Winter

by William Horwood

  Anyway, I saw the headline, ate the rest of the chips, smoothed out the now-greasy, vinegary newsprint and looked at the story. One second later I looked so astonished, or maybe so totally shocked, that one of my friends actually asked me if anything was wrong. I said it wasn’t – and it wasn’t wrong. Something was very right, so right that I felt funny all over and in a daze.

  It was the image that went with the story that did it.

  Of course it was only black and white because after the Greening few newspapers had colour print any more. It showed a man on a road and he had a big untidy backpack. The story was all about him. They called him ‘Boots’ because he wouldn’t give his proper name. I didn’t know then what an urban legend was, but he was one of those. He had quite a following, not that he wanted it, the story said. That was because when he turned up things happened. Good things mostly.

  None of that interested me then, though later it was those things that happened – or sometimes did not happen in fact – which became my obsession. It was the picture of the man himself that grabbed my attention.

  He looked old, maybe seventy.

  He was tall and he had long, untidy hair which the newspaper said was still red in parts but mainly grey. He was gangly, sort of skewed over and in the picture he was setting off on the road again but looking back because the photographer had asked him to. In fact the story said he didn’t like his picture being taken, which was why there were so few ever taken throughout his long and extraordinary life, but on this occasion he said he didn’t mind.

  But that’s not the point.

  The moment I looked into that man’s eyes as he looked at me through the media of camera and newsprint, I knew I had met him before. By ‘before’ I mean before my first memory. I knew it as surely as I knew my name was Jack.

  I also knew without being able to explain it that there were a whole lot of other things around him that I had known. Like people, like places, like things; and I knew I would meet him again one day.

  I also knew it was important that I didn’t try to meet him because I felt sure that the journey he was on meant he was coming home to me. To me!

  You can say, ‘How can you have known all that just from seeing a photograph?’

  I will reply because we forget far, far more than we know and sometimes something triggers a flood of memory. That’s what happened that day for me.

  I was intrigued by how he got his nickname. Apparently it was because his boots were home-made out of car tyres bound up with twine. He absolutely refused to wear proper boots. He said that using leather for boots was a crime on animals killed for the purpose. All life, he said, is sacred. He admitted that using synthetic material for shoes was a waste of resources but since he had not yet found a way to change the fact that humankind, as he put it, uses rubber and its equivalents for tyres and then discards them he thought he’d set an example by recycling the worn treads.

  From the moment I first read about Boots and recognized I knew him, I began collecting the many stories and anecdotes – and myths as well – that had been told about him over the years and which explained his near-legendary status among some people by the time I heard about him. I collected these stories with the same persistence as I collected Ordnance Survey maps.

  As I did so and my collection of cuttings and suchlike about him grew, I created a filing system for them. I began by doing it by newspaper and magazine where they appeared. Then I did it country by country, because I built up a list of pen-pals, other collectors of other things. I found other stuff for them, they found Boots material for me.

  Finally I realized that I had enough in my collection to refile everything in chronological order going right back to when he was much younger. I wanted to see if there was a pattern in terms of where he started, where he travelled to and where he thought he was going next. As I said before, I had known already what his final destination was; I had from the first moment I saw his picture – he was on his way to me. But I wanted to know what his life had been before that and, if possible, why he was as he was.

  My pursuit of Boots was obsessional but it had one rule above all else – and interestingly I found, as time went by and I heard of other people who shared my interest, that they abided by this rule too, as if Boots, without trying, had made it up himself and announced it worldwide. You didn’t try to contact Boots, you let him get on with it. The thing that emerged from all my research into Boots was that he had such natural dignity that people automatically treated him with respect. Without it, given the dangerous places he went, he would probably have been dead long ago.

  The only people who interfered with him were officials of various kinds trying to move him along or the media wanting interviews and pictures. He handled them with such gracious indifference that he was rarely troubled for long. He made a good story when there was nothing else about and, though he seemed eccentric in much of what he did, most people who came to know about him realized that maybe he was the sanest man alive.

  But his followers like me did nothing.

  We waited.

  Eventually I had a fairly complete picture of the chronology of Boots’s life for something more than five decades, from 1968 on. In that year he was, judging by the evidence, about twenty-eight or -nine. Try as I might, I could not find anything before that, nothing. It was as if his previous life had disappeared entirely, or he had.

  I was sure that if I looked hard enough I would eventually find something earlier, maybe even before he got the name by which his band of devoted followers, like me, knew him. But I already knew a very great deal about Boots, from the reports made, the stories told and from reading between the lines.

  There’s one important thing to repeat here. It came to me in that moment I first connected with his image and looked into his eyes: I knew that he was searching for something and that’s why he was a restless wanderer. I knew Boots would carry on wandering until he found it or he died. I knew that his greatest fear was not finding whatever it was he was looking for before he died. I knew that because in one of the reported interviews with him he said words that rang so true to me that they felt like there was a truth there for all of us: ‘I lost something a long time ago but I cannot remember what it was, however far I travel, however hard I try. I know I will only find it when I stop looking. But when you long for something so much, when you’ve lost something so deep, how do you stop, how do you ever stop?’

  I knew the truth of what he said because that’s how I felt. I had lost something too, which was my past. Talking of which, I never stopped collecting Ordnance Survey maps and reading them like books. The day I came across Map 174 and found White Horse Hill and Uffington and Woolstone I knew I had to go there. Two days later I did. I wasn’t surprised to meet Katherine and get my horse back. That day I met Margaret and you, Arthur, and heard the Chimes for the first time. That day I found a home.

  The Foales had regretted not having children but in retirement they had gained two.

  Margaret had been ill on and off for two or three years. She was getting tired and feeling weary. She had struggled on because she hated to think that Arthur would be left alone if she went first. Maybe that was why she had wanted children.

  But when Jack moved in, big and protective as he was, she weakened, as if she could afford to now that she knew her Arthur would not be alone and would always have someone to help.

  She didn’t want to go, but she no longer needed to stay. So a few months after Jack had lit up their lives, doing things around the place the others couldn’t, carrying Margaret up and down the stairs because he was good like that and one memorable day getting a wheelchair and pushing her all the way up White Horse Hill so she could see the view a final time . . . a little while after that she passed away.

  Arthur didn’t say much and nor did they. The Chimes said more. He would wander about and in good weather go down and sit with his tomatoes.

  Jack would mow the lawn or climb ladders and lie looking at the
trees. Katherine would take them off for hikes and they would listen to Arthur theorizing about time, discontinuity and his sense of imminence.

  Eventually, most days, one of other of them would make tea, find the biscuits, like Margaret always did, and they would end up together chatting, reading, musing, being family to each other.

  But always, always, there was the sense between them that they had been there before and they could not rest content until they knew how and why.

  50

  MISTER BOOTS

  Mister Boots lived at Terrell State Hospital for nearly five years after his first appearance in Texas, until the spring of 1968. Up to that date he had no desire to leave and nor was he ever any trouble. Rather the opposite.

  In fact Boots became something of a legend quite soon and though the hospital was tough, especially on the potentially weak young men, he had an extraordinary capacity for making supportive friends. He was a natural teacher and willing and able to help others solve problems and make things. He spoke with what seemed a refined accent to most residents and used language that was quaint, as if he came from another age.

  Any impression that his amnesia and initial assessment gave, that he was in some way mentally frail, was soon dispelled. He had a facility to learn languages, which he did very quickly from other patients at the hospital whose first language was not English. By the time he left he spoke French, German, Spanish and Italian nearly fluently and had some knowledge of Mandarin and Russian.

  He also taught some of his fellow patients a language which they used at those moments when they wished to talk among themselves and not be understood by other patients or hospital staff and officials. No one could identify it at that time but years later, long after he had left the hospital, it was still in use at Terrell and a linguist from Berkeley University identified it as a combination of Gaelic, Welsh and a variant of Pictish, but in a form that made it a fully functioning language on its own account.

  He was by nature a problem solver and seemed to understand better than the janitors how Terrell’s complex and arcane electrical system worked. He also took over the running of the hospital’s irrigation system for its extensive and famous gardens and in his fourth year built an outdoor sculpture, not unlike a simple prehistoric stone henge, which he claimed was his means of escape, should he ever need one.

  By ‘escape’ it was assumed he meant his habit of sitting in the middle of his sculpture and humming, a common strategy adopted by some patients to block the real world out.

  In May 1968 Boots was tracked down by the journalist Robert Eckram, then working for the Los Angeles Times, who was researching a story concerning an attempt that April to assassinate the President, John F. Kennedy, who was by then serving his second term. Eckram was working on the theory that there might have been a link with an earlier attempt which had involved, it was said, a cover-up by the police and CIA. This first attempt had taken place in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd 1963 on the same day, in the same place and at exactly the same time that Boots was shot.

  Eckram was able to demonstrate that four bullets were fired that day, from two different locations, only one of which passed through Kennedy’s body and from which he recovered. Police and hospital records as well as photographic evidence enabled the journalist to show that Boots was on the grassy knoll from which two of the shots were fired. He had compelling evidence to support his theory that had the second shot, which hit Mister Boots, hit the President it was highly unlikely that he could have survived.

  As is well known, it was this near-death experience that radically transformed the President’s life. The legislation he forced through during his two terms of office, for environmental change, civil liberties and the weeding out of vested interests in US politics, followed by his later environmental work with the United Nations, pushed the world in new directions. It kick-started the movement towards austerity and environmental common sense which was responsible for the Greening of many countries in Western Europe and North America but especially England, where the movement first took off.

  The first story ever to appear anywhere in the world about Mister Boots was the one by Eckram in the Los Angeles Times a month after his visit to Terrell. Its headline was, ‘The Man Who Saved the President’s Life and Changed the World’.

  The unwanted celebrity this brought for Mister Boots and his friends at Terrell upset him. He asked to be discharged and was told that, though it was a certainty, he needed a final assessment.

  He did not wait for it but left the hospital without formal permission sometime during the night of October 31st and November 1st 1968 during a patient firework display celebrating Hallowe’en. He was last seen in the centre of his stone circle at Terrell and, according to one of his friends, he appeared to be perfectly happy. In fact, they said, he was doing something they had never seen him do before. He was dancing.

  Mister Boots did not surface again for seven years.

  When he did it was as a dishwasher in one of the restaurant outlets of the New York-based Rap’s Beef restaurant group. In that capacity he met and became friends with Lance Rap, son of Eike, the founder, a scion of the meat industry and one of its celebrity supporters. Mister Boots turned the son into a vegetarian.

  When Eike died, Lance took over and in a few months pushed through one of the most extraordinary transformations of any major restaurant and food groups in the USA. Rap was notoriously narcissistic, vain and snobbish but he was also a culinary genius. He turned the group into a vegetarian delight.

  He frequently credited Mister Boots with his anti-meat philosophy and also with the partnership that turned Rap’s international. When the non-English-speaking wife of the hotelier Juan Carlos Festone turned up for a meal and was unable to make sense of the menu, Boots was summoned from the kitchen to translate into Portuguese. He so charmed her that the following day she brought Festone to meet him – and to taste the food. The resulting Rap-Festone Group, it was said, ‘turned the world off meat’.

  Boots moved to Paris with Rap and stayed there on and off for ten years, by when the Rap chain had spread worldwide and had become the most profitable anti-meat lobby in the world. Rap always credited Boots with its success but when in 1984, after an episode of depression, Boots disappeared and a body was found in the River Seine it was identified as his.

  Rap’s memorial speech was one of the few statements about Mister Boots on the record by someone who knew him personally. He said, ‘He was a friend like no other, without pretension, unwilling to accept any reward for the inspiration he gave. We offered him anything he wanted but we could not give him peace of mind. He always said that he had important work to do and could never accept the idea that perhaps he had done it already. Did he not save a President’s life? Did he not inspire a revolution in eating? Did he not do countless small things for people, mainly unrecorded, which changed their lives and perhaps the world as well?

  ‘My friend’s inexplicable sadness lay in the fact that he felt he had lost something and he could not find it, because he could not remember what it was. This might be a joke to some, but to him it was a continuing agony. If I could have helped our friend fulfil that quest I would willingly have given up all I have and travelled across the world to do so.’

  Mister Boots’s memorial service in Paris was attended by over five hundred people from all over the world.

  Along with their public sentiments Festone and Rap added a strange private instruction to the managers and staff of all their outlets worldwide, from the humblest eatery to the finest five-star hotel. It was born of Rap’s personal belief that his old friend was not and could not be dead and the identification was a mistake. They told their staff if ever a man answering Mister Boots’s unique description turned up and asked for help he was to be given it at once, in a manner and with a style that befitted any normal customer.

  This instruction had an unexpected outcome for, of course, every down-and-out alive began turning up at Rap restaurants and hotels,
usually at the back door. All were cared for, within reason, and many other restaurant groups followed Rap’s lead. In this way Mister Boots changed the world for vagrants like himself.

  Three years later, Lance Rap had a late-night call.

  It was from the manager of one of their two hotels in Bhutan. A tall, thin man with freckles and red hair who spoke English when he wasn’t conversing in Nepalese had turned up at the door. He had asked for refreshment and ‘That is the problem, Mister Rap, I am sorry to trouble you but . . .’

  ‘What is the problem? Give him whatever he asked for.’

  ‘You have said we must give him that but I do not understand “brew”. What is that please?’

  Rap, to his credit, laughed.

  ‘It is . . . it is . . . is he there?’

  He was and they spoke, Boots treating the conversation as if he had left yesterday. They spoke for a long time and Boots answered some questions but not others. He said he had not yet found what he was looking for but he had not given up hope. Also the mountain air had done him good and he had decided he preferred cold climates and was planning to come ‘home’ – a word he had never used before with Rap. But where that was he would not say.

  Later Rap spoke to his manager again.

  ‘It will be better if you let Mister Boots make his own brew. Admit him to the kitchen, give him what he needs and he will make it for himself.’

  ‘But, sir, he is an honoured guest.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rap, ‘he is. Very honoured. So you let him do as he needs to do. Which may include the washing-up. That’s how he is. And . . . one more thing.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘When he leaves, please ask him the same question I did. He might give you the answer he would not give me. Ask him where he’s heading for. Fax me if he tells you.’