The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (35 page)

Thomas, more than anyone else, had sent me out along the paths, and in the course of my walking I had read my way through much of what he had written – the natural history, the travel books, the letters, the war diary, the poems – and much of what had been written about him. I had come over my years and miles of walking to think of Thomas’s writing as a kind of dream-map: an act of cumulative but uncentred imaginative cartography, a composite chart of longing and loss projected onto the actual terrains of his life, and onto the Downs in particular. Thomas knew to some degree, I think, that this was what he was engaged in creating: an ongoing exploration of his interior landscapes, told by means of the traverse of particular places and the following of certain paths.

I slept that first night on the Downs in the dubious shelter of a forestry plantation called War Down, tucked into a cocoon-like tent, while the rain slipped down the conifer needles. I have spent more comfortable nights under canvas. But by dawn the rain had stopped, the air was warm and I started early. Thomas’s 1916 poem ‘Roads’, which I was trying to get by heart as I walked, tripped through my mind.

The hill road wet with rain

In the sun would not gleam

Like a winding stream

If we trod it not again.

Wild clematis smoked up the hedgerows. Creepers – bryony, ivy, honeysuckle, bindweed – slinked out along tree branches and hung down over the path like the slipped coils of snakes. Where rain had sluiced the chalk it was slick as silk.

Away to my north-east I could see the shapely high ground that rises above Steep, the village where Thomas and his family lived for ten years in three different houses. The first of these, Berryfield Cottage, sat at the foot of a chalk-land plateau, juniper-dotted and topped with a stand of firs. The house was pleasingly remote: to reach what Helen took to calling ‘
the outer world
’, you had to follow a winding lane so deep-sided and dark ‘that the entrance to it on the main road looked like the entrance to a tunnel’. At night they could hear wind in the beech hangers, the cough and bark of foxes and owl-hoots. Even there though, in a landscape that brought him pleasure, Thomas couldn’t rid himself of his depression. There were whole days of silence in Berryfield Cottage, his head drooping wearily with the effort of being alive, his face sunken and grey under the ‘
crushing attacks of gloom and wretchedness
’. He was sharp and harsh to the children; sharper and harsher to Helen. Nor did the landscape always restore him to himself. One desperate day in the winter of 1908 he took his revolver from a desk drawer, pocketed it and strode out of the house without speaking to Helen. He returned late in the afternoon, unharmed, his shoes caked in mud and leaves, unwilling to speak of what he had been through up on the plateau, his wounding of her having substituted for his wounding of himself.

There were wonderful times in Steep, too, though they were rare. Sometimes he and Helen would sleep the night in the copse at the end of their garden, lying on their backs at roosting hour and watching the patterns made overhead by the birds in flight. At first Thomas tried to help Helen remember the names of the constellations, but she had no desire to learn them, content for the night sky to remain an effect of pure design. When good weather came they would leave the children with a neighbour, put down their work, take their sticks from beside the back door and head off on foot into the countryside. Sometimes they would walk over to Gilbert White’s parish of Selborne; sometimes they caught the train to Canterbury and walked the Pilgrim’s Way back to Winchester. Once they went to Wiltshire for a fortnight and saw the White Horse at Uffington. Helen thrilled to the atavism of what she called ‘
the ancient ways
’, the sense of being connected by footfall to ‘history and tradition’. Thomas taught her how to walk differently: ‘with [her] body, not only with [her] legs’, feeling the landscape as she moved over it.

For Helen, too, each footfall taken in Thomas’s company was double-penned, leaving its mark twice: on land and in her memory. ‘
Every hillside, every wood and meadow
, every green lane and steep chalk track’ was ‘imprinted on my heart for ever [by the] walks that Edward and I took there’, she would write after his death.

Near Buriton, on the county border with Sussex, I saw a broad-backed figure in the distance on the path. My pace exceeded his and the figure came into focus. A man, short and slim, perhaps fifty years old, his broad back in fact his rucksack. Into net pockets on either side of the rucksack were tucked two battered plastic Coca-Cola bottles, their labels long gone. They resembled boosters on a rocket pack. A pan tied on by its handle clinked against a metal buckle with every pace. It was a long-term wayfarer’s pack: messy but efficient. I fell into step alongside him, and we began talking. He was called Lewis. His manner was calm, measured. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles. He’d left home six years previously, he said, after the death of his wife. He had sold his house and decided that he would walk. So he’d walked Britain from top to toe. He’d walked across France, through Spain and over into North Africa, and he had plans for China and the Himalayas. Mostly Britain, though. He lived on the long-distance paths. He woke each day around five o’clock, whatever the time of year, and tried to cover five miles before breakfast. He kept the Coke bottles filled with water.

‘Now and then I treat myself to a night in a bed and breakfast,’ he said, ‘but mostly I just sleep wherever I’m walking.’

He reached behind as he said this, and patted a tent roll on the bottom of his pack. For each major walk, he kept a journal. Always the same kind: red and black cloth-covered, A5, tough enough to be stuffed in a pack. When he had filled one up, he posted it back to his brother who lived in Newcastle. ‘He’s got three dozen of them now, all lined up on a shelf,’ Lewis said. ‘One day I’ll turn them into a book.’

Somewhere near Amberley a barn owl lifted from a stand of
phragmites
. We stopped to watch it hunt over the water margin, slowly moving north up the line of the river, pulling a skein of shrills from the warblers in the reeds. It was a daytime ghost, its wings beating with a huge soundlessness. ‘You go ahead,’ said Lewis to me. ‘I’m in no hurry.’

There are two intertwined histories of modern wayfaring
. One involves the wilful wanderer, the Borrovian or Whitmanesque walker, out for the romance of the way. The other – a shadow history, darker and harder to see – involves the tramps, the hobos, the vagrants, the dispossessed, the fugitives, the harmed and the jobless, bodging life together as they ‘padded’ it down the roads. Ten miles a day was the statutory lot of the ‘padder’; ten miles a day would eat up the ground. The years in which old-wayfaring flourished in Britain, from the 1880s through to the 1930s, were also key decades in the history of the ‘tramp’. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the final breakdown of a guild culture in England which had lasted since the early medieval period, whereby workers would be notified of employment and would walk to find it. Many of the men returning from the First World War came back to England with no job and no prospect of settled work. The life of the road was the only option available to them, and in the twenty years after the war there was a substantial tramping population on the road, sleeping out and living rough. Plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys up and down the country, as the woods became temporary homes to these shaken-out casualties of conflict. Their numbers were augmented when the economic depression of the 1930s left millions jobless across Europe and America.

The most heartbreaking moment of Laurie Lee’s great book
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
(1969) comes not long after he has left his own valley in the Cotswolds and is dallying over the chalk of Sussex on his way to London. He eats dates and biscuits to keep himself going up, and sleeps by the path: a night in a hayrick, a night in Chanctonbury Ring. The year is 1934, at the height of the depression. Lee is fresh to the road and is just beginning to understand something of the other kinds of people he meets: the odd recreational walker, some long-term professional tramps (who were identifiable because they ‘
brewed tea
by the roadside, took it easy, and studied their feet’). But there were others, Lee noticed, ‘all trudging northwards in a sombre procession’, who belonged to ‘that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time’. These people:

went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-Thirties.

It is a sad and brilliant paragraph, compassionate in its noticing – especially the ‘vague’ polishing of shoes by men who had once been in jobs where shininess of shoe mattered; a means of symbolically keeping the dust of the road at bay – and it is evocative of these brigades of broken men who walked the land but often fall out of the headier accounts of life on the path.

East of Beacon Hill I reached a sustained ridge of chalk. From the woods came the game-show buzzers of jays and crows. Whitebeams marked the path to right and left, with their grey-green upper leaves and their sharp silver unders. I walked through a field of common orchids and pink clover, and ate the clover anthers for their nectar. I passed tombs and memorials of different eras: Bronze Age burial mounds which had once held cremated ashes in pottery vessels; Neolithic long barrows; a wayside shrine to a German airman killed in 1940, which was covered with remembrance crosses, rose petals and flints. Then I emerged out of a dark and yew-rich wood and onto a down that stretched for two miles or more ahead of me. Bleached light, shining grey beech trunks, a tractor ploughing a distant field to corduroy. Grass flickering in the wind, grasshoppers scraping and bowing. White flints scattered across the fields, tumbleweeds of sheep’s wool bowling between them.

At dusk I followed a hollowed path that wound up the wooded scarp slope of the Downs east of Storrington. The path’s depth spoke of continual foot-passage over centuries, and I liked its design: it moved in round-cornered zigzags, an uphill meander through the trees. There in the forest, night was further advanced. I turned a corner and a badger bustled out of a bank of dog’s mercury, stopped, stared at me, its eyes giving a quick green jewel-flash in the dark before it barrelled on downhill along its path, and I followed mine uphill, out of the woods and onto the summit plateau of the Downs, to a place called Chanctonbury Ring, where Lee had slept and where I now wish I hadn’t spent the night.

The Ring is a circle of beech trees, planted on a hilltop that had been the site of Bronze and Iron Age fortifications and a Roman temple. In 1760 a young aristocrat from the scarp-foot village of Wiston named Charles Goring decided to add his own layer of history to the Chanctonbury earthworks. He planted beech saplings in a well-spaced circle and, according to one story, then daily carried bottles of water up the slope to irrigate his saplings on that arid downland summit (according to the other story, he got his servants to do this job for him).

Either way, the saplings took and flourished and eventually grew into a cathedral grove. For two centuries, Chanctonbury was the best-known landmark of the South Downs. On one July evening in 1932, 16,000 people boarded specially scheduled Southern Railway trains in London to follow a moonlit walk over a stretch of the Downs, gathering to watch sunrise from the Ring. But then in 1987 the Great Storm blew in and wrecked Chanctonbury. It’s now missing most of its main trees, and its interior has reverted to a sprouty scrub of ash and bramble.

Nevertheless, up there that evening it still felt surprisingly remote. Brighton glittered away to the south, like something far-fetched on fire. The Weald to the north was almost lightless. The sky was a tarnishing silver. I rolled my sleeping mat out between two of the remaining beech trees just as dark fell, and took my shoes and socks off. The rabbit-cropped turf soothed my feet, and I wriggled my toes in it, then walked the circumference of the Ring. Nearly back at my starting point, I stepped on some sheep dung and had to spend a few minutes flossing the consequences out from between my toes with bunches of grass. After I’d eaten, I lay down to sleep, placed an ear to the turf and imagined the depths of history the soil held – Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, Augustan, down through all of which the beech roots quested. I held that giddying thought for at least half a minute, and then sank into senseless sleep.

I heard the first scream at around two o’clock in the morning. A high-pitched and human cry, protracted but falling away in its closing phase. It came from the opposite side of the tree ring to where I was sleeping. My thoughts were sleep-muddled:
A child in distress? A rabbit being taken by a weasel or fox?
Impossible, though: the sound was coming at least from treetop height. A bird, then; an owl surely. But this was like no owl I had ever heard before: not the furry hoot of a tawny or the screech of a barn owl. I felt a faint rasp of fear, dismissed it as ridiculous. Then another cry joined the first, different in tone: slightly deeper and more grainy, rising at its end; the shriek of a blade laid hard to a lathe. Also more human than avian, also unrecognizable to me, also coming from treetop height. I lay there for two or three minutes, listening to the screams. Then I realized, with a prickling in my shoulders and fingers, that the voices had split and were now coming towards me: still at treetop height, but circling round the tree ring, one clockwise and one anticlockwise, converging roughly on where I was lying. I felt like standing up, shouting, flashing a torch; but instead I lay still and hoped it would all end. The cries met each other almost directly above me, twenty or thirty feet up in the dark. After fifteen minutes they stopped and eventually, uneasily, I fell back to sleep.