Picture: TRISH LANZENDORFER

The gap year, that modern-day equivalent of the Grand Tour, hadn’t spread beyond Oxbridge when I was a student. Even if it had, and I could have afforded it, it would have been wasted on me. On my first term at college in London, I was desperately homesick, feeding all my loose change into a coinbox, or reversing the charges, so that in a smelly kiosk in Tooting I could hear my mother’s voice for a few minutes and imagine myself back in our kitchen in Portstewart. 

  Lately, though, I’ve found myself thinking kindly of those students who must be feeling they’ve gone from gapper to grounded. They’ve arrived in a new town, dropped their bags in a new room. They’ve been looking forward, like generations before them, not only to broadening their minds but to expanding their circle of friends. And then they discover that in 2020 freshers’ week won’t be happening, teaching is online and the pub is off-limits. Some of them, flushed with youth and invincibility and, maybe, a sense of entitlement, have been partying anyway, and making news in university towns all over the UK. 

  On September 15, on the website of the Belfast Telegraph, I saw a video in which Paula Bradshaw of the Alliance Party, who represents South Belfast in the Northern Ireland Assembly, stood stern-faced in front of a house let to students in the Holyland area of the city. Indicating a balcony behind her, she said: “We saw a photo, and there were 11 people on it. So dangerous. I suppose we see this behaviour every year; it’s very anti-social, it’s very inconsiderate of the local people. But this year it provides an extra threat to the local community in that we are in the middle of a health pandemic.”

  Inconsiderate: I’d like to think it couldn’t have been said of me when I was their age, but I’m not so sure.

The nearest I got to independent travel as a student was at the end of my journalism course in 1977. I hitched a ride with one of my sisters. Trish, who lived in Melbourne with her boyfriend, Rolf, had come home to Portstewart to see the family and show Rolf a little bit of Ireland. Then off they had gone in their camper-van, in the middle of January, down south to Rosslare, across on the ferry to Le Havre, through France, Spain, Andorra, back to France, on to Italy and all the way to Greece. Then they headed north again, through Yugoslavia, back into Italy via Venice and on to Austria. They zigzagged for a stretch in and out of Germany (where Rolf’s mother lived), but also dipped into Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland before returning to France and crossing to England by hovercraft. Coincidentally, they’d be pulling into London in the middle of June, shortly before I’d be packing to leave it, so they invited me to join them on the last leg of the trip: from London to Fishguard in Wales, then across on the ferry to Rosslare, and up the west coast of Ireland to home.

“We’ll just mosey along and stop where we fancy,” Trish said. “Stay the night if the crack’s good.” I liked the sound of it. One of our early stops in Ireland was at Blarney Castle, in County Cork. There was a queue to kiss that famous stone, the one that’s said to bestow the gift of eloquence, and I wasn’t in any hurry to join it. “C’mon,” Trish said. “You need it more than any of us: you’re the one going into journalism.” I can picture her holding my chest, still giggling, as I lie backwards, lips pursed, on the parapet walk.

And Trish has pictured me, in a photo taken along the way that she’s recently emailed, looking on as Rolf made what he considered was an essential tweak to the front of the van. It’s a photo that’s been bringing back memories…

I remember a pub where we were allowed to stay on beyond closing time because we could sing or recite a few verses of poetry. I remember our pulling in a few times by a stream or the sea to catch a couple of fish and grill them outside the van. And I remember Trish and Rolf, who had driven across so much of Europe, saying that nowhere had mosquitoes been such a pest as they were on the west coastof Ireland.

We had a good time — but I’d hate, 40-plus years on, to be asked to give an account of it. I’m reminded of a series we ran during my stint on Police Review, in which coppers would recount the strangest and funniest happenings they had come across on the beat. “Notes taken at the time” it was called, after the question that an officer opening a notebook in court would inevitably be asked: “Were the notes taken at the time?”

My evidence would be inadmissible. I don’t have any notes — not because I’ve lost them but because I wasn’t yet in the habit of taking them. Until Trish emailed me a brief log she’d kept, I didn’t have a clue where we’d stopped en route. Memory tells me we whizzed from London to Fishguard, crossed to Rosslare, and, with pauses for stone-kissing, fishing and singing, reached Portstewart a few days later. The notes taken at the time prove that memory is sometimes a terrible guide. We were on the road for nearly three weeks. 

After leaving London, we spent the evening of day two in Seatown, in Dorset. Next night we pulled in in Paignton, in Devon. In Cornwall, we spent a night each in Pentewan, Gweek (where we called at a sanctuary for grey seal pups), Hayle, Croyde and Berrow. One of Trish’s brief notes, which were partly to help her, in the age of film cameras, remember which picture had been taken where, says next to Croyde: “Rolf coming from beach after fishing.” So… memory got something right. Another note says there’s a picture of “Trish at Land’s End”. That one made me think, “Oh, yes, I do vaguely remember eating ice-creams by the ‘Land’s End’ sign with Trish and Rolf…”

We stopped at Porthcawl and (Trish’s photo-notes show) at a car park near Port Talbot steelworks before reaching Fishguard and the ferry. On the Irish side of St George’s Channel, we headed initially south-west from Rosslare, calling at Tramore, Castlemartyr, Blarney Castle and Listowel before heading up the west coast. Farther north — and how could I have forgotten this? — we spent time on Achill, the biggest island off the Irish coast (and we reached it on a road bridge, from Mulrany). If I were heading that way now, I’d arrive prepared, well-briefed on the days of the basking-shark fishery, on the Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle, who saved thousands from starvation during the Great Famine of 1845-49 but whose proselytising caused controversy and strife on the island, and on Achill’s associations with the German novelist and Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll, who lived at Dugort in the 1950s and, with his account of the country he found, Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal), inspired hundreds to follow in his footsteps. At 19, though, I was no more in the habit of reading myself into places than I was in writing about them. Sligo, where we spent our penultimate night on the road, was a familiar place-name: the home of the Currid family, for whom I’d pulled pints in the Anchor Bar in Portstewart. I’d no idea then that 10 minutes’ drive away, in the  churchyard at Drumcliffe (“Under bare Ben Bulben’s head”), is the last resting place of WB Yeats.

We were travelling at the height of the Troubles and, as it happened, approaching the border in the middle of the marching season. The photo Trish sent shows me, with hair only slightly wilder than it’s been during lockdown, looking on as Rolf paints “AUSTRALIA” above the windscreen on the camper-van. He was anxious, Trish reminds me, not to get into trouble with either of our two warring communities, “and he wanted everyone to know he wasn’t local”.

He certainly didn’t sound it. His accent was definitely Australian, though his surname is Lanzendorfer and his antecedents, as the name suggests, are German. He was then, as he is now, a small, wiry figure with a goatee beard and glasses. He was handy, and not just with a paintbrush. When I read Cannery Row a few years later, and came to Steinbeck’s description of Gay, the mechanic among those most casual of casual labourers from the Palace Flophouse, I’d be reminded of Rolf: “For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.”

I’ve been thinking of him again recently, and something he said to me on the road in Ireland; something that’s stayed lodged in my memory, but been embroidered and distorted, too.

I’d grown up in a seaside boarding house with eight siblings, learning early how to scrub wash-hand basins, and how to iron sheets and pillow cases, but my standards might have slipped since I’d gone to college. Maybe it had something to do with the space I’d got used to in the halls of residence: a room of my own that I wouldn’t be turfed out of to make way for a late-arriving, paying “visitor”; a shower block where I could stretch my gangly limbs and where, not having to do any cleaning myself, I’d forgotten that somebody would have to. Maybe, like those students in Belfast who so annoyed Paula Bradshaw, I could have been more considerate.

Rolf must have thought so. It was in his interests not to fall out with a member of the Kerr family, but he says what he thinks, and, though we were brought up to guard our tongues (“Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”, as Seamus Heaney put it), I admired his honesty. Memory tells me that I’d had my first shower and got dressed again when he took me aside for a quiet word. Narrative practice tells me he would have said something like this: “I can tell you’ve not had to shower in a van before, mate. Bloody hard not to get splashes all over the place, isn’t it? But could you please try to leave it as you found it? We’ve all got to use it.”

Rolf had a stroke recently, and his memory isn’t what it was. Mine, when charged with calling up an incident from more than four decades ago, is no more dependable. So I discovered, anyway, when I sent Trish a draft of a piece inspired by our trip. She emailed back to say: “I remember vividly Rolf embarrassing you… and I felt awful for you… It had nothing to do with the shower, ’cos we didn’t have one in the van; he got precious about you dropping crumbs on the floor.”

Four decades on, memory has rewritten the story, and invented a shower along the way, but a foundation of truth remains. What Rolf said did sting at the time, but it made me think, too.In 2020,I look back on it as a lesson in sharing space, and I’m particularly mindful of it when I’m out for a run.

I love running on my own, partly because it’s thinking time, away from screen and keyboard and clock. The “Health” app on my phone logs the walking I’ve done, but it doesn’t know I run, because the phone’s never with me when I do. I carry nothing but a key and an asthma reliever (and I can’t remember when I last had to use that). As I leave the house and return to it, I might pass the time of day with one of our neighbours. Anywhere else, the only words I hear are in my head, either as I try to recast some phrase of my own that wasn’t working at the desk, or as I try to settle into my stride, with a rhythm provided, maybe, by Masefield’s “Sea Fever” or Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”. So it was, anyway, before 2020.

Since I got that doctor’s letter in April advising me to take the measures we’ve since learnt to call “shielding”, I’ve got more cautious on runs. If there are wheelie bins out on the pavement, I assume that someone will come out at any moment to check they’ve been emptied or to top them up. I give them a wide berth. If there are builders working on a house, and their van’s parked on the road outside, I expect them to be moving back and forward between the two. The same goes for a householder at a door and a car with an open boot. And, having once met two electric scooters coming round a corner side by side, I’ve come to expect them, too, on the pavement.

I never cut corners. I go round on the outside, roadside edge. If I can’t see round a corner I cross the road well before it to the pavement on the other side. A corner, railings and a Leylandii hedge? That’s a definite no-no. However loud the coat, scarf or boots that might be coming the other way, you won’t hear them through Leylandii. I was never keen on this dense, dark barrier, which is less foliage than fortification, and I’ve recently come to hate it more. Even Richard Mabey, a writer who, according to his friend Tim Dee, has a good word for all growing things, animal, vegetable and mineral, makes an exception for Leylandii and cherry laurel: they are, he has said, “riddled with incipient loathsomeness”.

After I’ve rounded a corner, I run on the side of the road where I can see farther for longer. If there’s someone coming towards me, I cross to the other footpath if I can or, if I’ve glanced behind me and it’s safe, I edge out into the road. If there’s a dog-walker or people walking two abreast or more coming towards me, and there’s a cycle lane on the side of the oncoming traffic, I nip into the cycle lane until I’ve passed the pedestrians.

I’m doing this partly to protect myself, partly to avoid huffing and puffing over anyone else. I’m trying to be considerate in our shared spaced. As a result, what used to be a solitary activity has become almost convivial.

I get a smile, or a wave, or both. An old boy (an even older boy?) in a flat cap will salute me. Two masked women, coming round the corner and seeing I’ve moved out to give them more room, chorus a “Thank you”. A few days later, coming up to that same corner, I meet a powerfully built guy in his thirties and do the same for him. “Wise man,” he says with a grin, which could be either gentle joke or veiled threat.

Halfway through another run, I see two boys in their mid-teens coming towards me on the pavement. One’s wearing a mask, the other’s bare-faced, and both have eyes on their phones. I glance over my shoulder, then edge on to the road to avoid them. The bare-faced one looks up and, just as I pass them, shouts something. And what he shouts is: “Go on, son!” And a greying “son” in his sixties ups his pace the rest of the way out and back, legs so strong that a fox, crossing his path as he heads for the home straight, gives him a wider berth than foxes usually do.

Running away from parks, which are too busy with people on release from lockdown, has made me more appreciative of those suburban front gardens that are still gardens, with a lawn or shrubs either side of a path and maybe even a small tree or two. In normal times, commuters using the railway station park at our end of the street for most of the day, so to ensure space for the cars of family coming and going, we’ve paved most of our front. We have, though, kept a sizeable triangular-shaped bed on one side, planted with viburnum and ceanothus, bright with daffodils in spring, geraniums later on.

Over the past few decades, more and more householders have dispensed with greenery completely, turning the space before the front door into a showroom for SUVs and wheelie bins. Most dispiriting of all are the houses whose owners haven’t bothered even with block or brick paving; they’ve just covered the ground in tarmac. Dunroamin’, that front-door declaration of the contented suburban settler of the 1930s, has given way to Just Parkin’. (Will lockdown, and all those months of home-working, make the most recent arrivals keen to look out on something livelier? Or will it prompt them to make an office of that garage where they never put the car?).

Covid-resistant running (especially when combined with short-sightedness) does interfere with close observation. I know that a grey heron is a regular caller at a pond beside the Miller and Carter pub in Worcester Park (I’ve seen it several times), but I can’t pause too long to look for it because the pavement narrows in front of the pond. And I didn’t know, but I do now, that for a couple of months I was running towards Old Malden straight past a fine example of a Streamline Moderne home of the 1930s. It’s a crisp black-and-white snap between faded Polaroids; between a mock-Tudor house and a chalet, both with mellow red bricks. On the left, it projects to the front and rises as if it had ambitions to be a rectangular tower, a lighthouse, maybe, an impression strengthened by the two openings in it, which are more embrasures than windows. Then lighthouse morphs into liner, and it sweeps ocean-wards in a gorgeous curve to the right. How did I miss it? Because it’s near a point where I’m nearly always crossing the road to avoid pedestrians, and I need to keep my eyes on the cars.

I don’t have to do that at the quieter street corner where the maple is planted. So I was able to stop there and take a good, long look at its hand-shaped leaves — its palmately-lobed leaves, as I’m learning to call them — and see that those five lobes were rounded. Rounded as they would be on a field maple. A genuine field maple. Which means that the tree in the street beyond our front wall, the one I casually ID’d as a field maple to a friend visiting our house a while back, isn’t. The leaves on that one have what my new pocket guide to trees says are “distinctive, angular, sharply-toothed lobes”. So it’s more likely to be a Norway maple.

At a point where I often turn for home when on a shorter circuit, there’s a corner-plot garden where, behind a palisade of silver birch, there’s not a square foot that’s lifeless. It always gives me a lift. So, when I was passing it one day, and saw its custodian doing some pruning, I told him so. He appreciated the compliment. Now, when he’s out in the garden, or I pass him down the street, I get a wave and a “Hello” from him too.