Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Clare?’ he asked. ‘We can get you out of it, you know.’

  ‘They’ve made me a special kit with my name on and everything,’ I said. ‘Of course I can’t get out of it. Anyway, I don’t want to get out of it. It’ll be fine. Look at my boots!’

  I changed into my football kit. The first time I have ever worn a football kit. I pulled up my socks and tightened my laces.

  ‘All the gear and no idea,’ I said to myself.

  Never mind, confidence is the key. Lots of people do things every day that they’ve never done before, and I’m sure they feel just like this. Terrified. I joined the other penalty takers in the tunnel. John Bishop was going first. He used to be a really good footballer, nearly a professional, and he’s a lifelong Liverpool fan. This was his idea of heaven. I went out second and touched the Anfield sign, because I knew that’s what players did. I needed a bit of luck.

  They called out my name on the tannoy and I hoped people wouldn’t boo, but they were a friendly crowd, here for a special event. John Bishop took his first penalty and hit it low and hard to the right. The keeper – sorry, the mascot – waved a wing at the ball but got nowhere near. John celebrated in style and whooped the fans up into a frenzy.

  ‘Look at that, Clare, isn’t it great?’ he said to me, pointing at the sea of red behind the goal.

  I swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure I wanted all of them watching me taking my very first penalty in public. I decided to focus on one thing and one thing only. My left foot. Just plant that next to the ball and the rest will look after itself. Don’t get all fancy with a run-up or muck about trying to pick a corner, just two steps and boom!

  The ball flew forward, which was a good start. It went in the air a bit, then dipped down low and past the goalkeeper into the back of the net. I had scored! I had actually scored a goal at Anfield. I waved at the crowd and trotted into the goal to collect my ball. I thanked Mighty Red as I did so. I’m not sure if you’re meant to thank the goalkeeper when you score a penalty, but it seemed the polite thing to do.

  I re-enact the goal and the celebration for the boys.

  ‘What happened with the second one, Auntie Clare?’ asks Toby.

  ‘Well, do you know what?’ I reply. ‘The second one went straight through the keeper’s legs and into the net. Two out of two!’

  I do a little jig of celebration for the boys, who slap me on the back and grin.

  ‘Phew,’ says Jonno. ‘We thought you were going to be really embarrassing, and then we’d have to pretend we didn’t know you.’

  We walk past a barrow on the right, an ancient burial mound that now sits quietly in the middle of a field, and turn left when we reach a row of trees. There is a glorious view down to Sydmonton Court and of Madeleine Lloyd Webber’s stud paddocks. We wave hello to them.

  ‘This is lovely,’ says Aunt Gail. She says ‘lovely’ a lot, because the Americans tend to favour ‘awesome’ or ‘great’, and she prefers to protect her English heritage and her accent. She sounds more English than my mother, despite having lived in South Carolina for the best part of fifty years. She’s also unfailingly positive, so most things in her world are ‘lovely’.

  The boys run ahead and then back to us, teasing Boris because he isn’t allowed off the lead. Aunt Gail tells me that when she came down for breakfast that morning she found Boris lying on the kitchen table. Not just sitting in the chair by the side of the table, but actually lying across the middle of the table. Mum pats his head and says, ‘Bad boy, Boris.’

  He looks very pleased with himself.

  We amble along, chatting to the boys to keep them interested and to stop them trying to kill each other. There is a sign on the fence that reads ‘DO NOT LEAVE VALUABLES IN YOUR CAR. THIEVES OPERATE IN THIS AREA.’ My mother reads it out slowly and deliberately, puts her head on one side and looks at me as a QC would in court. I scrunch up my face and say, reluctantly, ‘OK. You were right. I was wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she says. ‘I couldn’t hear you. Can you say that again?’

  ‘You were right and I was wrong!’ I shout into the air around us, my voice reaching up to the branches bursting into life, across the lumpy, short-grassed slopes, up into the sky, where a buzzard is wheeling, his finger-like wings stretched out beside him.

  ‘This is fun,’ says Toby.

  I start to tell him about Watership Down, about Fiver and Hazel and Bigwig and Silver and how they had to find a new home, so they came here, right where we are walking.

  I tell them about Nuthanger Farm, which is down on the Ecchinswell Road about a mile away. There’s a footpath very close to it and I promise them we’ll walk there another time. Mum tells them that the book has been turned into a film and a TV series and that Art Garfunkel sang a song about the rabbits called ‘Bright Eyes’.

  ‘So what happened to the rabbits?’ they ask.

  We walk alongside a row of huge beech trees to a gate and cross the narrow country lane on to Watership Down.

  ‘They’re here,’ I say, pointing to the slopes on our left and the thickets of trees and bushes ahead of us. ‘They’re all under here in a massive warren. It’s a palace of a warren, the biggest one in the world, and they come out early in the morning and just as the sun is setting in the evening to have a party in the open air. They’ll be safe, because there will never be any houses built here. It will all stay just like this for ever.’

  Boris suddenly pulls Mum sideways. He has seen a rabbit disappearing down one of the myriad holes that pockmark the north-facing slope of the Downs.

  ‘Hold on tight, Nini!’ shouts Jonno.

  She manages to stay upright and prevents Boris from re-enacting one of the gorier scenes from Watership Down.

  We come up to the top of the Downs and cross on to Cannon Heath Down. Mum suggests we walk next to the new all-weather gallop my brother has just put in for the racehorses. It’s made of oiled sand and rubber, and it is clearly the best thing Archie has ever smelt, because he dives into the middle of it and rolls and rolls until he can’t roll any more. He has sticky, oily sand all over him and a piece of chopped-up red electrical cable on the end of his nose.

  As we are on home soil and have a fence between us and the public footpath, Mum finally relaxes and lets Boris off the lead. He goes berserk, running as fast as he can backwards and forwards on the grass and bouncing on the all-weather gallop and back. Archie chases him and then rolls again, gets up and chases him some more. Within ten minutes, Boris is panting as if he’s run a marathon.

  ‘I see why you kept him on the lead,’ Alice says to my mother.

  ‘Indeed,’ she replies, looking at me and once more raising an eyebrow. I don’t bother saying anything. One ‘You were right and I was wrong’ a day is enough for me.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ says Aunt Gail, again.

  Toby is starting to flag a bit. He’s only five, after all: ‘How much further is it, Auntie Clare?’

  ‘Well, you can see your house down there, so I would say it’s about another mile, and I think we’ll be there in twenty minutes or so. How does that sound?’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  We pass the point on the grass gallop where my father’s Derby winner Mill Reef broke his leg in 1972. The boys want to know what happened and how he was saved by a vet from America who pinned the leg, how he recovered because he stayed so calm and how he learned to walk with the plaster cast on his leg (and then how it was cut off – the plaster, not the leg). That keeps them entertained until we cross on to the side of the Downs and cut down along the edge of the steep bowl-shaped slope we call the Cuckoo Pen. Boris is on the lead now, because he’s done enough running for a week.

  Jonno and I are at the back.

  ‘I think we should walk backwards, Auntie Clare. Did you know a hundred steps backwards is equal to a thousand steps forwards?’

  ‘I did know that, JJ, because it was me who told you.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, tu
rning round. ‘Well, anyway, let’s do it.’

  He and I walk down the steep slope backwards, counting our steps, which doesn’t hurt any of the muscles that have been starting to ache but gives me some pain in very strange places the next morning.

  Toby has an energy surge because we are going downhill and he knows where we are. We head towards Uncle Willie’s farm, turn left down the grass track and right into Prince of Wales Avenue, planted in 1894 when Prince Edward (later Edward VIII, who abdicated) was born.

  Mum looks at her watch. Perfect timing for her meeting. The boys race each other to the gate, because I’ve promised a prize to the winner. Toby has a head start and wins easily but looks a little disappointed to win only a pound.

  ‘How many miles have we done?’ he asks me.

  I plug my Jawbone bracelet into my phone and wait for it to upload. It says 5.87 miles.

  ‘Well, that was a lovely five point eight seven miles,’ says Aunt Gail.

  Mum goes to see the accountant; the boys run into Park House to tell Anna Lisa how far they have walked. Alice and I look at each other and smile.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ I suggest.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘And, by the way, if you want to live here one day, that’s fine with me.’

  We have just been recording the latest series of Ramblings for Radio 4. Lucy is producing half of the series, and Karen the other half. Lucy wrote on her notes for the Essex walk: ‘You can take the train and I will leave my car at the station. I promise you won’t have to be driven anywhere by me.’

  During that walk, one of the group told me about her first husband, who had died at twenty-seven of lung cancer. Her second husband had died of prostate cancer (they were married for thirty-three years) and her third had also died of cancer. She did not tell me to elicit sympathy, nor was she sorry for herself, it was just a conversation you have when you’re walking along, the sort of conversation you couldn’t have anywhere else. Another told me about her search for a partner and how hard it is after the age of sixty, because you’re so used to doing your own thing you don’t want to compromise for another person. I told her about the walking club I had met that was designed for those looking for love.

  ‘Oh, I might just try that,’ she said. ‘I did walk with the last one, and that was fine. It was just the other stuff that didn’t work out!’

  When we went to Devon for two days, I let Lucy drive from the station, because I had to finish writing an article. I regretted it almost immediately. She stalled the car three times before we reached Fingle Bridge, so I took over for the return journey. To be fair to her, it was one of those eco-friendly cars where the engine cuts out when you stop. The trick, I found, is to put your foot on the clutch, rather than keep turning the keys while bashing the wheel and swearing at the car.

  We walked with a group called the Diamond Ramblers, who are all past or approaching their sixtieth birthday and have, between eleven of them, lost thirty-six stone in weight. They were incredibly revealing when talking about the shame of being overweight and how different they feel now that they are fitter and lighter. But, more than that, the bond they have as friends who walk together is unbreakable.

  One of them, Jenny, had moved from Yorkshire to Devon to be near her ill daughter, and suddenly found herself with no friends; she had a dodgy hip and was miserable until she joined the Diamond Ramblers. After a bracing walk from Otterton to the Jurassic Coast, up to Ladram Bay and back to Otterton Mill for lunch, she tried to assess the impact the group had had on her.

  ‘I can’t even put it into words, but honestly’ – her voice broke as she looked at the rest of them – ‘you have changed my life.’

  I have started reading Walk! A Celebration of Striding Out by Colin Speakman. I am happy to follow his example of becoming an evangelist for walking, of trying to turn around the misconception that it’s somehow boring or low grade.

  And it’s an important mission: our over-reliance on the car means that, as a nation, we are becoming ever more sedentary. Our average walking distance per year has fallen in the past two decades from 244 miles to 189 miles, which is only 3.6 miles per week.

  I try to do nearly double that per day, and it’s made a huge difference to my life. My mind is clearer, my fitness has improved, my stress levels have reduced, my connection with Alice is better because we walk and talk together, our dog is fitter and we know our local area intimately. I have had adventures with my mother, my brother and my nephews. Flora is keen to come walking with us because the boys have told her it’s fun. Even my father might, one day, be persuaded to join us.

  I am excited just thinking of all the footpaths that I have yet to discover. I have been lucky to walk in some beautiful and remote places, from the Shetland Isles to the Isles of Scilly, from the Channel Islands to Northern Ireland, but the joy of it isn’t in going too far or being extravagant. The joy is in allowing myself to slow down, to be close to the land, to smell the freshly cut grass or hear the willow warbler calling.

  One of the new jobs in my life since London 2012 is presenting Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2. It means a 5.30 a.m. alarm call every Sunday but, as I said to my book editor, Joel, it’s not a time of the week that I’d be using to do anything else. It’s a joy to present, as we have fascinating conversations about faith, spirituality, motivation and how to lead a meaningful life.

  In the course of doing interviews for that show I met a remarkable woman called Roz Savage. She has rowed single-handed across the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. She has spent over five hundred days at sea, on her own, undertaking a seemingly impossible challenge in order to raise awareness of environmental issues.

  Roz had had a successful career in management consultancy, a husband and a sports car. It all looked good, but she wasn’t happy, so, as an exercise, she wrote two versions of her own obituary – one for the person she wanted to be and one for the person she was becoming. It made her see that she needed a purpose, to make a difference in this world, so she took a fairly extreme course of action: she left her husband and her job, went on a retreat to Ireland, and then came up with her plan to row the Atlantic. She followed it up by becoming the first woman ever to row solo across the eight thousand miles of the Pacific, and then added the Indian Ocean, just for good measure.

  Roz is not enormously tall or strong, nor is she bonkers (which you might assume). She is just like you or me: she is ordinary – apart from the fact she decided not to be. In her book, Stop Drifting, Start Rowing, she explains:

  If you don’t keep pushing the boundaries, keep expanding your comfort zone, your comfort zone actually gets smaller and smaller, until you’re shrink-wrapped in such a tiny comfort zone that you can’t move, you can’t achieve anything, you can’t grow. And so I keep pushing, keep developing, keep evolving. I keep showing what an ordinary person can do when they put their hearts and minds and souls into it.

  I have thought a lot about Roz, and about her belief that it is the search for meaning in our lives that gives us relevance. It doesn’t matter how we do it, she says, it’s more important that we engage in the process. ‘It is the search itself that gives meaning to our lives, lends our existence a narrative arc, makes us feel that we are on a quest, a journey, a trajectory. Without that sense of life’s great adventure, it would be hard indeed to feel that life has meaning.’

  I am not about to row any of the great oceans, but I like to try to prove, on behalf of all women in the media, that nothing is impossible. We can take on a heavy workload, we can deal with pressure, master a complicated subject, engage with experts and we can present those subjects with joy and enthusiasm. I get called a ‘workaholic’, as if it’s an insult. I just smile, knowing that a few dinosaurs in the press are still adjusting to the fact that women can do what men have been doing for decades – and they can do it without making it seem like hard work.

  I will shift my focus to other challenges at some point, because I want to have new adventures and I want to ke
ep improving as a broadcaster and communicator. Roz Savage’s words keep ringing in my ears – if I don’t push out of my comfort zone, I will suffocate.

  Writing My Animals and Other Family and this book have been exercises in that cause. I always told myself that I didn’t have the concentration or the ability to write a book, so it’s nice to prove myself wrong.

  Now for the next challenge – and for a bit of time every day to walk rather than gallop through life.

  Illustrations

  Lucy and me with the furry microphone on the Firth of Forth

  Walking on the shifting landscape of the Sands of Forvie in need of a ‘chittery bite’. With Elizabeth Hay, Ellie Ingram, Lucy and Annabel Drysdale

  © Ken Ingram 2008

  With Pete and the Monday Walkers, stopping for whisky in Perthshire. That’s me in the fetching hat

  Archie, wet and muddy

  Alice looking for trout in the River Teign

  Willie and me on our last day together at Ascot

  The Mountains of Mourne. ‘Can we live here?’

  Sky, hills, river valley. Space to breathe

  Eanna and John on Dublin Bay. ‘Love your man, love your mountain’

  With Patrick Gale in Cornwall

  Gordon Luff: Inner Hope

  With Anna Maria Murphy in Polperro, notebook in hand

  Cool, calm Karen, who produces Ramblings

  A Devon pony says hello to the microphone

  Devon, South-west Coast Path

  Barefoot walking with Michael

  Michael’s feet with a coating of mud

  Werca’s Folk singing by the River Coquet, with Sandra Kerr conducting