Borrowed Boots: Part One
Late 1940s
 
‘But these are the only shoes I have,’ I said. Shoes were important. Five years after the war ended, everything I possessed was important: one dress, one coat, one two-piece suit, one pair of slacks cut down from my aunt’s Land Army dungarees, some stockings, and a pair of tidy shoes.
Richard and I had come down from our respective colleges to our Exeter homes for the Easter vacation. We were at his parents’ house, planning our first major expedition -- our first whole day together. We were going to walk over the ridge of the Haldon Hills and down to the coast at Teignmouth, staying off roads where we could. But I had no boots, only these thin-soled shoes.
‘Hang on a moment, what size are you?’ asked his father, and disappeared. He came back with his army boots from the war before last. He was a smallish man, and they were my size.
He put them down in front of me. I looked at them, set side by side on the pastel carpet. Gleaming with ancient spit and polish, they had bent into comfortable shapes and then become gnarled leather sculptures after years in a cupboard. They had about them an air of containment, of secrets – much like their owner. It seemed as though they were still imbued with molecules of the Somme. After a moment I ventured to slide my feet into their dark mouths. If I wore thick socks, they would do.
We met next day with our knapsacks and thermoses, crossed the Exe valley and started to climb. It was a fine April day, full of windy light. There had been rain overnight, which gave everything a washed brightness. Trees were hazy with fresh green, and primroses studded the high hedges. We walked deep-sunk lanes past cob-walled farms shouldered in among trees. Red Devons lowed as they were chivvied from a yard: ‘Come up Beauty, Daisy, Cherry’. At every farm, battered silvery churns stood by the gate.
Our path cut across meadows of wet glossy grass and buttercups, which bucked in the wind. It ran along margins of barley fields where new pale green bayonets stabbed up through dull crimson earth. We tore our way past last year’s wiry brambles, and climbed high stiles, where I made sure to jump into his arms.
 
Near the top we looked back at Exeter. The pale cathedral stood out above the bombed city, which from a distance appeared undamaged. On the summit we celebrated with sandwiches and Camp coffee. Through the trees we looked south to the sea, a distant glimmer of hammered tin.
On the long tramp down, I was more and more comfortable in the boots, but Richard had begun to limp. We rested and talked to a farmer, who led a young horse. The horse danced uneasily beside him, its ears mobile with anxiety. The hedges around us were newlylaid, saplings half severed and woven into horizontal wickerwork along the banks.
Late in the afternoon we arrived in Teignmouth, tired but triumphant, and in Richard’s case, lame. Joggling together on the back seat of the bus home, we measured our walk on the map: seventeen miles.
I looked down at the boots, which had gradually warmed and softened to clasp the ankles of a green girl. They had been washed by rainy grass and bombarded with soft yellow explosions of buttercup pollen. They had withstood barbed-wire brambles and their soles now carried a sticky cake of Devon soil, the colour of blood.
We arrived back aching, warm and happy, and stood on the carpet in our stockinged feet, grinning. My future father-in-law looked up from his evening paper.
‘Well,’ he said to his son, ‘can she walk?’
 
Jenny Scanlan
 
 
 
 
Borrowed Boots: Part Two
2016
 
In late May some sixty-seven years later I arrived in Exeter wearing my own well-worn boots. Although setting off to follow my parents on the path to Teignmouth, I was also tiptoeing over memories of other journeys stretching back to the scent of the Somme on my grandfather’s boots, and to my own wanderings in the Exeter area where I had lived between 1979 and 1990, first as a student and then during my first years of employment.
My mother was unable to recall the exact route they took that day, so I invented my own. I suspect they started climbing closer to Exeter than I did but at that time they didn’t have the spaghetti snarls of the M5 and A38 to negotiate. My route took me south from Exeter along the canal and Exe estuary to Powderham Castle. It turned out that this first leg was rich with my own memories, punctuated by two pubs I often went to at Double Locks and Turf Locks, places I’d also tied up in various boats on the way to and fro wider waters.
Having set off in the afternoon, I broke my journey overnight near Kenton before the climb up to the great ridge of Haldon the next morning when I started to find the landscape recognisable from my mother’s description. Like my parents, I tried to avoid tarmac as much as possible and soon found myself on a web of small lanes, deep-sunk bridleways, and permissive paths which sometimes seemed to tunnel towards a porthole within which a thatched roof might be framed.
I was also walking after a night’s rain and there was a sense of dank greenness, the soil a deep, clotty red. The verges were effervescent with grasses, bluebells, forget-me-nots, pink and white campions, high pillars of foxglove. I had to excavate some of the names from the silt of memory -- names spoken aloud by my mother on childhood walks: pimpernel, angelica, speedwell.
Halfway up the hill I met a Norwegian man with his dog and explained why I was wandering the lanes.
‘An exciting walk!’ he said, smiling broadly before walking on towards his morning coffee.
By contrast my B&B host had stopped wiping a table and looked up when I told him my route.
‘Is there something bad about it?’ I asked.
‘Not as long as you like hills,’ he said. ‘There’s a 20% gradient near the top. Good luck.’
I had two Ordnance Survey maps with me – a cloth one from 1946, probably the same one that my parents had used, and the pink-jacketed 1974 version I had when I lived here. The names I read on the maps and on signposts left no doubt where I was. ‘Clumpit Lane’ could be nowhere but in Devon, and as I walked upwards, the thrill of being back in this half-familiar landscape matched the party-spirit of the late Spring day.
I edged upwards through dense oak woodlands marked on the map as ‘Haydon Common’ where enormous trunks and lichen-tendrilled branches danced, birdsong echoed as though the woodland was sealed with a roof, pheasants cackled. And then I came to a three-way junction. An old black and white ‘lighthouse-style’ road marker had lost all three of its direction posts but the maps led me along a deeply-furrowed bridleway south-west, rising steeply towards Great Haldon. A ruckle of large pink-white stones drew a dim line along its centre.
There was a wet, woody scent. Through gaps in the deep, dark banks and hedges, buttercup-hazed meadows glinted, carrying seated brown cows. And then I was out to a small road that runs the Haldon spine, surprised to pass a ‘Huskies Exercise Area’.
A man getting a large Alsatian out of his car asked me: ‘Have you got a Mac?’
He stretched the last word into two syllables.
‘They just said on the radio: it’s raining from one o’clock.’ Delivering this news to me seemed to fill him with glee.
I looked at my watch. There was about half an hour to go.
I had lunch at the edge of the steep escarpment at Mamhead, the highest point. The view below was hazy and I could only distinguish the widening end of the estuary and the sea beyond by faint, white, inshore stripes. I wondered what my parents had filled their sandwiches with and whether one of their knapsacks might have been the canvas one that I inherited and used for my earliest independent walking.
As I dropped steeply, first on tarmac and then on sticky-underfoot bridleways that skirted Luscombe Castle, the haze began to lift and I plunged back into warm sunshine. (Ba to you Mr ‘Ma-ac’, I thought). For some reason I had imagined it would be downhill all the way to Teignmouth. I’d forgotten how the miniature nature of this landscape belies the surprising challenges of its gradients. It was a rollercoaster of tight coombed valleys. The air was pollen-rich. A line of ducks crossed the road at a shallow ford. The earth was drying back to pink.
Crossing Dawlish Water, I was tempted to follow it into the town, to the coast. I recalled so many afternoons spent sitting on benches in the gardens beside the river with Granny, watching the ducks, and of sandy sandwiches on the beach. But I was tiring now and didn’t divert.
At last I came out onto the headland above Teignmouth. Everything was glittering below. The railway line curved around the coast towards faint cliffs. A clear trajectory led downhill to the seafront; a swaying path between high oaks. I doubt cream teas were on offer to my parents so I had one for them, looking out along the beach to a rickety pier, its legs dissolving in haze.
I assume my mother passed the Cracknells’ ‘can she walk?’ test with flying colours; she married my father the next year. She had been brought up to walk by parents who were pioneers of the walking holiday themselves, appearing in photos from the late 1920s on various coastal headlands, each carrying a small canvas rucksack. My mother continued the tradition with us, championing family walks for brambling and flower-spotting, an infamous summit of Snowdon in a blizzard, and countless coastal walks in Cornwall accompanied by a picnic basket bulging with hard-boiled eggs.  
Two women I had chatted to on Haldon Hill, laced together by the leads of four large dogs, seemed thrilled by the idea of my walk and who had inspired it. They took a photo of me and we stood chatting and smiling at each other for some time before parting ways. Like them, I was in no doubt who I’d borrowed my ‘boots’ from.
 
 
Linda Cracknell