The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

It was not like Harold to make a snap decision. He saw that. Since his retirement, days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair. He slept poorly at night, and sometimes he did not sleep at all. Yet, arriving more promptly than he anticipated at a postbox, he paused again. He had started something and he didn’t know what it was, but now that he was doing it, he wasn’t ready to finish.

“You have to believe. That’s what I think. It’s not about medicine and all that stuff. You have to believe a person can get better. There is so much in the human mind we don’t understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”

Harold gazed at the girl in awe. He didn’t know how it had happened, but she seemed to be standing in a pool of light, as if the sun had moved, and her hair and skin shone with luminous clarity.

[…]

“I don’t mean, like, religious. I mean, trusting what you don’t know and going for it. Believing you can make a difference.”

Harold thought of all the things in life he’d let go. […] The people he had passed over and over again, in the brewery car park, or on the street […] The neighbors whose forwarding addresses he had never kept. Worse: the son who didn’t speak to him and the wife he had betrayed. He remembered his father in the nursing home, and his mother’s suitcase by the door. And now here was a woman who twenty years ago had proved herself a friend. Was this how it went? That just at the moment when he wanted to do something, it was too late? That all the pieces of a life must eventually be surrendered, as if in truth they amounted to nothing? The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference.

They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. Remembering his own doubt, Harold was humbled. “That is so kind,” he said softly. He shook their hands and thanked them.

Life was very different when you walked through it. Between gaps in the banks, the land rolled up and down, carved into checkered fields, and lined with ridges of hedging and trees. He had to stop to look. There were so many shades of green Harold was humbled. Some were almost a deep velvety black, others so light they verged on yellow. Far away the sun caught a passing car, maybe a window, and the light trembled across the hills like a fallen star. How was it he had never noticed all this before? Pale flowers, the name of which he didn’t know, pooled the foot of the hedgerows, along with primroses and violets. He wondered if, all those years ago, Queenie had looked out from her passenger window and seen these things.

What he said? He had looked down at his son, for whom he wanted everything, and been struck dumb.

Yes, life is terrifying, he might have said. Or, Yes, but it gets better. Or even: Yes, but it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Better still, in the absence of words, he might have taken David in his arms. But he had not. He’d done none of those things. He felt the boy’s fear so keenly, he could see no way round it. The morning his son looked up at his father and asked for help, Harold gave nothing. He fled to his car and went to work.

Why must he remember?

He hunched his shoulders and drove his feet harder, as if he wasn’t so much walking to Queenie as away from himself.

Exeter took Harold by surprise. He had developed a slow inner rhythm that the fury of the city now threatened to overturn. He had felt comfortable in the security of open land and sky, where everything took its place. He had felt himself to be part of something bigger than being simply Harold. In the city, where there was such short-range sight, he felt anything might happen, and that whatever it was he wouldn’t be ready.

He looked for traces of the land beneath his feet and all he found was where it had been replaced with paving stones and tarmac. Everything alarmed him.

It must be the same all over England. People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

[…]

He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passerby, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen. To carry a little of them as he went.

And then it had stopped. The talking, the shouting, the catching his eye. This new silence was different from before. Whereas once they had wished to spare one another pain, now there was nothing left to salvage. She didn’t even have to give voice to the words in her head. He knew simply by looking at her that there was not a word, not a gesture he could say or do to make amends. She no longer blamed Harold. She no longer cried in front of him; she wouldn’t allow him the comfort of holding her.

Harold closed the front door quietly, not wishing to wake Martina, but she was watching from her bathroom window, with her face pressed to the glass. He didn’t look back. He didn’t wave. He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

How had it happened that Harold was walking to Berwick while she sat at home, doing nothing? What were the steps she had missed? […] The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable.

It was not a life, if lived without love.

Harold walked with these strangers and listened. He judged no one, although as the days wore on, and time and places began to melt, he couldn’t remember if the tax inspector wore no shoes or had a parrot on his shoulder. It no longer mattered. He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

He walked so surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

For the rest of the afternoon, Harold continued to tread the streets but without knowing where he was going. He needed someone to share his faith in his walk so that he could believe in it too, but he barely had the energy to talk. […] No one said what he longed to hear. No one said, You are going to get there, and Queenie will live. No one said, There will be crowds applauding because this, Harold, is the best idea we have ever heard. You must definitely finish.

“We knew no one but it didn’t matter. We only needed each other. Harold had a difficult childhood. I think he loved his mother very much. And his father must have had some sort of breakdown after the war. I wanted to be everything he’d never had. I wanted to give him a home and a family. I learned to cook. I made curtains. I found wooden crates and hammered them together to make a coffee table. Harold dug me vegetable plots at the front of the house, and I grew everything. Potatoes, beans, carrots.” She laughed. “We were very happy.”

Again, he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.

In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place. It didn’t matter that other people would do it in a different way; in fact this was inevitable. […] He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his. He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.

When Harold managed to ring, she could do no more than listen. “Goodness,” she would murmur. Or “Who’d have thought it?” He told her the places where he had rested, the log bunkers, toolsheds, huts, bus shelters, and barns. The words tumbled out of him with such vigor she felt ancient.

[…]

He was so bewildering to her, this man who walked alone and greeted strangers, that in turn she said mildly high-pitched things she regretted about bunions, or the weather. She never said, “Harold, I have wronged you.” She never she said she had been happy in Eastbourne, or that she wished she had agreed to a dog. She never said, “Is it really too late?” But she thought these things all the time as she listened.

He thought back to the night he had slept in the barn near Stroud. No one knew the real truth about why he was walking to Queenie. They had made assumptions. They thought it was a love story, or a miracle, or an act of beauty, or even bravery, but it was none of those things. The discrepancy between what he knew and what other people believed frightened him. It also made him feel, as he looked back at the camp, that even in the midst of them he was unknown. The fire was a glow of light in the blackness. Voices and laughter came to him, and they were all strangers.

“I miss you too. But, Maureen, I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now at last I am doing something. I have to finish my walk. Queenie is waiting. She believes in me. You see?”

“Well yes,” she said. “I do see that. Of course I see it.” She took a sip of tea. It was cold. “I just—I’m sorry, Harold—I don’t see where I fit in. I know you’re a pilgrim now and everything. But I can’t help thinking about myself. I’m not as selfless as you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m no better than anyone else. I’m really not. Anybody can do what I’m doing. But you have to let go. I didn’t know that at the beginning but now I do. You have to let go of the things you think you need like cash cards and phones and maps and things.”

Harold was sure he would be better once he was back on his feet. But he wasn’t. There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him, the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference whether Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.

What began as a flat, subdued feeling grew over the hours into something more violently accusing. The more he dwelt on how little he mattered, the more he believed it.

People think I am walking because there was a romance between myself and Queenie all those years ago, but it isn’t true. I walked because she saved me, and I never said thank you. And this is why I am writing to you. I want you to know how much you helped me all those weeks ago, when you told me about your faith and your aunt, although I fear my courage has never matched yours.

He had believed that when he saw her he could say thank you and even goodbye. That there would be a meeting of a kind, and that somehow it would absolve the terrible mistakes of the past. But there could not be a meeting, or even a goodbye, because the woman he had once known had already left. Harold thought he should stay, leaning on the windowsill, until he could accept this. He wondered if he should sit again; if being in the chair would make a difference. But even before he sat, he knew it wouldn’t. Sitting or standing, he knew that it would take a long while before he could sew into the fabric of his life the knowledge that Queenie was reduced to this. David was dead too; there was no bringing him back.

He couldn’t say how he knew it, or whether the knowledge made him happy or sad, but he was sure that Queenie would remain with him, and David too. There would be Napier, and Joan, and Harold’s father with those aunts; but there would be no more fighting them, and no more anguish for the past. They were part of the air he walked through, just as all the travelers he had met were part of it. He saw that people would make the decisions they wished to make, and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy. He did not know what would follow from Berwick-upon-Tweed, and he was ready for that.