The Walk

The Walk is the engine of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the act that turns an ordinary retired man into a figure of national wonder. When Harold Fry leaves his home one morning to post a letter, with his wife Maureen hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking, to save someone else's life. That single decision, made in a phone box outside a pub, sets in motion a journey of hundreds of miles that becomes at once a physical ordeal, a pilgrimage of faith, and a slow excavation of a past he has spent twenty years trying to avoid.

The Decision and Its Terms

The Walk begins not as a plan but as a compulsion. On the telephone, Harold tells the hospice that he is coming by foot, from South Devon all the way up to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and that he is setting off right now. His words carry the force of a vow: 'As long as I walk, she must live. Please tell her this time I won't let her down.' When Maureen protests that he is sixty-five, that he only ever walks to get to the car, and that he has left his mobile phone, his voice sounds stripped away as he insists, 'But it isn't enough to post a letter. Please. I need to do this, Maureen.' The appeal is childlike, as if the choice were hers, when clearly he has already decided. Maureen's response is a bitter challenge: 'Well, you head off to Berwick, Harold. If that's what you want. I'd like to see you get past Dartmoor.' The Walk is thus defined from its first moments by a tension between Harold's fragile, almost superstitious faith and Maureen's scepticism, a tension that will persist across the entire journey.

The Body and the Rhythm of Walking

From the outset, The Walk is experienced through Harold's body. In his first hotel room, he leans against the soft upholstered headboard, crooks his left knee, clasps the ankle in his hands and draws it up as far along his leg as he can without losing balance, slipping on his reading glasses for a closer inspection. The toes are soft and pale, a little tender around the nails and in the bulbous joint at the middle, with a possible blister on the way at the top of his heel. Considering his years and his lack of fitness, Harold is quietly proud, pronouncing 'Not bad' before performing the same slow, thorough inspection of his right foot. As the journey continues, the blister becomes more painful, and he finds a way of shoving his toes towards the front end of the shoe to avoid the leather biting into his ankle. He is not thinking of Queenie or Maureen, not even seeing the hedgerows or the horizon; he is the words 'You will not die,' and they are also his feet. Sometimes the words march themselves in different orders, and he realizes with a start that his head is chanting 'Die you will not,' or 'Not will you die,' or even plain 'Not not not.' The simplicity of placing one foot in front of the other is joyful; if he keeps going forward, he will of course arrive.

Walking as Memory and Unburdening

Once Harold is back on the open land, between places, pictures run freely through his mind. In walking, he unleashes the past that he has spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and it chatters and plays through his head with a wild energy that is its own. He no longer sees distance in terms of miles; he measures it with his remembering. Passing allotments, he sees Maureen in the front garden of Fossebridge Road, wearing an old shirt of his, her hair tied back against the wind and her face smutched with dirt, digging in French-bean plants. He sees a bird's broken egg and recalls with splintering tenderness the fragility of David's head when he was born. He hears the hollow cackle of a crow and is suddenly lying in his bed as a teenager, overwhelmed with loneliness. The Walk becomes a form of involuntary memory, a pilgrimage through his own history. It also becomes a way of shedding the material world. In Cheltenham, Harold donates his washing powder to a student going into a laundrette, offers his wind-up torch to a woman from Prestbury who cannot find her key, gives his plasters and antiseptic cream to the mother of a distressed child with a bleeding knee, and hands his guide to Britain to a bewildered German couple lost near Cleeve Hill. He rewraps the gifts for Queenie and parcels up the recent souvenirs for Maureen, taking them to a post office. The compass and the rucksack he keeps, because they are not his to give away. He continues to sleep outside, choosing dry places, washing in public lavatories, fountains and streams, rinsing his clothes where no one is watching. He is glad that people in houses and streets and cars are safe, and glad too that he is at last outside them.

The Walk as Public Pilgrimage

The Walk does not remain private. When Harold meets a convivial young man named Mick south of Coventry, who buys him a lemonade and toasts his courage, Mick declares, 'What you're doing is a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century. It's awesome. Yours is the kind of story people want to hear.' Harold's own explanation is simpler: 'I don't push it and I don't hang about. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there. I've begun to think we sit far more than we're supposed to. Why else would we have feet?' As others join, the group tells itself it is no longer an assortment of torsos and feet and heads and hearts but one single energy, bound by Queenie Hennessy. They put up tents, unroll sleeping bags and sleep beneath the sky, promising Queenie will live. Yet the greater the numbers, the slower they become, and the daily mileage drops, sometimes to no more than three. Tensions develop: Kate has no time for Rich, calling him an egomaniac while he calls her a bitter cow; both the gorilla man and a visiting student sleep with the same primary-school teacher; Wilf cannot stop trying to convert fellow walkers to God. Harold listens with growing unease. He doesn't mind where people sleep, or how they walk, or what they eat. He simply wants to get to Berwick.

The Walk's Deeper Purpose

The Walk is ultimately a confrontation with the worst memory Harold has, the one he is normally so good at repressing. On the outskirts of Taunton, a memory surges into his mind of an afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end: his hand reaching for a wooden door, the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the smell of mouldering, heated-up air, the stillness of a silence that was not what it should be. He shouts 'No' and bats out at the rain, and suddenly his calf explodes as if the skin-side of the muscle had been sliced open, his knees buckle, and his body lurches to the ground. The Walk forces him to live again the afternoon he drove Maureen to the funeral director's to see David one last time in the coffin. She had packed a few things: a red rose, a teddy bear, and a pillow to go beneath his head. In the car she asked Harold what he was going to give, knowing he had nothing. At the funeral director's she said she wanted to say goodbye to David alone, and Harold sat outside with his head in his hands, waiting his turn, until a passer-by stopped to offer a cigarette and Harold took it, although he had not smoked since the days on the buses. His fingers shook so hard on the cigarette that the passer-by used three matches to light it. The Walk, in the end, is the slow, painful road back to that moment, and the attempt to find a way through it. It is the means by which Harold, one foot in front of the other, walks towards the truth he has spent twenty years fleeing, and towards the possibility of finally letting go.