by qualifying as an accredited guide (she is the first woman to do so)... A rather exceptional story of an exceptional girl- easier to admire than to like- and a candid, casual account of a vagrant committed only to the excitement, and terror, of high places.