No overview of creative writing and climbing would be complete without an exploration of Helen Mort’s poetry. In her 2016 collection, No Map Could Show Them, Mort writes of female mountaineering, expressed powerfully in ‘Dear Alison’, one of a sequence of poems inspired by the late Alison Hargreaves. Hear Mort reading here:
http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=8937#17
(You can also view the slideshow containing interviews and additional poems via this link.)
This video, produced by UK Climbing, documents Mort’s tribute to Hargreaves, a British mountaineer whose achievements include all of the great north faces of the Alps in a single season. Hargreaves died in 1995 while descending from K2’s summit.
Mort’s verse is lyrical and exciting, moving in many ways, including its contribution to the intersecting worlds of climbing, female sport and feminism. Reading it, I am simultaneously awed and, frankly, worried. You see, I can’t help but question, again, whether indoor climbing is too mundane, artificial, simply a poor cousin of sandstone and granite in comparison to mountaineering, set in the natural landscape, its original home. And yet, indoor climbing doesn’t seem simply a substitute for me; getting to The Reach is what I can manage, it is my workout, my sanity, and it satisfies me.
This past Saturday, with Women’s Marches around the world, I am drawn to the collection’s focus on the female experience. Within Mort’s Hargreave’s sequence is ‘Home’:
Home
‘Oh, a woman is so missing snow, ice, rock …’
- Entry in Alison’s diary, early 1978, after breaking her leg
Even in your house you aren’t at home –
your blue raincoat collapsing from its peg,
teacups abandoned in the kitchen sink.
In her interview on the collection, Mort touches on the fact that Hargreaves was subjected to criticism for leaving her children behind to pursue her sport. The poetic text, ‘you aren’t at home’ and ‘abandoned’, arguably alludes, on one level, to these themes. For women, perhaps especially mothers, with the pursuit of sport, adventure, indeed any activity without monetary compensation (and sometimes, even those attached to a paycheck!) there can be accusations of selfishness, and associated feelings of guilt.
Coincidently, I am reading Jane Eyre for the first time, finding parallels with these emerging themes. Brontë writes from the perspective of Jane Eyre:
‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.’
This long passage seems appropriate here. Published in 1847, these fundamental desires for equality are arguably still often unmet in 2017. Many women still live with these sorts of expectations, and some societal thinking promotes female ‘restraint’ and ‘stagnation’ over freedom. In a sense, then, climbing, for women, can be all about the escape, the ‘exercise for their faculties’, whether that ‘exercise’ takes place on K2 or in a gym in Woolwich. The climb takes on layers of meaning: aspiration, ascent, advancement, a rising.
My regular climbing companions and I are all mothers. We steal time from our work and families in order to climb. We rush back for school pick-ups; we boulder and belay while talking, often, about our kids. We’ve dreamt of an outdoor climbing trip, to the Lake District, or Italy. These plans have been put on hold until our children are older. This weekend, some of us marched, bringing our kids; we aspire. And next week, we will climb; we will make our ascents, indoors, and then hurry home.