The Road

There is one book that has had a huge impact on my psyche over the last few years. It's a thin novel that was sent to me by a friend from Edinburgh: she had put between its pages a short letter and sent it on its way, telling me how much it had meant to her. I am not the reader I once was. That book, together with its letter, lay forgotten in one of the many piles about the house until I came to move it once too often. Now it demanded my attention and that night I opened the book. To say that I was haunted by it is too feeble a description by far. I am not sure that any book has occupied my thinking in the way that this one has done: 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. On the surface it is the simplest of stories: a man and his young boy are walking a destroyed landscape in search of something. We learn piece by piece what it is they have left behind and what they are moving towards, or may be seeking. And yet we don't ever know the full truth. This landscape, a ravaged America, has witnessed some terrible disaster. The trees, the rivers and the sea are all dead. The land is occupied by a few bands of merciless marauders, and all of them use the artery of the road. But what endures in one's reading of this book is a sheer pervading sense of the love possible between a father and his child. One scene stands out for me above all the rest. At one point the two break into a petrol station and find a dispenser which has long since been toppled over and raided. Just one can of cola remains. The father opens it and gives it to the boy to drink. He simply sits and watches his son drinking, happy to witness his brief happiness at a few fresh mouthfuls of dark bubbles.
I think it was most likely 'The Road' that set me thinking about the fragility of our world and the savage stupidity of the way we abuse and consume it. However long ago I found myself writing a poem which gained the title 'The Ghost Orchid', named after yet another species we have destroyed. The poem is published in my last collection 'Coracle' from SPCK in London.


One day, when the air is sore to breathe
And the seas are dead and heavy, thudding
Over empty shores, and only a dwindling of us

Remain - strange, in hiding,
From yellow and red skies,
From scabbed earth -

We will draw in caves
The eerie shapes
Of everything we remember;

We will weave out of firelight
What fields meant, what horses were,
The story of flowing water, of birds bringing morning into song.

And for a while
Before we have grown old
Like moss on rocks, furred and searching with age,

Our children will believe
It was that beautiful,
That good.