Up to see Jane, me squelching and slipping up the path between the tennis courts. Danni is there making tea and coffee for us.
I wait in the kitchen while I hear the buzz of her stairlift as she comes down the stairs. She is now 94. Before Christmas she told mum she really felt her age and she was getting fed up.
When I told her that I was walking lots and writing a book about it she said ‘He who walks alone walks the farthest’ which I took figuratively to mean he who walks alone discovers the most. It’ll do well as a blessing for the book.
We talked about the farm and she told me how busy it always was. ‘There were always people in the kitchen’ she told me. Not workers but tradespeople or those commercially connected to the farm. She told me about two brothers who came from New Zealand every year to help shear the sheep. One of them carried on doing it even though he was allergic to the lanolin, the waxy substance that comes from sheep’s wool. He eventually died relatively young, she thought as a result. There was also the haymaking and the netting of elvers (when they still existed in numbers), all the nets hung up to dry in the old barn at Bowden’s Farm, where Richard now lives.
As she talked sometimes it seemed a struggle and she forced the words out sometimes with her eyes closed as she cast her mind back through the years. And I felt bad for asking. Normally I stay til Danni comes back at 12.30 to make her lunch but after I’d gone to the loo about 12 I got back and Jane was asleep and I told her I’d leave. I wonder if she’s coming to the end of her own epic journey.
The Slow Walker 