Day thirty-seven

 6th June 2009     ENGLAND

Let us not forget

These last five or so weeks I have woken up on the moors, in woodlands, fields and meadows… sheds, bothies and barns… a porter cabin, a fire station, in the back room of a pub, a train station in Scotland and a workhouse in Wales …in the homes of strangers… the night before last in the home of a friend not seen for many years… not forgetting the youth hostels, hotels and churches. Today I add to that list by waking up in an Edwardian manor house… it would seem, home is where I hang my hat… and where it is I kick off my worn-out boots at the end of each day (…the hat being my imaginary cloth cap). In a dormitory, I lay in a bottom bunk, again with hands behind my head, listening to this old house waking up, people talking, floorboards creaking, doors opening and shutting, pipes banging, the thud of someone crash landing from a top bunk, and of others laughing… no sound of any swallows this morning. 

In the big hall downstairs, the breakfast table is set. Carlo already has a handful of logs crackling away in the stone fireplace. People come down the stairs in dribs and drabs, some head for the warmth of the hearth, others (that are not yet properly awake) sink into the old sofas near the bay windows and some are already sat at the far end of the breakfast table. Another twenty minutes everyone is sat around the table, grace is said, and we break-fast. Toast, milk, jam, sugar, cereals, teapots and more all move up and down the table like some chaotic chess game... everybody wins, nobody goes hungry. While helping to clear the table, Carlo asked me how many more days I have before I reach the south coast. “Four days, that includes today… you should come along”. Carlo smiles “When are you leaving”. “Just need to pack my bag and that’ll be me… ten minutes”. 

Ten minutes later and the bag is packed, a photo is taken outside the house with some of the guys… I cannot help but wonder at what they thought of this (not so young) guy and his stories of Gruffalos and Angels… that said there was one here who knew something of my story and that was Amalia, she with her dad, Omar, had met me outside Carrickfergus Castle in Northern Ireland, a number of weeks back (that was on Day 17… it was Omar that had given me the money for the ferry ticket, so as I could get back across the ocean and into Wales… again I say a quiet “Thank you”). And what of my thoughts as I bid farewell to these (annoyingly) young faces… it is one of hope, each one of these guys an inspiration, I see them helping to create a better… a kinder world. I wonder at what adventures and stories they will bring back to this old house in twenty years from now.  

Outside this big old house and with collar up, bag over one shoulder, I look to find Carlo and Barbara, to say thank you for allowing me to stay the night… as I turn around, I see Carlo stepping out the front door, walking boots on and a bag over his shoulders. “You did say, I should come along… that is if you're still OK with that”. “Whaa”… I hear myself laugh and with a big grin on my face, I say “Yeah yeah of course… glad to have you on board”. And with that the two of us head up the driveway… not sure what Barbara thought of the idea. It will be good to share something of this walk with another.

Carlo is not only a little older than me, but he is also a little quicker than me, I am a step or two behind, and wondering if I can keep this pace up for another four days. Things were looking grim… I’m thinking this ex RAF mountain rescue guy is going to have to swallow his pride and ask Carlo to slow down a little… only I don’t have to, without saying anything, I think Carlo realizes that I have been pretty much on the go / none stop for a good number of weeks, and that of course the guy behind him (me) is going to be slowing down a little… Carlo drops down a gear… in my head I say thank you.. for understanding that I didn’t want to have to say ‘can you slow down’… Things were looking grim but they’re looking good again… it’s not always easy to swallow your pride. The weather today is good for walking, not to hot… a mix of sunshine and cloud. Carlo tells me a friend has phoned him, a guy called Terry and that he is driving out to meet us… half an hour later, the three of us are sat on the side of the road, with a hot flask, chocolate bars and biscuits… hmm, a food delivery services, this bodes well… I’m kidding, thank you Terry, the treats were very much appreciated… not sure but I think the last time I tasted chocolate was a couple of weeks back, just south of Belfast… a chocolate chicken, given to me by the young Princess Erin… no I’m wrong, there was the cottage chocolate factory in North Wales… Thank you again to both. 

Walking through Salisbury Plain we pass many signs warning us of tanks and sudden gunfire. It is on these open plains the British Army gets to play with tanks (sorry, train with tanks)… It was in September 1916 when the tank first rolled on to a battlefield, it was during the Battle of the Somme in The Great War (WW1)… a war that would end all wars…sadly that never happened... a hundred years on, and tanks are still being used on battlegrounds around the world. My dad was in the military, my three brothers also… Navy, Army and Air Force and I as well… that said I still wonder how many more shells need to fly from the cannon of a tank before they are forever banned. 

On this walk I have passed through many a small village each one unique and yet at the same time, kinda similar… most of them will have a village green, a church, a Post office, a pub, a corner shop, and many still have an old red telephone box, but what it is they all seem to have without exception is a war memorial made from stone, with the names of those killed in the First World War engraved into that stone… and twenty years later we did it all again… World War Two… the stone engravers dug out their chisels and hammers and added a whole many more names to those memorials. There are over 100,000 war memorials registered in the UK (and that’s just in the UK). It is estimated somewhere between seventy and eighty-five million people perished in those two wars… a number hard to get your head around… how to make sense of that… other than to say… to many people have died.

Although Carlo had slowed his walking down, he is still setting a good pace, probably not a bad thing… I’m thinking that I was maybe slowing down a little too much… my hands are no longer buried in my pockets and the kicking stones, that’s not happening anymore. Carlo has introduced a little more discipline back into the walking. As we walk, we talk… I have a lot of respect for Carlo, he’s a guy who has taken his faith and has made it apart of how it is he is lives his life… me I try to do the same, but I know I’m not there yet… like this walk I am a good number of steps behind Carlo (… more than a good number). We walk into the village of Tilshead and find a pub called the Rose and Crown, we step inside, explain ourselves and again people give… after thirty-seven days, I am no closer to knowing how better to say thank you. It is always good to sit down with a pot of tea… we look at the map, there are a number of place we could aim for before the day is done, figured we would play it by ear, let the legs call the shots… the tea is gone all too soon, the thank you’s are said and that’s us back on the open road walking over the plains… the skies are looking good, just needing to keep an eye out for any rouge tanks… I’m hoping they don’t hunt in packs.

It is hard not to think about the military when walking through this part of the UK. Salisbury Plain was purchased by the ‘War Office’ (now called the Ministry of Defence) that was over a hundred plus years ago, for the purpose of training the armed forces… the wider county of Wiltshire has always had a strong connection with the military (the Romans would have known this place well)…  

…I again think about the thousands of War Memorials scattered throughout these islands.
Long before the wars of the twentieth century… a number of War Memorials did exist up and down this land, only then these monuments were built to celebrate famous battles and the officer’s from both the Navy and the Army that had led and fought in those battles… the names of the lower ranks… the common man… the many who had fallen in such conflicts were not recorded on these monuments. It was only after the Boer War (1899 -1902) that attitudes began to change. The turning point was the First World War (1914 -1918)… with the sheer numbers killed in that conflict, it felt no longer right to celebrate such things… the nation was grieving (pretty much every family had lost somebody). The logistics of bringing so many of the dead back home was close to impossible. The solution was to create cemeteries close to the battlefield where they had died… the downside of this, was that families back home didn’t have a gravestone nearby, a place to focus their grief or to lay flowers… and that is how the War Memorials we see today came about, most were funded by local communities. The names of the fallen engraved into stone… not for the purpose of celebration but instead to be remembered… and their sacrifices not forgotten.

The road is long, my legs and boots are worn and Carlo is fast… but all is good… again we talk about this and that, we share some stories, we laugh… at what I don’t know … and other times we walk quietly, wrapped up in our own thoughts. Tanks aside, Salisbury Plain is a peaceful place, a vast open space in the middle of what is a crowded part of this island… huge skies and open moors… there is something a little special about this area. It is on these plains that two and a half maybe three thousand years ago, early Mesolithic hunter-gathers (over I don’t know how many generations) built the iconic Stonehenge… I wonder at why it is they chose this place… it is believed some of the stones (weighing between 2 to 5 tons each) came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, that’s over a hundred and forty mile away (…wow that would have been some blog to read). We are missing something; these guys were far more than just hunter-gathers… they understood something more about how this world (this reality) works, than what we give them credit for… you don’t drag heavy stones across country for a hundred miles and more for no reason at all.

I am taken out of my thoughts by the ping of Carlo’s phone, a message from a guy called Andy… he would like to meet us… this is all good… an hour later or thereabouts we meet Andy just outside the small village of Shrewton… sandwiches, tea and biscuits. Thank you, Andy… very much appreciated. 

Back on quiet roads and no more than a few hours we walk into the village of Winterbourn Stoke, passing a church called St. Peters we see a sign ‘Cream Teas in the Church All Welcome’. Carlo and I look at each other and with a quiet nod of understanding, we head into the church… there is a table to one side with a tea earn, homemade cake and biscuits… the welcome is incredibly warm, a few moments later we are sat on a pew with a cup of cream tea, a saucer and a slice of cake. Paul, a church elder sits with us, intrigued by our story, asks if we have a place to stay the night and offers us the summer house in his garden. “Wow… thank you, we would really appreciate that, Thank you so much”. 

We walk back with Paul to his home; he introduces us to his wife Diane and then shows us the summer house… It may sound daft (and maybe a little arrogant)… but time and time again it has felt that a reality I don’t understand has been one step ahead of me on this walk… getting things ready… anticipating where the day would end... Yeah I know, that all sounds a little spiritual and it’s not really what I am… I’m a truck driver, feet on the ground kinda guy… for things to fall into place once in a while, I get that… but time after time… that’s a little more than just chance, I would say that’s bordering on the spooky... Paul and Diane let us get settled in, and an hour later they bring out soup, toast and tea… “Thank you”.

That night it seems to take forever to fall asleep… it is hard to imagine the tens of thousands of young men that had died on the battlefields of Europe, the beaches of northern France and other faraway places (thousands of them no older than the guys I had shared breakfast with this morning)… many would have died, never knowing what it was to have danced with a girl or to feel the butterflies in their stomachs as this girl (a girl they had never met nor never will do) reaches out her hand, and what of that impossible smile they would never see… they would never get to know what it is to hold their own child. That is what they gave up… that is some sacrifice… and that is why we don’t forget. 

How is it (for me anyway) easier to better understand tragedy when looking at an individual and not the thousands that were caught up in it… in my head I see another guy dying on some other battlefield, reaching to the inside pocket of his trench coat, and pulling out a letter from a girl by the name of Veronica... Bang Bang… ‘I really wanna hold her’… and somehow knowing that’s not going to happen (not in this world anyway). Sometimes we grumble at the stupidest of things or we get on our high horse about stuff that in the bigger scheme of things really doesn’t matter at all. I cannot begin to imagine sitting in a trench that is being heavily bombed, with the dead and the wounded all around me… and wondering if I would ever get to see my little ones again… to hold them tight… Yeah, before we grumble at what it is we don’t have or about the stuff that doesn’t really matter… let us stop a moment and look around at what it is we do have... and what it is that does matter.

… it’s the middle of the night, I’m wide awake, in a sleeping bag, in a shed (sorry… in a summer house), in a small town that I don’t know… yet all is good… I have a full belly, a roof over my head, outside there are no bombs falling, no bullets flying. Back home in Scotland, two little girls are waiting for their dad to come home… and he will… I feel a huge amount of gratitude and a sense of responsibility to those that came before.

Hmm… gratitude and responsibility… add a third component… the ability to love, and we have something here… A solid foundation… the beginning of a faith… the start of a journey… the what it is we need to live the best life we can live… and maybe, just maybe in doing that we can help to create a better… a kinder world.