Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  *

  Can I actually walk the Pennine Way? I have contemplated this question many times over the preceding months, and the truthful answer is this: I don’t know. I’m forty-seven, I weigh twelve stone and twelve pounds, and when I look in the mirror, I see a reasonably fit, relatively healthy person. And from my father I have inherited a stubborn streak. Some people have interpreted this as ‘ambition’, but it isn’t, it’s just a pig-headed refusal to give up or accept failure, particularly when the chances of success are microscopically small or when defeat would be a far easier and more dignified option. On the other hand, I have an unspecified lower back problem that incapacitates me a couple of times a year, and although I wouldn’t describe my lifestyle as sedentary exactly, it’s certainly true that on certain days my legs do very little other than dangle under a desk or propel me from the multi-storey car park to the ticket office at Wakefield Westgate railway station. And from my mother I have inherited ‘small lungs’, apparently. I don’t know if this has ever been clinically measured, but our poor capacity for storing and processing oxygen is family lore, and from an early age I was warned never to dream of being crowned King of the Mountains in the Tour de France or to take up a career as a pearl diver. In terms of training, I’ve done a bit of stretching and a bit of swimming, plus a few hours on a primitive cycling machine in my mother-in-law’s back bedroom. I’ve also moved house. Only a couple of miles down the road, but hand-balling dozens of cubic metres of boxes containing thousands of books must count as some kind of physical conditioning. And I’ve been to Glastonbury, the original intention being to test my boots in the mud, though Glastonbury 2010 turned out to be a bit of a scorcher, so all I know is that my size ten GTX Mammuts are 100 per cent resistant to both dust and cider. ‘I’ve done a lot of mental preparation,’ I tell people, when they ask, and have reasoned with myself that I will undergo most of the physical training en route, preparing for day two by walking on day one, and so on and so forth. What could possibly go wrong?

  Other people also seem to be in two minds about my chances of success. When I confide to a friend that I rate my odds as no more than fifty–fifty, he says, ‘I admire your optimism.’ And when, during the week before I set off, I ask my wife if she truly believes I can do it, she folds her arms, leans against the wall, looks at the floor, and says, ‘Simon, I’m very worried about you.’ Which I take to be a less-than-wholehearted yes. Or an indication that she considers me to be in the grip of a midlife crisis, needing to prove my youthfulness and manliness by hiking an insane distance every day for the next three weeks without a break, then at night, when I should be recuperating, giving public readings. Couldn’t I just cut to the chase and buy a Harley Davidson or grow a ponytail instead? We’re having this conversation in the kitchen. I’m getting my ‘kit’ together, and I’ve just come back from the garage with a purple and pink rucksack, hers, which has been hanging on a rusty nail for as long as I can remember and is a little bit moth-eaten. With her ‘very worried about you’ comment still hovering in the air, and possibly as a way of holding faulty equipment responsible for my imminent failure, I shake the dust and cobwebs from the rucksack and say, ‘Do you think this is up to the job?’

  ‘Well, it got me to Everest base camp without any problems,’ she says, then goes outside to build a wall.

  So, no pressure there, then.

  A day or two later, I walk over to my parents’ house, about eight miles away across the moor, to give the rucksack a trial run, and find that it doesn’t really have all the necessary pouches and flaps to accommodate the complex paraphernalia carried by the contemporary hiker. My mum goes upstairs and pulls her own rucksack out of the airing cupboard, a big blue one with badges sewn on the front denoting her long-distance walking conquests. The fact that she completed the Pennine Way when she was fifty (carrying all her pack and with two dodgy knees, not to mention the small lungs) is just another reason why I MUST NOT FAIL. I remember going into the spare room before she set off, and seeing all her luggage laid out on the bed, including dozens of T-shirts compressed into a small dense block, and several weeks’ worth of underwear which she had somehow managed to vacuum-pack into a couple of freezer bags, next to a travel-size packet of Fairy Snow. As well as the rucksack, she also gives me her Platypus, a soft, plastic water holder which sits in the side pocket of the rucksack and supplies liquid to the mouth via a tube, and I quickly try to suppress the Freudian implications of being lent such a teat-operated demand-feeding device by my mum.

  My dad, who has been remarkably silent on the whole subject of me walking the Pennine Way, is sitting in the armchair watching Cash in the Attic, and is now ready to lend his opinion.

  ‘Looks heavy, that bag,’ he says.

  ‘It’s just a day bag,’ I say. ‘Everything else is going in a suitcase.’

  ‘Give it here, let’s have a feel.’

  As if his arm is one of those spring-loaded hooks for weighing record-breaking carp at the side of a pond, he picks up the rucksack, then announces: ‘Twenty-five pounds. Too heavy. You’ll have to strip it down a bit.’

  Like a naughty schoolboy turning out his pockets in front of the headmaster, I start emptying out the bag. When I packed it, I genuinely thought I’d included the minimum amount of gear for the maximum number of eventualities, but in front of my dad, everything now seems lavish and embarrassing, as if he’s caught me with lipstick and mascara. So the camera gets a shake of the head, as does the notebook, the glucose tablets and the torch. Neither is he impressed with the GPS unit or the spare batteries or the packet of plasters, though the twelve-blade penknife does elicit a nod of approval. The last object in the bag, and one that takes up quite a lot of room, is a waterproof raincoat. Dismissing one of the fundamental tenets of hill-walking and demonstrating a complete lack of respect for the notoriously changeable Pennine weather he says, ‘You don’t need a coat.’

  ‘’Course I need a coat.’

  ‘Nah,’ he says.

  ‘So what do I do when it rains?’

  ‘Just take a bin bag,’ he says. ‘Cut a hole in the top and stick your head through,’ he adds, before turning back to the television. For several days afterwards, I find myself thinking of the moment on Look North when I’m dragged from a ditch on some god-forsaken upland, wearing a refuse sack. Or wondering why my father would prefer it if I made my triumphant entry into my home village of Marsden, or perhaps more pertinently his village, dressed as rubbish.

  Home to Abbotsford

  Wednesday 7 July

  On the morning of my departure, some kind well-wisher called James has emailed to point out that due to the centripetal forces induced by the rotation of the planet, the Earth actually bulges towards the equator, making the equator further from the centre of the Earth than the two poles, meaning that any journey from north to south in the northern hemisphere is not downhill, as I have commented on my website, but a climb. Thank you, James. And so it is with a heavy heart, a heavy rucksack, an even heavier suitcase and the laws of the universe stacked against me that I post the keys back through the letterbox and set off down the road. I have in my pocket enough money to get me to Scotland by public transport, and not a penny more. I am going for broke: from now on it’s poetry or bust.

  *

  ‘I suppose I’ll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping.’ So said Dr Richard ‘Axe Man’ Beeching when publishing his The Reshaping of British Railways report in March 1963, two months before I was born. I’ve only ever seen one photograph of Dr Beeching; in it he is wearing an Oliver Hardy moustache over his lip, a rather smug smile, and is sitting on a train – an irony that couldn’t possibly have escaped him. Many said that Beeching’s drastic cuts to the nation’s rail network were short-sighted, which I agree with. On the other hand, it could be that his faulty vision actually saved the Penistone Line, a single-track route so insignificant and overgrown that it was probably overlooked rather than spared. To this day, I eve
n wonder if the authorities are aware of its existence, or if it might be one of those operations staffed entirely by volunteers and enthusiasts, or even by ghosts. My local station isn’t so much neglected as abandoned, even by vandals, and is a station only in the sense that it has a name and trains stop there, albeit not very often. Whatever the reason for its survival, it means I can catch a train pretty much at the bottom of the garden, even if the conductor can’t supply me with a one-way ticket to Berwick-upon-Tweed. ‘Change in Huddersfield then pay again,’ he advises. Then he looks at my boots and my rucksack, and adds: ‘Good luck.’ I presume from this comment that he’s seen something about my walk in the local paper, and taking his remark as a comic reference to Richard Attenborough’s calamitous blunder in The Great Escape, I reply, ‘Danke schoen.’ I see then from his expression that he has no idea why this English-speaking hiker should suddenly be spouting phrasebook German, and he moves off down the carriage in search of less complicated fares.

  Huddersfield isn’t a difficult town to leave. There are obviously a great many things I love about the place, because I’ve lived here all of my life and will probably die here as well, which has to be the biggest compliment anyone can pay their home town. But is it too much to ask for a little reciprocity every now and again, or that as admirers we shouldn’t be required to work so very hard to justify our affection? On grey days like these, the view from the eastward-moving train is the organic architecture of an endless chemical plant with its elaborate and convoluted pipe-work set against the background of a dark and dirty hill. Leeds Road, in front of it, is a strip-mall of franchises and dealerships, and if the canal isn’t actually clinically dead it’s doing a very good impression of something no longer alive. The Galpharm Stadium is visually interesting, although its name is so ugly that even the most devoted Town fan rarely enunciates it, and the other two obvious landmarks are the red-and-black slab of the B&Q Superstore and the rocket-like chimney of the local incinerator. Huddersfield, I’m not running away, but just for a few weeks will you let me go?

  The train is packed. It’s odd to be a walker among so many workers, to put my rucksack on the luggage rack next to briefcases and umbrellas, and to see my big clomping boots lined up under the table next to pairs of shiny brogues and colourful high heels. But in some ways it reminds me why I’m making this journey, because thinking back, I was built for the outdoors. I had a childhood of moors and woods, of tree-houses and tents, of dens and camps. I went from the football field to the tennis court to the cricket pitch and rarely went home in between. I was a kite-flyer and a bike-rider. I stalked the undergrowth with an air-rifle. And I skimmed stones across the reservoirs, of which Marsden has dozens, as if the village had an inherent fear of dehydration which manifested itself in a mania for collecting and storing water, until every depression was flooded, every valley dammed, and every raindrop caught. The moor was wrung for its supply, brooks and becks were tapped and siphoned, rivers decanted into dye-pans and dams by the mill, and ‘catch-waters’ were dug out along the contours of the hills, like drip-trays a couple of yards wide and several miles long, drawing off every last droplet of moisture. Along with the railway and the canal it made the area a vast theme park of tunnels and bridges and shafts and tracks, an immeasurable, unsupervised playground. I imagined when I was younger that I’d spend my days and earn my living outside, and when I swapped social work for poetry, part of the idea was to get out of the office and into the wider world again, to rejoin the adventure. But the sediment has built up. The stodginess of routine has set in. So even if I’m writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic I’m usually doing it in a chair, in a room, behind double glazing. The Pennine Way is about getting OUT THERE again. It’s about taking the air and clearing my head.

  The commuters disembark at Leeds. I fall asleep against the window, wake up to see York Minster go past, then Sutton Bank with the Kilburn White Horse floating in the landscape. Then Durham Cathedral. The next time I look up it’s towards sand dunes, the sea, then Holy Island and the superstructure of Lindisfarne Monastery, beached by a low tide. Familiarity dissolves with distance.

  *

  Al picks me up from the station. I’ve met him twice before, at a couple of Hogmanay parties about a decade ago. On each occasion we were both less than sober or we were hungover, but he’d spotted my SOS on the website, and recognises me on the platform, and we drive for an hour or so through the Scottish Borders, from one neat and tidy town to the next, across low, stone-built bridges and alongside wide, shallow rivers. I don’t know this part of the world at all. It seems very orderly, very picturesque, and very empty. I once tutored a residential poetry course in a big farmhouse somewhere hereabouts. The lady of the house was generous and welcoming, but her husband didn’t seem completely comfortable with the idea of poets poking around his yard and lounging on his settees, and made it his business to drive past the sitting-room window every five minutes on his mini-tractor while we were scrutinising some delicate piece of versification. Was that just down the road or a hundred miles away? The place names are familiar, but that’s because when I see them I hear the voice of rugby union commentator Bill McLaren, saying, ‘They’ll be dancing on the streets of Hawick/Melrose/Galashiels tonight,’ after some tousle-haired dairyman- cum-prop-forward had galloped half the length of the field and touched the ball down under the English posts.

  With Al’s wife Judith we eat posh fish and chips in a gastropub in Selkirk, then it’s off to Abbotsford. Abbotsford isn’t the start of the Pennine Way, but it is the home of Sir Walter Scott, and venue for the first reading. Al tours me around the formal gardens, past the glasshouse, in and out of the sculpted hedgerows, then across a mown stretch of meadow to the bank of the Tweed. There’s a marquee on the lawn; Abbotsford might be the spiritual home of one of Scotland’s most famous sons, but like most historic sites and country piles it needs money and plenty of it, so for the right price you can get hitched here. I imagine the amplified strains of Whitney Houston or Tom Jones bouncing off the ornate masonry and echoing around the walled vegetable patch. In the house itself, we pass through a corridor decorated with Scott’s collection of weaponry: swords, pistols, daggers, pikes, armour, plus the heads, horns and hides of many an unfortunate beast. Scott was unable to fulfil his ambitions as a military man because of a bout of polio when he was two which left him lame, but what he lacked in physical ability he obviously made up for in arms and artillery. Like Lord Byron with his club foot, he clearly wasn’t embarrassed by the concept of over-compensation. The galleried study is marvellous, a wonder, and somewhere in the background I can hear Al pointing out the wax seals, the quill pen, the lavish handwriting and the handsome spectacles . . . But I’m not looking. Or listening. My mind’s drifting. I’m thinking of the 256 miles and nineteen consecutive poetry readings stretching away to the south. I’ve made a big song and dance about this venture, talked about it on the telly and the radio, written pieces for the papers, roped in dozens and dozens of volunteers to cart my bag and lay on events and give up their beds. The whole project is based on the kindness of strangers, the entire itinerary held together by nothing more than a loosely connected chain of names and addresses and telephone numbers of people I’ve never met and who don’t know me from Adam. But the weakest link in that chain, I now realise, standing here among the trappings and trophies of Sir Walter Scott’s epic deeds and dazzling accomplishments, is me. What the fuck was I thinking? Failure seems unavoidable, with humiliation and shame the inevitable consequence.

  But it’s too late now, because the glasses from the champagne reception are being collected, and I’m being introduced, in the library, with a white marble bust of Scott staring down on me in judgement from the mantelpiece. In front of the great bay window, I explain what I’m doing here, and how I’m leaving a hat by the door – all contributions welcome. In fact I’ve decided to leave a sock instead, still a clean one at this stage, on the basis that it allows for more discretion when making a dona
tion and even offers the possibility of taking something out rather than putting something in, should the reading offend. Then I launch into the first poem, one hand on my book, one hand on a display case containing a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair and Rob Roy’s sporran. Towards the end, several people in the audience seem moved to tears, covering their eyes with their hands and bowing their heads. One woman takes a handkerchief out of her bag and lifts it to her face. But it’s just the sun, setting directly behind me, streaming into the library, blazing around my head and behind my back, reducing me to flames.