AS an adventurous young girl during the Second World War, Gwen Moffat's dream was to become a guerrilla. How dreadful, then, to find herself instead stuck on the farm as a Land Girl, then as an army driver for the Auxiliary Training Service. A casual lift offered to a hitchhiker in North Wales changed her life for ever, as Moffat recorded in her best-selling 1961 classic Space Below My Feet, reissued this month by Sigma Leisure, Cheshire, at £8.95. Her hitchhiker "launched straight into a description of an astonishing world completely outside my experience, a free and splendid world of mountains and mountain climbing and hidden lonely cottages which he shared with friends... "My imagination pictured supermen and lovely casual girls subject to no ordinary rules or conventions, wandering gaily about the country, laughing, working and making love - and having a multitude of shocking adventures." He took her climbing on Tryfan. Neither wore a watch: they timed their day out by the routine of the farmhouse in whose barn they lodged. The farmer's wife was washing the dishes when they called for their jug of milk. Breakfast time, they judged. Only when a baffling darkness fell as they gained the summit of Tryfan, did the awful truth dawn: She was washing up the lunch things! Torchless, they descended Tryfan's precipices in a pitch-dark gale and were lucky to get down alive. Never mind, climbing had Moffat hooked. In 1945, aged 21, she deserted from the Army, walking out of the hated Nissen hut with only ten shillings and a sleeping bag to her name, and spent the next five months sleeping rough. Once, having slept by a railway embankment, her clothes for a pillow, she had to lie idle for hours in her bag, waiting for a break in the shunting to get dressed. She became "a tramp, a rebel . . . the one that got away." Above all, she became a serious climber, falling in love definitively with climbing and "la vie Boheme" on Glyder Fach. She liked to climb barefoot, gipsy style, hating clumsy nailed boots "the size of soup plates." Like "a newly-wed," she could not get enough of the rock. After months of climbing, she came clean with the Army. Wearing a heavy skirt constructed from black-out curtains and her boyfriend's climbing shirt, she gave herself up to the military police with the words: "Good afternoon, I'm a deserter. What do I do?" They court-martialled her and set her to work the switchboard. When she finally left the Army - legitimately - she returned to North Wales for more passionate climbing. In 1948 she married a fellow climber. They lived on The Lady Kathleen, a down-at-heel fishing boat moored by Conwy's Marine Walk. Heavily pregnant, Moffat loved to swim in the "exciting" swift currents. She barely made it to hospital, climbing with difficulty into a "tossing dinghy" when labour pains set in. When the marriage broke up Moffat became warden of Rowen Youth Hostel, eventually renting a cottage in the village for seven years. It was on a cart track 600ft above Rowen, near Maen y Bardd cromlech. Everything - food, fuel and furniture - had to be carried up the mountain on your back. Speaking from her present home in Penrith, Moffat, now a mellowed 77-year-old, said: "It's my favourite place on earth. Sometimes when you were walking home you mistook the cottage lamp for a star, it was that high." Moffat remarried climber Johnny Lees, then running the Mountain Rescue unit at RAF Valley. She trained as a mountain guide, and climbed all over Britain and Europe. She turned to writing, wrote scripts for the BBC and exhilarating best-sellers about her wild and free climbing life. In the 1970s she lectured on conservation at Bangor University. Then a new twist in her extraordinary career: crime fiction. She has now written 23 crime novels, some set in North Wales. "They all have a wilderness theme, mountains, deserts, sea cliffs," she said. "I used to write two a year; now only one." Her latest book Quicksand, came out in June. Moffat returns to her beloved Snowdonia each year for a rendezvous at the climbing hut of the Pinnacle Club, of which she is an honorary member. "I can still get up a mountain!" laughs this redoubtable woman. | 
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