I pick up the Via Francigena, the 2000+km pilgrim path from Canterbury to Rome, in Arras, where I left off last year.
Once free from the outskirts of Arras, the Via emerged onto the agricultural flatlands of Pas-de-Calais. Vast fields of thick warm-brown soil, meticulously ploughed, alternated with waving green wheat and yellow oilseed.
A heavy afternoon thunderstorm led me to shelter under some young trees in the Sunken Road Cemetery, resting place of 213 soldiers from the WWI 1916 Somme offensive, fallen in trench warfare. Thinking they might be scared of the noise, I reassured them. “It’s only thunder”, I said. “Not war”. I told them what the land looked like now - all evened out, and planted with crops, guarded by wind turbines, shepherded by friendly farmers in tractors. I described the Paris-Lille TGV rushing past on the horizon. The flowers, the butterflies and bees around their graves. How brightly green and soft the grass was. One headstone had several small yellow snails on.
The temperature had dropped suddenly with the storm.
“Were you cold?” I asked them.
An answer came back, felt rather than heard: “Yes, very cold”.
Most of the headstones stated the age of death. “I bet some of you lot were younger than 18”, I said.
No reply.
I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have told them what I later learned in Péronne - that the region’s mine-clearing crews recuperate 50 tonnes of shells and live ammunition each year, and that an estimated further 700 years will be needed to clear the Somme of bombs.
I was about to leave, thinking the storm had passed, but they told me to stay a while longer under the trees. And they were right - the heaviest downpour was yet to come. When it had passed I thanked them, and marched on with sadness, grateful for my warm boots and modern hiking gear. Grateful for peacetime.
That first night I spent on a wet grassy verge on the edge of a ploughed field, somewhere between Arras and Bapaume, 45 minutes’ walk from the previous buildings. I had forgotten to pick up a stone with which to knock in the tent pegs, and the only one I could find nearby was a crumbling piece of the white cliffs of Dover (separated by half a million years or so). My pitch was wonky, but mercifully it held until morning. In theory my first wild camping experience was a success: I slept for nearly ten hours and awoke warm-ish and dry, but this did not assuage my feeling that something in my adventure was missing.
On the second evening I found a beautiful buttercupped lawn behind a tiny sunlit church in the village of Sailly-Saissisel, the bells chiming prettily. I knocked on the door of the nearest house and asked the inhabitant - a small child - for some water to fill my foldable camping bucket. I was looking forward to a wash. The mother came to the door, and when I told her who I was (“Je suis pèlerine - I’m a pilgrim”) and where I was walking to (“Rome”), the whole family appeared to look at me with incredulity. “Would you like warm or cold water?” she asked me. I, like a fool, confidently answered, “Oh, cold’ll do, thanks” - as if turning on the red tap was that much more trouble than the blue one. But when I got back to my tent and began my ablutions I discovered that, thankfully, she had decided for me: a bucket of warm water with a splash of Dettol for good measure.
This is what had been missing the previous night, I realised. The game was not to hide in a field, invisible to others, but to live next to other humans - live ones - and learn how to request, and accept, assistance. A mentor once told me that being mentally strong was not trying to do everything by myself, but to learn how to ask for help. I cannot walk thousands of kilometres to Rome in isolation.
I went to bed that night feeling warm, clean, safe, and that I was exactly where I supposed to be. A biblical thunderstorm did not even keep me awake for long. I had some anxiety around whether my Durston Mid-X Pro tent - hitherto untested (by me) in stormy conditions - would keep out the torrential rain. As I lay watching the lightening and counting the seconds before the thunder shook the ground beneath me, awakening some primal fear, I was glad I had reassured the dead men in the cemetery. I began to think, “There’s no way I’ll be able to sleep through th—-”.
A good ten hours of sleep overtook me. When I awoke, a joyful buttercup centimetres from my face just outside the inner mesh, I saw my pitch had held beautifully and the inside of my home was dry.
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