The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (23 page)

Hay bales were piled one on top of the other, some low and others reaching as high as the rafters. He climbed up; it was easier to gain a footing in the dark than he had imagined. The hay creaked under his yachting shoes, and was soft beneath his hands. At the top he unrolled his sleeping bag and knelt to unzip the side. He lay very still, although it worried him that later his head and nose might feel the cold. Rooting through the rucksack, he found the soft wool of Queenie’s knitted beret. She wouldn’t mind his borrowing it. From the opposite side of the valley the house lights trembled.

Harold’s mind grew limpid, and his body melted. Rain began to patter on the roof and against the tarpaulin, but it was a gentle sound, full of patience, like Maureen singing David to sleep when he was little. When the sound stopped he missed it, as if it had become part of what he knew. He felt there was no longer anything substantial between himself and the earth and the sky.

Harold woke in the early hours before dawn. He eased himself up on one elbow and watched through the gaps, while the day fought against the night and light seeped into the horizon, so pale it was without colour. Birds burst into song as the distance began to emerge and the day grew more confident; the sky moved through grey, cream, peach, indigo, and into blue. A soft tongue of mist crept the length of the valley floor so that the hilltops and houses seemed to rise out of cloud. Already the moon was a wispy thing.

He had done it. He had spent his first night outside. Harold felt a rush of incredulity that quickly became joy. Stamping his feet and blowing into his cupped hands, he wished he could tell David what he had achieved. The air was drenched with such birdsong and life, it was like standing in rain. He rolled his sleeping bag tightly, and got back to his walking.

He kept going all day, stooping for spring water when he found it, and drinking in palmfuls that tasted cold and clear. From a roadside stall, he stopped to buy coffee and a kebab. When he told the vendor about his walk, the man insisted he should not pay. His mother was in remission from cancer too; it was his pleasure to give Harold a meal. In return Harold offered the bottle of spa water from Bath. There would be more along the way. He passed Slad, where a woman with a kind face looked down from a top-floor window and smiled; and from there to Birdlip. The sun sparkled through the leaves of Cranham Woods and poured on to the beech carpet in a trembling filigree of light. He spent his second night in the open, making an empty woodshed his shelter, and the following day he made his way towards Cheltenham, with the Vale of Gloucester falling to his left like a giant bowl.

Far away the Black Mountains and the Malvern Hills straddled the horizon. He could make out the roofs of factories, and the hazy outline of Gloucester Cathedral, and the tiny shapes that must be people’s houses and cars. There was so much out there, so much life, going about its daily business of getting by, of suffering and fighting, and not knowing he was sitting up there, watching. Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.

In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place. It didn’t matter that other people would do it in a different way; in fact this was inevitable. He would keep to the roads because, despite the odd fast car, he felt safer there. It didn’t matter that he had no mobile phone. It didn’t matter that he had not planned his route, or brought a road map. He had a different map, and that was the one in his mind, made up of all the people and places he had passed. He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his. He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passer-by, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.

These things made complete sense. Why then was there something remaining that troubled him? He slipped his hands in his pockets and jingled the loose change.

The kindness of the woman with food came back to him, and that of Martina. They had offered him comfort and shelter, even when he was afraid of taking them, and in accepting he had learned something new. It was as much of a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility. He thought of the peace he had found, lying in the sleeping bag in a barn. Harold let these things play in his mind while below him the land melted as far as the sky. Suddenly he knew. He knew what he must do in order to get to Berwick.

In Cheltenham, Harold donated his washing powder to a student going into a laundrette. Passing a woman from Prestbury who couldn’t find her key in her bag, he offered his wind-up torch. The following day, he gave his plasters and antiseptic cream to the mother of a distressed child with a bleeding knee, and also his comb by way of distraction. The guide to Britain he handed to a bewildered German couple who were lost near Cleeve Hill and, since he knew the plant dictionary by heart, he suggested they might like that too. He rewrapped the gifts for Queenie: the pot of honey, the rose quartz, the glittering paperweight, the Roman key ring and the wool hat. He parcelled up the recent souvenirs for Maureen and took them to a post office. The compass and the rucksack he kept, because they were not his to give away.

He would make his way to Broadway, via Winchcombe; from there to Mickleton, Clifford Chambers, and then Stratford-on-Avon.

Two days later, Maureen was coiling her bean plants against stakes when she was called to the gate to receive a parcel. Inside she found a new selection of gifts, as well as Harold’s wallet, watch, and a postcard showing a woolly Cotswold sheep.

He had written:

Dear Maureen. Please find enclosed my debit card, etc. I am going to walk without so many things. If I keep it simple, I know I can get there. I think of you often. H
.

She climbed the slope to the front door without noticing that she had feet.

Maureen stowed the wallet in his bedside drawer, beneath the photographs of herself and David. The postcard she pinned to Rex’s map.

‘Oh Harold,’ she said softly. And she wondered if, despite the increasing distance between them, he somehow heard.

19

Harold and the Walk

IT HAD NEVER
been such a beautiful May. Every day the sky shone a peerless blue, untouched by cloud. Already, the gardens were crammed with lupins, roses, delphiniums, honeysuckle and lime clouds of lady’s mantle. Insects cricked, hovered, bumbled and whizzed. Harold passed fields of buttercups, poppies, ox-eye daisies, clover, vetch and campion. The hedgerows were sweetly scented with bowing heads of elderflower, and wound through with wild clematis, hops and dog roses. The allotments too were burgeoning. There were rows of lettuce, spinach, chard, beetroot, early new potatoes and wigwams of peas. The first of the gooseberries hung like hairy green pods. Gardeners left out boxes of surplus produce for passers-by, with a sign:
HELP YOURSELF
.

Harold knew that he had found his way. He told the story about Queenie, and the garage girl, and he asked strangers if they would be so good as to help. In return, he listened. He might be offered a sandwich, or a bottle of water, or a fresh set of plasters. He never took more than he needed, and gently refused lifts, or walking equipment, or extra packages of food to keep him going. Snapping a pea pod from a curling stem, he ate it greedily, like sweets. The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.

After the night in the barn, Harold continued to sleep outside. He chose dry places, and was always careful not to upset things. He washed in public lavatories, fountains and streams. He rinsed his clothes where no one was watching. He thought of that half-forgotten world lived in houses and streets and cars, where people ate three times a day, slept by night, and kept each other company. He was glad they were safe, and he was glad too that he was at last outside them.

Harold took the A-roads, B-roads, lanes and tracks. The compass quivered northwards and he followed. He went by day or by night, as the mood took him; mile after mile after mile. If the blisters were bad, he bound them with duct tape. He slept when the need for it came, and then he returned to his feet and walked again. He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.

And yet the strangest part in all this was that a driver might overtake him, and briefly observe an old fellow in shirt and tie, perhaps a pair of yachting shoes, and see no more than another man, off down the road. It was so funny, and he was so happy, so much at one with the land beneath his feet, he could laugh and laugh with the simplicity of it.

From Stratford he made his way to Warwick. South of Coventry, Harold met a convivial young man with soft blue eyes, and sideburns that curled below his cheekbones. He told Harold his name was Mick and bought him a lemonade. Proffering his beer glass, he toasted Harold’s courage. ‘So you put yourself at the mercy of strangers?’ he said.

Harold smiled. ‘No. I’m careful. I don’t hang about in city centres at night. I avoid trouble. But on the whole the kind of people who stop to listen are the kind of people who are going to help. There have been one or two moments when I was afraid. I thought a man on the A439 was going to mug me, but he was actually about to offer me an embrace. He had lost his wife to cancer. I misjudged him because he was missing his front teeth.’ He saw his fingers against the lemonade glass, and how dark they were; the nails chipped and brown.

‘And you really believe you will make it to Berwick?’

‘I don’t push it and I don’t hang about. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I’m going to get there. I’ve begun to think we sit far more than we’re supposed to.’ He smiled. ‘Why else would we have feet?’

The young man licked his lips, as if he was savouring the taste of something that was not yet in his mouth. ‘What you’re doing is a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century. It’s awesome. Yours is the kind of story people want to hear.’

‘Do you think I could trouble you for a packet of salt and vinegar crisps?’ said Harold. ‘I haven’t eaten since lunchtime.’

Before they parted, Mick asked if he might take Harold’s photograph on his mobile phone: ‘Just to remember you.’ Concerned the flash might upset several local men playing darts, he said, ‘Could you manage it outside where I can get you on your own?’

He told Harold to stand beneath a sign that pointed north-west towards Wolverhampton. ‘It’s not where I’m going,’ said Harold, but Mick said that the small detail wouldn’t show up, what with the dark.

‘Look at me as if you’re shagged out,’ said Mick.

Harold found this came very easily.

Bedworth. Nuneaton. Twycross. Ashby de la Zouch. Through Warwickshire, the western fringes of Leicestershire and into Derbyshire; on he went. There were days when he covered over thirteen miles, and others when the built-up streets confounded him, and he walked fewer than six. The skies turned from blue to black to blue. The soft hills rolled between the industrial cities and towns.

It came as a surprise when he reached Ticknall that two hikers stared point-blank. South of Derby, a cab driver passed Harold with his thumbs up, and a busker wearing a purple jester’s hat stopped playing his accordion and grinned. In Little Chester, a golden-haired girl offered him a box of fruit juice, and hugged his knees, full of joy. A day later, in Ripley, a group of morris dancers appeared to put down their beers and cheer.

Alfreton. Clay Cross. The silhouette of the crooked spire of Chesterfield announced the start of the Peak District. At a drop-in coffee morning in Dronfield, a man offered Harold his willow cane, and squeezed his shoulder. Seven miles on, a shop assistant in Sheffield pressed her mobile into his hand so that he might ring home. Maureen assured him she was well, although there had been a small problem with a leaking shower-head. After that she asked if he’d seen the news.

‘No, Maureen. I haven’t seen a paper since the day I set off. What is it?’

He couldn’t be sure but he thought she gave a small sob. Then she said, ‘Well, you’re the news, Harold. You and Queenie Hennessy. You seem to be all over the place.’

20

Maureen and the Publicist