When I awoke two hours later, it was with a shiver. Clouds shifted across the sky in erratic manoeuvres, casting long shadows across the beach. A film of sand clung to my torso and I hurriedly scraped it off so I could dress – it was cold enough to merit my sweatshirt and hat. My feet, which before had been little fires at the ends of my legs, were now as pale as frozen chicken. The approach of autumn was in the air. A few spots of rain hit the backs of my hands.
I felt invigorated and ready to move again, but I knew I should rest properly and see the day out in Bude. My only problem was that I had no idea what to do with myself. It is very difficult to rest when you have no house or shelter to rest in. Resting involves privacy, warmth, food and drink, perhaps some easy distraction: a book, a film, a newspaper. The tramp has none of these things. His life is always public, his warmth fleeting and his food and drink likewise. Distractions are rife but they are rarely leisurely. There is no television. Books cost money better spent on food, and, though he can visit the local library, the tramp cannot join it, for membership requires an address. Newspapers are good, but more effective when stuffed down trousers to keep the legs warm.
Life on the streets is not just difficult; it can also be deeply boring. I had supposed many homeless drank and abused drugs so much to be able to sleep; but maybe it was also just something to do. We all need hobbies. I considered buying eight cans of lager from the supermarket and getting horribly drunk alone down at the beach, but the prospect of walking with a hangover expelled the idea from my mind.
Instead, I spent the afternoon wandering the small town, listless and sullen, the hours dragging by as slow as fatigue. I poked my head into shops, but the employees gave me suspicious looks, and anyway what was the point if I couldn't afford anything? There was a small grassy square, but it had grown too cold to sit still. I used a public toilet to defecate and ended up sat there for the next half-hour, trousers around ankles, reading the graffiti which spiralled about the walls. I looked for homeless people who might talk to me, tell me their story or recommend a good place to spend the night, but found none. I did not doubt Bude had its homeless population – it was small, but not small enough – but of where they had hidden for the day I was ignorant. A young man in his early twenties busked outside a bakery, a few coins in his guitar-case, a backpack propped against the wall. I gave him a smile and stood next to him – we could talk about busking, if anything had changed in the last ten years – but he seemed nervous at my arrival, kept looking down at his earnings at his feet, and I was sure he was extending the song to twice the length it was supposed to be. When the eighth chorus came around, I felt stupid and awkward, and left him alone. Even Alex the charity-hawker had gone home. Home.
I decided to walk back along the coast path towards Widemouth Bay. Halfway between it and Bude, I had noticed a depression above the cliff face where I could sit or lie just out of view of the walkers on the path. The grass was spongy and comfortable, the view sensational and the privacy welcoming. I worried about its proximity to the cliff edge – I had always made sure to sleep well back from any drops for fear I might roll over in my sleep – but it did not matter. Owing to my afternoon nap, I did not sleep at all that night.
3
I left Bude gnawing on a cheap stick of supermarket bread, taken from the shelves and placed in a rack by the doorway, its yellow sticker the symbol of its retirement. I had to walk uphill to get out, but the gradient was nothing compared to the hellish day between Port Isaac and Boscastle. Besides, here there were pavements – the whole 2 miles to Stratton, no less! – and my feet skipped lightly over the tarmac. I joined a cycle path which would take me to Hatherleigh on the edge of Dartmoor, stopping halfway along at Holsworthy to eat lunch on a railway bridge, built in 1898, its tracks macadamed over, which rose high above a thin river. It had been the most pleasant day of walking so far.
The walker often has the smug fallacy that he is the only one going in his direction. Everybody one meets, of course, is going the other way. I had formulated and revised my classifications of other walkers since leaving Sennen, and most fell into typical camps. Artists and photographers were common, though only on the clear days, and usually in the most remote spots. I rarely, however, saw one painting or taking a photograph – more often they were walking, easel or tripod under arm, pacing back and forth until they found their subjective perfection, like a dog's ever-shrinking circles as it settles down to sleep.
Dogs were, of course, common too, walked most often early in the morning, sometimes out and on the paths before I was, usually at a beach and, if not, close to one. Protective dogs would approach me from afar, circle behind and then track me back to their owners; the more friendly dogs stuck their wet noses into my palm and then loped alongside me until their owners had to call them back, as if in fear their dog might accompany me to the horizon.
The most numerous of all, and the most indefatigable, were the ramblers: often older, ruddy and decked out in expensive all-weather-all-terrain equipment. They had swarmed the Cornish coast path like paparazzi around a celebrity, filling it with the fluorescent colours of their raincoats and the clinking melodies of their walking sticks, offset to the ambient beat of thick boots clunking on the soft ground. But, as I pushed deeper into Devon, they dissolved. In fact, the further I walked the fewer people I saw, until I began to wonder if I was the only one walking along this path. There had been moments of extraordinary solitude in Cornwall, when I could see no other person about, and I could almost always see far. But a town or a village was never more than a few hours away, and they heaved with summer holidaymakers. Perhaps they had all come from south Devon, for between Holsworthy and Hatherleigh I crossed paths with only a handful of people – most of them small groups of teenage boys who leaned their BMXs against a hedge and sat cross-legged on the grass sharing a pack of cigarettes between them, who paid me no heed – and, with Cornwall further and further behind me, I began to feel lonely.
4
Margaret didn't believe me. 'Promise me you'll get a good meal tonight,' she said, holding out a five-pound note.
'You're kind, but I don't need it,' I replied. 'Honestly.'
'A young man like you shouldn't be walking around with no food in his belly. Take it.'
I opened my knapsack to show her my stove and tins of beans. She brushed it aside.
'What kind of a meal is that? Take this and get yourself something proper.'
Margaret's insistence was so sweet I felt like crying. I had told her everything, but she had watched me as I spoke with a mixture of condescension and pity, and I knew none of it was taken seriously.
'It's hard for young people today,' she said, still holding out the note. 'No work, no hope for it. Do your parents know where you are?'
I smiled at her, for she had mentioned my parents, and all through our conversation I had wondered who she reminded me of. She reminded me of my mother. Her charcoal-grey, big-eared Weimaraner pulled himself up on to the bench and nudged his way between us, taking it in turns to lick her face and then mine. Margaret – in her sixties, gentle, slim, pretty – chided him affectionately and he responded with more licks.
'My parents know exactly what I'm doing,' I said. 'So does my wife. I promise. There's no need to feel sorry for me. This is my choice.'
Finally putting the money back into her purse, Margaret instead insisted I take one of her apples, and that was a gift I could not refuse. She smiled sadly at me as if I brought someone to mind, and then rose from the bench. 'Archie, Archie, Archie!' she sang, and the dog flew from its seat and bounded off up and along the path in the direction of Hatherleigh. Margaret followed, turning once a minute to look back at me and wave.
I stayed in my seat, grateful for the rest. Margaret's outlook was rare – most believed my true story, but those that did not chose instead to see me as a menace. I had known that the latter would be the case through much of my journey. As far back as Elizabethan times, tramps – who in the sixteenth centur
y were known as 'vagrants' or 'rogues' – were considered vermin or madmen, what Iain Sinclair calls the Tom O'Bedlams of their day. Under Tudor law, any vagrants who were caught were subjected to whipping, placement in the stocks, imprisonment, branding, or hanging. Those deemed fit to work were often sent against their will into slavery, deportation or forced labour in the galleys.
It held no account that many of these wandering 'rogues' were, in fact, either on the road in search of work for which they were well trained or on their way to work for which they were well trained. One case study from Warwick which dates back to the 1580s cites the arrest of 130 vagrants. Of these, seventy-seven were tradesmen or professionals on their way to or in search of their next job (and the remainder were mostly wives or children in tow). Almost a third were labourers and servants, then came cloth-workers, peddlers, tinkers, builders, a surgeon, a student, a mole-catcher, a coal-digger, a clockmaker, a roper, a locksmith and a barber. Nevertheless, most suffered corporal punishment for their tramping.
Tramps have been considered a problem for as long as recorded history will allow us to look back in time. In the year 1569 alone, around thirteen thousand 'rogues and masterless men' were arrested out of the approximate twenty thousand that existed across England. Only three years before, the Somerset Justice Edward Hext wrote that 'of these sort of wandering idle people there are three or four hundred in a shire', plus thirty to forty gypsies. We have the Elizabethans to thank for the coinage of that closing word: in those times, Romany gypsies were known as 'Egiptians'.
For all the public perception of vagrants, rogues and tramps throughout the ages, there is much evidence to suggest that they were never as problematic as their contemporary accounts made them out to be. What we might see in hindsight is instead that ancient antipathy which has existed between those who settle and those who choose to be nomadic, which has been recorded since the scriptures.
Bruce Chatwin, for whom nomadism was a poetic passion, traces the mutual distrust between nomads and settlers back to biblical times, when the nomads of Persia would look down upon their settled brothers with scorn at their childish need for the protections of cities and walls; and when the settled Egyptians would decry the Bedouin Hebrews as being akin to plagues of locusts, devouring their resources and then moving on to their next patch to do the same. Chatwin particularly notes the fallacy in the latter's thoughts: nomads do not wander aimlessly from each new ground to the next – in fact, most nomads move along their centuries-old tour or circuit of pastures in cyclical and repetitive patterns, allowing the ground to regenerate for when their families and cattle return months or years later. Indeed, the very word 'nomad' is derived from the Greek word nomos, which means 'pasture'.
Such antipathy, such distrust and such animosity continue to this day. There remains amongst our settlers a fundamental distrust of anyone who needs to move; and there also remains a deep dislike amongst our twenty-first century nomads of anyone who chooses to stay put.
5
Hatherleigh was one of those towns with a hill for a high street. I arrived in the early evening and walked to the top, where the peaks of Dartmoor capped the horizon. There was no one about. The shops had shut and the pubs did not seem to be open, either. If they were, their doors were closed, their windows were dark, and no noise came from within. I fancied I could unroll my sleeping bag in a beer garden and sleep undisturbed, but then two men, both in orange T-shirts and bald, appeared from a house to stand on its doorstep and smoke roll-ups. They stared at me as I passed, muttering something I could not hear. Tramps, I knew, would not be tolerated in small, provincial places like this, and anyway I was still not ready for sleeping on the streets just yet. No one really cared if you spent a night rough in the dunes or a cliff-side field, nor did they care if you were part of a city's homeless community (though they said they did to both cases). But in places like Hatherleigh, arrest was certain, and violence probable.
I had once wondered why there were so few homeless in the south-west and so many in places like London, Birmingham and Manchester. Why on earth did rough sleepers choose to hole themselves up in dirty cities on shop doorsteps when down here there were parks, rivers and beaches? One reason is money: cities are hives, and the more people who pass you on the street, the more likely they are to drop cash in your hat. But another reason is violence. The financial, retail and tourist areas of cities – where you are most likely to find rough sleepers – are protected by the police, who are bound by strict rules. Residential areas, on the other hand, are protected by the residents, men like these in Hatherleigh who have the territorial instinct to safeguard their land, their homes and their families from anyone alien and threatening, and who will slip around the law if they have to. These places are old, and they are bigoted.
I walked out and on to the main road – the A386, which connected Okehampton to Bideford – heading north in the vain hope that I would spot a likely sleeping-patch. It was still hours from sunset, but dark, pregnant clouds had floated over from Dartmoor, and the air was thick with the prospect of an early, rainy nightfall. There was no pavement on the A386 and few grass verges, and the occasional cars which passed me with their headlights on full-beam seemed to make no effort to swerve out from my hurried footsteps.
It was growing cold; I was growing hungry. To my side, a long, brambled hedgerow bisected the road and fields, some with cows, some with sheep, some with nothing at all. When the road was quiet, I scrambled over a hedge into an empty field, catching the frayed tips of my fingerless gloves on thorns, and then hid beneath it, out of sight of both the road and the farmhouse half a mile away. I cooked beans and ate them quickly. I needed to make some notes, but I was tired and a little scared, and so I climbed into my sleeping bag and fell asleep before eight o'clock.
I woke to a splashing downpour which had soaked my face and insinuated itself into my sleeping bag. The neck and shoulders of my T-shirt were dripping. I leapt out, pulled my poncho from my knapsack, and then squatted uncomfortably under it, waiting for the rain to stop. It got worse. I checked my watch. Three o'clock. The darkness and the sound of the rain were engulfing. I rolled my sleeping bag up and sat on it, extricated my towel from my knapsack, dried my face and torso as well as I could under my poncho, and placed it all back in the bin bag. I was just about dry now and my belongings were out of the rain, but I felt miserable. Three hours later, the torrent stopped, and I must have nodded off, for I awoke crumpled up on the ground to the noise of the morning rush-hour traffic, wet grass in my mouth.
6
Tired and irascible, I walked back into Hatherleigh to find it as quiet as the previous day, and this irritated me profoundly and irrationally. With little energy and less inclination to walk, I stood at the side of the road and stuck out my thumb.
Two hours later, a car slowed to a halt beside me. I stuck my head through the open door and asked, 'Where are you going?'
It is traditional for the driver, not the hitch-hiker, to ask this question, but I had no answer for it, except perhaps 'east', and this may have sounded suspicious.
'Tiverton,' the driver replied.
'Excellent,' I said, and got in.
He was a young man, perhaps twenty-five, with a friendly smile, but I was not in the mood for talking. When he asked what I did, I fed him the conversation-killer.
'I'm writing a book about walking from Land's End to London. I should really be walking now, but I had a bad night sleeping rough, so I'm cheating a bit by hitching.'
He seemed interested. 'Sleeping rough, eh? Why didn't you get a room for the night?'
'The book's about travelling and living like a tramp. I walk during the day and I sleep out at night. I don't have enough money on me to get a room. Last night I wished I did, though.'
'So it's like you're homeless.'
'More like a tramp.'
'Lot of homeless round my way,' he said, ignoring me. 'Thing I don't get is, they're all Eastern Europeans. Used to be, when I was a kid, they
were British, but not any more. Don't get me wrong, I'm not racist or anything…' – that comment nearly always meant the opposite – '… and I've got nothing against the ones that come over here to work, even if they do undercut our tradesmen and put them out of business. But I don't think it's right to just come over here and abuse our benefits system.'
'Surely if they're homeless then they're not on benefits?'
'Selling The Big Issue, then.'
'That's not a benefit. That's a job.'
'So they're taking our jobs, then.'
'You just said you didn't mind that.'
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