The sprawl of Newquay was a shock after the wilderness, but strangely welcome at the same time. The urban blanket begins in Porth and stretches all the way to the Gannel: a collection of headlands, intersected by sandy beaches, catching some of the best surfing waves in the country. The town built its reputation on the newly growing surf culture of the sixties, but that heyday has passed, leaving a town becoming down at heel. Home now to the ever-growing tribes of stag and hen parties, shrieking through the streets in fancy dress, filling shop doorways with empty bottles and pools of puke. It’s off-putting to the locals, families and surfers alike: all the trade that the shopkeepers would like to attract. But the pubs and restaurants need the party revenue to keep them open during the winter. This contradiction has left the town pivoting on an awkward catch-22. Only a handful of surf shops now remind us of its past, and its best hope for the future.
Being separate from people for large chunks of time had reduced our tolerance levels, but for a moment it was comforting to feel part of humanity. For a moment. And it was a good place to shelter from the rain ripping in on a horizontal westerly. I zipped the waterproof hood tightly round my face and viewed Newquay through a tunnel.
It was quickly evident that beyond the holidaymakers, still there in numbers in September, there was another side to the town, a side the vacationers ignored. The invisible ones. The homeless street dwellers lining the shopping areas in greater numbers than we had seen since Glastonbury. Wet bodies curled in doorways. But these weren’t well-honed professional beggars, these were tough, hardened rough sleepers. A tall, broad ex-soldier asked us for money, and when we told him we had none and were homeless ourselves he didn’t question it, but gave us directions to a soup kitchen. Moth gave him some coins and his last chocolate bar. We had very little left, so wandered up to dodge the rain and claim our free bowl of soup.
The soldier’s directions had sent us to St Petroc’s, a charity aimed at helping the single homeless who fall through the net of social care provision. I didn’t ask what happened to couples that fell through the net, but they redirected us to the soup kitchen anyway. Depending on which statistics you read, Cornwall has the second or the fifth highest rate of rough sleepers in the country, outside of London. It was claimed to be just forty or sixty-five people, or thereabouts. If that was true, every homeless person in Cornwall was currently dipping bread in tomato soup in a disused church in Newquay. The anomaly in figures was explained by a volunteer; apparently, only those people on the street in the given area between the set hours of the count could be included in the figures. And that was if the person confirmed that he was homeless and sleeping rough. And if he was asleep, or appeared to be, you couldn’t wake him to ask.
‘So, does every homeless person sleep on the street in the given area at the right time?’
‘Of course not, they’re everywhere. There’s a group that sleep in the woods, but the council want to get them out so they can create some sort of public access space. What they really need are shelters for overnight stays, not pretty paths in a woodland, taking away what little safety they have. They’re opening some new shelters this winter, ten beds here, ten there – it’s better than nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough.’
‘Trouble is, people think we’re all addicts of some sort; puts them off helping. They think it’s a waste of time.’
‘Of course there’s a high proportion of addicts on the streets, but whatever makes you homeless, you still deserve help.’
The rain had cleared and the sun flickered through the clouds with a thin, watery light. We sat on a bench on the steaming pavement and watched people go by. Shoppers, holidaymakers, mums with kids fresh out of school in shiny new uniforms, skaters on longboards, dog walkers, a homeless boy with a duvet over his shoulder. We were all of those people, and none of them. The bakery by the post office was selling the last of its pasties for twenty-five pence each. Moth bought as many as he could, handing one to each of the people sitting on rags in doorways, keeping the rest for ourselves.
Fistral Beach was loud with booming waves and neoprene dancers heading out to sea. The street behind was lined with blond, tanned boys in VW vans, anxiously watching the waves for a good set coming through. But we carried on, crossing the Gannel estuary by the wooden footbridge, just ahead of the tide. Then on, out on to open headlands and our room for the night.
The sky held only the faintest haze of light as Moth got out of the tent alone and made tea. I was still in the sleeping bag, under a thermal blanket that we’d traded for Robinson Crusoe in a charity shop in Newquay. A flock of sheep were surrounding us when he opened the flaps, but dashed away with the sound of the zip. A rock just off the headland, oddly named the Chick, was swarming with sea birds. The cacophony of noise drowned out the sound of the swelling sea rushing through the gap. Herring gulls, black-backed gulls, oystercatchers, cormorants and terns, all bickering over the same lump of inhospitable, jagged rock. It seemed every living thing in the area wanted to occupy Kelsey Head, and none of us were happy to share the space. We left the birds to it, passed the empty army camp at Penhale, with its abandoned Nissen huts, and headed down on to Perranporth Beach. I could live in one of these corrugated iron huts. With a little imagination, the whole site could provide housing for the people of Newquay who desperately need shelter, but undoubtedly it’ll be converted for leisure use.
The beach is flat, straight and as long as a landing strip. Moth’s shoulders were stiff, and I was more tired than normal, so we sat in the sand beneath two sculptures made from beach debris. Human rubbish fashioned into human forms. We made some more tea and shared the last of the ibuprofen. An old man carefully laid out a towel close by, then methodically took off every stitch of clothing and lay very precisely on the towel. There was something close to tortoise-like about the naked old man, wrinkling, drooping as if his old skin was sliding away, soon to reveal a pink, exposed, smooth new body. I had to stare. We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show.
One naked man was interesting, but two became a little awkward. When a third shouted ‘good morning’ as he strode past in only walking boots and blue socks, I felt I had to put the stove away and carry on. The alternative was to make them tea and discuss anti-wrinkle cream. We left, feeling overdressed and half tempted to go for a full body tan.
The beach didn’t end but became a desert, stretching on remorselessly. The scorching sand scalded our bare feet and we put our boots back on. Cutting up into the dunes to find some shade we lost all sense of direction. Rather than showing the way out, every peak just revealed more never-ending dunes reflecting the heat. Dried out, turning to dust, we slid through the sand back down to the beach and fixed our eyes on the cliffs beyond Perranporth, a shimmering distant oasis that we might never reach. Eventually, a swarm of people and windbreaks emerged from the haze near a car park. The end. We begged iced water from a café and slugged it down, listening to our bodies hiss with pleasure.
I peeled more skin to find yet another nose.
The cliffs of St Agnes Head are desolate, scraped and scarred by its mining history. Littered now with open shafts and ruined buildings, left open and weeping with sulphur fumes and dust, the land stained with a rainbow of ore.
The days had fallen into a routine. Between morning and early evening, camping spots abound. After six, they’re nowhere to be seen. The nights were getting longer and colder; as soon as the sun sank, the air temperature dropped quickly behind. That morning had been our earliest start and without realizing we’d walked through a day which had become our longest. But now we were exhausted, desperate to find somewhere for the night. The Nancekuke Common RAF airbase rose to our left, with its high steel fence trapping us into a strip of gorse and bramble. The land was dead and still and the fence endless. Dropping down into a shallow valley, a patch of grass seemed promising. But the valley had been barricaded on the landward side with a man-made dam of rubble, grown over with gorse, brambles and thistles. The land around the dam oozed water, running with ore-stained mud. We carried on, the light falling, darkness coming, until eventually the fence turned inland and the airfield turned to farmland and fields of brassicas. In the final moments of light we pitched the tent in the corner of a grass field. No longer a twenty-minute battle with hooks and pegs, the tent was up in five minutes in semi-darkness. I heated a tin of soup; our legs were throbbing, our strength drained to zero by sand and fences.
The sky lit into colours we hadn’t seen since the Rumps, fading to blackness, then a silver light that moved with the sea.
‘Am I seeing things, or are those cabbages glowing?’ Moth was wandering around the grass field, trying to stretch the aches from his body before sleeping. ‘Do you think it’s a trick of the moonlight?’ The field had a light green aura, a supernatural hue.
‘No, they really are. Could be just the angle of the moon.’
‘What on earth do you think goes on inside that fence?’
Now a radar base, the site was originally built during the Second World War as RAF Portreath. By 1950 it was no longer needed and was given back to the government. Using equipment brought back from Nazi Germany, the government turned the airfield into a chemical-weapon production plant as an offshoot to Porton Down and began manufacturing the deadly nerve agent Sarin B. Production continued for two or three years alongside other chemical weapons. An investigation by the Independent newspaper reported that forty-one deaths and a high incidence of serious illness occurred amongst the workers involved in the production of Sarin B. In the study ‘Sickness Experience at Nancekuke’ in 1970, it was found that workers at the plant who had been involved in Sarin B production were 33 per cent more likely to suffer serious illness than the average and 50 per cent more likely to suffer respiratory disease, the classic outcome of nerve-gas exposure. The government denied any errors on their behalf, suppressing the report and altering its conclusions, declaring that during this period there had merely been a ‘higher than expected level of absenteeism’. However, in 1971, they admitted negligence, and made ‘generous’ payouts to sufferers, in the region of £120 each. In 2000, the government finally admitted that they had dumped the machinery used to produce Sarin B in the mineshafts on the common and began to clean the site in 2003.
The next morning the cabbages were just plain green and the holidaymakers were already arriving in the valley of Portreath, not far away.
The path skipped around the rims of deep hidden coves and in and out of car parks as it ran parallel with the road, the nearness to the road making it perfect dog-walking country. We had grown to appreciate the challenges dog walkers face every time they encountered a stile. A lot of wooden stiles on the path have an open section at the side, with a piece of wood that slides away to allow the dog through. Which seems to work fine for small dogs, but anything bigger and it needs to be circus trained, or collected up as a huge, hairy, muddy bundle and manhandled over to the other side. Some stiles are made of stone slabs trapped horizontally into the wall, which necessitate the walker going up the stairs on one side, traversing the top of the wall, then down the staircase on the other side. Some are huge, sturdy constructions that would befit a castle: perfect for big dogs, but small ones need to be carried.
We were at a gate. Gates are great for dogs, even if, like this one, it’s a kissing gate. These are ingenious constructions: a C shape of fence has a gate inserted into it that’s hinged on the opposite side, allowing the walker to enter the C from one side, then open the gate and pass out the other side. Great for everyone: walkers and dogs can get through easily; great for farmers, unless they have really intelligent sheep. But not great for backpackers, or fat people. I’m convinced that the usability of the kissing gate depends on the size of the person constructing it. If they’re large they leave plenty of space between the edge of the gate and the back of the C, enough room to pass behind the gate and out the other side. If they’re small their concept of space is completely different. After being trapped repeatedly in these gates, the backpacks wedging us in, we had developed a way of getting through that prevented us getting stuck. Enter the C with the gate fully open, climb up the back of the C until the backpack is higher than the gate, kick the gate to fully closed, then climb down and exit the C.
After spending a morning at stiles waiting for dogs, lifting dogs over, catching dogs that had been thrown over, we came to a tiny kissing gate. I climbed the C, just as a chubby man in early retirement, who had been following us, rushed up to the gate, obviously in a desperate hurry to get home to read the newspaper. He completely ignored me hanging precariously from the top of the fence and let his three dogs through one at a time. Then stood angrily getting redder.
‘Well, are you going through or what?’
I climbed out of the C, followed by Moth, and let the chubby man go rushing past. There was loud clapping from the other side of the hedge.
‘Wow, that was so good, what a perfect way to get through the gate.’ A smart elderly couple were clapping excitedly. ‘Could you possibly do it again so I could film it?’
Moth obligingly climbed in and out of the gate while the couple cooed over the camera, shaking him vigorously by the hand when their masterpiece was finished.
‘The book club are going to love that; do you mind if I put it on the blog?’
‘No, feel free, mate.’
‘We’re coming to see you in St Ives. We can’t wait.’
‘Are you really?’ Moth pulled his hat lower and stepped back. ‘Well, who exactly do you think you’re going to see?’
‘You, of course! Oh, is that a clue? Is that the theme, our different personalities? Perfect, who are you today?’
‘I’m just a homeless bum going for a walk.’
‘Oh, that’s perfect, perfect. Oh, we’re so excited now, can’t wait to see you perform, Simon. Bye for now.’ They carried on in the opposite direction. ‘Split personalities, contradictions, opposites. Thrilling to have a heads-up, let’s blog this as soon as we get back.’
We watched them go, deep in conversation.
‘It’s just funny now. Imagine the stick he’s going to get when his book club read his blog. He’ll never live it down.’
‘Cruel.’
‘But we still don’t know who Simon Armitage is.’
‘No, but we have a clue: he’s interesting to book clubs, so he must be a writer.’
‘And they’re going to see him perform in St Ives.’
‘Writers don’t perform, do they?’
‘Could be a book signing or something, but you wouldn’t call that a performance.’
‘Corker. Whoever he is we might even get to meet him.’
‘Don’t know if I want to now, quite like the mystery.’
We were hanging over the edge of Hell’s Mouth to see the seals on the rocky shore beneath, grey forms lying in the sun or dropping into the water, so lucky to have caught a moment of silence between the tourists that walk here in droves from the car park and beach café. An ozone wind rushed over the edge, bringing the creatures’ deep, sorrowful calls echoing up through the rocks. Their sadness was surely an illusion, a human interpretation of the animals’ noise. The sound held no sense of doom, or longing; they were probably bickering over space, living and dying between the rock and the sea. Not emotion, just an echo of the low tone of life.
We moved away as more tourists came, past Godrevy Lighthouse, glittering in the sun as it reflected from the sea. A bright shining light along the endless headlands all the way back to Trevose Lighthouse and possibly, faintly, in the far, far distance, Hartland Point. It was impossible to think that we were the same people who had stood at Hartland Point, with its bunting café; less still the broken shells that had stepped off the bus in Minehead. And before that? Out of reach, too far away now, our home had drifted out of range. It existed, but the distance made it untouchable. The raw, jagged, visceral pain of loss had gone, but the memory of it was still there, if I closed my eyes and let it come. It wasn’t at Godrevy though; it had been left on another headland, the pain was only in the echo.
The wind picked up, whipping the sea into a frenzy. Hayle Beach stretched for miles ahead, basking in the white glow from St Ives, clearly in view now across Carbis Bay. We walked easily across firm sand, not like the grasping, soft horrors of Perranporth, our eyes always on the sea as it closed in quickly, rising and crashing in froth and spume. Herring gulls calling daylight calls, tossed up by the air currents, mocked our slow progress. Kite surfers lifted from the waves, harnessing the air and the water, and, just for a second, hanging between the two, free from both. At low tide and with extreme care it’s possible to cross the mouth of the River Hayle, but as soon as the strong currents start to fill the estuary it becomes a deadly trap. The tide pushed us inland and we followed the path along a string of tiny wooden shacks, gilded with shells, buoys, driftwood and collected beach debris. I could have lived in a little wooden hut, a tiny blue shelter for the winter that was coming. The summer visitors were thinning with the shorter days and most of the shacks were empty, soon to be shuttered against the storms to come.
The path disappeared into a concrete sprawl near the old quay and then became a pavement that would follow the side of the road for miles. Paddy says some walkers opt to miss the urban section between here and St Ives and get the bus. It was late afternoon and the walk would have left us stranded in a residential area after dark with nowhere to camp, so we opted for the bus. We had just enough money left for the fare and there would be a headland for the night beyond St Ives, so we queued at the bus stop.
‘Where are you guys off to? Getting a bit late in the season for backpackers.’ A twenty-something in long shorts and a hoody was in the queue ahead of us.
‘Land’s End, then it’s all down to the weather. We might just carry on.’
‘How long have you got?’
‘As long as we want.’
‘What, nothing to go back for? That’s amazing, doing this at your age. Just getting out there and doing what you want.’
‘It’s not quite like that.’
‘Oh, it is, man, if you haven’t got to go back, you’re free, living the life. Good on ya, guys.’ He got on the bus going the other way, but shouted back. ‘Live the life, old guys.’
We sat on the bus; it was a strange sensation to move so quickly, covering a distance that would have taken us hours on foot in just a few minutes. The path had taught us that foot miles were different; we knew the distance, the stretch of space from one stop to the next, from one sip of water to the next, knew it in our bones, knew it like the kestrel in the wind and the mouse in his sight. Road miles weren’t about distance; they were just about time.
We got off in St Ives, an hour before dark, on the wrong side of town from an open headland. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered. Moth still filled the air next to me and we were free, living the life.