Now I was torn. My focus had been ripped away from the walk and onto my brother’s life: first his survival and then his small achievements before finally turning to his long-term future. Owen was getting better, the flickering open of his eyes in that first week had turned, seven weeks later to a recovery of sorts. He wasn’t better, he wasn’t the same. But he was alive; he could return home to live alone, manage his own life and start to think about returning to work, he had that much of a future. If Owen was better, that meant I was free again, free to return to my old life. But what was that? It was walking.
Walking is healing for me. I walked myself fit after surgery. I walked to Bristol to see if I was still myself after cancer. As I walked these three thousand miles I was creating calmness within myself, building an appreciation of my qualities, the strength that gets me through, the joy and positivity with which I approach each day no matter how exhausted I am.
I knew that I’d need to walk to feel better about my brother’s difference, about the new, damaged state he found himself in as he lay blearily in hospital, vulnerable, in pain. Once I was certain that he was safe I’d walk to move away from fear, away from the pressure, the trauma, the uncertainty buzzing in my head. Walking would bring fresh air to my brain and body, a certainty that I can cope with change, that there are more things in this world than one woman and the near-loss of her brother.
My sister lent me money so that I could finish my challenge: a final thousand pounds to hoard and savour and only let slip away incrementally on cups of tea and tins of mackerel, treats of toast and chocolate bars and the occasional pint. I was so skint, gone beyond poor to near-destitution, living on fumes, my savings almost gone. The walk had taken months longer than expected and it was so hard to always live under budget. I was still trying to live on less than £50 a week, £35 if possible, a £5 daily budget plus a window to overspend into. I’d always overspend but the mental limit helped me restrict myself. This level of budget was incredibly hard to keep to, even though my main expense was food; the cost of not eating at home, not able to buy in bulk and store the extra, meant it was more expensive than usual. The few weeks of work in November had helped but I was tired of skimping and worrying about money, tired of having nothing coming in and always going out. I was always berating myself for adding cake to my pot of tea, or crisps to my second pint. It was exhausting, especially when I was berating myself for something so minimal. I really needed those treats, for calories as well as morale.
It all felt a bit futile now: this walk, this sunshine, these cancer charities. I’d spent almost two months on a knife-edge, waiting to see if my brother would return to health, balancing there with my family, keeping us from tumbling over into argument, keeping the right people informed of his condition in the right way, keeping close to Owen as he came back to himself. The buzzing, intense pressure of phenomenal worry had become normal. I’d totally zoned in on him and the structure of hospital routines, and as that intensity of concentration receded I felt hollow and sad.
I knew that this would change, that I’d come to feel different in time. I just had to keep acting as if this were normal and the jumble inside me would slowly unravel, leaving me free to enjoy the final thousand miles. There were months of walking the Welsh coastline still to come, another six rivers to follow and a target of £10,000 to raise for charity. I went back to Wales because it was the only thing to do; completing the walk was the only thing that existed for me.
I felt like Rip van Winkle in reverse; in this tale, it was Wales that slept in stasis, not me. I would return from a strange dream to the same life – same mountains, same sea, same gossips in village shops, same ovarian cancer, same boots, same rucksack, all seen with new eyes. It was me that had changed. I’d been to death and back again and now I was different.
THE MARY JONES WALK
Route description: A trail created as a memorial to mark the route that Mary Jones walked to buy a Bible in 1800. Mary was a woman who, in her sixteenth year, walked twenty-eight barefoot miles from her mother’s squat cottage in Llanfihangel y Pennant to Bala, carrying the money she’d saved for six years to buy a Welsh-language Bible from Thomas Charles, an influential preacher. He gave her three, so impressed was he by her dedication.
Length: 26.5 miles
Total ascent: 1,259m
Maximum height: 300m
Dates: 8 – 13 April 2015
Time taken: 6 days
Nights camping/nights hosted: 3/3
Days off: 0
Average miles per day: 14
I was walking while wanting to hide. I was hiding while wanting to walk. It was a strange week, this time of return, of spring, of newness, beginning again. I felt immediately happier on my return to Wales, the warmth of the colours, the sharp increase in the distance of my horizons. How could I feel sad when I walked alone over hillsides, the grey flat sea far below me, sheep and their lambs mixing and calling, sleeping curled against each other, nestling at field edges?
No more being hemmed in by grey buildings, exhaust smoke hanging in a flat landscape, so flat that canals provided most of the nature-walking. Here I found blue sea, sun sparkling on lakes, vivid purple heather lining small paths that wound through low hills. Anglesey was in the distance, patches of snow gleaming on high mountains as the sun coloured my face down by the flat marsh edges. Instead of a walk to hospital, always thinking of schedules and the beginnings and ends of visits, I now had entire days and open landscapes, grass springing back under my feet as sheep raised their heads to watch me pass, their noses flaring after a trace of my scent.
This made me happy, listening to the rain fall thickly-wet as I lay dry on a dusting of dead leaves and bat shit in a quiet, long-forgotten building, arcs of spider web hanging in the corners. The daffodils, the dawn chorus; deep swellings of joy came with the rediscovery of positive sensations. Stress had obscured the knowledge that a beautiful world still existed away from hospitals, large-scale machines created to manage the squirming, filthy nature of human illness and death: contain it, sanitise, streamline. In hospitals there’s no life, no real, raw, messy, contaminated, interwoven living.
My feet felt better; the pain of long overuse had been dimmed by two months of inactivity, and instead I could pay attention to the gentler sensations of the stretching and strength of my leg-muscles as I began to walk again. It was a nice time, to walk gentle distances in the spring freshness, hair waving in the sunlight.
I enjoyed a great deal of that first week away from Derbyshire; the sensory part of walking Wales lifted me. But I also felt deeply sad at times; there was a lot of delayed shock that needed to trickle out. Owen had almost died and we’d been with him every moment as he fought back to health. I wanted to fix him, I wanted him to be better and there was nothing I could do to make it happen. He was ill and I was far away from him. I felt desolate and broken. Normally I’d hide, hibernate. I was 35 years old and I knew my ways by then, the ways I dealt with stress: solitude and unhealthy food. You may think that an extended daily walk would provide the solitude I needed, but it didn’t somehow. I needed to hibernate, not sit alone on a rock in an open landscape. I needed to be left undisturbed, not on alert to the possibility of a farmer on a quad bike buzzing over the horizon, or a fellow walker at the next stile, ready for a hello and a cheery conversation.
I had a taster of private space with Dianna in Dyffryn Ardudwy. She knew what had happened and thoughtfully made me a bed in the caravan in her garden. I’d explained to my online followers some of the immensity of what had happened, to account for my sudden disappearance from daily updates. I made polite conversation but retreated as soon as I was able, escaping to the caravan balancing a tray containing teabags, a jug of milk, a cake-tin, and a glass bottle of blackcurrant whisky.
Cooking being one of her ways of caring, Dianna showed me her tenderness by baking me a cake. Foil-wrapped eggs were spaced, like turrets, at regular intervals around the edge of a chocolate Easter c
ake. I delicately consumed the entire thing, slice by slice, and sloshed whisky into a wineglass, savouring the dark and sharp-sweet flavour. I drank as much as I could without seeming to have drunk it at all, afraid of my urge to empty the bottle. I wanted to destroy myself for a short evening, but knew this wasn’t the answer to my stress, only a way to add more to it. I’d been a heavy drinker in the past and knew this was a destructive instinct that I shouldn’t listen to.
The sun and signs of spring did me a power of good. I felt my heavy heart lifting as my feet trod gently across the miles down from Porthmadog and around two estuaries. I was walking in Wales and walking back to myself. My time was my own again, to be filled with my own simple desires: to walk, to sit, to eat and to sleep. My limits were defined only by a far-away target: the promise of home, a return to Machynlleth and an end to walking. But it lay a thousand miles away, deep in the future.
I turned away from the coastal path at Rhoslefain and headed inland to Abergynolwyn to begin the Mary Jones Walk.
I wanted to walk barefoot to mark her journey, but my tender feet squirmed at the idea. They’d grown soft and weak in their protective casing; there was no way I could walk a mile barefoot, let alone fifty-six.
First, though, the Mary Jones Walk started with a break, an empty house that was too good to resist.
“I’ll leave the key under a rock for you,” said Sarah in Abergynolwyn.
I intended to stay there for one night and then walk away towards Bala. I meant to keep walking, I needed to; after all these breaks and interruptions, there was no time to lose and I didn’t have the money to stretch things out needlessly. But it was an empty house and I so badly needed to do nothing. So I did, staying there for three nights, walking a few miles on Sunday afternoon but mostly sleeping until late morning and trying to write, trying to get my feelings out, begin processing as the calmness of walking Wales seeped back into my alarmed brain, long set on alert by danger to my tribe.
The part of me that wasn’t berating myself told me that it was OK. Calm down, you can take as long about this as you need, you can always borrow more money. It’s been an intense two months and you obviously need some time alone to do nothing. Take it. Sit all day and write. Have baths. Sleep as much as you like. Let the fear out, feel the effect that the stress of your brother’s accident has had on you: the weeks of worry and focus and hope. Allow yourself to stop. Allow yourself to heal.
Eventually, after a few days away – first down in Bristol to go to my own hospital appointment, and then to visit my brother in the neurological rehabilitation ward – I was properly ready to start on this section of the walk. Owen was well enough not to need a constant family presence but I couldn’t just leave him altogether; he was vulnerable and we had to be a major part of his life for a while. I’d go back and forth until the end of the walk: first a week of walking and then a break to visit him, then two weeks walking before visiting him again, then a month. The gaps would become longer and longer as we became more certain of the shape his recovery would take. My own hospital visit was a quick tick on a to-do list. I was in no immediate danger and had other things to worry about than the 4% chance of my cancer returning; my brother had a life-changing brain injury and I was in the middle of a 3300 mile walk. I was more worried about my feet than my ovary!
I set off from Abergynolwyn at 11am, spinning out a last few moments at Sarah’s breakfast table before I put my boots on and went out to walk. Again. I crossed the valley and climbed up to a back road that led into the forestry and the farms that border Tal-y-Llyn. I’d not seen this side of the lake before; the road curls alongside on the opposite side. I walked along, enjoying the sunshine and fresh green countryside. Just half an hour’s walk and I was already far away from roads and buildings, from everything except nature. Perfect.
The path wriggled up and down above the lake, descending into small gorges to cross streams and ancient abandoned farmyards, trees growing out of crumbled ruins. My grandparents had honeymooned here, in the early 1950s. I looked at different outbuildings, trying to imagine where they might have stayed, thinking about the life of a newly married couple sixty-five years ago, driving to Wales in their Austin 7, their hopes and happiness. What would a 50s Welsh cottage be like? Indoor toilet? Heating? Furniture? Linen? They would have had the absolute basics without the rural tourist industry of today – no such thing as a five-star holiday cottage.
The lambs were coming again, the knock-kneed joy of jumping babies. I walked through fields full of brand-new lambs napping in the sun, struggling to co-ordinate legs and brain. One particularly brave lamb didn’t run away with its mother, but stood, stared, came over and smelled my legs then curled up beside my foot. I couldn’t resist crouching down and taking a few photos. A lamb close up!
At the end of the lake, I dropped down to the road and passed the foot of Cader Idris. There was a short period of road walking – pretty dangerous on this fast and busy stretch – but when I reached the head of the mountain pass the road opened up into the wide valley, and I could turn left to walk over the reedy moorlands before arriving at the Cross Foxes, a large hotel at the T-junction marking the ancient stopping-place. There was time for a quick pint at the hotel and to put my feet up on the sofa, before I was ready to walk around the small hill towards Brithdir, looking for somewhere to sleep. I got distracted by an old barn, walking into the field it stood in, entranced by the view of Cader Idris to the left and layers of hills, blueing beautifully in the fading light. It was a wonderful view but I couldn’t find anywhere that felt right. Ground too lumpy, stones scattered near to the barn walls.
Eventually I came to a cycle-track that led over open farmland. The flattest spot was on the path itself, another place I wouldn’t normally sleep but decided to chance it. I laid out my bed and ate my evening meal – the usual flavoured couscous soaked in cold water, mackerel, grated carrot, mayonnaise – an unappetising idea that tastes loads better than it sounds! It was cold that night, I had to put a scarf over my head and face and my nose was freezing, but the hardship was worth it for the sight of the moon rising over the hillside.
I sat up to watch the pre-dawn light flood the view below me, eyes taking a while to focus, gluey from the cold night air. Around me, dew beaded every grass-blade; it was a fresh morning, just a little bit too cold for me to jump out of bed. I should have done though, about half an hour later came the buzz of a farmer’s buggy. Oops! He had to make a detour around my sleeping spot; it was obvious I’d camped there but he just nodded to me.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
It was ten miles to Llanuwchllyn and another beautiful warm day. Summer warm, too soon for me; I still had my white winter skin and thick clothing. I went a few miles to the edge of a forest, stopping for breakfast on some tussocky tree-roots, sitting and admiring the thick mosses and fallen leaves. But I must continue, I must always continue. The path took me along quiet tracks, high up on the valley side.
Below was the modern road in the valley bottom. It would have been a toll-road 200 years ago and Mary Jones couldn’t have afforded that. So instead I experienced the old tracks she might have walked – tree-lined, winding, the ways to travel before tarmac and car engines came into being. Up and down went the day, from farm to farm towards Llanuwchllyn.
I trudged on, feeling surprisingly tired and rubbish. A row of four excited pensioners perked me up, sitting outside their caravans enjoying the sunshine. They gave me a fillip of validation, a water top-up and £30 for my donation-tin. I imagined that I’d probably see them in exactly the same place as I retraced my steps, walking the path in reverse on my way back to the coast. I went on a bit further but was struggling. I stopped for lunch, which was a carrot and a stray chocolate bar from the bottom of my rucksack. Boots off, feet propped up in the air, scouring my rucksack for remaining scraps of food. As I carried on walking my head ached more and more; I think it was the hazy light and its effect on my flapping flags, the white edges
fluttering in and out of my vision. I sat in the Eagle Inn, Llanuwchllyn with my head in my hands and phoned Fiona, my host east of Bala, to see if she’d mind picking me up, pressing a little upon her good nature given the eleven-mile distance. She came, though, took me home and made me comfortable in the caravan. I tucked up with a meat pie and peas, bed by nine thirty, woolly blankets and the radio.
The next day, washed, rested, I felt better. From Llanuwchllyn to Bala was an easy, flat five miles around the lake and I could sit for a couple of hours in a café, getting given free tea and chips by a lovely Irish waiter. It was a beautiful, beautiful day; the greens and blues of the woods and lake glowing bright and relaxed in the sunshine, and I felt so glad to be doing this. I’d followed the likely path that Mary Jones came to buy a Welsh Bible, 200 years ago. What kind of money would I raise if I saved for six years? How many books could I buy? She bought one. How different my life was to hers, my needs fulfilled with ease, millions of books available to me, delivered to an address of my choosing, bought with my disposable income.
The route follows ancient trackways and drovers’ roads, mostly high above the valley bottoms where the marshes or toll-roads would have been, many years ago. Thinking about Mary’s life back then, her experiences, the most I could do was stare at the view and wonder what wasn’t there.
I did well with my own body too: not at Mary’s level, twenty-eight barefoot miles overnight. No, it took me three days. But that was good enough; I’d managed sixty miles in five days, averaging twelve miles a day which, for me, was flying. My body felt full of power, my legs were strong with muscle; just my feet held me back, my poor strained plantar tendons.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 29