Letters from Berringford 8 'Travelling'

Erewhon

Berringford

1 August, 1978

Travelling

It is a fine night and I am sitting in the garden just outside my porch.  The sun has not yet set, and I can see the rows of runner beans that have climbed to the top of the high poles of hazel. That reminds me that I must keep some of the bigger pods for seeds to plant next April.  It is good to see the beans that I planted a few months ago now grown high.   When I was younger and taller I planted the row of beans here, but I never saw them flower. I was on the road to India when they climbed the poles and were ready for picking and eating. At other times I would come home from a journey and then help to dig up potatoes that I had never sown.  I travelled much in those days. “You have a bottom that won’t sit down,” said Carmen.

“For my part I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel’s sake.  The great affair is to move.” So said Robert Louis Stevenson in  ‘Travels with a Donkey’.

Stevenson was right, wasn’t he?  I’m not too sure about the donkey part, but the rest of it is correct.  When we are moving, when we are on the road, all our niggling problems fall from us.  We forget them all: the electricity bill that seems too high and the fridge door that won’t shut properly (and which perhaps caused the expensive bill), the best place to keep the front door key, the noise the neighbours make on Friday nights, and the nagging thought “We should be asking Bill and Freda over to dinner next weekend”.  When we travel, our only worry is to get from A to B before night comes.  Our bag holds all we have. When we have little, that little gives us few problems.  The job and the house and the car are forgotten. All we think of is the needs of the day, and those needs are easily satisfied.

Starting is all.  “Aller Angfang ist schwer” said Goethe, and this is true of travelling.  Once you have shut the door and left the house, it is easy.  It is the packing of the toothbrush that is hard.

Memories come back, for I’ve stopped my travelling now, memories of our journey through Asia, the six of us.  The routine of striking camp, a quick breakfast with the day still cold, the tents rolled up and stacked on the roof of the van, the stove put away in the back, everything in its place, all stored away and roped up, a quick look to check the site, the engine started and moving off again.  “The great affair is to move.”  Tedium cannot catch us while we are moving. We cannot be bored, and what a waste of time boredom is. But then, after a time, the movement itself becomes addictive.  One has to move.  It is the great escape.  We arrived in India, by the way, and then carried on further east, but that’s a story for another evening.

Africans can give us a lesson in travelling.  They live on the journey. They continue their lives while on the move. We, on the other hand, journey in a vacuum and pick up the threads of our life when we arrive. They are patient.  If the journey takes two days, so be it.  If it takes three days, well, so be it too.   There are few genuine nomads left in this world.  Their life is a continuous movement to this grazing ground, to those wells, to that festival or to this great meeting place of the families.  Think of the great tradition of travelling to Mecca, to be undertaken once in a lifetime by every Moslem, and a whole lifetime some took to do it. Inching onwards along dusty, sandy roads to the next poor village where the people took them in with their tradition of kindness to the traveller. Think of the pilgrim routes to the shrine of St James in Santiago or the road to Canterbury when a motley group left the Tabard Inn one April for “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” 

What great travellers there have been!  To the east, to China, up and down India, across the burning heart of Australia, following tracks criss-crossing the Arab world, riding over long, dull plains, lonely and against the odds.  When they returned, they knew that if they told their story, their tale of the hardships of day to day, they would never be understood by those who remained safe at home with the curtains closed and the fire burning in the hearth. “The great affair is to move”.

Aunt Jane has a chronic case of the bug.  My younger brother Robert is on the road too, in Australia at the moment.  But there is a time for everything, and it is also pleasant to come to rest, to see the runner beans I planted climbing the poles to the sky, to watch the sun setting in the same place two nights in a row. The sun is setting here now, behind the pine trees in Uncle Jasper’s garden, with a glimpse of the sea in the distance.  It is cooler now and soon I will put away the fork and the brush and go inside and find something for supper.