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“A rough, tough, amoral little thug from the slums of Liverpool… eventually grows into a beautiful and strong person through his experiences and relationships with others in climbing. “-from a 1952 American Alpine Journal review of Elizabeth Coxhead’s novel A green bottle, published in 1951, about a gifted climber in Wales.

“In her modern, human and positive vision of a girl from the slums, OGB was ahead of its time.” – from the e-book publisher, 2013.

“Miss Coxhead’s portraits are so well drawn, her honesty in describing the temptations of promiscuity so complete, that one follows her to the end.” —Books of the month review, 1951.

“The novel would later be condemned for its explicitness by the Very Reverend Douglas Henry Crick, who was the Anglican Bishop of Chester.” – History website hinckleypastpresent.org.

“By far the best climbing novel I’ve read” – Jack Longland, Everest’s first explorer, who also laid down the toughest route in Wales (E1 when the highest standard was Very severe), in a cover line for the 1955 paperback edition.

Wait what? And How? ‘Or’ What– how did I learn about this climbing novel by Elizabeth Coxhead, one of the leading writers of her time?

Although long passionate about climbing literature, with a particular affinity for its female writers – moreover, in one of the best times of my life, I lived and climbed in North Wales, the framework of the book – I had missed this one. I only came across this last week while writing about an upcoming rock climbing novel and looking for context. Snag a Kindle edition of A green bottle for $6 I read it in less than 24 hours. Its fiery and outspoken protagonist, Cathy Canning, has long lingered in my mind in a way that is both exhilarating and melancholy.

Ian Smith, former editor of the British High magazine, calls A green bottle, published in 1951, “an important book in British mountaineering literature: well written, moving and quite revolutionary”.

Cathy knows her own mind, and she’s keen and passionate, especially about learning to climb: “I’m a big fan, aren’t I, Chris?” she says in one of the many telling passages, here addressing her love object. “Always grab, grab, grab.” She really loves the mountains, knew from her previous foray from Liverpool to the countryside as a child: “It had been, though she couldn’t explain it to him, like the cracking of a shell, the light pouring through.”

A first passage, characterizing Cathy’s father, highlights both the novelist’s insight and her economy of expression: “Mrs. Canning, Cathy’s mother, had become a perpetually on the alert bitch. Mr. Canning, a left-handed riveter and conscious for years of valuable skill, now knew that the return of prosperity could bring him neither a better home nor a better wife, and he was consumed by the perpetual, smoldering wrath of the intelligent . a man who was given no words to express and resolve his grievances.

Elizabeth Coxhead was a mountaineer and offers an abundance of authentic cliffside scenes. Elizabeth Knowlton, the American Alpine Journal critic, wrote that these parts interested her so intensely that she had forgotten to appreciate the plot: “There is rock work of all kinds here, frequent moods of the block and the elimination of novices , to the delight of conducting a ‘Very Severe’… Miss Coxhead sensitively observes and vividly describes the details of facts, sensations and mood. Any climber, Knowlton wrote, would continually enjoy these “pleasures of recognition.”

Cathy takes up rock climbing, is cared for by kind mentors, and finds deep happiness and a sense of belonging in the hills and hostel life of the time. With her hardscrabble past, she’s an anomaly: the novel was written before the more visible working-class climbers were shaking things up in the then class-conscious UK; Joe Brown established the revolutionary routes The gates of the cemetery and Cenotaph corner, both E1 (5.10), at Llanberis Pass, North Wales, in 1951 and 1952. One of Cathy’s new friends is the son of an earl.

Among my many favorite descriptions are: “The road shone like a ribbon of steel under the light of huge stars in the clear mountain air. Tryfan’s triple peak “- a classic rock peak I know well -” stood out like black fretwork against them. Llanllugway was a line of greatest stars; then came a stretch where the river roared by the road, and they descended into deeper darkness.

And this, from a moonlit ascent of Mount Snowdon: “Gripping the stones, they looked around. The scene was fantastic, toad-colored; inky blues, slate grays, livid greens. The crests stood out skeletally; stripped of its trappings of daylight, the mountain showed its bare bones. Beyond, the small hills were dark gray specks against the bright, milky sky. Only the water was glistening, a filigree of silver where the moonlight caught her… An immense elation possessed her.

Cathy is a great talent, encouraged by her peers, spending every penny of overtime money in a laundry to buy boots and ropes, thinking all week about the transition from the weekend to her other world. She has various suitors, but it’s in the mountain world that she falls in love, and she’s direct and equally decisive in the supposedly piquant scenes that shocked the Bishop. A critic of the Cheshire Observer felt that the book’s various “love episodes” should have been omitted.

Coxhead’s nephew, Richard Chesshyre, wrote in a preface to the 2013 digital edition that the author was provocative, “delighted” by the bishop’s censorship, and that it boosted book sales. But oh, there are complications in Cathy’s love story…

“To this day, in mountain huts and hostels, readers argue into the early hours over the book’s controversial ending,” Chesshyre wrote.

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A clue as to this outcome comes from Terry Gifford, British poet and author of The pleasure of climbing, who spoke with Elizabeth Coxhead’s sister, Alison. Gifford wrote in High magazine, as reproduced in Footless Crow in 2010: “It was Alison who gave me the key to understanding A green bottle when I suggested that the novelist seems to be saying firmly that there can be no easy happy endings in life. “But that,” she said, “was like the times of the 1930s. And we had that war you’re too young to remember!”

The era followed World War II and was a time when home, hearth and domesticity were seen as ideals, and women who followed interests outside the kingdom were often seen as selfish. In America in the 1950s, the average age for a woman to marry was 20. Women in the UK won the same right to vote as men on July 2, 1928, when the author (born 1909) was 18 or 19, and only about 20 years before she probably wrote the novel.

I have my own (dismayed, might as well say) opinions on the ending, which I won’t say more about, but the author must have found it true to the times and his own sense of duty.

Coxhead was extremely capable and enterprising, her life overflowing: she climbed, though at first she was dismissed at a glance (like Cathy, she found a kind mentor); she graduated from Oxford at a time when almost no woman did; She worked as a journalist for the Guardian and other periodicals; she wrote 10 novels (The figure in the mist also contains rock climbing, Scotland) and four non-fiction books; and she was a radio host. The film rights of A green bottle were optioned twice in his life – another of his books, A friend in need became a movie, but the climbing scenes would have been unmanageable for large movie cameras of the day.

She may have loved a mountaineer who was killed on the Isle of Skye, or so her niece, Miriam (the author’s sister objected) believed, interviewed by Terry Gifford.

Independent as Coxhead was, yet she was just as loyal, if not more so. She eventually spent many years as a devoted caretaker to elderly and very young parents. In 1979, Coxhead, according to Hinckley’s records, fell and fractured her femur. The text continues: “At the age of 70, she realized that she was likely to end her days as a burden to others. In September, Elizabeth committed suicide on the Gerrards Cross railway line in Buckinghamshire Gifford called his “an act of compassion”.

A copy of the first edition of A green bottle (sold online) contained the inscription: ‘To Mr and Mrs S. Cross, Happiest Memories of Langdale, September 1953, Elizabeth Coxhead. Sidney Cross was one of Lakeland’s leading climbers, a rescue leader, and a hotel operator in Langdale, all of which fit the universe of this novel.

“I was happy to bring attention to this pioneering book,” Terry Gifford tells me in an email.

“The book looks fascinating,” my friend Harriet Ridley, a top climber who lives in Wales, tells me. “I’ll chase him away.”

And I walk away hoping these “happiest memories” have sustained one brave climber who wrote about another.

The novel is reproduced in its entirety in the omnibus A step in the clouds, compiled by Audrey Salkeld and Rosie Smith and published by Ken Wilson under the Diadem/Sierra Club Books imprint.

See also: native air Look at the bond of escalation and the void of disaster.