PILGRIMAGE (II) - WHY?

I’m not sure we ever know why, really. Perhaps it always goes deeper than the mind can stretch.

There’s my first ever visit to Spain, in 1973, when I was 19, with S. I loved S. Looking back, I would have liked to marry her. But women weren’t marrying women in those days. I’d never have thought of such a thing in relation to myself, and I’ve never felt that way about a woman since. But I loved S – oh yes, a lot. So the thoughts and memories of that time are intense. We were two bright working-class girls, all at sea in Cambridge, which was much less cosmopolitan than it is now, but still most of our fellow students of modern languages had grown up in more than one country, while we had scarcely been out of England. We knew so little about anything, had no idea where we should go in our first long university Summer vacation.

The FEVE route - nearly all the way to Santiago

S had been brought up Catholic and must have known about Santiago de Compostela. It must have been her idea, I think, to travel on the FEVE (nice website), the slow, extremely cheap narrow-gauge railway all along the North coast of Spain. I don’t remember much detail of that journey, having then none of the assumptions or reference points I look for now. We found extremes of picturesque and horrible in Franco’s Spain – fantastic kindness and closed minds, dusty poverty and smelly drains.

On the long, slow train journey we saw a few walker pilgrims, returning from Santiago. They were grimy and wind-burned: very exotic. I can see them now. So it goes back as far as that. 

More than twenty years later, the name of a dearly beloved novelist, David Lodge, as presenter led me to watch a TV documentary about the Camino. (He published soon after a lovely, lovely novel featuring the Camino, ‘Therapy’, wherein a successful but unhappy middle-aged man…) On TV, the Camino looked beautiful, interesting and in places intriguingly remote. I knew a lot of the world a little by then, and Spain quite well. But I’d never been back to the green, rural and industrial North.

But neither of these was the immediate reason. That was the commonest one: overwork, middle age and an inchoate longing for ‘something else’. I’d been working 12 years for the politicians. We all worked like shit and never took all our annual leave. I was owed several months, so requesting one month was not unreasonable. “I’d like the whole of October off”, I was surprised to hear myself say.

 III – Cheating on the first day…

Comments

[Pica]

Jean, this is fantastic. I'm eager to hear more.

I used to go to the same mass in Brum as David Lodge...

[udge]

Love the cliffhanger ending. You do write well, Jean.

[tamarika]

Am moved that my walk (among many other things) has "inspired" these writings, Jean. Once again I love to learn more about you and as always you write so beautifully.

[Lucy]

This is getting very morish ( no pun intended...)

[zhoen]

I always guessed it was our hunter/gatherer nomadic genes expressing themselves.

[dale]

Lovely. Breath bated here too!