The Salt Path Read online

  ‘Bet you regret it now, my girl.’ No, Mum. No, I don’t.

  The path followed the edge of the woods as they ran up to an open area of grassland, the wire-netting cones around the sapling trees marking it as a deer park. The lights of the big house were coming on in the distance.

  ‘Do you think He’s dressing for dinner?’ I was imagining a warm fire and dry clothes.

  ‘You’re only jealous.’

  ‘No, I’m really not. Let’s camp here – it’s perfect.’

  ‘It’s not worth it. There’s bound to be an estate man round in a Land-Rover in the morning, telling us to clear off.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to get up early.’

  The owls in the woods hooted theatrically all night, flat soft grass and I still couldn’t sleep. I tried to count them, there could have been four or five, or maybe it was the same one flying around in circles. However cosy ‘He’ was in the big house he didn’t have this, he couldn’t hear the beat of an owl’s wing through the oak branches, or the scratch of his talons against the bark of a beech tree. He wasn’t breathing the sweet smell of nettles or the sharp tang of gorse as he put his head on a pillow. But then again, he did have a pillow.

  When I finally woke Moth was already up, writing a note on a piece of paper.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Writing a thank-you letter. What do you think?’

  I found my glasses in my boot and read the crumpled piece of notepaper: ‘Dear Sir, thank you for a very nice night camped in your deer park. I’ll be sure to tell all my friends of your hospitality.’

  ‘I’m just going to leave it in the top of the cider bottle and tuck it in the wire cone. They’re bound to find it.’

  ‘What about “leave no trace”?’

  ‘It’s not rubbish, it’s a thank-you letter.’

  Eight thirty, the earliest morning so far. We shooed ladybirds from the tent and walked.

  8. The Corner

  Lying in the sun on baking-hot grass, having walked four miles before lunch and eaten a handful of elderberries straight from the tree, there’s a lot to be said for being a vagrant. Lundy was directly ahead; we’d been walking towards it for days and very soon would be walking away. On the other side of the combe we’d just crossed, the woodland faded out through steep bracken, down to yet another stream before rising up again to where we sat. Two small figures scrambled through the gorse, bracken and nettles on the other side, and we indulged in our favourite entertainment: watching other people get it as wrong as us. The figures disappeared from view and we ate some fudge. Fudge for breakfast, fudge for lunch, and it was looking like fudge for dinner. Our smelly, sweat-soaked clothes were dry and it was nearly time to move on. Then a rare sight. Two backpackers appeared over the brow of the hill. Backpackers with full packs who looked like they were doing a long distance. The young men stopped for a moment with the cursory questions about how far we were going.

  ‘Land’s End? Great, more backpackers.’ They took their packs off and dropped down beside them on the grass. ‘Hey, we’ve seen you before. You were camped near the Great Hangman. How the hell did you get in front of us?’

  How the hell did we get in front of them? They rummaged in their rucksacks, packed with the complete abandon of youth, everything shoved in supermarket bags and bulging from every pocket. Their rucksack straps were bound with bubble wrap and their sleep mats tied on with string.

  ‘Where did you camp last night? We couldn’t find anywhere and ended up on the grass square in front of the visitor centre.’

  ‘The deer park; it was great, except for the owls. I thought there were four of you at the Great Hangman?’

  ‘There were. One dropped out at Woolacombe, so we spent a couple of days there. Then the other’s just given in on Greencliff; it was so fucking hot, he couldn’t take it. We walked back to Westward Ho! with him and got the bus to Barnstaple, saw him off, stocked up with supplies at the supermarket, then bus back to Westward Ho! and had to do Greencliff all over again.’

  ‘Greencliff was a nightmare. We nearly gave up there. Such a good idea to go to the supermarket. There was no food in Clovelly except a bag of pasties and fudge.’

  ‘We missed the path at the top over there and got stuck in the brambles.’ He peeled off his socks to examine his blisters and pick thorns out of his ankles.

  ‘Yeah, we watched you.’ It was so warm to be in the company of these two young people, so random, scattered and carelessly enjoying life. I felt a stab of longing for my children, the same age, with the same lightness of being. I swallowed the tears and dressed his wounds with antiseptic wipes and blister plasters.

  We talked for an hour in the hot sun, stories from the path uniting us in mutual comfort. Josh and Adam had set off from Minehead a few days after us and somehow their diversions and our slow motion had landed us here at this moment. They would be in Bude and on their journey home the next day; we would be somewhere a few paces or a few miles south of here, and we would never see them again. But that didn’t matter.

  ‘Are you really going to Land’s End? I wish we had the time. I’ve got to be back – we’re supposed to be moving house in three days.’

  ‘Yeah, Adam’s girlfriend thought he was only away for a week. You’re going to be in such shit, man.’

  ‘What the hell, she’ll get over it.’

  ‘I’m sure she will. We might carry on to Poole if we can.’ It seemed an impossibly long way off, but just saying it made it sound a little closer.

  ‘You lucky bastards.’

  We swapped some sachets of coffee for a bag of couscous and waved them off. When they’d gone from view, we followed slowly behind. Hand in hand in the hot mid-afternoon sun. Homeless, dying, but strangely, in that sweaty, dehydrated moment, shyly, reluctantly happy. Lucky bastards.

  Hartland Point is a geologist’s delight. The rock on this coast changes and changes and changes again, but at Hartland Point it’s unlike anything else. Created in shallow seas 320 million years ago, the sedimentary strata are formed from layers of sand, shale and mudstone. Around 290 million years ago, when the Gondwana tectonic plate moved up from the south and collided with the Laurasia plate in the north, they met in a huge upswell of rock known as the Variscan orogeny. It formed mountains through Portugal, western Spain, Cornwall, Devon and on through the south and west of Wales and Ireland. The Hartland Point cliffs are carved out in sandstone ribs that rise up into chevron-shaped rock folds. A movement millennia old, still visible, still alive beneath our feet.

  But all I could see was a football on a stick. An absolutely giant football in the sky ahead of us. On a stick.

  ‘Get a grip, Ray, it’s a radar station; it says so in the guidebook. It’s used for air traffic control.’

  ‘I’ve got to sit down.’

  ‘Have you eaten too much fudge? I think you’re having a sugar rush. You just need some real food, but there’s nothing ’til a hotel at Hartland Quay. That’s going to be ten miles in one day; I don’t know if we can do that.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. We’ve got half a bag of fudge and some couscous.’

  I’ve always liked bunting. Happy, cosy, childhood garden parties and canvas camping trips. But the bunting hanging from the tiny café in a shed at Hartland Point was the most perfect bunting I’ve ever seen. A bunting oasis. Bunting with heart. Bunting with food. Unexpected food supplies are like waking up one morning and realizing, unexpectedly, that it’s your birthday.

  ‘Can we pay four pounds each for a panini, or shall we share one?’ Please say one each, Moth, please.

  ‘No, you need to eat, and who knows when we’ll get to somewhere to stock up on rations. One each.’

  Mozzarella, basil and tomatoes combined into some kind of wind-whipped, gull-swirling heaven. I sat with my back to the football and the wind in my face, looking out over the end of the Bristol Channel and the start of the wide, endless Atlantic Ocean. It’s wild here, a corner where tides, winds and tectonic plates co
llide in a roar of elemental confusion. A place of endings, beginnings, shipwrecks and rockslides. The viewpoint by the railings caught the air and rushed it up in a jet of cold, oxygenated, sea-spray fizz. I flew with the power of the uplift; alive, we were alive.

  ‘Shall we carry on?’ Something’s changing. Something’s forming. I can’t see it yet, but I can feel it coming. We turned left and headed south. I kept my eyes fixed on the sea, and away from the football.

  The ground climbed and fell. The vegetation became shorter, treeless, tough and stubbornly rooted in shallow soil, resilient to the full pelt of the Atlantic forces. Rocky headlands fell repeatedly to streamed valleys. An outcrop of rock ahead called the Cow and Calf, like no cow and calf I’ve ever seen, became a well-known friend shrinking in the distance behind while the rocky headlands kept coming. The sun set through scudding clouds to the west and the light dimmed as we reached a flat area of short grass on an exposed cliff top. The view through the doorway of a ruined tower caught the fading light as it framed the tower of Stoke Church. We considered camping close to the tower, hoping it might afford some protection from the wind, but in the dark it was hard to tell how stable it was, so instead faced the tent head on to the Atlantic air as it rushed over the open cliff, too tired to care.

  I woke to the sound of torrential rain. Water thundering on to the taut flysheet. My eyes were gritty, still in the fog of sleep, but the water was only coming from the south. It should be coming from the north, or west, straight off the sea, but the rain wasn’t beating on the opening. Then it stopped. Torrential rain covering the back of the tent, then stopping. Weird. I stuck my head out of the door to view the strange clouds that must be passing very quickly. There were none. The sun was just lifting on to the sea, blurring the water into the sky with the white blue of early morning. Not a cloud. But the source of the rain was trotting away east with a smug look on his wiry muzzle; the dog on the end of the lead seemed equally satisfied. I could make a cup of tea or wash pee off the tent: there wasn’t enough water for both. I went for the tea and hoped the pee dried quickly.

  A slow, slow, leg-pumping morning confirmed that Paddy Dillon is probably superhuman. In fact I’m convinced he’s ex-SAS, eats raw seaweed for breakfast, runs marathons when there’s nothing on TV, and wears camouflage pyjamas. He seems to think this is day nine when it’s really day seventeen, that it’s quite feasible to cover fifteen and a half miles ‘of the most scenic’ but also ‘one of the toughest’ stretches, and still have strength to admire the waterfalls. He also thinks it can be ‘quite tiring’ in wet and windy weather. Does that mean it’s a walk in the park on a hot sunny day? At least there were plenty of streams from which we could refill the water bottles. He’s right about it being the most scenic. Treeless open headlands, ragged water-torn rock formations and a coastline that runs from Hartland Point to a fading grey smudge on the far horizon: a smuggler’s paradise. The heat kept rising. On cliff tops with no shade, my cheeks were beginning to feel like leather and my third nose was emerging from the peel.

  Dropping into a shady combe and over a wooden footbridge, a sign unexpectedly welcomed us to Kernow, the local name for Cornwall. The north coast of Devon had passed under our feet, leaving a new county stretching away to the west, disappearing into the horizon. It was evening when we dipped into another valley. The climb up the other side rose above us so steeply that without discussion we pitched the tent on a small patch of grass near running water and fell asleep for half an hour. Five miles, six pieces of fudge and the day was over. I left Moth fiddling with his rucksack and followed the stream to where it disappeared over a two-metre drop, then down a rocky slope towards the sea. Peeling off my sweaty, dusty clothes, I climbed down on to the slope and stood under the ice-cold water as it fell in a waterfall from the edge above. I’d been in the sea at Peppercombe, but hadn’t been in clean water since Combe Martin, eleven days ago. Sand, salt and a profoundly disgusting stench washed into the sea. My skin was red, brown and peeling, turning into cured leather on my arms and cheeks, red and swollen on my legs. My hair felt similar to the coarse grass on the headlands and my big toe was now half its depth but twice its width, flattened by the reinforcement of my boot. The cliff reached out to sea in a jagged fin of rock, shielding the water behind from the harshness of the currents, creating a calm pool of stillness. Behind a notch in the black line of rock, the sun seemed to be held up, prevented from finally sinking. Foam broke against the fin and ran exhausted and calm into the bay behind. I climbed back up to my clothes, checking that there was no one walking past. As I put the stiff rags back on, I thought I heard cricket commentary. At the tent Moth had his feet up on a rock with another cup of tea, listening to the little radio that I thought was in storage.

  ‘How have you carried that so far? It weighs as much as a bag of sugar! No … why have you carried it?’

  ‘So I could listen to the cricket.’

  ‘Right.’ I was uncomfortable. The radio seemed out of place, an intruder in the wild space that had become our new reality. ‘So what’s happening?’

  ‘Five overs left. They’re talking about the light. There’s a chance it could be a draw; it’s a shame – we could win this.’

  We lay in the grass by the tent and watched seagulls flying over in flocks as England won the Ashes, but the match was a draw and Jonathan Agnew got in a flap about it being a ‘disgrace’.

  The light had almost gone and the seagulls kept coming, calling quietly, not with loud and raucous chattering as they do in the day, but longer, quieter calls.

  ‘Where do you think they’re going?’

  We watched as the gulls dipped over our heads to the cliff edge, then dropped towards the bay to join hundreds of others floating on the calm water, protected by the rock fin.

  ‘They’re sleeping on the water; it’s their safe place.’

  ‘It is safe here, isn’t it? Protected. I’d live here if I could.’ Moth paused for a moment. ‘When it’s over, you could bring me back here if you like.’

  ‘What do you mean? When the walk’s over?’

  ‘No. When it’s all over.’

  His body moved the air next to me, my skin sensing the shape of him in the falling light.

  ‘Shall we swim?’

  The deep water was cool, but pockets still held the warmth of the day. Floating in the darkness, Moth pushed out into the gently moving bodies of grey, bobbing in near silence around him. The moon caught their white heads, occasionally turning towards him in untroubled curiosity. We hung weightless in the salt as everything drifted from us and was lost. All that remained was the water, the moon and the murmuring forms that shared the sea.

  The gulls settled into a dark blue rhythm, as the cool dampness of night finally drove us into the tent. It’ll never be over; we’ll never be over.

  Part Three

  * * *

  THE LONG FETCH

  Often, for undaunted courage,

  fate spares the man it has not already marked.

  Beowulf, Seamus Heaney

  9. Why?

  Robert Stephen Hawker built himself a hut from driftwood, precariously positioned on the cliffs below Morwenstow. It’s now the smallest property owned by the National Trust. Hawker was a devout Cornishman, with a passion for the county and the people who lived in it. According to one of his many poems, ‘twenty thousand Cornish men will know the reason why!’ I didn’t know why the men in his poem wanted to rescue Trelawny, but I was beginning to understand why they loved this piece of land so much, and why Hawker was driven to build his shack in this exposed spot. Because sheltering in his wooden hut surrounded by the gorse-filled air, amongst the rocks, sea and sky, his thoughts were set free.

  So free in fact, that he passed his days as the vicar of Morwenstow, walking the lanes and cliff tops in a purple coat, pink hat and yellow cape. We would at least have had bad dress sense in common. I wish I’d known him, spending his years rescuing shipwrecked sailors from the sea and giving the dead
a Christian burial in his graveyard. It seemed fitting that we were finding shelter from the burning heat in his hut, shipwrecked from life, lifewrecked in the driftwood.

  He might have given us some food too. We were well into our second day of the fudge diet and it wasn’t going well. Headaches, dizziness and hunger were now constant. We could have diverted inland to a café in Morwenstow, but that would have used unknown amounts of money that we barely had, and when you start a diet it’s best to stick to it. We’d be in Bude later anyway.

  A mile further on and we knew we’d been stupid. We should have gone back and refilled the water bottles, but we couldn’t bear to retrace our steps and so kept moving forwards. The heat was intense on the open cliff top, bouncing back from the scorched earth and reflecting from the blue sea. Not a breath of wind, just heat wrapping around in a hot, dusty, sweaty, suffocating fog. Then we drank the last drop of water. The heat pressed us down; it took every ounce of willpower to stay on our feet and keep moving. Where there should have been streams, there were only dried-up cracks in the earth. The thirst overtook the hunger in a primal craving for water: we needed it and we needed it now.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Stupid to think we could walk this path, to not have enough money, to pretend we weren’t homeless, to get the court procedure wrong, to lose the children’s home, to not have enough water, to pretend we weren’t dying, to not have enough water.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Shouting, crying, throwing the water bottle in anger. Angry with ourselves for making the wrong decision; angry for all the wrong decisions. Die – just do it and die now. Don’t drag me through death with you. If you’re leaving, just go, don’t condemn me to years of letting go, sitting by, waiting for the iced blade to cut my heart out, rip me bone from bone, leave me macerated, spewed out, screwed up. If you’re going, just go, get it over with. I can’t say goodbye, can’t live without you. Don’t leave, ever. Leave. I’m already dead. I died when you let that demon take our home and throw our children into the street. Yes, death come and save me, save me from you, save me from ever having to say it’s okay again. It’s okay, we’re okay, it was no one’s fault. We spat out words of pain, self-pity, hate – for judges, doctors, false friends, each other. The scratching, desperate need for water took over from every other need, hid the pain in our joints, the battered and blistered feet, the sunburnt, cut and bruised skin. Nothing else mattered; we needed water and we needed it now.