Here at Kings Lynn the Great Ouse is impressive, a silt brown expanse of water navigable to even the biggest ships. As I shivered waiting for the ferry to tie up, a Russian freighter’s wake marked a pattern of waves on the top of the random swirls of the tide. The Ouse looked like a body of water that it was worth being superstitious about. I felt like I was crossing the River Styx as I sat in the small boat.
I had a terrible night’s sleep. The room I had stayed in overlooked a town centre car park and I had been kept awake most of the night by the hand-brake turns of the local youths driving round the open space. I felt old looking out through the curtains at the revving cars below. It did not help that I had eaten something that had disagreed with me that evening. I was not in good shape when I set out across the river. King John, the silly man, lost the crown jewels in The Wash. I managed to lose my breakfast and most of my marbles.
There is something quite freakish about the modern Fen landscape and as I walked north under the two huge pylons that span the Ouse I got my first taste of the unsettling effect of this reclaimed land.
I was up on the large banked up dyke which ran to the horizon a steady ten feet above the muddy foreshore. To my right the Ouse swirled as its waters met the tide, to my left and quite noticeably lower than the river, a tractor ploughed a long straight furrow. I tipped my head to one side in an attempt to raise up the sunken field.
It’s a built landscape, the Fens, constructed by the joinery of reclamation. It would look Dutch if it wasn’t for the absence of any reassuring windmills. It’s a landscape larger and more regular than any other I had seen in England. The modern John Deere tractor looked like a toy as it wobbled its way across the field. Even the horizon was somewhat unusual. There was simply nothing to be distinguished beyond the raised sea wall. The sea and the sky simply shaded into the land. It was a landscape that taught me how slowly I walk.
I thought that I had left the autobiographical part of the walk behind me. But as I wandered on deeper into the Fenland I went back into the movie house of my head.
My brothers used to call me Clapham, after Clapham Junction, the stitched-up scars on my stomach look like the tracks of the shunting yard. At the time it hurt to laugh. But still I really loved that nickname. It was no accident that it came back to me now.
The first fourteen years of my life had been uneventful. I laboured under the burdens of a happy childhood, the dreamy third son who did not find anything difficult. Peritonitis changed all that.
I spent three months in hospital with the resultant infection, followed by five years of operations to fix up the complications. The experience left me with scars which warn about weather changes and a deep seated mistrust of my body. As I walked at the edge of the Wash, the old men I had got to know on the ward came back to say hello to me. Just like they had every other time I doubted myself. Boy- they called me- in between coughs. Boy, what are you doing?
There’s a particular smell that comes with the memory of that Summer of illness. A rotten, flesh smell of farts and old men mixed up with grasping gangrene. A smell that sneaks out underneath the fiercest chemical cleaners. Then there’s a quality of light during the nights I did not sleep. The night light glow of low watt orange bulbs. The filament of light dancing like a phoenix. Some of my contemporaries on the ward were seventy years older than me, and in the confusion of their last few days they returned to the Great War which still scared them witless. For a short time of confusion I joined them there. I live on and they all died. All of these details came back to me as I walked.
After the illness everything became difficult. I could not run. I could not play my saxophone. I was rude and I was shy . Everybody else was out there chasing girls.
I persevered, I learnt to endure. I learnt that I would have to run if I wanted to catch up. I pursued, largely in the dark, running in the direction I thought that everyone else had gone.
In my head I called myself ‘The Broken Thing’, doubting my ability to do anything right.
"We don’t see many walkers in these parts!"
Curiosity is the one thing that stops the tractors in the Fens and, judging by the local reaction to a rucksack and the trusty map, long distance walkers are a rare sight hereabouts. I became an attraction as I walked on over the bridge into Lincolnshire. I decided it was time to visit a pub.
One of the drinkers I met had heard me on his radio when I had given my first nervous interview. I knew he had heard the interview, because he not only knew who I was and where I was going to, but he could also faithfully reproduced for me a particular verbal tick of mine ( saying ‘would of’ rather than ‘would have’) that I particularly disliked. I cringed as I listened to my ‘recorded’ voice. Bizarrely for someone who seemed to know all about my walk he then asked me - "So what are you doi’ere then?"
Here - meaning here exactly. Here in my field in Lincolnshire like. This corner of the country, not worthy of inclusion in a walk of England. As I talked to people I came to realise that Lincolnshire puts itself down.
"Can’t read.. can’t write... can drive a tractor!".
"Lincolnshire! Lincolnshire! All tatters and cabbages and that’s just the people I’m talking about." This was only a sample of what I heard in the pubs. Jokes by Lincolnshire at Lincolnshire’s expense. Perhaps the strangest comment of them all, was something I saw written on a toilet wall.
"Oi Mister don’t insult my sister - that’s my mother you’re talking about".
The County Council should invest in some local assertiveness classes (either that or some basic family planning).
After two days of wandering in the wet along sea dykes I had had enough of isolation and flashbacks to my past. I had come inland to make the walk easier. My cherished route had gone completely out of the window and I was wandering along the main road in the direction of Fosdyke. Having come in from the marshy extremes of the Wash to the line of the A17 I was having trouble getting away from it.
In other parts of the country being by an A-road would not have bothered me as I would have used a complicated web of local footpaths to take me across country away from the road in the direction that I wanted to go. Here in the made land of the Fens there are no old footpaths and the by-roads run in loops on the tops of old dyke walls joining up the farms to the arterial routes. Crossing the River Welland I realised was going to be a problem as the only bridge on the map was the A17.
I was not happy hacking along beside this busy route. It was an unsettled, windy day and the juggernauts that blasted past produced breaking waves of turbulent air that tore at my clothes and plastered my hair to my face. I was deafened by the passing loads. I dipped like a swimmer jumping through the surf and found myself spinning ever closer towards the wheels, pulled towards death and a tabloid headline - ‘ Walker dies in Sixteen Axle Slaughter’. I thought it would be a good idea to return to the seawalls.
It was a ten mile walk along the raised banks to Boston but I could already see across the empty fields to the Stump, as the tower of Boston’s church is called. The Stump, the only significant feature on the horizon. I had always imagined that hills were the hardest form of walking. But here in the flatness of Lincolnshire I found out how much the mind is part of what keeps you going. I was punished by the repetition. The lack of variety.
The memories came back. The ward was in front of me. I tried to use humour to keep myself going.
This landscape is certainly flat. Flatter than a hedgehog run over by a roadroller. I walked for an hour making up similes. Boston Stump grew by half an inch.
Time passed and I walked. I walked and time passed. All the while I watched the Stump on the horizon. The gradually deteriorating weather being the only indication that time was elapsing at all.
An eternity did pass and I came to a sharp turn in the path and I found myself looking up the Haven to the town of Boston itself. The town skyline was now not dominated by the Stump but by a criss-cross pattern of high tension cables and the cranes and towers associated with its industries. The seaward approach to the town was made all the more charming by having to walk past the landfill site, with its panoramic view of the nearby sewerage works. It was at this point that it started raining hard and I was really glad I had decided to come to Boston.
Things did not look any better in next morning’s rain.
The kind people who had put me up for the night dropped me in the centre of the town. I turned and there was the church tower, the bloody Stump, that I had stared at half of yesterday. I felt like an unwanted puppy dumped on a street corner after Christmas.
In looking back on the first few weeks of the walk I realise now that I really did not enjoy most of it. I had struggled over the first week. I had endured in the second week and now... and now I felt flat. Flatter than a Lincolnshire Fen. The emotional equivalent of the long walk along a featureless sea dyke.
This morning’s route took me along the side of the River Witham up on the embanked walls that ran alongside the wide channel of the river. The river isn’t absolutely straight but runs in dead straight sections of a couple of miles before coming to an obviously man-made corner where another dyke or ditch runs into the canalised river. I was perhaps ten minutes out of Boston when I realised that this was the view that I would be getting for most of the day. The top of the river wall and the dead straight river. The grass I walked through was sopping wet and water began to seep its way in through my boots. Pretty quickly I had a couple of fine blisters forming on the insides of my insteps.
I had got into the habit by now of going to a pub at lunchtime if I could find one on the map. I enjoyed the company, talking to the locals about my trip, and I had located a pub at place called Chapel Hill (which was all of seven metres above sea level). I was looking forward to getting out of the rain and to getting my feet dry. However as this was All-Shits Day the pub I had picked out had burnt down. I sat outside the blackened shell in the rain putting plasters on my blistered feet.
This isn’t much fun.
I could no longer control the whispering voice.
This isn’t much fun.
The murmuring grew louder. In my head, the walk should have been full of sunshine.
"THIS ISN’T MUCH FUN!". I felt much better for screaming at the top of my lungs.
After Chapel Hill the Witham looked more like a real river, with the curves
and unpredictability of a renaissance beauty. As I rounded the corner beyond
Dogdyke and I saw the Tattershall bridge crossing the river and I was excited to see a
road leading up to Tattershall Castle. I had been feeling stranger and stranger ever
since I had crossed the Great Ouse at Lynn and I was glad to have come to the end of
my personal wilderness.
As if on cue the rain stopped as I left the river. I started to steam as I walked along the main road heading for Tattershall. My hair dried into a clump of junior dreadlocks, and by the time I got alongside the castle it was warm enough for me to stop and strip down to my shorts.
After scaring off a few tourists with my near nudity I headed off on the road towards Woodhall Spa. At one point the road went past a small stand of trees and I found myself staring at them as though the oaks were some extraordinary tropical plant. It felt like a lifetime since I had been near a wood.
Woodhall Spa is one of those surprising places that only Lincolnshire could spawn, a holiday town plonked down amongst the Fens. A tourist town by agreement. Postcards, people milling and a whole bevy of places to stay which made it feel like a metropolis after the emptiness of walking by the Witham. I instinctively cast my eye around for the sea. Woodhall had the feel of Brighton or Bognor.
Along the road coming in to Woodhall I felt myself finally put the hospital behind me. My memory was busy now digging up ex-lovers. All those promises and kisses which I did not bother to keep.
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004
