GOOD COMPANIONS

I was delighted to read Laura Freeman’s review of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews (September). But “They always walked alone”, as the headline claims? Not so.

In When We Two Walked, Rita Snowden’s beautiful 1939 account of a tramp around the south coast of England, she could not conceive of the idea of walking alone. She delighted in sharing the time with her friend Ann, because “the riches of one’s journey are more than doubled by a companion”.

She knew that not everyone shared that view, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson’s opinion that “To be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.” Anything else, he maintained, risked being “more in the nature of a picnic”. Perish the thought!

The quote is from Stevenson’s essay, “Walking Tours” (Cornhill Magazine, June 1876), which he wrote in belated reply to William Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey” (New Monthly Magazine,

January 1822). Hazlitt had written of how he liked “to vegetate like the country” when out for a walk.

Hazlitt’s take was, perhaps inevitably, a bit more complicated than that. A shared love of walking was not enough to resolve the differences between him and his wife Sarah Stoddart, whose prodigious daily mileage Freeman notes.

But in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), Stephen Graham quotes Hazlitt saying, “Give me a companion on my way, be it only to mention how the shadows lengthen.”

That’s more like Snowden. Companionship in walking, as so often in life, is often found in the sharing of place and time, not of words. What she really loved were the “miles when, because a friend is a friend, you’ve no need to speak at all”. Mark Baker london n1