The Salt Path Read online

  Part Two

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  THE SOUTH WEST COAST PATH

  While some might be daunted at the prospect of walking for weeks on end, staying somewhere different every night, while keeping themselves fed and watered, it is simply a matter of careful planning.

  The South West Coast Path: From Minehead to South Haven Point, Paddy Dillon

  5. Homeless

  We could have been in Taunton two days later. If we’d made it, we might have dodged the worst of the heat. We would have made it, if it hadn’t been for the angels.

  We’d driven up and down the M5 many times, always with a destination to be reached or a timetable to adhere to. But when the only timetable is when you will eat again, it’s easy to be distracted.

  ‘How many times have we driven past the sign to Glastonbury and said, “Next time”? Let’s just go for an hour; we’ll still get to Jan’s house in Yeovil tonight, leave the van and be away in two days.’

  Moth’s friend Jan had been happy to help us in what small way she could. There was no rush to get there; we could just climb up the conical hill of Glastonbury Tor and see the view from the other side. Then away.

  ‘Yeah, why not?’

  A huge mass of Celtic mythology surrounds the tor, where human evidence has been found to date back to the Iron Age. Like every third village in western Britain, it claims connections to the stories of King Arthur. We’d recently passed the side of a lake in Wales where he was alleged to have thrown his sword, so it seemed like a viable diversion. I still don’t grasp why a King of the Britons would throw ‘the’ sword into a dingy grey lake on the side of the A5, or hang out in Glastonbury for long enough to be empowered by ley lines and inspire a chain of crystal shops. Maybe we’d be more enlightened by this visit, or by Tintagel, which we would walk through in Cornwall – if we made it that far.

  It felt so good to get out of the van and stretch after a long, depressing journey. We took photos of the Somerset Levels on the mobile phone, and photos of Americans and Chinese admiring us, photographing them, admiring the Somerset Levels, and then walked back down to the town. A swell of alternative, New Age, crystal-polishing wonder. And a surprisingly large number of apparently homeless people. Sitting in doorways and alcoves, in blankets and sleeping bags, many of them with bowls requesting money. A boy in his early twenties was tucked in between the bin and the drainpipe outside the white witch crystal shop. Underneath the rough exterior, and despite the grubby clothes, ragged hair and ripped hat, he had the look of a smooth-skinned, perfect-toothed, clear-eyed public schoolboy. We sat on the opposite side of the road, eating a crystal-blessed pie, as he aced the begging market. The well-heeled passers-by were obviously encouraged by the clean, perfect smile and the rounded vowels of his response, to the detriment of his less fortunate peers.

  ‘Look at this.’ I’d spotted this poster all over town. ‘Healing with angels at Heavenly End. Three pounds each. Shall we go, just for the Glastonbury experience? It starts in twenty minutes, then we’ll be gone. Just a bit of a lark before we go.’ And what if it wasn’t just hokum, what if it could help him?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, go on, it’s just a laugh.’

  While we wandered around the car park, trying to find the gateway to Heavenly End, the Etonian beggar went into the public toilet. When he came out, he’d swapped his ragtag coat for the skateboard in his rucksack and for all the world looked like a surfer as he skated to the bank. We sat on a bench as he came out of the bank, returned to the toilets, then left in his ripped coat to resume his position by the bin. Begging in Glastonbury is obviously a career choice.

  A woman dressed in white answered the door.

  ‘Hello, I’m Michelle, welcome to Heavenly End. I won’t explain anything that will happen, just let the angels be your guides.’ She took us through the house to her lounge.

  ‘Here’s a blanket and a cushion, find a space and relax. Everyone’s here already.’ The room was full of people lying like sardines on the floor, on the sofa, draped over the chairs, all dutifully under their blankets with their eyes closed. I picked my way across the bodies to a space, looking back at Moth as he raised a cynical eyebrow.

  ‘I’ll start the music that helps us to summon the angels.’ Michelle set her stage to the tune of South American pipes and whale calls, lighting a burner that filled the room with ‘breath of heaven’ smoke. Then she summoned her angels.

  ‘Gabriel from the south is here; he’s bringing a blue light. Take that blue light in through your toes.’ Then all her other angels brought lots of other colours and we lay with their angelic power in a hot, smelly, sardine-shaped rainbow. If this is what angels smell like, then heaven’s the place for me. I know what we called it in college, and it wasn’t ‘breath of heaven’.

  ‘Breathe deeply, take the angels’ power to the point of your pain, to your arms and legs, to your heart and brain, to your liver, to your, to your, errr, kidneys. And relax.’

  The music stopped and the room breathed quietly. The silence was filled by a familiar snore, low at first, as it always is, then louder and louder. I leant up on my elbow; the other fish were lying meekly, inhaling and exhaling. Except Moth, who was fast asleep, snoring with abandon.

  ‘Say goodbye to the angels and rise back into your body, and back to the world.’

  They all sat up, quietly comparing their angelic trips: swimming with whales, flying with the birds, walking on water. I was just pleased with a three-pound shot of ‘breath of heaven’. But Moth carried on snoring.

  I prodded him awake.

  ‘Moth, get up.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I know you’re comfy, but just get up now.’

  ‘No, I can’t, I can’t move. Fuck, do you think this is it? Am I paralysed? I can’t move.’

  Michelle kept her distance, offering a glass of water and then backing away. Did she think she’d brought the wrong angels, or that we might sue her?

  ‘I can’t feel my legs. Is this how it will be? What if I suddenly won’t be able to walk, really suddenly?’

  Eventually he got to his knees, then to the chair.

  ‘It’s because you were lying flat out for an hour. You know you can’t move when you’ve been lying on your back.’

  ‘I told you I didn’t want to come.’

  ‘You’ll be fine; it’s all that snoring, you’ve breathed in too much “breath of heaven”.’ Oh shit, what if this happens on the path? If we even get that far.

  As we drove out of town, the Etonian was sitting on a bench looking very clean and well fed, chatting on his mobile phone.

  Instead of two days it took nearly two weeks of sleeping on Jan’s floor before Moth’s back pain and stiffness from the Glastonbury angels had worn off. It was time to move on: we needed to leave before we outstayed our welcome; no one wants to share their bathroom indefinitely. We left the little van on Jan’s drive, desperately wishing it was just a bit bigger so we could have slept in it, and she drove us to Taunton, relieved to see the back of her squatters. We said our goodbyes, vowing not to lie still for too long and to stay away from passing angels.

  In early August, standing on the side of the road in Taunton, our rucksacks by our feet, we were finally, truly, homeless. I’d never been homeless before. I’d travelled, lived in a van for weeks on end, but this was different. Travelling in the knowledge that you have a point of return gives you the will to keep moving away. There’s always a door you can return to and drop your bag, even if that door is the thing you’re escaping from. But the feeling that day was entirely different. There was no door. The space I inhabited in that moment was the safest, securest place I had and I didn’t want to move.

  ‘Shall we find the bus to Minehead then?’

  There was nothing else to do. That was why we were there, to give ourselves a reason to keep moving, to find a way to shape our future. But I didn’t expect to pay ten pounds each in bus fares to get to Minehead. Added to the diesel for t
he drive to Somerset, food in a motorway service station and a couple of bottles of wine to say thanks for keeping the van, and my little red purse was looking thinner. Much thinner. We had fifty pounds left. But that was going to be enough; we’d have forty-eight pounds deposited in the bank every week. Enough.

  Sitting on the back seat of the bus, I started to feel calmer. Maybe it was being contained by the bus, but I even felt a small pulse of excitement. We were heading north through Somerset. We could fool ourselves that we were on a day trip to the seaside and got out the chocolate and bananas.

  ‘Where y’all heading there? South West Coast Path, I bet? Us too. Where y’all staying? This your first night? Us too.’ An incredibly loud American voice filled the bus, from a tiny prim woman with curly brown hair and a very serious jacket, with lots of really useful pockets.

  ‘That’s right, we’re starting out today.’

  She scuttled towards the back of the bus, with her equally small partner. He was clearly heading out on safari, in identical jacket and trousers that had even more pockets, bulging with important-looking things.

  ‘No, you can’t set off at this time of day. You have to leave early morning. It’s a day’s walk to the next accommodation after Minehead. Where y’all staying tonight? Come and have a drink with us.’

  ‘We’re backpacking.’ I glanced at the rucksacks, stuffed full and sitting like huge turtle shells on the seat next to us, sort of obvious really. ‘We’re camping, so we’ll just set off and put the tent up later.’

  ‘What? You’ve got a tent in that? What and cooking stuff too? Ours are as big as that and we’re staying B & B and doing luggage transfer.’

  ‘What’s luggage transfer?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re just gonna walk and some nice young man’s gonna take our bags to the next B & B. We’re going right through to Westward Ho! Where y’all heading?’

  ‘If we make it to Land’s End, then we’ll probably carry on to Poole, but we’re in no rush, we’ll just see how it goes.’ Moth looked at me with an eyebrow raised as he silently created our back story. There were plenty of things we didn’t need to tell them.

  ‘Land’s End! You can’t camp all that way, you’re like, well, too old.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see how it goes. You’ll probably pass us in the next day or two anyway, we’re quite slow.’ I’m only fifty; how old did they think we were?

  We hadn’t even looked at a map of Minehead so had no idea where to find the start of the coastal path, other than knowing we were facing the north coast and needed to be going west, somewhere on the left. We wandered downhill, through curtains of buckets, spades and flip-flops, past crowds of OAPs eating cream teas, until we finally arrived at the seafront. We dropped the rucksacks with relief and sat on the promenade with tea and chocolate bars. A huge hill to the left seemed to rise near vertically from the prom. Surely that couldn’t be the hill at the start of the path … Paddy Dillon says the path “drifts”; he doesn’t say climb a mountain. This didn’t bode well.

  ‘No, definitely says down the prom to the monument.’ Moth’s finger traced the orange line of the path, skilfully drawn along the copy of the Ordnance Survey map in The South West Coast Path. ‘It’s okay. It probably skirts along the bottom and then rises around the corner somewhere. Right then.’ He put the map and his reading glasses back in his pocket. ‘You up for this?’ He looked tired, but didn’t seem to be in too much pain.

  ‘Nothing better to do.’

  The crowds started to thin as we walked towards the monument of giant metal hands holding a map that marks the start of the path. Staying at the monument for far too long: taking photos, fiddling with our packs, trying to will ourselves to take that first step. Excited, afraid, homeless, fat, dying, but at least if we made that first step we had somewhere to go, we had a purpose. And we really didn’t have anything better to do at half past three on a Thursday afternoon than to start a 630-mile walk.

  Halfway up an excruciatingly steep zigzag path through the woods above Minehead, it became clear that Paddy Dillon was going to be the master of underestimation. We sat on a bench with a glimpse through the branches towards the sea, trying to breathe and reread his guidebook.

  ‘No, he definitely says, “drifts a little inland and uphill”.’

  ‘Well if this is drifting, we’re in serious shit if he says “quite steep”.’

  We’d walked half a mile, drunk half a litre of water and my head felt as if it was going to explode. A large family passed us heading downhill.

  ‘Those packs look really well stuffed; where you heading for?’

  ‘Land’s End, hopefully.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right – well, good luck with that!’

  The tribe scampered downhill laughing. My hips were screaming and the sole of my foot was sore. They were right to laugh; I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been me.

  ‘Do you think they’re right? That we’re a bit of a joke really?’

  ‘Course they’re right, and that’s only with what they can see. Imagine if they knew the truth of it? I daren’t tell people we’re going to Poole.’

  ‘Poole? We’ll be lucky if we see Porlock.’

  What felt like hours later we made it out of the woods on to the moorland above, where the ground levelled, ponies grazed and the views opened towards South Wales.

  ‘It’s like we can’t escape.’

  The day quickly turned to evening and with it the realization that we were on the open edge of Exmoor, above the Bristol Channel, and night would be coming. We had to find somewhere to put the tent. The open areas of low grazed grass were behind us, and now the only small areas of flat grass were on the path itself, with heather and gorse all around. It seemed obvious to me that the tent would have to go on the path.

  ‘We can’t put it on the path. What happens in the morning? There’s bound to be someone along to tell us to move.’

  We walked on, my hips burning.

  ‘Perhaps it’s arthritis.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve spent too long in front of the computer. There’s a flat patch over there.’

  The rucksack was off my shoulders at the mere thought of stopping, but within seconds my feet were covered in ants, thousands of them crawling and flying over the grazed patch of heath.

  ‘We’ll keep looking.’

  But looking closer, every patch of short grass was a mass of ants: crawling ants, flying ants. They were in the air; we were walking through clouds of flying black bodies, ants in our clothes and our hair. Running from a black mass before I breathed them in, I stopped in the heather to scratch and they’d gone, I’d left them behind. They were only hovering over the short grass.

  Pitching a tent on heather isn’t easy. A patch of young, short-stemmed growth was the only option, but a huge risk for the thin groundsheet of the lightweight tent; it could be ripped on the first night. We did it all the same. After half an hour of fighting with unfamiliar poles and ropes, we had the tent up. The base mounded like a feather mattress but we felt as though we were lying in the fork drawer.

  ‘Did we pack some duct tape?’

  ‘Nope.’

  As the light disappeared, shrinking away, withdrawing into the west, the lighthouses of South Wales began to spike the darkness. So far away and yet the light was still in reach, touchable, while the land they stood on was already slipping away. I screwed my eyes tight and walked up the track to the farm, ran my hands over the stone walls, felt the heat of the fire. I couldn’t lose that feeling, had to carry it with me always, the feeling of safety and home.

  ‘I think I can feel homelessness now, like a balloon cut free in the wind. I’m scared.’

  ‘I’d hug you, Ray, but I can’t sit up.’

  ‘Shall we eat the meatballs? I’m sure they weigh the most.’

  Cold above, cold to the side, cold beneath. What makes a sleeping bag lightweight? It was obvious at four in the morning, in the grey-green light of the tent as the cold ate through. Less insulation, a lot
less insulation. If I lay on my back, the worst of the cold was warmed by the insulation mat. But I couldn’t lie on my back; it hurt too much. On my side and my back felt like iced water, exposed to the bone-aching cold. Pressing my back against Moth to suck up some heat, he stirred and turned on to his back and snored. And snored. I piled everything that came to hand over me, put a smelly vest on my head and my feet on the rucksack. Almost bearable. Why didn’t I bring a hat?

  Dozing fitfully, I dreamt of empty houses and Moth choking. I woke, sweating, heart pounding, head ringing. I’d made it through a horrid night, warm at last as the sun came up, but I couldn’t doze off again, I had to get out of the bag. Desperate for a pee, I scrambled through the tent flaps, falling over the gas stove and pan in a rushed attempt to get out and put my boots on at the same time. I squatted in the heather, where the gorse ran into the sea and became Wales beneath a gentle yellow light, the air clear and clean as if it didn’t exist.

  ‘Good morning. Beautiful one, isn’t it?’

  I crouched in the undergrowth with my leggings round my ankles and my arse hanging out in the breeze.

  ‘This morning, yes, lovely.’

  Dog walkers, how do they get out so early?

  Moth finally woke at eight thirty, subdued, struggling with stiffness. He hated mornings, knowing that when he woke the pain would come. It had become a habit to hold on to that last moment of drowsiness for as long as he could before he had to get up and acknowledge the day. Painkillers, then a cup of tea, then a second. Ten thirty and he made it out of the tent. Cast-iron bladder. CBD was supposed to cause incontinence, but certainly didn’t seem to have affected him so far.