This book is a rich combination of biography and autobiography, witha narrative plot that is a quest story, laced with occasional interludes of self-reflection and examined-life episodes, a journal of living close to nature, a confessional exercise of increasing self knowledge – and much more. It's a remarkable achievement.
From page one Raynor Winn brings us into the life she shares with her husband of 32 years, their children just grown up and left, and we enter the story as catastrophe, 'a tsnumai of bad things' hit them in the face. Her husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness which cannot be cured, is not easily treated and therefore is difficult to manage. Within days they lose a civil court case that costs them their home, their farm and all that they had built together over those thirty two years. And the case was brought by a friend they trusted, and involved a betrayal of that trust and the lacerating knowledge that they lost on a technicality.
What to do? Homeless, bankrupt, facing serious illness deprived of house, security, money and those core essentials for those facing the full force of life gone wrong, a sense of home, of familiar place, gathered memories and known people. The book takes us into the fear and misery of those first days, and then we realise, to our relief; this isn't misery literature about sad lives, it's an account of two people's defiance, resilience, courage, and reckless way of finding and testing out who they are and could be. Sitting under a stair cupboard as the bailiffs knock on the door, Ray finds a guide book to The Salt Path round Land's End, 650 miles of it. And they decide they'll walk out the house, get whatever gear they can afford, get on a bus, and start walking. The plan is to camp wild, to live on minimum and sporadic benefits, and just keep walking.
The idea is insane, and more than once on their long walk they admit it must look like that, and sometimes feels like that. The consultant's advice was take it easy, rest, make the best of each day. Instead they decided to go on a walking expedition along one of the most demanding walks in England. The book is the account of that walk.
The descriptions of land and geology, climate and sea, badgers and seagulls, people and places, changing moods and moments, are held together in a narrative that is never self-pitying though honest about pain and hurt and loss. But the dominant mood is determination to hope; it is clear that these two people decided to live, repeatedly to choose hope, and opted for freedom. No one can say to them, "Well that's easy for you to do". If they did the answer would likely be, "Well, we've nothing to lose, we already lost it!"
I am not a great fan of confession literature as such; too often they become self-congratulatory, giving accounts of enhanced competence, exaggerating to impress, or making a big deal of what life brings their way as if bad stuff never happened to other people. This book is different. These are likeable, honest, vulnerable folk. The escapades camping wild, the hunger and deprivation of having no money, the relinquishing of dignity, make for engrossing and at times moving reading. Then there is the awareness as we read, that these two people, homeless and near peniless, are on a journey on the coast, on an internal journey of self discovery, and are doing so in a society that can often be complacently unaffected by people having a hard time and struggling to make life work. They encounter kindness and callousness, friendship and snobbery, some who understand and more who were just bewildered or patronising.
So do yourself a favour and read this book. And if you are engaged in pastoral ministry read it alert to the important insights these two walkers offer into suffering, grief, and loss, and the example they set of resilience and of faithful friendship over decades. And as you walk with them you overhear hopes and fears being talked out loud, and you follow the footsteps of love that walks along with and beside each other, no matter what. This is theology with boots on, with a cheap haversack and even cheaper sleeping bag. It is travelling light, but for weighty reasons. And I think you'll come to like Ray and Moth, and be glad you are allowed to look so intimately into their troubles and ways of dealing with them. The book is a gem.
Leave a Reply