I’d travelled from Wales to England and the differences began almost at the border. There were small thatched cottages and the villages became less stark, less dour, the difference of a richer country showing in small ways; a house could be kept for longer, a settlement allowed to grow naturally, rather than terraced houses clustered around some industrial edifice. The path between Wales and England had led away down a back road, and I’d come to a timbered house, worn and kinked with the weight of age, an arch leading through to a stable block and courtyard beyond. Crooked painted lettering above the door showed a date centuries ago. It was just a house on a back road – nothing special, no museum, no marker point, just one of many ancient dwelling places throughout this land. Suddenly I felt gossamer-thin ghosts, the weight of the history of England layered down upon me. Our present lives are built on so many that have gone before, mark upon mark of our history of living on the same land.
On the day I walked away from Shrewsbury I finished at Atcham. There I came across a pub that immediately made me feel uncomfortable. Too glossy and too many business clients giving me the side-eye: a place for meetings and important lunches, everyone driving there, not walking. I felt as if I would break things with the huge bag I carried on my back, lumber through the pub strange and wild, knocking over glasses and bumping against chairs. It was an unpleasant feeling and I walked quickly away from the posh pub and its judgemental customers, living within tightly bound strictures, too moneyed to allow space for my transience, nothing to define me except what I carried on my back.
Up the straight busy road and down a side turning, I saw a triangle of woodland on the map, just a small copse but it was more than enough to provide shelter for the night, dampen down the noise of traffic, and provide camouflage enough for any passing dog-walkers not to notice me. I found a gap in the barbed wire and slipped through, treading softly into the centre of the young wood. Small birch trees provided a soft carpet of copper leaves for my bed. I lay down, feeling happy and safe. This was my adventure, this was what I was setting out to do. At its core, my journey was to walk and to sleep, nothing more complex than that. The leafless fingers of the trees waved softly above me, and I felt at peace with the simplicity of my surroundings, snug and safe in my sleeping bag, well insulated against the March night.
All the fuss and effort of the first week released a little, the adrenaline buzz of walking and hum of online comments. When I camped alone I found calm, released from the effort of movement or the stimulation of having to talk to anyone at all. After a while of lying and listening to the wind sway the branches, all the chatter of thoughts disappeared. The scrolling lists of things I needed to do to make this walk a success, to inform as many people as I could about the symptoms of ovarian cancer – it all melted away.
As the day came and gentle light glowed around me, a light rain began to fall, just enough to make me hustle to pack away. A light mark on the ground where my body had been was the only trace of my sleeping-spot. A hidden night, invisible in public. I ducked out into the world again, cars passing, morning dog-walkers, continuing on the path.
At the point when I set out to walk 3300 miles I’d lived in Wales for almost sixteen years, moving between three different towns – more than long enough to have a diverse network of friends, many of whom were offering me places to stay when I reached their area, enough connections that I’d have someone to visit at least every couple of weeks, mainly when my routes took me back into mid-Wales.
I can’t remember how long it was before the first message came, but it was surprisingly soon. Someone – a complete stranger, not even a friend of a friend, but someone who had received news of my journey through the myriad sharings of the internet – had reached out in return and invited me into their home. Hi, when you get to x, you can come and stay with me. The list grew and grew, I started to make a map, mark a star for each offer, so I could see when they came close. It meant more than just a bed; it meant a shower, washing my clothes, a safe place to close my eyes. I wouldn’t say I was a mistrustful person but, during the planning and anticipation of this journey, it had just never occurred to me that so many people would offer me places to stay.
I did plenty of wild camping on this journey, sleeping in field corners, showering in leisure-centres and washing my socks in bathroom sinks, but I never went more than a week without a bed, usually having to camp for no more than two or three nights in a row. Many of my hosts were just strangers who’d decided to help me out, who found me through a variety of means: internet or radio or word of mouth or chance encounter. Whether inspired by the story of ovarian cancer or my travelling alone, they all reached out to aid me and it changed the nature of my journey completely.
At Ironbridge, where the folding of the land, a changing in the thickness of the stone, sent the Severn River turning south, I bought a pork pie in celebration. I’d walked 100 miles! When calculated in steps and effort this number was huge. A 100-mile walk, a massive effort, worth an “oooh” and a “well done”. But it shrank down to nothing when I realised it was a thirty-third of what I’d set out to do. A thirty-third, a fraction barely worth mentioning. What was a thirty-third of an apple, one pip?
The weight of my walk settled down on me, and I felt sad and helpless as I walked over the bridge and down towards a pub where I would meet my next host. I struggled to make conversation with this woman I didn’t know, only having admired her paintings on the internet: wanting only to sleep and rest, restore myself for the next day.
The way I’d been able to set out on a journey of this size was by not thinking about it; organising the whole thing at once was too enormous to comprehend so I faced little pieces of it, acted as if I was setting out on a long walk. If I was walking, what would I need? Well, I’d need a rucksack and a pair of boots. And so it began. Making the journey theoretical, reducing the terrifying task to small jobs meant I lined up a list of them that could be tackled in turn. The walk manifested invisibly in the background without my ever having to face up to the implications of the whole of it.
Now I had to do the same again with the route itself. I’m not sure it’s possible to comprehend a journey of 3300 miles on foot. How can you imagine the size of your tracks, each step pressing against the ground, seeing a hill in the far distance and, hours later, standing on top of it, turning round and looking the way you’ve come, seeing your imaginary trace across the land, so many beads of sweat and heavy breaths? One day is hard to see, maybe ten or fifteen miles, but 3300? Huge, too huge. So I’d walk to Bristol, I thought to myself, focus on that and let the rest come later, when it needed to.
When I came close to Stourport I knew I was going to see Gaz and Steph again. I met them in September 2012, the first time I followed the River Severn to a hospital appointment in Bristol. They lived near a boatyard by Stourport, outside the entrance, on the river itself is a huge, rusting ferry. Something you can imagine as a steam powered craft on the Mississippi River, the kind that Huckleberry Finn found floating and abandoned.
Back then, at the end of one too-long day, I’d walked to Bewdley but had nowhere to sleep, walked a bit further, Stourport and the boatyard got in the way, still nowhere I could sleep. Past a lock and to a steep, dank wood: seventeen miles on the road by this point, rucksack cutting into my shoulders and feet like stones in my boots. I was ready to give up, but one last push and I came to a flat, grassy meadow with a weeping willow in the centre. Perfect. Just one problem: there was a caravan in the corner and it looked like there was someone inside it. Unusually, I decided to make myself known, risking the shouting and banishment to ask if I could sleep in the field. I was just too tired to go any further.
Wonderfully, as I approached the open door, a lovely friendly lion-head popped out of the doorway, golden-brown hair pushed back from a wide, calm face… Gaz.
“Hello, can I sleep in this field?”
“Of course you can, mate. Do you want a beer?”
We made a fire and drank cans of s
trong cheap lager, talking about silly things like feeding swans blackberries, making animal friendships. He was impressed with my story, in the way that cancer can sometimes be a magic word, and during the evening he went to fetch Steph from the first boat down on the river. I remember a light shining out of her face as she talked about being a nurse, and how enthusiastic she was about what I was doing. She gave me a little bag of food the next morning and a card that said I was a special person.
I spent the night in the caravan in the end, on the sofa while Gaz took the bed, telling each other bedtime stories and giggling ourselves to sleep. Gaz was saving up money to travel to South America, filling a van up with tatty goods for a car boot.
I’d loved that night and sent them a few postcards from further down the way, telling them where I’d got to downriver, keeping our connection open for a while longer.
The second time I met them was in August 2013. I’d decided to kayak to hospital this time, so I borrowed the kit and got a friend to lug me to the Severn, pushing me off where it became navigable at Pool Quay, near Welshpool. I didn’t have their phone numbers but I wanted to stop by and say hello. I couldn’t find a decent space to pull up by Gaz’s grassy meadow so I floated on a bit towards Steph’s canal boat and, shyly, looked to see if there was anyone in. There was, she was in the kitchen.
“Do you remember me?” I said, feeling proud to be coming to say hello in a kayak.
Yes, yes, of course she did, and she invited me in for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. Steph is like me, she’ll get philosophical at the drop of a hat so we went off on great rambles for a few hours, talking about the world and getting to know each other a bit more. I met her husband and learned about how she’d cared for him during his serious illnesses. Gaz wasn’t in the meadow any more, he’d moved his caravan back to the boatyard. We tried calling him but he was working that day. So off I went, with a hug from Steph, a phone number and another little parcel of food.
This time, another six months on, I walked into the boatyard for the first time, threading my way between hunks of metal. Cars, boats, lorry-trailers and caravans had been slotted into place, forming a rusty mosaic, built up over years. Empty canisters, bolts, torn pieces of metal scattered throughout the place, pushed into corners, up against bumpers. There was rust everywhere, like blown sand.
I found Gaz standing by an open fire, boiling some water in a dirty pan. Cleaning it, he said. He’d brought his caravan into the boatyard, painted it in the bright horizontal stripes of the Colombian flag and stuck pictures of tropical scenes on the outside, some kind of oval printed plastic. I looked closer.
“Gaz, are they toilet seat covers?”
“Yes, bab!” he said, thrilled that I’d noticed his ingenuity.
I asked about Steph and his face fell as he told me she had terminal lung cancer. This wonderful woman was dying. She was still living on her boat, pulled up beside the big ferry now, to make it easier for friends to come and see her. I went and showed my face but she had friends with her and it all felt a bit rushed; illness makes a person special and delicate and I didn’t want to force her to talk to me.
Instead Gaz and I lounged around on a bench in front of the caravan and caught up on the last year. He’d been to Peru, fulfilling his latest travel passion. As various men appeared from corners, climbing down ladders from their boats or coming across the yard from caged-in lorry trailers, he’d introduce me proudly, tell the essence, the facts of my important self. I was the special guest, fresh with my story of a big adventure.
The man from across the way came out first, sitting in the sun underneath the hull of the huge yacht opposite, and talking about how hard his life was. Dave was past 65, had thick glasses and a bad leg. A couple of decrepit dogs followed him, languidly sniffing around, tennis-ball tumours swinging in the skin of their bellies. First he brought me tea, then two shortbread biscuits on a flowery plate. Finally, he shuffled away to his boat and came back with his change jar, two salt-pots full of coppers and leavings. Gaz opened a packet of crisps. Then Paul from the lifeboat around the corner brought out some olives.
Two more of them brought me their change collections, emptying jars and dishes of 5p and 10p pieces, taking back the spare screws and cigarette filters. I was awash with coppers and generosity, feted by these backwater urchins and honoured that they chose to give to me, paying their respects to my journey in unique style. Delapidated men, heavy drinkers, low-skilled, breadline lives, surviving at the edge of society; I didn’t expect that they would dignify me in this way.
I had dinner with thin and twitchy Mike, squeezing into a mesh-roofed tunnel alongside his lorry-trailer, dogs skidding on the wooden floor he’d looted from an abandoned factory. The dogs were large and unruly, a hot pepper-smell coming from their short ginger hair, rare breed. Egyptian throne dogs, he called them. I was served dinner by Mike’s partner: a huge pile of cauliflower cheese and gammon, thick oily slices overlapping on the plate. The dogs were everywhere, sniffing at plates, jumping ungainly onto chairs as they snapped at each other, wrestling and nipping on the foam cushions that lay out on the floor until they became too much and were banished to the large cage in the corner of the room.
After eating, I went back to Gaz, cheery and happy in his shambolic caravan, walls collaged with postcards and posters, ornaments crowding every surface. He had no bedding, just a thin sleeping bag on the foam-mattress bed. We sat close together as he told me about his experiences in Peru, this ponderous, gentle, heavy-drinking man. Our heads hovered close together in the magic distance where air prickles with possibility, just a slight turning together would mean our lips met. I wanted to kiss and love him, give him the tenderness he deserved, even just for one night, but he was too shy and used to being alone, a protective shell tucked and gathered tight around his vulnerability.
“You could live here if you wanted,” said Gaz. “I can get you in. Tenner a week.”
I thought about coming here, living an invisible existence. I could buy one of the rust-ridden boats and restore it, working to save money so I could leave again. I could use its dilapidation to spring myself to a better future, but only if I could hold out against the immobility of this boatyard, the depression. I knew, underneath, that I didn’t want to pour my life into this fumbling, black place. I had a mission; time was too precious to waste.
The next morning I went to see Steph, alone, and this time it was easier to talk to her. She made tea, her skin stretched tight over her face, little bony body moving lightly in the small boat and first we talked about my journey. I showed her my shock blister photo and talked about how much I was enjoying myself. But soon enough we had to turn to what was happening to her. Cancer, once present in your life, is always there, hovering.
So we talked about her illness and at first it was the nuts-and-bolts stuff of where it is and how she’s feeling, physically. What she’s doing to treat it and when her next appointment is. Then after a while we got onto the real feelings, the things you can’t say easily to most people. She talked of the chest-drain taking the liquid from her lungs, about hard days and easy days, about talking to people who don’t have it, their struggles to understand, their crushingly awkward attempts to make conversation. Cancer is frightening and isolating and lonely. It’s on your mind all the time, sitting in front of your face, taking up your consciousness. It turns your focus inwards, making you so self-centred that you can’t bear to be polite to other people when they do something compassionate but misjudged, no matter how well meaning.
We understood exactly what the other was talking about, even from our different perspectives: hers that of a person who knows that the cancer has spread throughout her body with no hope of treatment, and mine that of someone who’d had an encapsulated tumour, easily removed and treated.
We didn’t speak of death, so imminent yet so untouchable. I didn’t bring it up, couldn’t, really. She owned that conversation, no-one else. I walked away feeling saddened but uplifted by our co
nnection. Somehow, when a person is dying in front of you, it charges every interaction with electric importance. There was nothing I could do for Steph, just spend time with her and take our conversation away, honour our small special connection.
The river took me directly south from Stourport and I could start looking ahead to Bristol. I was behind on my targeted mileage, thanks to the blister, but fortunately there was a woman ahead of me offering a bed for a few nights. If I could stay with her I’d make up the time, get a few days of easy, weight-free walking. I was noticing a small, strange pain in the base of my right foot, as if a piece of me wasn’t stretching properly. Just walk to hospital I thought, get to Bristol, have a little rest and then worry about tackling the next bit.
Sally generously fed me and kept me for days, picking me up for the first time once I reached Worcester, driving 40 miles at a time to pick me up and drop me off. I was tracked by her as I made my way down the winding path, following the river-flow. She’ll try and take over, warned my auntie in Shrewsbury, and she was right.
It felt excessive, the amount of trouble Sally was prepared to go to. It was really difficult to say no to this woman, her constant proffering of things I might need in an effort to be useful, and her hurt wheedling when I tried to turn them down. Accepting help was still a new feeling, and when I felt it pushed on me, it only made me more fiercely defend my independence. When I was resting in someone’s house I had to remain pleasant, polite, making conversation. What I really wanted to do was to be alone, to squidge out and relax. I escaped as early as possible, each night, to my tiny bedroom.
Sally was nervous and loud, overbearing with her care and attention to detail, but her help was integral to my making it to Bristol on time. Though I’m grateful to her, at the time I found it heavy-going to be around someone so invasive. I couldn’t leave early, it wasn’t worth the angst. Plus, I needed this. I was only five days from Bristol, my appointment looming. My feet were tired and aching and I could walk further without my bag, no straps at shoulder and waist, restraining and weighting me down. My body was able to swing freely, loosening my tight muscles. The strange ache in the base of my feet continued, but I could walk seventeen miles a day bag-free, so fast compared to the agonised painful trudging at the beginning of the river.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 4