“Where is Em?” QR asked on the group chat.
She’d given me a different name to begin with, but then stripped me of my laurels and simply called me Emily. A nod to the Brontë or Dickinson I like to think, because I am the writer amongst us, the poet, the romantic.
“Where is Em today?” is a genuine question, and it’s also a gentle check-in, a quiet asking of “are you ok?” because I’m also the one amongst us who lives alone and travels alone. I guess that not responding to anything on the group chat is the modern equivalent of not taking the milk bottles in. It’s good that someone notices.
This particular day she asked, it was also a good question because, beyond a generalisation, for most of that afternoon I couldn’t have answered it. That became true for the following morning as well, and then even more so on another day.
I wasn’t lost. You can’t really get properly lost on a island roughly ten miles by five. If all else fails, keep walking and you’ll hit sea, turn right or left and keep going and you’ll end up either back where you started or at least somewhere you recognise. If the island is Guernsey you will most likely end up on a road with the word “BUS” painted on it at some point. So if all else fails, find such a road, and the word, and (provided it’s not too late in the day) just wait…and a bus from one side of that road or the other will get you back to Town.
Besides these days we have mobile phones and the internet will give us cab company details. The internet will also give us maps, so – really – if you’re lost on a small island it means that you’re really trying to be precisely that. It means that you left your phone behind, or ‘forgot’ to charge it, or walked out of range of any signal. It means that despite everything you promised your father you left the compass at home again. It means that the map is not in your bag.
It means that you’re learning to walk, to wander, meander, roam. Stroll rather than hike. You are no longer going for a walk, certainly not “doing a walk”. You have no destination in mind, no route planned…or if you did, you’re not holding to it. At every junction you make a choice that Queenie would be proud of, completely random. You walk down a lane for the purely logical reason that you don’t recognise it and wonder where it goes, or because you do recognise it and can’t remember, or because you know it well and it’s been a while, or for some other nebulous notion.
So I have to wonder if, subconsciously, I was really trying to get lost. To wander and feel that adrenalin of having no idea how to get from where I am to where I want to be. On the conscious level, it wasn’t intentional. I’d just forgotten that I have absolutely no sense of direction and perhaps should not be let out on my own.
I’ve been coming to the island for some seven years now (not including the two years when none of us went anywhere). I should know people by now. I should know my way around by now. Neither of those things are true. I come here on retreat. I come here to walk randomly. There are familiar places and unknown lanes and paths, and only a limited notion of how they connect to each other. All of the roads and paths and lanes and streets twist and turn and I forget where the sea is, or where the sun should be at this time of day.
On the first day of this trip, I simply walked down the woodland path to the beach, to swim in the sea. It was a grey day. The tide was still on the rise. I swam regardless. A female mallard gave me a nip on the shin. I've never been bitten by a duck before. A gentleman threw a pebble in the direction of the gull that was stealing my sandals while I was in the water. Later, I walked back up the road route. Possibly the first time I have done so without needing to pause part-way up.
No getting lost here, only the familiarity of steep climbs, the scent of wet earth – yes even in this driest of years there is petrichor under the trees, there is moss slippery underfoot, there is the moment when the sea comes within sound, before sight, and I try to judge the state of the tide,
by the sonic shifting of waves and pebble churn.
I strip down and walk into the water. This is ‘my’ swim-spot. I only get a few days a year here, but I will keep coming back for as long as I can come down to it and walk my way back up again. The water is cold, but not ouch-cold, not Scilly Isles or North Sea cold, only freshening cold, enough to make me splash arms and body before taking the deep breath that enables me to stroke out on an exhale as I flatten myself into the water. Deep swell, but not much breaking, easy to get beyond and stay within my depth.
Isn’t it wonderful? asks the gent who will later rescue my pack from gulls. We’re both smiling that sea-water smile.
Settled back in, I walk the cliff path into Town. I catch my bay looking green-blue under a clouded sky, reflecting the wood-cloaked cliffs. I wonder about the hand-picked, grass-tied posey on a remembrance bench: a single carnation, a dandelion, sea-thrift, no message. Round the headland the sea is shades of slate and tin, shot with whitewash towards the horizon. A sail-less three-masted brig lies at anchor where the gunmetal meets the silver, and whispers of pirates and rum.
On shore I meet the road that always makes me think I’m in town when I’m only half-way. I will learn this route better one day, or perhaps I will simply continue to enjoy the surprise of rediscovery. There are buddleia beyond the wall, and they are the joy of hummingbird hawk moths. I am still trying to figure out how to catch them with a hand-held camera and limited patience. Gorgeous creatures. What I fail to catch, I can still be grateful for. I walk on with my insect-smile.
I did not get lost that day. I did not go into Town. I turned straight back up the Val des Terres beneath the trees. Counting my steps, determined not to pause, all the way to the top. Not the most poetic way to enjoy a walk, I know – but sometimes we simply want to prove something to ourselves – and I will walk this street many more times.
Then it rained. We have spent the Summer praying and begging for rain. Sometimes our prayers are answered in the affirmative. The island is already green again. Clearly it has had some of what we have had at home in the last few weeks, including the miracle of how quickly the earth and the trees come back when their thirst is quenched. I said that I know we need the rain, but if I have two wet weeks on Guernsey, I will not be best pleased. And I would not have been, but I won’t begrudge the occasional day (or as it turned out half-day) of downpour. The land still thirsts and I still want Summer to linger, we’ll have to share and share alike.
Even so…even as I wanted sun on my skin, I smiled my wet-stone smile as I walked the down & up of Le Varclin towards the road. The abreuveur flowing freely from the spring. The first fallen leaves shining like jewels scattered as offerings. I wonder if it’s only on Guernsey that the farmers and villagers have thought to pave their cattle watering places, to prevent the muddy-puddling of the surrounding area. I wonder how long it is since cattle or horses were brought here to drink.
A day or two later I walk up the Rue de Jerbourg looking at the big house in a field that had cows in it on that first misty morning eight years ago, when I walked up from the hotel with no idea where I’d landed myself or how I was going to manage this new life that had been dumped upon me. I remember that trip, and the ones in between.
I note the changes.
I look at all the big houses and am briefly – only briefly –envious of the people who own them. I wonder who they are and whether they are happy. I hear Mam (again) saying ‘think of the dusting’. I know that if I had such a house I would simply fill it with stuff. I would have no use for so many rooms – and the garden must cost a fortune to maintain – and I have a theory that we stop appreciating the view that we see every day.
In another life Jay & I would take on one of those places and turn it into a wellness space. He would teach the things he knows and I would teach the things I like to think I have an inkling about. We would bring guests to help us with the things we don’t know. It would be a creative, healing space. Eastern philosophy. Celtic mythology. Mystery. No yoga necessary. Lots of walking definitely. Getting lost (and then found) very probable. In another life: the one we did not live.
Meanwhile, back in my reality, I strolled around the village after the rain. Cyclamen hold their raindrops out to me. The Calais abreuveur is lime-green coated with vegetation. I walk up Gypsy Lane and over the field, almost diving into a hedge when two grown men round the bend at speed screaming like teenagers. Oh, sorry love, they call behind them. I guess they rarely encounter people in the evening on this field edge track that is no longer what you can legitimately call a lane.
I pause. Entranced. If they were starlings it would be called a murmuration and it would spend more time in the sky, less on the ground. I don’t what you call it when they are sparrows. I am assuming they are sparrows. They are too fast in flight for me to get a clear view and when they land, which they do frequently but not for long, they simply vanish into the loam of the ploughed field. They put to the air when a gull flies over, a threatening shadow that they don’t recognise
as non-predatory. They put to the air when I inadvertently put myself above the sky-line back-lit by the dropping sun. They put to the air for reasons of their own that I can’t identify. No doubt they can hear and see things that escape my attention which is focussed entirely upon them. I edge into the field, trying to get close enough to them on the ground, to identify for sure what I am looking at. Of course I fail, and they take to the air again.
Eventually I realise I’m exhausting them unnecessarily and move away.
Unless, of course, that it is some evening game of their own that they are playing that has nothing to do with me, or gulls, at all.
The evening I walked down to the Jerbourg viewpoint, I did what I always do: looked for my altar-chair. I could not see it. I wondered about storms and erosion – both of which seemed unlikely to have been sufficient to remove it in a single year. Even so, I was willing to let it go. Everything changes. Even on islands.
The day I walked that short stretch of path from Fermain round to the point, I found that I was wrong – and also right. Of course, the rock formation is still there. I walked down to it, led by vivid Clouded Yellow butterflies. They were too busy about their own affairs to settle for even a moment, but a joy in motion – and thank you to them for leading me back down to the rock. It sits there, smaller than I remember, but just as cloaked in lichen. Orange sea lichen or sunburst lichen (the same thing) – xanthoria parietina – sharing space with ramalina subfarinacea – who is not loved enough to have a common name – and, growing out of a cleft plantago maritima – the sea plantain (past flowering now) that has a common name but seemingly no known curative usage other than for the staunching of wounds, for which - to be fair - any leafage not actually poisonous will do just as well.
Along the path the sea thrift holds on and down in the short grass I found something new to me: autumn squill. Prospero autumnale, now reclassified as scilla autumnalis, presumably just to confuse people like me. A member of the asparagus / hyacinth family. I did not know that hyacinth and asparagus are related.
There is so much I don’t know, which is precisely why I get excited about learning what bright orange lichen or tiny purple flowers are called. I won’t remember, but it is a kind of a joy to know, if only for one day.
I climb back up the steep and mostly stepped path to the Jerbourg road. This one I still cannot do without pausing for breath. At least the thighs and hips don’t complain. That’s progress.
These are paths I know well enough, though in the right light, the views still take my breath away.
Early morning in Autumn doesn’t need to be especially early, the sun is low in the sky and can be at the angle to blind you as you walk down the woodland path as it suddenly strikes between branches already shedding their Summer cover. At nine o’clock it’s still low enough to be showering a diamond pathway across the bay, directly towards you, your own personal gift from the universe.
Ah, but yes, there was also that whole getting lost thing.
There was the day I got lost going into Town. I’d decided to take a deliberately long way round, and I’m glad I did because I found Candie Gardens – how come I haven’t been there before. That was somewhere to come back to on another day with more intention. At the time, I was still drinking in the architecture of the ordinary – all the houses on the hills above the sea. Some of them once grand but quite ordinary now, and others that had never been anything but. Terraces. Tiny gardens. And at intervals the new money that shouts ‘look at me’ and I confess that I do. I wandered in roughly the right direction, trying to keep a bearing on the coast and opting for downhill rather than up, and heading towards buildings rather than away and somehow I found my way down to the harbour.
There was the day I walked the other way, found an abreuveur I didn’t recall and walked its stream path all the way to the road. Not lost on this occasion, just following a path I did not know, trusting that I’d recognise where I was when I reached its end – which I did. Moulin Huet. Little changed since Renoir summered here in the 1880s. So there is something I am reminded of, from other visits, that gets lost in between: I don’t know enough about Renoir. Artists can be difficult people, but I might have liked him, if only because he had this thought: "to me a painting should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. Yes, pretty! There are enough annoying things in life without us creating more."
I’m not saying that, say, Guernica should never have been painted, or that the First World War poets didn’t have a point – only that it is refreshing to know that some artists also accept that one of the purposes of art should be to cheer, to be not even ‘beautiful’ but merely ‘pretty’. And why not? I will go away and learn about Renoir, the man and the artist. And next year I will make him and his work my focus.
If I don’t forget.
Having reached the road at Moulin Huet I set about walking up it. A different stream trickled down alongside, but the gentle river-song was cut through by the angry barking of large dogs from somewhere up ahead. I crossed the road and kept going. The dogs kept running about (beyond a wall I am sure they could leap without a thought) and sounded more angry the closer I got.
I’m always one to admit that discretion is the better part of valour – or that I’m a coward when it comes to being bitten by dogs. I retreated and walked back up to the spring. After all, it’s never the same going up as it was coming down and I knew pretty-much where I was, if not exactly where I would come out. No more confused than I am in my own suburb when I realise there is a street I have had not cause to walk down.
Always walk down streets you do not know. Even the ones closest to home. I stumble across restaurants and pubs, and parks, and street art, and river banks. But those are other stories for other days.
On this occasion I came out more-or-less where I expected to in the heart of the village, which was a good thing, and which did not happen the next time…
...which is also a story for another time.
~ / ~
