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It is hard for Jessica Hepburn to pinpoint the exact moment she decided to climb to the top of the world as well as to listen to every single available episode of Desert Island Discs.
“They’ve become so inextricably linked in my mind,” says the author, adventurer and self-described “unlikely athlete” who, in 2022, at the age of 51, successfully summited Mount Everest.
Previous accomplishments include swimming the English Channel and running the London marathon. Desert Island Discs was her joy, her pleasure, her fuel. “I’m arty, not sporty. There’s nothing I enjoy about swimming, running or mountain climbing other than it gives me a licence to eat and drink on the sofa,” she says.
First broadcast in 1942, there are more than 3,300 episodes of the classic BBC radio show available online. Since Hepburn began her training in 2017 to climb 8,848 metres to the top of the world’s highest mountain, she has listened to every single one – often, while practising hill-walking with weighted packs on her back. Realising that she could combine hard physical training with her passion and, better still, that her favourite radio programme would make it easier was a “life-changing moment”, says Hepburn.
Interviewees on the show are famously asked for the eight tracks, a book and a luxury item that they would take with them if they were cast away to a desert island, explaining their choices, before choosing just one track they would save from the waves. “The music unlocks stories and truths from its castaways who are, let’s face it, the Who’s Who of British life over the last 100 years,” says Hepburn. “Each castaway offered me so much wisdom and learning.”
In her memoir, Save Me From the Waves, Hepburn recounts how, while training for Everest, she is at one point the only person in her group who fails to summit Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe, from the north side. Lying in her sleeping bag, exhausted but too upset to sleep, she listens to the actor Tim Robbins tell Kirsty Young that, at 50, he started thinking: “How many years have I got left? And at those moments you go: what the hell am I doing here?” He continued: “I asked myself the question: what is it that will make you happy? What is it that you have not done that you will regret not doing?”
The next morning, she got up, walked down to base camp and drove round to the south side (which, because it is marginally warmer, is slightly easier to ascend). From that side, she successfully climbed to “the top of Europe”. And when she got there, she cried. “But they were happy tears. Tears of self love.”
In 2021, due to Covid, cyclones and a chest infection, she failed in her second attempt to summit Everest (her first attempt, in 2020, was also thwarted by the pandemic). But it was being cast away with the author Paulo Coelho that convinced her she should try again the following year. “From the moment you have dreams,” he said in his Desert Island Discs interview, “you can at least start fighting for your dreams. And from the moment you fight for your dream, everything is meaningful.”
“That’s when I realised that the beauty of life is having dreams,” says Hepburn. “Sadness comes when you don’t know what you want from life.”
The twist here is that Hepburn knew what she wanted, and couldn’t get it, no matter how hard she tried to make her dream a reality. Diagnosed with unexplained infertility in her 30s, she had spent a decade – and over £70,000 – trying to become a mother, undergoing 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy which proved almost fatal. Then, when she was in her mid-40s – after years of repeatedly finding out she wasn’t pregnant, including on the day her father died – her 16-year relationship with Peter, her “total soulmate” and the love of her life, broke down. “Everything we went through was a factor,” says Hepburn. “It became totally clear our relationship was irreparable.” The couple sold their house and split up, and Hepburn moved back into her childhood home in north London, alone. “If there was an Olympics for mental endurance, I think I’d be on the podium,” she says. “That is my strength.”
Left with a “huge emotional hole” in her life where her family should have been, she walked up Ben Nevis and Snowdonia, pounded the hills of the Lake District and the Peak District and trekked all over Parliament Hill, constantly feeling the absence of Molly, her name for the unborn child that only ever lived in her imagination.
Often, when she was training in the mountains, she would meet younger, fitter mountaineers – usually men – who would ask her why she was there. “I’m just a middle-aged woman with a dream,” she’d usually say. But sometimes, she would tell them the cold, hard, unpalatable truth: that it was because she was in “a lot of pain”. “I was in so much pain, emotionally,” she writes in her memoir. “The challenges gave me something else to focus on and the physical hardship of them released the pain in a way that, I think, improved my life.” During training for her first Everest attempt in 2020, she found that listening to other people’s life stories helped her feel less alone, and to make sense of her suffering. “One of the things I learned from my Desert Island Disc friends is that, in life, the hard stuff we have to go through makes us the people we are. I felt if I could get through the hardness of this challenge, I would be stronger – and I am.”
Today, she wants to share that path to inner strength with others, which is why she urges everyone to ask themselves the following question: “What’s going to energise you and lead you to an exciting life?” adding, “It all starts with a first step.”
It wasn’t only the reflections of the various castaways that healed Hepburn as she climbed and connected with nature. She found their choices of music – she listened to nearly 30,000 songs – motivating and invigorating, especially when she was outdoors, walking. “Movement is very associated with music, and the castaways introduced me to so much music that I didn’t know.” As she expanded her musical repertoire, she found herself creating an army of playlists for every aspect of her life. “I’d go out in the morning in the Lake District and I’d put on my ‘morning playlist’ or my ‘rain playlist’ or my ‘bird playlist’.” She also used the playlists to help her exert control over her emotions. “If I’m feeling sad, I have a playlist to make me happy, or if I want to cry, a playlist that makes me sad.” She created a playlist for Peter, too, and for those she had lost – her dead grandmother, her late father – and Molly. The latter includes Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “If you ask any parent what they want for their children, they’ll usually reply that all they want is for them to be happy,” she explains.
Despite this, when Hepburn finally ascended Everest on 14 May 2022, playing the Miley Cyrus track The Climb in her head, she didn’t feel triumphant, exhilarated or even relieved. “I felt numb,” she says. “It had taken me six days to get from Base Camp to the top. I was exhausted.”
Her descent then took a deadly turn. In a freak accident, when she was still at 8,000 metres, an empty oxygen bottle catapulted out of the sky into her leg, fracturing her fibula. “It either fell off someone’s bag, got dislodged or someone hurled it off the mountain,” Hepburn says. There was no helicopter rescue at that height, and her oxygen was running out. “All the castaways who thought about death and chose their death music – Schubert’s Adagio for Strings and Mozart’s Requiem being the two top choices – spoke to me in that moment, because I was facing death,” she says.
She didn’t know she had broken her leg. But no matter what the mountain threw at her, she had faith in her own abilities to get down it alive. “I had to get down,” she says. “I wanted to live.”
While she still feels a deep and enduring sense of loss about Molly, she is equally aware she’s had once-in-a-lifetime adventures she would never have sought out if her daughter had been born. And this is not a coincidence. “If you are faced with a personal tragedy in your life that you can’t change,” she says, “something unexpected and painful, my advice is to see that as an opportunity to do something with your life that you wouldn’t otherwise have done.”
Save me from the Waves: An Adventure From Sea to Summit by Jessica Hepburn (Quarto, £17.99) is available at guardianbookshop.com for £15.83
