Thread by @electra_rhodes

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

My grandad, born in 1898, was none of these.

But what he was, was a walker.

🧵

He was only ever in his waddlesome old age, when I knew him. Grumpy, but kind to me, his smallest grandchild. Him, waiting for a knee replacement & me with callipers, both of us similarly lame. I was a willing captive audience for stories of his steadier youth.

He was a man who felt like he’d never done much. He survived Passchendaele, when most of his regiment didn’t, but not because of any battlefield heroics, but because he caught Spanish flu & was sent home to recover.

Back in the labour market he began as an office boy & ended just one rung up. The epitome of a suburban white-collar worker.

But, that wasn’t all he was.

Once a month he’d pack his canvas rucksack with a sheet of oilcloth, a poncho blanket, a tin of tea & a temperamental methylated-spirit stove. Just the bare necessities that would keep him warm, fed & dry.

Rucksack hoisted, he’d slip out from their tiny London terrace at dawn, hop onto an omnibus, hold onto the back of a seat, the fabric rough & itchy under his palm, think of nothing, until he reached the sweep of the South Downs where he’d try to tramp off his survivor’s guilt.

He’d hike all weekend, kipping down under hedges, or if the weather was inclement, on the floor of a church. There he'd cudgel the horsehair kneelers into a makeshift bed. Hard, but not as bone-leaching cold as a stone-flagged nave.

He’d usually make it home to my granny by Sunday evening, other times catching a post-train overnight, changing into his work clothes - collar, tie, and decent polished shoes - at the railway station or in the cramped vestibule of the train.

Of course he had a few run-ins with gamekeepers or farmers. Trespass wasn’t criminal, but you risked losing your job or home & a beating if you were caught. Working for a solicitor, he knew all the small things that could go wrong inside a humdrum life.

His pocket diaries, inadequately kept in fading pencil, confess his worries, facing the reality that his was a little life with few expectations and a narrowing circumference. Wife. Children. Work, work, work.

But even after all the broken promises of the war there was one great-gulping thing that broadened his horizons beyond the odd weekend ramble - his determined belief in everyone’s inalienable right to stand free on any piece of land.

After a ramble across contested fields turned violent & his pal was hauled up before the Bench, Grandad chipped in for the fine. His diary notes he should have been there & he was just a missed bus away from losing his not very much that was everything.

It ate away at him.

He never told me, nor does his diary say, how he found out about the walk.

In April 1932, without Granny’s knowledge, he withdrew six months worth of savings, enough for his train fare to Manchester and one night’s bed and board.

I don’t know where he stayed that Saturday, but the next morning he caught a train along the Hope Valley line to Edale. All through my childhood I asked again and again if it was really called that, it seemed such an unexpectedly propitious name.

He spent that second night cocooned in his bed-roll, watching the distant lights of Sheffield. I don’t know if that’s true. How lit were those towns back then? But it made for a good telling when I was small.

On the morning of the 24th April he had only a vague idea of where he was supposed to be. He had a borrowed map, but a map is not the territory, & Kinder Scout is big. He walked around, hearing voices now & again. Raised. Angry. Aggrieved.

Sometimes, in the distance, he could see gaggles of men.

He eventually caught up with them. There had already been a couple of fights & arrests had been made.

They shared wax-papered packets of sandwiches & a few bottles of beer, amazed he’d come all that way. He was amazed they were risking their livelihoods so close to home.

‘Worth it.’ They all said.

His diary reports he’d have liked to have stayed up there, with these men who shared this fellow feeling. But work & his little life were calling. So, he returned to Manchester & caught the milk train south, changing into his too tight collar & tie on the train.

Then he walked steadily into work, his chin a little higher.

There was a lot of filing to be done that Monday, and his boss tutted over the pictures in the paper of ‘those ruffians on the hills’.

He felt like he wasn’t really there, missing all the good bits, as he did. But despite getting lost, it rallied him. He pushed against the boundaries of his small life, like blowing into a balloon, so it reaches its limit but never bursts.

The afternoon before he died, Boxing Day 1978, he lit the still-temperamental meths stove & made tea. ‘Whatever the circumstances of anyone’s birth,’ he said, passing me his spare army-surplus enameled mug, ‘under the sky we are all free.’

He swallowed a mouthful, his old-man jaw working, hoping I was listening.

‘Don’t be afraid of the worst that can happen. Ask instead, what is the best?‘

It’s 91 years since the mass trespass on Kinder Scout & it’s still a rallying cry for the right-to-roam movement. Still relevant, as it gets tougher to access land, the possibility of wildness is shrinking & simply being able to live or protest outdoors is criminalised.

So, I’m grateful to those people. And to my grandad, risking everything to remind us, that whatever our circumstances we should remember that under the sky we are all free.

And, when the time comes to remind others, to trespass if we must.

#Kinder91 #RightToRoam #FreedomToRoam