Harold's collapse and rescue by Martina

Harold Fry's collapse on the outskirts of Taunton is the pilgrimage's first true reckoning with the body. For days he had walked, driving himself harder despite the pain in his calf and the cold in his bones, but on this afternoon the accumulated strain of his journey and the weight of a memory he most feared finally broke him. The collapse was not merely physical; it was the eruption of a buried past that he had been 'so good at repressing.' As he reached the packed houses and satellite dishes of Taunton's edge, a memory surged into his mind—the afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end. He saw his hand reaching for a wooden door, felt the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, smelt the mouldering, heated-up air, and heard the stillness of a silence that was not what it should be. He shouted 'No' and batted out at the rain, but nothing would hide him from it. Suddenly his calf exploded as if the skin-side of the muscle had been sliced open. The ground tipped at an angle and seemed to swell; he reached out a hand to stop it, but in the same moment his knees buckled and his body lurched to the ground, his hands and knees smarting. As he fell, the words 'Forgive me. Forgive me. For letting you down' ran through his mind. The next thing he knew, someone was tugging at his arms and shouting about an ambulance.

The Rescue and Martina's First Assessment

The woman who rescued Harold had spotted his fall from her bathroom window. She helped him to his feet, retrieved the contents of his plastic bag, and supported him across the road, waving at traffic and shouting 'Doctor, doctor!' Inside her house, she led him to an easy chair and loosened his tie. The room seemed sparse and cold; a television had been angled on top of a packing box, and close by, a dog was barking behind a closed door. Harold had never been comfortable with dogs. He did not want to be in her house, did not want to take up her time or get close to another stranger, and he was afraid she would send him home. He wished he hadn't given in to his fall; it had been in him to keep going. The young woman passed him a mug of tea, offering the handle so that he wouldn't burn his fingers. She had a thick accent—Eastern European, he guessed—and when she finally spoke with more volume and less speed, she asked, 'What the fuck were you doing out there in the rain?' Harold reassured her that as soon as he had finished his tea, he would get going. He told his story, which she heard in silence: he had made a promise to Queenie and he must not fail her. She watched him without smiling and then said, without emotion or judgement, 'But you're fucked.' She held up the two halves of his reading glasses, one in each hand. 'Your shoes are fucked. So is your body. And your spectacles. Every way you look at it, you're fucked. How do you think you're going to make it to Berwick?' Harold hung his head, his trousers splattered with mud and frayed at the knees, his shoes sodden. He admitted it was an awfully long way to Berwick, that he was wearing the wrong clothes, that he had not the training or the physique for the walk. 'I can't explain why I think I can get there, when all the odds are against it. But I do. Even when a big part of me is saying I should give up, I can't. Even when I don't want to keep going, I still do it.' To his surprise, when he stole a glance at her, she was smiling for the first time. She offered him a room for the night.

Martina's Care and the Treatment of Harold's Feet

At the bottom of the stairs, Martina kicked the door that housed the angry dog with the underside of her foot and told Harold to follow. She told him her name was Martina and that she was from Slovakia. 'We thought this fucking place was temporary,' she said, and Harold tried to make his face look like that of someone who was used to her sort of language. 'I curse too much,' she said, as if reading his thoughts. 'It's your house, Martina. You must say what you like,' Harold replied. The next morning, Martina came to his room carrying a washing-up bowl, two towels over one arm, and a plastic first-aid box. 'For your feet,' she said, nodding in the direction of his yachting shoes. Harold protested that she couldn't wash his feet, but she insisted she was not there to wash them—he was walking funny and she needed to look. She was trained, she said, and gave him a sardonic look when he asked if she was a nurse. 'A doctor. Women are these days. I trained in a hospital in Slovakia. That's where I met my partner. He worked there too. Give me your foot, Harold. I won't send you home. I promise.' Gently she lifted his ankle, and he felt the soft warmth of her palms. She touched the skin, working her path to the sole of his foot. Catching sight of the bruising above his right ankle, she winced and stopped, and craned her face closer. Her fingers crept over the damaged muscle and sent a spasm fireworking deep inside his leg. She lifted his leg and peered at the underside. 'The bruise goes all the way to the back of the knee.' She warned him that if he continued to walk on this leg, it would get worse, and that his blisters needed treating. The bigger ones she would drain; afterwards they would bandage his feet, and he needed to learn how to do that. He watched as she punctured the first pocket of pus with a needle. He didn't flinch. She pressed out the fluid, careful to leave the flap of skin intact. Harold allowed her to guide his left foot towards the bucket of soft, warm water. It was an intensely private act; almost between the woman and his foot, and not the rest of him. He looked at the ceiling so as not to look in the wrong place. It was such an English thing to do, but he did it anyway.

The Gift of the Shoes and the Compass

While Martina did her cleaning job in the afternoon, Harold fixed his reading glasses with plasters and wedged open the back door to clear the small garden. The dog sat watching him with interest, but it didn't bark. Harold found her partner's tools and tidied the edges of the lawn, and pruned back the branches of the hedge. His leg was very stiff, and since he couldn't remember what he had done with his shoes, he walked with bare feet. The warm dust worked on his heels like velvet and melted the tension. When she returned from work, Martina presented him with a brown paper bag inside which he found his yachting shoes, resoled and polished, with fresh laces. 'You don't get service like that on the NHS,' she said, moving away before he could thank her. That night they ate together, and Harold reminded her she must let him pay for the room. She said they would see one another again in the morning, but Harold shook his head. He would be gone with the first light; he needed to make up for lost time. The dog sat at his feet, its head resting on Harold's lap. 'I'm sorry I didn't get to meet your partner,' he said. Later, as he packed his plastic bag in his room, a slight rustling from the hall, followed by a knock, took him to the door. Martina handed him two pairs of walking socks, as well as a roll of blue duct tape. Then she hooked an empty rucksack over his wrist and placed a brass compass in his palm. They had been her partner's things. He was about to insist he couldn't take anything more, but she nipped her face towards his and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. 'Go well, Harold,' she said. 'And you owe me nothing for the room. You were my guest.' The compass was warm and heavy in his hand. Harold left as he had said he would, with the first light. He propped a postcard against his pillow, in which he thanked Martina; and also the set of laminated place mats because her need for them might be greater than Queenie's. To the east the night had cracked open, revealing a pale band of light that began to climb and fill the sky. He patted her partner's dog at the foot of the stairs. He closed the front door quietly, not wishing to wake Martina, but she was watching from her bathroom window, with her face pressed to the glass. He didn't look back. He didn't wave. He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It had been hard being her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

The Deeper Significance of the Collapse

The collapse at Taunton was not an isolated accident but the culmination of Harold's physical and psychological strain. On his tenth day of walking, there was not an isolated moment in his walking, not one muscular flex, that did not fizz the length of his right calf and remind him he was in trouble. The three-and-a-half mile stretch along the A396 to Tiverton had been his hardest yet, with few spaces to hide from cars and drivers blaring their horns and shouting at him to get off the road. He berated himself for managing so few miles; at this rate it would be Christmas before he reached Berwick. A child, he told himself, could have done better. The memory that surged into his mind as he reached Taunton—the afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end—was the memory of discovering his son David's body. In his later confession letter to the garage girl, Harold wrote that he had buried his son twenty years ago, that David had hanged himself in the garden shed with some rope tied to one of the hooks he used for garden tools, and that it was Harold who discovered him. The collapse was thus the body's refusal to carry any longer the weight of that buried grief, and Martina's care became the first true tending of that wound. Her treatment of his feet—draining the blisters, bandaging them, teaching him to care for them—was an act of physical healing that mirrored the emotional healing his walk was beginning to enact. The gifts she gave him—the walking socks, the blue duct tape, the rucksack, and the brass compass—were her partner's things, and in giving them she passed on not only practical tools but a kind of blessing. The blue duct tape would later become Harold's most essential possession, binding his shoes to his feet when the soles were thin as fabric and his toes would be through the leather at any moment, so that the shoe was a part of himself. The compass and the rucksack he kept even when he gave away his other possessions, because they were not his to give away. Martina's parting words—'Go well, Harold'—and her kiss on his cheek marked the first time a stranger had truly cared for him on his journey, and the first time he had learned that it was as much of a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility.