Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  I’ve decided I’d quite like to spend New Year’s Eve in Looe, because they wear fancy dress, have fireworks off the pier and everyone goes for a swim in the sea on New Year’s Day. Alice isn’t so keen. There’s a statue down by the harbour of Nelson. Not Viscount Nelson, the naval hero, but Nelson the grey seal. Like his namesake, Nelson the seal had one eye but, unlike his namesake, he was unmoved by approaching naval forces, preferring to scoff fish and bask in the sun on Pennyland Rocks. His bronze lies, fat and wrinkled, his front flippers splayed across a rock, at the entrance to Looe Harbour, above an inscription describing him as ‘A Grand Old Man of the Sea’ and ‘a splendid ambassador for his species’.

  The bronze was unveiled in May 2008 by sailor Sir Robin Knox-Johnston CBE, who was first to complete a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. If that wasn’t honour enough, the official inauguration of Nelson the seal’s statue was also given a fly-past by 849 Naval Air Squadron. I think the ceremony and the grand monument to a one-eyed seal sum up the delightful daftness of our nation. I like to imagine that it gives us character, rather than making us look silly. It’s a marvellous statue, by the way. Very seal-like.

  The hairdresser’s in Looe is called ‘Village Gossip’ and was full of customers doing just that. (It makes a change from ‘Live and Let Dye’ or ‘British Hairways’, neither of which is as clever as our local dry cleaner’s on Turnham Green: ‘Turn ’em Clean’.)

  I was meeting a writer in Looe called Anna Maria Murphy. She writes poems, short stories and plays which tell of lost love, unrequited love, lifelong love and the wrong love. For her theatre company’s thirtieth birthday, Anna Maria decided to walk the footpaths of Cornwall in search of people and their real life stories.

  Her inspiration was Mary Kelynack, a Newlyn fishwife whose descendants still live in Cornwall today. In 1851, at the age of eighty-four, Mary decided she wanted to meet Queen Victoria and see the Great Exhibition. So she walked to London. It took her five weeks, and when she arrived she saw the Great Exhibition and met Queen Victoria. She went to Mansion House and had tea with the Lord Mayor, who gave her a sovereign. Mary promptly burst into tears, thanked him and said, ‘Now I shall be able to get back.’ I hope she didn’t take the sleeper train.

  Anna Maria Murphy thought the tale of this 84-year-old woman walking three hundred miles was inspirational. Although she didn’t want to go to London, she thought she would walk for twenty days along the footpaths of Cornwall, meeting people as she went and discovering their stories. She turned it into a work called Roads Less Travelled.

  We were meeting in the car park on the outskirts of Looe Harbour, on the edge of Kilminorth Woods. It was a damp, misty morning that demanded many layers. I thought I may strip off later, but I wanted to be sure I was warm enough, particularly in the woods, which looked forbidding. Anna promised to lead me on a walk and, while I had no clue about the route or the people we might meet, I knew enough from reading her work to expect the unexpected. Her stories are always based on truth, and it seems that people tell her their innermost secrets; it’s as if she charms them into a sort of spell, from which she creates a fact-based fiction. Her work has that elusive ring of authenticity.

  We headed off on a Victorian promenade through Kilminorth Woods and within minutes were far away from the busy village, surrounded by moss- and lichen-laden trees. A woman came towards us with two little dogs, and I thought I would run an experiment to see if Anna was just lucky or whether she really had a knack for getting people to tell her things.

  I started jabbering on about the woman’s dogs and correctly identified them as Papillons (ten years of presenting Crufts means I’ve picked up more than I realize). The woman told me one was a rescue dog and was still adjusting to life in a happy home, learning gradually how to live rather than existing under the shadow of fear and uncertainty.

  Anna was taking notes in her notebook, which was full of names, sketches and little maps. She asked the woman where she had come from originally, because her accent was interesting. I thought she might be Belgian, but it turned out she came from Newcastle. (Scoff all you like, but mix Geordie with a bit of Cornish and, I’m telling you, it sounds like Belgian.) From this encounter, and this Papillon owner, Anna had the makings of a story about a woman who rescued dogs.

  The path was wide and laden with rotting leaves, cushioning our steps and silencing our progress. The whisper of the ancient oaks hid its wildlife from view. A wooden fence to the right gave us some support and protection from tumbling down into the River Looe below. The path narrowed and the trees closed in overhead, creating a dark, dank atmosphere as we approached a set of steep steps heading up into the ether. The promise of light ahead led us on as we panted our way up what they call the Devil’s Wall.

  After I got my breath back, I quizzed Anna about her own story. She was born in Polperro, above a fish market. A childhood living with the stench of fish guts and imagining herself haunted by the spirits of conger eels and lobsters means that she doesn’t much like fish now. She told me that people in Cornwall are very adaptable because they’re used to changing jobs according to demand, and that the flow of people in and out creates a fascinating backwash.

  ‘We should be grateful for the families who save up all year to come here and be by the sea. Their stories are our flotsam and jetsam.’

  It was a wild day. As we came out of the woods, we saw the sea for the first time, with the white horses prancing, looking flighty and fractious. A grey sky above was brewing a storm that we hoped might hold off until we got to Polperro. We passed a wooden sign that read ‘Jack the Giant having nothing to do, built a hedge from Lerryn to Looe.’

  It marked a near-ten-mile-long Cornish hedge that had been built to protect the coastal villages from invasion and which stretches from the Fowey to the Looe estuary. The barrier had once stood seven feet high and twenty feet wide. It dates back to the Dark Ages and probably marked the edge of an ancient kingdom. For all our ability to fly across the world or connect with people online, my imagination takes me further when I feel linked to primeval history. I love walking through woodland that has stood for centuries, or thinking of those who would have walked this way in years gone by.

  As we walked towards Talland Bay, I thought of the book I have on the myths and legends of Britain. It tells the tale of Parson Dodge, an eighteenth-century vicar of Talland. He was an exorcist of such renown that people were frightened to go near Talland Church at night in case they bumped into him chasing out evil spirits. There is, however, a rumour that Parson Dodge was in cahoots with the smugglers and encouraged the tales to keep locals away while the stolen goods were being moved.

  Even today, vicars are called upon to rid houses of poltergeists and ghosts. When I first met the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, I talked to him about living in Lambeth Palace.

  ‘Is it haunted?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘With all us archbishops having lived there? Of course not.’

  I asked him what he meant, and he told me that it was well known that all men of the cloth have powers to rid places of ghosts and poltergeists. When he was a vicar in Liverpool, he would often receive requests from his parishioners to rid their house of an evil spirit. The person in question may not have been a regular churchgoer or believe in God, but they believed in their vicar’s ability to chase out ghosts. Welby didn’t disappoint them.

  In Talland Bay, there was no sign of evil spirits. But there in the pink bay with pink shale stone was a woman dressed entirely in pink. She was packing up her car when Anna started chatting to her.

  It turned out that the lady in pink had a near-death experience ten years ago and can now communicate with dead people. I asked all the scientific questions about what happened with her illness and how she recovered, but Anna was more interested in the visions.

  ‘I was walking through Looe, and a great big angel turned up,’ the lady said. ‘I was in a bookshop at the time, and my vision was taken
up with this huge, fiery figure. The bookshop owner saw me go a bit funny and said, “Are you all right, duck?” So I went into that little angel shop that used to be there and I asked them about it. That was the beginning – after that, it was constant.’

  The lady in pink said it was like having a new boss that she had to answer every time he came calling. I felt a bit sorry for her, to be honest. What with fiery red angels appearing at all hours and conversations with dead people she’d never met, it must be exhausting. She explained that she had come to Talland Bay because the Mary line runs through there.

  I knew a bit about the Michael line, which is a ley line believed to run from St Michael’s Mount to Hopton in Norfolk, via Glastonbury Tor, the Avebury stones and Bury St Edmunds. The Mary line intersects it at various points and aligns the water points and holy wells, while Michael hits the high spots, such as tors and church spires.

  Once I walked near Llanthony Priory in the Black Mountains with a ley-line hunter who had a group of dedicated female followers. They would sleep under the stars and hunt for ley lines with divining rods. It turned out that on several of these trips he had taken the opportunity for – let’s put it this way – a little extra warmth from his female followers. All of them seemed very happy with the arrangement and I’m sure it benefited his energy levels in one way or another.

  Back in Talland Bay, Anna was fizzing with excitement. As we walked on, she said, ‘That is pure story gold. “The Lady in the Pink Coat”.’

  While she jotted down notes in her hardback notebook, I had to stop. My foot had been bothering me for the last mile or so, and I was convinced my walking boots had shrunk. I stuck on a blister plaster, which did the trick. I wondered if it was the energy from the Mary line making my feet expand.

  We climbed up on to the cliff path that leads to Polperro, past a First World War memorial. It’s a narrow, exposed path that gives you a blasting from the Channel: a natural facial that would cost a fortune in a spa. There was no one around, and I was in my own little world, thinking of what it would be like to be haunted by angels, while Anna was busy composing her story.

  Walking towards us very fast was a tall, slim figure. His hair was blowing in the wind and he had a newspaper under his arm. He saw the microphone and stopped to say hello. ‘Where are the cameras?’ he asked.

  It was Richard Madeley. Richard Madeley off the telly. He and his wife, Judy Finnigan, live in Talland Bay, and they were both down for the winter, writing and reading books. He walks to Polperro every morning to get his newspaper.

  I explained that this was radio, not television, and he congratulated us for coming in the off-season.

  ‘Best time to be here,’ he said. ‘We love it.’ And he bounded off in the direction from which we had just come.

  A Belgian-sounding Geordie who rescued dogs, a woman in pink who saw angels, and Richard Madeley off the telly. This walk was getting weirder and weirder.

  We rounded the bay alongside a walled garden into the busy harbour of Polperro. The tide was out and the boats were balancing precariously on the dry bay. Walking into Polperro is the only way to get there, because the streets aren’t wide enough for cars. The houses are crowded on top of each other into the tiny space of a cliff ravine, each one with its own tale to tell. One has its outer walls entirely covered in shells; another is grey with white windows. Anna told me it had been the doctor’s house.

  On dark nights, they say you can hear the cries of Willy Wilcox in the caves under the western side of the harbour. He was a fisherman who went exploring and got lost in the maze of tunnels under what is now known as Willy Wilcox’s Hole. Apparently, he is still looking for a way out.

  I left Anna in Polperro to write up her stories, and continued to Fowey – the home of another writer, the novelist Daphne du Maurier.

  Du Maurier first came to Cornwall as a child, and stayed in a blue-shuttered white house on the Fowey estuary where the ferry crosses to Polruan. It is called Ferryside, and her son, Kits Browning, still lives there. Walking the paths around Fowey, she came across a dilapidated, secluded house in the woods called Menabilly. She became enchanted, obsessed even, with the place and dreamt of restoring it to some sort of glory. She wrote Rebecca in 1938, using Menabilly as the inspiration for Manderley.

  ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ is one of the best-known openings to a novel, but it is the sense of place as well as the haunting nature of the dream that puts the reader right there, staring at that same view. Manderley itself is as strong a character as Mrs Danvers, Rebecca or Maxim de Winter:

  There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver lying placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.

  I turned again to the house, and though it stood inviolate, untouched, as though we ourselves had left but yesterday, I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin …

  Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer’s fancy. As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.

  Light came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air, and there, in the library, the door would stand half open as we had left it, with my handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses.

  Du Maurier wrote all this before she ever lived in Menabilly. Then, in 1942, she rented it from the Rashleigh family and stayed there with her family for twenty-six years. She loved the sights and the scent of Cornwall, the industry of the harbour and the freedom of the cliffs with their unlimited view across the ocean. In Vanishing Cornwall, she writes:

  There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal water. Down harbour, around the point, was the open sea. Here was the freedom I desired, long sought for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.

  Walking around Fowey, you cannot fail to be infused with the spirit of Daphne du Maurier. I visited Lanteglos Church, where she married Major Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, in June 1932. There is no village, just a farmhouse and the church. It has a wild, slightly drunken graveyard where yellow lichen gives the gravestones a Jackson Pollock effect: they look as if they have been splashed with paint.

  Du Maurier walked incessantly, as many writers do, looking for characters, or places, or happenings that would turn into a story. ‘I walked this land with a dreamer’s freedom and with a waking man’s perception,’ she told an interviewer. ‘Places, houses whispered to me their secrets and shared with me their sorrows and their joys. And in return I gave them something of myself, a few of my novels passing into the folklore of this ancient place.’

  Jamaica Inn is based on Cornish wreckers and smugglers, and a pub of that name on Bodmin Moor. Her short story ‘The Birds’, which became an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, apparently came to her when she was walking from Menabilly to Polridmouth and saw a tractor ploughing a field, pursued by a giant flock of seagulls.

  Du Maurier wrote menace so well, and the landscape in which she chose to immerse herself suited her perfectly. She fell in love with Fowey, saying, ‘This for me and me for this.’ Her daily walks fuelled her writing and her mind.

  I could see why. The freshness of the air, the ease with which you ca
n walk a couple of miles and escape the crowds, with their ice creams and Cornish pasties; the changing scenery and the shifting weather patterns. It is invigorating, inspiring, challenging.

  When you’re high above the harbour, you realize how much sound travels in this environment. I could hear laughter and screams from down in the streets. It is no place for keeping secrets, which of course makes it perfect for a writer.

  We passed a man with a dog.

  ‘That’s Spam Miller,’ said the du Maurier expert with whom I was walking. ‘His dog is called Dog. So was his last one, and the one before that.’

  A man called Spam with a dog called Dog. Yup, that’s Cornwall for you.

  The verges smelt rich with wild garlic. A local woman told me how she and her sister used to be responsible for bringing the cows in from the pasture for milking. They had to keep them moving, because otherwise the cows would stop and munch on the wild garlic, which they loved. If they ate too much, the garlic came through in the milk. I don’t know about you, but garlic milk on my cereal doesn’t really appeal.

  I looked down into the harbour, to see the Troys. They were heading out for their weekly races, their huge, coloured sails billowing out like pregnant elephants. The Troy-class boats are unique to Fowey; there are only twenty-nine built in the same mould, with lead keels and huge sails, harking back to an earlier age of super-fast schooners. Many of them race on Wednesdays and Saturdays, picking up serious speed, the sails flinging over to be nearly horizontal as they tack.

  Risk-takers tend to love Cornwall, because there is always something vaguely hazardous to do. But there is also food for the thoughtful, with any number of literary festivals, music nights, art galleries and theatres. The most dramatic setting for any play is the Minack Theatre, just south of Porthcurno, between Land’s End and Penzance.