Day thirty-six

5th June 2009     ENGLAND

Not of this world

I wake up to the colour of pink, it is still early but light enough to see half a dozen Disney Princesses looking down at me… I kinda know what they are thinking… ‘What’s this Gruffalo doing here, where’s our little Ellie’. I don’t answer, instead I look to see what time it is… too early to make a move… under the glare of not very happy princesses, I again close my eyes … and in the darkness, I say a ‘thank you’ to Ellie, for giving up her room and allowing me to have a night in a proper bed.

A good couple of hours go by, before I am again sat in the car with Jon heading back to the same roundabout on the outskirts of Wootton Bassett, the place he had picked me up from yesterday (Jon tells me “There’ll be no cheating in this walk you’re doing”). I climb out the car with a cooked breakfast in my belly and in my bag clean clothes and a packed lunch… Thank you Wendy. To have met up with Jon after so many years was really good. Shaking hands and saying our farewells, I knew we could not allow so many years to go by before meeting up again…proper friendship is something we should recognize as having real value.

The walk between Wootton Bassett and Lyneham takes a little under two hours. Walking past the main gates of RAF Lyneham felt a little strange… it had been more than half a lifetime ago when I had first arrived here, I was no more than just a skinny kid (just out of basic training). I remember the first day, a bunch of us new guys, in full uniform sat in the Guard House, filling in forms… a sergeant giving us a brief about what the operational roll the camp was responsible for, a general introduction to the lay-out and facilities on camp, being allocated bedding and accommodation. Halfway through the talk the sergeant told us we could take our jackets off…when taking my jacket off I heard a rip… Sat on the coach on the way here I had noticed the corner of my rank badge was coming away from the top of my sleeve jacket, being not long out of basic training, made me a dab-hand with a needle and thread… five minutes later without even having to take my jacket off, the job was done. It was only when taking the jacket off in the Guard House, I realised what I had done… sewed the badge both to the jacket and to the shirt underneath… I remember the sergeant just looking at me and shaking his head.

‘Support Save Supply’, that is the moto of RAF Lyneham, they are honourable and good words. I had said yesterday that maybe we had fallen out of a truck and banged our heads and that maybe we were a little broken… but not to broken so as not to have an understanding of who it is we are and where it is we come from. That moto is evidence of that. Instead of ‘Support Save Supply’, it could have read ‘Frustrate Endanger Withhold’… but it doesn’t. Why! Because that is not the world, we belong to… yeah, I know, we can pick up a newspaper, see something on screen, read about some politician caught up in a scandal of one kind or another, and argue that this is the world we belong to. Me, I don’t believe that at all… the phrase ‘In this world, but not of this world’ comes to mind… I picture the truck driver sprawled out on the floor, thinking the same, ‘On the ground, but knowing this is not where he belongs… he belongs in a higher realm… preferably in the cab, sat behind a wheel’. Sometimes we need to find a quiet place, be it sat on the floor leaning up against the tyre of a truck, or on a bench in the stillness of a church, maybe sitting at the dock of a bay looking out across the ocean or just kicking stones along a quiet country lane… and if it’s safe to do so, close our eyes for a squidge longer than a few moments, and step into the realm of thought and contemplation, maybe add a little bit of prayer into the mix …It doesn’t matter who we are, where we are from or when in history we lived… that sense of not feeling good, when we have knowingly done something wrong… is universal … and how is that… because we don’t belong in this world that we have somehow managed to create around us,  ‘…In this world, but not of this world’… we only need to close our eyes just that little bit tighter to know this to be true.

It would have been good to have stepped through the camp gates (only I no longer have a military ID card)… a lot of good memories of this place… this is where my truck driving days started… met a bunch of good guys here… thirty years on and still in touch with them (once in a while we meet up)… retell the same old stories, each time a little more embellished, truth and fiction become muddled… but that’s ok... why, because it makes us laugh that little bit harder. I pass the camp and head south towards the small market town of Calne, an Iggy Pop song comes to mind ‘Dumb dumb boys where are you when I need your noise’.

A couple of miles down the road… and as the ‘dumb dumb boys’ step out of my head, in comes the awareness of a body that is a little worn out… my arms, my legs, my body ache… I see in front of me a gate to a field, set back from the road… a good place to dig out one of the sandwiches that Wendy had made for me this morning. I sit on my bag and lean up against the gate post, glad to take the weight of my legs… the sky is a mix of blue and white. I shut my eyes and as the sun moves out from behind a cloud, I feel it’s warmth on my face and the touch of a gentle breeze that is winding its way through this green and pleasant landscape… in the near distance the sound of birdsong, I breath in slowly, the air is fresh… with the scent of, I don’t know… wide open space I guess. This raggedy guy (with his collar up) sat next to a field, feels very much at home… a cheese sandwich in one hand… and with time, in his other hand… four more full days of walking and that’s me on the south coast… this walk is all but done… It has been an extraordinary adventure. I remember that very first step… a bag over my shoulder. Instead of money, a toothbrush in my back pocket, in front of me close to a thousand miles of sunshine and rain… the upside, a simple faith (some would say ‘bordering on the naïve’)… a believe that in forty days I would be on the south coast of England stepping into the church that I was baptized in. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I’m thinking, if I stop closing my eyes when walking on country lanes, its looking like it just might happen. 

As I use the gate to pull these aching bones and muscles back up on to their feet… I hear a whisper in the breeze, telling me… ‘It is the journey not the destination that matters’ … and I am nodding to myself, ‘yeah, I’ll take that’. 

A little after mid-day I walk into the small town of Calne, in the heart of the town there is a hotel called the ‘Lansdowne Strand’. The place was built as a carriage house sometime back in the fifteen hundreds (a ‘carriage house’ is like an early version of a modern-day coach terminal that we find in our cities today…with restaurants and budget hotels)… a place to rest up for the night and get a hot meal, for the coach to get refuelled and some maintenance if needed). I step under the wide arch of the main entrance, I walk into the lobby and at the same time my head steps back into history… close your eyes (yeah, I know I’m forever closing my eyes)… you can hear both the wooden wheels and horse shoes of a horse drawn carriage pulling up on cobbled stones… both horses and passengers being fed and bedded down for the night, before they continue their journeys the following day… if walls could talk, this place has seen people come and go for four hundred years and more. I approach the receptionist and explain myself, I ask, with my imagery cloth cap in hand ‘if a cup of tea would be possible’… and again I am told to go sit myself down… and five minutes later, a pot of tea arrives with a sandwich… ‘wow…Thank you so much’… it really is about the journey and the people we meet on the way.  

A pot of tea and that’s me back on the road… and again it takes a mile or two before the hobble turns into something that resembles walking. My phone pings… a text from Carlo…. yesterday I had sent a message to him asking if it would be possible to stay the night at his place… I say Carlo’s place. ‘Cleeve House’ is a large Edwardian house (southeast of Melksham) that sits in six acres of land with woodlands and views over Salisbury Plains, the building is used for conferences, weddings, B+B, workshops and also a retreat… Carlo and Barbara stay in a small corner of the house and pretty much run the place. I don’t know if you remember, when I was in Scotland (I just checked it was ‘Day 10’) I talked of my brother and how he had for a number of years pushed me to take a closer look at faith… well this was the place I came one weekend, to take that closer look… it was Carlo that gave the presentations. I guess that weekend something clicked. Since then, I have been to Cleeve House a number of times…I got to know Carlo and Barbara… Sorry, where was I… ‘my phone had pinged’, Carlo was more than happy for me to stay... I text back a ‘Thank you’… the phone back in the bag, I again say ‘Thank you’ to Carlo for the presentations given those many years back… and I guess for a brother that didn’t stop pushing.

Faith, I think became a part of who I am… that’s not to say I was ever very good at it, the sit down… stand up, sing a song… sit down… stand up again… was never any good at that. That’s not me knocking congregations be it of any faith, the coming together at the end of a week, for the purpose to give thanks, to say prayers , that can only be a good thing… but like I say, I’m just not very good at that stuff, I prefer to step into an empty church, a woodland glade, be on the side of some mountain or on a beach skimming stone with my little ones... and quietly offer up a prayer, a 'thank you for the days' kinda prayer... I guess a bit of loner… but hey I’m a truck driver, much of the week is spent on my tod. People matter to me, I’m just not good in crowds. Sorry… in today’s essay, there is not too much about the actual walking… the head seems to be full of this and that… memories of days gone by…it’s already looking back on a walk the legs have not yet finished.

The sky becomes a little more blue… I walk along quiet country lanes, pick up woodland tracks, hobble along canal towpaths. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze. Swirling clouds in violet haze. Colours changing hue. Morning fields of not yet amber grain. I think of the truck driver who fell out of the cab, as truckers often do… I cannot help but wonder does a believe (a faith) set us free… many times we do not listen… maybe we did not know how… perhaps one day we will. This world was meant for one as beautiful as you and I. A faith (for me) seems to add a little more depth to a world that is already incredibly beautiful. (… sorry Don made a bit of a hash of Vincent).

I arrive in Cleeve House just after five, Carlo greets me with a handshake and a big smile “Good to see you”. The place is busy, there’s a seven-day Seminar going on plus a martial arts workshop. Everybody comes together for dinner in the main hall… a lot of noise and chatter… it is good to see young people taking a closer look at faith, wanting to be people that can make a difference. In the evening I find myself sat at a table with Mike and Penny, tea and an open packet of biscuits… they are both helping out with the seminar. We share stories, talk about this and that… I am suddenly aware at how many good people there are in this world… people that care… people that want the best for the next generation… people, for want of a better word… are beautiful. 

That night laying in my bunk, I think about the mismatch we see in this world. How did we turn something beyond beautiful into the headlines we see on TV. I wonder at how it is that truck driver fell… maybe when sat in the cab, he reached over to the bunk behind him to open his lunch box, only instead he opened Pandora’s box, or maybe he grabbed a rotten apple… not sure why but I think we kinda need to know what happened, did not Buddha say ‘to untie a knot you must first know how it was tied’. I’m thinking the purpose of religion is to get us of the floor and back into the cab… and when we are back behind the wheel (the driving seat) with God alongside us, that is when the adventure really begins. That first guy who fell out the truck, I don’t think he never even got out the yard (the garden)…        

...In this world but not of  this world.