Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain

by George Mahood

  ‘We’re looking for somewhere to stay tonight, and young farmer Ross from Morvah said you might be able to help us out. All we need is some floor space or an outhouse.’

  ‘Yes, Ross did phone and warn me that you might call past. You can sleep in the barn round the back. There’s plenty of hay to use as bedding, but you’ll be sharing with a bull.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said.

  ‘Sounds… fun,’ said Ben hesitantly.

  We followed Harry through the dark, around to the back of the house, through a barn full of calves and into a stable.

  ‘Here you go. You can move that hay around to make yourself a bed and you should be pretty comfortable. Don’t worry about Surprise,’ he said, pointing to the gigantic bull in the neighbouring pen. ‘He won’t bother you. He’s a prize-winner and is the sixth best bull in the country.’

  Surprise was the size of a small caravan and was thankfully separated from us by some metal bars. He poked his head through and gave a huge snort to welcome us.

  ‘So, what do you think? Is this place alright for you?’ asked Harry.

  Ben looked panicked.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ I said, ‘We’ll take it.’

  ‘You should be warm enough, but I’ll go and see if I can find a blanket or two just in case. There’s a light just here, and you can use the toilet in our utility room,’ he said, and disappeared out of the barn.

  ‘This wasn’t quite what I was expecting,’ Ben uttered, after Harry had left. ‘I thought we’d be able to blag hotel rooms or B&Bs. I didn’t think we would have to sleep in a barn with a bull. I mean, look at the size of that beast.’

  ‘Chill out! It’s not often that you get a chance to sleep on hay next to a prize-winning bull. There’s plenty of time for hotels, and B&Bs,’ I said, trying to reassure him.

  Harry soon returned with his wife Caroline, who was clutching two sleeping bags.

  ‘You can keep this one,’ said Caroline, holding up one of the sleeping bags, ‘but we’ll need the other one back in the morning. We start milking at 6am, so you’ll probably hear us. Breakfast is at 8am, so come and have something to eat before you head off.’

  They spoke to us as though we were the most recent of many to pass through Zennor and sleep in their barn. Not once had either Harry or Caroline questioned what we were doing or why we had nowhere to stay, but they had been extremely welcoming, in their own special way.

  Ben had perked up since getting the sleeping bag, and was already moving the bales of hay around to make a bed on the floor. We both sank back into the hay and let out a simultaneous ‘ahhhh’. It was possibly the most comfortable I have ever felt. After a long, hard day of walking, cycling, scootering, begging and blagging, the nest of hay was just what we needed.

  It was 10.30pm and we had not eaten since the airport. It was time to delve into the ice-cream container. Ben ripped the top off the container and we were presented with a huge pile of cold roast pork, a heap of stuffing, an enormous lump of cheese, several pieces of crackling and a stack of thick brown bread with some sachets of butter. We could not think of a single sight in the entire world that would have looked more alluring.

  ‘The picnic set!’ exclaimed Ben.

  ‘Perfect, we can use it to eat our dinner with.’

  It was as though our adventure was turning into some sort of role-playing computer game; collecting items along the way to use later.

  Knock on door of house.

  Collect picnic set.

  Give wellies to young farmer.

  Get food from wedding.

  Use picnic set to eat food.

  We had almost completed level one, and if we survived the night with Surprise we would have conquered the evil end-of-level boss, and moved straight onto level two.

  Ben unzipped the picnic set so that we could have a proper look at it for the first time. It contained, well, as you would expect from a picnic set, everything that you need for a picnic: plates, bowls, cups, knives, forks, spoons and a corkscrew. They were all still in their individual wrappers and we decided to try and dirty as little of it as possible so that we could pass it on to someone else. Carrying an entire picnic set all the way to John O’Groats seemed rather unpractical. Ben unwrapped one plate and one knife and we began to tuck in to the feast. Half an hour previously we had been hungry and homeless, and now we were living like kings; albeit those three wise men that visited the stable.

  Surprise bashed at the bars with his head. Not in an aggressive way, but he seemed keen to come and join us for dinner.

  ‘At least we’re not eating roast beef,’ joked Ben.

  We were just drifting off to sleep when a huge series of bangs startled us. It was the sound of fireworks from the wedding down the road. Surprise was not a fan of fireworks and bolted around his pen like he was at a rodeo. We got out of our sleeping bags and rushed to try and catch the fireworks before they finished. I mean ‘catch’ as in watch. Catching fireworks is very dangerous – don’t try this at home, kids. The calves in the next-door barn were on a full stampede and they pounded around the yard in distress. We got outside just in time to see the extremely under-whelming grand finale, which consisted of three fireworks exploding at almost the same time. We could hear the token applause and cheers that greet the end of every firework display.

  ‘Wooo... ahhh... yeeaaah.’ Indeed. Back to bed.

  On our way back into the barn we noticed a small cat-sized animal in the darkness. Ben knelt down to get a closer look and discovered it was a very old dog that was sniffing around in the corner. We had been told by Harry to keep the barn door closed, so we assumed that the dog should be shut outside, rather than in. Ben picked up the dog and kindly pushed it out of the door, but the little thing scurried straight back in before we had a chance to shut the door. He tried again, this time gently tossing it out of the door. Again, the pesky thing bounced back through the door. Ben tried again, slightly more forcefully than before and again the dog was back in the barn at lightning speed before we knew it. It was at this point that I heard the chink of metal. I bent down and discovered that the poor feeble dog was actually chained up on the inside of the barn, and the reason that it kept coming back so quickly was that it was restricted by the length of its chain. Ben instantly realised what he had done and cuddled the poor dog as best as he could. I had lost the power of speech because I was laughing so much.

  I had only ever laughed this much once before in my life. When I was in the sixth-form, a friend of mine was showing a group of us a music video he had made. When his recording had finished it switched to what had previously been on the video tape. It was footage of his mum and dad filming each other naked in their bedroom. I have never seen anyone or anything move as quickly as he did when he dived across the room for the eject button. That was, until I saw the speed that this dog came back each time Ben threw it out.

  We closed the barn door, with the dog inside where it belonged and we prayed that it would still be alive in the morning. The calves had just about settled down after the fireworks and Surprise was sitting on the floor and snorting quietly to himself. We drifted off to sleep without further incident.

  Day 2 - As I was going to St Ives…

  Zennor to Camborne - 30 miles

  We were covered in mould when we awoke. Our clothes, faces and hair were covered in black spots, which we decided must be mould spores, although for a while we were worried they were fly eggs and were going to hatch into our skin and infest our bodies like some ‘50s B-movie. I had thought I was being sensible by removing my boxer shorts before I went to sleep, and leaving them to air on a hay bale. They were now completely speckled with mould, whilst Ben’s, which he had decided to wear all night, were spotless, albeit a little more smelly than mine.

  Surprise had been a fairly quiet roommate. He had decided at about 6am to let us know he was awake by crashing into the bars and knocking over a large wooden board that had been propped against it. This in turn toppled onto our BMX and sco
oter that were leant against the wall, and these fell over onto my face.

  There were flies swarming all around us. I pulled my whole body into the sleeping bag and scrunched it up above my head. Surprise was awake, the calves next door were awake, the sun was shining through the window bars, Harry and Caroline could be heard milking the cows and I was bursting with excitement. There was no use trying to get back to sleep.

  We eventually got up and put on our spotty clothes. On the way through to the house we were relieved to see that the dog was still alive. In the daylight it looked even feebler. It whimpered in fear as Ben picked it up and gave it a cuddle.

  Harry and Caroline were both in the kitchen. Caroline was at the AGA with a sizzling pan of bacon, and Harry was at the table reading the paper. It was a good-sized farmhouse kitchen with one of the walls covered in postcards and rosettes from their various prize-winning cattle. The rosettes were from the cattle, not the postcards, I should clarify. Although, if the cattle had written the postcards it would have clarified their prize-winning credentials.

  It wasn’t until breakfast that we got a chance to tell Harry and Caroline about our challenge. Until then, they had thought we were just a couple of travellers looking for somewhere to stay. After hearing our plans they opened up completely and we even caught them smiling a couple of times.

  Harry had lived on the farm all of his life. His father had looked after the farm before him, and his grandfather before that. Caroline had been a nurse previously, but now worked on the farm full-time.

  Harry gave me some bailer twine so that I could construct a belt for my enormous pin-striped suit trousers. Caroline insisted on giving us two gigantic Cornish pasties and a couple of bananas to take with us for lunch. After several attempts, Ben managed to squash the sleeping bag into the picnic set, leaving no room for anything else. We packed up our things and said goodbye to Harry, Caroline and Surprise. By the time we got going it was 10.30am and our aim to be in St Ives by 10am was already looking rather unrealistic.

  Before we left, Caroline retold us the story of the mermaid of Zennor. The story goes that a lady in a long dress – to hide her fishy bits, presumably - used to attend services at the church of St Senara, in Zennor. She was enchanted by the singing voice of the chorister, Mathew Trewhella. One day their eyes met and they fell in love. He followed her down to the village stream, and then to the beach at Pendour Cove, and Mathew was never seen again. It is suggested that they disappeared beneath the waves together. Some people still claim that if you sit at Pendour Cove at sunset in the summer, you can still hear Mathew’s voice in the breeze.

  This sounds like a load of old bollocks to me.

  What really happened was that some ‘out of town’ hussy passed through Zennor and tempted Mathew – a suggestible and naïve village idiot - back to her flat in Penzance. Mathew then realised that eloping with some girl in the city was a better existence than being a choirboy, and so never returned to the village. As for hearing his dulcet tones floating across the waves on a summers evening - that’s just Phil Collins being played at the wedding disco.

  By daylight, Zennor was a picture postcard village. The road from Harry Mann’s farm dipped down to the pub where the wedding had been, and the rest of the village sat on the slope beyond. Unlike the other villages that we had passed since Land’s End, the main road does not pass directly through the Zennor. It had somehow secured its own bypass. The parish of Zennor also has the honour of being the last, alphabetically, in the whole of Britain. FACT!

  The weather had brightened up, but there was still a thick barrage of mist in the air stopping the sun from breaking through. Our clothes were already sticky with dampness, so the extra moisture made little difference. Caroline had warned us that the terrain between Zennor and St Ives would be as tough as what we had experienced on the previous day.

  ‘Although…’ she had said, ‘the last two miles are all downhill.’ It was this phrase that kept repeating in our heads as we pushed our bikes up the first of many unreasonable hills.

  However exhausting and painful it may be, there is no better way to see the countryside than on a scooter and a crappy BMX. You travel so slowly that you see absolutely everything; appreciating every inch of downhill freewheeling, and savouring every incline slowly and considerately on foot.

  After a while, we spotted a turning to a camping and caravan park, and decided to go and check out their lost property. The caravan park turned out to be a tiresome mile-long detour from the main road. It was a completely unsuccessful trip as they had no bikes and no shoes. The receptionist, however, was one of Cornwall’s finest sights and made the excursion entirely worthwhile.

  On the steep downward descent into St Ives, I spotted a squash club set back from the road. I managed to swerve into the drive, but it was too late to warn Ben who shot past on the BMX completely out of control. The scraping of his boots on the road echoed up the quaint street as he tried to slow the bike down. In a moment of lunacy, he reached out and grabbed onto a lamp post as he passed, and was swung around in a circle, bumping up and over the curb, and finishing on the pavement facing back up the hill towards me. It was a move that any gymnast would have been proud of. He then wheeled his bike up the hill to where I stood in astonishment.

  We had been taking it in turns to wear the rigger boots, but they were beginning to cause problems for both of us. We were now ‘athletes’, and clay covered rigger boots are not considered suitable athletic footwear. I had pulled over at the squash club thinking that they might have a lost property that we could scavenge through.

  The squash club seemed to be a part of the bar next door, because the barman sprinted round as soon as he saw us.

  ‘Can I help you, guys?’ he said as he bounced towards us. I mean bounced as in a sort of jolly run, rather than actual bouncing. That would be weird.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘We were just wondering whether you had an old pair of trainers that had been left behind?’

  ‘Did you lose a pair here?’ he asked

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Ben, and then he explained the whole situation, after which Dave – the extremely excitable barman – began bouncing up and down on the spot. This time, I mean bouncing in the literal sense.

  ‘I love it, I love it,’ he said, clapping his hands together like a small child. ‘I don’t think we’ve got any trainers at the moment, but you can come and have a look.’

  We followed him through the corridors to a small broom cupboard under the stairs. He opened the Alice-in-Wonderland sized door, and removed a box containing a few random bits and pieces. There was one pink sock, a pair of tights, a baseball cap, a sweaty sweatband, a necklace and a set of car keys. Ben held up the sweaty sweatband and the tights and looked at me with a look as if to say ‘How about these? Do you think these might be useful?’ I raised an eyebrow at him, which made my feelings known. He got the message and put them back in the box.

  ‘Sorry, guys. No luck, I’m afraid,’ said Dave, sounding almost as disappointed as we were as he put the shoebox back. ‘Hang on a minute, what are these?’ He retrieved a pair of white Adidas trainers that had been hiding behind the vacuum cleaner. ‘I’m not sure whose these are or where they have come from, but I would just take them if I were you.’

  They were a perfect fit, and, as Ben pointed out, they were almost trendy.

  ‘I’m sure nobody will miss them,’ he said. ‘They’ve probably been here for years. Or maybe that’s where the manager keeps his trainers.’

  ‘I thought you were the manager?’ I asked.

  ‘Noooo,’ said Dave. ‘I just work at the bar next door and I’m covering while he’s popped out. I would disappear if I were you before he gets back.’

  We tried to leave the rigger boots with him, but he thought it was a bad idea for us to leave any evidence that we had been there. We jumped back onto our bike and scooter, with proper footwear on our feet, the rigger boots on our handlebars, and freewheeled down the last few hundred metres
to the sea.

  St Ives was once a thriving fishing village, but following a decline it rebuilt itself as a holiday destination and art centre. Thanks largely to former artist residents such as Barbara Hepworth and Russian sculptor Naum Gabo (No? Me neither), the town is now considered an important centre for art. With the exception of Liverpool, it is the only place outside of London to have a branch of The Tate.

  St Ives is a pretty little town. We were there on a sunny Sunday and the place was crawling with tourists. It has its fair share of tat, but it has still managed to maintain its charm. For a small seaside town however, the sea was very difficult to find. We spent a while trapped in the maze of tiny back streets before eventually finding it. It was the big wet bit by the harbour.

  We stopped by a patch of sand by the water. I say ‘patch of sand’, rather than ‘beach’, as it was a patch of sand, rather than a beach. The fog had completely cleared and it was a beautiful day. We sat back against the harbour wall and bit into our Cornish pasties. They were immense. The seagulls swooped and dive-bombed us from above, trying to sample our lunch, but we skilfully defended our provisions with deadly backhands.

  Ben propped the rigger boots against one of the large bins along the waterfront. They were in prime position for a passer-by to see, and failing that, the bin man might have been tempted by a change of footwear.

  There was a ‘SPEEDBOAT HIRE’ sign by the harbour. Up to this point, we had only asked for things we NEEDED for our journey; clothes, food, bikes… beer. But there we were, basking in the sun, without a care in the world. We had been fed, watered and were fairly well clothed. It was time for some fun.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Ben to the guy manning the speedboat stand. ‘We’re cycling to John O’Groats without spending any money, and along the way we’re hoping to experience some of the excitements that Britain has to offer.’