Michael Harding: Walking alone on the Camino but carrying so many memories of my father
Michael Harding. Picture: Brian Farrell
I’ve written about my mother, and my childhood, and my beloved, and the cats and the trees and wild horses, but I have never written about my father.
So, on my 70th birthday I resolved to walk a short Camino in Spain sometime during the following 12 months: from Sarria to Santiago, echoing the pilgrims of history that made the journey to hear the great bell and see the magnificent thurible swing across the sanctuary in the cathedral dedicated to the apostle James.
I told nobody what my intention was. I was worried that people might think it was a silly idea. Sentimental and indulgent.
To walk with my father on the Camino. I just said I’d like to stretch my legs a little. My father was 47 years dead in 2023. Almost half a century. So that may have been a trigger.
And I hoped some part of him would be with me. I could ponder his story, reflect on his life, think about his character. I could resolve the mystery of how I relate to him, and he to me, and what it means to have a father.
From Morgade to Portomarin was a lovely walk. I had overcome several problems, most notably the footwear. The Hoka shoes were a mistake.
I bought them in Letterkenny the week before I left for Spain. They cost €270. My jaw dropped when the salesperson declared the price, but I had researched the shoe and from everything I’d read I believed these magical soft-cushioned soles were the right option.
Soles as thick as planks of wood and gauze-like uppers. Perhaps I should have spent more time breaking them in before the long walk.
Anyway, after the first 20km three of my toes were wounded, each from being squashed against the other, and on the knuckle of the big toe which had swelled considerably in two days there was a deep blister. A sea of pus beneath the surface. And then that broke.
I didn’t believe I would make it to Palas that day, although it was only 12 km, and when I got there I went to a gift shop, bought a pair of sandals for €28, got rid of the bandages and socks, and felt reasonably comfortable all afternoon.
The following morning, I wore the sandals again, tying the Hoka shoes to the back strap of my rucksack, and I walked in comfort for the entire day, covering 15km to Melide.
Yellow arrows on the streets and pavements directed me through the town and out into lush countryside, with green fields and tall trees each side of a wide tarred laneway. But it might as well have been Ireland.
Without the drama of sore toes, the walking was still mantric; a rhythm that ingrained itself deeper and deeper in my mindstream. I wondered how I would ever be able to stop.
Maybe just walking with no destination, with no expectations and with no narrative is the true nature of our souls.
I noticed sounds more than thoughts. I could hear bees sometimes, and the wind moving through reeds and the branches of trees above me.
I could hear solitary cars in the distance and the frenzy of a thousand cars each time I came into a town. I could hear voices of other humans rising out of restaurants and cafés and in market squares.
I could hear water in the distance, and then closer as I approached a lively stream or waterfall. I could hear the sound of other pilgrims, their feet pushing on over gravel pathways, their breath pushing in and out as they passed beside me.
I remember one afternoon in Arzúa, a town en route and halfway to Santiago, I lay stretched on the bed with sore limbs considering all these things. I had been walking for three hours and it was now 2pm.
I was close enough now to Santiago to feel confident I would make it, and the feet had healed wonderfully in the cheap sandals.
I was even tempted to leave the Hokas in a church porch or give them to a charity shop if I passed one. But considering the price I paid for them, and with my Cavan common sense, I kept them tied to the rucksack; in the right context I might still get some benefit from them back in Ireland.
So, I showered and lay on the bed in my hotel, listening to noises from a courtyard down below where people were having lunch.
When I looked out the window, I saw a man of about my own age, in a white suit and straw hat.
He was sitting at a table below me and facing away from me, so all I could see was his back, the suit and the straw hat on the top of his head.
I could see the old brown hands like thick ivy swatting flies and tapping the table as he waited and raising the little glass of wine to his lips.
But otherwise he was very still and when he spoke his voice sounded sharp and humourless. He was talking to a woman, who might have been his daughter.
And she was minding two young boys who were playing in the flower beds that skirted the stone walls of the yard.
The man seemed to be chastising her, his hands flying in the air, his fists punching the table, his head bobbing this way and that beneath his white straw hat.
And she was taking it with a smile, as if it was all okay. She nibbled at her spaghetti with a fork, in between glances at the two boys, curbing their desires to tear the roses down with their boots and climb the wall.
But it was the suit that the old man wore in the courtyard that absorbed me. It hung on him as on a skeleton and I could only think of my father in the coffin, when his corpse was clad in Tom McKenna’s finest tailoring.
I had been so used to my father naked beneath the sheets of various hospital beds that I had forgotten what he looked like when he was fully dressed. And then in the morgue, when I gazed into the coffin, he appeared more alive than his usual self in a remarkable blue suit.
ONE day a few years before he retired, my father ordered a new suit from Tom McKenna, the main outfitter for gentlemen in Cavan town, and when he returned from the measuring ceremony that evening he announced to his wife that the suit would be blue.
“Blue?” she exclaimed, slightly horrified. She had married a man who wore grey suits. What would he be doing in a blue one? What for that matter would any man be doing in a blue suit in 1964?
“Actually,” he said, “Mr McKenna says it will look much the same as a grey suit. It is a grey suit. But they call it blue.”
“Did you see the material?” she wondered.
“No,” he admitted. “I’m not good on colours.”
The reason I recall that blue suit is because it completed him in the coffin. He looked well.
In the early 60s there was an air of change everywhere. Young people wore long hair and people gossiped about the possibility of colour televisions coming to Ireland, like they had in America.
So, Mr McKenna convinced my father that the dark charcoal grey was a thing of the past.
“Men are wearing brighter colours nowadays,” he explained, and to his surprise, my father agreed.
“Give me the blue,” my father said, and so it was made up in a few weeks. There was no waistcoat with it. Apparently, Mr McKenna said that waistcoats too were a thing of the past. Everything will be casual in the years ahead.
And there was a place for a belt on the trousers, although that’s where my father drew the line. He believed in braces; it was a moral stand against the impending decline of civilisation. Belts might be acceptable to young gyrating teenagers who desired nothing but hedonistic orgies in dens of iniquity described as ‘night clubs’, but not to him.
On Christmas Day of that year, he wore the suit with braces to the dining table. We had no guests to liven things up. There was nothing unusual about the food. It was the standard feast of Yuletide joy cooked with stress and tension by my mother in the kitchen.
And when we sat down to eat, my father took off the jacket and tossed it on the chair. My mother chastised him for not hanging it up with the coats under the stairs. They argued about why it was not appropriate to hang a suit among the overcoats, and then fell silent for the afternoon.
From that day until he went into hospital to die, I never saw him wear anything else in public other than the blue suit.
But even in those cameo scenes, composites in my memory, fictions assembled from multiple Christmas meals, I find it difficult to remember him at will, until I see some old man that triggers my memory, like the man in the white suit below my hotel window.
- ‘I Loved Him From the Day He Died: My Father, Forgiveness and a Final Pilgrimage’ by Michael Harding is published by Hachette Books Ireland.
- Michael will be at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork on Thursday, October 10 at 7pm. Tickets, €25.99, include a copy of his book and are on sale now
