The Old Road

Some places stay with you, long after you’ve gone.

The old road ran from the chapel down to the strand, and for the first fourteen years of my life I believed it had been built for me personally. It had a bend in it that hid the sea until the last possible moment, and then gave you the whole of it at once, the way you’d hand somebody a full cup — carefully, and with a small show of ceremony.

My mother walked it every day of her married life. My grandmother walked it before her, in boots that were passed down twice more after she was done with them. Between the three of them they must have worn a groove in it, though the council came in 1987 and laid tarmac over the whole thing, and after that it was just a road.

I went back in March. The bend is still there. They cannot straighten a bend without buying land, and nobody has ever managed to buy that particular field from that particular family, who have been refusing to sell it since before there was a state to sell it in.

So the sea still arrives all at once.

I stood at the bend for a long time in the kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as occupy. A man came past with a collie and said desperate altogether, which is what we say instead of hello when the weather is doing anything at all, and I said desperate, and he went on.

And that was the whole of it. No revelation. Nobody came out of a doorway that has been a doorway since 1911 to tell me something I needed to know.

But going back up the hill I found I was walking in a particular way — a slightly shorter stride, a lean into the camber — and I understood that I had learned it here, at seven or eight, and had been carrying it around three countries and half a life without ever once taking it out to look at it.

The road remembers every footfall. That is not a sentimental idea. It is a practical one. It is in my knees.