Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  We set off at 9.30 a.m. and by 2 p.m. we are drinking our second pint in the Kirkstyle Inn. So if it really is eleven miles from Greenhead to Knarsdale we must have been walking at a military pace, although we did cheat a bit this morning, picking up the trail where it crossed the main road instead of tramping back up to Haltwhistle Golf Club. Does that mean I’m disqualified?

  Perhaps we might have taken more time if there had been more to look at, because in all honesty this isn’t the most spectacular or engaging leg of the journey. Yes, the meadows and cow-pastures are pleasant enough. And map-reading around the farmyards and walled fields requires a certain level of mental engagement, and there are some curious little cloughs and valleys to descend into and climb out of, and a few pretty bridges to cross along the way, but nothing to write home about, as they say. Blenkinsopp Common followed by Hartleyburn Common are often cited in the guide books as notorious swamps, and as well as getting bogged down it would be easy to wander off course in what is essentially an un-signposted, featureless plain, where the path lies hidden beneath the grass skirts of thick, knobbly tussocks, and other misleading tracks and channels snake away in the wrong direction. It’s dry today; we get lost two or three times but there’s enough of a view to navigate by farmhouses on the horizon or more distant hills, and on land which is farmed the extensive matrix of fences and walls usually corrals and steers the wayward rambler towards the right gate or stile eventually. Still, it’s always reassuring to spot one of the little green-and-yellow acorns nailed to a post and to see what is clearly a National Trail stretching away in front. At Batey Shield, five men are creosoting six new telegraph poles laid out horizontally in the field – we smell the vapours from two or three hundred yards downwind before we see them. One of the workers puts down his big paintbrush and his bucket of treacle-coloured liquid to explain that a new resident in the area is having electricity installed to a renovated farmhouse somewhere up on the ridge, at his own expense.

  ‘How much will that cost him?’

  ‘A pretty penny.’

  The men have a dog with them, one of those yappy Jack Russells with unlimited energy and perpetual enthusiasm, and after doing a couple of circuits of our legs and investigating a smear of sheep shit on Danny’s otherwise meticulous trainers it returns to its mini gymkhana, making a clear round of the six wooden poles in a respectable time then coming back for another go. The creosote acts like smelling salts for the memory, reminding me of the many ramshackle constructions I put together with my dad, then daubed with coat after coat of that dark, oily preservative. Like the rabbit hutch, and the tree-house, and several lean-to sheds, all wonky and unstable and built with a dangerous combination of eagerness, impatience and whatever materials came to hand. Our most ambitious structure was a greenhouse. When the leaded sash windows in the house were replaced with uPVC double glazing, we carted the old ones to the bottom of the garden and hammered them together with bent and rusty nails of every length and thickness which had accumulated in a biscuit tin over several generations. For a door we used five sawn-off floorboards and the hinges from a fridge that someone had dumped at the side of the cricket field. How the greenhouse withstood the force of gravity I don’t know, let alone the forces of meteorology in the upper Pennines, but it stood its ground for several years, a hothouse for tomatoes, something else I can’t smell without being transported back to the early seventies. Some nights I’d still be awake in the small hours, looking through the bedroom window, when my dad came home from a concert or show, disappearing into the black of the garden in his dinner jacket and dickie bow with his pipe in one hand and a watering can in the other. Before the greenhouse finally succumbed to the elements it became an impenetrable jungle, crowded with six-foot-high rose-bay willow-herb and man-eating hogweed, and poking out of the gaps in the roof, the desperate tendrils of aged tomato plants fighting for air and light, still clinging to bamboo canes and rooted in sliced-open grow-bags somewhere deep inside. I also remember the thick, high privet hedge that ran the length of our garden, a sort of dividing line between the lawn and the moor, with civilisation on one side and wilderness on the other. Once, as a punishment (I can’t remember what the crime was) my dad made me cut it, all twenty or so yards of it, with a pair of ancient shears which I could hardly lift and barely open. A few hours later, with blistered palms, I watched as he inspected the work, ran his eye and his hand along its trimmed length, saying nothing. Then for reasons which he never explained, he lifted me up and put me down on top of the hedge, so I lay there in its crown, suspended by nothing more than twigs and stalks, looking up at the sky.

  *

  Marker stones splashed with yellow paint guide the traveller across the valley bottom between the Hartley Burn and the A689. This is another boggy morass in wetter years but navigable today via duckboards, causey paving, some intelligent path-finding and a bit of It’s A Knockout-style balancing across the wobbly tussocks. At the road there’s a sewage works to the right which we don’t bother to investigate, then a possible short cut up to Lambley Common, which we also ignore, possibly because I’m feeling guilty about cutting the corner this morning. After climbing to about three hundred metres, the path then stiffens and straightens as it follows the Maiden Way, a Roman road, pointing due south, with the South Tynedale valley running parallel to the left and the South Tyne river flowing north through its corridor. We sit down and eat, with the uninhabited, roadless mass of Glendue Fell followed by the treeless ‘forests’ of Bruthwaite and Geltsdale at our backs. All through our meal an agitated lapwing and a territorial curlew are protecting their interests, the lapwing flapping and paddling and piping away on its two-note penny flute and the curlew sounding its ghostly distress whistle while making repeated low-altitude reconnaissance flights over our heads. On the far side of the valley a farmer is herding sheep on a quad bike. At home the sheep are grey, having absorbed the grime in the air and the greyness of the clouds, although it’s much cleaner up on Marsden Moor than it was fifty years ago, when soot from the Lancashire mill-towns settled in the heather and the grass and to go for a walk on the tops was to come home filthy. But these sheep are pure white – almost as white as Danny’s trainers – especially in the midday sun. Harried by the quad bike and now also by a dog, hundreds of them finally funnel through a gap in a wall and spill out into a lower field, like grains though an hourglass. Crossing Glendue Burn by the stone bridge a man goes past, hurrying up the hill carrying a shotgun and a long-handled axe, but doesn’t acknowledge us. As we head through Burnstones I find myself admiring the engorged udders on a very large cow, and Danny says, ‘I think you need to go home.’

  *

  The jukebox in the Kirkstyle Inn, by my reckoning, holds about fifty songs for every house in Knarsdale village, if it is indeed a village and not a hamlet, and possibly not even that. As part of my plan to ‘clear my head’ I’ve deliberately left my iPod at home, so this is the first time I’ve heard recorded music for about a week, and as the money tumbles into the slot and the first guitar chords and drum beats enter my ear, it sounds rapturous and extraordinary, an almost hallucinatory, far-reaching sensory experience. It’s as if I’m tripping, a sensation compounded by the notion that every song title seems to be a comment on my personal situation, including ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’, ‘Road to Nowhere’, ‘Many Rivers to Cross’, and the compellingly apposite ‘Walk This Way’. I say to Danny that it’s a pity we didn’t bump into each other at Glastonbury earlier in the year, and he points out that it would have been unlikely, not just because there were 170,000 other people there but because at that time we didn’t know each other. He seems surprised that I know how to rack the balls in the triangle and which end of the cue to chalk, and when I go three–nil up he tells me that losing to a poet at pool isn’t something he’ll be bragging about with his friends this coming weekend. Then Wendy turns up in her Noddy-size car, slightly raised at the front by the weight of the Tombstone in the back, and evacuates Danny ba
ck to Greenhead, at which point the landlord calls time and I find myself outside on the kerb with a big turquoise suitcase, hoping the weather doesn’t change. Suddenly a car pulls up and a man jumps out with a cauliflower in one hand and a lilac-coloured flower in the other.

  ‘Blue sow thistle!’ he says to me, holding the flower in my face, then disappearing around the back of the pub. A minute or two later he reappears, minus the vegetable.

  ‘Only found in four places in Britain, that,’ he says, waving the flower in front of me again and winking.

  ‘Maybe only three, now,’ I say to him, but he’s already in the van and away down the road.

  *

  Josephine Dickinson’s house is beyond Alston, almost beyond anywhere it seems, an incongruous brick-built bungalow in a landscape of stone farmhouses and barns, boxed in by a phalanx of dark green pine trees to each side, with west-facing windows looking directly at the incoming weather. Josephine is a poet; I met her twenty years ago on a residential writing course and have bumped into her a couple of times since on the ‘circuit’. She was charged by her tup in the field the other day, and although she managed to fend it off with a spade, she’s wearing her arm in a sling and nursing some hurt feelings. We wander down to the field with a cup of tea, and watch her very excitable sheepdog perform the wall-of-death around the inside of a breeze-block outbuilding. The tup, who I’m happy to see is on the other side of a sturdy-looking fence, ignores us and goes on nibbling grass. The handful of sheep look ready for shearing to me, some with their fleeces hanging off their backs, like cricketers on a hot day wearing their woolly sweaters tied around their waists, but Josephine says that it will be a couple more weeks before the coats are ‘floating’, a stage where the wool almost stands off the skin on a layer of fine threads, called the ‘rise’. It strikes me as an unusual place to live, this farm, this location, but by every measure Josephine is an unusual person, with an unusual story, which she tells me in her living room, surrounded by tottering piles of books and in the presence of three inquisitive cats. Some years ago, she and her boyfriend were living what is sometimes characterised by the media as a ‘chaotic lifestyle’ when they were given a small flock of geese as a present. The geese were supposed to be kept in a pen for a few days to remind them where home was, but on the warm and bright morning after they arrived, Josephine decided to let them out for a bit of fresh air, and away they sailed, over the wall and off down the valley. Unable to round them up on her own she screwed her courage to a point and went to the brick-built bungalow between the dark stands of pine trees, to ask the notoriously ill-tempered farmer Douglas for a helping hand, and he astonished her by coming to her rescue and assisting in the recapture attempt. The day after, she approached the bungalow again, on tiptoe this time, hoping to push a thank-you note through the letter box then skedaddle. But the door opened and Douglas invited her in, and within a week she was living with him, and not long after, they were married. It was a coming together of needs and wants, Douglas cooking and caring for Josephine and supplying his highly accurate veterinary syringe so Josephine could measure out reduced dosages of medication until she was clean, and Josephine’s luminosity – something noticed by everyone who meets her – brightening the dark corners and shadows of Douglas’s life. More remarkable is the fact that when Josephine walked into his house and closed the door behind her, she was forty-one and Douglas was eighty-six. She pulls out an album, and shows me wedding photographs of the happy couple, which in any other family would be images of the smiling bride and her proud father, or doting grandfather even, except their knowing faces and their intertwined hands and the language of their bodies tell a different tale. There’s a moving symmetry to the story: when Douglas died he was ninety-two, Josephine having nursed him through his last days, and Douglas having reawakened her poetic instincts – she’s published four books since that first meeting. She closes the album and slides it back into the bookshelf. I say that she must miss him, but she doesn’t catch the words because her head is turned and she can’t see my lips, and when she can’t see my mouth she can’t understand me, because Josephine is deaf. And to add yet another twist to the story, she is also a classically trained pianist. I ask her if she can play some Chopin, and after searching through a pile of sheet music she sits down in front of the upright Boyd & London, straightens her back, places her fingers on the keys, and plays. Like with the jukebox earlier in the day, it feels like another hyper-sensory experience, but more so this time, the kind of music that God must hear, no matter how busy or distracted, because it comes out of hundreds of square miles of nothingness, out of the emptiness of the hills and the silence of the moors, and from the most unlikely hands.

  *

  I am driven to the reading through heavy rain at terrifying speed by a local woman who ‘knows the roads’. The venue is Yew Tree Chapel B&B in Slaggyford, with its amazing stained-glass windows made by David, the owner. Doves are perched on the garden gate and the trellised archway, as if in welcome. Every time the little bell rings it makes the sound of someone entering a situation-comedy corner shop, then Mary answers the door and shows audience members to their seats, either around the living room or on the stairs or the galleried balcony, even in the pulpit. The reading is prefaced with a musical recital for piano and flute. A clock chimes on the half-hour and the hour. My allocated reading position is a high-legged red swivel-chair in the corner of the room; pushing off with my feet, I make a couple of anti-clockwise revolutions, letting the wooden beams and the wall-lights and the high ceiling orbit around me for a few moments, letting the centrifugal force spin blood to the outer edges of my brain before slowing and coming to a halt in front of the twenty-nine waiting faces. And then I begin.

  Knarsdale to Garrigill

  10 MILES

  OS Explorer OL43 West Sheet, OL31 West

  Wednesday 14 July

  I wake early in the company of cats, one on the bed, one on top of the wardrobe and another in the Tombstone with its head on the money sock, guarding the £148 takings from last night’s reading. I managed to launder about a third of the pound coins with Dave (‘Never say no to change’) at the Greenhead Hotel, but the amount of cash I’m hauling across the country is becoming a bit of a headache. The increasingly thick wad of notes might not be a huge strain on the rucksack but it’s weighing heavily on my mind, and I’ve started daydreaming about caching it in the earth, like foxes do with dead rabbits and voles, to return to during times of need. I could leave it in the Tombstone, I suppose; the Tombstone has no lock, but does contain a repellent quantity of festering underwear and rancid socks, and anyway, I’m living among the kind people, people who’ve voluntarily given their time, their energy, their front rooms, their beds, their cooked breakfasts and their towels in exchange for nothing more than the recital of a dozen or so poems, most of which (as one lady felt obliged to point out to me after last night’s reading) don’t even rhyme. Perhaps it’s embarrassment, then, that’s making me carry a sheaf of readies down the spine of the Pennines instead of simply asking someone to stick it in the bank for me or swap it for a cheque, though when I make a quick mental calculation of how much I’ve spent on coats, boots, socks, gadgets, salves, maps and other assorted necessaries, I’m still a long way down on the deal. Lying awake among the purring cats and the sound of wood pigeons in a tree outside, my mind moves from stocktaking and auditing to a more general consideration of my progress so far. To date, I’ve walked about eighty miles, just less than a third of the way, in six days, and apart from a few minor aches and pains, I feel fine. On the first day I decided to keep a score of mental and physical well-being, giving myself a grade out of ten at the end of every leg, ten being human perfection, zero being dead. I was expecting wild oscillations of both mood and health, but so far it’s been a steady seven or eight on both counts. Can I walk the same distance twice more? Yes, I reckon I can. Will I finish the Pennine Way? Well, say it softly, but I think I just might. And on that smug note I roll
over and indulge in another hour’s kip.

  *

  A further reason for the sense of quiet confidence is that today’s stretch is a bit of a dolly, a saunter of ten miles in an unwavering direction along the banks of the South Tyne, a gentle climb of no more than a hundred metres all told with a disused railway line to guide the way, and A TOWN, Alston, about halfway along, with cake shops and pubs. Only a week ago a ten-mile walk would have been an expedition, but now it’s a rest, even a reward, and the only foreseeable hindrance to progress today will be indolence.

  David, a friend, has come to walk with me. He’s been staying somewhere in the eaves of Yew Tree Chapel and descends the stairs with wet hair and the remains of breakfast-in-bed on a tray. The temptation would be to strike directly south from here but having cheated once already, if only by a few hundred yards, I dutifully insist that we go back to Knarsdale before beginning in earnest. There may be wind up on the hills but down here in the valley bottom it is sheltered and still, and even though the ground is wet and the river lively from last night’s downpours, the sun comes out and the elevated path manages to steer a course between waterlogged ditches and flooded fields. In fact dead rabbits are the only obstacle for the first hour, at least one every couple of hundred yards, all speckled brown fur and little white arses, fully stretched, back legs and front legs pointing in opposite directions with no obvious signs of disease or attack. I turn one over with the toe end of my boot expecting to see some bloody wound to the throat or a pair of bulging ‘myxie’ eyeballs, but its eyes are closed, its face at rest and its pelt perfectly intact. Hundreds more are hopping around in the grass on the hillside so I guess dead ones are a mathematical inevitability, but why so many of them should be lying prostrate along the Pennine Way remains a mystery.