Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  That ‘someone else’ was us. Instead of raging against the machine, or despairing at the horror of it all, David was engrossed. This is his exercise and his therapy.

  ‘It’s not a bad hobby for me,’ he explained. ‘I do it every day and it’s especially good for me if I’m studying. I’m going to Poland, and I’ve been listening to this audio programme in Polish. So I just walk along, pick up other people’s garbage and prepare. Then I go to another country and notice how much rubbish they either have, or don’t have.

  ‘I’m completely doing it for me. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment and, more than that, we bought a house here and this is where I live, so I want it to be clean.’

  I couldn’t quite share his acceptance of the situation. As cars flew by, I willed one of them to throw something out of the window so that we could put a face to at least one of the villains and challenge them to a fight. I would swing my loaded bin liner at them or pour the contents into their car.

  Alice did this a couple of years ago. We had gone to see her parents in Esher but had come from different places, so we were in two cars. I was following her back to London in crawling bank-holiday traffic when I saw her get out of her car just before Hampton Court. She went to the window of the car in front and had a quick conversation, then got back in her car and slammed the door. She looked quite cross.

  Of course, I phoned her straightaway.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘I was giving him back a bottle he’d thrown out,’ she said in a terse voice.

  Alice can sound quite terrifying when she is cross. I always make her do the tricky phone call when we need to complain about a leaky boiler or question a bill. She’s better at it. I would end up making friends with them and asking them round for dinner; Alice will negotiate a free service or a refund.

  ‘But anyone could have been in that car. They could have attacked you, or thrown it back at you, or –’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she interrupted. ‘You were right behind me, there are people all around and it just made me furious. How dare they?’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Nothing much. They looked a bit shocked. They were young, perfectly nice-looking, and I suppose they just thought it was all right to throw a bottle out of the window. Well, it’s not.’

  We were relatively new to Twitter at the time of the bottle incident, so we didn’t anticipate the way a story can sometimes take off. Alice tweeted that she had thrown litter back into a car, and she received over a hundred responses. The Evening Standard called me and asked to talk to her.

  ‘I wasn’t brave,’ she told them. ‘I was just cross.’

  They ran an article calling her a ‘litter crusader’. I misread it as ‘little crusader’ and wondered how they knew that she’s not very tall. The next day the Daily Mail printed a full-page piece with the headline ‘BBC NEWSREADER TAKES ON LITTER LOUT’ and called her ‘a national heroine’. When she got in to work to read the news, she opened her emails to find dozens more requests for interviews or columns. On Radio 2, Vanessa Feltz hosted a phone-in with the question ‘Would you do an Alice Arnold?’

  Alice was rather discombobulated by the attention, but the issue certainly chimed with people. It also coincided with the spring-cleaning season. Sadly, it didn’t make a lasting change to the attitude of those who litter.

  Back on Broomers Hill Lane, David was telling me about the things he had picked up.

  ‘I’ve found loaded diapers. My mother had six children – she might have thrown a child out of a car window but never a diaper.

  ‘Hugh found twenty pounds the other day. I mean, I’ve been picking up litter every day for years and I’ve never found money, but he does it one time and finds twenty pounds! Huh.’

  David has always been a tidier. He told me that his bedroom as a child was always spotless and he wouldn’t let his sisters over the threshold ‘because I didn’t want them to befoul what was really the only clean room in the house’. Now, he thinks of the outside area near his home in the same way he used to think of his bedroom. He’s taking on a big cause.

  Did you know that slugs love beer? Nor did I until I picked up bottle after bottle containing drunken slugs wallowing in the remainders of pale ale. They stank: a really rancid stench. One bottle was sealed. I delicately opened it to smell the contents.

  ‘I think it’s wine,’ I said. ‘A whole bottle of wine. Or maybe it’s elderflower. I can’t tell.’

  David was laughing. ‘I wouldn’t sip it if I were you,’ he said. ‘I’ve found plenty of bottles of urine along here.’

  I dropped the bottle in disgust. Wishing I had worn gloves, I poured it out and put the empty bottle in the bag that was resting on its hoop on my hip. We were now on to our third bags.

  It was ridiculous. Here we were in one of the prettiest villages in England and I felt that it was ruined. The beauty of the cottages and the lanes was a sham because under the surface was evil waste, deliberately chucked by people with no sense of responsibility or concern.

  I’m a solutions kind of a person. I read some self-help book once that told me to look at the solution, not the problem, so I’m always looking for the magic answer.

  ‘I know,’ I said, in one of my eureka moments. ‘We need to make it fun to dispose of litter. What about a drive-through dump? You don’t have to get out of the car – you just throw your litter into skips and score points. If you get a certain number of points, you win!’

  I thought it was brilliant. Recycling centres always have long queues at weekends. This way, it wouldn’t waste your time, or involve stepping out of the car, and you could win a prize.

  It was one of my best ideas ever. Even better than the Mobot, or making every business conduct at least one meeting a day while walking, or even having a dog on my lap while I presented Crufts.

  Karen, Alice and David weren’t so sure. They pointed out that it would mean a series of ugly skips by the side of the road and that it rewarded people for doing what they should do naturally – getting rid of their rubbish.

  A car came towards us rather fast and slowed down, its driver no doubt curious about the three people with bin liners. I stared at her. We are used to calling people who don’t dispose of their rubbish carefully ‘litter louts’, which could give a false impression that they are slovenly youths. This was a middle-aged woman with mousy-brown, shoulder-length hair, both hands on the steering wheel and a look of panic on her face.

  I tried to do a Sherlock-style deduction. Could she be an offender? My instincts were that she wasn’t, but I knew Benedict Cumberbatch would examine her more closely, work out her daily routine and probably consider her a suspect.

  ‘The trouble is,’ said David, who has far more experience in this field than me, ‘you just don’t know. She could be a chucker, but I’ve never actually seen anyone do it. I sometimes think I should hide here in the hedgerow and wait until I see someone throwing something, and then I could pursue them and arrest them.’

  I found the day rather fascinating, but also terribly sad. So I cheered myself up by thinking about all the exercise we were taking, constantly bending down and up again, a form of standing sit-ups. I came up with the slogan for a fitness campaign: ‘Get Fitter with Litter’. My second brilliant idea of the day. This was good for my brain, as well as my abdominal muscles.

  Looking at the positives, we were also halfway towards building a car. We’d found a hubcap, a rear-view mirror and a number plate. I was sure there would be a tyre or two if we looked hard enough. Perhaps we’d find one before we headed back to the house to sample Hugh’s pie.

  When we got to the top of the hill I dragged David into the driveway of a house. A footpath goes across the fields there, and it had a beautiful vantage point across to the South Downs, beyond which I knew you could see the Channel. It was what they call ‘the quintessential British vista’ and, yes, you got rolling uplands, fertile river plain, hedgerows dividing fields into envelo
pe-sized rectangles, a grey church spire and villages that you knew had at least two pubs, a post office, a duck pond and a village green where cricket is played in the summer. They would have cherry trees heavy with blossom, wisteria dangling from cottage windows, a thatched roof or two, box hedges and rose gardens, red-brick walls and wooden benches, oak trees and copper beech. I imagined teashops full of retired couples, children playing Pooh Sticks on a stone bridge, polo fields in the distance and the mustard windowframes and doors of the Cowdray Estate.

  I asked David what he could see.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, staring into the distance with a look of a crusader aching for a foreign war, ‘I see all the rubbish that we’re not seeing right now.’

  ‘What, from here to Bognor Regis, you look at that view and all you can see is hidden rubbish?’ I was amazed that his enjoyment of the countryside could be so ruined by having spent so much time clearing it up.

  ‘Yes. I feel that people are looking too much at the long view, and they say, “Oh, it’s so beautiful.” They’re not looking down at the ground, which is covered with rubbish, so they don’t see the problem.’

  It’s amazing that David even wants to live in the English countryside now he knows the ugly truth. It would be like finding out that the love of your life was having an affair: soul-destroying. Yet he soldiers on, trying to plaster the wound by picking up all the rubbish he can find, tying it into black bags and taking them to the dump. By the end of our short walk, we had amassed ten bin liners full of rubbish. Alice had four to my three. You might think this wasn’t a victory to celebrate or that she wouldn’t be in any way triumphalist. You’d be wrong.

  It was exhausting, not because of the physical exercise but because of the concentration. At one point, David disappeared up the bank into the hedge. He’d caught a glimpse of a can reflecting in the sunshine and was determined to dig it out.

  I asked him if there was one thing that he would really, really like to find.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with certainty. He had thought about this before. ‘A dead body.’

  ASHMANSWORTH–HIGHCLERE

  Buoyed by coffee and hot-cross buns, we rejoin the Wayfarer’s Walk. Spring is in the air and the splendour of the Hampshire countryside folds out before us. The fragrance of new growth fills us with optimism, and the fragrance of something else powers Boris the boxer forward and, of course, sideways.

  We cross a main road, past a former pub called the Three-Legged Cross, where walkers who have taken the bus from Newbury can hop off and explore west or east. It’s now home to a rather glamorous furniture-design company. On another day, I would have spent at least an hour in there examining coffee tables, but the Wayfarer’s Walk pulls us forward.

  The next section is familiar territory, although I have ridden rather than walked it. We come into the Highclere Estate and, through the trees, get our first glimpse of Highclere Castle.

  ‘Look, there’s the castle,’ I say, pointing into the distance.

  ‘Where?’ asks Alice.

  ‘Over there!’ I jab excitedly – you know, how you do when you’re trying to show someone a dot in the distance. Alice is quite blind, so this is never easy.

  She thinks she has face blindness, a rare affliction that means she can’t remember what anyone looks like. I spend my time at any party whispering names in her ear. Even people she knows well and really likes are strangers in her fuzzy vision. Anna Watkins, who won an Olympic gold medal in the double sculls with Katherine Grainger, is a case in point. Alice loves Anna and has had many good chats with her about broadcasting, sport and whether Alice could’ve made it as a cox (she’s quite small, as I may have mentioned before). You’d hope a seven months pregnant, six-foot-tall woman whom she admires and likes would be memorable.

  At the BT Sport launch party in the summer of 2013, I didn’t even bother doing the usual memo – ‘Anna Watkins, Olympic gold medallist, you sat next to her last week’ – because I was sure Alice would see her and give her a big hug. Mortifyingly, I saw Alice looking confused and heard Anna saying, ‘It’s Anna Watkins. We’ve met before.’

  Oh God.

  I’m lucky that she recognizes me most of the time. One day, I’ll get back from filming with dolphins in Japan or rhinos in South Africa, walk through the front door and find Alice on the phone to the police reporting an intruder.

  So pointing out Highclere Castle in the distance is a fruitless task even if Alice does follow the line of my finger to the third tree on the right, then come down a bit … there!

  Thanks to the ITV series Downton Abbey, the castle is now famous on both sides of the Atlantic as home to the Earl and Countess of Grantham. What the scriptwriters invent, though, isn’t nearly as dramatic as the real history of the place and the people who have lived in it.

  The grand Gothic castle that stands proud in the centre of the estate was designed in 1838 by Sir Charles Barry, on the instruction of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon. Barry had just finished building the Houses of Parliament, and you can see the similarities in the intricate stonework, narrow towers and turrets. It was a Victorian version of the Jacobean style, described by Barry as ‘Anglo-Italian’.

  During our childhood we never went inside the castle, but we saw it often enough from a distance when Dad was playing cricket on the estate, when we went drag hunting there or rode round the cross-country course. Dad trained horses for the Queen and therefore had plenty of dealings with Her Majesty’s racing manager Lord Porchester, who would become the 7th Earl of Carnarvon. He never lived in the castle and regarded it as an impossibly expensive place to maintain, but his eldest son, Geordie, has taken a very different view since he ascended to the Earldom.

  The castle is now open to the public and is used as a wedding venue – infamously, for one of Katie Price’s marriages: a Cinderella-themed one, I believe, with Peter Andre as the pumpkin. Snobs suggested that Highclere had gone downmarket, but I just see it as part of its transformation into a modern, money-making estate. You’ve got to make a few mistakes to find out what works and, anyway, if a woman wants to dress as something out of a fairy tale and arrive in a pink carriage covered by a sheet because Wotcha! magazine has bought the exclusive, who are we to judge?

  Downton Abbey has taken Highclere into a different league of financial security, and its owners should now be able to keep the castle from crumbling for generations to come.

  The castle may get all the headlines, but the grounds are magnificent. The park was designed in the eighteenth century for the 1st Earl by Capability Brown and has more than fifty Lebanon cedars, planted for maximum architectural effect and still standing proud nearly three hundred years later. Lime trees, ancient oak, copper beech and silver birch mark our way as we tentatively skirt the estate. Even though it’s a public right of way, it feels odd to be walking across the estate of someone you know without having told them you’re coming. I know Mum is worrying that it isn’t really allowed.

  The most renowned Earl was the 5th, who was keen on the then newly invented automobile (he suffered a nasty car accident in Germany in 1901 which left him very weak), racehorses (he founded Highclere Stud in 1902) and Egyptology (he started going to Egypt after his car accident, in search of warmer weather). He was also quite keen on spending money but, rather fortunately, he had married the illegitimate daughter of Edward de Rothschild, who came with an enormous dowry and an annual allowance for her husband.

  Spending it wasn’t difficult for the 5th Earl. Cars and racehorses are not cheap hobbies, but even more expensive was his new passion. While in Egypt, he met a young archaeologist called Howard Carter, who persuaded him to provide the backing for his digs. They had mixed success, put the archaeology on hold during the First World War, then went back to excavate what they could in the Valley of the Kings, which was assumed by most to have been plundered dry.

  Having spent the modern equivalent of £10 million financing Carter for over a decade, Lord Carnarvon was running out of patience
and money. During a house party for Newbury Races in 1922, he told Carter it had to end. By now, they were searching for the elusive tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy king who had died or been murdered around 1223BC. Carter was desperate, and declared he would finance his last season himself. Carnarvon relented and in November 1922 received a telegram from Carter saying: ‘At last have made wonderful discovery in the Valley. A magnificent tomb with seals intact. Re-covered same for your arrival. Congratulations.’

  They had struck gold, and a heap of other treasures besides. Carnarvon travelled to Luxor to share the joy of uncovering the greatest ancient find of the twentieth century. Four antechambers were packed full of artefacts and, when they finally reached the sarcophagus, Carter found the only mummified Egyptian pharaoh that hadn’t been disturbed and ruined by robbers. It took him and his team ten years to classify and clear the contents of the tomb.

  Sadly, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of his investment. Four months after descending the stairs into the tomb he died from an infected mosquito bite. The ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ was born. Legend has it that at the moment he died in hospital, his dog let out a howl and dropped down dead at home.

  As we walk, we can see his burial place to our left on the top of Beacon Hill – his tomb stands upright on the site of an ancient hill fort. My grandmother told us that he had asked to be buried standing up, so that he could keep an eye on the place. I find the whole thing rather spooky, and I remember the first exhibition they had at the castle, when we were allowed to see the artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb. I was frightened to be in the same room as them in case I got cursed.

  Feeling the 5th Earl’s eyes upon us, we progress along a wide path through a copse until we come to a flint roundhouse that looks like a medieval castle. I have since discovered that it’s called Grotto Lodge and was built in Victorian times as a gatehouse to the estate. It has cross-shaped arrow slits that suggest trespassers won’t be given a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Mum and Alice turn left towards the gate to examine the sign. Mum’s eyes aren’t very good either, but when they get closer they see it says: ‘KEEP OUT’.