Late August and the village was heaving with visitors, the silent winter streets an almost forgotten memory. But sitting on the bench in the gorse there was hardly a passer-by. In the late-afternoon sunshine the only human sounds came from the beach far below at Lantic Bay. People were dotted over the sand and jet-skis cut figures of eight through the bay and between the boats moored in the bright water. I couldn’t stay – I needed to get back to the chapel where I’d left Moth sleeping. For days he’d been overwhelmed by a strange dizziness, as if he was slightly drunk on a swaying boat. A sensation that only seemed to be relieved by lying down with his eyes closed.
I left the bench and cut across the fields. The National Trust rent the land in this strip of cliff-top margin and control the way it’s grazed. The grass looked like the fields of my childhood: not smooth-grazed and low, but varying in height where the sheep had eaten but not mown the grass. This lighter grazing regimen allows a scattering of wild flowers to remain, and provides the type of cover that the skylarks love. When I’d walked through here in the spring and early summer, the small brown birds would lift high into the air, singing their bright celebration of the sky, attracting mates and my attention away from their nests. But in late summer the fields were quiet, the birds away feeding. Inland from here the land changed and became what spreads throughout much of the south-west: arable fields of wheat and barley. Monocultures where little wildlife can exist in fields sprayed with pesticides and weedkiller, where the wildlife and the plants it thrives on are driven out of the fields and into the hedgerows and woods. Not the habitat for many of our grass-living birds, who are retreating to the margins, their numbers dwindling.
Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet. Past the windblown hawthorn whose roots hold tight while its branches are stretched inland by the force of the wind. Ahead a backpacker appeared from the steep steps that led to the village, rising through the cleft in the rock and vegetation and pausing to catch his breath and look out to sea. A small wooden gate stood between us and as we approached it I could see he wasn’t the average backpacker, with the latest equipment and a determined expression. He’d stood and gazed out over the Channel before slowly turning and walking on, unhurried. A bright yellow reflective jacket shone out against the dark gorse, and, on top, an old rucksack with an external frame. Strange to see on a man who at the oldest could only have been in his mid-twenties. I reached the gate before him and held it open for him to pass and as he looked up his face was a showcase of piercings: an open expression adorned in silver.
‘Hi, you’re backpacking. Where are you heading?’ The inevitable question that had been asked of us so many times as we walked the path, but now I was the one asking.
‘Not sure tonight. I’ll just do a couple more headlands then stop, I think. But I’m heading to Plymouth.’ He seemed almost nervous as he replied.
‘Oh, right, a few more days then. Where have you come from?’
‘I started in Penzance. I’ve been walking for two weeks or so now.’ He seemed to relax a little as he walked through the gate, but wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He didn’t look like a person who walked often, although two weeks on the coast had given him the tan lines of someone who had been squinting into the sun and wind.
‘That’s a great section. I bet the Lizard was amazing in this heat. What brought you to the South West Coast Path then? Have you walked much before?’
‘No, though I walked to the shop a lot when I was a kid! No, haven’t been living the sort of life where you walk much. I’ve been sleeping rough in Exeter for the last year, you know, on the streets. But then I read this article about a couple who’d been homeless and walked the Coast Path and I thought, I can do that. So I borrowed all the stuff I needed from the charity people and they helped me get a train ticket to Penzance. It’s been really hard though; I’d never put a tent up before, and these boots …’
‘That’s incredible. Have you eaten? Come back with me and have some food, or a cup of tea at least.’
‘No, I can’t. I have to keep going. This walk. This, all of this.’ He gestured his arm across the sea. ‘It’s changed everything. I have to keep going. I’ve got a routine now; I know my days. Can’t remember when I last felt this way, if I ever felt it. I’ve got to find somewhere to put the tent, then make some soup. This is my day.’
I knew this boy: not his life, but the feeling he was expressing.
‘Have you any idea what happens when you get to Plymouth?’
‘I’m not sure, but I won’t be going back to the way I was. That part of my life’s over now. Everything’s changed. I’ve changed.’
I watched him go through the dip and over the brow. I couldn’t tell him it was my article. This was his moment, his life, his discovery; I couldn’t interfere with that.
I pictured the young man walking away beyond the brow, tunnels of blackthorn engulfing him in a green transformative cloak. As it had us. Another life saved by the immense power of the elements on this wild strip of land. I spread my arms and let the rising ozone wind fill my clothes. I’d stopped and spoken to him without thought or hesitation. Had I felt at ease with him, felt a connection? Or was it something else? During all those dark months in the chapel I’d written myself back on to the path, back on to this foot-wide piece of dusty track. Back into the sun, the wind and the green, never-ending horizons. Unknowingly, unexpectedly, I’d written myself back to the place where I felt safe, secure and whole: our wild home. I closed my arms on the salted strength and carried it down the familiar path to the village. But the path had changed; it was no longer the windswept haunt of thrift and kestrels, but a new way, lit by a hesitant light from an unexplored source.
It’s hard to spot a fork in the road of life, harder still to make a deliberate choice which way to go. But sometimes you can catch a fleeting glimpse of one as it disappears in the rear-view mirror. The outcome doesn’t change, but many miles down the road, with the map unfolded in front of you, it’s possible to point to the fork and say: Yes, that’s where we took a different route.
Squatting in the back of a van on the approach to the M6 motorway, holding a reluctant toddler on a potty, in a traffic jam that had already lasted for two hours, wouldn’t be one of the moments when you would expect your life to change forever.
‘If this is what it’s like on the A road, what the hell is happening on the motorway?’
‘You’ve said it, some kind of hell.’ Moth was driving, hoping to get the four of us to Scotland for a two-week holiday that we’d planned for months. Maybe this would be the trip when we found our dream home, the ruin in the mountains that we’d thought about for ten years. We didn’t know where we’d find it, but we were totally convinced it would be in the north. Tom sat in his car seat, a chocolate biscuit smeared across his face, hair, clothes and now me. Rowan, squirming and annoyed on the potty. The camping equipment mounded menacingly in the space behind me.
‘I don’t think I can take much more of this – it could go on all day. What happens if we just turn off the road now, just turn left, where does it go?’
‘West, if we keep going, west into Wales.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Yes, anything to get off this road.’
The sun set over Cardigan Bay as we stood on the side of a hill in a chill wind rising from the valley below. The sea was streaked in every tone of dying light, washing Moth’s face in a pink and orange hue. Tom was quiet in the backpack, his face a chocolate smudge on Moth’s shoulder, his plump lips relaxing in a gentle pucker, toddler hands fat and sticky, hanging limply from his sides, a deep and peaceful sleep. Rowan, not awake but not asleep, wrapped tightly in a blanket hugged on to my hip, her tangled blond hair catching the last tones of day.
‘I didn’t realize Wales was so beautiful.’ Moth had always been drawn north, to the high mountains and the open spaces, but something in the sunset held him entranced.
We held hands and looked out to sea, while the traffic on the motorway inched its way forwards. Unaware then that the next twenty years of our lives beckoned in a place we would never have discovered if we hadn’t taken an unplanned detour.
As I turned the corner to head back to the chapel Sarah stepped out of her doorway. Fighting the instinct to run, I took a deep breath and stopped.
‘Well, hi, how are you, haven’t seen you for a long time. How’s the writing?’
‘It’s going well.’ I could do this. I pulled my ozone-filled clothes just a little tighter, unaware that the chill I was feeling came from the fork in the road that I couldn’t see, from a direction I didn’t realize existed, from a choice I didn’t know I was making. ‘I’ve just had an article published in the Big Issue.’
‘Oh wow, well done. What’s it about?’
I took a deep breath. A breath filled with the doubt of choices made, of losses endured or yet to come. A breath filled with nights on wild headlands and pebbles from the beach.
‘It’s about losing our home in Wales and becoming homeless. About choosing to walk the South West Coast Path rather than wait for a council house and the many rural homeless people we met along the way, the hidden rural homeless.’
‘You lost your house, your home, everything?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t say before because I know it can make people feel quite uncomfortable. I’ve encountered that reaction so many times I felt I had to keep it to myself. But today I realized there’s no point.’
‘You don’t need to hide that here. There are some people who would react that way, but there are lots of others with a history of life falling apart, people who’ve come back to live with parents, or just to start again.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think it seems to be a bit of a mid-life theme. Lots of us find we have to go back to the beginning of our life in order to start again. Back to where we grew up, or where we were happiest. To a time before things went wrong. I see it like pressing the reset button.’
I watched her walk away, then leant over the wall that protected the narrow street from the drop down to the river. The water was full of boats moored for the summer: yachts, motorboats, the little blue boat that took visitors on river cruises, the black wooden hull of a tall ship, its sails tied down, the crew heading to shore. Children jumped off the harbour wall beneath the no swimming sign; old people in shorts tied their dinghy to the pontoon. Life. Life going on. Lives being lived.
It was all so simple and so clear. Sometimes you just need someone else to switch the light on in your dark place. The strong, fearless person who had finished the path had got lost somewhere in the hospital corridors, lost in a choice that had haunted me. Moth was right; I’d gone back to the start. Afraid of people, hiding, the child behind the sofa. But Sarah was right too; this was my moment to start afresh. The months of being that child again hadn’t been wasted time. She was afraid and isolated, yet she had a connection to the wilderness that hadn’t left her. She’d had something else, too, a dream that had been broken and lost along the way. I’d stood with her in her room as she stroked the books on her shelves, her small fingers running over the pictures of penguins on the spines, and imagining. The children shouted and splashed as they jumped off the wall, swimming away from the ferry as it weaved between the moored boats and came into the quay. I took one more breath of ozone air and went inside.
Google can find just about anything you need, if you ask the right question. After two hours of searching it gave me exactly what I was looking for. A non-fiction literary agent, not so big that they would ignore me, not so small that they would be ineffective. I uploaded my submission package and sat back as Rat stood up and stretched from an afternoon on the wall. I could see the sun beginning to set on the very last day of our walk along the South West Coast Path. I felt Moth’s hand in mine, the scent of blackberries in the air and the overwhelming sense that this moment is the only one we have, the only one we need.
I pressed the reset button.