The time was the early 1950s; the place a village school on the rim of the Bedfordshire sprout plains. Danny’s boots may have stigmatised him, but they were also a brave step forward in British social history. We can’t be exact, but sometime between the wars, most likely in the 1930s, it came about that every man, woman and child in the country owned a pair of boots or shoes. This had never happened before. Though footwear was a fashion item in imperial Rome, and though shoes had been mass-produced in standard sizes since the 1880s, the high cost had put them beyond the reach of large families on low incomes. It was welfare policy before and during the second world war that saw the end of barefoot children. Teachers were encouraged to tell their education committees if any child was poorly shod, and the result would be the issue of a pair of all-but-indestructible black leather boots. Just like Danny’s.
And boots, of course, were made for walking. So were the lace-up “walking shoes” the rest of us wore in winter, and the black plimsolls or T-bar sandals we changed to in summer. My own daily walk was a mile each way, which I did sometimes in the company of other children but often alone. Sometimes I ran the whole way. I was once knocked down by a cyclist, and once foully sworn at by a gamekeeper for walking on the wrong side of a hedge. Apart from school itself, nothing worse ever happened to me.
Walking in the 1950s was not a health issue or a carbon-saving, green political gesture. It was an integral part of life, one’s feet as set in their god-given purpose as nose or liver or lungs. We were an ambulatory species, and had been so ever since our beetle-browed ancestors first strode off to hunt and gather. Even after our fathers got their eight-horsepower Fords or Austins, it would never have occurred to them to drive us to school in them, or our mothers to the shops. That would have offended common sense. If your destination was within walking distance, then you walked.
I have been walking ever since. Not in a map-and-compass, Gore-Texed kind of way (though I’ve done my share of that), and not to save the planet, but simply as the most reliable and observant way of getting from one place to another. This is especially true in London, where the cross-streets, squares and alleys are the sane, low-blood-pressure alternative to the lunatic hell of the Underground. Mental health is surprisingly prominent in the relentless, high-pressure sales pitch that the public-health industry now applies to this most animalistic form of transport. Men who walk more than two miles a day apparently face half the risk of dementia as those who walk less than a quarter of a mile. Walkers are also less likely to be depressed or to suffer from insomnia, and can expect to enjoy what psychologists (who perhaps should get out more) like to call “better cognitive function”, by which they mean thinking, remembering and learning. And noticing things.
This is about half right. You certainly notice things, but the things you notice are not always the best medicine for depression. In town and country alike, you bang your nose against the serial idiocies of post-war planning and transport policies; the debasement of architecture; the corrosive imprint of the Common Agricultural Policy; the Disneyfication of the heritage industry; the contempt for history; impassable traffic; designer pubs. You notice, too, that other people’s legs are coming increasingly to resemble their appendixes as organs of mystery. What exactly are they for?
My walking-for-fun is mostly on the north Norfolk coastal footpath, which for most of the year offers a simple contract – for a small expenditure of effort you get big skies, creek and marsh, tranquillity shared with goose, duck and gull in some of the most beautiful coastal scenery in lowland Britain. In the holiday season, however, the “footpath” is lurched over by a slithering, clutch-slipping motorcade of SUVs and family saloons that force walkers into the gorse. Drivers’ expressions harden and freeze as ruts deepen, mud thickens and the suspicion dawns that 4WD may not after all be the complete antidote to the laws of gravity and friction, but still they press on. This is as truly wild as any place in eastern England, so they can’t drive very far, but by hell they’ll take every last inch they can get. Sometimes, gratifyingly, they sink to their axles and need to do some urgent business on their mobile phones.
Unsurprisingly, it’s an age thing. One evening in July, sitting on an upturned boat cast up by the tide, I watched four muddy old women – one of them on sticks – haul themselves out of the marsh and shout derision as a Saabful of expensive-looking twenty-somethings struggled to complete a nine-point turn without tipping into the mire. It’s as if the young people’s limbs were stuck permanently in some larval stage, like tadpoles or axolotls. In the 1950s nobody saw any need to calculate how far people walked – what would have been the point? It would have been like worrying about how much air we breathed, or urine we passed. Now, as problems of obesity slide further and further down the age scale towards the womb, we count our footsteps like drops of healing water.
It is widely asserted (though I have not been able to find the proof) that we walk 25% less than we did 25 years ago. The earliest figure available from the Department for Transport (DfT) is for 1985-6, when the average distance travelled on foot (counting only journeys of 50 yards or more) was 244 miles a year. By 2004 this had slipped to 196 miles, or a little over half a mile a day – 10 minutes’ worth at a moderate 3mph. Average! Which means that for every person walking more than this, another is walking less. The DfT’s national travel survey in 2004 asked people how often they took walks of 20 minutes or more without pausing. For a quarter of the population – the axolotls – the answer was less than once a year or never. The figure is skewed by the very old and the very young, but not by much. Twenty-four per cent of the under-17s fall into the axolotl class, and even the most mobile group, the 30-to-39s, stands (or sits) at 17% – a gut-wobbling example which they are force-feeding their children like spoonfuls of lard. The Health Survey for England in 2001 revealed that 8.5% of six-year-olds and 15% of 15-year-olds were not just overweight but obese – an increase of 3.5% since 1996, and the most visible manifestation of Gordon Brown’s fixation with continuous growth if not of Tony Blair’s leaner, fitter Britain. The role model seems to be John Prescott, with almost no journey now too short for a bit of extra buttock-time. In 2004, 20% of trips of less than a mile were made by car, and a quarter of all car journeys were of less than two miles. Many of these involved carting children to and from school – a trend accelerated by the government’s “choice agenda”, which extends school journeys and instils car dependency before it teaches the alphabet. “A” used to stand for Apple. Now it stands for Asthma, a condition associated with traffic pollution that has doubled its hit rate in less than a decade.
Sadly, I failed to persuade my own old village primary school to reveal how its pupils now made their daily journeys, but others have been trying an idea that came out of Hertfordshire in 1998 – the “walking bus”. The mechanics of this were explained in a paper given to the 2003 European Transport Conference by the Centre for Transport Studies at University College London (UCL): “A walking bus is a group of children who walk to school along a set route, collecting other children along the way at ‘bus stops’, escorted by several adult volunteers, one of whom is at the front (the ‘driver’) and one is at the back (the ‘conductor’).”
If good intentions guaranteed success, then walking buses would have filled the pavements as surely as parents’ cars had clogged the highways. But novelty packaging couldn’t disguise the fact that children and their minders were being asked to forgo the ease and speed of wheeled transport in favour of shoe leather. And Satan has a bigger advertising budget. Car manufacturers do not shy away from targeting the school gate with TV commercials equating children’s pride (never mind their parents’) with the size and newness of the vehicle that delivers them. Keeping ahead of the Joneses is a far more seductive proposition than keeping up with a pedestrian virtual bus driver in a fluorescent bib. From a peak of 68 in 2002, the number of walking buses in Hertfordshire fell to 26 in only a year. Many schools never even started them, deterred usually by inadequate parental support, fears about road safety or, as UCL tactfully put it, “lack of the head teacher’s time to start the process”. “A” is also for Apathy.
One of the weirdest aspects of axolotlism is the extraordinary growth in conspicuously rugged, high-performance shoes. You would think from the advertisements and window displays that we were a nation of marathon runners, deckhands and lumberjacks for whom a 10-mile hike in a downpour was just what we needed to pique our appetites. Even the derided sandal suddenly went all pecs-and-six-pack when Clarks introduced their much-imitated ATL (All-Terrain Leisure) model in 1994. Nobody will say precisely what the life expectancy of a pair of these is – there are too many variables in usage and wear – but Bob Hardy, Clarks’ foot-fitting manager, agrees that 5,000 miles would be a reasonable expectation.
Cleated shoes have become like the SUVs whose tread patterns they so accurately reflect. Bestsellers all feature “active air” high-tech soles made of hard-wearing compounds honeycombed variously with tubes, channels and air sacs to cushion the wearer’s feet. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, as in Africa still, the naked human foot was naturally cushioned by the yielding earth on which it trod. In the unyielding age of concrete and tarmac, which arrived too soon for evolution to match it with hooves, the cushioning has to come from our shoes. Like the gas-guzzler in the garage, they are capable of going far beyond anywhere their owners will ever take them, and are valued chiefly for their image as breezy, salary-earning suburban cousins to Doc Martens, bristling with unfulfilled promise. (I could cross the Andes in these if I wanted to.) It is a matter of no regret to manufacturers – or, more likely, importers – that more of their shoes will be parked on the feet of axolotls than will ever stride out for 20 minutes without a pause.
