“Off in search of Walden…again” responds my inbox automatically
for the last week to anyone that wrote to me. It seems to be a
recurring theme, this search for Walden. Walden was
Thoreau‘s
escape, a place where he found a spirituality with the earth that bore
him. My automated responder however, suggests that I’ve tried on
numerous occasions, and yet still haven’t found what I’m looking for. To
be honest, I don’t think I even know what it is I am looking for. The
throbbing void within me continues on without articulation, not having
any terms of reference to cling to. Being bludgeoned by the Ultimate
Truth of science and surrounded by a rabid commercialism from the moment
I could speak, probably didn’t help. Growing up in a suburb outside of
the city of Portsmouth, we didn’t do God and we didn’t do nature. We
just did what we were told.
Last year, at the Uncivilisation festival there was a
moment
where I noticed my hometown on the distant horizon through a break in
the trees. I was staggered that a place I’d come from and subsequently
written off, could be so close to the euphoric experience I was having
at the festival. It was then that I pledged to myself that I would walk
to my old home, from my current one, from London, to Portsmouth. At
first conception, this was purely to see what was there, to find out
what was literally between the two cities, how the landscape changed
from one county to another. It was an exciting prospect, and at that
moment the great pilgrimage I’d dreamed up felt incredibly alluring and
mystical. How tired I must have been with the common and acceptable
forms of escape, that undertaking a walk through Surrey and Hampshire,
would become romantic and even exotic.
9 months on and I finally decided to carry through with the plan. The
original reasons for doing it, still held, but by this point, I had new
ones too. It appeared to me before I took to the road, that all our
experiences are basically the same when we consume from the market.
Straplines and products all brainstormed in breakfast scrums,
graphically designed and packaged up, and then sold on to us as a unique
and mutually beneficial transaction. This walk was not designed, nor
commodified in any way. Indeed, to most, it would no doubt be a deeply
undesirable way of spending a week. It was not socially permitted, but
it was still possible (legally, technically, physically etc), and
therein lies its uniqueness, under lining all other motives. This
journey was not only one of intrigue into the landscape of southern
England, but an exercise in freedom too.
So off I went. I left Paddington on Day 1, while the heavens were
wide open. “Come rain or shine”, my inner monologue was bitterly
barking. Through the plush west London neighbourhoods, over the
Hammersmith bridge, down through leafy Barnes, and onto Richmond Park.
The grazing stags conjured images of
Fenton’s rampage
last year, and kept me chuckling all the way Kingston. An A to Z served
me well up to Surbiton, where I had to change to an Ordinance Survey
map. The walking turned drab through the suburbs of Long Ditton toward
Clayton, so when I reached some green woods, I breathed deeper. Little
did I know that I’d stumbled upon Little Heath, a site where
The Diggers
had cultivated common land to receive a security in sustenance that
they were denied elsewhere. They ended up being denied here too, after
they were driven away by the local lord of the manor. I walked on with
this in mind, and just as I turned a corner from the plaque that
described the history of the area, a huge private compound loomed
menacing on the lane.
Cargill,
the gigantic industrial agriculture and food processing corporation
decided to locate their international headquarters there. Warning signs
of CCTV and guard dogs plastered the fence surrounding the Knowle Hill
Park enclosure. Gerrard Winstanley, one of the most prominent voices of
The Diggers, once declared “true freedom lies where a man receives his
nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth”. As
my stomach turned, I felt he must have been turning in his grave. Not
much has changed my dear fellow, not much at all.
I trudged on through Cobham and popped out in some fields just within
the M25. There at the end of a lane where people walk their dogs, I
camped for the night, under some trees by a stream. I’d chosen to settle
just as darkness was falling so as not to be seen by many people. One
curious couple out for an evening stroll hazarded a question as I was
erecting my tent, “Are you nature watching?”, to which I replied
dismissively but cheerfully with the briefest summary of this story so
far. “Nature watching? Whatever can they mean…” I thought to myself as
they walked away. “Is this some new middle class past time I haven’t
heard of?”, and then unfortunately concluded, “well, yes, I suppose…I am
Nature Watching”.
Sleeping lightly, I woke to Day 2 at 6am. A quick breakfast in front
of the sunrise and then got on with the long day ahead. Walking towards
the omnipresent roar of
The Orbital,
I crossed over and out, just past Downside. It was 8 o’clock in the
morning and I was walking on A roads towards Effingham Junction. Lone
commuters whizzed past me in their Beemas and Audis. Their off-spring
were dressed up like their careerist parents and waiting in polite
droves at the side of the road for the coach to take them to their
assimilation centres. All day the poor bastards would be hammered with
useless facts, then post school they’d be hammered in
Jukus
until their parents returned from the coal face, where they’d hammer
them once more themselves before bedtime. Or most probably they’d
outsource the hammering to the entertainment systems. Life in
Horsley…the envy of the whole country, no doubt. Into the woods at the
bottom of St Margaret’s Hill, scaled the incline to the church, then
down the back alleys of Chilworth. On to some B roads through Godalming,
popping flap jacks and boiled eggs into my mouth on every hour.
It was sunny on this day, so all my wet weather gear was in the pack,
adding much more weight, and I could feel every gram of it desperately.
I started obsessing about the contents of my pack, listing every item
in my head, and assessing its true value on the journey. I began to
realise, that what was making the walk unpleasant and even loathsome at
times, was fear. I had an irrational sense of fear of the unknown, the
fear of the elements. Totally rational in the modern sense of course,
but in a greater context, it was ridiculous. It was the start of summer
in England, not winter in Archangel. I was highly unlikely to come to a
grizzly end at the hands of the elements. I was reminded of one Tweeter
who wished me well but bade me cautious as “the country can be
dangerous, you know, ticks and things”. Hmmm, ticks… quite. The focus
of my anger shifted from the weight itself, to the causes of the weight.
Why was I carrying water? There are no reliable streams and rivers in
which to drink from in England due to industrial scale agriculture. This
could be true, or it could be a disclaimer I was projecting. Who was to
know? I’d been walking with friends in northern Sweden a few years ago,
and we only carried receptacles, there were fresh streams all over the
place. One only needed to bend down and scoop some up whenever thirst
made itself present. I took it all for granted then, but certainly not
now, with all this excruciating load bearing down on me.
Allemansrätten anyone?
Much to curse on the way through Witley, up to the quaint cottage
lined viewpoint of Sandhill, where indeed the hill was made of sand. At
Brook I devoured a pub lunch for dinner to give me the final push
towards the
Devil’s Punchbowl. Getting there would require crossing the infamous
A3,
the long standing road that connects London to Portsmouth. What I
thought would be a very quick crossing, ended up taking an extra hour.
With the recently finished Hindhead tunnel bypass, they had eliminated a
couple of ancient footpaths. Where the map showed my route, there was a
secure electric fence to keep me off the road and whatever else they
had in mind. The end of the day thankfully turned into a relatively
peaceful one. As I descended into the wooded caldera, the sun was
setting over the woodland and the traffic noise receded enough for me to
forget the day’s woes. I found a big fir tree and the bottom of the
depression and set myself down to pass the night beneath it.
In the morning, it was raining drizzle, but the great boughs of the
Fir kept much of the discomfort away whilst packing up. Day 3 was to be
just as arduous as the previous, with the aim of getting past
Petersfield in the most pleasant way possible. I hiked out of the
Punchbowl, touched Hindhead’s eastern flank and walked towards
Haslemere. The morning traffic here was gridlocked, and it looked like
this was typical in the town. I staggered slowly past every jammed
vehicle and came to a traffic information sign saying, “The weekend of
the X this road will be closed for engineering works”. Directly beneath
it was another official sign, with an air of desperation yet no hint of
irony, saying “Stay calm and keep shopping in Haslemere”. I groaned
onward out of the town, down the country lanes of Lynchmere, getting
lost for a while, but finding my way back through a golf course, and
into The Black Fox for a pub lunch. Inside, a surly Scottish landlord
with no interest in anything and contempt for everything, serving the
retired elderly folk and their retired adult children who Were Driving.
On to Rake, Hill Brow, stepping down into an Ancient Woodland. This was a
most agreeable hour passing through Durfood Wood, listening to the bird
noises reverberate under the canopy, and for once on this trip, the
number of non-coppiced trees outnumbered the
coppiced.
Shortly after, at Durleighmarsh there were fields as far as the eye
could see, and as I climbed up a style I became momentarily awestruck.
The onward footpath went straight across a field of brilliant yellow
flowering crops. The mid-afternoon sun was dazzling, the skies were
raging blue. It was glorious. It was the kind of thing I wanted to tell
everyone about when I returned home. But then I realised as I walked
through the mono-crop of
oil seed rape
that there was nothing close to pretty in this scene. Biofuel, state
backed with a minimum percentage mix for every diesel pump in the
country. Land devoted to gross misuse in order to keep England and its
people dependent on world markets. Coupled with the construct of private
property to spin matters with an air of legality, the perfect corrupt
system before my very eyes. I looked down at the ground beneath my feet,
there was no weed, no insect, no nothing, but a hard barren looking
soil and the Rape thrusting skyward. God knows how many tonnes of
fertilisers and pesticides they spewed across these acres to grow diesel
for the utterly pointless journeys of millions. As I crossed the field a
mantra sprung up in my head that I couldn’t banish, “Rape by name, Rape
by nature. Rape by name, Rape by nature…”. On and on it went like some
inane pop song you just can’t shake, all the way to the Petersfield
suburbs.
Here the houses began to look familiar to me. They had that classic
non-design look of the 1960s that they used to throw up all over the
south coast of England. They looked just like the house I grew up in, I
was clearly in Hampshire now. Waves of fatigue set in as I approached
the centre of Petersfield. I’d had enough of the meticulously planned
and commodified countryside, of the sprawling listless boon docks, and
the pockets of sham arcadia. I was at the end of my tether here, I was
ready to submit and flee back to the warm artificial bosom of the city. I
promised myself, as soon as I was the other side of the A3, again, I
would pitch up and pass out.
Thankfully as I hobbled out of the way of the speeding traffic on the
London to Portsmouth highway, I had a second wind. I realised the sun
was setting, and that
Butser Hill
was within sight. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to settle down at the top to
see the Meon Valley fade into the gloam, I thought. I slid quickly into
the rhythm of a march and powered through the little lanes around the
hill for the last 4 miles of the day. At the summit there were dog
walkers and children and their nannies, all about to clear out and leave
me to the highlight of the trip. I leaned back on my pack as if it were
comfy old sofa, fired up the primus with some stir fry noodles, and
watched the sun dip slowly down over Hampshire. My body utterly
exhausted, and my brain a total void, I could barely comprehend what it
was I was experiencing. What was this country I was born into? How did
it form my character? Where was its true essence? What was relevant?
What was the Ultimate Truth? What was to be done? Staring gaga 93
million miles into space, no answer came back. Once dusk set in I moved
across to the other side of the hill, overlooking the A3 and Portsmouth,
the final destination. I thought perhaps it would be nice to see the
sun rise, for consistency’s sake, if nothing else. There I pitched on
the hillside, the twinkle of the city of Portsmouth in the distance.
The morning was overcast, so the sunrise wasn’t to be. Day 4 I hoped,
would be fairly leisurely, as I was close to the end and wanted to
dawdle a little in my old haunts. I descended the hill along more narrow
country lanes, brushing past the site of last, and actually this year’s
Uncivilisation
festival too. There were few people around, a man from the council
needlessly strimming a grass verge, some dustbin men collecting refuse
at the birthplace of cricket, The Bat and Ball. I entered the back of
Denmead just before midday, and detoured into the cemetery to find my
Dad’s aunt’s plot. As I was looking for her stone, here were two more
men strimming the grass, this time around the graves of dead people and
making an ear splitting infernal racket. I frowned. Surely this is no
way to tend to a site where we have buried those we have loved and lost.
A few moments later I chanced upon an epitaph, and stood a while
processing the inscription, “…who leaves behind a loving family…will be
dearly missed…always in our hearts”. It was at this point that I lost
it. Emotion for the first time during the whole trip overwhelmed me. It
was an immense sadness for the loss of something I’d never even known. A
lack of comprehension of what it was I had and hadn’t witnessed in the
last few days. All of it bound up in association with the empathy I felt
for the relatives of the deceased’s headstone I was reading.
I struggled out of the cemetery without any composure, the men from
the council strimming away with their ear defenders on, completely
oblivious. To the nearest pub, the White Hart I believe, for an ale and a
hearty lunch of something welcome but ultimately forgettable. Back on
the road, through the Forest of Bere, and up to Southwick, the last
village before I had to climb the Ports Down Hill. With plenty of time
left in the day, I took another pint in the Red Lion, a respectably
carpeted establishment unfortunately under the tyranny of the F*llers
pub co. Over the 4 days I had exchanged curt pleasantries about the
weather with the odd person, but somehow I’d managed to get this far
without an actual conversation with anyone. It wasn’t until the landlady
of the Red Lion struck one up with me, that I realised how completely
alone I had been. The presence of man could be felt all over the
countryside in multiple ugly ways, but there was barely anyone there
actually living. Most had gone there to die, to play golf, or to
commute, if there’s even a difference. And it made the whole place dead
as a consequence. We acknowledge the hyper atomisation in the cities,
but it’s here in the countryside too. I warmed immediately to her, and
was so grateful for the grain of humanity she extended toward me after
these barren 4 days on the road.
Slightly buoyed from social interaction and a couple of pints of HSB,
I walked out of Southwick and up the hill through the country lanes
that would lead to Portchester, passing through more fields of rape as I
ascended. As I came up to the summit of Ports Down Hill, the city of
Portsmouth the relentless outer sprawl lay before me. I walked down the
hill a little watching this horror unfold, and came to a footpath and a
plaque announcing Portchester Common. I’d grown up in Portchester for
16 years of my life and I had no idea there was an area of it devoted to
the commons. Not that I was missing much. Portchester Common was a
squalid little field with a few scrub bushes, dissected in two by the
M27 motorway,
trampled down by pylons and telegraph poles, and completely forgotten
by the people of Portchester. What a site to behold standing in the
middle of it, a spaghetti of cables overhead, cars below, and a maritime
scene in the distance to rival Pearl Harbour post-attack in its
ugliness. I sobered up pretty quickly and clumped down the hill to the
house where I grew up.
It was still there, a few modifications, some decking, net curtains,
what you’d expect. I walked down the lane that ran along the side of the
house, and heard kids laughing in the back garden. Yes, despite the
conditions, moments of happiness were possible here. I was heartened.
Onward, down to the old schools where the trees had grown so tall, and
yet were just saplings when I was a boy. They’d painted my junior school
a mixture of turquoise and green on the panels that clad it. I stood
grinning at them thinking, “That’s a nice colour. What a lovely colour
for the little ones.” And I meant it. Down past the last pub of the town
to be converted into a Co-operative supermarket, down past the petrol
station upgraded to an M*rks and Spencer supermarket, toward the Wicor
Rec. Along the harbour front towards Cams Estate and its golf course.
Stopping briefly to read a historical plaque about the area, “Fareham
once had a thriving ship building industry in the 1800s due to the local
availability of timber…but the industry died when there were no more
trees left in the area”. No doubt some local politician was championing
it at the time with the tedious idiom, “jobs and growth”. I got to
Fareham in the late afternoon, and spent the night at my aunt’s house,
weary, spent, and desperate for a bath.
The next morning was the final and 5th day. I had just a few miles to
complete, most of it along one long A road to the Gosport Ferry. My
aunt and her dog accompanied me for the last leg. There’s not much to
say about these last few miles. They were dreary except for the odd
colourful glazed tiling of a Gosport pub. We reached the ferry terminus,
crossed Portsmouth Harbour, and that was the end of it all. Within
minutes I was on a train bound north to London, flying roughly through
the route I’d walked for 4 days, in 1 hour 30 minutes.
So there it is, an account of London to Portsmouth on foot, by a
curmudgeon to rival all curmudgeons. Maybe. I tried hard to be objective
on the road, and as far as I’m concerned I was. But ultimately, this is
what I found, this is what I saw, and this is how I interpreted it.
Call me a cynic, call it inevitable progress, but the facts remain. It’s
ugly out there. Any perceived spots of beauty are nothing more than
contrived, artificial, essentially a Disneyland. This is no path to
genuine fulfillment of the human soul. All we can hope for in our
unlucky generation is some rabbity flea bitten compromise.
Theodore Roszak
summed it up perfectly in the first line of his essay entitled ‘Where
the Wasteland Ends’: “If it seems cranky to lament the expanding
artificiality of our environment, the fact underlying that lament is
indisputable, and it would be blindness to set its significance at less
than being the greatest and most rapid cultural transition in the entire
history of mankind.”
This conclusion could have been derived at before, clearly, as it’s
no secret that England is an industrial wasteland. I just desperately
wanted to be surprised, and I’m deeply saddened to say that all it did
was meet my expectations.
