Life must be filled up

Virago has a birthday and to mark it comes Virago is 40: a Celebration, available as a free e-book. Various Virago authors were asked to write a piece in which the number forty was significant. I’m grateful to Virago for many of the books they’ve published, especially those I bought as they came out; for instance Elizabeth Taylor’s novels and Angela Thirkell’s Trooper to the Southern Cross, a book it’s almost impossible to find in the original edition. Reading Virago is 40 wouldn’t make me rush to buy a Virago book. Unfortunately, some of the writers have interpreted the brief as an invitation to write Polly Filler-ishly about themselves at tedious length. ‘I don’t need a penis in my panties'. Is this 1970? In fact, the book made me so cross I’d have hurled it across the room if it hadn’t been on the Kindle.

I needed light relief and turned to some books I’d picked up cheaply recently. The first was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I’m so far behind the times that she already has a new book out, Perfect, which I now look forward to reading. I’m in the ‘loved it’ camp with Harold Fry.

‘When Harold Fry leaves home one morning to post a letter, with his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking. To save someone else’s life.’

Harold receives a letter telling him that a former colleague is in a hospice, suffering from cancer. For reasons not revealed until the end of the book, he feels guilty about having ‘let down’ this woman in the past, so he writes to her. He sets off to post the letter, and just keeps walking. He has his credit card, so is able to pay for overnight stays. He phones home, his distraught wife wondering if he’s got Alzheimer’s, worrying about what the journey is costing and whether Harold and the ex-colleague had an affair. Harold plods on, his shoes falling apart, his feet wrecked. Whenever he tells anyone what he’s doing, and why, they seem to understand. Eventually, he sends the credit card back home and lives on the kindness of strangers or off the land. News of his journey reaches the press and he becomes an unwilling celebrity, recognised on the road. The only part of the book I didn’t like is the section where his pilgrimage is hijacked by a motley crew of hangers-on; it seemed unnecessary. Harold is a perfectly ordinary man who does a rather saintly thing. I detected a similarity here to the writings of Alexander McCall Smith. A book for people who want to believe in basic human decency and goodness.
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