Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  This moor has a nightmare reputation in bad weather, both for getting lost and getting wet, but the weather today is glorious – clear and bright and still. Charles catches us up at Crag Top, Charles being the supplier of ecologically acceptable walking clothes including the top made from recycled wood chippings, which as luck would have it I happen to be wearing. I’d inadvertently given him the wrong starting position for today’s walk (Ickornshaw, instead of Cowling, maybe, or possibly Middleton) but he’s picked up our trail and jogged across the moor to hunt us down, puzzled by the combination of modern boot tread, dog-paw imprints and the footsteps of Yorkshire aborigines. At a nearby farm there are two visual treats, the first being an albino peacock, which strikes me as a near-perfect contradiction in terms, the second being a blue-and-white original Dormobile parked on a front lawn. A Dormobile is camping without a tent, holidaying without having to unpack, taking your living room for a drive; you’d have to have a heart of stone not to love a Dormobile or dream of sleeping under the concertina awning, and Slug has to take me gently by the elbow to ease me out of my Dormobile trance and guide me back onto the path, the path which plunges from Crag Top to Crag Bottom down the eastern side of Dean Clough via fields, driveways and a couple of gardens, then promenades along the far side of Ponden Reservoir before veering abruptly south, then west, rising towards the next expanse of moor.

  The fact that Pennine Way signs are now appearing in both English and Japanese is an indication that we are entering Brontë country, and the fact that we are meeting some very casually dressed walkers, in sandals and Hawaiian shirts, for example, implies that we are now on part of a tourist trail. Thousands, quite possibly tens of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to Top Withens (or Withins, as it appears on the map) every year, many of them clutching copies of Wuthering Heights, some even clutching Kate Bush albums, and clamber among the ruins, or sit in the stone ‘chair’ hoping for some kind of spiritual or emotional connection with those astonishing sisters and their astonishing work. But for all that the town of Haworth has become the worldwide headquarters of the Brontë industry, the cobbled Main Street being a theme park of Brontë cafes and Brontë teapots and Brontë shortbread, Top Withens remains resolutely non-commercial, just a ruined farmhouse with a fallen-in roof and tumbledown walls. Even the carved plaque, set into the gable end by the Brontë Society in 1964, reads as a series of apologies, qualifying statements and outright disclaimers, with such phrases as ‘has been associated with’, ‘may have been in her mind’, and the altogether unequivocal ‘bore no resemblance to’. Rather huffily, and as if it was written by the same person who provided similar signs for the houses of the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, it ends: ‘This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries.’ It’s a good place for a picnic, though, with shelter and shade and stunning views to the south. A ram takes a bit of a shine to Slug, or rather to the sandwiches in his trouser pocket, and we take several compromising photographs of the ensuing coming together of man and sheep, and several Japanese visitors follow suit, all armed with expensive cameras and powerful, all-seeing lenses.

  The flight of reservoirs at Walshaw Dean is low on water. Wherever all the rain of the past couple of weeks has been going it isn’t here; Alcomden Water, the stream below the last dam wall, is little more than a trickle, and the exposed valley looks rusty and sore, with cracks opening along the banks of baked mud, and red and orange boulders littering the crusted basin. Anna has trodden on something sharp and is bleeding, and Slug is limping, so we’re a little bedraggled and out of step by the time we round Standing Stone Hill, heading towards the ancient and cobbled village of Heptonstall. Like familiar chess pieces positioned across the arc of the distant horizon I can make out several regional landmarks, such as the phallic column of Stoodley Pike, the masts of Emley Moor, Pole Moor and Holme Moss, even Thurstonland Church, and the series of power stations leading out towards the east coast, Ferrybridge, Eggborough, Drax, their cooling towers pumping out vertical clouds of silver-white steam. Which means I’m nearing my own territory now, preparing for home.

  Lower down, where the vegetation thickens, Johnny points out a few stands of Himalayan balsam, the new public enemy number one on the botanists’ list of invasive species. In times gone by, Japanese knotweed was always the most wanted, and at one point was classified as a notifiable infestation. We had a big clump at the bottom of the garden which my dad would scythe down every year, but twelve months later it would be there again, taller and stronger. To try to stifle it he laid a square of heavy shag-pile carpet over the stalks, but they grew under it, around it and eventually through it. On one occasion he even resorted to a scorched-earth policy, tipping kerosene into the soil and setting fire to it, but nothing short of a US air strike and several barrels of napalm would have made any difference. In the end he settled for a partial truce or stalemate, and from his living-room window at the height of the summer I can still see the distinctive, heart-shaped leaves waving from the far end of the garden. The Himalayan balsam doesn’t seem as deeply rooted – I pull a couple out as I’m wandering along and they come away easily – but according to Johnny they’re taking over, and Johnny knows about these things.

  Having been invited for a cup of tea and a lump of cake we call in at Lumb Bank, one of the Arvon Foundation’s residential writing centres perched on a ledge above Colden Clough with a view down the narrow valley towards Hebden Bridge, and tiptoe past several students in gazebos, in the field, under fruit trees and dotted around the bee-bole garden, some with laptops and some with pads of paper, all deep in contemplation, all fighting with words. Strictly speaking the Pennine Way doesn’t actually pass through Hebden Bridge, or the next town east along the bottleneck valley which is Mytholmroyd, but that’s where I’m staying tonight, in one of those ordinary houses in an everyday street, not at all unlike the house I grew up in. Number 1 Aspinall Street is a back-to-back end-terrace with a lamppost outside. A few years ago it was acquired by the Elmet Trust, and is open to the public as well as being available for holiday lets. Mytholmroyd isn’t an obvious tourist destination and Aspinall Street isn’t exactly the golden mile, being one of several stone-built rows in a quiet residential area behind the busy A646 and beyond the dark and sluggish Rochdale Canal. But Ted Hughes was born at number 1, and even though he only lived there for the first six or seven years of his life, the view from the attic window and his experience of the neighbouring woods and cloughs gave rise to many of his most famous poems and provided a psychological, social and environmental template which was to serve his writing for the rest of his years.

  On the wall between the front door (the only door, in fact) and the living-room window there’s a blue plaque. I know this because several years ago I stood on a makeshift wooden podium and pulled a cord which drew back a pair of little red curtains to reveal it, then made a short speech to the gathering of friends, family and reporters, while a man with dreadlocks and an acoustic guitar slung over his back came marching through the proceedings, muttering under his breath, clearly not daunted by the authoritative gleam of Councillor Conrad Winterburn’s mayoral chain, and quite probably incensed by it. So I’ve stepped across the threshold of this house quite a few times, but never slept in it, and have been fantasising about spending the night in the converted roof space which was Hughes’ bedroom, gazing up at the stars, and maybe even writing a poem. Staying here is something exceptional and personal, something I’ve been walking towards, wider than Malham Cove, taller than High Force, deeper than High Cup Nick, an experience that cannot be compromised or negotiated or shared.

  ‘You’re very uptight,’ says my wife, when she arrives.

  ‘I don’t think Daddy wants us here,’ says my daughter.

  ‘’Course I do.’

  ‘Where’s Slug?’

  ‘Gone to Hebden Bridge to look for somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Why can’t he stay here? There’s a spare bedroom.’

 
‘Well I . . . er . . .’

  ‘How is he getting to Hebden Bridge?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘Hasn’t he got a bad leg?’

  ‘The thing is . . .’

  ‘Simon, you’re very uptight.’

  ‘I don’t think Daddy wants us here.’

  ‘I DO want you here and I’m NOT UPTIGHT, OK?’

  We wander slowly up the road to the Ted Hughes Theatre at Calder High School, where Johnny goes past in a collared shirt and jacket, and Anna, checking tickets at the door, has made a Cinderella-like transformation and is now wearing a smart evening dress. Both of them are wearing shoes. Every day, during the walk, I think about the readings: where, when, which poems and in what order, who to thank, if anyone will attend. Then all the way through the readings I think about the walk: changing the map, charging the phone, checking the route, filling the water bottles, packing the Tombstone, applying the ointments. Anna says, ‘The mayor was going to come but he’s had his car stolen.’ About two hundred people have made it, though that’s a guess, because I’m too tired to remember to count. Neither can I remember what I read, because I’m on autopilot, somewhere else, having an out-of-body experience in which my body is sorting out clean socks and sandwiches for tomorrow while my mouth spouts poetry. The only time I make contact with myself is when I stumble over a word and have to reset the controls, or when my mind goes completely blank and I nod off at the wheel, then wake up suddenly with the reading veering into a ditch. I know that person on the front row, but who is it? Have I read here before? I opened this theatre, didn’t I, or was that somewhere else? Am I a member of the Elmet Trust, or its patron? Or its president? Am I Ted Hughes?

  By the time we get back to the house it’s late. My daughter goes in the attic but comes back down saying she is ‘freaked out up there’, so we all end up in the same bed, and by four in the morning I’m tired of fighting for the sheets and being elbowed in the ribs, so I plod downstairs, make a cup of tea and tip out the sock on the kitchen table. Out slides a whopping £516.15, plus a slice of clingwrapped fruit cake, plus a photocopied and folded page from Ted Hughes’s manuscript of his unfinished translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, plus a piece of tree bark. I’m exhausted, and part of me never wants to read another poem in my life, let alone write one. But there’s a soft, enticing, almost insistent dawn light radiating through the curtains and around the slats in the blind, and the first birds are beginning to call, and it’s now or never. So with a notebook and a pencil I go back upstairs, and carry on going up, quietly, towards the very top of the house.

  Above Ickornshaw, Black Huts

  are raised against damp

  on footings of red brick,

  landlocked chalets lashed to the bedrock

  with steel guy-ropes

  and telegraph wire,

  braced for Atlantic gales.

  All plank and slat,

  the salvaged timbers

  ooze bitumen

  out of the grain, a liquorice sweat,

  its formaldehyde breath

  disinfecting the clough

  for a mile downwind.

  Seen from distance,

  these tarred pavilions or lodges

  make camp on the ridge

  in silhouette – black, identical sheds

  of identical shape,

  though up close

  no two are alike,

  being customised shacks,

  a hillbilly hotchpotch

  of water-butts, stoops,

  a one-man veranda,

  a stove-pipe wearing a tin hat.

  And all boarded shut,

  all housing

  a darkroom darkness,

  with pin-hole light

  falling on nail or hook

  or a padlocked box,

  coffin-shaped, coiled

  in a ship’s chain.

  Mothballed stations on disused lines

  neither mapped nor named.

  Birds avoid them –

  some say the hatches fly open

  and shotguns appear, blazing

  at tame grouse,

  that inside

  they’re all whisky and smoke,

  all Barbour and big talk,

  but others whisper

  that locals sit here

  in deckchairs, with flasks,

  watching the dunes of peat,

  binoculars raised,

  waiting for downed airmen

  or shipwrecked souls

  to crawl

  from the moor’s sea.

  Hebden Bridge to Marsden

  14 MILES

  OS Explorer OL21 South Sheet, OL1 West

  Saturday 24 July

  I once gave a reading in a small, modern, city-centre art gallery. At some point during the evening I noticed that members of the audience were nudging each other and tittering, and when I eventually glanced backwards, over my shoulder, I saw a man in a doughnut costume on the street outside, leaning against the glass wall and listening through the window. I then saw the house manager for the evening go out of the venue, and a minute or so later could hear him remonstrating with the doughnut, as could the rest of the audience. The conversation went something like this:

  House manager: ‘Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing?’

  Doughnut: ‘I’m a doughnut.’

  House manager: ‘So I see. Do you have to stand here?’

  Doughnut: ‘I’m advertising doughnuts. It’s my job.’

  House manager: ‘We’ve got a poetry reading going on in there.’

  Doughnut: ‘So what, doughnuts can like poetry.’

  A car went past and I didn’t catch the next few words, but then heard the manager say, ‘Well, why don’t you come inside?’ Although I was reading a poem from the page in front of me, my mind was actually saying, ‘Don’t bring the doughnut into the reading, please don’t bring the doughnut into the reading.’ The doughnut then said to the house manager, ‘I can’t, I’m waiting for a colleague.’ I don’t remember what happened next, except for thinking that if TWO doughnuts came inside, I would put down my book and retire.

  The incident made me very wary of reading in any venue where the outside world can look in. Places like Standedge Tunnel and Visitor Centre, a cavernous, open-plan former boatshed with tall glass doors. Behind me, as I launch into the first poem, I can sense latecomers and nosey parkers pressing their faces to the glass and hear them rattling the handles and locks. At the far end, through an equally big window, dog-walkers and bike riders stop to peer in. With fifty-six people seated in narrow rows in front of me, I’m sitting on the metal steps trying to compete with another voice – my own – as it echoes between the girders and rattles around the stone walls. I prefer to stand when I read, but I’m already several feet above the audience, and it’s good to take the weight off. The steps have yellow lines painted onto them to stop people missing their footing, and the arched stone entrance that frames me is flanked by floor-to-ceiling ironwork; to all outward appearances I am reading in the wing of a Category A prison. It’s supposed to be the climax, the wandering minstrel at his homecoming gig, but it doesn’t work. They say you can’t be a priest in your own parish, and maybe that adage applies to poets as well. Many people in the audience are friends or family, or the friends of family, and they’ve heard it all before. Slug has certainly heard it all before, in Grasmere, Malham, Gargrave, Hebden Bridge, and now again in Marsden. I’ve tried to vary it, but it’s only ever a variation on a theme, and choosing which poems to read has become like choosing from set-menu options in a Chinese restaurant, tonight being menu C: ‘The Shout’, ‘Causeway’, ‘Roadshow’, followed by ‘You’re Beautiful’, ‘The Christening’, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Crispy Duck, Egg Fried Rice and fresh lychees for dessert. Every time a train goes past on the westbound line it sounds its horn before entering the three-mile tunnel, like some kind of poetry censoring system, bleeping words, phrases and sometimes whole sentences.r />
  Afterwards, someone has set up a book stall in the children’s play area. I hang my jacket over one of the tiny chairs, sit with my knees up by my ears, and sign a few copies. In the pub across the road there’s a celebratory atmosphere. Slug buys a bottle of cava to toast my achievement, then the drinks are on me, or rather they are on the £110.18 in the sock, which also contains a scented candle and (a recurring theme by now) a packet of Elastoplast. I should let my hair down a bit, get drunk with the rest of them, but I can’t, partly out of being sensible (and uptight etc.) and partly out of guilt, because even though I have walked home I have not yet completed the Pennine Way, and tomorrow I have to set off again, drag myself up to Brun Clough Reservoir by eight in the morning and haul my sorry arse over very horrible Black Hill, and the day after that, find my way across the even more horrible Bleaklow and Kinder Scout, on my own. When the Apollo 13 mission went wrong, the astronauts had to bypass the Earth and make a momentum-building slingshot around the dark side of the Moon, and watched helplessly as the blue planet sailed past the window of their spacecraft. That might seem like an exorbitant metaphor for someone who only has to overshoot his own house by twenty-seven miles, and the Peak District isn’t exactly the final frontier. But sitting in the pub with the glasses clinking around me and another bottle of bubbly arriving in a plastic bucket, I can’t help but feel a bit of a fraud, and that all this rejoicing is somewhat premature. The name of the pub is the Tunnel End, the end of the tunnel being the place where light is. And that’s still two days away.

  *

  Twelve hours earlier we’d convened above Lumb Bank, a new party for another day, being the three Armitages, my friend Rick, making a reappearance after an impressive performance between Dufton and Langdon Beck, and his wife Jo. But not Slug, who has thrown in the towel, and whose non-appearance this morning has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a former girlfriend who happens to live in the Hebden Bridge area, he insists. He will ‘follow on by public transport’, and his place is taken by the last-minute arrival of Subhadassi, who spotted me last year in the basement jumble sale of Huddersfield’s TK Maxx store, came alongside and said, ‘So is this where poets buy their jackets?’ Subhadassi (‘a glimpse of beauty’) was born in Huddersfield and ordained a Buddhist in Spain in the early nineties. His other conversion was from chemistry to the arts; amongst other things he’s a fine poet and an entertaining walking companion. It must take some courage to turn up and walk with someone you’ve only met for a few seconds in the men’s section of an ‘off-price retailer’, and must also take some courage to be a Huddersfield-born Buddhist going by the name Subhadassi.