That was Sunday night. Or, if you want to be pernickety, Monday morning.
We decided to leave after an early breakfast on the Wednesday, and since that gave us just two days to get ourselves organised we adopted a plan of campaign.
Henry’s house was made the collecting point for all the paraphernalia. Henry said that was logical, because we’d be going in his Volvo. Fraser said it was even more logical than that because it meant that Henry could lie back at home and rootle through the various bits of gear that he (Fraser) and I brought in.
I rang a camping shop for a lightweight tent and three hiking-frames. Fraser checked the coach times for the girls’ journey to Wales, and one way and another we pushed on our preparations with vigour and common sense.
Fraser and I had a shock on the Tuesday afternoon. We had gone into the town together to pick up the groceries and the camping equipment, and as we strolled between the two shops we were talking in a desultory sort of way about whether we mightn’t be overloading ourselves.
The camping shop in Milford is one of those vast, shadowy, professional-looking places which have all changed their names from things like Bodger and Perkins: Canvases and Ropemakers into Living Off The Land and Great Outdoors.
Fraser and I walked in, and I said to the proprietor, ‘We have come to collect the tent and three walking-frames which I rang you about yesterday.’
‘Ah yes,’ said the man without glancing up. ‘That’s the lightweight Matthew-Walker. I’ll just finish this gent and then I’ll be right with you, my friend.’
I looked at Fraser in some surprise. Fraser looked at me. We both looked behind us. Apart from the two of us and the proprietor there was nobody else in the shop.
We peered into the darker recesses, but there was no sign of life. The canvas jackets and sou’westers were hanging bulky and motionless on a rail at the farther end. The shop window was still as a photograph.
After a while Fraser started strolling about in curiosity, peering inside the lids of trunks and snapping his fingers at the faces of all the plaster models to see if he could make them blink. I put my head into a small blue tent, but it was empty.
All this while the proprietor seemed to be carrying on a conversation with himself, ticking things off on a pad as he prattled along. ‘Spare boot-studs,’ he would say. ‘Two packets of those. Laces - two. Tent-pegs - now we had the hardened steel type, didn’t we? - yes. So it’s four boxes of D173B - always best to have the proper job.’
After a while Fraser and I just perched ourselves on a heap of sleeping-bags and watched him. It seemed such a harmless eccentricity that we were disappointed when he finally got to the bottom of the page and started adding it up. ‘What a pity,’ we said to ourselves. ‘We were just beginning to enjoy this. So much better than half the stuff you get on the goggle-box nowadays.’
‘There we are, sir. This is your docket,’ said the proprietor eventually, maintaining his illusion to the last. ‘We’ll charge it to your private account.’ And so saying he tore the top page off his pad and stuffed it into a pile of knapsacks and bedrolls that was propped against the front of the counter.
‘Thanks very much,’ said the pile of knapsacks and bedrolls. Then, in a most astonishing way, the pile seemed to pick itself up and started moving towards the door.
‘Nice day for a walk anyway,’ shouted the knapsacks and bedrolls back over its shoulder as it went.
‘Mind how you go now,’ exclaimed the proprietor cheerfully.
Fraser said it was the sight of the mickey-mouse feet trundling like clockwork beneath all the apparatus that first told him that there was some form of humanity strapped inside it.
For my part I never saw the feet, so I had to wait for the whole bundle to stagger sideways into a pillar before I realised there was a man there. Huddersfield-born, I would say, and judging by the choice of words a man of no mean education.
We asked the proprietor if the man was part of the British Trans-Polar Expedition, and the proprietor said, no, he was a chap called Copple who was off for a weekend’s rambling in Bedfordshire.
‘A very good customer of mine Mr Copple,’ he said, suddenly alert like a missionary or estate agent. ‘Deep into survival economics - it makes so much sense when you think about it.’
Fraser said, as we drove back, that it would be a good warning for us not to take too much.
We found Henry at home - hard at work entertaining the girls to tea and madeira cake. He was surrounded by a sea of packages and bundles, most of which I suspect he had put there himself as necessities for the trip.
Widget said we’d never be able to carry all that lot on our backs and Henry said we certainly would. Katrina said it depended what you meant by ‘carry’. In the sense that it could all be piled on to us somehow to score an entry in the Guinness Book of Records she couldn’t deny that it might be technically possible. But we had to think of the practical aspects. She had read somewhere that tortoises which rolled over in the desert were never able to get back upright again and died horribly under the howling blue sky.
Fraser suggested that the practical way of finding out was for the three of us to get changed into our walking clothes and then strap ourselves into the back-packs to see how comfortable we were. This seemed like a good idea and it didn’t take long - at least not so far as putting on the clothes was concerned.
For myself I had been rather waiting for a chance to change. I had given a good deal of quiet thought to what I was going to wear and I expected the effect to be rather striking. A gentleman on holiday, it seemed to me, should appear to be just that - a gentleman, on holiday. Not for him the leatherette plimsolls and padded anorak of the bogus professional. From the wardrobe in my den I had selected a pair of my uncle’s old plus-fours woven from a particularly tasteful pinkish tweed, hairy stockings and army boots, and a new lightweight colonial jacket in beige denim which I had snapped up at the sales.
Fraser and I met at the top of the stairs. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed when he saw me.
I gave him a look of disgust. For some mysterious reason he himself appeared to be dressed out of the scourings of the garden shed.
Our entry certainly caused a sensation. As we came in, Widget dropped a saucer with a bang, and Penny broke out into a nervous laugh and had to be calmed down with a glass of water.
Just at that moment Henry opened the door. For a second I thought we had been joined by a bumblebee. Then I realised that that couldn’t be so. The middle part of his body from the waist to the knee was swathed in black nylon knickerbockers with a yellow zig-zag stripe careering up the thigh. He had no stockings, but an enormous pair of mountain boots made him look as if he was walking on sucker-pads. His headgear was a luminous long-peaked golf cap.
Katrina said: ‘Let us be serious for a moment. As a piece of contemporary theatre or a trio of lunatics in a Christmas charades party your appearances could not be faulted. However, you are supposed to be walking through the countryside and I am anxious to avoid a terrorist incident. The inhabitants of the Welsh borders are a simple people, and to speak frankly I am not sure that they will get the joke. They may see your arrival - and I can’t say that I could blame them - as an invasion of privacy, possibly even a sketch for a BBC satirical programme. I can’t speak for anyone else, but as far as Henry is concerned if he doesn’t make this journey in a Guernsey sweater and jeans he can look for other accommodation when he gets back.’
Widget said the same, and Penny said that provided Fraser could spare her forty-eight hours and the money for seven reels of thread and a new washing machine she thought she could get him looking respectable before he set out.
So it was back upstairs again, change, and back down again feeling disgruntled. But the mood didn’t last long. The sight of the back-packs and all the equipment soon had Henry brightening up.
Henry loves equipment. It goes so well with his indolent nature. In fact, if it weren’t for the warm-hearted action of his friends in steering him out on walks and cycle-rides and on to tennis courts, he could cheerfully sit at home all day just playing with the gadgets and instruction books he has got himself without bothering about the physical side of the thing at all.
Take these hiking-frames, for instance. There they all were, neatly folded away into their plastic wallets, each containing its delicious bundle of tubes and straps, to say nothing of the little packets of wing-nuts and snap-on clips. Then there was the instruction leaflet with its picture of a gypsy-eyed campeuse beckoning you in no fewer than six languages to plunge inside and start assembling all the bits and pieces. ‘Assemblage actuated with facility,’ was the way she expressed herself in the English version - and I must say you can’t put it plainer than that.
You’ve noticed, have you, the odd thing about instruction leaflets, that however arduous the task it always seems to be taken in hand by a woman in the few minutes she can spare between slipping into her swimsuit and dashing down to the beach. I suppose it is all to do with the march of progress. There was a time when grown men would make heavy weather of a simple job like re-aligning a land-drain or taking the cylinder-head off a combine harvester. Today this sort of thing can be done quite easily while your nail varnish is drying.
So, with Henry and Fraser and me doing the operation, just think what a doddle it would be. We each opened our plastic packet and laid all the pieces out in front of us. Yummy yummy.
I had one piece less than Henry, and Fraser had a piece which was a different shape from any of ours, but Henry told us both to stop griping. He said the whole thing would be covered in the instructions.
‘One,’ he said, reading attentively from the page. ‘Overplace bracket A at Arm 6.’
We did as we were told.
‘Two. Samely Bracket B, Arm 7.’
Quite.
‘Three. Proform unique compaction.’
Now I freely admit it was probably here that we went wrong, though I will say of my own compaction that it was certainly unique. As a result of it, Bracket A quite capriciously sheared itself off and lay on the carpet with its feet in the air, looking for a role, so to speak. By comparison with mine, Fraser and Henry’s compactions were weak-kneed, lily-livered affairs which didn’t seem to advance the cause of back-pack assembly by a single step.
We all stopped and looked at the picture. Then we tried again.
After that we tried again.
It seemed to us - and this is why we gave so much attention to the compaction proforming process - that Stage 3 was an important step in terms of the overall assembly. After Stage 3, you see, the girl in the illustration had quite clearly got herself something which was the recognisable skeleton of a hiking-frame. And it not only looked right, but it obviously hung together, because as soon afterwards as Stage 4 she could be observed kneeing it in the groin in order to ‘sustain curves for shapement formation’ - a fairly painful moment for the frame, by the look of things.
Now our frames weren’t like that at all. When you picked our frames up they all just tumbled apart on to the floor and rolled about in little pieces as though they wanted us to play spillikins with them.
‘Look,’ said Henry after the fifth attempt at compaction. ‘You two take the picture and I’ll do the action bit. Then you watch and tell me what’ - he nearly said ‘what the bloody flaming hell’ but he didn’t - ‘you tell me what I am doing wrong. Ready ... Go!’
Fraser and I got it at once. In a flash. No doubt about it at all.
‘You’re not grinning properly,’ we said. ‘Look at the drawing, man. Behold the wench swathed in smiles from ear to ear. Subliminal stuff. We’re in the realms of the occult, Henry old lad - mind-over-matter and all that.’
‘Think of Tibet,’ Fraser added encouragingly.
I must say that, for somebody who is as out of touch with the occult as Henry normally is, the results of this advice were far better than we could have expected. Briefly remarking ‘Sod Tibet!’ - a well-known greeting in the Himalayas - Henry put his foot on Arm 6 as it sat there overplacing Bracket A and scrunched it down into firm contact with the carpet. I couldn’t see the grin on his face of course because he had his back to me; but, judging by the outcome, it must have been one of those big wide dreamy ones of his which he lets loose from time to time. Result? Compaction. Good, old-fashioned, unique compaction - and marvellously proformed with it. Absolutely as per diagram.
Fraser and I said that now we’d seen how it was done we’d let Henry carry on to the finish. We said we didn’t want to steal his thunder by coming up with half-baked imitations of our own.
Henry got on pretty well after that. He formed the shapement curves for Stage 4, and then he hooked on Brackets C to E and overplaced them at Arms 2 to 5. Then he got the straps in place and extended all the buckles so they fitted round his tummy. And then, just as he was about to break into his broadest grin, he caught the eye of Fraser and me looking out at him over a Tibetan peak of packs and packages.
‘That’s all the stuff we’ve got to carry, is it?’ he said nervously.
‘No,’ we assured him. ‘It’s all the stuff you’ve got to carry. It is your third, traveller.’
‘Either that,’ I said, ‘or you can hire a porter.’
We laid the frame down on the floor and tied the bundles on for him. Henry said there was a proper way of ‘dressing’ a back-pack so that everything had its place. But we said we would overlook it if he wasn’t properly dressed on this occasion. ‘It’s just for the experiment,’ we said.
Henry said there was a proper way of putting on a back-pack too, and we said come on show us. So he knelt down on his left knee, and after a brief search for one of the shoulder-straps which had concealed itself inside the rolled up sleeping-bags, we finally got him saddled into the thing. Then Fraser and I strolled away towards the mantelpiece and started eating cake, while Henry went very quiet and pink in the face.
Fraser and I watched him with keen interest. Exactly what Henry was doing kneeling on the floor going pink in the face we didn’t know. I thought myself that he might be doing some exercises - a silent muscle-flexing routine which we would all have to go through every time we set out. Fraser commented through a mouthful of crumbs that it looked more spiritual than that. He thought perhaps he was reciting something - a poem by Landor perhaps, or a code of conduct called The Happy Hiker’s Dos and Don’ts.
We found out from Henry himself. ‘Here! Help me up, can’t you?’ he spluttered out at last in something between a gasp and a roar. ‘This load’s too darned heavy to stand in.’
We levered him to his feet.
Slowly and smoothly, like a trombone, the tubes of Henry’s hiking-frame slid apart under the weight of the bundles. It wasn’t exactly a dramatic moment - it was too long-drawn-out for that - but it was a moment of rich sadness. A captain going down with his ship must wear much the same expression as Henry did when his bundle of packages subsided softly on to the carpet.
Fraser said it had been an interesting experiment - unsuccessful but interesting - and no doubt we would be trying it again. In the meantime, however - till we got it right - he hoped we wouldn’t mind if he used a rather less modern method of carrying luggage from A to B. Like so many old-fashioned ideas, it was quite amazingly effective: it was called a suitcase.
The girls were sleeping at our house, and we were sleeping at Henry’s. The girls had said it would be better that way because then they wouldn’t rouse us when they got up to make breakfast. We said it would be more of a case of our not wanting to rouse them, and they said Yes, sorry - that was what they’d meant.
So they drove away, and Henry and Fraser and I wandered into the kitchen, and grilled ourselves some herrings which Katrina had thoughtfully laid on for us. Then we sat round the table and drank beer.
‘This time tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we will be on the Welsh Marches.’
‘Why do they call ‘em Marches?’ said Fraser reflectively.
‘Because they march beside us,’ I said. ‘Simple as that.’
The evening was clear and it was a night of stars. Far off, all those leagues along the sky, the seven lamps of Orion hung like a guardian warrior over the hills of Dyfed. Fraser drew at his pipe and spoke in a low voice:
The winds out of the west land blow,
My friends have breathed them there;
Warm with the blood of lads I know
Comes east the sighing air.
It fanned their temples, filled their lungs,
Scattered their forelocks free;
My friends made words of it with tongues
That talk no more to me.
‘You must still be hungry,’ Henry said. ‘Sorry we’ve run out of herrings. How about a slice of toast?’