Tag: pilgrimage

Crossing to and across France, 19th-21st March

“The man, therefore, read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.” – The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan

The Solent ferry was called Saint Cecilia, which was, we thought, rather appropriate for a pair of choral singers. It was a vehicle ferry; the foot passengers walked on via the same gangway. Anne and I could well have been the only foot passengers, and the only vehicles were a few cars and a couple of lorries. The cabin was all but deserted and we spent the crossing grinning nervously at each other and making banal remarks like ‘Well, this is it’.

Once in Portsmouth we were obliged to walk to the railway station in order to find a taxi. It was a chilly night, but we were too excited for this to affect our spirits; besides, walking was what we were planning to do, so why not begin early? We had allowed plenty of time to reach the continental ferryport. Anne got her walking poles caught in the top of the door and fell rather than climbed into the cab, but sustained no damage either to herself or to the poles in so doing. With hindsight I would have advised her to make the most of her undamaged state; it was not to last more than a week.

Five pounds’ worth of taxi ride later we were checking in. Our sailing was delayed by well over an hour, so we raided the vending machines. A man nearby commented that my hat had something of the Indiana Jones about it. He had a point. We then settled down with the books Anne had brought for the train. (I had excised such fripperies from my bag ruthlessly – weight again – but she was planning to post them home once finished.) Both were religious in subject: I had Sparrow Story, a retelling of the Gospel set in present-day Palestine, while hers was a theological work by a Roman Catholic monk. The latter had some reference to God in the title, a fact which attracted the attention of the Irish family sitting opposite. (‘You’re not religious, are you? You are? Are you Catholic? No? It’s all about the priest, isn’t it? The difference is, only the priest is allowed to drink the wine…’) Their sailing (to Bilbao) had been seriously delayed, and they had evidently been compensating for the monotony of the intervening hours with copious amounts of Stella Artois. The grandmother of the party was enchanted to discover that my name was Kathleen (as was hers) and almost equally disappointed to find that I had absolutely no Irish blood in me – a reaction I was to encounter more than once along the Camino, although never again with so much Stella involved. I earned the undying gratitude of the whole family by donating a hair bobble for the granddaughter. The little girl’s father was also very taken (‘I’d carry your rucksacks for you any time… I’d sit round your campfire with you…’)

They were still waiting for their sailing when we went off to see where ours had got to, when we found ourselves a quiet corner to say Evening Prayer, when we were finally called, and, for all I know, when the Normandie departed. It was well past midnight by this point, so we decided immediately to hunt for our accommodation. Being young, free and poor we’d gone for the cheapest option: the ‘reclining seat’. These turned out to be in the on-board cinemas and to be upholstered in a particularly hideous floral velour, not that this bothered us particularly by this time. I ran through my footcare routine by way of an experiment: wash feet thoroughly; apply Vaseline; wash socks; hang socks to dry over nearest suitable object, which in this case was the luggage rack in the cinema. Then I retired to bed or, rather, to seat. It very shortly became apparent that I was unlikely to get any sleep in this monstrosity, so I unpacked my sleeping bag and stretched myself out on the floor. This proved more conducive to slumber, and I got a reasonable amount of rest before being woken by the announcement that we would be disembarking at Caen-Ouistreham in approximately an hour’s time. I stuffed the sleeping bag back into its drawstring bag, safety-pinned my (still damp) socks to the back of my rucksack, and waited for Anne to do likewise. I then shovelled the remainder of my English small change into the RNLI charity box (no sense in carrying extra weight), and we hovered around the ferry’s main passenger doors until she was secured in the harbour, the gangway was in place and we were able to walk out onto French soil. Phase One complete.

Caen ferryport is not, in fact, situated in Caen; it’s in Ouistreham, a village a few kilometres to the north. We caught the bus into town (I had bought the tickets, €3 each, in the port, while Anne reminisced about continental family holidays when all she and her brother would eat was jambon frites). We were the only passengers on a 53-seater coach; the driver was very friendly. I should have asked for the gare, not centre-ville, but I either did not know or hadn’t remembered that the bus and railway stations were as good as neighbours. It was not a problem, in any case. I knew Caen fairly well, having spent three weeks there on a French exchange in 2002, there were maps dotted around the town, and we had plenty of time. We ate breakfast (satisfyingly French: café noir, pain au raisin; té, pain au chocolat) in the station café, then passed the time by buying postcards, the first of which got sent from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, enquiring of a station attendant how the tickets worked, and saying Matins. A passer-by seemed to object to this, but we didn’t understand her complaint, nor did she speak English, so the incident passed off quickly.

The train journey to Paris was uneventful; Anne spent most of it asleep and I spent most of it looking out of the window and thinking how nice French trains were. We had the luxury of a compartment to ourselves, something that I’d assumed had passed with the age of steam. We passed through Lisieux, which prompted a discussion about which Saint Theresa Anne’s cousin was named after, and more French exchange reminiscences. When the train pulled into the Gare Saint-Lazare (a name familiar to me from the bus destination blinds that clutter up my house, but like the rest of Paris a place I’d never been to) we applied ourselves to the question of crossing the city to the Gare Montparnasse. The Métro, contrary to my dire premonitions, proved relatively easy to navigate with the help of a friendly gentleman in the advice bureau, and we emerged unscathed and in time to consume a leisurely sandwich and watch the sparrows at the Gare Montparnasse. From there we caught the TGV to Dax – again a not very interesting journey, although I was gratified to notice that we passed through Poitiers, even if it was by chemin de fer rather than chemin de Saint Jacques. Saint Rhadegund, I thought, would understand.

We emerged into the glow of evening sunshine at Dax. The railway from there to Saint-Palais is long gone, but its one-time existence is attested in a couple of surviving, useless, level crossings and the coach service that ties itself in knots meandering through the towns once served by the railway. We caught the coach, and I was at last able to stop worrying that we would miss a connection: this was the last one.

Night had fallen by the time we arrived in Saint-Palais. We were turfed out into a rather bedraggled looking car park, followed the lights into the town, and then fell to wondering what to do next. I knew what street our hotel was in, but where that street was in relation to the rest of the town I had no idea. We wandered around a little, noticing in passing the opening times of the tourist information office, but the Rue de Jeu de Paume was not immediately apparent. Fortunately a passer-by noticed us, enquired what we were looking for, and pointed us in the right direction. It was just around the corner. Phase two completed.

I would recommend the Hotel de la Paix, Rue de Jeu de Paume, Saint-Palais, to anyone. The proprietor was very kind, the beds comfortable and the food excellent – a wonderful vegetable soup, tender lamb and exquisite chocolate mousse. The room contained several helpful little ledges, over which we draped our damp socks from the day before, and our sopping socks from that day. Since the disappearance of the Franciscan house had made indulging in such luxury as a hotel a necessity for us we resolved to enjoy it. After all, it was very likely to be the last such luxury for a while.

That being so, we did not set the alarm for too early the next morning. A proper bed is not to be sneezed at. Besides, we had agreed not to leave Saint-Palais until the tourist information office was open, for we needed to get our credenciales, our ‘pilgrim passports’, stamped, and we thought that they would be able to tell us there where would be the place to go. I sat on the balcony and dusted my feet with talcum powder in the morning sun, calling back ‘Praise him and magnify him forever’ to each verse of the Benedicite as Anne presided over Matins. We lingered over breakfast – croissants with butter and jam, and excellent French coffee – then paid up and left. The proprietor and her assistant wished us well.

We headed for the tourist information office, nipping into a nearby shop to buy a map – a fairly large scale representation of the French Pyrenees, with the Grande Randonnée 61 (in other words, the Camino) marked on in a line of red dots. I noticed a box of fabric badges in the glass counter and asked to buy one. The process was made rather difficult by the fact that I had no idea what the French word for them was, but the shopkeeper worked out what I wanted, and I at least – Anne, I think, regards my obsessive decoration of my grey woollen blanket with such souvenirs with a sort of benevolent tolerance – proceeded to the tourist information office with a distinct feeling of gratification.

Getting our credenciales stamped proved, in fact, to be very easy indeed: they had a stamp in the office. The girl there was quite excited to see that this was the first stamp in our books, but not as excited as we were to have our first stamp. This was it. This was the real beginning of our pilgrimage.

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.
The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage – Walter Raleigh

As it happened, we walked it in 2007. As we approached July 2006 and graduation, it became clear that neither of us was going to find a particularly interesting job for the next year, so, prompted by Héloïse, we brought the scheme forward and joined the Confraternity of Saint James that summer. We considered leaving from Exeter and aiming to arrive in Santiago for Easter 2007. This proved to be impracticable – Easter was too early in the year – but the idea of walking in the spring remained attractive. The idea of leaving from Exeter also failed to fit into our time scheme: we were obliged to delay our departure until after my father’s 65th birthday party, which was after the end of term, rendering any such plan pointless. Having consulted the CSJ guides, we had concluded that the summer would not be congenial, with the weather too hot and the Camino too crowded, while the autumn of 2006 seemed too soon and that of 2007 too far away.

I bought new boots and telescopic walking poles, and began to get into a routine of hiking around the Isle of Wight. The distance between my parents’ houses – four miles exactly – proved to be ideal for practice walks. Anne, a town dweller, had fewer opportunities to get into condition, but, having completed the Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award, had the advantage in terms of experience. As yet, however, we had no definite date to aim for, nor even any definite starting point. Eventually I took a trip up to York to see her, defying freak weather conditions in the Solent, and we started planning in earnest. We visited the Rohan sale and bought waterproof jackets and zip-off-at-the-knee walking trousers, drifted around Millets assessing the respective merits of various rucksacks, and purchased lightweight ‘sporks’. We laid a map of the Camino out on the floor and calculated how long it would take us if we were to walk an average of 20km per day, taking one day off every week. I investigated ferry tickets and train timetables online. We quibbled a little over the starting date, but eventually fixed that we would leave from the Isle of Wight on 19th March, immediately after my father’s party.

The idea of starting from Le Puy and visiting Conques (home of Sainte Foy, whom Anne had studied in the course of her degree), or beginning at Poitiers (home of Saint Rhadegund, to whom my neighbouring parish church is dedicated) had to be abandoned: we could not afford to spend so long in France, where the accommodation would be far more costly. At the same time, we wanted to give ourselves a few days of easy walking before we tackled the daunting prospect of the Pyrenees. Eventually we plumped for Saint Palais, two days walk from the border, and allegedly the location of a house of Franciscan monks who were quite prepared to put up pilgrims. We did not realise until we got there that it actually made a rather appropriate starting point: a couple of kilometres beyond the town is a monument marking where three of the ancient pilgrimage routes across France met.

I returned home and began six weeks of intensive planning and preparation. I stepped up my walking, paying greater attention to the precise distances I covered and the weight I carried. I tried to pace myself and, like the exam candidate who spends more time colouring in their revision timetable than in revising, ended up with a beautifully planned schedule that I adhered to for perhaps a week. Beside the walking practice it included lists of kit to be purchased, borrowed or found, and a supremely haphazard teach-myself-Spanish course compiled from a pre-GCSE textbook, three freebie CDs from Sunday newspapers, an antique teach-yourself book and a helpful interactive course from the BBC website. The delicate balance of my schedule – which assumed that I would always have internet access, would always be on the Isle of Wight and at my own disposal – was of course disturbed by trips to Exeter and family crises (my mother was taken into hospital one week and moved house the next).

Nonetheless I was relatively confident in my physical and mental ability to acquit myself adequately in the challenge by the end of February, having one day completed fourteen miles of the Yar River trail, which begins very conveniently just down the road from my house, before getting lost in Brading and taking the train home. I had also fulfilled my organisational responsibilities, the principal of which was booking the tickets for the train journey across France, and over the course of several expeditions to Newport (9 miles walk, for I always took the bus home afterwards) had purchased much of the kit – and caught up with an old school friend who was now working in Blacks. I had looked out my tiny Book of Common Prayer and scoured eBay for a similarly sized Bible. On an expedition to a factory outlet mall in Portsmouth my mother bought me a pair of lightweight trousers and a microfibre towel. I was then faced with the problem of keeping the weight to a minimum; the Confraternity recommends a maximum of 8kg, including the water ration. This, I found, is almost impossible, and once we’d begun the pilgrimage I could never bear to weigh my rucksack.

As the date of my father’s party approached the opportunities for practice walks diminished as all hands fell to tidying the house, which, as anyone who has even a slight acquaintance with the family will appreciate, was no easy task – although on the day before the great event I walked from Ventnor to Niton specifically to deliver a large selection of cold meat to the relevant refrigerator. I also tried out my somewhat rusty French in booking a hotel in Saint-Palais. The Confraternity guidebook regarding the Le Puy route had proved to be some years out of date, and the monks had moved.

The party was to follow the usual pattern of cramming as many friends as possible into the comparatively limited confines of the sitting room, providing them with food and drink, and then encouraging musical performances. Suffice it to say that I was there, wearing a black velvet dress distinctly lacking in back on the grounds that this would be my last chance for glamour for the next two months, and the evening wound up with most of the guests several sheets to the wind and singing Nonconformist hymns; also that, mid-party, Heloïse and Andrew inspected our kit thoroughly and recommended the removal of several items – notably a ‘bivvy’ bag, on the grounds that firstly it was unnecessary weight and secondly we were unlikely ever to be far enough from civilisation to need it for any purpose other than sitting on.

The following day, Sunday, the festivities were concluded with a pub lunch with the remaining guests after church. It was Mothering Sunday; my mother was in Yorkshire at the Association of Radical Midwives national meeting (her singing friends, however, had turned up to my father’s party regardless, and given a spirited rendition of Longfellow and Balfe’s splendid piece of Victoriana Excelsior!). This fact did not stop the priest presenting me with a posy for her as he did all the other members of the congregation who might conceivably have a mother in the offing. I saved it and left it on her kitchen table later that day. Besides the more predictable hymns we sang To be a pilgrim (I hadn’t had the heart to inform the choirmistress that Anne in fact dislikes it intensely), and were invited to step forward for a blessing as we departed on pilgrimage. We also received a card; inside, besides the unsurprising ‘May the road rise up to meet you…’ blessing, was a prayer that I had not come across before:

Bless to me, O God,
the earth beneath my foot.
Bless to me, O God,
the path whereon I go.
Bless to me, O God,
the thing of my desire.
Thou evermore of evermore,
Bless thou to me my rest…
As thou wast before at my life’s beginning,
Be thou so again at my journey’s end.
As thou was besides at my soul’s shaping,
Father, be thou too, at my journey’s close.

I copied them both into the miniscule Bible before we left.

A fully laden practice walk to Ventnor and back on Sunday afternoon and a final dash around Newport’s shops on Monday, having taken a fond farewell of my boyfriend at Cowes, left us as ready as we would ever be for the pilgrimage. We distributed Compeed, painkillers, raisins, dried apricots and Somerfield ‘Simply Value’ instant noodles between our two rucksacks, copied friends’ addresses into the Confraternity guidebook, and checked a thousand times that our tickets and passports – and pilgrim records – were where we’d put them last. Giggling geekishly, I scrawled DON’T PANIC across the cover of the guidebook, swore at our sluggish internet connection until it came up with the timetable for ferry crossings to Portsmouth, and decided at the last minute that I could not do without a second jumper, so pulled on a navy blue guernsey. My brother John recommended pasta as a good source of slow-release carbohydrates, so I made macaroni cheese for supper while Anne tried frantically to copy all Héloïse’s annotations to her Confraternity guidebook into our up-to-date edition. She got as far as Castrojeriz, 449km from Santiago, before my mother arrived to tell us that it really was time we left if we wanted to catch the 2030 ferry, so my father promised to follow our progress in Heloise’s book and send any further annotations by text message.

Bizarrely enough, it was snowing when we manoeuvred our laden rucksacks out of the front door, snowing hard enough to make visibility something of a problem for driving. I was half afraid that our plans would be scuppered before we could even leave the Isle of Wight. The snow eased off as we neared Newport, however, and by the time we reached Fishbourne the weather was clear enough for us to look forward with confidence to the next stage in the journey.

There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim. – John Bunyan

Life, they say, is more about the journey than the destination. I must admit that this is an attitude that I have come to apply to literal journeys as much as metaphorical ones. I love travelling; I prefer to take my time, seeing no reason why the fastest journey should necessarily be considered the best; I tend to be philosophical about delay, and I dislike being hurried. While aware of the necessity of getting from A to B, I am quite prepared to go via M, Q, or Y if M is likely to be more scenic, Q less crowded, or Y known to possess a feature of greater than average architectural merit. As with life, I am confident that I will arrive at my destination sooner or later, and if I am required to make the journey at all I would rather I made the most of it.

This principle held true for me along the length of the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, that I walked with my friend Anne in the spring of 2007. A Quaker challenged me, the summer before, about the idea of pilgrimage. God is everywhere: no place can be called holier than any other. What was the point? Actually, I agreed. Santiago de Compostela itself, the Holy City of the Iberian peninsula, held no greater attraction for me than any other place; I had my reservations as to whether it was genuinely the resting place of the mortal remains of Saint James the Apostle, and there were other European cities that would have taken precedence my ‘must see’ list. The traditional way of getting there, however, made it another matter entirely: one’s own two feet; one’s own pace – quite literally; the chance to prove that five hundred years of civilisation hadn’t turned one soft.

The Camino had been on my list of Things To Do One Day ever since my godmother, Héloïse, and her friends Andrew and John had walked it in the year 2000. I was no great walker back then, but something about the idea had appealed to me and it had sunk into my mind, resurfacing occasionally when I purchased walking boots or hi-tech rucksacks, and one chilly Saturday as I picked up a few small, pink scallop shells from the beach at Dawlish. The five mile Out of Doors Society walk was going well enough for me to mention to Anne that one day I was going to walk the Camino. She was intrigued, and I think that was that. We were going to walk the Camino – not ‘one day’, but definitely. We were going to walk the Camino when we’d finished our degrees. We were going to walk the Camino in 2008.

It was a mentality that coloured the rest of our time at Exeter University. We memorised Taizé chants; we kept thinking we ought to learn some Spanish; we embarked upon a weekly swimming regime; when the Tolkien society began debating which Middle-Earth races its members belonged to, we didn’t bother to argue – we knew we were Rangers; we continued to accompany the Out of Doors Society across Dartmoor and to despair at how often they got lost; we purchased a number of small gold-coloured shell-shaped buttons at the closing down sale of our favourite haberdashery; we got quietly excited at relevant articles in the Church Times and the other publications to which the University Chaplaincy subscribed. We were going to walk the Camino in 2008.