Footsteps to Freedom

Our van used to be a mobile library getting up and down the roads that our customers found harder to navigate. Often, while Mrs Semple (I find I can’t call her Shirley) rearranged shelves, I’d take pre-selected books to the customers’ doors, for those unable to get out and about at all.

Then, in April, our function changed. With the council’s blessing, Mrs Semple’s brother-in-law took over the van.

He’s a grocer, and we started delivering boxes of fruit and veg to those shielding. As usual, Mrs S took the wheel and I carried the boxes to leave on doorsteps, careful to keep our distance from others and each other. It’s been a strange time for many people. I’ve heard them talk of how hard it is to adapt. But, for me, it was just one more change.

I’ve been walking into new situations all my life.and I’ve been footsore for much of my life.

But “pack up your feet or get left behind”, as my grandmother said, when she wrapped my feet in bundles of cloth before we set off on our great walk.

“Are you sure it wasn’t ‘pick up your feet’?” Mr Ashbury’s daughter asked me once.

“Now, Liz.” Mr A sighed.“i’m certain Isniino knows what she means without you telling her.”

Mr A is one of my regular customers, who’s gone from ordering books to fruit and veg. Or, rather, his daughter Liz has. She’s retired and lives with him.

He once asked me to call him James but, as with Mrs S, I find it too familiar.

He’s always careful with my name, as if it’s precious cargo he might break if mishandled. I told him that Isniino means “born on a Monday”. He told me that the child born on Monday is “fair of face”.

We’ve talked of names a lot.when he told me that every cat has a real, secret name, known only to other cats, he put a finger on something important.

You see, as a young woman, grandmother walked great distances to find work. She said that, in a white man’s house, every servant had two names – their own, precious cargo one – and another, serviceable as cotton, tacked on by the employer for ease of use.

Grandmother’s precious cargo name was Aasiya, after a pharaoh’s wife.the woman she cleaned for called her Annie.

I was 14 when the militia swept through our village, burning crops and houses.we walked seven days to the safety of an aid camp until our feet were as ragged as the cloths they were bundled in. Grandmother lay down in the shade of a tent and squeezed my hand.

“I shan’t get up again, my dear,” she told me, wiping tears from my face.“but you must carry on.”

So I kept on walking. I had no choice. The only time I stopped, I was crammed into a boat with others. I was told I’d have a new life here – but it was much the same as the old; a mattress shared with two others, a tiny window on to a grey sky and a restaurant kitchen where we worked all day for our “keep”.and then one night, as I finished up in the kitchen, I saw that a door into an alleyway had been left ajar. It was just a sliver into the world beyond, but it beckoned.

I knew this could be my only chance. We had been told the world “out there” was no less pitiless than the one we had left or now inhabited; that we were locked in for our own protection, where we had food (scraps) and shelter (the mattress).

We were told there was nothing beyond the gap in the door but a stone wall, 10 feet high.then I thought what grandmother would say.

“Pack up your feet or get left behind.” So I pushed open that door wide enough to slide through.

As soon as it widened, the door gave a loud, protesting squeak and a light snapped on in a window overhead.

“Who’s there?” a voice called, and I heard something rattling against a wall. Perhaps a long stick with a pointed end.

I ran into the alleyway and kept running.at the far end, I could see the headlights of cars in semi-darkness.

Breath filled my lungs as I realised there was a way out – a bigger gap beyond the narrow one.

I turned into the corner of a street full of traffic, and forced myself to slow down, mingling with crowds piling on to buses and crossing at traffic lights. I was in a bigger city than I’d realised.

I walked for the next few hours, knowing I would have to stop somewhere. So when I passed a building with a word on it that I recognised, I went inside. I told my story to the policewoman through an interpreter.

I gazed at the interpreter in awe as he wove my words back and forth in an elaborate tapestry, one of “us” who slotted so easily into this strange world. When I’d finished, he put a hand on my arm.“you did the right thing.you’ll be all right now.” But he didn’t meet my eye. I soon realised why.a van came and took me away to a place with narrow beds and locks on the doors, where people asked the same questions over and over about why and how I had come. I told them with pride of my journey from its very beginning, thinking they would see my spirit, determination and courage.and I told them about the others I’d left behind in that building tucked

down an alleyway.they deserved their freedom, too.

A charity took up my case for asylum. I was placed in a hostel in a village a long way from that city (so my captors would never find me, an interpreter told me). I could come and go, but not go out to work. I did learn English, though, at a literacy class in the hostel. I’ve always been a quick study.

Suddenly, squiggles made sense and a shout of joy or recognition could be distinguished from a threat or challenge. The world became less frightening, even if I now understood my precarious place within it.when I got my letter from the Home Office, I went around in a daze.

“You’ve got opportunities now.you can do paid work, study, find somewhere to live, make a new life,” my case worker,

Omar, said.yes, in theory, all things were possible – but where to start?

Omar got me part-time work in a care home, at first working in the kitchen (how ironic!), but it came with my own little room in which to live.and then I joined Mrs Semple on the mobile library. I had to leave the care home, but she knew someone with a “loft conversion going begging”, and one thing led to another. Like putting one foot after the other. I got to know Mr A and the others on our route. Mr A would sometimes come to the door before the lockdown, but he could only walk a short distance, carefully, with two sticks.

“It’s as if I’m crossing an ice sheet in slippers!” he’d say, laughing.

He never asked me questions about my home or the past – questions that I burned to answer again some day, but for now, clutched tightly to myself.

As well as the secret names of cats, he told me every snowflake is as individual as a person’s fingerprints and that is why everything in the world is important, down to our last finger and toe, and the snowflakes that melt on our tongues. I did tell him I’d done a lot of walking, and even something of grandmother.

He said that, once upon a time, women had been put away for taking long walks for the sake of it. He said that 200 men had once walked the length of England to ask the government for work.

“Walking,” he said wistfully,“is a wonderful thing, Isniino, with a long and glorious tradition. It’s a sign of being free.”

Then, in May, there was a big anniversary of World War II.

Mr A had told me through a window, when I’d dropped off his fruit and veg that week, to look out for ceremonies online. He was disappointed because he’d been practising to walk to the memorial in the village square. But he was still going to stand, he said, for the special silence.

So I did look it up online, and watched people adding to a sea of blood-red flowers spreading across sombre stone.

That day, I knew Mr A would be wearing his medal, inscribed with the words “for valour”. Mrs Semple had once told me to ask to see it.

“Not many people have a medal like James Ashbury’s,” she’d said.

He’d been reluctant. It was Liz who’d run to fetch it and hold it out to me. I’d traced the letters with my new power of decoding.

“Pity they didn’t strike one for your grandma,” he’d said.“i’ve never set much store by bits of metal, but other people do, that’s the main thing.”

A few days after the war anniversary, I was dropping off his box of fruit and veg.

He opened a nearby window and said he’d had an idea because of all my walking. He was going to walk up and down the brick path between the azaleas in his back garden, to raise money for a refugee charity.

Liz popped her head up behind him, f lustered.

“Dad! You’re 96! You put him up to this, Isniino?” She frowned.

But I was starting to know that, as they say here, her bark was worse than her bite.

“Do behave, Liz,” her dad said mildly. “It’s my own idea, though Isniino must take credit for inspiring me.

“I walk up and down that path for hours as it is; may as well get some charitable mileage out of it.”

He wore his uniform and medal when the local paper came to take his picture. I pored over the headline: Local war veteran raises thousands for charity.

Mr A was rather embarrassed by the way the paper had talked up his heroism.

“I would hate you to feel patronised,” he said.“the great white saviour and all that. Perish the thought.”

I did perish that thought, because I knew his heart was large, just as he knew I was brave and determined.

But I wanted to have my voice heard, too, on behalf of myself and others.

Otherwise, Grandmother and those others had lain down for nothing, far from home, in the shadow of sand-beaten tents. So I, Isniino Warsame, will carry on walking.when the time is right, I’ll be walking for a cancer charity, since that’s the work I hope to specialise in when I train as a nurse.

We will all be women, walking in the moonlight, and some will have their undergarments on the outside! Grandmother would not approve.

But perhaps I underestimate her. She was always first to remind me that we risk getting left behind unless we keep moving.

I have been heartsore and footsore much of my life. But those days are dwindling behind me on the dusty road.

Now I walk, as my dear friend Mr A has reminded me, because I am free.