Sands of Time (13 page)

Joe Middleton was sitting at his breakfast spooning his cornflakes into his mouth several days later with his own copy of the very same map that the strangers had used spread out on the table in front of him. ‘The inspectors are right. The path has been deliberately blocked, here and here and here.’ He put down his spoon and reached for his fluorescent marker.

His wife Maureen sighed. ‘I think it’s a lovely walk just as it is, Joe. It hasn’t been blocked at all. One can walk the whole length of that path. It is just that it has been rerouted once or twice. But that’s nicer. One can see the birds and flowers in the hedges …’ She broke off almost guiltily as her husband gave an exasperated sigh.

‘We do not go for walks to see birds and flowers,’ he said firmly. ‘You know that. That is the whole point of joining the Association. We walk to make sure that rights of way are not being abused.’

‘Boring!’ She said it under her breath. There was no point in arguing with him. She knew that from long experience. No point at all.

As she expected once he had finished his breakfast he headed for the phone. ‘Footpath 29,’ he said urgently, into the mouthpiece. It was like a code word, signalling the start of the D-Day landings. ‘Your inspectors were right. I checked yesterday. There are four deliberate obstructions, two fields with unsprayed, unmarked paths, a great deal of untidiness and a village of yokels who couldn’t care less!’ There was a pause. Whoever was the other end of the line at headquarters in London was rustling a reciprocal map, trying to fold it open without spilling his cup of coffee or getting jam from his doughnut onto the paper. ‘Saturday? OK. Perfect. I’ll contact everyone on my list and you bring your team. And by the time you come I will have checked every path in the parish.’

Maureen could hear the eagerness in his voice and the excitement and, she had to admit this, the spite.

Slowly she began collecting the dishes and carrying them over to the sink. She knew exactly what would happen next. The group would descend on the selected footpath, they would walk it slowly and determinedly. They would scatter little yellow arrows, hammering them on other people’s gates and telegraph poles and trees, they would rip off private signs, destroy all
keep
out
notices and
no trespassing
signs they came across, whether or not they actually referred to parts of the right of way, all the time maintaining expressions of self-righteous zeal worthy of seventeenth-century Levellers. Then, exhausted and much empowered by their day in the country, they would all return home to compose letters which would flood down onto the doormats of local councils – county, district and parish – and landowners, and finally, the press, local and better still, national, and then sit back to watch the chosen community tear itself to pieces. It was a sport to people like Joe and she hated it. Even more so now because for the first time this was a footpath on their own doorstep.

He was worried about that too. Embarrassed. ‘I have been too busy with other projects, Mo.’ He kept looking at the map and shaking his head. ‘How could I have missed it? This is my own village! Right on my patch. What must the Association think of me? I won’t be able to hold up my head when they come over.’ He sighed mournfully. Then he glanced at her. ‘You’ll be coming too, won’t you, Mo?’ He walked over to the sink to begin brushing his hiking boots even though he knew she hated him doing it over her cooking space. ‘I thought we could have cheese and pickle sandwiches this time. There isn’t a pub round here that I can recommend to the members. Not the sort of thing they’re used to, anyway.’

‘There’s a lovely pub, Joe.’ Maureen was indignant. ‘For goodness’ sake. These people are supposed to be coming out to enjoy the country, not replicate their posh London bistros!’ She knew it was a pointless comment. She had learned by now that enjoying the country was not actually on these people’s agenda at all. She heaved another deep sigh. ‘I’m not sure if I can come. I might go over and see the kids. I promised our Primrose I would.’ That would take her safely out of the loop for the whole day with a bit of luck. She glared down at the sink, now covered in a fine dust of dry earth. What she had said was tantamount to treason and she knew it, but she had also known for a long time that she was going to have to put her foot down one day and today was as good as any to start. One did not mess in one’s own village. What Joe was about to get involved in was going to have repercussions.

It wasn’t until three days later that it began to dawn on the inhabitants of Winchmoor that they were the target of a well-orchestrated, nationally-advertised invasion. It was Doreen who saw the first sign. Someone had ripped out several of the sagging pickets of her fence and tossed them into her garden. The rambling rose whose weight had caused it to collapse had been viciously hacked back and someone had nailed a small bright yellow arrow to her gate post pointing down the footpath, which from being a gentle rose-scented overgrown lane had turned since mid-morning into a broad, naked track. On the other side to her own garden Colonel Wright’s beautiful laurels had also been sliced back into a hideous torn caricature of a hedge through which she could now see clearly right into his garden.

‘Oh my lor!’ She stared round, her heart thudding with fear and anger. ‘We’ve been vandalised.’ She picked up a piece of her fence. It had been lying out across the path and she had meant to fix it sometime, but no one had ever made a fuss about it, not even the kids on their mountain bikes, so she never thought anyone minded. And now. She surveyed the wreck of her roses in dismay and suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

Colonel Wright did not cry. He contacted the police. They agreed with Doreen that it must have been vandals. Neither the local constable, nor Bill Cartright, chairman of the parish council, had noticed the small yellow arrow and if they had they would not have realised that it was a declaration of war. No one did until the letters began to arrive – from all over England! It appeared, to the amazement of the inhabitants of the village, that members of the Association had been coming on a regular basis from every corner of the country to this particular spot and that they had regularly, if unnoticed, been walking this beautiful and important track, a vital link in the national footpath highway, and had suddenly found it unacceptably and deliberately blocked.

Stung by the attack the various council departments went into action, now fully and indeed painfully aware that they had been remiss in the maintenance of several rights of way in the Winchmoor district. First they contacted Ted Ames, the farmer. He must spray off the crossfield paths immediately or face heavy fines. No, they wouldn’t wait for the few short weeks until the harvest. No they wouldn’t agree that as the villagers had walked around the field for fifty years instead of across it the path had been changed by custom. No one had applied for a proper diversion according to the bylaws. And that was that. An ugly brown gash appeared across the field as the crops died. Poison was what the enemy wanted. Now. Poison was what they got.

‘You know who’s behind this, don’t you?’ Sally Murphy from the pub had phoned Julie Ames the day after her husband had given up arguing in the name of common sense and sprayed the field. ‘It’s that odious little man from Dyson Drive.’

‘Not Mo’s husband?’ Julie was shocked. ‘Surely he wouldn’t do this. Not to his own village.’

‘He would. You know the kids have been banned from riding their bikes up the path now? Apparently they are not allowed on the footpath as it’s only for people on foot. There’s a notice gone up. And horses can’t go up there any more either. They all have to go on the road through the village and you know how dangerous that is!’ She paused as they both considered the flow of lorries hurtling off the bypass to cut a few minutes off their journey towards the motorway link. ‘I heard he walked straight through Bill Riley’s back garden the other day as well. Said it was an ancient right of way and no one was going to stop him.’

‘But that’s crazy. No one has used that path for years. There’s a whole estate of houses built across it now.’

Sally gave a hollow laugh. ‘Apparently he’s been on to the parish council and is demanding they run a path behind the whole line of houses, cutting them off from their gardens. Either that or pull the houses down because the builder hadn’t checked properly about rights of way.’

Julie was stunned into silence for a moment. ‘He can’t do that!’

‘He can apparently. It only takes one person to insist on the letter of the law.’

‘What is the matter with the man? Why would anyone want to walk up there anyway? It doesn’t go anywhere.’

‘I don’t think that’s the point.’ Julie sighed. ‘These people have no idea. No idea at all.’

It was Colonel Wright who opened the
Sunday Times
first in the village, exactly two weeks later. ‘Village torn apart by footpath row,’ he saw as the page two headline. ‘Lone local hero fights to re-open rights of way against a barrage of local resentment. Entrenched landowners determined to break the law …’ And there was a photo of Joe Middleton standing by … The colonel squinted at the photo in astonishment and fury. It was his own decimated laurel hedge! He felt his blood pressure mounting dangerously high as he reached for his coffee cup and then put it down again untouched. His hands were shaking violently. That was his own beautiful hedge and it had been blocking nothing! Nothing.

Doreen surveyed the pile of timber that had been her fence. A man from the council had come over with a measuring tape and fussed and measured and tutted and told her that it encroached fifteen centimetres onto the public right of way – the footpath. So the whole thing had to come down. As did the remains of the rose. She stared at her once beautiful little garden miserably. Completely open down its entire length it was unprotected from children and dogs and litter. All had done their worst. How was she ever going to replace the fence? She couldn’t even afford a new rose. Bewildered and unhappy she stood and watched as Marjory Cockpen’s Jack Russell skipped in off the path and proceeded to squat almost at her feet. Marjory, walking along the now broad and ugly path, eyes front, ignored the dog’s indiscretion. Doreen wasn’t to know that the old woman was as unhappy and embarrassed as her neighbour. It had never occurred to Marjory to take a bag for her dog’s do-dos – hitherto deposited out of harm’s way in the hedge, and even if it had with her arthritis she could never have stooped to pick it up.

Crying silently Doreen turned back into her cottage and closed the door behind her. As far as she was concerned she had just lost a friend.

Maureen was standing at her kitchen window staring out at the road. Two reporters were there from the local paper talking to Joe by their front gate. The whole world knew by now that this was the local HQ of the war.

‘This is the third footpath I have campaigned about.’ Joe’s words would appear on page three the following morning. ‘The other two were in neighbouring villages and are now fully open and accessible. They are tidy and neat and though I say it myself would do credit to a proper garden!’ What he didn’t expect when he proudly read the piece the next day was the sharp little editorial two pages further on.

‘Joe Middleton is a representative of an increasing phenomenon in the countryside these days; a retired townie determined to turn the country into a mirror image of the town he has forsaken. He appears to have no real concern for the accessibility or the beauties of the landscape, obsessed instead, in an all too familiar way, with small detail rather than the greater picture. Interviews in the villages whose footpaths he has so proudly fought to clear all tell the same story. Neighbours once friends, now enemies, beautiful countryside fractured, hedges and trees trimmed neatly back to conform to some notional norm, while flowers and berries die. Fields are blighted by the now familiar ugly poisoned scars which dissect them with the precision of a ruler rather than gently following ancient contours and byways. All to provide access for armies of seemingly angry walkers who it is rumoured actually measure the length of grass blades to ensure that they comply with footpath regulations, rather than raise their eyes to enjoy the God-given glory of the countryside they are traversing. Communities do exist where members of different countryside groups have managed to get together to settle such matters as the rerouting of old rights of way amicably and sensibly. Would that this could happen everywhere. Alas, as long as people like Joe Middleton see it as their duty to regard common sense as a dirty word and live by a Pooterish insistence on the value of small print for its own sake, this country will continue to slide into a morass of red tape and mediocrity, turning its back on the spirit of independence combined with neighbourly compromise which once made this country great.’

‘I’d give a good deal to know who wrote that!’ Ted Ames read the leader out to his wife as she dished up the potatoes for lunch. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better, that does!’

‘Well, you won’t when I tell you the latest thing this man wants.’ Julie sat down opposite him and shook her head. ‘I think it’s probably the last straw. You know where the footpath emerges from Dines Wood and crosses the heath?’

Ted nodded. He picked up his knife and fork.

‘Well, apparently the footpath has moved a few feet from its old position. The hedge has widened over the years and parts of the wood are bigger now. They’ve made the whole thing into a nature reserve. There’s a lovely old holly on the edge of the wood. This man says it has to be cut down as it’s on the footpath.’