by Raynor Winn
We left Dave and Julie in West Bay to catch the bus for their return home. As we hugged them goodbye, we knew that this time really was the last. It had been a relief to share the path with them, a happy distraction from our own lives, and the sunlight was just a little dimmer without them. We bought a roll of duct tape and walked on, looking back over our shoulders for miles, expecting them to reappear.
Below Thorncombe Beacon in a cold south-westerly wind we squatted to examine the tent poles. The ends of almost all of the plastic tubes were beginning to split; we were merely days or a high wind away from the tent becoming useless. It was almost dark by the time we had carefully bound each end with tape and forced the now fat poles through the too narrow sleeves, easing each one gently into position.
‘It should hold – just hope we never have to put it up in a hurry.’ I rubbed boiled-cabbage back rub on Moth’s shoulders as the wind increased and we packed everything loose into the rucksacks in case the duct tape didn’t work.
It held, but first light brought rain squalling in on a strong wind, pushing us downhill and onwards, onwards, roaring through a maize field, clattering the tall stems before it blew past, agitated and eager to be gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind a dense, cloying mist. We walked slowly up Golden Cap in a cloud so thick there was no sign of why it was called Golden, but as the highest point on the south coast it had to be celebrated.
The trig point stood among clumps of broom, with other paths leading off in every direction – it was impossible to see where to. Our home in Wales had been deep in mountainous countryside and whenever we had a moment spare, we walked in the hills. The children were pre-school when they climbed their first mountain, but as they grew older it often took some imagination to encourage them to be out in the cold on an arduous walk. Whenever we reached a trig point Moth would jump on and plank for a photo, lying on his stomach on the column and pretending to fly, anything to cheer up kids who were ready to give in. It became a family tradition, so the sight of the Golden Cap trig point was too appealing, CBD or not.
‘Do you think you can do it without hurting yourself?’
He dropped his pack down and putting his hands over the top of the column hoisted himself on. I waited for the cry of pain, the inevitable self-rebuke for having been so silly. It didn’t come. He spread his arms and flew into the clouds, free and floating, for all the world as if he would live forever. I ran around taking photos as if it was the first time he’d flown, or the last.
‘Maybe it’s the cabbage rub.’
His face was clear, he wasn’t even hiding pain, and he was laughing. In the fog-bound heather we hugged and jumped, laughing, kissing, shouting. Was this possible? From the point of not being able to get out of bed, back to strong and in control of his limbs in just under two weeks. This shouldn’t be possible. But it was. I should have noticed that I was no longer seeing the drag in his footprints, but it hadn’t registered.
‘Maybe it’s because we had a rest in Weymouth. Maybe my body’s adjusted quicker, like acclimatizing to altitude.’
‘But how? How can the stiffness have receded so quickly? On the north coast it took weeks.’
‘I’ve no idea; I knew it was feeling easier over the last couple of days, but I didn’t dare hope.’
‘Do you think it could be something to do with oxygen? I know we thought it before, because the path makes you breathe so deeply. That huge wash of oxygen – can it somehow affect the brain? It can’t be, though. If it was that simple, the hospital would just hand out oxygen tanks.’
‘I don’t know. It’s obviously got something to do with heavy endurance exercise. It must cause some sort of reaction that we don’t understand. I don’t know how it works, I just feel great.’ We jumped and danced in the fog of Golden Cap.
‘Be careful on the stairs.’
‘Don’t plan too far ahead.’
‘We don’t need to – we’ve got Paddy for that. Even if everything he says is backwards.’
20. Accepting
Living with a death sentence, having no idea when it will be enacted, is to straddle a void. Every word or gesture, every breath of wind or drop of rain matters to a painful degree. For now we had moved outside of that. Moth was on death row, but he’d been granted the right to appeal. He knew CBD hadn’t miraculously disappeared, but somehow, for a while, it was held at bay. While we had space to think clearly, when death wasn’t hanging around the tent like a malevolent stalker, a thing to fear, Moth felt he had to say it.
‘When it does come, the end, I want you to have me cremated.’
There had been a spot in the back field of our farm, near the hedge with a view to the mountains, where we said we’d be buried, in the days when we thought it would be our home forever. But now there was no field, no religion, no place where he felt he could safely be left.
‘Because I want you to keep me in a box somewhere, then when you die the kids can put you in, give us a shake and send us on our way. Together. It’s bothered me more than anything else, the thought of us being apart. They can let us go on the coast, in the wind, and we’ll find the horizon together.’
I hung on to him, too choked to speak. It had been said; death had been acknowledged. He would fight, but eventually he’d lose. Moth had been strong enough to see this from the start; now I was calm enough to know it was true and let it be. We lay in the tent at the edge of Lyme Regis, on a patch of grass between the lobster pots and the chalets, and let death in. And life came with it. The jagged, shattered, lost fragments of our lives slowly, mercurially drawn back together.
Leaving the sea, we entered the woods, our packs weighed down with fossilized ammonites from the beach, relics of other lives, other millennia, from a time when we were fish. The trees closed behind us and we entered the Undercliff: an eerie, damp British jungle, created on Christmas Eve 1839, when eight million tonnes of soil slipped towards the sea leaving a huge chasm. Sheep, rabbits, a tea room and an area known as goat island were taken with it. A field of wheat slipped intact, and was harvested the following summer. Left alone, the slip has naturalized into seven miles of ferns, ivy and trees that dripped and oozed with water in the steady rain. A land changed forever in a moment, and now caught in it. Wild and untouched plants have grown in their own way, taking their own form, free to gnarl and twist and seed at will. The path is the only way in or out and it weaved on for eight miles before we finally emerged into the light.
Our strength seeming to increase by the day, we were in cruise control and the miles slipped easily by. Seaton and Beer were gone in the flash of a 1950s’ time warp and we stopped on the beach at Branscombe to make food, nestling the stove on the shingle beach. Branscombe is still part of the Jurassic Coast, still within the World Heritage Site, yet in 2007 when the MSC Napoli ran into difficulties in the Channel, rather than take her to the much closer Falmouth Harbour, it was decided by the powers that be that the vast container ship should be taken to Portland. Inevitably she didn’t make it and ended up a mile off the beach at Branscombe, an area of great importance for wintering sea birds and endangered seabed marine life. The ship began to list and flotsam washed up on the shore. Perfume, wine and BMW motorbikes. Hard as they tried, the authorities couldn’t stop the scavengers, who were later said to have only been ‘helping in the clean-up operation’. As we walked the beach, there was no sign of what had occurred seven years before, but when we left we did spot the shiny chrome of a motorbike in the shed behind the café. We camped on a perfectly flat mown field, which in 1935 had been given to the community by Mr Cornish. The common close to the field was a swathe of low undergrowth and we sat on a bench under silver birch trees, overlooking the lights of Sidmouth below. A badger walked quietly past, disappearing along one of the many intersecting paths through the bracken. Totally oblivious to the smell of people who hadn’t seen a shower for days he disappeared into the green, only to quickly reappear down another path. Moments later he popped out of a further path only to end u
p back where he started from. He was either very fast or there were a few of them running through the bracken. Looking at the tracks in the heavy dew of the following morning, it seemed as if badgers hunt in packs. But it was a great thing that Mr Cornish and others like him had created safe havens for wildlife and walkers; they both needed sanctuary on this coast.
Since leaving Dorset and walking into south Devon, not only had the cliffs turned red, but there appeared to be a caravan park around every corner and finding somewhere to camp was becoming increasingly difficult. Leaving Budleigh Salterton in the dying light it seemed almost impossible. Darkness fell as we followed the path, trapped between high hedges and an impassable wire fence that bounded a golf course.
‘Told you we should have gone back down to the beach.’
‘No, it was too close to the town.’
‘Better that than this – there’s just nowhere.’
We came to the top of a hill, gorse and brambles at shoulder height on both sides of the narrow path. Below us, the lights of Exmouth spread away into the distance, but in the foreground a grid of roads and stadium lighting marked a vast holiday park, resembling more closely a prison camp than somewhere you would choose to go for a holiday. There was nothing else for it; we climbed over the fence on to the golf course. The sixteenth hole was made for camping. Perfectly flat with a velvet-short sward of grass and a bench. Ideal. It was pitch dark, interrupted only by the glow from the lights below. The golf course stretched out inland, but to the seaward side, the undergrowth mounded up between us and the path six feet below, just enough to block us from the view of any early-morning dog walkers. If we were gone before the first golfers came, we’d be fine.
The tent poles fell out of the sack with the usual clatter. There was no need to be quiet; we were at least a mile from the nearest habitation – unless there was a house hidden somewhere in the gorse, which seemed unlikely. Anyway, we’d had no problems with people on the whole of the path – crumbling cliffs, man-eating ants, over-friendly dogs, but never humans. All the same, a rustle in the undergrowth made us feel uneasy. We stood silently, frozen to the spot. It could be just a badger or a fox; there’d been plenty of those and they gave us no cause for alarm. We heard the rustle again, a few metres to the left. The noise was circling around the perimeter fence, in the undergrowth, not on the path. Maybe it was a deer, perhaps a little muntjac? Was that a head and shoulders that sprang up, then disappeared? We crouched down below the thorn bushes. Then we saw him. A black figure, clinging to the fence, looking over the golf course, pale hair catching the lights from below. There was no other sound as he stood there; hopefully he was alone, but there could be others, hiding, waiting. We stayed low, knees locking, trying not to breathe loudly. He moved around, back to the right. Was he heading away, following a small path that cut inland? We waited forever, until we couldn’t squat any longer and had to stand. With a start the man shot up out of the gorse two metres in front of us and fell backwards through the bushes. We heard him scrambling around, and then running off down the path. Would he come back? Would he come back alone? We daren’t put the tent up and sat on the bench expecting him to reappear with back-up at any minute.
By midnight we gave up and pitched the tent, cold and wet from the rising dew. Too tired to make food we ate a fudge bar, but hadn’t fallen asleep when we heard a deep rumbling like distant thunder. Not just a sound, but a sensation that rose through the ground. Was he coming back with an army? We lay still, waiting for voices that didn’t come. Getting out of the tent into the starlit night there wasn’t a sound, not a movement, except for a small boat that moved into the bay, its light swinging rhythmically across the cliffs.
Before six the next morning we packed the tent away and sat on the bench to make tea. The sun was rising, bathing the red cliffs in rich rust colours and lighting the sixteenth hole. Other than the disturbed dew it was impossible to tell we’d camped there. We’d mastered wild camping, turning ‘leave no trace’ into a fine art. A man in the distance was walking his dog across the course, meandering between the holes, but undeniably making his way across to us. Eventually he walked on to the sixteenth green.
‘Hello. Beautiful spot for a sunrise, isn’t it?’ Moth as usual ploughed straight in with his charm offensive. The man looked at us and grunted, two dogs running around his feet as he walked around the green, clearly checking for damage to his grass. But there was none; we’d carefully removed any loose earth as we’d withdrawn each tent peg.
‘You’ll be off when you’ve had your breakfast then?’
‘Yes of course, just came up for the sunrise.’
He grunted and walked away, his white hair catching the morning rays. We watched him go with relief as the water boiled for a second cup of tea.
We headed down towards the holiday camp and very soon the source of the rumbling was obvious. A large earth slip had occurred only a couple of hundred metres away. A long stretch of red earth and stones had slid into the water and now boiled around the base of the cliff in a rust-coloured stew. The whole stretch of land between the golf course and Straight Point looked as vulnerable as the section that had gone. At any moment the holiday park might have less grass to cut and our friend with white hair could have more to worry about than the movement of a few grains of soil.
Through the regimented rows of caravans and chalets, down the long pavement walk into Exmouth and before we knew it the Jurassic Coast was behind us. We bought rice, tuna and chocolate bars and caught the ferry across the River Exe to Starcross. Leaving the jetty, the path followed the road and then wove in and out between the railway line and patches of scrub and concrete. We finally wandered out on to Dawlish Warren and camped behind the visitor centre on the nature reserve as it was getting dark.
‘Just looking at the map, we’ve got another thirty miles of this. Built-up areas, railway line, seafront. There’ll be nowhere to camp. What do you reckon if we blow the last of the cash and get the train, then the bus to Brixham? Back into open countryside and we’ll be fine. It’s that or we could find ourselves in a doorway somewhere and we don’t need to do that.’ Moth was thumbing backwards and forwards through a section of the guidebook.
I thought about our restless night on the golf course and realized that our nerves probably wouldn’t take many more nights like that.
‘Okay. Feels weird to miss another chunk, but maybe we’ll come back one day and do this and Portland.’
‘Don’t think it matters. It’s not a pilgrimage. Is it?’
We got off the bus in Brixham and wound our way back on to the coast at Sharkham Point. Life was back to normal. Rucksacks full of rice and noodles, thirty pounds in our pockets and my nose red and peeling. It was August, peak tourist season, and people were everywhere on a very popular stretch of coast. The route to Plymouth would pass through busy towns and bustling seafronts and would entail at least five ferries. Having caught the train, we now wouldn’t be able to afford anything except ferry tickets for the next week.
‘Well, here’s a thought. We’ve just dawdled along since we started again and it’s been fairly easy.’ If you say so, Moth. ‘What if we were to up the pace a bit? Get through this section and over the last ferry as quickly as we can. We don’t know how much the ferries will cost, so at least this way they’ll be behind us and we’ll know what cash we have left to buy food.’
‘What do you mean, up the pace?’
‘Well, try and keep up with Paddy.’
‘You are kidding me.’
‘We could do it.’
‘Preferred you when you were ill.’
Man Sands, Long Sands, Scabbacombe Sands, Ivy Cove, Pudcombe Cove, Kelly’s Cove, Newfoundland Cove, oh look a herring gull, Mill Bay Cove, ferry, Compass Cove, Combe Point, sleep. The rain whipped in, foaming froth around the base of the Dancing Beggars rocks off the headland, easing to drizzle as we took the tent down.
Moth looked at the map.
‘It’s going to be a big one today.
Do you think you can do it?’
‘Do I think I can do it? You’re the one that’s ill. But this is mad; we could do a few ferries then just wait it out until we get more money.’
‘Then it’ll be the same next week, daren’t eat because we don’t know how much the ferries are going to cost. Let’s get it over with, and then we’ll know where we stand. There’s a great beach after Plymouth; we can hang out there for a week if you like.’
‘Yes, I like. So are we going to walk then or what?’ What was going on? Stronger, energy levels rising, mind clearing. But I didn’t dare hope; there’d come a point when we stopped, then we’d see how he really was.
We sat in the reed beds between the main road and the Slapton Ley nature reserve: a long shingle bar separating a mile and a half of freshwater lake from the salt water of the Channel. An information board at the head of the lake offered the chance to see a profusion of wildlife, including grebes and otters. One mangy-looking heron stood passively rocking on one leg, and a few sparrows squabbled in the reed heads, but definitely no grebes or otters. Maybe the wildlife was clustered on the other shore, away from the constant stream of traffic passing along the main road that topped the shingle bank.
In Beesands we stopped to enjoy a moment of virtual eating outside the pub, as a young couple tucked into piled plates of fish and salad, half a bakery of crusty bread and a dessert ballooning with cream and chocolate. We held our breath as the path narrowed on a rocky ledge around Start Point, but as the drizzle lifted away to leave a clear evening we could see all the way back to the Isle of Portland, or thought we could, almost. At Prawle Point we tucked the tent into a dip out of the wind and heated up some rice and tuna.
‘Could really have eaten that food at the pub.’
‘You probably couldn’t even if you had it. My appetite’s disappeared.’