Monoculture possibly, monotonous without doubt. In fact it’s plain old boring, slogging along the gravel access road with a drawn curtain of trees on either side. But after yesterday’s escapade on the hills, boring means not getting lost, which is good. Today I like boring, because it gives me chance to take stock, catch my breath and my thoughts, and to think of the road as a kind of catwalk while I try out various combinations of rainwear and hats from my rucksack. I even begin writing a poem in my head, something I never do if I’m feeling rushed or stressed. I’ve also realised how important the map is; even on an apparently straightforward stretch like this, the road forks or the path sneaks off into the trees for half a mile or so without warning. It’s important to keep checking, and in some ways, more essential to know where you’ve been than where you’re heading. A sheepfold, a disused quarry, even a thin wire fence: tuning into this fine-scale cartography takes time and concentration, but being able to put a finger on the map and say with absolute confidence I AM HERE makes the air smell sweeter and the sandwiches taste fresher. We stop by a closed metal gate to eat, and the midges come swarming onto us, on our hands, in our hair, our ears, our mouth, up our noses. Keep walking and it’s fine, but pause for a second and they materialise, the descendants of those midges that feasted and gorged on my bare legs when I was seven, and have inherited the taste. On we go. A forestry worker in some ginormous mechanical contraption lifts felled trees from one pile and drops them on another. It seems churlish of him not to return our wave, given that he probably won’t see anyone else for another twelve hours, but maybe he doesn’t notice us, in his glass cabin, under his hard hat and his ear defenders and several layers of Avon Skin So Soft. Maybe he just hates people, in which case, he’s found the perfect employment. Jess trots alongside, uncomplaining and obedient, the ideal animal companion as far as I can tell, but a savage beast, according to Matt, when deer are around. In the water-meadows of Somerset this tame pet has suddenly become electrified at the sight or sound or more likely the smell of a roe deer, and several times has bolted off into the long grass and returned later with a claret-coloured face, a trail of blood leading to some beautiful wild creature four or five times its size with its throat ripped out. Sheep: not interested. A rabbit: take it or leave it. But once a deer enters the picture, this cute toy dog with its schoolgirl name and pretty collar becomes a killer. Becomes a wolf. Every now and then I look down or up or along one of the firebreaks, those mysterious, beckoning fairways cut into the forest, expecting to see deer, and on two or three occasions I’m not disappointed. But they dissolve in an instant into the brush and undergrowth. Ghostly, telepathic, clairvoyant beings; they knew we were coming long before we arrived, and know to disappear before the aerial of Jess’s tail stiffens and points, and before her eyes turn red.
The trail leaves the forest as it climbs towards Brownrigg Head, following two parallel fences and six or seven partly submerged white marker stones. It’s the first quagmire of the journey, impossibly wet and soggy, surface water up to a foot deep where there should be a path, meaning we have to tack off to the right looking for terra firma or hopscotch along the tussocks, a game that inevitably leads to sore ankles and wet boots. Down the steep pitch of Gorless Crag it’s so sodden that one guide book actually suggests walking on the wall, except the wall has fallen down either through waterlogged foundations or by people using it as a bridge. More deer in the wood to the west see us coming and dematerialise. Thinking that I’ll vault across one particularly nasty-looking ditch, I realise I’ve left my walking poles back in the wood, having put them down to tie my bootlace then gone sprinting off before the midges could devour me.
‘I thought you were walking better,’ says Matt.
I loved those poles, for their aluminium lightness and their metallic blueness and their clever telescopic retracting and extending abilities, and not least because of the small fortune I paid for them. But all the love in the world won’t make me go back over that swamp.
‘They’ll turn up,’ Camilla says, trumping me with the same kind of optimism that could leave them stranded in Bellingham tonight.
A party of six, including two dogs, are coming towards us in single file as we’re squelching up the opposite side of the valley. Having noticed my itinerary on the internet, William had been in touch with a vague and what I thought was an impossibly loose plan to intercept me somewhere on this stretch, but here he is, with his family and his picnic basket, right on cue. On the rump of Padon Hill, on a flat rock, we sit, eat, drink, talk. As far as I’m able to gather between gusts of wind, William is a London solicitor in the week, a Northumbrian farmer at the weekend, and a patron of the arts in his free time. The offices of Bloodaxe Books, my first publisher, are stabled in one of his estate buildings, which he points to, somewhere in the unknowable distance, with his index finger.
‘So where is your farm?’ I ask him.
‘Here.’
‘Where?’
With a sweep of the arm which seems to take in every square mile of land in every direction either side of the Pennine Way, he repeats his previous answer. ‘Here.’
After the pit-stop, William and co. see us over the scrubby heather of Whitley Pike, direct us towards a stand of trees in the middle distance, then peel off. The wind rages and the rain lashes, but it’s superficial, cosmetic rain – it doesn’t mean it – and we’re heading downhill, and for reasons that are probably all to do with biscuits and cake I’m feeling energetic, exhilarated and full of self-belief. As a demonstration of this newfound I’ll-do-whatever-I-want confidence I get the camera out and take an arty photograph of a quad bike tyre being used as a feeding trough, and a few minutes later, decide to pee in the middle of the moor. Decide to piss in the wind, in fact, as if I’m so powerful I can even disprove a universally acknowledged truism. If there was a tide nearby I’d probably try to turn that back as well. Matt and Camilla are more tactful, making use of a roofless, tumbledown, brick-built outhouse, while Jess stands guard under the lintel.
Even though the setting isn’t particularly dramatic, there’s more surface variation here, certainly more than the uniform greenness of Kielder Forest and more also than the cover of bracken and grass thrown over the Cheviots. A patchwork rather than a blanket, to the point where the landscape closely resembles the map, or even becomes the map itself, making it possible to dead-reckon by distant features, such as Hareshaw House, where three big horses stand impassively in the front paddock, unimpressed by our presence, selectively blind and deaf as we scuttle past. A narrow B road abseils the arched back of a distant hill. To the left, the stony, terraced grandstand of Callerhues Crag becomes prominent then recedes. To the right, the Linn Plantation opens up beneath us before closing behind. Moor becomes heath, heath becomes meadow, meadow becomes field. A golf course on the other side of the valley seems absurdly manicured, conspicuous in its form and lurid in colour. We are returning from another world. Bellingham, pronounced Bellinjam, is tucked somewhere beneath the hill. My schedule, fished out of the rucksack, says I’m staying with someone called Dick, and this must be him, sitting on a stone bench with a cap on his head and his coat zipped right to the top, his hand coming forward to shake mine. As we walk down the lane towards the town we call in at the Heritage Centre to collect the Tombstone. Lovely Joyce dropped it there earlier, then Dick took one look at it or perhaps experienced some of its gravitational pull, and decided to leave it to me. So much for the epiphanic arrival: I scramble the last fifty yards dragging the embarrassingly enormous and embarrassingly turquoise suitcase up Dick’s steep lane, its wheels screaming under the weight and gouging two deep ruts across a tended grassy verge.
*
These are the difficult hours. A new town, a new house. The back bedroom, decorated with photographs of children long since grown up and piles of books never to be read again. A towel on the bed. Someone else’s bathroom. The arcane knowledge required to operate a temperamental shower, the leverage needed to give the
toilet a proper flush, coming downstairs with wet hair to a family of strangers talking in accents and dialects other than your own. The desire to curl up in a ball and lock the door, the obligation to explain yourself, to engage in conversation, and to smile. Not that Dick is anything other than generous and kind, and it can’t be much fun for him either, having a complete alien inhabiting his domain, witnessing his rituals, fiddling with his appliances. Dick’s ex-daughter-in-law lays out what in our house is known as a Sunday tea: cold meats, quiche, rice salad, bread rolls, soup, a plate of tomatoes – a bit of everything to be eaten in no particular order. The older of Dick’s grown-up grandsons is at university, the other is thinking of joining the police but doesn’t know why, and I can’t work out if Raoul Moat’s confused and chaotic death a few miles downriver, with rumours of Taser wires and sniper rounds, has given him second thoughts or whetted his appetite.
The reading has all the ingredients of a fiasco, being outside, in a flapping marquee, between bouts of rain, midges and folk music. But it’s a beautiful thing. A shepherd, unaccompanied and smelling of a pipe tobacco my dad used to smoke, stands up and sings a couple of traditional ballads. (By traditional I mean I can’t understand a single word but it sounds heartfelt and authentic.) A guitarist and a squeezebox player make smutty jokes, sing saucy songs and poke fun at neighbouring towns. A young fiddler and flautist make an appearance, even though they’re due to leave in the early hours of the morning for a musical adventure in some remote and exotic part of the world and still haven’t packed. A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I’m sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she’s giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr. And I read my poems. Attendance: 76. Takings, a gratefully received £211.17. I’ve only been on the road three days but somehow I already seem to have several friends: Katrina is in the audience, and William of Bloodaxe and co., and a photographer I met on the way to Dick’s house, and a guy from the mountain rescue team I bumped into yesterday, and a woman who tells me she played bass with one of my favourite bands, the Wedding Present.
‘Wow. Which album?’
‘Dunno. The silver one.’
‘Saturnalia?’
‘Might have been.’
‘I love that album.’
‘Yeah. I should listen to it.’
On the way to the pub afterwards for an abstemious lime and soda and to buy Dick a pint, I tell myself that this is what community is. People of all shape and stripe, pulling together, putting up a big white tent in a car park and doing their thing. Community is also Matt and Camilla getting a lift back to Byrness with the two German girls staying with Colin and Joyce. Then again, in the Black Bull, community is several dozen of the local yoof drinking premium-strength continental lager and singing karaoke, and in the Chinese takeaway, community is a handful of voluble Otterburn squaddies in uniform ordering chicken chow mein, and when these two groups crash into each other on the high street after closing time, as seems inevitable and almost obligatory on this highly charged Saturday night, that will be community as well.
‘Sometimes I shout out in the night,’ says Dick, as we’re going up to bed. But if he does I don’t hear him. I fall asleep thinking of my lost poles lying cold and alone in Kielder Forest, so ergonomically pleasing and so reassuringly expensive, but gone. I really loved those poles.
Bellingham to Once Brewed
14.5 MILES
OS Explorer OL42 East Sheet, OL43 East/West
Sunday 11 July
The weight of the Tombstone is not being helped, I realise, by the steady accumulation of lots of dosh, much of it in the form of pound coins. Unfortunately, I’m never within ten miles of a bank during opening hours, and there seems little prospect of off-loading the money until lower down the trail. I transfer the coins into a knotted T-shirt and push it towards the bottom of the case. Rolled into a fat wad, the notes go into a waterproof Tupperware box then into the rucksack. The other object adding to the mass is the year’s supply of Mars Bars given to me by my wife the day before I set off. They’re World Cup Mars Bars, branded with the England football strip, and following the Germany game in the Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein, very cheap. I’ve been scoffing as many as I can – this trip is going to be as tough on the teeth as it is on the feet – as well as offering them to fellow walkers, random hikers and even moorland animals, but as yet there is no obvious evidence of depletion, and a great number of them have morphed into a dense paving stone of chocolate and glucose somewhere between the layer of underpants and the rainwear stratum. Guide books are heavy as well. Instead of carrying them, I’ve been razoring out the relevant pages to take with me each day, slicing up books in my pyjamas, as if sitting up half the night in a stranger’s boxroom counting used fivers wasn’t furtive enough. But from now on I’m aiming to read and memorise, then just trust to the map.
By eight sharp I’m walking past Dick’s recycling bin, overflowing with the damp, scrunched-up balls of newspaper I’d stuffed in my boots overnight, then down the steep path behind the leylandii hedge and alongside the site of last night’s gig, where the marquee has been dismantled and the area forensically cleansed of any poetry-related activity. Bellingham-pronounced-Bellinjam is still dozing: condensation clings to the two police cars parked outside the stone-built station; a faulty light in the cashpoint machine flickers on and off; two old-fashioned petrol pumps straight out of an episode of Heartbeat stand like saluting sentries in the forecourt of a local garage. The path tries to hide round the back of the graveyard, but I find it, and stroll along the river, then past other features I remember from the guide books – the stone bridge, the campsite, the Forestry Commission District Office. I’m glad to be on my own today, to have a bit of a Laurie Lee moment, rising early, leaving the town while it’s still in bed and heading into the wild blue yonder. A steep climb up Ealinghamrigg Common gets the knees pumping and the heart pounding, and now the breeze is picking up, a sharp, clean knife of air, the kind which pares away the layers of torpor and lethargy that build up around the spirit and the soul over the years. The wind increases as I rise through the contours, until at the top of the hill I turn west into the most tremendous surge of fresh air, a screaming and buffeting jetstream, and I take off my hat and undo my coat, letting it pummel my face and rip at my hair and hammer my chest. Directly in front, the most astonishingly vivid and perfectly symmetrical rainbow makes a glorious archway over a distant relay station, exactly where I’m heading, and for a moment or so I feel welcomed and blessed, invited by higher powers through this portal of colour and form designed for my benefit alone, forgetting temporarily that rainbows are the product not only of light but of water. So what the heavens are really announcing is rain, and ten minutes later, it’s a gale.
I wrap up and press on. Past Shitlington Crags (an opportunity for a childish joke in better weather and better humour) and Shitlington Hall (ditto), a sprawling farm actually, where I have my first encounter with dogs. Five of them, collies, come bundling and bouncing across the yard, four of them all bark and no bite, the other one growling ominously around my heels, though when I spin around it sits down, and from the milkiness in its eyes and the way it looks into some vacant space over my shoulder I think it might be blind. Much of the Pennine Way traverses private land, and today the trail seems determinedly invasive and assertive in its routing, passing continuously through gates, yards, crops, livestock, along cart-tracks, and close to buildings, windows and doors. Some land-owners appear to have accepted and allowed for its presence, guiding walkers across their property via careful landscaping or explicit notices, in stark contrast with a thankfully smaller group of mutterers, grumblers and saboteurs who obviously can’t abide the daily procession of work-shy trespassers. The majority, though, seem ambivalent as to its existence, making no positive contribution to the u
pkeep of the trail but not actually hindering its progress. At Lowstead, a renovated cluster of buildings on the bank of Blacka Burn, the Way actually approaches the main house along its tarmacked drive, takes in two sides of the neatly mown lawn then winds through a rambling garden before vaulting a stile and heading off up the side of the valley, to the next farm, then the next, then the next. And somewhere between Leadgate and Horneystead, a fairground teddy bear used for target practice spews stuffing from its exit wounds, as does another teddy nailed to a tree trunk. A decapitated scarecrow in a blue boiler suit slumps forward in a deckchair facing the path, though I choose not to take it personally. Neither am I offended when a couple drinking tea in a hardwood conservatory refuse to return my smile; to me the moment might seem unique, but to them I’m just another idiot in the rain, and no doubt they’ve seen thousands of them. Pennine Way folklore tells of the route actually running through a residential bathroom at one time. I’m a great believer in the right to roam, but not enough of an activist to insist on hiking past a homeowner’s shower curtain or gatecrash some other confidential act of sanitation.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 5