South of Worcester, the ground I passed over was flat and agricultural. Small English villages with their squat black-and-white timbered cottages, ancient churches, antique towering oak trees in every field. The slow, fat river meandered alongside me. I passed my old favourite landmarks from previous journeys: the riverside pub with rare breed chickens pecking throughout the garden, the huge oak tree that leans to 90⁰, a huge rising of earth holding the roots anchored where they tried to pull from the ground.
I stopped for a rest while walking the wide horseshoe loop of the Arlingham peninsula. I lay down and watched the sky, looked at the rain clouds massing on the other side of the wide river, and felt the wind ruffling the grasses at the top of the floodbank rising above my head. There were so many things rushing through my mind, as I wriggled my toes to ease the ache. I was distracted by thinking of emails to Assembly members, trying to get them to publicly support my awareness-raising. Then my thoughts moved swiftly to the chocolate in my rucksack. But for a small, precious piece of time I just lay there, feeling the grass gently prickling underneath me, and listening to the sound of it catching the wind.
As a carer, my days had been split into eight visits, each one a sequence of tasks that had to be accomplished within thirty minutes. The tasks had to be crammed in while not forgetting to take time for conversation with the service-user. Not too much though; don’t forget yourself and get caught up in natural connection, it must remain surface conversation, easy to extricate yourself from. Get out in time, remember to write up your timesheet, list the jobs completed, and then rush away to the next house. If you’re lucky you’ve got five minutes to pause before you repeat the process again. I was getting paid to be the person who didn’t matter. The person who always bends her will, her personality and her time to the needs of others.
Each day was totally commanded by time constraints, I said yes to every piece of work I could and there was always somewhere I needed to be. In my scant spare time there was a to-do list to tackle, all the many small pieces of preparation for making a long-distance and very public journey with the aim of raising awareness of and funds for research into ovarian cancer.
Now I had time, entire days with only one thing to do. The clenched grip that my care-work schedule had upon my brain, the constant tick-tick of time passing, and the awareness of so many things I had to do was suddenly released, and I wobbled at the lack of structure. It was hard to have only one thing to do all day. What am I doing this afternoon? Walking. Tomorrow? Walking. I had nothing to do but walk, the rest of the spring and summer to fill with steps and fresh air. It felt strange, this release of pressure. I had to unwind, remember the travelling life once more, how to live with nothing to do.
The river had widened out into an unknowable blankness. Broad and smooth, moving in curling patterns, deep undertows of current coming to the surface in swirls and widening rings as sun-warmed surface-water mixed with cool immense depths. The path felt lonely and isolated, a thin strip of floodbank built up to protect the flat flood plain from rain-swollen river. The rare solitary houses crouched, blank-faced, behind the barrier. Constant wind shuttered their faces; they were closed, under attack. I passed a derelict pub, windows barred, grime climbing the grit-spattered walls. It was a strange area, walking down past Shepperdine, windy and abandoned, dominated by the blocky square bricks of two closed nuclear power stations.
An inlet in the mud banks led me inland to a bridge, and a boatyard where yachts lay marooned in the flatlands, and retreating tides had scored deep channels into the muddy banks, jagged like lightning strikes. There was a constant metallic music here, mixed tones of clanking cow-bells and tinkling cymbals or sleigh bells. The gentle cacophony of clinks and jingles came from the breeze, shaking ropes and linkages against masts and boat-sides. It was a beautiful background of calm, almost Buddhist, chiming and I took a break against the thick metal fence, leaning back to dream for a short while.
At last came my first sight of the Severn bridges, standing grand and calling to me, white and stately in the clear air. They were the marker of the end-point, just as the single lichen-coated pillar on Plynlimon stated the beginning of this wonderful river. I would walk all the way along the sheep-cropped river bank as the bridges grew awkwardly from small, faraway toys until they towered over me. They roared with traffic, braced against cars, holding the thread of transport over the river and connecting Wales and England. They were a soaring dream of wire-lines and concrete stilts, carrying a thread of road where car-ants ran. This was the end of the first part of my journey, and glee swelled within me.
I’d done it, I’d walked to Bristol.
THE OFFA’S DYKE PATH
Route description: A 177-mile National Trail, crossing the border country of England and Wales from Sedbury Cliffs in the south to Prestatyn, near the Dee Estuary. The route runs along or close to Offa’s Dyke, a linear earthwork built in the late eighth century by the King of Mercia to mark out the western boundary of his kingdom.
Length: 176.8 miles
Total ascent: 9,085m
Maximum height: 700m
Dates: 24 March – 9 April and
26 April – 3 May 2014
Time taken: 26 days
Nights camping/nights hosted: 8 /18
Days off: 7
Average miles per day: 10.1
I went to hospital for my check-up, had a scan and was fine. No evil cellular squatters had nestled into my pelvis.
I felt pretty sober that day. This walk was mostly making me feel full of power and happiness. I could smile full-beam at everyone I met, wanting to chat, share things, hug people. Going to hospital was like tripping into a brick wall. The return to something scary, because it might happen, it might come back, and there in the hospital is where you go to begin to find out.
Sometimes it feels as if my cancer wasn’t really cancer at all, just a near miss. But that’s only true to a tired mind. I had a mucinous adenocarcinoma, stage 1a, grade 2. The important part is the stage 1a. It means I got lucky.
It took me about a year to feel good again. I came out of the illness part, through the recuperation and into the after stage where you put cancer behind you and stop being scared of it. It’s just that it all comes back a bit when I go to hospital. Fear rises when the nurse leans forward to look closely at the ultrasound screen, or as I lie down, letting my body relax to horizontal vulnerability on the table, waiting for the doctor to loom over me and touch my stomach.
When I went into follow-up treatment, I was told that my cancer had a 6% chance of re-occurring within five years, and that 75% of recurrences happen in the first two years. That day, after achieving the first stage of my walk, I also crossed the line into the third year and it felt hugely significant. This wasn’t quite over yet, I wasn’t free of cancer, but it helped me to see that the fear barely needed to be with me anymore.
Looking back, with my repaired psyche, I can see that perhaps I was never in that much danger. That once I’d recovered from the surgery, it could have been so much worse. My body just lost a few minor organs; it was my tender and nervous brain that suffered in the long term. Maybe if I’d had a house and was financially stable, was supported by a partner and close community, this might have been a minor blip, a little operation to live though, and then later realise that everything was actually alright. I could look carefully at the statistics, my 94% chance of surviving for five years and onwards, snuggle down in a warm bed surrounded by people that I loved and be thankful that I was OK.
But there was no such OK for me. I had no home during my illness, I had no normal to return to from such a jagged interruption: no routine, no place of safety. The shock of such intense vulnerability was as difficult to get over as the cancer itself. A necessary part of my recovery was to teach myself to think positively: to focus on the 94%, rather than the 6%.
I came out of hospital, walked up Whiteladies Road and had a vanilla milkshake and a slice of Rocky Road brownie
in a really nice café, and then found about six OS maps in a second-hand shop for 75p each. I felt better.
In Bristol, I stayed with friends who had done so much during my illness: friends of my parents, really. Pete had been my dad’s best mate when he moved to Swansea for his first job after university, then best man at my parents’ wedding in 1975. The last time I’d seen him and his wife Jenny had been at my father’s funeral but, after a decade of silence, I phoned them while waiting for abdominal surgery, scared and homeless.
It was pure fluke that I had my treatment in Bristol. I’d arrived as an exciting, travelling wild person sleeping on a friend’s sofa for a week but had turned unexpectedly into a weak and frightened woman who wanted to stay for a couple of months while awaiting a potential cancer diagnosis. My friends couldn’t handle it and neither could I. I couldn’t communicate in my time of stress, just shrank back and looked up studio-flats on the internet, wondering if I could find somewhere without stairs that would accept housing benefit, and imagining a food stockpile that would get me through the first few weeks of shuffling immobility. I was scared and didn’t know what to do. The operation was too imminent to change hospitals; my brother phoned Pete and his immediate response, “How can we help?” was an incredible relief.
They welcomed an ill, traumatised woman into their home without reserve. I had my operation just a week after moving in, coming back to them a pale, quiet person, shuffling and in pain. They opened their home to me indefinitely and for that I was so grateful. Every time I returned to Bristol in the intervening two years, seven times, seven appointments, I’d returned to stay with Pete and Jenny, a long-standing friendship between families cemented by their aid.
A group came to walk out of Bristol with me that sunny March morning: Pete, Jenny, son George and his girlfriend Jenny, and my mum and her friend Leslie. They came with me as far as they could, stopping for breaks, aching feet; none of them worn-in like I was. We all made it to Severn Beach, though. I introduced them to the famous (in my eyes) Shirley’s Café, an ancient wood-lined cabin with an equally venerable owner, too old for serious work now, her family bustling around her as she wiped the counter. I’d come in here every time I’d passed through and felt like it was an institution. After tea and cakes I hugged goodbye and left the others to catch the train home. I faced towards the windy Severn bridge, heading back to Wales and the start of the upcoming 3000 miles.
I stayed in Chepstow the first night, and then walked the day through the beautiful forests of the lower Wye, following the acorn markers of the Offa’s Dyke path high above the winding river, and just catching a view of Tintern’s ruins through a break in the trees far below. The path was easy to follow, popular, and well maintained as a result. Every stile brought another path-marker somewhere in the distance. I just had to scan the ground ahead and make a line for it, usually following the trodden marks of other feet.
After a night of camping, this time in the lushness of riverside woods surrounded by the strong smell of wild garlic, I made it all the way up to Monmouth, the next big town, walking into the streets as afternoon became evening. I bought food for a couple of days, knowing the path ahead held a Black Mountain crossing, no shops or villages, and two or three nights camping before I reached Hay-on-Wye. I stopped in at the leisure-centre, thinking I might be able to shower there, and was appalled when they wanted to charge me £3! I appealed for a charity-walker fee waiver and it worked, a tactic I would use all around the country, staying in the shower-room long enough to wash clothes as well as body.
I was heading out of town and ducked into a pub on a whim, thinking I’d charge my phone for a final half hour before heading out to walk. It was an upmarket wine bar, starting to fill with people at the end of their working day. A couple came in and obviously noticed me. They asked if they could sit with me, and we talked about cycle journeys. I told the usual story of cancer and hospitals and walking around Wales, and they looked at each other and then invited me to stay.
It felt strange. You’re not supposed to do this, to trust strangers, just go home with people you meet in a bar. Part of me stayed alert all night, waiting for the creak of a door yawning open in the darkness of deep sleeping-hours. Travelling the way I do, having experienced wild camping for years, hitchhiking alone across Europe, a part of me must always remain cautious. But I also realised they were far more likely to be just genuinely lovely people.
The woman, Pat, was a particularly beautiful person. Both divorced, they’d met on a cruise ship and fallen in an immediate love that was strong enough to bring Pat here from her home country. I saw their first photo of them together, facing each other on deck, gesturing, locked into fascinated conversation. I realised that I really could trust them, that people could be nice for no reason other than they wanted to help me. We ate salmon frittata and talked about travelling – nothing more sinister than that.
I weighed my rucksack on their balance scales the next morning. 16 kilos! What was I doing, this was way too heavy. It was hurting my unfit body to drag this amount of weight along. Every item individually seemed essential but together they were far too much. I was carrying too much food – whey protein to put on my breakfast, a huge bag of trail mix, additional spare food, chocolate bars. It was as if I was scared to run out.
Arriving in Pandy late one afternoon I decided to camp there, rather than ascend the slopes of the Black Mountain and risk becoming exposed and vulnerable to weather changes as I slept. A long straight road separated scattered houses from a large hotel and between the houses and road lay a market garden. Just peeping over its high hedges was the pale half-moon of a polytunnel. The temptation to sleep in guaranteed rain-free comfort was hard to resist, and I sneaked over a gate in the corner, shrinking from the gaze of the houses as I walked across the field to the safety of the covered plastic. Warm and dry and giggling at my naughtiness I walked through the five large tunnels, until I found an unused area where I could lay out my sleeping-bag and prepare some food.
The light faded away to dimness as I sat waiting for the water to soak into my plain couscous. I had nothing to eat with it, just seasoning from an out-of-date salt-mill containing dried garlic and chilli flakes. I took a mouthful and put the bowl down. I felt defeated. This wasn’t anywhere near good food, it was tasteless and unappetising. I needed to find something different. I needed to stop making do. All this meant was that when I became exhausted and couldn’t face my unappetising, ill-planned rations, I spent money in cafés that I couldn’t afford. I pushed the food aside, the light was almost gone and I was too tired to eat anything else. I lay down to sleep in the short space, buoyant on the rubbery earth beneath the black tarpaulin. I had muesli for the morning and would have to make sure I ate extra trail mix tomorrow too. I couldn’t miss meals: calories meant strength.
Coming out of the polytunnel early, I blinked blearily. I’d packed up quickly, as a radio started droning Radio 4 in a shed nearby. I trod, light-footed, to the field’s corner gate, skulking away before discovery. I was grateful for the early start as I planned a long seventeen miles up on the Black Mountain, a long finger of north- south hill, steep climbing to 700m and then a ten-mile plateau walk.
As I suspected, it had rained overnight, and as I came up through a sodden copse to the open land where the climb started, a mass of cloud and wetness draped around me, droplets hanging shining on gorse. The cloud stayed with me as I followed a trail through the peat and heather, flagstones laid where too many feet had ground away the soil. I saw no-one else that day, it was just me and the mist. There were grouse rattling in the background, and occasional wild and windblown ponies, steadfastly ignoring me, even as they sat directly beside the path, their manes hanging shaggy and glorious.
There was nowhere to shelter, no trees or scrub, nothing to tie my tarpaulin to. I had to walk the whole length of the hill before making camp, winding my way down off the flat-faced peak in search of a place to sleep. My aching and swollen toes pressed against the fr
ont of my boots, at their limits after a seventeen mile day. I lost the path somewhere down off Hay bluff which led me instead to a murky road nearby, almost in Hay itself. There, I saw a barn where I could gratefully bed down in the soft straw. There’s peace inside a barn. An empty structure, made for shelter but half open, where the wind rustles the trees outside but inside all is soft and quiet and warm. Barn sleeping is my favourite kind of wild camping, the hay cushioning is an insulation to nestle down into. Human shelter normally excludes everything of the world – animals, weather – but a barn is open to these things. Mice rustle and burrow nearby, the rain blows into the open sides but doesn’t touch me, and I snuggle comfortably, sharing my sleep with the natural world.
I slept long, wandered slowly into Hay and spent the morning lazily consuming a full English breakfast, perusing a few bookshop shelves, sneakily washing a full set of socks and knickers in a café toilet as a pot of tea cooled on a table outside. The clock struck 1pm as I left. 1pm and I’d walked half a mile. Terrible!
A few miles later I sat down for a bit then walked a few more over to Newchurch, sat down some more and decided to try for the final three to Gladestry. If I made it, there was only a hill to walk over to Kington the next morning, where I could have a day off with my mum.
The problem was that my feet were hurting and in a serious way. Sometimes I would experience a deep ache of tendon pain that went away after a while; alternatively, there was the sharp burning blister pain that was awful at first but which could be walked through. That day it was the kind of pressure pain that comes after you’ve pounded your feet onto the ground over and over again for far too long. A time-to-stop-walking-this-is-too-much-and-the-pain-will-not-stop kind of pain. I pulled a piece of plastic out of the hedge, one of those document-wallet type things. It was full of water and as I poured it out, out came the sad, saturated body of a mole. I was walking on painful feet, holding the plastic, irritated by there being no bin to put it in.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 5