The Hard Way

 The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us, by Susannah Walker

This book arrived for me while I was gone on the Ridgeway, and that's what it's about!  Sort of.  I was kind of confused about the title at first but eventually Walker moves from the Ridgeway to focus on the much less known Hard Way or Harrow Way, and it is not easy to trace.  Anyway, I helped to back the publishing of this book, pretty much on a whim, so I got a copy and my name in the back.  You can look me up.

Walker seems to be about my age, and spent much of her 20s walking and even living on the Ridgeway, before settling down into marriage and a child and suddenly no more walking.  Or at least, it became far more difficult to get out to anyplace as inaccessible as the Ridgeway, which is not stroller-friendly and has hardly anyplace to park and leave the car, and she spent a lot of time thinking about how women get pulled into domesticity once they have kids, in a way that doesn't need to be as all-encompassing as it often is.  As a person who loves her family but just wants to get out and walk the hills by herself every so often -- which she feels has been assumed for men and impossible for women -- she's got a few things to say.

She goes through most of the big names in Ridgeway writing and it's true; they're all men who used walking in the country as an escape from their families.  (Sure, everyone needs that sometimes...including the women...is the point here.)  Somehow, she points out, the wives wound up giving up their own literary or scientific interests in order to take care of the family on no money and support his writing.  She's especially mad at Edward Thomas and John Betjeman, who seem to have been really horrible, not to mention unfaithful, to their wives.

But hey, there are women on the Ridgeway too!  They tend to be slightly ignored, but they're there.  Walker just had to look hard to find them.   And she also spends a lot of time walking, mostly on the parts of the Ridgeway that are between Avebury and Lyme Regis, where it ends at the sea -- that part is not the National Trail part that I walked.  A lot of it is on Salisbury Plain, which is also full of the army, so it's not always easy to access.  There is some good stuff about the military and how everybody kind of pretends that it's not right there in the middle of the countryside -- she has lots to say about how we pretend the countryside is natural and unspoilt, untouched by human hands, when in fact it's been just as molded by humanity as everything else, and has history too.  Then she focuses on the Harrow Way.  I spent a lot of time scouring Google Maps, as I usually do, to try to follow along.

I enjoyed this book a lot, though I sometimes felt Walker got a little over the top.   She's a clever and evocative writer and I had fun with a lot of her stories.  Also when she complained that UK public transport is dismal, I had to laugh, because I was amazed by UK public transport.  Come visit me, Susannah, and see what it's like!  We'll go hiking, but we will definitely not take any buses or trains!  Do not take me up on this for at least six months because our best park just burned down and is closed until further notice!  

This book also added heavily to my TBR list, since I want to get hold of many of the books she mentions.  Not so easy over here, but I can do it.

[On Edward Thomas and his bouts of depression]  His complaints at these times are that Helen is too cheerful, or simply that his family are too present, too much there.  He flails at them as though it was their fault for existing in the first place.  Thomas couldn't bear domesticity, but he needed it in order to have something to leave.  Home and his wife are not just a base camp from which he can walk out unimpeded with, helpfully, his lunch fixed by someone else.  More essentially, his opposition to domesticity is what defines him...