Sheffield poet Helen Mort's new memoir scales the heights in an exploration of mountains and motherhood

Her acclaimed second poetry collection No Map Could Show Them (2016) was about women and mountaineering and her well-received debut novel Black Car Burning (2019) was set amongst Sheffield’s climbing community. Now, in her new memoir A Line Above the Sky, her first foray into non-fiction, she explores mountains and motherhood.

“Mountains have always been an important part of my life,” she says. “I have many happy memories of hillwalking in the Peak District and Yorkshire with my dad from the age of about four, so mountains and wild landscapes have always been where I feel most at home. As I have got older and made my life as a writer, that is still where I go for inspiration.”

A significant presence in the book is the late Alison Hargreaves, a fearless mountaineer who died at the age of 33 on an expedition to K2 in 1995. Earlier that year Hargreaves had successfully completed a solo ascent of Everest and much had been made in the media of the fact that she was the mother of two young children. She was often pressed in interviews about the risks she was taking (questions not asked of male climbers who were fathers).

“I have always been preoccupied with the life of Alison Hargreaves – I admired her, she grew up near where I did, so would have climbed in the same places I have and I was interested in the treatment she received in the press as a mother. When my son was born three years ago, I started thinking about her again.” It was also around the time that Hargreaves’ son Tom Ballard, also a mountaineer, lost his life in an accident on Nanga Parbat. “That really connected to my heart,” says Mort. “I felt a real obligation to explore my complicated feelings about mountains and sons. I started thinking about the similarities between mountaineering and the adventures of childbirth and bringing up a young child.”

She also draws parallels between writing and climbing, both risky endeavours which require courage, focus and commitment. “I am not risking my life in what I put on the page but the risk is part of the reward. You have to put yourself out there to get that thrill of being alive.”

While it remains a constant, Mort says her relationship with mountains and climbing has subtly changed through the course of her life. “There is something special about having experienced the mountains at different stages – as a child, a young person, a pregnant woman and a new mother. And now with my three-year-old son leading the way. It is wonderful seeing him exploring for himself, finding his own limits. I’m so happy to be passing on the precious gift my father gave me and that Alison Hargreaves gave to her son.” The book is affectingly honest and open-hearted. “Being candid is the only way I know how to write, but with this I knew I had to make myself vulnerable, in a way. I have never finished writing a book before and had the feeling ‘I have really put my all into this.’”

Helen Mort is at Sheffield’s Festival of Debate on April 23. www.festivalofdebate.org.uk

REVIEW

A Line Above the Sky

By Helen Mort, Ebury Press, £16.99

Yvette Huddleston 4/5

Parenthood is a life-changing experience. Priorities alter and there is a lot of readjusting to do.

Some of that is joyful, some of it can be difficult and it is this light and shade that award-winning Sheffield poet Helen Mort explores in her brilliant new memoir A Line Above the Sky. She candidly investigates her own feelings about motherhood through the prism of her close relationship with the landscape and the natural world. A keen climber, before becoming a mother three years ago, Mort was used to heading for the hills whenever she felt like it, conquering various peaks both in the UK and abroad. Walking and climbing have been a significant part of her life since she was a child when her father would take her out into the rugged moorland of the Peak District where she grew up. As a poet Mort’s writing is beautifully lyrical – she conveys the visceral thrill and the intense focus of slowly working her way up a rockface to reach another summit. At the same time, she doesn’t pull any punches in her descriptions of the challenges of pregnancy (her dismay as her angular climber’s body begins to soften) and of being a new mother – the pressures and expectations, the loss of identity. Underlying all this is a subtle examination of how society regards women, particularly mothers, who are prepared to take risks. Wise, honest and utterly compelling.