South Brent

South Brent is the first settlement Harold Fry reaches after leaving the small hotel where he spent his first night on the road, and it functions as the true threshold of his pilgrimage. It is the place where the retired brewery representative, who had never walked farther than to his car, first measures himself against the demands of the journey he has promised to make. The village sits on the route north from Kingsbridge, and Harold's arrival there marks the moment his walk ceases to be an impulsive gesture and becomes a physical undertaking with real consequences for his body and his resolve.

The Threshold of the Walk

Harold's approach to South Brent comes after a day of walking that has already transformed his perception of the world around him. Setting out from the hotel, he had been struck by the vulnerability of being a single figure on the road without his mobile phone, startled by the cracking of branches and the possibility of unseen dangers. But as he found his rhythm, England opened beneath his feet, and the feeling of freedom, of pushing into the unknown, became exhilarating. He planned to head north towards South Brent, where he would find modest accommodation for the night, and from there follow the A38 to Exeter — a drive he had once made in an hour and twenty minutes, but which now stretched before him as an unknown quantity of walking. The hedgerows were so dense and high that journeying along the single-track lanes felt like travelling through a trench, and he was surprised by how fast and angry cars seemed when one was not inside them.

Arrival and the First Night

Harold arrived at South Brent in the late hours of the afternoon, treading paving stones again and struck both by their smallness and their regularity. He came to cream-coloured houses, front gardens, and garages with central-locking systems, and felt the triumph of someone returning to civilization after a long voyage. In a small shop he bought plasters, water, an aerosol can of deodorant, a comb, a toothbrush, plastic razors, shaving foam, washing powder, and two packets of Rich Tea biscuits. He took a room with a single bed and framed prints of extinct parrots on the wall, where he carefully examined his feet before applying plasters to the weeping blister on his heel and the swellings on his toes. His body throbbed with a deep aching; he was exhausted, having never walked so far in a day, but he had covered eight and a half miles and was hungry for more. He would eat, call Maureen from a pay phone, and after that he would sleep. As the sun slipped over the edge of Dartmoor, filling the sky with russet cloud, Harold couldn't help wishing that David knew he was walking, and he wondered if Maureen would talk to him about it.

The Bed and Breakfast and the Voice of the Place

The following morning, Harold was the only resident in the dining room of the bed and breakfast, which was really a small front room with a three-piece suite pushed flat against a wall and a table for two positioned at the centre. It was lit by a lamp with an orange shade and smelt of damp; a glass-fronted cabinet exhibited a collection of Spanish dolls and dead bluebottles, dry as twists of tissue paper. The woman who owned the B&B said that the girl who helped was off, speaking the word as if there were something unsavoury about the girl's absence, as if she were maybe a piece of food that had to be disposed of. She put his breakfast on the table and watched him from the doorway, her arms folded. Harold was glad not to have to explain. He ate greedily and impatiently, staring out at the road beyond the window and calculating how long it would take a man who wasn't used to walking to cover the six miles to Buckfast Abbey, let alone the further four hundred and eighty plus to Berwick-upon-Tweed. He read the words of Queenie's letter, although he knew them now without looking. Then a voice said, 'I hate South Brent.' Surprised, Harold looked up. There was no one except him and the owner, and it seemed unlikely she had spoken; she was still leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, jiggling her leg so that her slipper dangled from her foot, on the verge of escape. The voice came again: 'We get more rain in South Brent than anywhere else in Devon.' The village itself seemed to speak, complaining of its own weather, and the moment stands as the first of many in which the landscape of Harold's journey acquires a kind of presence and agency of its own.

The Significance of the First Step

South Brent's importance lies less in what happens there than in what it represents. It is the first proof that Harold's body can do what his will demands, the first place where the abstract idea of walking to Berwick meets the concrete reality of blisters, plasters, and aching limbs. The eight and a half miles he covers to reach it become the unit by which he will measure the entire journey, and the care he takes with his feet — the slow, thorough inspection, the tidy parade of plasters — establishes the ritual of self-maintenance that will carry him through six hundred and twenty-seven miles. The village also marks the beginning of his separation from the world of houses and streets and cars, the half-forgotten world he will later be glad to be outside of. When Maureen had challenged him on the phone, daring him to get past Dartmoor, South Brent was the implicit first test; by reaching it, Harold has already begun to prove that the ordinary rules of his life no longer apply. The voice that complains of the rain is the first hint that the land itself is watching, and that the journey will be measured not in miles but in the remembering and the encounters that the walking unleashes.