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but once he’d left London behind his pace had slowed. He walked the old Roman road north as thousands had before him: Diddakoi, tinkers, prophets, fools; the footsore army of men who once tramped England’s byways looking for work.
    Usually he navigated by a kind of telluric instinct, an obscure knowledge he had learned to call on even when the land he walked through was unfamiliar: the wind on his face; the pull of the water table deep beneath the ground; the change from chalk to greensand to lias under his feet. Yet in the land just north of the capital it was hard to feel those things, though he couldn’t have said why. There were towns in which he could still sense the soil beneath the streets and feel the land’s scars and sly take-backs and reburgeonings; here, though, it was as though the green acres were half mute, and it made him uneasy.
    The road ran like a ruler through paddocks, arable fields and golf courses; from a car it probably looked bucolic, accessible, but in fact every acre was fenced off, divided up, used; it did not welcome walkers, and almost everywhere, apart from the busy road’s wind-thrashed and perilous verges, was private.
    It was trespass that had landed him inside the last time. He’d set out in late January from the farm on the edge of Dartmoor where he’d spent the winter dry stone walling, heading roughly north-east at a slow couple of miles an hour and hoping to bring spring weather with him. The first arrest happened in Somerset as he was crossing what turned out to be some rock star’s estate; the second was in Wiltshire, for damaging a crop – or so they said – and after that it was over and over. He was pretty sure the police in one area had warned the next to look out for him, or maybe word had just spread among the locals – who could say? They cooked up some kind of order in the end, telling him to stay off private property, but it had just made him more determined. Eventually he’d ended up in a magistrates’ court in Berkshire and had been given a four-month sentence, which had been a shock – though he’d only served two.
    He could have made it easy on himself, cooperated with the police, pleaded guilty; he could have agreed to get some of those maps that showed rights of way in green and stuck to them. But there was a principle involved. All he wanted to do was walk the land in which he’d been born, peacefully and subject to no one else, and if you compromised that idea, he thought, you might as well give up.
    Years back he’d lived for a few months in a van belonging to a Marxist called Tommo. The van had been parked up, with a few others, on the derelict forecourt of an old Elf petrol station. Tommo did evening shifts as a pot-washer in the titty bar across the road where the lorries stopped, and Jack had always wondered how he managed to square the cash he took from the bar with the ideals of freedom and equality he’d espoused. He’d talked a lot about land ownership and private property and the Inclosures, and about The Man who kept the English proletariat – by which he mostly meant Jack – down. Passive resistance was what it was all about, he’d said. Eventually Jack had moved on because he couldn’t stand to see the girls come and go; but he still thought of Tommo now and then, and about some of the things he’d said.
    Jack felt the spring sunshine warm on the back of his neck, felt the beginning of a poem flicker tantalisingly somewhere, just beyond the place where he could think about it. But that was OK, he could wait. Perhaps he would get his notebook out later, if it had shown itself by then.
    Although the Roman road ran, in one form or another, nearly all the way to Lodeshill and its farms, after a couple of miles walking he struck off it, preferring to take his chances on private land again than suffer the lorries’ constant roar at his back. He wasn’t in a rush, and there was more to see that way, anyway: a fugitive stand of wild