The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [56]
Walking came to Dave’s rescue 15 years ago, when the kids were leaving home and barely a week went by without some new named path being unveiled in the local paper. Age and a grumbling knee had put paid to his squash playing, so he took to heading out into the hills most weekends, usually alone but sometimes with Maureen or his colleague Roger, and had soon walked most of the waymarked routes in Surrey, Sussex and Kent. He tried joining the local Ramblers’ Association group, but it was just the residents’ association in gaiters. Twice now, he’s had week-long walking holidays in the Peak District, which brought back fond – and some difficult – memories of his childhood; he was surprised to find himself quite so glad to be going back to the Hornby train-set prettiness of the North Downs. Walking became not just a hobby, but an ideological passion, a one-man crusade to reclaim his land, his history. He’s read up on the Diggers and the Levellers, on enclosures and Kinder, and the knowledge gives a spring to his every step.
Politics used to be so straightforward for Dave, but all the black-and-white certainties of the seventies social revolution and the them-and-us Thatcher years had long since dissolved into a murky grey soup. He’d been briefly excited, and not a little amazed, by the strength of local feeling against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and had helped organise a coach from the area to the huge march in London, but then spent all day praying that he wouldn’t bump into anyone he knew, lest they saw him marching under placards saying ‘Dorking Churches Say It’s Not On, Mr Blair!’ and, worse, thanks to its witheringly posh sentiment and even posher rhyme, ‘We Don’t Want a War in Iraq, We Just Want a Walk in the Park.’
Dave writes a good letter; over the years, he’s had a few printed in the Guardian, the Independent, Private Eye and the Surrey Advertiser. He’d become an active member of the Ramblers’ and the Open Spaces Society, and diligently lobbied politicians and council officials about blocked paths and the debate over the right to roam. One case had excited him over all others, had reminded him of his red-hot, long-lost beliefs. He wrote letters to MPs, councillors and one terribly wry one that he was thrilled to see printed in the Observer. He’d even driven down to Sussex, in his and Maureen’s tiny Fiat, to join a demonstration of ramblers, under police protection, as they attempted to walk the notorious path that had been blocked by the man Dave hated more than any other on Earth. More than Jeremy Clarkson. More even than Thatcher.
Every pantomime needs its villain, and in the long-running Cinderella that is the story of the rambling movement, no rapscallion ever came with a more dastardly swank and hollower cackle than Nicholas van Hoogstraten. The battle over the Sussex footpath past his home near Uckfield occupied more column inches, drew more protestors and caused more fury than any since Kinder Scout. There were a lot of Daves out there, and they rose as one. To the local authority, East Sussex County Council, the Hoogstraten path is known as Framfield 9 – even the name sounded like a gang of imprisoned hostages or victims of a miscarriage of justice. Free the Framfield 9!
Where do you start with Hoogstraten? The name, perhaps, for the ‘van’ is, of course, pure affectation. And that’s not his only name, for he has admitted to using up to 20 aliases, reportedly including Nicholas Hamilton, Dr Karl Brunner, Paul Clark and Reza Ghadamian. According to a 2009 report in The Times, when Hoogstraten was cleared, on technicalities, of charges in Harare of illegal currency dealing and possession of pornography (many of the images included Old