The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Read Free Page A

the tide. The mud’s the thing to watch, too: step in the wrong places, and it’ll bog you down and suck you in, ready for the tide to get you.’
    Two days before I set off, my Alaskan friend James helpfully recommended that I take a small sharp hatchet with me: ‘That way, if you get stuck in the mud with the tide coming in, you can cut your legs off at the ankles and escape.’
    Patrick had a final warning: ‘The Broomway will be there another day, but if you try to walk it in mist, you may not be. So if it’s misty when you arrive at Wakering Stairs, turn around and go home.’
    It was misty when I arrived at Wakering Stairs. Early on a Sunday morning, and the air was white. It wasn’t a haar , a proper North Sea mist that blanked out the world. More of a dense sea haze. But visibility was poor enough that the foghorns were sounding, great bovine reverbs drifting up and down the coast. I stood on the sea wall, looking out into the mist, feeling the foghorns vibrating in my chest, and wondering if I could imaginatively re-categorize the weather conditions such that I could disregard Patrick’s final warning. I felt mildly sick with anxiety, but eager to walk.
    With me, also nervous, was my old friend David Quentin, who I had convinced to join me on the path. David is a former scholar of Renaissance literature, turned antiquarian-book dealer, turned barrister, turned tax lawyer. He is probably the only Marxist tax lawyer in London, possibly in the world. He likes wearing britches, likes walking barefoot, and hopes daily for the downfall of capitalism. He is 6' 7" tall, very thin, very clever, and has little interest in people who take it upon themselves to comment without invitation on his height and spindliness. We have covered a lot of miles together.
    The air at Wakering Stairs was warm and close; thick like gel in the nose and mouth. The tide had recently turned, and just offshore the exposed Black Grounds were steaming: a brown mudscape of canyons and buttresses, turgid and gleaming, through which streams riddled. Sandpipers and oystercatchers strutted in search of breakfast. The surfaces of my body felt porous, absorbent. The creeks and channels bubbled and glistened. Two big gulls pottered the tideline, monitoring us with lackadaisical, violent eyes.
    Where the road met the sea wall, there was a heavy metal stop-barrier, tagged with a jay-blue graffiti scrawl. A red firing flag drooped at the foot of a tall flagpole. Beyond the stop-barrier was a bank of signs in waspy yellow-and-black type and imperative grammar, detailing bye-laws, tautologically identifying themselves as warnings, indemnifying the MoD against drownings, explosions and mud-deaths, offering caveats to the walker, and grudgingly admitting that this was, indeed, the beginning of a public right of way:
Warning: The Broomway is unmarked and very hazardous to pedestrians.
Warning: Do not approach or touch any object as it may explode and kill you.
     
    Away from the sea wall ran the causeway, perhaps five yards wide, formed of brick rubble and grey hardcore. It headed out to sea over the mud, before disappearing into water and mist. Poles had been driven into the mud to either side of the path, six feet tall, marking out its curling line. There were a few tussocks of eelgrass. The water’s surface was sheened with greys and silvers, like the patina on old mirror-glass. Otherwise, the causeway appeared to lead into a textureless world of white.
    Three oystercatchers flew overhead with quick-flick wing-strokes, piping as they passed. We climbed the ramp to the summit of the sea wall, stepped over a scatter of beer cans and walked down towards the start of the causeway. I stooped to gather a handful of white cockle shells from among the shore rocks. I subdued the alarm my brain was raising at the idea of walking out to sea fully clothed, as only suicides do.
    We walked along the rubble and sea-cracked hardstanding, along the causeway and over the