Just imagine.
If you could go, would you?
I LOOKED UP. LET out a sigh. I was not in Spain, but somewhere near Slough, on a slow train bound for nowhere. I closed my book, a tale of sunshine, music and adventure. Monday morning trundled past, laden with drizzle and gloom. Flat-roofed pubs, warehouses, muddy park pitches. This was where I lived. This was my life.
Books carry me far away. I enjoy that, for I am cursed with fernweh, a yearning for distant places. Throughout my adult life I have either been wandering the world, preparing to, or wishing that I was. I grow excited every time I pack a bag and slip my passport into my pocket, but despondent when I arrive back home and put the passport away in a drawer. Returning inevitably disappoints, pricking my hope that going away might somehow have fixed my problems.
I first read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning when I was a student, dreaming of travel and getting ready to live. Laurie Lee had never left England before he docked in Spain in 1935. He hadn’t given much thought to ‘what would happen then, for already I saw myself there, brown as an apostle, walking the white dust roads through the orange groves’.
Laurie’s hazy plan was to walk south from Vigo, exploring a new country and playing the violin to pay his way. He had no schedule or deadline. He slept under the stars, lived on bread and cheap wine, and flirted happily. Laurie’s book is a paean to pure adventure, free from responsibility, made possible by the music from his violin. Reading it whisked me away to sunlit hills and villages, and I dreamed of one day following Laurie to Galicia. I wanted the same uncertainty, freedom and excitement in my own predictable, routine-dominated life.
But there was one fundamental problem. I could not play the violin, nor any other musical instrument. I had learned the piano for about a year when I was 10, until my mum yielded to the tedium of getting a reluctant, talentless boy to practise and allowed me to quit. I remember the music teacher at school – a bully later outed as a paedophile – mocking my timid and tuneless singing in front of a laughing class. I burned with shame and fought back tears. Forever after, I dreaded music lessons. Today, merely the thought of having to sing in public makes me prickle with nerves. I hate karaoke or dancing. My heart sinks whenever I hear the line, ‘introduce yourself to the group and tell us a bit about yourself’.
Realistically, then, I could never busk through Spain. I had neither the skill nor the personality. Yet following Laurie’s route with a wallet rather than a violin would be merely a walking holiday. That was missing the point. So, for 15 years, I shelved the idea. Instead, I looked elsewhere for adventure. I cycled round the world. I walked across southern India and the Empty Quarter desert. I crossed Iceland by packraft. I rowed the Atlantic, spent time in Greenland and on the frozen Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. I was ridiculously fit. I hung out with intelligent, daredevil, ambitious misfits. Each expedition gave me ideas and skills for new journeys. They were miraculous days of joy and wonder. I even managed to turn these escapades into my career. I gave talks and wrote articles and books. I was the luckiest man in town.
But then, in life’s musical chairs, the music stopped. And I realised I had been sitting in this threadbare seat for years now, staring out of commuter train windows. I called myself an Adventurer, but I was not living adventurously anymore. I was no longer proud of the story I was writing. The woman next to me, late for work and furious, tapped her displeasure in a series of to-and-fro text messages at my shoulder, clammy in her perfumed blouse. Tap-tap-tap. Pause. Beep-beep. Tap-tap-tap.
I shifted my focus to my reflection in the dirty, rain-spattered window. I didn’t like what I saw. I was bored with myself. I had grown up and settled down. For most people this is the conventional, accepted route in life. I envy them. But it was not working for me.
I wanted uncertainty and doubt in my life, and the courage, energy and spirit to face them. I needed to move in order to breathe. I craved being on the road again, inhaling the heady air of places new with just one difficult but simple goal to chase. Instead, I was trundling round and round telling old tales to pay the bills. I had given up.
I GLANCED DOWN AT the book in my lap, closed my eyes, and sighed. Then, without thinking, I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jeans, contorting myself on the cramped seat to do so. But instead of the artificial escape of social media, today I opened Google.
‘Find a local violin teacher’, I thumbed.
A website popped up, I found an email address, and before I had time to dwell on it, I began to type.
Fri, 20 Nov 2015, 11:56
TO: Becks Violin
FROM: Alastair Humphreys
SUBJECT: Can you teach me the violin really quickly?
Every journey, every change in direction, begins with one tiny deed, quick to revoke and easy to forget. An action so devoid of binding consequence that there is no reason not to take it. No reason except inertia and fear. The hardest part of every adventure is this one moment, small yet significant. It is the decision to begin, to get moving, to push back the boundaries of your normality, perhaps even to turn your whole life around.
I hit ‘Send’ and went back to my book.
LAURIE LEE AND I first met as teenagers, though he was 63 years older than me. Laurie lived in a lush valley in Gloucestershire where, emboldened by booze, he was busy getting his leg over with half the girls in the village. I was studying Cider with Rosie for English GCSE, avoiding eye contact with the teacher – all irascible nicotine and tweed – and willing the lunch bell to save me. Not for the final time, I envied Laurie.
Cider with Rosie is the story of Laurie’s childhood. It is vivid with eccentric village characters and tales of his friends roaming the countryside. Laurie grew up in a chaotic but loving home with his mother and six siblings. One of his earliest memories was of a man in uniform knocking on the door to ask for a cup of tea. Laurie’s mother had ‘brought him in and given him a whole breakfast’. The soldier was a deserter from World War I, sleeping rough in the woods.
Laurie left school at 14 and went on to become a poet, screenwriter and author. He procrastinated prolifically in the pubs and clubs and literary parties of London. When he did write, he worked slowly with a soft pencil, editing and re-editing obsessively. Throughout his life, Laurie was plagued by self-doubt and often considered himself a failure, despite the unexpected, extraordinary success of Cider with Rosie, which sold more than six million copies. He described himself as ‘a melancholic man who likes to be thought merry’.
The next time Laurie and I met, in our twenties, we were both looking for adventure. I was in my final year at university when I picked up an old copy of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the