A year ago I was on a train, rattling slowly through December’s grey towns and leafless landscapes. I was reading a book, a tale of bright sunshine, colourful village fiestas, and adventure. I looked up from my book and let out a sigh.
For most of my adult life I have either been wandering the world or reading stories of people wandering the world. Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was one of the books that got me started and I still read it almost annually.
Lee arrived in Spain in the summer of 1935. He had never been overseas, had rarely even left the quiet Gloucestershire village he grew up in. He was searching for adventure and chose Spain simply because he knew one phrase in Spanish — ¿un vaso de agua, por favor? His vague, romantic idea was to walk through the country, paying his way by playing his violin. Lee travelled slowly, lived simply, slept on hilltops and relished spontaneity.
Every time I read his story I yearned to follow in Lee’s bucolic footsteps but there was one significant problem. I could not play the violin or any other instrument. Even the thought of performing, dancing or singing in public terrified me. But the walk without the music would be missing the point.
And so for 15 years I shelved the idea of walking out one midsummer morning in Spain. Instead I embarked on a series of physical challenges in remote environments. I cycled round the world for four years. I walked across southern India and the Empty Quarter desert. I crossed Iceland. I rowed the Atlantic.
But the more expeditions I did, the better I became at them. I realised I had begun sticking to what I was good at, living precisely the unchallenging, routine life that this was all supposed to help me avoid. The essence of adventure is to seek out that which scares you and to risk uncertainty and failure. I realised that if I wanted to continue testing myself, I needed to move away from meaningless penances in the wilderness.
As the train rumbled on, I pulled my phone from my pocket. But this time, instead of the escapism of social media, I opened Google. “Find a local violin teacher” I began to type before I had time to really think.
I bought a violin the next morning.
An impulsive, flippant email sent while bored on a train had set something in motion. Becoming a beginner again was a refreshing experience — I loved the tangible steps of improvement. I quickly learned, however, that the violin cannot be quickly learnt.
After seven months I was still appalling. But it was time to begin what promised to be a hungry and deeply embarrassing journey. I would catch a Ryanair flight to Vigo, where Lee began his walk, take no money, busk to survive, and try to make it all the way to Madrid.
At Vigo airport I sealed my passport, return plane ticket and credit card in a plastic bag with a note to myself saying “if you open this before the end you have failed”. From now on it was just me, my violin, and five pitiful tunes that most seven-year-old violinists would turn their noses up at. I hoisted my pack on to my back and walked down to the harbour. I was more nervous than I had been since the day I set off to row across the Atlantic.
It was a disaster. My songs sounded as pitiful as I knew they would. I deeply regretted this farce. There was no crowd, no cascade of coins, no applause. Just indifference, disbelief, laughter or wrinkled noses as people accelerated past my empty violin case, eyes averted.
After a fruitless, mortifying hour sawing away in the charming, once peaceful plaza, an elderly man rose from his bench and walked slowly towards me. I assumed that he was going to reprimand me. “Enough! Time to move on.” But instead he put his hand into his pocket. Surely not! He pulled out a coin and I felt I was going to burst with excitement and amusement and relief. A whole euro — and with it hope.
I consulted my map and walked out of Vigo. I had a month to follow Lee’s route as far as Madrid but this was the first time I had given much thought to the 500 or so miles ahead — confirmation that walking 20 miles a day was far less daunting than playing a ditty to a dozen people. Eventually the fierce heat and the hard city streets gave way to fragrant eucalyptus woods, views back down the mountains to the sea, and my first night under the stars. I cooked rice bought with my first earnings on a tiny fire, eating gratefully from the pan, and fell asleep in a field, buzzing with the excitement of beginning.
I soon settled into the slow, ageless rhythms of walking journeys that heft you to a landscape: waking at dawn, walking through pine forests or hillsides of bracken, chatting with shepherds on dusty white droving roads, swimming in trout pools, snoozing in sweet chestnut groves and rolling out my bedding each night. This was the same way Lee experienced his Spain. The wayside blackberries, apples and grapes were not yet ripe, taunting my hungry belly as I eked out crusts of bread.
I suffered, as Lee had done, across the fiercely hot plains of Castile. Sunflowers marched for miles across the empty world, yellow armies of nodding heads and my only companion in those shimmering, lonely miles. Wheat fields whispered in the faintest breeze as I trudged towards Toro, in Lee’s words “an ancient, eroded, red-walled town spread along the top of a huge flat boulder”. One advantage I had over him was the invention of irrigation sprinklers. One scorching afternoon I stripped naked in a cabbage field for a delightful cold shower. All I had to do each day was walk, and then work (busk) in order to afford to walk another day. Life was simple. Simple but not easy.
I fretted that my beginner’s luck would expire and my incompetence be shouted out of town. I nervously dragged out the process of finding strategic spots to busk, unpacking my violin and arranging my music sheets slowly before the first violent screech shattered the town’s peace and my happy anonymity. The thrill of earning the day’s first coin never diminished, however, and I grew increasingly confident with my performances. Declare and embrace your vulnerabilities and they cease to be weaknesses.
One hot, still morning I arrived in pretty Puebla de Sanabria on the banks of the meandering Río Castro. My timing was fortuitous: it was Sunday and the town was filling with ambling, affable tourists. By the time my patch of shade beneath the castle walls had run out and the cobbled streets lulled to siesta stillness I had earned a scarcely imaginable €20.05. I feasted on chorizo and ice cream. Then, on my way out of town, I was beckoned over to a street party outside a bar. I was fed chicken wings and beer and danced through the tipsy afternoon. My attempt to play a duet with the local guitarist was a predictable disaster, but the day was a triumph. I wove my way into the sunset, singing happily, feeling like Lee.
Every day I counted my earnings down to the last cent. My total income for the month was €125.40, ample for so many miles of memories. In shops I calculated fastidiously, focusing on the calorie-to-price ratio of foods rather than their taste appeal.
Despite this frugal existence, or perhaps because of it, I cannot remember when last I felt so self-contained, so sure about what I was doing, so content to be in the moment. Every time I played, every time I headed back up into the hills with a loaf of bread sticking out of my rucksack, I felt incredibly happy. I whistled Guantanamera (one of my five busking tunes) and stamped the rhythm with my hiking poles. I treasured the gift of time as I walked through the slow summer.
The journey was primarily a solitary experience. I spent day after day on footpaths far from anyone, and even accidentally strolled through the high security grounds of the Royal Palace of El Pardo for a few hours. With hindsight my trespass seems obvious, but at the time I thought nothing of it as I climbed a high stone wall in order to cross what looked merely like a tantalising expanse of open countryside on my map (the guard who eventually spotted me was too surprised to be particularly angry). Above all, standing in a busy street where nobody knows your name, playing the same songs very badly in hope of a coin for your supper, is an extremely lonely place to be.
Yet the loneliness made the encounters and conversations along the way all the richer. An elderly gentleman sat me down on a bench and mused that my journey was akin to the board game La Oca, similar to Snakes and Ladders, rolling my dice and taking my chances as I went along my way. One morning I accompanied a postman, Marcelino, on his morning round, delivering letters and chatting in the street. He treated me to an espresso at noon.
One evening I was invited to sleep indoors, the only night of the whole trip. Sergio bumped into me just after sunset in the quiet village of Matapozuelos, an island amid a flat sea of farmland. A seasoned traveller himself, Sergio was excited to hear my story and knew well the impact of kindness on a lonely soul in a foreign land. I accepted gratefully — a shower! a bed! — and followed him to his home. Sergio lived with his mother, who was taken aback by the dirty vagabond on the doorstep. She fussed that the spare room I would stay in was not sufficiently prepared. It was perfect, of course. She studied, unimpressed, the sewing repairs that I had made on my shirt. And then she proceeded to fuss over me, mother me and force-feed me terrific quantities of delicious food.
After the disappointment of beautiful Segovia, where the foreign tourists ignored my busking efforts beneath the Roman aqueduct and the police moved me on for the only time in the trip, I climbed up into the glory of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains. The sun set to the sound of cowbells and the scent of crushed thyme as I walked a Roman road up meadows dotted with oak trees.
“A green haze of pine-dust floated in shafts of sunlight and squirrels swung and chattered above me,” wrote Lee as he climbed these same hills. “Gulping the fine dry air and sniffing the pitch-pine mountain I was perhaps never so alive and so alone again.”
Cresting the rocky mountain escarpment, I followed the Río Manzazares down from its source, galloping down a grassy bowl of a valley and swimming in deep, clear pools. It was a beautiful end to the wilderness. I would follow this river all the way to the capital, only a couple of days’ from here. I savoured the silence of these final few days, waking at dawn in forests with the evening cicadas all gone. I would pack up, leave no trace, and be hours down the path before first speaking a word.
Arriving at last in the baking heart of Madrid I shrugged off my sweaty rucksack for the final time, flopping down in a shaded pavement café. The crowds, the traffic, the heat of the tall avenues all felt unsettling. After a month on the road, this was my end. I asked the waiter the cost of a beer. He told me and I headed out to the nearest plaza to perform for the final time. Returning to the café with sufficient money I ordered a small celebratory beer.
The first sip exploded in my mouth like frosted stars. I had earned that beer. I truly savoured it. I left the remainder of my coins on the bar as a tip, my own small gesture of goodwill to a stranger. I had begun with nothing; I ended with nothing.
Part of me wished that my journey could continue for months like Lee’s did. But now that I knew I could busk my way across a country, I did not need to keep doing it. Now that it had become just a delightful way of life it was no longer a challenge. The purpose of this walk had been the unknowing, the uncertainty and the risk. My summer with Laurie Lee had been my most challenging, fresh and surprising adventure in years.
