David's hobby was a
statement, of course; Gillian knew that. If anyone asked, Gillian would say he
was a hiker, that hiking was his hobby. Really, what she wanted to say was that
he was an awkward sod.
Neither of them had ever
had an affair. Their marriage, to outsiders, was rock-solid. They'd both spent
their lives in adult education and Gillian was a lay preacher. Devout
ecologists, they knew their birds. But if David's hobby got much worse, Gillian
would have to up sticks. Or, with a bit of luck, he might get properly arrested
and put away for a bit, instead of being cautioned, just an embarrassment in
some local rag. That would shock him out of it.
The rot started, to
Gillian's mind, when David took early retirement once the kids had flown.
Ludlow was too quiet, after Bracknell. Lives of quiet desperation, as Pink
Floyd had put it. Gillian played a lot of her ancient, vinyl numbers while
David pored over old maps in the kitchen. She wondered how she had ended up
like this. Distance Learning for the Open University. No colleagues. Rain
spattering the picture window and David becoming an awkward sod. She had even
started smoking again, and David had banned her to the garden. One morning
there was a tussle, and Gillian threw one of those books at him. It missed, but
landed with a splat and a few of the pages flew out and David smacked her
across the face. Or would have done, if she hadn't ducked.
Everything at sixes and
sevens, as her mother would say.
"Why can't you just
hike normally, like everyone else?" she'd asked him, one day, when he was
strapping on his horrible little snot-green knapsack with those chocolate
stains, bound for Telford.
"I am hiking normally.
It's the world that isn't normal," he replied.
"Change is totally
normal," she said. "Look at us."
"I can choose to live
the life I want, Gillian," he said.
"Well, at this rate
you'll live it without me, soon."
The climax came when he
brought back yet another one of those books. He'd got enough of them, now, to
cram three shelves. There were a couple of local second-hand bookshops nearby:
one was neat and expensive with an ex-stockbroker behind the desk, the other
chaotic and cheap with Mike and his unwashed beard staring at you from the
shadows. If you were prepared to spend a whole morning truffling under his
gaze, the cheap one could yield some treasures. Today it had yielded David's
type of treasure.
He waved it under Gillian's
nose, ever so pleased with himself. She could smell the shop off his cagoule:
pipe-smoke and bodily decay.
"Found it," he
said. "At last."
"Don't tell me. The
Himalayan Trail, 1914. Maybe I'll get rid of you for a few months and then
you'll fall down some post-1914 crevasse."
"Do you have to smoke
in the kitchen?"
"Bloody hell, David,
you don't mind filling your lungs with it in the bookshop, do you?"
He sat down, opening the
book.
"Wonderful," he
murmured. "This is the crown jewel."
"Looks just like all
the others. Old and sad."
"Buckinghamshire
Footpaths by JHB Peel, published 1949."
"Exactly. Just like
all the others. Walking in Warwickshire, London's Countryside, See England
First ..."
He took out a reddish leaf
that someone had pressed between the pages.
"Fifty years old, this
could be. Wych elm. Look. Tragic."
It crumbled in his fingers
like dried tobacco.
"David, that's the
last damn book or it's divorce."
"I could say the same
about your cigarette."
She hesitated. She felt the
smoke in her chest.
"Alright. We'll do a
deal. Fags versus those books."
He looked at her over his
glasses for a moment, then at the book open in front of him.
"OK," he said.
"I don't need any more. This is the ne plus ultra, this is."
"Why?"
"Listen."
He put a bit more distance
between the book and his glasses (another sign of age) and read.
"Milton Keynes is a
homely place. Fields encroach upon the dusty by-lane, and brim over the
scattered cottages. There is nothing here of the conventional beauty spot, for
indeed no one seems to have heard of the place, save the handful of its
inhabitants; and these think so well of it they rarely leave it. I have known
and loved Milton Keynes since I was a boy, but at no time in my legion pilgrimages
thither have I met a stranger. The church at Milton Keynes, which is among the
finest ..."
"I think you've made
your point. You're not going to do your thing at Milton Keynes, are you?"
"Of course. A circular
walk from Newport Pagnell via Milton Keynes, Woughton and the - I quote -
'delightful hamlets' of Little Woolstone and Willen, with a detour to Bradwell
Abbey and then on to Great Linford, with its single-branch railway back to
Newport Pagnell. In the author's footsteps."
"Oh dear."
"It's England,"
he said. "I've every right. Listen. The church is approached through a
line of small trees, having a farm that reaches to the church wall itself, so
that cows sometimes browse upon the backs of unsuspecting worshippers who have
stopped to discuss the result of the Crimean War, or whatever else passes for
news in this most blessed haven of pristine sanity."
"Then you won't be
wanted there, dearest. If it's a haven of sanity."
David smiled.
"The cows are concrete
cows now, aren't they?"
He almost made it to the
end, too; he was only arrested while trying to enter the grounds of the Gyosei
Japanese boarding school in Willen.
"Willen is unspoiled
because it is unknown," he shouted, waving the book about. "The
cottages here wear an air of permanence; the oaks have a great girth; and old
men are hale."
The policemen had received
about 100 calls relating to this bloke with his tatty green rucksack, and
hauled him unceremoniously across the cycle way to the van. The fun had started
when he'd crossed the M1 near Junction 14, where Mr Peel had admired the view
of "innumerable drowsy villages cupped within the trees". A lorry had
swerved onto the hard shoulder because David liked to think of the M1 as a
phantom. He was surprised - disappointed, even - to find the village of Milton
Keynes intact. The photographs of Milton Keynes in the book, showing thatched
cottages humped like natural grass mounds off a dusty lane, with a church tower
in the distance beyond grand elms, had nothing much to do with the clipped
suburban verges and lawson cypresses of the present incarnation, but at least
it wasn't under a Tesco storage depot as that ancient wood had been on the last
hike.
"At the inn you will
strike a footpath south-west to Woughton-on-the-Green."
Days over old maps had
established this footpath, as well as the inn. He crossed a few executive
gardens and ended up inside the Asda superstore, where the route went up the
Prepared Meals aisle. With the help of a compass, he followed the path with its
primroses and snowdrops under oaks and elms (it was early spring) through the
Chilled Foods section and on via a goods delivery bay into Dixons, which had a
special offer on Toshiba laptops. He got into a bit of trouble in Top Shop,
because the footpath curved into the back area where an off-duty cashier was
snogging with a deputy manager. But he wasn't arrested: when he explained what
he was doing, producing the book from his knapsack, they just thought he was a daftie.
Bradwell Abbey was in the
grounds of the City Discovery Centre, and he ate his picnic in peace. He had a
spot of bother when the footpath, after crossing 20 mini-roundabouts, eight
Redways and a multiplex car park, wound its delightful way through several
offices and the gents toilets of Mercury Communications. They thought he was
one of the Albanian field workers at first, until he opened his mouth. By now,
he'd been tracked by a total of 243 CCTV tilt-and-zoom cameras - a brief,
shadowy figure doing odd things: he was saved only by the difficulty of someone
watching all 10,000 or so tapes that were on the go at any one time in the
local CCTV centre.
Once he'd climbed his way
over the sea of parked cars and reached the nearest executive estate, he was
again in the realm of private householder security. An alarm rang somewhere
while he was crossing a neat lawn with a whirly-brick feature in the middle,
and the cops picked him up as he was scaling the wall of the Gyosei Japanese
boarding school a few minutes later.
In fact, the alarm was in
the form of a member of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, who thought
he was her estranged husband come back to do her harm. He did not resist the
police, he only quoted Mr Peel, but they arrested him anyway. Reports of a
trespasser had come in thick and fast over the last hour. Several people had
phoned the police from their mobiles when he'd climbed on their cars, which had
been in the line of the footpath. He'd even been roughed up by the owner of a
Mazda MX-5 convertible, and lost his bobble hat. The police had got fed up:
they were sick of alternative theatre at Milton Keynes, all these arty bods
down from London littering the public space with their Lottery-aided wank, high
on wacky backy or whatever. So they hauled him in.
But they decided he was a
genuine nut, going on about primroses and elms and meandering, drowsy streams.
"I just want to get to
Great Lindford," he kept saying, "down the winding English lane and
its high-banked bend, the fields studded with hedgerows. Look!"
And he'd flash the book at
them, which they finally confiscated.
"Jesus," said one
of the coppers, "what are you on, mate? Bang him up for the night, will
you?"
When they let him go in the
morning, he was not charged. Gillian stopped smoking and got very crotchety.
David went quiet for a while and watched a lot of television. Gillian was
almost relieved when he came back one day with Rambles through Middlesex, published in 1929. She went
straight out and bought 10 packets of Marlboro.
"At least he's not a
drunk," she murmured to herself, as he plotted the next hike with his old
maps, his finger cutting clean across the slumbering hamlet of Heath Row.
