Summer 2013

Summer 2013 is the hinge between Ray and Moth’s loss of a home and their life on the South West Coast Path. In early August they stood in Taunton with their rucksacks at their feet and understood that they were homeless; setting out toward Minehead gave them a direction, but not a secure place to return to.

The crisis before the walk

The season began under the pressure of several losses at once. The house had been repossessed, their holiday-rental business and income were gone, and Moth’s diagnosis made the time they might have together feel sharply limited. Ray felt she could not leave him to take a job when their remaining period of relative health was so precious. The immediate need for somewhere to live collided with the need to stay together.

The available options exposed how narrow that choice had become. A campsite wanted £80 a week, beyond their means, and housing benefit did not cover campsite fees. They had no friends with a room or garden available for more than a few weeks, and holiday caravans in the area were booked for the lucrative midsummer season. Renting was also close to impossible after repossession: their credit rating was poor, while the council could offer only a low-priority waiting-list place or a bed-and-breakfast room in accommodation mainly for people with drug or alcohol problems. In the council office, an official treated the prospect that Moth might not die within a year as evidence that he was not ill enough to qualify for priority. The couple concluded that they would rather live in a tent.

Homelessness beyond the stereotype

The book places their experience beside the public image of homelessness: a rough sleeper in a doorway, sometimes with a dog, assumed to be begging to support an addiction. That image, the narrative argues, excludes many forms of housing insecurity. Figures for 2013 recorded at least 280,000 UK households claiming to be homeless or about to become homeless; officials accepted 52,000 as statutorily homeless, while many of the remaining households received local-authority help through other routes. These were household counts, not a tally of individuals.

The counts of people sleeping rough were just as dependent on how they were made. A government snapshot estimated 2,414 rough sleepers across England on one night in 2013. In London, the Homelessness and Information Network recorded 6,508 people over the year, while a government snapshot for the period counted 543. The contrast underscores how a single-night count can leave people out of view. Ray and Moth’s own path—from temporary stays with others to a tent and other precarious shelter—also shows why homelessness cannot be reduced to sleeping in a doorway.

From Taunton to the coast

After sleeping on Jan’s floor for nearly two weeks while Moth recovered from back pain and stiffness, they left for Taunton. In early August, with their packs on the roadside, Ray recognized that this was different from travelling in a van: there was no door they could return to. They decided to take the bus to Minehead, the starting point of their intended walk. The fares cost £10 each; after the drive, food and other expenses, they had £50 left, though they expected £48 to be deposited in the bank each week. The walk began with little money and no settled home, not with the assurance of a conventional journey’s return.

Their progress did not always follow the trail on foot. A bus took them to Barnstaple and another to Westward Ho!, leaving Ray with a sense that she was cheating and Moth irritable at the interruption. The break made them feel disconnected from the route, while the grey town disappointed the spectacle its name had led Ray to expect. These moments complicate any simple idea of the walk as freely chosen adventure: they were travelling by foot where they could, but money, pain and circumstance also shaped how they moved.

Choice, continuation and the uncertain future

As the journey continued beyond its first weeks, walking came to offer a kind of control that temporary shelter with friends could not. In mid-September, after more than 250 miles of pain, exhaustion, hunger and wild weather, Ray and Moth could have taken a bus away and returned to Wales to seek council housing and a cheap winter campsite. Instead, they chose to walk on. They were tired and cold, but on the path they could decide whether to continue or stop without fearing that their presence would wear down a friendship into mere tolerance.

That freedom did not remove the fear attached to eventually stopping. As Plymouth approached, the familiar rhythm of packing the tent and walking each day gave way to anxiety about an unknown future, financial difficulty and what would happen to Moth when they had to resume life beyond the trail. Summer 2013 therefore signifies both a beginning and an unresolved threshold: the walk gave Ray and Moth a way to keep moving through homelessness, while leaving open the question of what stability, illness and belonging would mean when movement could no longer organize their days.