Learning to Breathe by Andy Cave

Maggie made me a mountain-climber

When Arthur Scargill called the 1984 strike, Grimethorpe proved itself among the most militant of the striking collieries, so, bar the odd "scab", it was "everyone out", including the 17-year-old Cave and his father. For a good part of the next year, the five-strong Cave family subsisted on £17.59 a week; one night, Andy's father escaped the police while stealing potatoes from a farmer's field - his arthritis from years down the mine nearly scuppered his get-away.

Margaret Thatcher's battle with "the enemy within" did Cave one favour, though - he had plenty of time to climb, graduating from trees and pylons, to rock and ice. It's an irony he acknowledges: "Without the strike would I have developed such a deep love for the mountains?" He and his new climbing friends hitch-hike from crag to glen and back, living on baked beans and sleeping on mates' floors - halcyon days in the mid-Eighties which Cave recalls nostalgically.

These sections of the book represent a rich seam of social history, and Cave picks away at it steadily. He is also honest about the legacy of the strike. He falls out with a friend who decides to cross the picket line after eight months, and wonders why he doesn't speak to him for another 17 years. On a building job in the early Nineties, he can't bring himself to room with a man who he believes was a scab. "History weighs down on one sometimes," Cave writes, "like a heavy blanket that refuses to be thrown off."

Climbing clearly lightens this load, however, and Cave's elegant writing draws on the congruence between mining and climbing, the black humour, the danger, the camaraderie. Other, smaller felicities crop up, such as the fact that a cable-car in Chamonix ascends at the same rate - 8m per second - as the shaft lift at Grimethorpe descends. There are graver echoes, too: the temporary plight of a climber gasping for air high on a mountain is pointedly compared to the permanent wheezing of an octogenarian mining acquaintance of Cave's.

Finally leaving the pit in 1986, Cave began a remarkable climbing career that he distils here into three ascents of personal importance, one in the Alps and two in the Himalaya. But despite these achievements, we're left in no doubt as to the prevailing nature of mountaineering, by turns frustrating, comic and deadly. The ascent of a route called Divine Providence on Mont Blanc begins in farce, an assault on Gasherbrum IV in the Himalaya ends in failure and the third, the 18-day ascent of Changabang, results in the death of his climbing partner in an avalanche, and very nearly his own demise.

Not that his understated style allows him to ponder too long. His study of the sociolinguistics of Britain's former mining communities and the international mountain guide exams he passes barely get a mention (Cave is one of only 150-odd active British guides to hold this formidable qualification). Instead, he concentrates on his arresting and episodic narrative, pitted with the occasional striking image: an abandoned mountain hut beneath Mont Blanc is described as looking "like a rusting trawler riding the back of a steep wave". The book's photos give the lie to his understatement, though - the shots of his mountain exploits are stomach-churning.

Any caveats? Well, yes. The wide, rich context of Cave's climbing and mining youth and the latter high-mountain dramas are each reason enough to read this excellent memoir. But his account of his 1997 Changabang ascent pulls the focus in very tightly. You're left wondering what connection this high-altitude, high-risk play has to his previous, comparably dangerous life underground. It's all the more surprising when, on the Gasherbrum IV expedition, he describes a platoon of Pakistani soldiers manning a high pass in oddly familiar terms: young, enthusiastic men, proud to be serving their country, seemingly ignorant of the dangers of their environment. The description lingers (and not just because nine of the soldiers subsequently die in an avalanche).

Then you click - even at 4,500m, it would seem you can find miners if you look hard enough.