The Lost Art of Walking

9. Walking Home and Away from Home

My mother always said, in what at first might sound like an approving way, that as a toddler I’d been very eager to walk and had learned the skill early. Then, in a less approving way, she’d add that perhaps I’d walked too early, while the bones in my legs were still soft, and that’s why I’d developed such terrible bowlegs. I’m not sure that I have bowlegs at all, but if I do, then the bowing is so slight that nobody except my mother has ever remarked on it. I always said to her it was because I was so eager to get away. Welcome to my childhood.

I was born on the kitchen table of my grandparents’ house, literally in a dead-end street in northern England, in the steel-making city of Sheffield, in a tough, poor, lively working-class suburb called Hillsborough. The majority of the family lived within walking distance of one another. For that matter they lived within walking distance of everything they needed: shops, pubs, dog track, football ground, betting shop, church. The steel factories my uncles worked in were equally nearby. Next to them were the candy and soda factories where my female relatives worked. Everybody walked to work. Everybody walked everywhere. Everything you could want was right there, unless you happened to want something else.

♦

My parents and I lived in my grandparents’ house until I was about five years old, when we moved into subsidized public housing, ending up in a ‘council estate’ in a place called Longley. We had only gone a few miles, and we went back to Hillsborough at least once a week, but it was spoken of as though we’d moved to the outer fringes of the twilight zone.

An English council estate is similar to, but culturally very different from, an American housing project, and I think the name says a great deal. Both are places where the poor, underprivileged, and undereducated live, but Britain likes it to sound as though its poor people are on some grand country manor, while America prefers to think they’re part of a science fair experiment.

Longley was regarded as one of the ‘good’ council estates. ‘Good’ meant low on crime, not bad schools, not too many problem families. These things are comparative and the gradations were very fine. Eventually my parents moved into the private sector and bought their own house, but that took some time. I was well into my adolescence before they made the move.

Longley was the place I grew up and the place I knew best. I’d walked all its streets endlessly, and it was a very long time since I’d set foot there.

♦

Certain ironists like to say that Sheffield is just like Rome: it’s built on seven hills. There, of course, the resemblance ends. And Roman citizens never had to cope with Sheffield winters, long, hard, with plenty of snow. Because I’d got into the ‘good school’ over on the other side of the city I had to take two bus rides to get there, one downhill from home into the center of town, then a second one uphill to where the school was.

When the snow fell buses could get down the hills but not up. It wasn’t unusual to find yourself stranded in the city center surrounded by hills that buses couldn’t get up. You either walked to school or you walked home. Sometimes you did both. When I complained to my mother about the misery and downright unfairness of this state of affairs she said I should be like Felix the Cat, and keep on walking.

There’s a persuasive theory that the hills of Sheffield are what keep the old people’s hearts ticking and in good health. All over the city little old men and women struggle to walk up impossibly steep hills, often weighed down by shopping, and they struggle and stop for breath every now and again, but they keep going. They keep walking.

My oldest friend, Steve, who still lives in Sheffield, has inlaws who live on the flatlands of Hull, a city fifty miles away, and at one time they used to visit him in Sheffield, but they gave it up. The hills were too much for them. A lifetime’s easy walking on level ground had left them without the right stuff to tackle Sheffield’s hills.

♦

There were many things my family didn’t do very well, and holidays were the worst of them. Both my parents seemed to believe in holidays and think they were a good thing. They wanted to go away somewhere, and yet there was never anywhere they particularly wanted to go or anything they particularly wanted to do when they got there. By default, we more often than not went to Blackpool, a seaside town that’s easy to praise for its gritty working-class vulgarity and energy, until you get there.

My mother always complained that there was nothing to do on holiday in Blackpool, that all people did all day was ‘mooch around’ — walk up and down the seafront. She had a point. The boardinghouses we stayed in had a ridiculous and strictly enforced rule that ‘guests’ had to be out of the premises from ten in the morning till five in the evening. You were paying for bed, breakfast, and an evening meal, nothing else. That was a lot of time to stay outside. Blackpool had a beach backing onto the Irish Sea, and both beach and sea were generally too cold and bleak to engage with, but it had a six-mile-long promenade known as the Prom. That was where you spent the day mooching.

Along the Prom there were fairground rides, a local version of the Eiffel Tower, bingo halls, souvenir shops, stalls selling fish and chips, seafood, sticks of rock candy, but we never went to these places. My parents regarded them as a frivolous and needless expense. Going to the seaside was holiday enough. Why gild the lily? Instead we joined all the other moochers, walking up and down the Prom, all day long, dragging their miserable kids behind them, not looking as though they were having the slightest bit of fun. The Nicholson family fit right in.

I can’t swear that we really walked the full length of the Prom in both directions every day, but it certainly felt like it. Even though there was public transportation, and even though we weren’t really going anywhere, my dad insisted we go there on foot. Today I wonder whether he was enjoying himself or punishing himself, or punishing my mother and me, or whether he was simply doing his best and really didn’t know how to take or share pleasure.

The problem of what to do as a family was never solved. After my father died I did my best to be a good son to my widowed mother. I was living in London at the time and she would come to stay and I’d try to entertain her. It was never easy. There was still never anything she wanted to do, and my attempts to second-guess were hopeless. When I suggested once that we might have a walk round the London Zoo, she reacted as though I’d suggested she might like to watch the goings-on in a brothel. And so we did nothing much except wander round London’s streets and shops. We covered miles, and she never complained, but I always had the terrible feeling that I was extending an unhappy family tradition.

♦

My dad wasn’t good at teaching me things. I was a slow learner and he was short of patience. When his first attempts to teach me how to operate, for instance, a yo-yo, a tenon saw, or eventually a motorcar didn’t bring instant results, there generally wasn’t a second attempt. He had fixed ideas about how things should be done, including walking.

I was happy to amble along, slouching, hands in pockets in a sloppy, uncoordinated way, which I think is normal for kids. In the course of writing this book I’ve spent time watching children walk, and they’re all over the place, no rhythm, no balance, no sense of purpose. Maybe it’s because they don’t have anywhere to go.

My dad pointed out that if you swung your arms you made much better progress. Your arms acted like pendulums carrying you inexorably forward. I could see he was right. I tried it. It worked. This was one of the few things I managed to pick up at the first attempt. My father wasn’t nearly as pleased as I’d have liked him to be.

There was nothing pretentious or aspirational about my father. In fact, it always seemed to me he put far too much energy into insisting on how ordinary he was. Nevertheless, he displayed a curiously aristocratic belief that the rules applying to other people didn’t apply to him. So if we were out walking and saw signs that said ‘Private, Keep Out, No Trespassing’, they made no impression on my dad. As far as he was concerned these notices were intended only for others.

It might have been nice to think my father was a socialist firebrand who refused to obey the rules imposed upon him by the landowning classes, and in the north of England there was a Bolshy local tradition of walking where you weren’t supposed to walk: political walking. In 1932 five hundred or so walkers performed a famous and symbolic ‘mass trespass’ on Kinder Scout in the nearby Peak District, trying to assert the right to walk across private open land that was used only twelve days a year for grouse shooting. There were clashes with police and gamekeepers, some fights, some arrests, but eventually, many years later, a ‘right to roam’ was established in England. It was, and still is, regarded as a mighty triumph for the working classes of northern England. My father, however, didn’t quite belong to this tradition. He wasn’t defiant, nor was he oblivious, but it was as though he believed that the makers of ‘No Trespassing’ signs would surely regard him as a special case.

And so one Sunday morning, when I was about ten years old, we found ourselves tramping along a woodland path on the outskirts of Sheffield, and we were confronted by a ‘Keep Out’ sign. Naturally my father ignored it and we kept on walking. We hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty steps before we were confronted by a large man sitting on the back of a large horse, and the man was furious. He was evidently the landowner and the one responsible for putting up the sign. There was a good deal of ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing on my land? Can’t you read?’ and so on. He was pompous, fleshy, tweedy. He did have a sort of authority about him, perhaps because he was on horseback, but that didn’t prevent him from also appearing ridiculous.

If it had been up to me, then or now, I’d simply have lied to the man, said that I hadn’t seen the sign, apologized, and retreated, but my dad didn’t quite do that. He didn’t deny that he’d read the sign but, he said, surely no rational person, however protective he felt toward his land, could possibly object to a man such as my dad and his young son walking through their woods on a Sunday morning.

My dad was so reasonable and so utterly mistaken that the man, though still angry, was taken aback. He’d been ready for a confrontation, raised voices, an escalating argument, but my father’s suggestion that he might have put up the sign without really meaning it left him flabbergasted. The best he could do was say, ‘How would you like it if I came and rode my horse through your garden?’

My father appeared to be giving the matter serious thought, then said, ‘Well, I take your point’.

I didn’t take any such point. Something was stirring in my bosom. Let him bring his horse to our garden, I thought. There’d just about be enough room for the horse to stand up, and his presence would surely have caused a gathering of local toughs and hooligans who, in my imagination at least, would express their class hatred, abuse the man, and probably steal his horse.

No son likes to see his father defeated, and this was certainly an argument my father couldn’t have won, but I thought he’d gained a sort of victory by refusing to argue at all. We turned and walked back the way we’d come, rather slowly and overcasually. I took some comfort in thinking that even though we’d been told off, we had at least successfully trespassed on the pompous ass’s land. We’d also succeeded in making him hugely angry and that had its satisfactions. My father wasn’t consoled by any of this, and he continued to be genuinely amazed that anyone could be so utterly unreasonable as not to want him to walk on their land.

♦

When I was in my early teens I was one of a small group of boys from my grammar school who met up in the center of Sheffield one evening to see our first adult film, telling our parents that we were going to one another’s houses. Adult films weren’t then what they are now, and the one we’d chosen to see was The Graduate. I’m amazed now to discover that the movie was released in 1967, and I’m sure we saw it first-run, but that would mean we were all about fourteen years old, which seems unlikely. No doubt we felt much older, and certainly tried to look it as we bought our tickets at the box office, which we did without any trouble.

The Graduate was far too sophisticated for our boyish tastes and we were severely disappointed. It also finished surprisingly early and we all went our separate ways, but going straight home and arriving back so soon would have made my parents suspicious. So I dawdled, eventually caught a bus back to the Longley Estate, and got off a couple of stops too early so I could walk part of the way home and kill more time. Wandering the streets at night seemed to be a safe thing for a boy to do, largely because there was nobody else on the streets.

The houses were small and tightly packed together, and there were lights on inside, and I remember I could hear televisions playing through the walls. There was a sense of quiet order. The whole area seemed to be dormant, and my presence felt sneaky and intrusive, like staring at someone while they’re asleep.

I walked all around what I considered to be ‘my’ neighborhood. I walked along all the streets that I knew, past the school, the park, and the few local shops and between the four patches of open grass in front of them known, incomprehensibly, as ‘the Plantation’, and along one or two streets that I didn’t know very well at all. I felt thoroughly detached, an unseen and unknown outsider. You might have thought there was something voyeuristic about it, although there was nothing to see.

Ultimately, however, it was all very dull. I had the sense that nothing interesting had ever happened in these streets, and that nothing much ever would. I walked for what seemed a very long time until I felt I’d exhausted all the possibilities of the neighborhood. I went home. As I walked into the house, after having had what I would later come to think of as an important moment, and having thought I’d walked for a good long time, my mother simply said, ‘You’re back early’.

Only much later did I read this passage in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums:

‘Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show — nobody talking — silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels’.

I had seen no little blue television squares on my walk — this was a neighborhood where people kept their curtains tightly closed at night — but I took his point.

♦

When, years after the event, I tried to tell my friend Steve about the way I’d felt that night, he joked that I was lucky not to have been arrested, but that was never likely to be a problem. The streets were as free of police as they were of criminals.

Steve was, and is, my oldest friend, and has been since we were both six years old. My first memories of him were as the smiling little kid who’d fallen in the schoolyard and broken his arm. Then later, the very day the cast came off, he’d fallen and broken it again. Now that both my parents were dead, Steve was my only remaining contact with Sheffield.

He was also a reminder of who and what I might have been. He’d been smart enough to go to college for four years and get a degree, but then he’d come right back, got a job in local government, married, and had two kids. He was a smart man in lots of ways, witty, thoughtful, a very talented guitar player, and yet there was something frustrated about him, and that frustration seemed to come from never having got out of the city he was born in.

Steve was also the man with whom I’d got my criminal record. We’d been hitchhiking from Sheffield to London, while at college, had made some bad decisions, and found ourselves stranded on the motorway, the English equivalent of a freeway, where walking is strictly forbidden. We walked gingerly, knowing we shouldn’t be there, but were spotted by motorway police, picked up, and eventually each charged with being ‘a pedestrian on a motorway’. As far as either of us can tell this hasn’t blighted our subsequent lives.

♦

I decided to go back to Sheffield for a long weekend of walking around the places of my youth, and it was natural that I stay with Steve and his wife, Julia. Natural, too, that I should invite Steve to come walking with me. He reckoned he could only do some of it.

♦

These days he was suffering with his back, which sometimes made walking too difficult and painful. He said he’d do what he could. On that basis he didn’t come with me when I did my first walk around Hillsborough.

Saturday afternoons, as I was growing up, were always spent at my grandmother’s house. My mother and I were deposited there while my father went off and did fatherly things. I didn’t much want to be there, trapped in my grandmother’s living room while she and my mother discussed the latest family scandals, and eventually a time came when I was eleven years old or so and it was reckoned that even though I was too young to be left alone in my parents’ house, I was old enough to be allowed to wander the streets of Hillsborough.

My mother always told me to go to the park, but the park seemed to offer less than the scruffy but busy shops in the neighborhood. There was a single shopping street, but it changed its name halfway along, from Langsett Road to Middlewood Road, running from the park at one end to a former barracks at the other.

The shops along the street weren’t really places an eleven-year-old could browse. A Woolworth’s was the most kid-friendly, and I remember there being more pork butchers than any community would rightly need, one of them called Funks, a name that seems much odder to me now than it did at the time. There was also a shop that made fresh crumpets on the premises, and there was some pleasure to be had in staring in through the window watching the crumpets come to life, rise and bubble before me on a hot plate, but even with the other attractions — a place to buy comics, a newsagent that sold toys — this didn’t really add up to an afternoon’s entertainment.

Nevertheless, I entertained myself in a way that then seemed perfectly natural, and which now seems a bit weird. There were two automobile showrooms on the street, one at either end of the stretch of shops. The one up by the park specialized in the NSU Prinz, a small, humpy, rear-engined German car, not quite serious-looking, odd rather than exotic, but a fascinating curiosity to me. The ones I liked best were finished in a gleaming lacquered red that made them look like giant toys.

The dealership at the other end sold American cars: Nash Ramblers, mostly station wagons. At the time it did seem a little bit odd that anyone would be trying to sell Nash Ramblers in a working-class enclave of Sheffield — today it seems utterly inconceivable. Who would ever have bought one? I liked them a lot and I always looked out for them, but I don’t remember ever seeing one on the road. How would you get spare parts? Which local Sheffield mechanic would be prepared to work on a car like that?

In fact, there are times when I wonder whether it was some sort of deep-cover CIA operation, that the Nash Ramblers were only there because of the NSU presence at the other end of the street. If those Germans thought they could sell weird cars in Sheffield, then they’d have to compete with American know-how.

That’s a recent thought. Back then it seemed that these competing enterprises had been put there for my delight, and the two showrooms became the two poles of my Saturday afternoon walks. I would stand in front of one of them, for quite a long time, rapt, quietly excited, looking at the bright, shiny, unfamiliar cars, then I’d walk the length of the street to the other showroom, do the same thing there, then walk back to the other, then back again, and so on until the afternoon was used up.

♦

I went back to Hillsborough on a rainy afternoon in September. In the intervening years Hillsborough had become infamous around certain parts of the world. Hillsborough is not only the name of a district, it’s also the name of a soccer ground where the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club is based, and where the ‘Hillsborough disaster’, or sometimes ‘Hillsborough tragedy’, took place. On April 15, 1989, at a sold-out cup match between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, thousands of fans packed into a limited standing area that was simply too small to accommodate them. As people packed in from the rear, those at the front were crushed. In all, ninety-six people were killed, and some of them died standing up, unable to fall to the ground because of the density of the crowd — hundreds more were injured.

The Liverpool fans are famous for singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, a song of Christian, or at least spiritual, consolation when sung in Carousel that becomes a war chant in the mouths of football supporters.

I began to walk the length of the Hillsborough shopping street. It was cold, it was raining, but my curiosity drove me on. It would have been amazing to find there were two car showrooms still in business, and I was not amazed. The building that had housed the NSU dealership was now Meade House, belonging to something called the Sheffield City Council’s Children and Young Peoples’ (that apostrophe is all theirs) Directorate Social Care Services. The showroom windows through which I’d once looked at cars were gone, and blank, insubstantial, cream-colored walls had been built in their place. The effect was bleak and characterless, and I could only guess at what terrible good works were planned and executed there.

Naturally the Rambler showroom wasn’t there either. Even the building that had contained it had gone and there was now a bus station in its place. And so again I walked between these two poles: between the bus station and the outpost of the Young Peoples’ Directorate. There was a lot about the place and its atmosphere that had stayed the same. The pokey, failing little shops were still pokey and failing, even if they offered goods and services that hadn’t been available when I’d been a boy, such as the crystal-selling shop, now closed, and the Hollywood Nail Bar, ‘American Style’, it claimed. But the newsagents and the betting shops and the place selling gas fires didn’t seem to have changed at all.

The pubs weren’t much different either. When I was growing up, the name ‘Shakespeare’ had been spoken daily by some family members since The Shakespeare was the name of one of the local pubs they drank in. It had now changed its name to The Shakey, but it looked as unwelcoming to me now as it had back then.

And there was still an excess of pork butchers, including Funks. In business since 1890, it said on the canopy outside, and clearly not about to give up now. There was a line of people queuing up to buy hot pork sandwiches with applesauce, stuffing, and crackling. I joined the line, and as I waited I checked my GPS to see how far apart the twin poles of my childhood actually were. I knew that my eleven-year-old’s horizons were limited, but I now discovered that the distance between the two showrooms had been scarcely more than a quarter of a mile.

I got served, but eating a hot pork sandwich in the street in the rain, with stuffing and applesauce running down your chin and wrists, seemed just a little too difficult. I headed for the park, where I hoped to find a bit of shelter. I was prepared for Hillsborough Park to be smaller than I remembered it, but it seemed as big as ever, with an athletics track and a boating lake and a library in one corner.

But there, next to the library, was a wall and a gateway that looked completely unfamiliar yet enticing. I stepped through the gateway and found myself in another world, in a classic walled garden, something that could have been from an English country house, decked out with bowers and trellises, raised beds and benches. And I found a place with a bit of shelter overhead, sat down, and ate my pork sandwich, and I was amazed.

I don’t know that my eleven-year-old self would have appreciated a classic English walled garden, but my contemporary self found it a wonder, an oasis of calm and elegance, with (let’s face it) thoroughly non-working-class values. And there was nobody in there but me. Maybe that was because of the rain, but I suspected not. The people who enjoyed The Shakey and the pork butchers and the betting shops probably weren’t the people who appreciated traditional English walled gardens.

I finished my sandwich, left the garden, and walked into the main area of the park through a metal arch. I looked back and saw some words, a motto shaped into wrought iron. The words said ‘You’ll never walk alone’, as sung by Liverpool fans: this gateway was in memory of the dead football fans.

I was only briefly a football supporter. I pretty much gave it up when I discovered ‘literature’. In any case I think I would rather walk alone than walk in the company of any number of football fans. In Hillsborough, in Sheffield, in my childhood, it seemed I had never done anything else but walk alone.

♦

Even so, the next morning my old friend Steve and I set off to explore the Longley Estate. I admit I was wary of going back. There was a theory, not mine, that people like my parents, like me, like Steve, were no longer to be found in public housing. Yes, the council estates had once been full of decent, honest, hardworking people, but they’d all moved on and moved up, the way my parents had, and those left behind were the scroungers, the criminals, the crackheads and crack whores.

Steve supported this theory. His parents, who had stayed much longer than mine in the estates, had finally tired of the crime, the graffiti, the drugs, and the rumors of drugs, and had fled to live in a trailer park twenty miles away.

On the ground there wasn’t much evidence to support the ‘left behind’ theory. Longley looked very much as I remembered it. Apart from a few style changes, some newfangled doors and double-glazed windows, and some late-model cars, a time traveler from the 1960^s wouldn’t have seen anything to surprise him.

We walked past my parents’ old house, the center of a block of three, very traditional, red brick and slate, with a door right in the middle, windows arranged symmetrically on either side. It seemed familiar, far more than I expected it to, given that I hadn’t been there for over thirty years, and yet there was no great pang of nostalgia. I well remembered what it had felt like to live here, to have walked around this area, to have been bored and restless and eager to get out. Neither I nor the place had changed very much.

And on the surface, that applied to the whole neighborhood. Steve and I walked and looked and noted what had changed but also how much had stayed the same. As in Hillsborough, the shops were a good indicator. What had been an old-fashioned grocery store was now something called Streetwise Youth Central. There was a hair salon, and although it was offering Power Tan Sunbeds, which was surely a recent development, it looked much like the hair salon my mother had gone to. And there was also a thoroughly old-fashioned shop called Sew Craft, Cross-Stitch and Wool, which seemed to be thriving.

From time to time we did see tough-looking young men with tough-looking young dogs, the international signifier of the demand for ‘respect’. First we saw three spindly lads in baseball caps walking or being walked by some sort of customized, slavering bull terrier. Then there was a family group: young dad and mom, two small kids, and an Akita, the Japanese fighting dog, as big as a pony. Then we saw a pair of squat, pierced, tattooed heavies, their style somewhere between heavy-metal fans and apocalypse survivors, with cans of beer and a dog on a leash that if I didn’t know better I would have thought was a dingo. How we respected them. Perhaps if we’d walked farther we’d have seen dog lovers with their jackals, their hyenas, their timber wolves. Our respect would have known no limits.

Steve and I reckoned these dogs were far more vicious than the ones that had menaced us when we were kids, and that their owners were no doubt much more vicious than the bullies we’d encountered. It might almost have made us nostalgic. Then we found ourselves talking about child abuse. We said, not exactly for the first time, that when we were kids, the place was quite the hotbed of grown men doing, or attempting to do, dodgy things to boys. Any lad walking on his own was fair game. Our school friend Brian had had his leg stroked by a man in the local movie theater. We all knew that was wrong, even if we didn’t quite know why, but that still didn’t stop us finding it hilarious.

Walking home from the library, a regular half-hour walk in each direction, I’d once met a man who claimed to be a doctor. He had a black bag and a stethoscope visible in his pocket, and he just may really have been a doctor, but he stopped me and talked to me in a way that now makes me suspicious. The man asked me what school I went to and what my favorite subjects were. He claimed to know a couple of my teachers, and possibly he did. What was so seductive was the way he talked to me, as though I were an adult, and that was incredibly flattering, so much so that I mentioned it rather proudly to my father when I got home. I could immediately see I’d told him something that would have been better left untold. He told me to be careful walking on my own, but I had no idea what there was to be careful about.

The real prize, however, went to our friend Rob, who told me about something odd that had happened to him in Longley Park. He’d met a man who invited him into the public lavatory and taught him how to masturbate. Rob hadn’t been a complete novice but was glad of some extra instruction, and even passed on a few tips to me, but he still felt there was something puzzling about the episode, and I shared his puzzlement. Neither of us saw anything frightening or dangerous or morally wrong in what had happened. We did think it was a bit weird, but then so many things that adults did seemed a bit weird. I haven’t seen Rob in decades, and from time to time over the years I’ve often wondered if he continued to shrug off the episode with such equanimity.

My walk with Steve took us into Longley Park, and we saw that the public toilet where Rob was violated and educated had been demolished and removed, and yet the footprint of the building was still absolutely clear. The grass surrounding it was green and healthy, but the flat rectangle of earth where the toilet had once stood was a damp, muddy, grassless rectangle. We were careful not to see anything too symbolic in this.

♦

The day after Steve and I explored Longley I took a walk by myself, a necessary walk but not one that I was looking forward to. I’d decided to walk up what in my mind had become ‘the hill that killed my mother’.

My mother had long had a heart condition, a damaged valve caused by a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. By the time I was a teenager she was suffering from shortness of breath and having trouble walking far, and by the time I was in college she could barely walk up a flight of stairs. Then she had an operation to replace the defective valve and was fine for the next decade, after which she was increasingly less fine until she had another operation to replace the replacement, and then she was fine again, as far as we knew.

She’d been out to Sunday lunch with my uncle. It was a regular thing. He was the one with the car and he picked her up and drove her to and from their favorite restaurant on the other side of the city. But this time, while they were having lunch, they and the whole of Sheffield were caught in a sudden, fierce, unexpected blizzard. The roads weren’t gritted or salted and there was no way my uncle could drive her back to her house: his car simply wouldn’t make it up the hills — that old problem. He took her as far as he could, which was not really very far, just to the bottom of a hill called Gleadless Road, a horribly steep road at the best of times, one that demands you drive up it in second gear, a road that buses and trucks struggle to negotiate even in good weather. It wasn’t a road that anybody, least of all my mother, would ever choose to walk up, and definitely not in the middle of a blizzard, but in this situation she thought she had no option.

She made it to the top — I was never quite sure how. When she told me about it later I was horrified, and we discussed what else she might have done: knocked on doors until she found someone who’d offer her shelter, but that still wouldn’t have got her home; called the police, but it didn’t seem likely they’d have been willing to provide a chauffeur service for her — called an ambulance and told them about her weak heart — well, maybe they’d have helped. But she was far too proud to do any of these things. She didn’t want to present herself as a cripple. There was also, surely, the option that my uncle might have driven her to his house, but this never crossed her, or my uncle’s, mind. In the end we agreed that anyone would probably have done the same and walked home, but then ‘anyone’ wasn’t necessarily a sixty-nine-year-old lady with a heart condition.

‘It damn near killed me’, she said.

Well, it did and it didn’t. It didn’t destroy her but it definitely didn’t make her stronger. Over the next few months it became clear, and clearer still given subsequent events, that this enforced hill climb had done some damage to my mother’s heart. The valve appeared to be leaking, and there wasn’t enough blood or oxygen flowing through my mother’s veins. She couldn’t get around as well as she once had: walking and breathing were becoming a problem again. This in itself wasn’t a great surprise. It would have happened anyway, sooner or later. We knew the valves were only good for a decade or so, and although something obviously needed to be done, there didn’t seem any great urgency. My mother wasn’t going to insist on surgery unless and until it was strictly necessary.

My mother died a short while later, quickly it appears, and although there must have been some pain, it couldn’t have been prolonged. She died trying to get up from the armchair in her living room. She never quite made it. She got halfway, struggled, and fell back awkwardly, half in the chair, half against the radiator beside her, where she was found the next morning by a neighbor.

I was a long way from England when she died, and I’m told it would have done no good even if I, or anyone, had been in the same room at the time. There was nothing anybody could have done. The doctors told me this sort of thing just happens. Damaged hearts like my mother’s sometimes simply stop working. So, to be absolutely correct, the walk up Gleadless Road hadn’t in itself killed my mother, but the sudden overexertion had been enough to cause undue wear on some vital part of her system, a part that would later give up the ghost.

I was wandering and walking through the deserts of Arizona at the time of her death. You might imagine you’d feel some psychic twinge, receive some supernatural message of disconnection when your mother dies, but I received nothing. I flew home a week or so later, with no reason to think that my mother wasn’t alive, and found a phone message from my uncle, which was odd, and if you thought about it, only likely to mean one thing. But even so it took me some time to put two and two together.

I tried to think where I’d been at the time of my mother’s death. I worked out that I was in a motel on the outskirts of Tucson, my morning, my mother’s evening, and I would have been planning the details of a day’s walk in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in the Sonoran Desert. While her body was lying slumped in the chair I was enjoying a good though apparently unexceptional day’s walking.

Now, a good decade after my mother’s death, I was going to walk up Gleadless Road, the hill that killed my mother. I left Steve’s house and made my way to the bottom of the hill and, frankly, from that vantage point, it didn’t look so steep after all. Perhaps my mother, and my memory, had exaggerated: maybe the hill wasn’t so scary, maybe it hadn’t affected her so badly after all. I began my walk.

There was a sidewalk going up on either side of the hill and I tried to think which one my mother would have chosen for her ascent. To the left of the road was a wooded area and a flat, open, grassy expanse. On the other side were houses in rows that ran across the hillside at right angles from the road. This was the Gleadless Valley Estate, a public housing development that had once had a reputation for being the best in Europe, and had won all sorts of architectural awards from people who didn’t live in public housing. I felt pretty sure my mother would have chosen this more built-up side. The houses provided a little protection, some shelter from the wind, and in places there were steps and a handrail. If you were making your way up here in a blizzard you’d be grateful for those things.

And as I went on, I realized the hill was every bit as steep as I’d previously thought. It was a cool day in September and I had on just a light jacket, but before I was halfway up the hill I was sweating and panting like a hog. I was impressed that my mother had made it at all. By the time I got to the top, which was still some way from where my mother actually lived — she’d have had another thirty-minute walk before she got home — I was in absolute awe of her determination and tenacity, amazed that she’d had the strength and the legs and the guts to keep going. What a strong, brave, game old lady she’d been. It even occurred to me as I gritted my way upward, feeling my temperature and heartbeat rise, the blood rushing into my face, sweat breaking out on my forehead, that the God of Ironic Deaths might find it amusing to strike me down with a heart attack right there and then as I walked. He didn’t. Evidently he’s biding his time.

At the top of the hill I stopped, turned around, and went down again, walking back this time through part of the Gleadless Valley Estate. It looked rougher than Longley, despite its awards. There was more graffiti, more broken and barred windows, more litter, some smashed bottles here and there. When I got back to the house Steve asked me how my walk was.

‘It damn near killed me’, I said, and he probably thought I was joking.