Paths to writing

It was lovely to hear Claire Tomalin talking on this afternoon's Radio 4 Book Club about her biography of Thomas Hardy: 'The Time-Torn Man'. She spoke of how significant to becoming a writer the long walk to school had been to Hardy, offering him a rich internal life. When I read the biography, whilst I was re-walking some of Hardy's Cornish paths, I was very struck by that childhood development, and wrote the following as part of a longer essay:

'As I approach [St Juliot's Church], I feel again that sense of path as theatre, but also path as custom, repetition, familiarity. The two things seem at a kind of odds with each other. For me, a recreational walker, it is the meditative inner world that predominates as I walk. There is rarely drama.

I know from reading Tomalin’s biography of Hardy how walking was central in his youth. The decisive turn his education took when he was enrolled at school in Dorchester at the age of ten, set him on a three mile walk each way in which he observed hares, ‘learnt to read the noises of the fields and the woods, the bark of the fox’ and exercised his imagination. This time for solitude and reflection no doubt walked him towards his writerly sensibility and helped shape the exquisitely sharp observations of nature that have startled me in my re-readings of his novels. But as Tomalin says, ‘Walking the roads, meeting others on the road, exchanging news with travellers, being overtaken by riders, carts and carriers or offered lifts’, will also have educated him about human life and led towards speculation and then drama. As his success grew in literature and public life, his walks continued but became a matter of recreation, an airing for his writerly mind, rather than of necessity.'

Walkers as visionaries

I'm very grateful to a reader of this blog for drawing my attention to Fieldwork, a collection of essays by Ronald Blythe, and in particular to ‘John Clare and footpath walking’ written for the John Clare Society Journal in 1995. It infects me with excitement, as reading sometimes does. It articulates, with wonderful clarity and economy, my own half-developed observations and ideas; and each time I read it, I learn something new.

The essay explores the role of paths (as opposed to roads and newly-forged ways) and our fairly recent but diminishing legacy of walking as a way to get somewhere which also becomes an incidental route towards learning. It draws attention to a peopled countryside, the fields as one-time places of social intercourse, where routes of work met and crossed. This was what I wanted to capture when I walked village paths in Kenya, meeting and chatting with people going about their ordinary business on foot; walking old ways such as drove roads with their legacy of footfall; and is one of the aspects of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I relish. The sense of travel along shared paths and social routes is very precious, when so much of our recreational walking now seems to suffer from both its deliberateness and its anticipation of relative solitude.

During the recent months of snow, I was intrigued to hear of a change in ‘normal’ patterns. A woman living a mile or so from the shop in Strathtay (where most people get to and from home entirely by car) told me how she and her neighbours, unable to get their cars out, established a new ritual. Each would walk the mile along the river to the shop, returning together, and finding that they enjoyed the unaccustomed pace and company. This would have been the natural way not long ago for rural dwellers, but I suspect now spring is here, and the roads are clear, it will be a rarity again.

Clare walked both for his travel to work – lime-burning or ploughing – and for his poetry, in order to look, to solve problems and to scribble furiously as he stopped in dips and hollows in the land. The effect of walking on a creative mind is profound, as Blythe says in this essay, ‘a great amount of our best poetry, novels and essays smell, not of the lamp, but of dust, mud, grit, pollen, and, I expect, sweat.’

But more interestingly for me, Blythe highlights how the experience of walking touches everyone: ‘.. it touches us because we are all descended from the walking men, the walking women, the walking children: and not so very long ago either. Sometimes we forget that it wasn't only the poets, novelists like Hardy, who had these wonderful ideas as they walked….. Certainly, these long walks to work, these long walks to school, these long walks with a friend, these long walks just to get out of the house, etc, were part of a pattern of life of people right up until the modern age. Whilst it happened, their minds ticked over in an extraordinary way. Because men and women haven't all been able to write, or paint, or make music about certain things, it doesn't mean they haven't experienced them...’

I particularly love Blythe's idea that countless people, not just writers, whilst on the way to work, or at work itself, were unwittingly visionary. And I love this line: 'It was the landscape being articulated in their heads, via their normal work practices. ' Walking is a great leveller – it democratises the visionary and gives everyone the opportunity to learn. But with the loss of these simple ways of getting around, I can’t help wondering what else we’re losing.

Now I’m off to try and find a copy of the out of print Fieldwork so I can read the rest of the essays, and while I’m at it, Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze, a novel featuring John Clare's time at High Beach Asylum in Essex.

print-making

One of the delights of being surrounded by white stuff has been observing the criss-crossing patterns of prints made by animal and human movement. I was on a hill near home this afternoon which was scrambling with mountain hares in their white coats. They were locked, as they should be now that it's March, in nose-to-nose combat, leaping and circling. I was mesmerised by the lines left by their journeys; ill-defined holes in deep snow, or fine, clawed paw-prints in the harder stuff. But always that characteristic cadence.


It brought to mind some lines I love from a Thomas Hardy poem:



'Yes, I companion him to places

Only dreamers know,

Where the shy hares print long paces,

Where the night rooks go'

(The Haunter)

Crooked Ways and Stiles of Stone

In Thomas Hardy’s poem of 1920, ‘If you had known’, he refers back to his courtship of his first wife Emma Lavinia Gifford which took place high on the clifftops and deep in the moist green valleys of North Cornwall. This poem was written fifty years after he first met her there as an architect travelling from Dorset to restore the church tower. Hardy returned to the area after her death in what Kenneth Phelps describes as a kind of ‘pilgrimage of penance’ which pained from him some of his most beautiful poetry. He describes in the poem the wet walk back from Beeny Cliff towards the Old Rectory of St Juliot’s in the Valency Valley, ‘by crooked ways and over stiles of stone.’

Returning myself after 32 years, I walked some of the same ways I had done whilst there on a painting holiday (which also turned into walking) at 17. And this time although still spellbound in a romantic homage to Hardy, I was captivated as if for the first time by the wonderful stiles and walls, and naturally, the crooked ways that lead to and away from them.

A gatepost graced a field entrance, crescent-shaped with its straight edge facing inwards, a slim half moon facing away from the gate. I approached it from a roadway wrapped in a tunnel of dark ivy, so that the gateway opened like a window onto light, framing the steep rise of a pale green field.

Such structures sprung up at me all over the fields where I walked. A chink in a high hedge or dry stone wall invites walkers with ingenious system of slate slabs sidelong. There are steep two-sided staircases; a kissing gate squeezed under a holly tree in the nook of a wall; slate cattle grids at a churchyard entrance. And all the slate seems silk-edged and petrol-sheened with long use by hands and feet and weather. All has been built and maintained for human thoroughfare, on foot. And it all seems like art to me.

Across open fields, the paths marked on the map often seeemd invisible. I was guided only by a chink in the hedge opposite, or by the suggestion of a darker green meandering line teased in the grass by repeated footfall, or simply by an instinct as to where the ‘desire line’ lay. This sense of the persistence of walkers, and the marks they make in the land has long fascinated me and I think I may have learnt it from early readings of Hardy’s novels.

A re-reading of The Return of the Native, my A-level text, had me following characters across the huge imperturbable face of Egdon Heath, in daylight and darkness, in confidence and fear. Eustacia Vye, the discontented dark witch-beauty, is practised in her footcraft, finding paths which are, ‘an infinitely small parting in the shaggy locks of the Heath’. Hardy shows us how the regular ‘haunters’ of the Heath feel their way in the dark: ‘The whole secret of following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike-road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night rambling in little-trodden spots. To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.’

For me, this ‘going back’ has been a pilgrimage of happy rediscovery rather than of penance – a rediscovery both of a place where I found new things outside and inside myself and of the literature of Thomas Hardy. It has brought with it a finer appreciation of how walking made him both the man and the writer that he was, and how he influenced my own walking and writing.

Writers’ Footsteps

The summer that I was seventeen, recovering from glandular fever, and with family holidays finally put behind us, I was dispatched on my own for a painting holiday at Carole Vincent’s studio in Cornwall. Boscastle’s rocky shores summoned me on a journey in the drought of 1976 with no appetite or energy, teenage recalcitrance and a reluctance to leave my boyfriend. But off I went. It was perhaps on that week that I discovered the joys of walking alone. After a morning spent painting and Carole’s rough hunks of home-made bread and beer for lunch, I went off for the afternoon with my pink-jacketed OS map to explore and extend my knowledge of the area. I gained strength, recovered my appetite and found an independence I didn’t know I had.

In the midst of A-Level English and a study of Return of the Native, I was inevitably drawn away from the village, upstream along the damp shade of the Valency Valley to find St Juliot church. Hardy travelled to his 'Lyonnesse' as a young architect, and met his first wife, Emma – a meeting that generated so much of his poetry and the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. Discovering the places that Hardy wrote about, the soaring Beeny Cliff and shady waterfalls, his 'Castle Boterel', I also seemed to find myself, my feet. Something mysterious happened, and that week took on a magical significance, a kind of falling in love with Hardy, with life, with discovery. A rite of passage I suppose.

When I think of Hardy’s novels now, I see small figures on ancient landscapes and pathways - the long walks his characters often have to take. I associate his work with walking, and with the particularity of places. One of my journeys on this project is going to be a return visit to the Valency Valley, following myself (and my own journal) that summer, pursuing a romance with Hardy.

But it has started a train of thought about following writers, and a reading of Richard Holmes’ fabulous Footsteps, part biography of Stevenson, Shelley etc, part memoir, part travel. And it has made me think of another ‘journey’, a sharing of landscapes with another writer whose work I have only come to know in the last year through adapting a short story of hers for BBC Radio Four, but which I admire enormously.

In 1946, Jessie Kesson took a ‘holiday’ from writing her own life in fiction and radio drama. Her writing career was a triumph over disadvantage and seemed to be born of a need to make sense of her past. Her childhood is described by her biographer Isobel Murray as ‘a series of violent shifts of surroundings and circumstances, with no ongoing family support..’. She was born illegitimate, lived in Elgin slums with her mother before being moved to an orphanage, and spent a year in a mental hospital, at the age of 18.

But in 1946, she took over the ‘Country Dweller’s Year’ in the Scots Magazine from Neil Gunn, and her monthly pieces are a little uncharacteristic of her wider work - exquisite observations of nature and rural custom in her favourite places. I read these recently (sadly only available by retrieving back copies in the National Library of Scotland) and was particularly struck by one passage describing the summer she spent at Abriachan above Loch Ness when she was ‘boarded out’ with an old woman after release from mental hospital. I was partly taken by the sheer exuberance of her experience amongst the smell of bracken-mould and primroses, on a hill so high up that ‘you feel any moment you might topple into Loch Ness below’. The same location is featured, again with visceral joy, in her fiction and poetry.

But perhaps I was also drawn to her writing about this location because about ten years before I came across her work, I wrote a short story, Keeping Away from the Water, also concerning childhood at Abriachan. In this story, excerpted below, the landscape plays an important role:

The sudden heat at Easter fells sheep into panting heaps in the shade and drops gifts of frog spawn overnight into the pond. The grip of winter lifts with the early morning mist. I lie on my stomach and gloop the frog spawn with a stick, watching it froth and pulsate. The winds turn sweet and soft, luring everyone out of winter dank cottages to breathe again, the air still clear of summer’s midges. Doors and windows are opened wide for the Spring to sweep through, rocking chairs and lifting papers from table to table, leaving the house smelling of wild garlic and the sea. Down the hill, boats are being re-floated in the loch, our neighbours stand and stare at the soil, appealing to their cold gardens to revive. Birds are careless; tumbling and falling down the steep gap to the water.

Voices burble up with the Spring wind, with the sunshine, in the birch trees. I hear them best if I lay my head in the whipping grasses and close my eyes. They never quite let me hear them directly - who they are, what they’re saying. I crunch down on last year’s bracken by the burn, finding primroses amongst the rusty deadness, turning their pale faces to be licked by the sun. I try to see what’s behind the veil of water, where the singing’s coming from. I peer into dark corners of saturated black and jewel green moss, waiting for the chatter to transform into words.

Particular places have an important impact on us all and I feel a (humble) affinity with Jessie Kesson at this coincidence of our observations. I am hatching a plan to celebrate this, to return to Abriachan and make the journey from village to lochside, the ‘plunge downwards through rough, hairy brackens’ she describes in I to the Hills.