A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part three: The plan – A Homecoming (of sorts)
I sat down with Ordnance Survey app and started planning. I was not about to just walk out of my mother’s front door, a couple of miles east of Newcastle, and spend the next two days hiking through the urban sprawl, so I checked out the local bus timetables to see which market towns I would be able to reach within a couple of hours. If this homecoming had any chance of providing the healing I so desperately needed, it would have to include some familiarity, comfort, and security. This homecoming of sorts would begin in Newcastle and head out through the landscape on which the stories of my childhood are written. Through Gosforth, Wideopen, and the locale of my entire childhood, Seaton Burn. The edge of everything, where urban sprawl gives way to farmland. Where the inclusive city yields to a less inclusive landscape. I stand by the line I gave it in ‘Cold Stone,’ ‘Even if I’d stayed, I’d have left.’
As it was at the end of my teenage years, so it would be now. My healing process would begin with my leaving – once again – the place I grew up in. I needed somewhere that still had room for new experiences without being overshadowed by the past. A landscape onto which I could project my Northumbrian idyllic fantasies, where I can set aside the harsh truth of knowing it’s all so very unlikely to ever happen, and certainly not for more than a few days at a time, anyway. You know the one, a house or cottage in the valley, surrounded by that thick, springy grass that sheep like to keep at just the perfect length for walking on. Behind the house, the back garden with washing on the line. Beyond, a narrow trail of exposed earth, punctuated by rocks and frilled with ferns meanders into a vast expanse of heather that rises to a plateau high above. Out the front and slightly downhill a burn, gently trickling its way to the North Sea via the Tweed, Coquet, or North Tyne River. And amid all of it, me, in an old jumper, writing something about what it all means.
I chose Rothbury. But first I had to negotiate Newcastle city centre. Nowhere near as daunting to me now as it was in the first few years after my leaving. Nevertheless, my hometown managed to lay on an array of gentle triggers just for me. It was matchday at St. James’ Park – the first of the season – and although kick-off was a few hours away, the black and white shirts were out in force. It has been almost 30 years since I was a regular among their ranks. I once wrote, ‘I was that club, it’s banners, and songs.’ I had put distance between us, yet now, if anything, the presence en-masse of my erstwhile brethren comforted me. I once wore those colours that screamed my allegiance. Now my 50 litre backpack and my hiking boots tell a different story – one that is equally identity affirming. I am one of you, though you do not know it. We are the same and we are not the same. My hiking boots mark me out as a visitor wherever I wander. In villages and market towns I am always met with a smile, and the occasional hello, while in the city I become invisible. I did receive a smile at the bus stop – from a young woman in what would have been described as goth gear back when I was a punk, that other tribe to which I once belonged and whose colours I so proudly wore. Stay away, those clothes said. Nowadays the punks, goths, and other once alternative interest groups that have been absorbed into the mainstream seem to be characterised as much by their inclusivity and mantras of mutual support and wellbeing as they are by their outfits and other make-up. Next to her was the only empty seat in the station. Locked into her phone screen, she raised her gaze when I arrived, showing me a welcoming smile that said, ‘Neither of us belongs here, come and sit next to me.’ I say that, but there’s a strong possibility I’m completely wrong and merely projecting my own feelings about this exact same seat, thirty years after the fact.