I wrote this years ago on a writing retreat which I really enjoyed.
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Does walking connect us?
Walking through the country lanes around Totleigh Barton and Sheepwash today reminded me of various times when I’ve been walking in my life. Aged five or six I used to love looking at the different wild flowers along the side of the path. I would go home and look them all up in my “Ladybird book of wild flowers” feeling excited when I found the names of the flowers that I had seen.
Walking seems to be one way that I can connect in with history and time stretching backwards rather than forwards. In my day-to-day life I mainly think about the present, what needs to be done today, what I’m going to do tomorrow and into the future. Walking connects me to the past.
Walking along today, the rhythmic but effortless striding, particularly when I was walking alone reminded me of other times that I’ve walked along on my own. The time when I had to walk to school in wet or at least damp clothes. I was about fourteen. My stepmother had said
“You are old enough now to do your own washing”
I was fine with that. The bit that I wasn’t so OK with was having to do it all by hand, and not being allowed to use the washing machine. My younger brother and sister and three stepbrothers all had their washing done for them by my stepmother, in the washing machine. I alone had to wash my clothes by hand, and critically, wasn’t allowed to use the washing machine, just the good old fashioned sink. I remember standing in the garage hanging my clothes out to dry on the clothes horse and staring at the washing machine. Sitting there. Door open. Empty.
Washed by hand, in the winter, with no central heating, no warm radiator to drape them over, my clothes, my school uniform, was often damp on a Monday morning. The rest of the week my clothes would be fine, dried through by my body warmth, but those cold Monday mornings still give me the chills when I think about them. When I am wearing damp clothes now and it’s cold I’m transported back to the days of getting up in the dark and putting on cold, damp school uniform. I can feel myself shivering as I pull on my wet white school socks and then squeeze my feet into my black school shoes and lace them up. Once dressed, bag packed I’d make my way downstairs in the cold and dark with my school bag then off down the road, fingers, toes and the soles of my feet already numb with cold.
Walking also brings back happy memories, I think of walks with my children when they were small. I remember the first time I went on a walk with my eldest son Sam, just the two of us, was when he was two. We were on holiday in Yorkshire, walking through the fields, along paths, jumping over ditches reveling in the sunshine and being in the countryside. At that time we lived in Brixton, in a council flat situated in the middle between Brixton police station and Brixton fire station. Not the quietest place on earth. So, being right out in the countryside, jumping over ditches, was a world away from our normal everyday existence.
I walked with Sam for an hour or so. We walked side by side, hand in hand, or when the path narrowed he went in front in his little red wellies, navy and white stripy trousers and blue tshirt, and I followed behind. What amazed and delighted me at the time was that not normally a child who dominated conversations Sam spoke pretty much non-stop for the whole hour. He told me about everything he had been thinking about from things that had happened at playgroup to what he thought about space and animals and what was happening in the world. I got a full tour of everything that was going on in his head.
That was 29 years ago now. How I would love to listen to a recording of what he said. It would be incredible to listen to. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps I’ve completely romanticized it in a
“My son is a child genius”
kind of way. I’ll never know. He is really smart though.
Walking along today also connected me to people that I’ve never met and will never meet. As I walked along alone, with conversations happening around me the rhythm and the route started me thinking of all the people that had ever walked the same path. People that had walked along there hundreds of years ago, before cars, before public transport. In the days when unless you had a horse you would have to walk everywhere.
I thought of where people would be walking to and why. Walking to school, to work, to church on a Sunday. Groups of people walking along to a village fair. As I thought about this I realized that rather than connecting in with some kind of exciting cosmic life force I was probably thinking of Downton Abbey or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Was I really feeling a connection to the past? To the hundreds of people who had walked this path? Or was I feeling a connection with a BBC dramatization of the past. A rather less exciting and not very cosmic connection.
About twenty years ago I was walking with my three older kids along a path up a hill near Arundel in Sussex. We were staying in the local youth hostel and had decided to go for a walk across the fields to check out the local area. We walked for a while then saw a church on top of a hill nearby and started to walk towards it. It took twenty or thirty minutes to walk up a well worn path. My kids were chatting away to themselves as we walked. The rhythm of the walk and the church present front and centre in the ever closer distance started me thinking about all the people that had walked up to that church, along the same path over hundreds of years. I was transported back in time and connected in to those people. I somehow felt their journeys, not as individuals but as a collective stream, as water streams along a river. As we got closer and closer to the church the feeling became stronger and stronger. I was part of a stream, I am part of a stream of humanity. A sense of wonder and feeling of connectedness to thousands of people washed over me.
When we reached the church the door was open so we went inside for a look around. It turned out that it was nearly one thousand years old and on that site previous to the church being built there had been an ancient nunnery. So people had been walking up that hill from Arundel for well over one thousand years.
Was I connecting into them?