After closing the door for the last time we had two weeks to put our few belongings into a friend’s barn and try to work out what to do next. The children couldn’t help: they were both students, living in shared accommodation, with barely enough money to keep themselves afloat. Moth’s brother was on holiday so we could use his house, but we had just two weeks before he came back with his family, then there wouldn’t be room for us all and we would have to leave. Only twenty miles away from home, just down the road, but we couldn’t go back. It was agonizing. Reeling from the shock of leaving our house and trying to acknowledge what the doctor had told us, the first few days passed in a near catatonic haze.
Logic said we should work hard and find somewhere to rent. It wasn’t just the house that had been taken from us, but our holiday-rental business too. Our income was gone. We’d need to find a job to enable us to reconstruct a life. But we were faced with the possibility that our life together was to be limited to a short time of moderately good health, followed by a decline into paralysis and death. I couldn’t leave him and go to work – I needed to spend every minute of this precious semi-health with him. I had to save every memory to carry with me into a lonely future.
I hated the doctor, sitting on the edge of his desk delivering his diagnosis as if he was presenting a gift. The best thing I can do for you, Moth, is give you a diagnosis. It was the very worst thing he could do. I wished he could take it away, and let me live without knowing. I didn’t want to see the black void of my future every time I looked at Moth. We stumbled through those days as if we had just come from a battlefield, scarred, shocked and lost.
Long-term camping was an option until we could find something better, but the best offer we had from a campsite was eighty pounds a week, far more than we could afford, and there was no housing benefit for campsite fees. No one we knew had a room to spare, or a garden they were willing to sacrifice for more than a few weeks. And we needed somewhere to settle our thoughts and come to terms with what had happened. No caravans were available in a holiday hot spot, where in midsummer every caravan is booked out for visitors who pay a lot more than housing benefit.
In an ideal world we’d have found a place to rent, but it was quickly apparent that when you’ve had your house repossessed it’s close to impossible to get a rental property. Our credit rating was on the floor. The council could put us on their waiting list if we chose that, but we were low priority and the only accommodation they could offer at that moment was a room in a bed and breakfast that housed mainly those with drug and alcohol problems. A girl with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail sat behind a desk in the council offices, speaking to us in a strong Welsh accent: ‘Well, if you’re not going to die soon, like in the next year, then you’re not that ill, are you, so I can’t call you a priority, can I?’ That was the moment when we knew it for certain: we’d rather be in the tent.
Back in Moth’s brother’s house I gazed through the window, dazed, unable to think of a way forward.
‘I’m glad really. I can’t imagine living in a council house down the road from the farm. That would be just soul-destroying.’ Not only that, but in such a tight-knit rural community we would be the source of gossip for months.
‘I know. At the farm we could shut ourselves away from everyone, couldn’t we? On our island.’
That’s what the farm had been to us, in every way: an island. As soon as we left the road and drove into the forest, we left the rest of the world behind. Beyond the trees the views opened up as if we had entered another world. Old field systems on all sides, separated by hedge-topped banks. Mountains rising high in the west and stretching away to the east, a delicate, smooth cloud snaking between. A huge buzzard lifting its wings, circling into the sky and hanging in the blue air, somewhere between the tree tops and the mountains. The world of the road, the villages and all human noise left behind as the forest closed the door behind us. But now we were cast adrift, with no safe haven to return to, floating through fog on a raft of despair with no notion of where we would come ashore, or if there would be a shore at all.
Moth stood by the window, looking across the hillside of gorse and heather. Home but not home.
‘I don’t think I can bear to stay around here. I need to put some space between Wales and us; it’s too painful to stay. I don’t know about the longer term, don’t know if I’ve got a longer term, but for now I need to be somewhere else. Need to look for somewhere else to call home.’
I took a deep breath.
‘Let’s pack the rucksacks then, and make it up as we go along.’
‘The South West Coast Path it is then.’
Packing a rucksack when you’re fifty just isn’t the same as when you’re twenty. The last time our packs had been ready for a trail was before the children were born, Moth still had long hair and I was a stone lighter. Then we’d shoved in anything we thought we would need and carried it regardless, our young bodies springing back from strain and injuries. We’d backpacked in the Lake District and Scotland, walking miles every day but nearly always staying on a campsite, very rarely wild camping. Thirty years on and I had the aches of twenty years of manual labour, damage that never quite heals but stays malevolently in the background. Stiff from three years spent fighting a court case, hunched over the laptop trying to construct our defence and prone to muscle damage at every twist or turn. And Moth? How could he possibly carry the weight he had before? We packed the rucksack as we would have in the past and gingerly lifted it on to his back. A sixty-litre pack, stuffed with our old orange canvas tent and two slightly rusty billy cans. Twice around the room and he was on his knees in agony.
‘Get this off me. I can’t do it.’
‘Then we’ll have to look at getting some different kit. Lighter tent for a start.’
‘We can’t afford it.’ Most of what we’d earned over the last year had gone towards the court case, or just supporting us while we worked on it. That, and two children in university at the same time. I’d returned the payments to everyone who’d booked the barn for their holiday that summer, which left us with only £320. But we did get forty-eight pounds a week in tax credits; as Moth had become increasingly unable to work, our income had dropped down to only the barn rental, which made us eligible for a weekly payment from the government. Even this small benefit needed an address, which meant staying in the area. We couldn’t stay, so we left the tax credits at the farm address and forwarded the post to Moth’s brother. Forty-eight pounds a week. We could survive on that, surely.
I reread Five Hundred Mile Walkies and told myself again that we could do this. Mark Wallington had romped along the South West Coast Path with a borrowed rucksack and a scruffy dog. We could do this, no problem. But it was obvious that we would have to walk it the other way around, from Poole to Minehead. The early section from Minehead to Padstow seemed by far the hardest, and the latter stretch from Plymouth to Poole the easiest. So it made absolute sense to walk the other way around and give ourselves time to adjust before we hit the harder sections. We just needed a guidebook. It had to be a guide that covered the whole trail, but it quickly became apparent that there was no guidebook that followed the route from south to north, they all went from north to south. I scoured the shelves in Cotswold Outdoors, but their massive guidebook section didn’t have a single volume going in the opposite direction. The poor skinny assistant got the full force of my disappointment.
‘I have to walk the other way, don’t you see, the start has to be easy for Moth. Mark Wallington was in his twenties and the biggest problem he had was popping rivets.’ Feeling red with anger and panic and self-pity, my rivets were about to pop.
‘I’m really sorry, ma’am, but there isn’t one.’ The assistant slipped away and I sat and sulked at the back of the store. If we had to start with the hard bit Moth might not be able to make it through the first week. What then? I wasn’t ready to face ‘what then’; my brain was moving into self-defence mode. There was only the walk; it was all I could think of, I couldn’t see beyond that. We looked at OS maps as an option, but to complete the path would take many more than we could afford, or carry.
‘Ray, I’m not going to walk five hundred miles reading a guidebook backwards. We’ll just start in Minehead and take it really, really slow.’ Moth was stroking my hair, but all I wanted was to get into a sleeping bag and cry. Don’t crumble now. You’re supposed to be the strong one, you’re not the one that’s going to choke to death. Easily derailed, I was only just hanging on.
We had to choose a book and when we looked properly there was no choice. Paddy Dillon’s little brown book, The South West Coast Path: From Minehead to South Haven Point, with its comforting waterproof cover and an Ordnance Survey map that covered the whole path, fitted so nicely in my hand and in Moth’s pocket that it had to be the one. But when we flicked through it over a cup of tea it became obvious that when Mark was walking his dog, he had either lost count of the miles, or missed a bit, or there’d been some seismic shift in the decades between that book and now, stretching Cornwall further into the Atlantic. The path wasn’t 500 miles long, but 630.
We had to buy some new bits of equipment; it couldn’t be avoided. Moth’s old rucksack had massive metal buckles that had rusted and seized and the lining of mine had disintegrated, letting the water pour through. The price of replacing them with anything of the same quality was horrifying. Two new rucksacks would leave us nearly £250 down. We searched for a cheaper option, finally choosing two packs from Mountain Warehouse, for less than half the price of one big-brand pack. They didn’t have any of the bells and whistles, but they were functional enough. The rucksacks became the focus of the next few days. Filling, refilling, packing, unpacking and walking around the house wearing them. It wouldn’t work. The stuff we wanted to take just wouldn’t fit in the small packs.
‘No, Ray, I can’t carry a bigger one. Let’s just treat it like leaving the farm. Let’s repack with only what we absolutely need to survive. Nothing else. Then maybe I’ll be able to manage it.’
‘The tent’s too heavy. I can’t fit it in and it’s too heavy for your shoulder, but there’s no way we can afford a decent tent, something that’s going to stand up to being on a cliff top for months. We’re stuffed.’
‘EBay?’
Waiting for an eBay auction to finish on what would be our home for the rest of the summer and maybe beyond was nerve-racking. Three seconds, two, one, and it was ours. A used-once Vango tent weighing three kilograms, a quarter of the weight of our old canvas Vango and a fraction of the size. We danced around the kitchen table; we had just bought our new home for thirty-eight pounds.
I rang our daughter, Rowan, desperately excited, needing to share this tiny scrap of good news, wanting to alleviate the atmosphere that had settled between us over the last two weeks of endless gloom. Wanting to be Mum and make everything okay. I had to get back to being that mum, but as soon as the phone began to ring I was regretting it. They might have grown up and left, but the home we’d lost was theirs too. Moth was their dad and his illness was as hard for them to accept as it was for me. These weeks were changing the core of my relationship with them. There were things happening that I couldn’t protect them from. The balance was shifting, and I hated it. I wasn’t ready. Yet they were two surprisingly well-adjusted adults – we’d done a great job – and they were ready. I was the one who still wanted to hold the world at bay and keep their lives in a perfect bubble. If I wasn’t that protecting hand to them any more, then what was I? It was the last shred that, deep down, I recognized as being ‘me’. Without that, what was left? Nothing.
‘What are you thinking of, Mum, are you mad? What if he falls off the cliff?’ Rowan’s voice jolted me back to reality. ‘You’ve got no money, so how are you going to eat? Do you really think you’re going to spend the rest of the summer in a tent? How can you? Dad can hardly get up off the chair some days; what happens if he seizes up on a cliff? Where will you camp? Do you know how much campsites cost? Have you told Tom?’
‘I know, Row. It’s completely crazy, but what else are we going to do? We can’t just sit and wait for a council house, that’s not us. We need this; as long as we’re together we’ll be okay, don’t worry.’
The line crackled in the silence.
‘I’m sending you a new mobile, with a battery that lasts more than ten minutes. Call me every day, and don’t ignore me when I call you. And tell Tom.’
‘Okay, Row, love you too.’
‘Hi, Tom. Me and Dad have decided to walk the South West Coast Path. It’s probably going to take at least two months, maybe three.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s six hundred and thirty miles and we’ll have to camp all the way.’
‘That’s so cool.’
Our manic star-jumping toddler had become too chilled for his own good, while the disco-dancing glitter queen had turned into my mum.
But who was I now? Who was Moth? Would 630 miles be far enough to go to find the answer?
The tent arrived three days later and we erected it in the living room: a wide low green dome, spanning the floor like the moss cap on a granite rock. We unrolled our self-inflating mats and got into our super lightweight sleeping bags, bought for five pounds each from Tesco. I made a cup of tea on the tiny Campingaz stove, and we sat in the tent doorway to watch Gardener’s World on the TV. When we tried to get out, Moth couldn’t move. However hard he tried, he couldn’t stand. I dragged him out in his sleeping bag and hauled him to his feet.
‘Do you think Rowan’s right? It’s probably not the wisest thing we’ve ever done.’
‘But when have we ever taken the easy option?’
We packed the rucksacks for the final time, in the knowledge that if we’d forgotten something, or there were things that we couldn’t fit in, then we would have to manage without them for the whole summer. Buying new kit was going to be out of the question; there would be no spare cash to replace equipment along the way. We’d be lucky if we could eat, especially having to buy our food on the south-west coast during the peak holiday season. The pile of things we wanted to take grew next to each pack. They obviously weren’t going to fit, but we started cramming them in anyway. I put my spare clothes in first, bare minimum to last for a couple of months and the pack was already half full. Nothing else for it, this was where I could save space. Throwing them across the sofa, I started again with only what I absolutely couldn’t manage without. Old cotton swimming costume, three pairs of knickers, one pair of socks, a cotton vest, a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved T-shirt to wear in the sleeping bag. Everything else I’d be wearing, so I put those to one side; another pair of cotton leggings, a short flowery viscose dress from a charity shop, cotton vest, red pair of walking socks and a cheap zip-up fleece. That was it.
I rolled the clothes into a ball in a small dry sack at the bottom of the pack. Then everything else. A self-inflating mat, the tiny gas stove, a gas canister, a stainless-steel pan with a handle that folded over to clip the lid shut, matches, an enamel plate and mug, teaspoon and a plastic spork, a way too small crushable pillow, the sleeping bag that squashed down with its compression straps to be small enough to fit into a side pocket, waterproof jacket and leggings. Then all the other trivia I felt I couldn’t manage without, a three-inch torch, an A5 exercise book, pen, foldable toothbrush and two-inch tube of toothpaste, travel shampoo, a quick-drying blue towel, lip balm, tissues, face wipes, mobile phone, collapsible phone charger, a two-litre Volvic plastic bottle of water that I buckled under the little straps on the very top of the rucksack. And a purse with £115, which was all we had left, and a bank card. I would carry the food too: we’d buy most of that along the way, but to start out with we had a three-inch tin full of concentrated Half Spoon sugar that took up half the space of ordinary, fifty teabags, two packs of rice and two packs of noodles, some strangely orange long-life meatballs in a bag, a tin of mackerel, some breakfast cereal bars and two Mars bars. That was our store cupboard, which we thought we would keep as our emergency rations, and top up throughout the trip.
I forced the top of the rucksack closed and pulled it tight with the compression straps. It was as full and tight as a football. I sat on it and it didn’t squash at all.
Moth’s rucksack was very similar, although instead of the flowery dress he had a pair of combat trousers which would roll up to his knees to make shorts. He had the first-aid kit, a penknife and a four-inch monocular for spying on the trail ahead. Tucked in the inside pocket was a thin copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which he’d carried with him on every trip for years. Instead of food and cooking equipment, he would carry the tent strapped to the outside of his pack. He put Paddy Dillon in the leg pocket of his combat trousers and we were ready.
Weighing the packs on the bathroom scales, somehow they both weighed in at almost the same weight: only eight kilograms. I still felt it was too much for Moth, but he picked it up and put one arm through anyway.
When he tried to pass his painful shoulder through the strap, it was too difficult, so I took the weight at the bottom of the pack and eased it over his shoulder. I had to do it before I put my pack on, as when it was on my shoulders my arms couldn’t reach high enough to move his straps. If I then rested my pack on my knee, I could swing my rucksack round to get my arm through, then Moth took the weight while I threaded my second arm in. Easy.
We stood together like a pair of stranded turtles.
Crazy but we had to do it. If we didn’t, we’d have to face the fact that the future would stretch beyond this summer and everything that future would hold. Neither of us was ready for that.
‘It’s a fact; we’re not as ninja as we used to be.’
Putting the rucksacks in the van, we turned south, driving away, leaving it all behind. It was a dream. Nothing was real. Driving away from twenty years of family life, work life, everything we’d owned, hopes, dreams, the future, the past. Not heading for a new beginning, not a fresh start with life opening up before us. The earth had cracked; we left ourselves on the other side of a void that we could never cross. Running from the rupture in someone else’s shell. Just driving away. And ahead of us? The walk, only the walk.