Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  This is because Andrew has a slightly unrealistic view of how long it will take us to do the Wayfarer’s Walk. He has never been much of a walker, but he likes the idea of the challenge: he now wants to do the whole thing.

  So we come up with a plan. We will start on the south coast at Emsworth, in the market square, and walk home through Hampshire. Brother and sister planning it all together. It will be an adventure, a challenge, a bonding experience. The only trouble is that he thinks a road map is a walking map.

  ‘Look, Clarey,’ he says. ‘It’s no distance from Emsworth to Alresford. We’ll do that in a day. Then there to home will only take us another day and a half. All done and dusted in two and a half days.’

  I know he’s dyslexic, but my brother’s also developed a worrying blindness to scale. From an artist, I expect better.

  ‘You numpty, that’s a road map. Everything looks close together, and it doesn’t show the hills or where the footpath goes. It’s sixty miles away. I promise you it will take us longer than two and a half days.’

  ‘Daddy is a numpty, Daddy is a numpty!’ the boys start singing. My sister-in-law gives me an old-fashioned look.

  ‘Well done, Auntie Clare,’ she says.

  Alice and I go back to London, but I want to keep the Wayfarer’s idea alive. To kick things off, I send Andrew a plan of the sections of the walk. I think it will take three and a half days minimum, if we are to actually enjoy it and not feel as if we’re on a forced route march.

  He’s still keen, so we decide we will embark on our journey in March 2014, soon after I return from the Winter Olympics in Sochi. I block out the days in my diary and keep up my fitness in Russia by walking every morning before I head off to write my scripts.

  I phone Andrew when I get home to see how his preparations are going. He has agreed to run the London Marathon for the first time, so he’s been jogging all round the local lanes. He is fitter than he has been in years.

  ‘I reckon we can do it in two days,’ he declares. He has looked again at the AA road map and concluded that all the villages named on the route look very close together. Now that he can run ten miles in under two hours, he thinks he can walk to Edinburgh and back. Emsworth – ha! That will be a walk in the park.

  I still think that’s a tad ambitious, but if we walk home, rather than to Inkpen Beacon at the end, it works out at twenty miles a day – for three days. As long as we don’t get lost or injured, it is just about achievable.

  A few weeks pass, then Andrew calls me as I’m on my way to Cheltenham.

  ‘Clarey, we need to talk about this walk. What are we doing?’

  Ah yes, the old ‘What are we doing?’, which translates as ‘What are you doing?’

  A week before we are due to start, it seems that Andrew only has two days spare. I had blocked out Sunday (after my Radio 2 show) to Wednesday, but I now realize I have to be back in London on Monday night for a charity dinner. No problem, I can be back in Hampshire by Tuesday morning and we’ll pick up wherever we left off. Then Andrew announces he has to be home on Tuesday night because the vet is doing a presentation to the yard about how to spot signs of colic. Our window of opportunity is shrinking.

  ‘And it looks as if I’ll have a runner at Kempton on Monday, so I’ll have to go racing,’ he says. ‘But how about we drive the first half from Emsworth to New Alresford and then walk the rest?’

  I tell him that we can't drive it because footpaths are not roads. That’s the point.

  This is typical of my brother. He admits himself that he’s not blessed with the powers of logic. I found a letter he wrote me when I was at university to wish me luck in my Finals:

  I hope that you are working very hard and that you will pass your exams so that you can earn lots and lots of money so that you can support your poor dyslexic brother, which is a poor educationaly (sic) sub-normal farmer (with very little common sense).

  Good luck and remember that getting a degree is a loser’s game – My Daddy told me that.

  Dad had managed to get into Cambridge with no A levels but sharp enough reflexes to catch the book that was hurled at him during his interview. He had failed his degree in land economy but got a blue for rugby union and was part of the unbeaten Cambridge side of 1959. His master at Christ’s seemed happy with that outcome, and so was he. After all, training racehorses doesn’t require a degree in anything other than patience.

  I tell Andrew I will work it all out on the Saturday after the Cheltenham Festival and let him know.

  ‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘I just think it’s better if you plan it all and tell me what to do.’

  Tristan Gooley, author of The Natural Navigator, says that we are all either navigators or passengers in life. I would quite like to be a passenger every now and again, but it seems I am, not necessarily by choice, a navigator. I scale back our ambitions and decide that if we can do half or even a third of the whole route, it will be a miracle. If we can’t walk the beginning section, we’ll have to start later and try to walk home.

  Alice has printed off a guide and it looks like we can do a relatively easy stretch on Sunday morning with all the kids and anyone else who wants to come, stop at a pub for lunch, and then Andrew and I can carry on and walk as far as we can towards home. Then we’ll finish the last bit the next morning before he goes off racing at Kempton.

  The major challenge of any linear walk is logistics. Where will you leave a car, and how will you pick it up when you’ve finished? But I have worked it out: as long as there is room for me, Alice and Archie to squeeze into the other cars, we can leave ours at the finish of the first section and just use it to take back the drivers.

  We have a big team – my brother and Anna Lisa with Jonno and Toby, Tonto the boxer and Henry the stupid Labrador, Anna Lisa’s mother, Suzie, and two of her other grandchildren, Jacobi and Elisia, plus family friends the Mackinnons, with three children and one yellow Lab. Children and dogs seem very excited. Adults seem very wary.

  I do my Radio 2 show in the morning, pick up Alice from home and head off down the M3. We meet at the Sun Inn just off the A30 on the edge of Dummer, apart from Andrew and Anna Lisa, who are running late and go straight to the start. As we make our wiggly way by car towards the Candovers, I keep telling everyone that the footpath back is actually more direct and will be shorter than the route we are driving. I hope to hell, for the sake of the younger ones, I am not telling fibs.

  I had been away for the whole of February so had missed the endless rain that had given Britain its wettest ever winter, and I had been rather fooled by a warm and sunny Cheltenham. It meant I hadn’t banked on the roads through Preston Candover, Chilton Candover and Brown Candover being closed because of flooding. The Candover valley sits along a tributary of the River Itchen. It is verdant land, a mixture of agricultural and grass fields with parkland surrounding the large estates. It is also very prone to flooding.

  We ignore the red signs, drive through the floods and find the church in Brown Candover, which I know is right next to the Wayfarer’s Walk. We find the church hall. A man comes out to tell us that we can’t park there, but then changes his mind, saying he likes to encourage people to do the Wayfarer’s Walk. We shout a cheery ‘thank you’ and download the dogs, children and kit.

  The church hall is hosting a ‘bring and buy’ sale later that morning, so the man warns us the car park may get a little squished. Archie checks out the early items brought to buy and I grab him just as he is cocking his leg on a box of CDs. Luckily, the nice man who let us park doesn’t see. I take Archie on to the large green field where he can cock his leg to his heart’s content.

  The church has a slight Gothic look to it, with its tall cone of a spire, but it’s classically English, with flint walls and a long, sloping, red-tiled roof. It’s so easy to forget that other countries don’t have villages, as we do, built around a church. I visited a hamlet recently in West Sussex that has a church large enough for a hundred people and only seven houses anywh
ere near it.

  We have been examining the church and its glorious windows for quite a while when, eventually, my brother and sister-in-law arrive, full of apologies that they’d got the time wrong. That brings our walking team up to seven adults, seven children and four dogs. The sun is shining, spring flowers are appearing and there’s the faint aroma of a freshly mown lawn. That and a whiff of dog poo, which I’ve picked up and deposited in a bin.

  Andrew seems to have come dressed as a footballer who has just finished a training session and doesn’t want to be recognized. He’s wearing blue tracksuit bottoms, a red hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and trainers. Admittedly, I look like I am heading off on a Scout’s camping mission: khaki shorts, trainers and a blue polo shirt, with a khaki canvas rucksack that I bought last summer in a shop in Chagford, Devon, that sells everything.

  ‘Have you got an OS map?’ I ask my brother, knowing what the answer will be.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I thought you had all that stuff.’

  Of course, I would have had a map if we’d been attempting the whole walk, but the section I’d picked was reputed to be well marked. Plus, I’d taken photos on my phone of the bits I thought we needed. So, although I didn’t physically have a map, I did have a sort of route planner.

  The dogs are sniffing bottoms and scampering around, while the children do pretty much the same. Alice is keeping an eye on Archie in case he sparks canine warfare. He can be a bit fractious if he’s threatened, but all seems fine as we set off up a gentle slope to the left side of the church.

  The boys chatter about how they want to build a time machine so they can go back and see what the route would’ve looked like in medieval times. We come to the conclusion that it would have appeared pretty much as it does now, which is part of the attraction. We are walking in the footsteps of stockmen who would’ve taken their sheep or cows in the other direction to market at New Alresford or Emsworth, from where they would have been shipped abroad.

  Despite the floods in the village below, the chalk path is dry and even. The first couple of miles fly by, with a hum of birds singing, people chatting and children falling over. The older boys chuck a rugby ball backwards and forwards and, as the path emerges from its tunnel of hawthorn trees, we spot a herd of about thirty fallow deer running in their strange hoppy, jumpy way across a drilled field.

  We walk three abreast, groups changing and children running up to ask questions. Seven-year-old Jamie Mackinnon decides he likes long-distance walking and wants to plan a walking and camping trip along the South Downs Way. Eight-year-old Jacobi thinks he might like to cycle it instead.

  ‘If I pushed myself to my limit,’ he says earnestly, ‘I think I could cycle for twelve hours a day and I would cover quite a lot of ground.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t see the countryside like we’re seeing it now,’ responds Jamie. ‘I think it’s nicer to go slower and take it all in, and if you’re cycling you don’t get to enjoy this – listen! It’s so quiet.’

  Ah, the wisdom of youth. Sometimes I think we spend so much time revering the old for supposedly being wise that we miss the direct truthfulness of the young. Mind you, I interviewed Baroness Trumpington recently and she is of the opinion that you earn the right to honesty with age. She says what she means and means what she says. I told her I plan to be dangerously honest by the time I am fifty.

  ‘You’ll get into trouble,’ she told me. ‘But the beauty of it is that you won’t care!’

  The chalky path is wide enough for three or four people to walk alongside, and even wide enough for the buggy containing the youngest Mackinnon child, Ella. I hadn’t factored a buggy into my planning. As I hadn’t done a recce, I had no idea if this was a route with a stile every hundred yards, or none at all. I love children, without ever having wanted one of my own, but I am not in tune with the needs of people with little legs.

  As luck would have it, we only have to pick up the buggy once on the whole walk.

  The children are remarkably cheery, don’t complain about blisters or cramp, and seem to enjoy the wide views towards the South Downs behind us and across to Winchester on our left. I explain to Jonno and Toby that it’s better to do a walk from south to north so that the sun is behind you and lighting up the way ahead, rather than shining in your face and making you squint. They think Auntie Clare is very clever for knowing that, but I am fairly certain that – like most things – I’ve cribbed it from someone else.

  Toby is the first to crack. Mothers have a way of knowing exactly how much their children can take, and Anna Lisa turns back after two or three miles to get the car and meet us on the one road we cross before Dummer.

  Toby bails out with fellow five-year-old Daisy and her little sister, Ella, while the rest of us carry on up the track towards Dummer Grange Farm. As we have covered about four miles, with just over two to go, for the first time I relax and think we might all make it in one piece without the children being put off walking for life. I smile as I hear Jamie and Jonno decide that, when they embark on their long-distance walk, they will use a company to take their kit from one stop to the next.

  We skirt around Tidley Hill, turn left down a track, and meet a dog walker coming the other way.

  ‘That’s the first person we’ve seen,’ says Jonno.

  Coming into Dummer, we stop to say hello to three donkeys in a field. The two brown ones look healthy, but the old grey one is clearly bowing to the effects of old age. We ponder the uses for donkeys and decide they are rather lovely companions but their practical uses might be limited, outside the obvious acting role in the local Nativity play.

  ‘I think that one might actually have been in Nazareth carrying Jesus,’ says my brother, pointing at the old fellow.

  Dummer is less than a mile from the M3, but the hum of constant traffic hits you only as you turn left and head towards the motorway. We cross right underneath it and then do a good impression of the shepherds who would have used the Wayfarer’s Walk as we gather up the children and the dogs to cross the A30 to the Sun Inn.

  The kids are thrilled that they’ve completed the challenge, and I have to say, if I was going to recommend a child-friendly walk with a good pub at the end of it (with a play area), Brown Candover to Dummer ticks all the boxes.

  ‘Now listen, girl,’ says my brother as we sit down to lunch. ‘I think we should make it all the way home, so don’t hang about. If we set off by three, we’ll do it easy.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Alice interrupts. ‘You won’t get all the way to Kingsclere tonight. I’ll come and collect you from North Oakley or Hannington, or wherever you end up.’

  My natural optimism was being tested by Andrew’s imagination and lack of long-distance-walking experience. I knew it was about fifteen miles home and the light would start to fade at six o’clock. We had three hours to get there, which meant cracking on at racing pace. It also meant we had no time to get lost or be diverted by flooding.

  1

  I have bought new boots off t’Internet. I tried them on briefly at home and, if I say so myself, they look great. I have decided that brown or black is dull, so I’ve gone for a light-maroon pair that were, to my surprise, on offer. As a committed saver of cling film and peeler-off of stamps, I cannot resist an offer.

  I am so busy admiring my new boots that I nearly miss my stop. My Ramblings producer, Lucy, is picking me up at Tiverton Parkway, our new favourite railway station, because it’s so close to the M5 that it’s barely a deviation.

  ‘Nice boots,’ says Lucy. ‘Are they new?’

  I puff out my chest like a budgerigar. ‘Oh yes. Aren’t they smart? And do you know what? They only cost thirty quid!’

  Lucy stifles a laugh. I have no idea why. ‘You surprise me,’ she says, in a voice that doesn’t sound surprised at all.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ I say.

  It’s the rule when we’re on the road. Much as I’d love to study my notes, gossip, twiddle the radio dial and che
ck Twitter, Lucy’s driving is so awful that it’s easier if I do it. Watching her try to select a gear is like watching the little white ball decide which section it’s going to fall into on the roulette wheel. Will it be fourth, fifth, possibly third? A lurch from the abused engine suggests it’s second gear. Again. Always fun at 60mph.

  Lucy and I have been walking together for most of our adult lives and have seen each other through all sorts of personal triumphs and tragedies. We randomly change topics of conversation without having to explain the logic of jumping from bonsai trees to the Winter Olympics, to her son’s girlfriend, who is currently singing in the Far East. (The link, if you’re interested, is Nagano – the Japanese host city of the Winter Olympics in 1998.)

  Lucy knows that I don’t like ham, tomato or pineapple, she will put up with a bit of BBC Radio 5 Live, for my sake, before re-tuning to Radio 4, and we both get a bit hyper if we drink too much coffee. When we first met, in 1999, I was very nervous and I made the mistake of taking a work phone call just before we started walking, the subject of which then distracted me for the next hour. She then banned me from having my phone on until after we have finished recording. I think the ban still stands, but she doesn’t know that I sometimes keep it on silent in my pocket …

  Twelve years ago, when we got adventurous and did a few walks abroad, we got tipsy on sangria in Spain and revealed far too much information to each other. There was no going back after that. We have giggled hysterically at ridiculous situations and people, we have been outraged, impressed or touched by others and we have cried into each other’s arms when things have got tough. We have got lost – many times – but we always find our way back again.

  I do, though, sometimes question her party-planning skills. Alice and I invited her to our civil-partnership party in 2006. I had urged her to stay in London, but she didn’t want to spend money on a hotel. She had such a good time that she missed the last train home and ended up in Northampton, two hours away from where she lives. She then had to pay over a hundred quid for a taxi to take her home. I didn’t need to point out that any hotel near us would have been cheaper, and more comfortable.