south Norfolk from Blaxhall it began to rain lightly: long streaks on windows and grey brick, like crap finger-paint. I checked on Warren. Had he lost weight? His flares had slipped down to reveal a glimpse of straw tradesman’s bottom, and he had fallen even further down into the ivy than yesterday, the weather gradually pressing him into the earth. It would soon be time, I decided, to put him out of his misery. I opened the door of my study and wondered vaguely about continuing work on my Norfolk-based folk-horror novel. I knew I wouldn’t. I had left it too long, lost momentum, again. I’d had a notion of the book way back when I’d first moved to Norfolk in 2001 as a twenty-six-year-old of puppylike idiocy: a misty flicker of inspiration first felt on holiday in flat fields abutting the North Sea and on an atmospheric early-morning walk across Blackheath near my old flat, amid fat crows, with plague-ridden corpses beneath me, listening to pastoral witchcraft-infused music recorded in low fidelity three decades earlier. A fictional epic of occult happenings and misguided hippy idealism on lonely lanes beneath dun clouds that I had neither the skill nor commitment to bring to fruition. Did it feature musicians? Maybe. I had no idea what it was really going to be about, whether it was going to be serious, or funny, or both, but it agonised me that I could not write it. I reached a point not far short of 30,000 words, twice, and abandoned the manuscript, twice. I told myself I’d done so because I had a mortgage to pay, a partner to support, and I needed to prioritise work that paid rather than fanciful self-indulgent nonsense. All this was broadly correct, but there was another reason, harder to look square in the face, for my inability to persevere: the simple fact that I could not fully believe in a single sentence of what I had written. I had been writing about Norfolk and Suffolk as a lover of the countryside and as a casual student of its folklore, but I hadn’t truly been out into Norfolk and Suffolk. A large portion of the first part of my life there had been spent in estate agents, tile warehouses and B&Q, which might have been fine if I wanted to write about estate agents, tile warehouses and B&Q, but I didn’t. I wanted to write about life – and possibly death – in the fields, but how could I if I almost never ventured out into them? All my life I had been a walker, even when I didn’t categorise myself as a walker. I walked endlessly as a child with my parents, endlessly as an adolescent golfer, endlessly, even, as a carless resident of London with no particular enthusiasm for public transport and a keen nose for exploration. For my initial stint in Norfolk, however, I was not a walker, and if you are not a walker and you want to write believably and truthfully about rural life, you are off balance, on the back foot, before you even begin. This seems obvious but didn’t actually occur to me until I had lived in the county for almost seven years.
When I did begin to walk, in late 2008, my attempts to write about make-believe characters in familiar but make-believe places improved, but something still stopped me pressing on as doggedly with my fiction as I desired to: a realisation that I was not ready, that I had some flavour but barely any filling. Despite this realisation’s presence I did not fully confess it to myself because the thought, as I turned thirty-three, then thirty-four, then thirty-five, then thirty-six, that I still wasn’t going to write this bastard book I believed I had been born to write, or the film script I sometimes considered writing instead, was too painful for me to address. Instead, without ever quite intending to, I did the next-best thing: I lived physically in a different story, also of a spooky nature, which did not require the typing of so much as a word. My walks became a folk-horror book or film of their own where nothing terrible ever quite happens but always might. This wordless physical novel had none of the dramatic plot twists that I’d always envisaged my real book as having, but it was long on atmosphere. That was OK, though. I was losing faith in dramatic plot twists. A film such as 1968’s Witchfinder General, about the seventeenth-century reign of the country’s self-appointed mysogynist-in-chief Matthew Hopkins and his mission to rid East Anglia of dark magic, much of which was shot in my prime Norfolk and Suffolk walking territory, and whose church I made a pilgrimage to on one of my earliest local rambles, does not stick with you because of its dramatic plot twists, many of which were downright hammy. It sticks with you because of its atmosphere, which, in its low-budget way, is so powerful that it makes you forgive the hamminess of the plot twists.
Like Witchfinder General and so many other British films and TV shows in the horror genre from the late sixties and early seventies, my walks were powerful in a low-budget way, and, like those films and TV shows, it was their very lack of resources that was partly responsible for imbuing them with the power. My boots, the one bit of walking equipment I’d shelled out for – alongside my maps – had cost not much more than twenty pounds. So much exercise in my past had been costly or off-puttingly pedagogical. When you first walk out into the deeper countryside, especially when you do so alone, it feels amazingly rebellious: to be able to do something so soul-quenching for nothing, with no authority figures to drain the fun from it, seems like it should have some kind of catch. Even as someone with a lengthy history of not following the paths in life I’ve
