27 May 2017
Pre-Amble
Twenty years ago today I was in the middle of
a long walk across England, following the pilgrimage path of
the Wife of Bath character from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
On 29 May 1997, while I was at Dorking, I learned that Anna Apostolidis was born in Washington, D.C. My great-niece, Anna was the first person born
into the new generation of my family. I sent her a postcard and promised to
bring her to England on her twentieth birthday. The time has arrived! Off we go
tomorrow to recreate the pilgrimage, with some assistance from a car and two
other companions, my sister Kathy and my niece Jeannie (Anna’s grandmother and mother).
I kept a journal on my first pilgrimage, which
I edited and submitted to a publisher. It didn’t get me a book deal, but
through that effort I met Kit Ward, who became my agent. She suggested that I
turn my non-fiction travel narrative into a novel and Paradise Walk was born.
For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to
present my 20-year-old narrative, along with some current comments and
pictures. Off we go! (I'll put my original text in blue.)
Introduction: “Wan
that Aprille...”
April Fools Day, 1997. Eighteen inches of snow fell overnight. I was up to my neck in the Canterbury
Tales and, frankly, not a happy pilgrim.
The flowers of May seemed far away; England seemed far away; I had just
discovered, too late, that I didn’t like the Wife of Bath; and I was locked
into walking across England in six weeks time because I had blabbed about it so
much that now there was no way out without looking like an idiot. Fear stalked me in the final weeks of
preparation—fear of physical pain, fear of being injured, but mostly the fear
of embarrassment. What if I couldn’t do
it?
At the age of forty-one I wanted to
mark a year that was a turning point in my life by doing something completely
different; something that was physically challenging but also meaningful in
some way. My father had died a few
months earlier at the age of eighty-two, and as I reflected on his life, I
realized that the middle point had been the year I was born, when he was
forty-one. While my walk may have been
part of some mid-life crisis, I was not so bold as to identify it as the middle
point of my life, because I was also revisiting a lot of Jane Austen, and
she died at forty-one.
I hadn’t read The Canterbury Tales
since high school, but the Wife of Bath character seemed like a great framework
on which to hang my adventure. I
remembered her as a big, earthy, adventuresome woman, a sort of proto-Feminist
character (and not unlike myself, I thought).
A walk from Bath to Canterbury seemed doable in a month. I sketched out a rough route and timetable,
wrote a proposal to take a sabbatical from my teaching position, and laid plans
through the winter for a long walk to begin in the middle of May.
In retrospect, the logical way to begin
preparing for a long walk is probably to do a lot of walking, but being a
sedentary creature by both inclination and habit, I did most of my preparation
by reading. The first book was the
greatest disappointment; when it came time to reacquaint myself with the Wife
of Bath I found that I didn’t like her.
The things I had remembered were still there, she was big, earthy, and
adventuresome, but Chaucer made all those things into jokes. She was, in fact, the antithesis of the model
woman of the medieval period. She was
also a book burner, the victim (and practitioner) of spousal abuse, and told a
story about a rapist-knight in King Arthur’s court. As I had planned my trip around her, this was
something of a disappointment, but the tale did provide me with an opportunity
to incorporate the Arthurian sites of southern England into my route, and I
still had a fallback position in Elizabeth Bennet.
There was no question about what I
thought of Jane Austen’s heroine, because I have started each of the last
twenty-five years by reading Pride and Prejudice. Most recently I read it as I sat with my
father in his last days. Pride and
Prejudice is like an old friend to me, and as Jane Austen’s life was
largely lived along the trail between Bath and Canterbury, I thought that
Elizabeth Bennet could provide a good counterpoint to the Wife of Bath.
These were the things on my mind as I
bought several maps and began to plan a walk that would take thirty days. The route would incorporate several of the
great medieval pilgrimage sites: Bath,
Wells, Glastonbury, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, Winchester, Westminster,
Canterbury; all the places mentioned in Canterbury Tales: Southwark, Deptford, Greenwich, Rochester,
Sittingbourne, Boughton, Harbledown and Canterbury; several of the King Arthur
Sites: Bath/Badon, Glastonbury, Cadbury,
Broadchalke, Winchester; and the Jane Austen sites of Bath, Winchester, Chawton
and London.
As a weaver and a traveller, Dame
Alison would have found herself perfectly situated at Bath. From nearby Bristol she would have departed
for her voyages to the continent. By the
fourteenth century regular connections made it possible for a woman to travel
in company to the coast of Spain, where the Wife, along with thousands of other
English pilgrims visited the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. On a voyage to Rotterdam she could have made
her connection down the Rhine to Cologne to see the relics of the three
kings. And after visiting Rome she would
have sailed from Venice for her three trips to Jerusalem. Chaucer mentions her visits to each of these
places. Though he doesn’t mention any
English pilgrimages besides Canterbury, she would also certainly have visited
those important sites in her own neighborhood, Wells and Glastonbury, as well
as those a bit further afield. Her own
route would almost certainly have been more direct to London than mine was, and
we know that she rode a horse rather than walked. Chaucer describes her as a good horsewoman,
riding astride at a time most women rode side-saddle, and the earliest picture
of her, in the Ellesmere manuscript, shows her comfortably sitting on the back
of a horse, a whip in her hand, spurs on her feet
I tried to get in a bit of a walk each
day in the weeks before I left, but one thing or another generally got in the
way, though I did make a walk of about two miles along the bike path in Woods
Hole several times. I bought two good
pairs of shoes, each of which cost more than any pair of shoes I had ever
owned. The French Mephistos were touted
as the best walking shoes by everyone I asked, and those and a pair of Nikes
would, I figured, meet whatever surface came along. I wore one or the other of them constantly
for several weeks and had them comfortably broken in by the time I left.
My pack was heavy with the extra shoes,
a laptop computer (with a battery charger and electrical adapter), a medical
kit, and several pounds of books and other research materials. I brought only one change of clothes. During the time that I was making these
preparations, I read two books that greatly influenced the way I was thinking
about my walk. The first was Hilaire
Belloc’s classic, The Old Road, the other was A. Wainwright’s Pennine
Journey. I also read The
Canterbury Tales in a verse translation, a prose translation, and began to
struggle through the original Middle English.
Belloc would become important from
Winchester westward for a few days, but Wainwright began to effect me
immediately. Wainwright is pretty much
the doyen of English long-distance walkers.
He wrote some forty guide books on the subject and pioneered several
routes, including a coast-to-coast walk from St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s
Bay. (When I told people that I was
going to walk across England, the first response was usually: “Are you going
with a group?” The second question was
“Are you doing St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay?”) When I began to consider making a walk, my
friend Gaby Kaye gave me a copy of Wainwright’s book, A Pennine Journey: The
Story of a Long Walk in 1938.
Wainwright effected me in three
ways: his description of himself as a
walker made me realize how much I did not know about what I was doing; he made me very afraid of bulls; and he made
me reconsider again my evolving position on the Wife of Bath. The truth is that Wainwright, while a stylish
writer, is also a sexist pig, and his musings on women made me ponder again
what Chaucer was up to, and how much the attitudes of English men had evolved
in five hundred years.
Wainwright wore a flannel suit on his
walk, complete with vest & tie; he carried no other clothes, and slept in
his suit at least twice. He walked some
twenty miles a day, in the process climbing, crossing, and descending ridges of
2000 feet. He knew his pace so well, he
claimed, that after a careful study of the map and the landscape, a quick
glance at his watch would tell him his exact position. Clearly Wainwright would not be my
model. Because I could walk two miles in
my lunch hour, I presumed I could walk eight to ten miles a day without a
problem—given that walking would be my primary occupation on this trip. I rejected the advice of my brother and other
detractors that I ought to walk eight to ten miles a day for a few weeks before
setting out. I had no idea what my pace
was, I wasn’t sure I was going to even wear a watch, but I did share
Wainwright’s love of maps. His comments
about women goaded me on. Three different
times he says women lack imagination, he never “witnessed genuine enthusiasm in
one of them.” (Sometimes there was the
“pretense of it” but the “divine spark” was missing.) According to Wainwright “it is the
comparative deficiency in intellect that makes woman’s claim for equality with
man pathetic.” Women are “strangers to
dependability” and “have not the rigid standards of men, nor the same
loyalty.” It comes as no surprise when
Wainwright confides that he finds his own company “vastly entertaining.” I liked Alison, the Wife of Bath, better for
having read Wainwright. What English
women have had to put up with!
Old friends Joan and Ron Gould offered
me a base of operations from their home on Paradise Walk in London, a cellular
phone to use in case of an emergency on the road, and a ride to Bath to get
started. I flew from Boston to Heathrow
on the 14th of May 1997 filled with enthusiasm and trepidation.
